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IF ONLY SOMETHING WOULD FALL OUT OF THE SKY


Cricket Cohen was dreading summer vacation. Her mother, Bunny Cohen, had signed her up for surfing camp with Lana Dean. Cricket would rather swallow a big ball of snot than do anything with Lana Dean. Lana Dean had very long and curly eyelashes and she acted like having long and curly eyelashes was something to be envied the world over, like her being born with them was a giant accomplishment. But Lana Dean had nothing to do with her eyelashes. Eyelashes were genetic. And Cricket had no interest in surfing. She didn’t want to skim the surface of the ocean, because all the interesting, important stuff was deep down, way down underwater.

Cricket was rarely interested in what other people were interested in. That’s why she was usually alone in the school yard during recess, thinking about stars. About how instead of twinkling, twinkling in the sky like in the lullaby, stars actually pelted the infant earth like bombs. They exploded, shrapnel flying everywhere, lava flowing like water. Gas and flames covered the ground she sat on right now. The whole planet was on fire. In such an inhospitable world, Cricket wanted to know, why did life start?

She knew how. The flames died and the temperature dropped and oxygen and hydrogen found each other and formed water. After that, life was inevitable. Single-celled shapes swam around and multiple-celled organisms joined the march and here we are today: society, the human race, middle school, summer vacation in two days, and surfing camp with Lana Dean.

But why? What gave life the big idea to give it a go?

This she could not figure out.

A fast-moving object swiped through her peripheral vision. Cricket’s heart raced. A meteor! Something worthwhile was happening. Finally, and she was in the right place at the right time. For once.

But it was just a softball.

Typical.

Vincent Lee and Sara Paul, the team captains of the softball game taking place in the center of the school yard, looked over. Cricket detected the usual worry in their eyes. Like they couldn’t predict what crazy thing she would do with their stupid softball. Cricket may have been odd, but come on, she knew what to do with a ball. She picked it up and threw it at them. Vincent and Sara ducked and then seemed relieved. Cricket sat back down and drew an amoeba on the concrete with a pebble.

The origin of life was, without a doubt, the most interesting thing in the world to think about. Which was why no one in her sixth-grade class thought about it at all. All they cared about was organized sports or being popular. What was wrong with the youth of today? Maybe she was too hard on them. Maybe she shouldn’t sell them short. Some of the kids in her class were more advanced and were able to care about both sports and being popular. At the same time.

Cricket longed for the olden days of lower school, when recess in nearby Central Park was the best period of the day. When after read-aloud the teacher brought out the rope with the loops and you held on. The teacher looked out for trouble so you didn’t have to. The teacher said when to cross the street, when there was dog poop or stranger danger, and when it was time to let go of your loop and play.

Cricket and Veronica Morgan had always held opposite loops because they were best friends. They climbed the rocks. They had a jewelry store. They collected treasures. They worked in a coal mine. They were astronauts. They lived in a castle.

Vincent Lee yelled, “Safe!” and suddenly everyone was yelling and arguing and Cricket had to wonder when playing—when life, for that matter—had gotten so strict and so boring. The rules and the nets and the bats, the bases and the goals, the penalties, the different-shaped regulation-size balls. Oh, forget it.

Cricket liked games where she made up the rules. That’s why she usually stood in the center of the playground waiting for an asteroid to hit her on the head or near the chain-link fence pretending to be in a prison-break movie digging a hole to freedom with a plastic cafeteria spork.

Lana Dean and Juliet Lysander and Heidi Keefe made their third loop around the yard. For reasons Cricket would never understand, walking in a circle while talking was what popular people who weren’t sporty did during recess. Cricket would be bored out of her mind walking around in circles. But she had to admit Lana and Juliet and Heidi looked like they were deep in a good conversation. It was almost tempting to join them. But knowing the limits of their intellects, they were probably talking about socks.

Here’s the thing. In her humble opinion, Cricket could, if she wanted to, be popular. But being popular meant you liked what other people liked, and that wasn’t for her. Cricket was the outlier. And she didn’t care. Except she did, a little, because there was no one at school to talk to. Who could she tell what she had heard the astrophysicist say last night on the radio? That if you added up every single sound and word ever made by a person, the number you’d get would be much smaller than the number of planets in the universe. That was an idea worth contemplating. Infinity. Let’s face it—infinity was an idea you could think about forever.

Cricket’s best friend, Veronica Morgan, was a person with deep thoughts. But she’d gone to a different school last year and Cricket hardly ever saw her. Now Cricket’s ideas and the imagination that imagined them were her only friends. No one else trusted imagination anymore.


Text copyright © 2017 by Catherine Lloyd Burns