Excerpt from Contrapposto by Dave Eggers, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I think 'plumage,' " Cricket said.

" 'Plumage'! You're right!" she said. "You know most of the Impressionists met in art school. They were like nineteen. Not so much older than us. Pissarro was more like thirty, which I think was kind of cute, kind of sad. He already had this Moses beard and looked sixty. So I don't think we're too young to start our movement. Jed can be in it. Do you think he would? We need at least three, I think."

Cricket thought Jed would be the worst member of any group. He'd hate every minute of it. "Maybe," he said.

"It's better this way," she said, "being so young. You're fifteen? I'll be seventeen in four months. We'll be basically the only teenagers inventing a new movement, so people will pay attention. I don't know how you feel about that word, 'teenager,' but it does have currency."

Cricket put his cup down, thinking that if he had any more beer he would need to lie down. He wanted to slap himself awake. He had the idea that he'd go to the bathroom to pee and pour cold water on his face.

"Okay, I'll stay here and guard your beer," Olympia said. "But don't leave me too long with all these rapey guys. Look at that one." She pointed directly at a middle-aged man in a white button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up to the biceps. He was holding a pen and a racing form in his stony gray hand.

He looked directly back to her.

"What a sick fuck," she said loudly in the man's direction. "I'm twelve years old!"

The man turned away.

Cricket found that the act of standing was very different than it had been an hour earlier. The aisle's folding seats shifted like shuffled cards. He found his way to the bathroom, a concrete box with a silver trough along one wall. Next to him, a man moaned in happy release. "That is delightful," the man said.

When he returned to the stands, the sun had ducked behind a high cloud ceiling and Cricket was relieved. The moment he sat down again, Olympia began.

"Do you like the name 'PanYouth'? Pan meaning 'across' or 'all' in Greek. You're in Latin, right?"

Cricket was taking an honors Latin class taught by an elderly man who wanted only to talk and tell jokes and occasionally pull one of the class's two girls onto his lap.

"This is something I wanted to talk seriously about," Olympia said, and turned to him. "You know all the great art movements have friends at their core, right? I'm talking about the movements where the people agree they're in a movement. A lot of times they're jammed together by some critic and the artists reject the name and the association. But think about Patti Smith and Sam Shepard. Did you know they dated for a while? This was like ten years ago so don't be embarrassed if you don't know that."

Cricket thought Patti Smith was married to John McEnroe but some¬thing within his leaden mind told him not to voice this thought.

"I've been thinking about this for like a year now," she said, and turned to him, her golden eyes open wide. The sun had returned and seemed interested only in Olympia. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes were flames, as if a fur¬nace were burning within her.

"Are you looking at my mascara?" she asked, and turned away. "I know I'm terrible at that, or maybe I don't have the right applicator. The truth is I don't have a very steady hand. I don't know why. It makes my drawings suck. Stop looking."

He wanted to say he couldn't help looking, at everything, and would al¬ways look at her, and at everything— he could not hope to fight the need to see, see, see—but instead he looked over her shoulder, then turned to look at the track.

"I didn't mean that," she said. "I mean, don't look at my fucked-up mas¬cara, but you can look at me, like, in general." She laughed her thunderclap laugh.

He turned to her and found an innocuous spot on her left cheek where he thought he might rest his eyes.

Excerpted from Contrapposto by Dave Eggers. Copyright © 2026 by Dave Eggers. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.