Chapter 6
CLOVER
When somebody hands you the keys to a room they built, they are not being generous. They are handing you a longer rope.
I understood this completely, and I took the rope anyway, because that's the job.
Two big events were happening today to further the mission to build this body diverse dance and cheer squad. Neither of them included my date with Cat Daddy tonight.
I was using every bit of my finely honed sorority girl skills and every corner of my trained engineering brain to manage all three things. I was only partly succeeding.
The one I felt the most confident about was the content shoot this afternoon.
Gabi and I wanted the launch video shot before the weekend so the program could get some notice as soon as possible.
The sooner the community heard about the new body-diverse squad mission, the more women we could reach and hopefully encourage to try out. I knew they were out there.
If a woman like me had pursued dance, there had to be more who existed and had exactly the skill I needed to make this a success. It was a matter of convincing them this was the real deal and not some frat-style prank.
Wednesday morning I'd sat in a folding chair at the back of Studio Loretta and watched Zahra Smith run this studio like the successful black woman that she was. But Zahra and Loretta’s was so much more than that.
I'd realized two things. One, that the Tigers Dance Squad's lead captain not only ran a Black-girl dance studio in a lower-middle class suburb I’d only just heard of called Avondale, but that she was the kind of community I needed.
Two, that I was being tested to see if I was going to be allowed into that community at all.
What I had not expected was the text that came Wednesday night.
Zahra: You want to recruit real Cincinnati women? The ones who aren’t sure they belong on a team like the Tigerettes, but do? I'm saying maybe.
Maybe. Not yes. From Zahra, maybe was a whole paragraph.
I'd typed back something professional and grateful and immediately regretted how grateful, because gratitude reads like a woman who didn't expect the door to open, and the whole point — the entire point of everything I was building — was women who walked through doors like they'd always had the right.
So now it was Friday and I was standing in the middle of Studio Loretta's beautiful, beat-up hardwood, and I was not the boss of this room. That was the test.
Zahra hadn't handed me her floor because I'd passed something on Wednesday.
She'd handed it to me to watch what I did with somebody else's floor in front of somebody else's people.
Whether I'd treat it like a set. Whether I'd rearrange it.
Whether I'd stand in the center like I owned it or hover at the edge like I knew I didn't.
I was hovering right in the middle of the two.
Zahra stared at me, and I saw the not-an-eye-roll look she was giving me. "You're allowed to touch things, Clover. I invited you. Stop treating my floor like it's going to file a complaint."
"I'm being respectful."
"You're being scared. There's a difference, and I can see it, and so can they." She tipped her chin at the room, which was filling up with a word of mouth crowd. The exact kind of women I was hoping for had shown up. Sure, there were the ones who looked like they’d cheered in high school, and had that typical cheerleader body and beauty. But there were also women here who looked like they wanted the chance I was offering to be real because they’d never been invited to the dance before.
"Go introduce yourself, tell them what you’re trying to build. Do your job."
Why did she feel more like a big sister than my potential team captain for this new squad?
So I walked around the room, greeted the women who were here to learn from Zahra and several more of the previous years’ Tigerettes on how to create their own audition routine. I answered their questions, and listened. Today, that was my job.
Zahra was the team member they trusted, I was just the face of the organization, until I got to know the real people I hoped would be on my side. Because there were a whole lot more people here than the ones who were interested in trying out for the new squad.
There were grandmas. There were so many grandmas.
There was a man named Big Tony, who I learned over the next twenty minutes had played offensive line at UC in roughly the Pleistocene era and now carried a belly like a trophy and a granddaughter on his shoulders who wanted to be a Tigerette someday.
There was a woman named Miss Patrice in a church hat indoors, which is a power move I respected, who watched the little ones from Wednesday's class tumble across the refinished floor and announced, to no one, to the room, to God, "Lord. I wish I was forty years younger."
There was Aaliyah from the Hello Kitty unitard, who recognized me from the back row and informed everyone within earshot that I was the boss of the cheerleaders, which I had not said, and which I was now never going to correct, because she'd said it like a fact about the weather.
Dev moved through all of it with a camera the size of my forearm, crouching, catching B-roll, getting gold. We needed warmth and real people. The room was lousy with it.
And I did my job. I did it standing on a floor that wasn't mine, in front of people who were Zahra's before they were anywhere near mine, and I felt the old reflex come up — the one that's been running since I was nine and got left out of a performance because I didn't, quote, look like the others.
The reflex that reads a room for its edges, finds where I'm allowed to stand, and never leans past it.
I felt it come up, and for once I made myself do the opposite.
I knelt to Aaliyah's level. I told Big Tony the program needed supporters like him. I let Miss Patrice tell me about the Tigers of twenty-five years ago for nine uninterrupted minutes.
Across the room, Zahra watched me do it. She didn't smile. But the eyebrow stayed down, which from Zahra is applause.
And just then a Tiger walked in.
I felt it before I saw it. The whole room did that thing when somebody famous enters, a collective inhale, a reorganizing.
It rippled through the grandmas before I clocked the source, and my first irritated thought was that Gabrielle had sent a player without warning me, because of course warmth and community films better with a jersey in the frame, and my second thought, arriving a half-second later and much less welcome, was a low hum in the base of my spine.
Isak Kingman.
I'd met him on Monday. In the hallway, Gabrielle introduced us, his hand warm and unhurried around mine, and his voice had done something to the back of my brain that I'd filed immediately under unhelpful and irrelevant.
A snag, a tug, warm and safe and known-from-somewhere.
Everyone in the sports world knew him or felt like they did.
That had been a clean, sensible explanation on Monday.
On Friday it was developing cracks.
Because Kingman crouched down to the toddlers' level the second he got near them — no performance to it, no glance at Dev's camera, just a tall man folding himself down to where a four-year-old was attempting a forward roll, and he said, with total gravity, "You've got to commit.
Halfway is how you land on your head. Ask me how I know. "
The kid actually asked him how he knew.
"Because I have landed on my head," Kingman laughed and said, "approximately fourty-hundred thousand times."
And something in my chest tripped.
Don't. Do not do this.
I had learned the lesson where I wanted something so badly my brain started pouring the bridge before it checked the load.
Here was the counter-data, and I require data so that the engineering brain I’d trained for the last four years could take over. Lots of athletes were charming. Self-deprecation was the entire house style of sports media. My own father has dined out on it for three decades.
He was using his fame as a tool.
He was nothing like the mystery man I’d been crushing on all week even though I hadn’t even seen his face.
If Isak Kingman, the most-watched man in Cincinnati, was Cat Daddy then anonymity would be the one thing on earth he could never actually have.
It didn't add up. Almost. It almost didn't add up, and the almost was the whole problem. I stood there in Zahra's studio running structural analysis on a man crouched among toddlers and could not get the numbers to either close or fall apart.
Suspect. I could get to suspect. I could not get to sure, and the not-sure had teeth.
Then a sweet grandma sidled up to Kingman with a Gatorade cup and asked him to sign it, and he did, easy, and she said something I didn't catch, and he laughed, and then he said, loud enough to carry, loud enough that Dev's camera swung toward him like a sunflower finding the sun:
"Ma'am, I appreciate it, but I don't think this program's looking for guys like me. I’m all hands and no choreography."
The room roared.
“I’d rather see people like you and these ladies who actually know how to dance cheering me on.”
Dev got it. The red light, the swing, a moment that was going to be the entire launch video happening in real time on a floor in a suburb called Avondale. The man had just, without seeming to know he was doing it, made a joke about himself, and made it land as an invitation instead of a wound.
"You're holding that clipboard like it owes you money," Zahra said, materializing at my elbow.
I looked down. I was holding my laminated run-of-show against my sternum with both hands, like a breastplate. Like a woman who'd felt a room reorganize itself around a man and reached for the nearest load-bearing object.
"Why are you looking at Kingman like a math problem? It’s good that he’s here, isn’t it? Shows the Tigers are behind this and not just the owner."
"I'm not."