14. Clover
CLOVER
Tryouts for the Tigerettes started off with the bang of seeing sixty-two-year-old Miss Patrice do a split in the end zone in front of four thousand strangers and absolutely nail it.
We'd asked her to be one of our judges for the day after she submitted an application to be a cheerleader.
Patrice Okafor, retired postal carrier, forty-one years of marriage, six grandchildren, "tap and jazz for twenty years, and I have kept up.
" She had too. She came out of that split like the floor had personally offended her and she'd settled the matter, and the lower bowl of Paycor Stadium came apart at the seams.
I had exactly one job today, and standing at the bottom of the end zone watching Miss Patrice get helped up by two laughing security guards, I let myself name it, because it felt good and this was going to be a good day.
The job was this —walk out of this stadium tonight with my squad. My squad. The one Gabrielle hired me to build, the one in my head for fifteen years, the one nobody got to redecorate on the way out the door.
Simple. Mine.
We hadn't planned on the stadium as the location for tryouts.
We'd planned on the practice room. Then the applications came in.
Not sixty, not the hundred I'd nervously bumped the room up to accommodate, but a number Gabrielle read off her laptop in a voice that kept losing its professional footing.
Somewhere around the third reschedule she walked into my office, set both hands flat on my desk, and said, "We're putting it in the stadium.
One end. Open the lower bowl. Let the city watch. "
So the city, the fans, the community watched.
Families in the first ten rows. Somebody's church group with a hand-lettered banner.
A pack of teenage girls who screamed for every single auditioner regardless of age, skill, or affiliation, like the whole day was a concert and everyone was the headliner.
Dev had three cameras and the drone and a face behind the viewfinder that I'd learned meant I am getting something I will win an award for.
We had a whole host of celebrities and Tiger staff judging.
Gabrielle on my left, in a blazer the exact orange of trouble.
Venus Fever, the WKRP morning DJ, who'd shown up at eight, declared the coffee "criminal," sent an intern for better, and hadn't sat back in her chair since audition two.
Rich Thompson, the Sunshine Chili CEO, in his company polo, doing a little dance in his chair on every routine like a parent coaching from the sidelines — which, it turned out, he sort of was, having once been the GM of the baseball team, a fact he dropped casually around hour three and refused to elaborate on, the monster.
Rutherford, was a judge because he'd been in the viral video and telling Rutherford he couldn't be a judge would've been crueler than anything I had in me. Daws was also a judge because the internet demanded it. Isak…judging too because — well.
I was not thinking about why.
The three boys counted as one judge with one vote.
And Monty.
Monty Whyte was a judge because Montgomery Whyte had decided he was a judge.
There'd been a chair at the end of the table that didn't have his name on it that morning and by the time I came back from sound check, a little folded tent card in the team's official font, MR. M.
WHYTE, like the font made it true. He sat the way men like Monty sat, taking up one and a half chairs and acting modest about it.
Manspreading at its finest. His clipboard, unlike mine, was just for show.
Try out number forty-one was Maya.
I knew her from the open prep sessions at Zahra’s dance studio.
She was the quiet one who stayed after to fold the mats nobody asked her to fold, with a tumbling foundation so clean it looked easy and a stage presence she kept folded up small like she was apologizing for taking the room.
Three weeks I'd watched her hold herself at the edge of every group like a girl who'd learned the edge was the safe place.
She walked to her mark. Venus dropped the track. And Maya… un-folded.
I didn't have a better word for it. The thing she'd been keeping small all those weeks just — opened, all at once, out into a stadium, and the round-off back handspring full she threw landed so clean that Rich said "oh" out loud into a hot mic, and the teenage girls lost their entire minds, and Maya hit her final pose with her chin up and her eyes wide like she'd surprised herself most of all.
I did not make a sound. So help me, I did not make a sound. I didn’t want to give away who I was favoring to be on the squad.
I wrote one word on my clipboard. Yes. And under my held-still face I felt the goal harden into something I'd bleed for. That one. Her. This was the squad.
The previous year’s captains went last, the rule I'd inherited and kept, everyone tries out every year, no exceptions, returning captains' option to go first or last. All three chose last, which told me something about all three before they took the floor.
Izzy Gylden went first, and her routine was all heat and grin. Then Shayla kept the crowd going with her technical and surgically perfect routine.
Zahra went last, the grand finale. She walked out to a sound from the stands that was different, recognition, the crowd knowing her, stood at her mark one beat too long, let them have it, then did ninety seconds of controlled, precise, smiling excellence and walked off before the applause peaked, because Zahra Smith did not perform for applause.
We had a small break before call backs while the judges' votes were tallied.
I was making a note on Izzy's fiery routine to see if she might want to incorporate parts of it into a routine for the squad when Isak leaned in close enough that I felt it before I heard it.
"My sister's here," he said. Low, the way you say a thing you're nervous about. "She wants to meet you. Is that — can we — is that okay?"
He had the careful expression of a man asking permission for something that mattered and pretending it was casual, and I'd been around Isak Kingman long enough now to know the careful was the real one and the casual was the costume.
"Bring her down while we’re on the break."
His whole face went bright like a kid in a candy store. I looked back at my clipboard before it could do the thing to me.
Jules Kingman came down looking like a second pea in a pod, a sharp-eyed college girl who shook my hand like she'd already formed seventeen opinions about me and was deciding which to lead with.
"Hi, I’m the very nosy little sister," Jules said.
"Older brothers are the worst, right?"
She grinned, Isak's grin exactly, on a face using it as a weapon instead of a white flag. "Oh, I like you."
We were at the rail watching the floor reset when one of the ladies walked past on her way to the water station.
Maybe twenty, round-faced, certain of herself in a way that took my breath, and across her chest in faded block letters over a silhouette of a woman mid-leap were swirly letters that read April De la Reine.
I felt Isak go still beside me. Not frozen. Still, the particular stillness of a body that's been hit in an old wound.
I knew the shirt. Knew the name on it. The whole curvy unbothered glorious world the woman on that shirt cracked open for women like me was a world her own children inherited as a photograph and a name on other people's chests.
I didn't say any of the things. Didn't say she changed everything, though she had. Didn't say she is the reason I knew there was a door, though it was and that was a conversation for a quieter room than a stadium, a night that wasn't this one.
The Kingmans looked at each other. A one-second glance, his eyes to hers and hers to his, something passing between them that had clearly passed a thousand times, a whole private liturgy about a woman they never got to keep. Then it was over and they were both watching the floor again.
The girl wearing their mother on her shirt laughed with some of the other girls getting water. She’d hit her tumbling pass during her audition like she'd been built for it, like the shirt was a promise she intended to keep.
"She's a yes," Jules said quietly, to no one.
"She's a yes," I agreed, and wrote it down, and let that be all I let myself do.
The day had already handed me a sixty-two-year-old in a perfect split, a woman who un-folded like a flower in the sun, and a solid yes audition wearing a dead woman's name like a torch.
I was standing at the rail of my own stadium feeling something dangerously close to joy, the squad in my head finally taking shape in front of me, mine, exactly as I'd drawn it.
Which is of course when Tiki found us.
She came down the tunnel steps in heels not built for stadium concrete, a headset connected to nothing, dog purse on her shoulder, three small heads tracking the action, and arrived at the table with the proprietary stride of a woman surveying a renovation she was paying for.
"There's my baby," she said, and for one horrifying suspended second I thought she meant Isak, before she gestured, expansively, at the entire end zone. The floor. The cameras. The four thousand people. The squad. "Look at her. Look what we're building."
We.
The word went into me like a splinter. Not because it was loud. Because it was an owner's word, and I was an employee, and that was not a scale in my favor and we both knew it.
"Tiki," Gabrielle said, in the warning register.
"I've been saying for ages the squad needed a vision." To me now. To the table. To the cameras she'd located by instinct. "A point of view. And I think with my eye and Clover's…whatever Clover does."
"Directing," I said. "I direct and coordinate it all."
"We could really make this sing. I'm thinking a whole rebrand. Lose the orange, it's so aggressive."