Chapter 18
CLOVER
Ihad a pre-game checklist forty-one items long and I had run it three times and I was on a fourth when Zahra took the clipboard out of my hands.
"You laminated it," she said.
"It's going to be on a field. Fields have weather."
"You laminated the backup too. There are two laminated copies." She held them up like evidence in a trial I was losing. "Clover. We're ready. The girls are ready. You did a great job, you picked the right girls for the squad. We can handle it now. Go stand on the sideline and let it happen."
Right. I'd spent fifteen years and one engineering degree and a lifetime of being told to sit down building toward this day, and it was happening in eleven minutes in front of sixty-four thousand people at PlayCore, and somewhere in the home tunnel my squad was holding hands in a circle being exactly as terrified as I'd told them not to be.
I took the clipboard back. I am not made of stone.
"One look," I said. "I get one look and then I'll release it."
Zahra let me have my one look.
And here is the part I had not laminated a contingency for, the part that had no item number, that had been sitting in my chest since a really weird but also nice dinner two nights ago like a second heartbeat I couldn't schedule around.
I had kissed Isak Kingman.
I had started it. Me. Reached up with my own traitorous hands and pulled his face down and kissed him on a public street with no audience anywhere, which by my own rule meant it didn't count.
Except it was the only thing in two days that had counted.
Now I had a debut to run and a brain that kept skipping the track and playing the same eight seconds on a loop. His hands at my waist. The little sound. The way he'd said barefoot in a tree like it was the most ordinary sentence a man ever spoke.
Get a hold of yourself, Freeman. There are sixty-four thousand people and not one of them is here for your feelings.
"Clover." Maya, my perfect, lovely Maya, who danced and tumbled and wore crop tops that showed her pretty rounded belly and stretch mark, sat at my elbow gentle as ever. "They're calling us."
I released the look. I put the clipboard down. I did not pick it back up, which took an actual physical effort I would not be describing to anyone.
"Okay," I said, to my squad, to the tunnel, to the nine-year-old version of me who got left off a performance roster because she didn't, quote, look like the others. "Let's go be impossible."
We came out at the first TV timeout and the noise hit like a wall I could lean on.
I'd put thirty-one women on that field. Thirty-one.
Sizes the League had never once let stand on a sideline, ages from nineteen to sixty-two, Miss Patrice anchoring the back row like she'd waited her whole life for exactly this and intended to enjoy every second of it.
Zahra up front. Maya stage left where I could see her unfold the way she had at auditions.
The track dropped, the Kelsey Best sample I'd fought three departments to license, and they moved.
And they were extraordinary.
I was a trained engineer. I dealt in tolerances and load and whether a thing holds.
And I stood on that sideline with my hands locked behind my back so I wouldn't do anything with them, and I watched thirty-one women hold sixty-four thousand pounds of doubt on their shoulders and not so much as wobble.
The structure held, the structure I'd designed held, and I had to look at the scoreboard for a second because the scoreboard didn't have feelings and I needed something that didn't.
Across the field, the New York Pets were warming up their own sideline, and there was Reggie.
I knew it was Reggie before I placed why I knew. Tiki's Reggie. Thirty-two, aging out, doing the slow careful stretch of a quarterback whose body had started sending invoices. Even from across a field you could see it on him, the thing nobody says out loud about an athlete in his last season.
That he was watching a younger guy's stadium roar for a younger guy's team and counting the Sundays he had left.
Tiki had traded away from that man. Was right now, somewhere in this building in her pink leather with her Perrier dogs, watching the QB she left and chasing the QB she wanted, and I felt a flicker I had not expected to feel for Tiki Barbra Jackson, which was the smallest, most inconvenient flicker of understanding.
Then the first pig hit the field.
It came over the railing near the forty and landed with a wet rubber slap. A pig. A little pink rubber pig, the squeaky kind, the kind they sold three-for-twenty at the team store with WHEN PIGS FLY printed across the belly because Cincinnati turned its own history into a souvenir.
I thought, for one generous second, that it was an accident.
Then came the second one. And the third.
A whole arc of them, raining down out of the lower bowl in the section right behind my squad, pink and squeaking, and over the railing a cluster of men, beers up, faces I'd seen before in a different form at auditions, cupping their hands the way that one heckler had cupped his hands.
You're taking the flying pigs thing too far, Tigers.
That's what he'd yelled at tryouts. And here it was again, organized this time, supplied this time, somebody had bought three-for-twenty pigs by the case and handed them out. The message landed exactly where it was aimed, which was at thirty-one women the world had decided were the joke.
Flying pigs. Get it?
The impossible thing. Look at them up there pretending they belong.
My squad's formation rippled. Just a hair.
Izzy's chin came up, scanning, the captain reflex, and Maya's count faltered for half a beat, and I watched thirty-one women feel the old shame land, the same one I'd felt at nine, the shame and fear and self-deprication that says “you knew, you always knew, this was never for you.”
And the reflex that had run in me since I was nine stretched and reached for the edges of the room, looking for where I was allowed to stand.
I told it to sit down, everything was going to be okay. Because I wasn’t nine. I wasn’t ashamed of who I was or what I looked like.
I was a proud, confident, black woman with a whole lot of junk in the trunk. And no one was going to take that away from me with a damn squeaky pig.
I did not have an item for this on the laminated sheet, but I had Venus Fever's voice in my head from a folding chair three weeks ago, handed over on purpose.
A flying pig means a thing that shouldn't exist does after all.
I keyed my headset.
"Dev. The pigs. Are you getting the pigs."
"On three cameras," Dev said, calm as a held breath. "Mx. Demille does not miss a pig."
"Good. Stay on them." Then I keyed the squad channel, and I made my voice the room the way I'd watched Zahra make hers the room, no raising it, precision and no sentiment.
"Eyes up, ladies. They threw us flying pigs.
" I let that sink in for a beat where I let them hear me not be afraid. "So let's fly."
I don't know what I expected. I'd love to say I had it choreographed.
What happened was Miss Patrice, sixty-two years old, retired postal carrier, forty-one years married, bent down in the back row, picked up one of the pink rubber pigs off the turf, held it up over her head to sixty-four thousand people like a torch, and squeaked it.
Once. Defiant. Into the roar.
And Izzy laughed, the real kind, you could see it crack across her whole face, and she scooped one up too.
Then the front row had them, and then the formation that had rippled was bending down as one body and coming up armed with the exact insult that had been thrown at them.
Thirty-one women holding pink pigs over their heads, and Maya found the count again and they ran the routine with the pigs, worked them in, made them part of it, threw them up on the eight-count and caught them, and the rubber squeak of thirty-one airborne pigs went up under the Kelsey Best track like the world's most ridiculous and perfect percussion.
The lower bowl lost its ever loving mind.
Not the men behind my squad. They sat down, the way men like that always sit down the second the room turns, the way Monty Whyte sat down in my head every time I pictured this exact kind of cruelty wearing a lanyard.
But the rest of PlayCore, the families and the church group and the teenage girls who screamed for everyone, the rest of that stadium came up out of their seats.
Somebody on our side started it and sixty-four thousand people finished it, a chant rolling around the bowl.
When pigs fly!
When pigs fly!
It wasn’t an insult this time. It was the Tiger Nation claiming us as their own.
Three-for-twenty rubber pigs started coming over the railings again, except now they were tributes, now they were ammunition handed to an army that had claimed it.
My squad caught them out of the air like it was rehearsed.
It was not. It was just thirty-one women who had decided, in real time, in front of the whole city, that the impossible thing was going to exist anyway.
I stood on my sideline with my hands locked behind my back, in tears I had absolutely not laminated a plan for, and I did not wipe them. I had a debut to finish.
Dev got all of it. On camera. Preserved in all its glory, for all time.
By the fourth quarter the pig thing was a hashtag. By the time the final gun went off, with the Tigers up by seventeen and Fox Daws having had, exactly as Isak promised my father, the game of his life.
#WhenPigsFly had its own life and my squad had been clipped and reposted from accounts that had never once said the word Tigerettes without a smirk.
It was pure triumph.
But I'd been doing this long enough to know the difference between a heckler and a campaign.
One drunk guy with a grievance buys his own pig.
He doesn't buy a case. He doesn't organize the section directly behind the new squad on debut night and hand them out and pick the one stadium, the one camera-friendly afternoon, when most people would see thirty-one women get told they were a joke.
Somebody had funded that. Somebody had wanted exactly the image of my women humiliated on their debut, and had been so sure it would land that they'd staged it under three of Dev's cameras.
They'd been wrong about which image they'd get. This time.
I found Maya in the tunnel after, glitter sweated halfway down her face, holding a pink rubber pig she had apparently decided to keep, and she hugged me so hard my ribs registered a formal objection, and over her shoulder I caught Izzy already on her phone narrating our own triumph back to us in real time, and I let myself have it, all of it, the whole impossible afternoon.
Then my phone buzzed in my jacket.
Kingman: That was the best thing I've ever seen on that field and I've thrown a 60-yard touchdown on that field
Kingman: Also Vito has questions about the pigs. He feels they were rightfully his.
I laughed out loud in the tunnel like a crazy person, and Zahra looked over, and I didn't even try to fix my face.
A third one came in while I was still grinning at the second.
Kingman: Come up to the family box when you're done. My dad's still here. He wants to meet the woman who just made the whole press box go quiet.
His dad. In the box. Wanting to meet me.
And the reflex that reads a room for its edges, the one I'd told to calm down twice already today, stood right back up and reminded me, gently, lovingly, in a voice that sounded an awful lot like every voice that had ever redirected me toward small, that there was a difference between being the woman who built the room and being the woman who got invited up into somebody else's.
I typed back that I’d be right up before I could talk myself into the stairs being too far.
Two days ago I'd kissed him with no audience.
This was the part I didn't have a rule for. The part with an audience that wasn't a strategy. The part where the legendary Bridger Kingman already knew my name.
I went up, and I went smiling.