Chapter 29
CLOVER
The fan vote results came in during the third quarter, and I missed them, because I was watching a sixty-two-year-old woman do a grapevine into a hip bump in front of sixty-four thousand people and land it.
That's the thing nobody tells you about getting the thing you spent your whole life being brave about not getting. You're not looking at the scoreboard when it happens. You're looking at Miss Patrice.
It was the last home game of the regulation season, the one Monty had circled on a calendar in a shell account as the day I'd fail. The clean fan vote he'd been certain would bury the squad under its own audacity was here and he wasn’t here to see it.
He'd engineered the finish line in confidence I couldn't cross it. Then he'd resigned for personal reasons three weeks ago and gone wherever men like that go, and the finish line had stayed exactly where he'd drawn it, and now it belonged to us.
The brand new Stripes Squad took the field at the start of the fourth quarter.
Not the Tigerettes. Not the polished pro squad, though they were there too, and they'd been the first to vote for this, which is its own whole story I'll tell some other time. This was the other one. The community squad. The one we'd built so nobody would be afraid to show up.
Big Tony led them out, all six-foot-four of him in a Tigers shirt, captain of the Cat-Dads, chin up, hitting every mark he'd practiced very hard to hit and clearly intending to get every one of them again.
Behind him came the Cat-Ladies and the Tiger Grannies, the workshop grandmothers who'd named themselves, Miss Patrice in the front row of them.
Maya and Quincy. Jasmine, seventeen, who could go pro and would, but who wanted this first. Dave from the café, who cannot dance and did it anyway.
A row of kids from Zahra's studio, the little Black girls from the photos on Studio Loretta's wall, mid-leap, except now the leap was real and it was happening at PlayCore in front of the whole Tiger Nation.
Bodies of every size, every age, every shade, on the field this league spent a hundred years telling them was for somebody else.
I stood on the sideline with my clipboard I didn't need, because Zahra was running it, Zahra in front with the count, the captain I'd met across a conference table a lifetime ago who'd looked at my whole concept and kept her eyebrow down, which from Zahra is a standing ovation.
She caught my eye once. Didn't smile. Just lifted the eyebrow, finally, all the way, and went back to the count.
The music hit.
And sixty-four thousand people did the thing I will spend the rest of my life trying to deserve.
They chanted it.
"When pigs fly!"
The thing Monty's hired pigs had been thrown to mean.
The insult engineered to make a field full of women small.
Venus had coined it back as a joke, a dare, a what-if, and the crowd had picked it up on debut day and run with it, and now sixty-four thousand people were on their feet screaming it as the Stripes Squad hit their marks, and it wasn't an insult anymore.
It wasn't a clapback either. It was the Tiger Nation claiming us as their own, the way a city claims a thing it has decided is theirs, loud and a little unhinged and completely without qualification.
When pigs fly.
We did. We flew. A whole field of us, the bodies they said couldn't, in the air at once.
I cried on the sideline and I did not add it to a list for later. I just let it happen at the appropriate time, in public, where anybody could see, which for me is thirty years of work in one sentence.
The vote wasn't even close.
It came up on the big board at the end of the quarter, the number, the franchise's official fan referendum on whether the body-diverse squad initiative continued into the season, and I'd braced for a squeaker, because I brace for everything, it's a reflex I was slowly learning to let go.
It was not a squeaker. The city had decided. The thing Monty handed me as a guillotine had turned in his hand and become the loudest yes I'd ever been part of.
Gabi found me on the sideline. She didn't say anything for a second.
Twenty years in this league, the mailroom and the hot dog and the worst team bought on purpose, and the woman who'd recruited me personally to a job I'd taken as a one-year favor stood next to me and watched her bet pay off in real time on a sixty-foot screen.
"You did that," I said.
"We did that. You built it. I just refused to let them take it.
" She bumped my shoulder, owner to director, sister to sister.
"Coach wants to talk to you about staying.
I told him to wait until after the vote so it wouldn't look like a bribe.
The vote's in. So. We're going to talk about you staying, Clover.
Colorado will still be there. The thing you build doesn't expire. "
"My master's—"
"Will keep. Minds doesn't close." She smiled, the real one this time, the warm one she'd earned the right to give me. "Think about it. That's all. Think about it without the countdown running. You're allowed to want this too."
She left me on the sideline with that, which is the kind of thing that reshuffles a list, and I let it reshuffle, and for once I didn't reach in and rank the new arrangement. I just let the items sit where they'd fallen.
And then I saw Isak.
He was on the field, which he wasn't supposed to be, technically, the quarterback does not belong in the middle of a cheer squad's fourth-quarter showcase, and there he was anyway, helmet off, jersey on, in the middle of the Stripes Squad with a kid on his shoulders and Big Tony showing him the hip-bump count and Isak getting it wrong on purpose to make the kid laugh.
Somebody had given him a shirt. Over his pads, ridiculous, stretched, a fan-made Cat-Dads shirt with a tuxedo cat on it, and he was wearing it like it was the most important jersey he'd ever put on.
From where I stood on the sideline I could see his face, and his face was doing the thing it does when the armor's all the way off, which I'm the only one who gets to see, except apparently now sixty-four thousand people got to see it too, because he'd stopped hiding the things that matter to him in places nobody could clap for.
The man who'd built a whole empire in the dark so nobody could take what he loved was standing in the middle of a field, in the loudest place in the city, in a homemade cat shirt, holding a stranger's kid, completely visible, letting everybody see exactly what he treasured.
He found me on the sideline. Of course he did. He read the whole field and walks to the spot where the play is happening.
"You're an honorary Cat-Dad now," I called over the noise. "There's no leaving the squad. It's a lifetime appointment."
"I'm aware. Tony swore me in. There was a pledge.
I take it extremely seriously." He set the kid down, gentle, sent her back to her row with a fist bump she'll tell her grandchildren about.
"There's a meeting after. The squad. They want to make me do a thing with the pigs at the next home game.
I said yes before I knew what it was. I'd say yes to anything that's the squad. "
"That's how they get you."
"That's how they got me." He looked at the field, the whole flying impossible field of it. "You did this."
"Everybody keeps saying that. I'm starting to believe it. It's very…cool."
"You are cool," Isak said. "Looks good on you."
And he got pulled back to the sideline by an equipment guy having a coronary about a quarterback in a cat shirt mid-game, and I watched him go laughing, and the list in my head was quiet, item one through whatever, all of it quiet, the whole machine that had run since I was nine just idling in the sun.
Warner found me in the tunnel.
After. When the crowd was filing out and the field crew was breaking it down and I was carrying gear back because I still carry gear, that's not changing, an engineer and a cheerleader hauls her own equipment.
He was in his street clothes, no pads, the middle linebacker who'd been traded to Cincinnati at his own request and spent the pre-season on the same team as the man I'd fallen for, watching it happen, knowing what we'd been to each other once. We hadn't really talked. There hadn't been a way to.
"Hey, Clo."
"Warner."
He stood there a second. He'd been the easy choice my whole adult life, the HBCU sweetheart, the football family, the Christmas card.
My parents adored him. He looked at me in the tunnel and I waited for the chorus to start up in my chest, the old one, the one that had told me for years that I was the wrong shape for the life I'd been handed.
It didn't start.
"That was something out there," Warner said.
"What you built. I didn't get it. When you used to talk about it, back when, the dance thing, the body thing, I thought it was — I don't know what I thought it was.
A hobby. Something you'd grow out of." He shook his head.
"I watched a stadium chant for it tonight. I was wrong about a lot."
"You were."
"I know." He huffed, not quite a laugh. "The week you thought I was going to propose, I've thought about that more than I'd like.
I don't think I knew what I was doing. To you.
I think I was saying I couldn't see how you fit into the picture I had, and instead of changing the picture I told you that you were the wrong shape.
" He looked at the field through the tunnel mouth, the lights coming down.
"Your dad used to tell this story. Birthday parties.
Every year. About how you organized your own party when you were nine because you didn't trust the adults to seat everybody right.
You made a chart. Place cards. You sat the lonely cousin next to the loud one so nobody'd be left out. "
I hadn't thought about that in years.
"I remembered it as a funny story about a bossy kid," Warner said.
"I told it that way myself. But I watched you put a whole field full of people somewhere they'd never been allowed to sit tonight, and I realized I'd been telling the story wrong the entire time.
You weren't bossy. You were nine years old and already making rooms where nobody got left at the edge.
" He met my eyes. "You did remember. The thing you always were. It just wasn't about me."
The chorus in my chest, the one that had sung since I was nine, the one Warner was the youngest voice in, did the thing I never thought it would do.
It went quiet. Not defeated. Not argued down. Just finished, the way a song finishes, the last note allowed to ring out and then released.
"Thank you, Warner," I said, and meant it, both halves of it, the thank-you and the goodbye folded into the same two words.
"Be happy, Clo. He's a weird dude. The cat on a motorcycle thing is genuinely strange.
But he sees you." Warner stepped back, gave me the tunnel, the way you give someone the field.
"I never managed that part. He does it without trying.
Don't let the bossy nine-year-old in you talk you out of being seen. "
He walked off toward the locker room, and I stood in the tunnel with my gear, and the song was over, and a new quiet had moved into the place where it used to play, and I found that I knew what to do in the quiet now.
I picked up my equipment.
I went to find my honorary Cat-Dad.
And I walked out of the tunnel into the lit-up empty stadium where a whole city had just decided we belonged, in the middle of everything, not at the edge of it, carrying my own gear, on my way to the loud man who'd been brave about the yes by himself for weeks while I caught up.
I'd caught up.
Neither of us had to be brave anymore.
We were just going home, and this time I knew the way, and the way had him in it.