Chapter 10
CLOVER
Sunday was a perfectly reasonable day.
Tig sat on my chest and purred. He had decided this was where he lived now and had no further notes on the situation. I ate leftover pad thai directly from the container, and I made a decision.
I didn't have to like it. I just had to stick to it.
Isak Kingman was my colleague. The mission to get this body diverse cheer team up and running was the mission. Tomorrow I was going to walk into the Tigers facility and be so professionally excellent that there would be physically no room in my brain for anything else.
This was a very good plan.
I was not avoiding the practice fields. I was simply going to my office, which was located in a direction that did not require passing the practice fields, and I was going to do my job.
I was a little bit avoiding the practice fields.
I drove across West Mehring Way at seven forty-eight Monday morning, which was early enough to get coffee before the nine o'clock I'd put on my own calendar to go over the audition timeline. We already had fourteen applications from the women who’d attended the workshop at Loretta’s Dance Studio, and even a few who hadn’t been there.
The community was spreading the news by word of mouth and that was exactly what we wanted.
The stadium was already lit up gold in the morning light the way it always was at this hour, white concrete, silver metal of the upper stands glinting, and the bright orange signage signaling Tiger pride to the world.
The whole thing sat against the sky like it had always been there and planned to stay.
But that wasn't the only thing on the building. I saw it before I was fully out of the car.
Block letters. Bright green spray paint. Right across the top of the box office where West Mehring Way traffic could read it without slowing down. Someone had taken their time with it. The letters were even. Deliberate. Artistic even.
GET LOST GABI!
I stood on the sidewalk for a second.
Then I closed the car door and walked toward it.
Gabrielle was already there. She was standing with her arms crossed and her phone in one hand. She'd already moved past the part where you react. She was in the part where you handle it. Next to her, in a jacket that probably cost more than my first car, was Monty Whyte.
He was shaking his head.
"Clover." Gabrielle clocked me coming without turning around. I had no idea how she did that.
"Hey." I came to stand beside her and looked up at the letters. "When did this happen?"
"Overnight. Sometime between two and five, best we can tell." She looked at her phone. "It's already on the news, and FaceSpace and FlipFlop. Someone on their morning commute tagged the team account at six fifteen."
I looked at the security camera mounted above the Tigers pro shop. It was off center and pointed slightly in the wrong direction. Like someone had nudged it.
"The footage?"
"Gap in the recording." Her voice didn't move at all when she said it. "Apparently the system had a maintenance window."
Monty made a sound. Deeply, performatively empathetic.
He looked up at the letters and shook his head again.
"These things happen, of course, with facility management being what it is.
Security protocols, camera maintenance, all of that.
" Very sad. Very practiced. And the pause that was exactly one beat too long.
"It's a lot to stay on top of. Especially in a transition period. "
Transition period.
I kept my face completely neutral. I had been practicing this exact face since I was eight years old and my dad had said something on national television that I had extensive opinions about, and I had gotten very, very good at it.
Gabrielle turned to look at Monty. Hers was better than mine. She'd had longer to work on it.
"I appreciate the concern, Monty." Her voice was pleasant and clear and had exactly the texture of a door being gently, firmly closed. "I need the full security log from the last seventy-two hours on my desk by nine. And I want a cleaning crew on this before the players arrive for practice."
"Of course, of course." He nodded. Very helpfully. "I'll look into what we can do to make sure nothing like this—"
"Thank you, Monty." She had already turned away.
He stood there for a moment, his helpfulness with nowhere useful to go. "What a rough Monday for you, Gabi." Then he walked back toward the entrance looking extremely satisfied for someone who had just been dismissed.
I watched until the door closed behind him.
"You okay?" I asked.
"I'm just fine." She wasn't performing it. She just was, the way she always was. Like she'd already done the hard work on what this job would cost her and paid it. She looked at the graffiti one more time, like she was filing it somewhere useful. "We have a video to look at."
Dev had the final cut ready and waiting, because Dev was constitutionally incapable of leaving work unfinished on a Friday. It sat in our shared drive like a perfectly wrapped grenade.
I watched it in Gabrielle's office at eight fifteen, coffee in hand, game face fully operational.
It was good. It was genuinely, annoyingly good.
The tumbling sequence popped the way it was supposed to, Izzy's and my passes landing in sync, Zahra's precision was visible even in fifteen seconds. Rutherford’s dimple was deep enough to dive into.
Daws looked like he'd been born for a camera, which he had.
Coach Roper's cameo was thirty-seven kinds of chaotic and somehow perfect.
And then there was Kingman.
The camera had caught him at the exact wrong angle, which was to say the exact right angle if you were trying to make a viral video and the exact wrong angle if you were me, sitting eighteen inches from my boss on a Monday morning and trying to appear like a professional person.
He was looking at me. Not the routine. Not the camera.
Me. Which was why Rutherford had been able to sack him.
And then the line came out with him on the ground, the complete unfiltered sincerity of a man who had apparently forgotten he was being filmed, and the look on his face right afterward was not embarrassment.
I knew because I had spent more time than I was going to admit to anyone, including Tig, thinking about the what that face meant.
Gabrielle laughed. Actually laughed. A Delighted, full laugh. "That's our video."
"Mm." I took a long sip of coffee.
"The caption." She was already typing. "New era, new team, new energy." She looked at me. "What else?"
"The link to the cheer team application." My voice came out completely steady. Personal achievement. Years of training. I deserved a trophy.
“Perfect. Have Dev post it to both our Tigers’ and Tigerette’s accounts and be sure to tag everyone in the video.” Her phone rang and as she glanced down at it, she frowned. “We’ll check in on how it performs this afternoon.
I headed out to find Dev and barely caught the sound of her answering her phone. “Hey Tiki, it’s a bit early for you, isn’t it?”
Dev posted it at nine oh two, from the team's official socials, tagging me, each of the cheerleaders, and of course, Kingman, Rutherford, and Daws's accounts too.
Weirdly Coach Roper didn't have an account.
Between all six of us and the team, we had millions of followers.
Granted most of them were Daws's, but Kingman had a larger thanmost football players following.
I went back to my office and worked on the audition timeline and did not look at my phone to see how the video was doing views wise.
I was not going to look at my phone.
It was silly of me to look at my phone.
I looked at my phone.
The view count was doing something that did not look like a normal view count. I put the phone face down on my desk.
The desk was very nice. It had belonged to the previous cheer director who had apparently preferred minimalism and left nothing behind except a single motivational poster that I had taken down on day one and replaced with a whiteboard.
The whiteboard currently had seventeen things on it. None of them were Isak Kingman.
I picked up the phone.
Nine hundred thousand.
Crap.
I put it back down and did twenty-five minutes of actual uninterrupted work, which I was going to count as a win given the circumstances, and then Gabrielle walked in without knocking because she owned the building.
Gabi came down to my office a few hours later and had her laptop open and smiling like a woman sitting on very good news. She was not going to wait for an invitation.
"Two point two million views."
I stared at her. "It's been three hours."
"Two hours and fifty-eight minutes." She turned the laptop toward me. The comments were moving too fast to read individually. She'd pulled up a sampling.
Where has this woman been all my life
This is the energy I needed today
FINALLY a team that gets it
I would literally run through a wall for this cheer coach
That last one was from an account with a verified checkmark and two point four million followers. I made a note of that for absolutely no reason at all.
"Pull up the tryout application portal." Gabrielle pulled one of my visitor chairs around to my side of the desk, sat right next to me and pointed at my laptop. "Let's see if this has gotten us what we really wanted." New submissions since nine am. I counted.
Twenty-seven new applications.
I looked at the timestamp on the earliest one. Twelve minutes after we posted.
I scrolled. Some were names I recognized from the returning squad inquiries we'd already fielded, women who had cheered for the Tigers before and wanted back in.
But most of them weren't. Most of them were new.
And most of them had filled in the optional comments field that we'd added almost as an afterthought when we built the new form.
I read the first one.