Chapter 11
ISAK
Isat on the living room couch and stared at the calendar invite. Vito headbutted my knee. I kept staring.
C. Freeman. Right there after G. Jackson. Wednesday, nine am, Conference Room A.
I could call in sick.
Vito headbutted me again, harder. I kept reading the attendee list like something about it was going to change.
I cannot go to work today, said little Isak Bear McK.
One sharp paw, nails out, tapped my thigh. I ignored it and stretched out on the couch. Maybe I had a fever.
"I can't call in sick," I told him.
Vito stepped off the couch, walked to the door, and began scratching at the carpet directly in front of it. The full production. Both paws, maximum commitment, like he had detected something dead under the floorboards and was personally offended by it and intended to excavate it immediately.
"I'm the starting QB. If I call in sick the team doctor shows up, then the trainers, then Roper, and then some sports blog runs KINGMAN INJURED with three question marks before I've finished pretending to have a temperature." I looked at the invite again. Vito scratched harder. "Not an option."
Vito sat down, looked at me, and went back to scratching. He wasn't arguing about the logistics. He was making a different point.
I accepted the invite.
I was going to walk in there and be so cool about this. Coolest person in the room. I had been in harder situations than a Wednesday morning meeting and I was a professional and she was a professional and it was going to be completely—
Vito covered the last of whatever he'd smelled and walked back to his armchair.
Fine. It was going to be fine.
Conference Room A was on the second floor, which gave me exactly one flight of stairs to get my face right.
If I had the attitude right, I was good. But my face had been known to betray me and all my feelings along with it.
Monty was already there when I walked in, at the head of the table, which was somehow predictable and irritating in equal measure. He was wearing a suit that probably cost more than my first car. He looked up and greeted me with a nod and a smile that never met his eyes.
Coach Roper came in behind me, dropped his legal pad on the table, and immediately wrote something on it, which was probably a doodle of a cookie or something.
Gabrielle came in at eight fifty-eight and right behind her Fox sauntered in like he owned the room. He sat next to me and said nothing, which meant he’d already assessed the room and decided we’d be talking tea later.
Clover came in at nine. On the dot.
She set her laptop on the table. Opened it. Looked at Gabrielle.
Not at me.
At Gabrielle.
I was a piece of furniture she had clocked the location of and did not plan to interact with.
Cool. That was fine. I knew this was coming. I had prepared for exactly this. I was prepared.
Rutherford came in last and pulled out a chair right next to Clover. I wouldn’t have cared even a little bit, no not me, except he jerked his chin up in greeting and gave her a wink as he smacked his gum.
I was accidentally on purpose beaning him in the winking eye with a football later today.
Gabrielle turned her laptop around, displaying the cheer video that had taken over Instasnap, and let the number sit on the screen for a second before she said anything.
Four point three million views.
"Two days," she said.
Fox leaned forward. "Is that… is that even a real number?"
"Both real and accurate. Also growing by the moment."
Fox sat back and made a sound that was not quite a word and not quite a whistle.
Gabrielle looked at me, then Fox, and Rutherford. "I want to keep this energy going. The three of you visible with the squad as tryouts build all the way through the preseason game. We lean into what's already working."
"Yes," I said. "I'm in."
She hadn't even finished the sentence.
"Yep. Same." Fox pointed a finger gun at nobody in particular, which was his way of being delighted about something without technically admitting it.
“Anything for our ladies,” Rutherford said and fucking winked again.
I wondered just how much a football through the eyeball would hurt.
Gabrielle started to say something about the auditions.
The door opened.
Not a knock. The door just opened, the way a door opens when the person on the other side of it has never once in their life waited to be told to come in.
The woman who walked through it was probably a little older than me and dressed like the meeting had been scheduled around her outfit.
Sunglasses pushed up into her hair, which I swore last time I saw her was black and curly, and this time it was blonde, long, and straight.
She came in on heels that had no business on the industrial carpet and looked around the room like she was deciding whether to buy it.
"Don't let me interrupt," she said, in the tone that was fully intended to interrupt. "I heard there was a meeting about my video."
Gabrielle's face scrunched in a way I had never seen it do.
"Tiki," she said. "I didn't know you were coming in."
"I'm always in the office when I’m in town.
" Tiki pulled out the chair at the opposite head of the table from Monty, the only open seat with any authority to it, which she'd clocked from the door, and sat.
"And this matters. Four million views, Gabster.
Four million. Do you know how long the family's been trying to get numbers like that? "
The family. I watched the word land on Gabrielle and not move her an inch.
"For anyone who hasn’t met her before, this is Tiki Jackson," Gabrielle said to the room, even and clear.
"My sister and the new team owner this year besides myself. Tiki, this is Theo Roper, our head coach. You know Montgomery, and Clover Freeman. She’s our new dance and cheer director this year.
And I assume you know Isak Kingman, Fox Daws, and Blake Rutherford. "
Tiki's eyes did a circuit of the table. They paused on me about a half second too long, and I recognized that lusty look in her eyes. Eek.
Then they landed on Clover, and I watched them do a recalibration, the recategorizing of a person into a smaller box.
Clover saw her do it and didn’t even flinch. I, on the other hand, wanted to throw the table through the window.
"Clover, dear." Tiki smiled. "You're the one in the video with the junk in your trunk." She paused for a very purposeful beat. "You're very brave."
"Am I?" Clover asked, but in a weirdly pleasant way. Watertight. That smile cost her, I was sure.
"Anyway." Tiki turned to Gabrielle and folded her hands like she was about to do everyone a tremendous favor.
"I want to be involved. I've been telling Jack-Jack for years I should be more hands-on, and now look, the one time the Tigers do something the internet actually likes, it's a cheer initiative, which is, let's be honest, exactly the kind of thing I understand better than anyone in this room.
" She gestured vaguely at the table, at all of us, at the concept of us. "So. I'm going to help."
"Help," Gabrielle repeated.
"With the squad. The marketing. The whole rollout.
I have ideas, I have contacts, I have a feel for this, no offense to anyone, that a football coach and an engineer do not.
" She said engineer like it was a charming little fact about Clover, a thing a child had done.
"It's my family's team too, Gabrielle. I'd like to act like it. "
Here is the thing about a play like that.
There was nothing in it you could say no to without looking like the bad guy.
She hadn't asked for a title. She hadn't asked for a budget.
She'd asked to help, and she'd asked in front of witnesses, and now refusing her meant explaining to the owner's sister why her enthusiasm for her own family's team was a problem.
Smooth. Genuinely smooth. I hated it.
Gabrielle opened her mouth.
"And Isak." Tiki turned to me before Gabrielle got there, redirecting the whole room with my name like a leash.
"I'm so glad you're attached to this. You and I should sit down.
I have a whole vision for how to use you in the campaign, and frankly you're wasted just throwing a ball around.
" She smiled at me like we were already mid-conversation.
Like there was a thing between us that had started somewhere I hadn't been present for.
"I've been telling people for weeks, the face of this franchise should be doing more than football. "
Telling people. For weeks. About me.
Don't be furniture, I told myself. Don't be furniture and don't be a jackass. Find the third door.
There wasn't one. There was the door where I corrected her in front of the owner and her sister and made a scene, and there was the door where I let it stand and let it sit in the room and let it sit in front of the one person at that table who'd already decided I was a man who let things sit.
"That's a front-office conversation," I said. Even. Friendly. The clean smile, the one off the building. "You'd want Gabi in the room for anything about the campaign. She runs football ops."
The temperature at Tiki's end of the table dropped about nine degrees.
"I know what my sister runs," Tiki said, still smiling.
"Just keeping the chain of command straight, ma'am. Coach is real big on it."
Across the table, Clover did not look up from her laptop.
She typed something. I had no idea what.
I had spent six nights learning the inside of this woman's brain through a phone screen and right now I could not read a single thing on her face, and that was the most expensive part of the whole morning.
Coach, from his seat, mild as a Sunday said, "We are big on it."
A weird little dog head popped up out of Tiki’s bag and made a sound that was half bark and half car horn.