Page 30 of The Tiger in the Sack

I was using every bit of my finely honed sorority girl skills and every corner of my trained engineering brain to manage all three things. I was only partly succeeding.

The one I felt the most confident about was the content shoot this afternoon. Gabi and I wanted the launch video shot before the weekend so the program could get some notice as soon as possible. The sooner the community heard about the new body-diverse squad mission, the more women we could reach and hopefully encourage to try out. I knew they were out there.

If a woman like me had pursued dance, there had to be more who existed and had exactly the skill I needed to make this a success. It was a matter of convincing them this was the real deal and not some frat-style prank.

Wednesday morning I’d sat in a folding chair at the back of Studio Loretta and watched Zahra Smith run this studio like the successful black woman that she was. But Zahra and Loretta’s was so much more than that. I’d realized two things. One, that the Tigers Dance Squad’s lead captain not only ran a Black-girl dance studio in a lower-middle class suburb I’d only just heard of called Avondale, but that she was the kind of community I needed. Two, that I was being tested to see if I was going to be allowed into that community at all.

What I had not expected was the text that came Wednesday night.

Zahra

You want to recruit real Cincinnati women? The ones who aren’t sure they belong on a team like the Tigerettes, but do? I’m saying maybe.

Maybe. Not yes. From Zahra, maybe was a whole paragraph.

I’d typed back something professional and grateful and immediately regretted how grateful, because gratitude reads like a woman who didn’t expect the door to open, and the whole point — the entire point of everything I was building — was women who walked through doors like they’d always had the right.

So now it was Friday and I was standing in the middle of Studio Loretta’s beautiful, beat-up hardwood, and I was not the boss of this room. That was the test.

Zahra hadn’t handed me her floor because I’d passed something on Wednesday. She’d handed it to me to watch what I did with somebody else’s floor in front of somebody else’s people. Whether I’d treat it like a set. Whether I’d rearrange it. Whether I’d stand in the center like I owned it or hover at the edge like I knew I didn’t.

I was hovering right in the middle of the two.

Zahra stared at me, and I saw the not-an-eye-roll look she was giving me. “You’re allowed to touch things, Clover. I invited you. Stop treating my floor like it’s going to file a complaint.”

“I’m being respectful.”

“You’re being scared. There’s a difference, and I can see it, and so can they.” She tipped her chin at the room, which was filling up with a word of mouth crowd. The exact kind of women I was hoping for had shown up. Sure, there were the ones who looked like they’d cheered in high school, and had that typical cheerleader body and beauty. But there were also women here who looked like they wanted the chance I was offering to be real because they’d never been invited to the dance before.

“Go introduce yourself, tell them what you’re trying to build. Do your job.”

Why did she feel more like a big sister than my potential team captain for this new squad?

So I walked around the room, greeted the women who were here to learn from Zahra and several more of the previous years’ Tigerettes on how to create their own audition routine. I answered their questions, and listened. Today, that was my job.

Zahra was the team member they trusted, I was just the face of the organization, until I got to know the real people I hoped would be on my side. Because there were a whole lot more people here than the ones who were interested in trying out for the new squad.

There were grandmas. There were so many grandmas. There was a man named Big Tony, who I learned over the next twenty minutes had played offensive line at UC in roughly the Pleistocene era and now carried a belly like a trophy and a granddaughter on his shoulders who wanted to be a Tigerette someday.

There was a woman named Miss Patrice in a church hat indoors, which is a power move I respected, who watched the little ones from Wednesday’s class tumble across the refinished floor and announced, to no one, to the room, to God, “Lord. I wish I was forty years younger.”

There was Aaliyah from the Hello Kitty unitard, who recognized me from the back row and informed everyone within earshot that I was the boss of the cheerleaders, which I had not said, and which I was now never going to correct, because she’d said it like a fact about the weather.

Dev moved through all of it with a camera the size of my forearm, crouching, catching B-roll, getting gold. We needed warmth and real people. The room was lousy with it.

And I did my job. I did it standing on a floor that wasn’t mine, in front of people who were Zahra’s before they were anywhere near mine, and I felt the old reflex come up — the one that’s been running since I was nine and got left out of a performance because I didn’t, quote, look like the others. The reflex that reads a room for its edges, finds where I’m allowed to stand, and never leans past it. I felt it come up, and for once I made myself do the opposite.

I knelt to Aaliyah’s level. I told Big Tony the program needed supporters like him. I let Miss Patrice tell me about the Tigers of twenty-five years ago for nine uninterrupted minutes.

Across the room, Zahra watched me do it. She didn’t smile. But the eyebrow stayed down, which from Zahra is applause.

And just then a Tiger walked in.

I felt it before I saw it. The whole room did that thing when somebody famous enters, a collective inhale, a reorganizing. It rippled through the grandmas before I clocked the source, and my first irritated thought was that Gabrielle had sent a player without warning me, because of course warmth and community films better with a jersey in the frame, and my second thought, arriving a half-second later and much less welcome, was a low hum in the base of my spine.

Isak Kingman.

I’d met him on Monday. In the hallway, Gabrielle introduced us, his hand warm and unhurried around mine, and his voice had done something to the back of my brain that I’d filed immediately under unhelpful and irrelevant. A snag, a tug, warm and safe and known-from-somewhere. Everyone in the sports world knew him or felt like they did.