Page 50 of The Tiger in the Sack

“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 following than most football players.