Page 51 of The Tiger in the Sack

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.

I’ve cheered since I was six years old and I quit at seventeen because I got too big. I’m twenty-four now. I saw your video this morning. I want to try out.

I put the laptop down on my desk.

Picked it back up.

Read the next one.

I don’t look like a cheerleader. I’ve been told that my whole life. But I look like the woman in your video. Can I come?

I set it down again, more carefully this time.