Page 67 of The Tiger in the Sack

“Whatever it is. Yes.”

“That’s exactly the kind of thing that makes this a bad…” She stopped herself, started over, and I watched her do the thing where she talked herself out of the room she’d just walked into. “No. We’re not doing it.”

“Doing what.”

“You know what.”

“I genuinely, at this moment, do not know, “ Yes I did. I knew exactly. I’d known before she said a word. But if playing dumb kept her talking instead of bolting, I’d play dumb until the building came down.

“A fake thing,” she said. Quiet. Like saying it softly made it less real. “You and me. For show. Tiki backs off, Warner backs off, my parents back off, easy peasy lemonade.” Then, fast, before I could answer, she started stacking the objections like sandbags. “Except it’s a terrible idea, and I have a rule, and the rule exists for exactly this kind of man, and you specifically are the reason the rule needed updating, so really if anything this proves the rule…”

“Clover.”

There are too many ways this goes wrong, and I’ve counted most of them…”

“Clover.” I leaned forward. “Yes.”

She finally looked at me instead of at the air between us. “You’re supposed to talk me out of it. I gave you the whole list. That was me handing you the list.”

“I’m not gonna talk you out of it.” Here was the part I had the sense not to say out loud, the part that would’ve sent her up a tree: that I’d say yes to a fake anything if the alternative was no real anything, that I’d take whatever shape of her I could get and quietly work on the rest.

I’d finally fucking found door number three.

GO BE IMPOSSIBLE

CLOVER

Tryouts for the Tigerettes started off with the bang of seeing sixty-two-year-old Miss Patrice do a split in the end zone in front of four thousand strangers and absolutely nail it.

We’d asked her to be one of our judges for the day after she submitted an application to be a cheerleader. Patrice Okafor, retired postal carrier, forty-one years of marriage, six grandchildren, “tap and jazz for twenty years, and I have kept up.” She had too. She came out of that split like the floor had personally offended her and she’d settled the matter, and the lower bowl of Paycor Stadium came apart at the seams.

I had exactly one job today, and standing at the bottom of the end zone watching Miss Patrice get helped up by two laughing security guards, I let myself name it, because it felt good and this was going to be a good day.

The job was this —walk out of this stadium tonight with my squad. My squad. The one Gabrielle hired me to build, the one in my head for fifteen years, the one nobody got to redecorate on the way out the door.

Simple. Mine.

We hadn’t planned on the stadium as the location for tryouts. We’d planned on the practice room. Then the applications came in. Not sixty, not the hundred I’d nervously bumped the room up to accommodate, but a number Gabrielle read off her laptop in a voice that kept losing its professional footing. Somewhere around the third reschedule she walked into my office, set both hands flat on my desk, and said, “We’re putting it in the stadium. One end. Open the lower bowl. Let the city watch.”

So the city, the fans, the community watched.

Families in the first ten rows. Somebody’s church group with a hand-lettered banner. A pack of teenage girls who screamed for every single auditioner regardless of age, skill, or affiliation, like the whole day was a concert and everyone was the headliner. Dev had three cameras and the drone and a face behind the viewfinder that I’d learned meant I am getting something I will win an award for.

We had a whole host of celebrities and Tiger staff judging.

Gabrielle on my left, in a blazer the exact orange of trouble.

Venus Fever, the WKRP morning DJ, who’d shown up at eight, declared the coffee “criminal,” sent an intern for better, and hadn’t sat back in her chair since audition two.

Rich Thompson, the Sunshine Chili CEO, in his company polo, doing a little dance in his chair on every routine like a parent coaching from the sidelines — which, it turned out, he sort of was, having once been the GM of the baseball team, a fact he dropped casually around hour three and refused to elaborate on, the monster.

Rutherford, was a judge because he’d been in the viral video and telling Rutherford he couldn’t be a judge would’ve been crueler than anything I had in me. Daws was also a judge because the internet demanded it. Isak…judging too because — well.

I was not thinking about why.

The three boys counted as one judge with one vote.

And Monty.