Page 68 of The Tiger in the Sack

Monty Whyte was a judge because Montgomery Whyte had decided he was a judge. There’d been a chair at the end of the table that didn’t have his name on it that morning and by the time I came back from sound check, a little folded tent card in the team’s official font, MR. M. WHYTE, like the font made it true. He sat the way men like Monty sat, taking up one and a half chairs and acting modest about it. Manspreading at its finest. His clipboard, unlike mine, was just for show.

Try out number forty-one was Maya.

I knew her from the open prep sessions at Zahra’s dance studio. She was the quiet one who stayed after to fold the mats nobody asked her to fold, with a tumbling foundation so clean it looked easy and a stage presence she kept folded up small like she was apologizing for taking the room. Three weeks I’d watched her hold herself at the edge of every group like a girl who’d learned the edge was the safe place.

She walked to her mark. Venus dropped the track. And Maya…un-folded.

I didn’t have a better word for it. The thing she’d been keeping small all those weeks just opened, all at once, out into a stadium, and the round-off back handspring full she threw landed so clean that Rich said “oh” out loud into a hot mic, and the teenage girls lost their entire minds, and Maya hit her final pose with her chin up and her eyes wide like she’d surprised herself most of all.

I did not make a sound. So help me, I did not make a sound. I didn’t want to give away who I was favoring to be on the squad.

I wrote one word on my clipboard. Yes. And under my held-still face I felt the goal harden into something I’d bleed for. That one. Her. This was the squad.

The previous year’s captains went last, the rule I’d inherited and kept, everyone tries out every year, no exceptions, returning captains’ option to go first or last. All three chose last, which told me something about all three before they took the floor.

Izzy Gylden went first, and her routine was all heat and grin. Then Shayla kept the crowd going with her technical and surgically perfect routine.

Zahra went last, the grand finale. She walked out to a sound from the stands that was different, recognition, the crowd knowing her, stood at her mark one beat too long, let them have it, then did ninety seconds of controlled, precise, smiling excellence and walked off before the applause peaked, because Zahra Smith did not perform for applause.

We had a small break before call backs while the judges’ votes were tallied.

I was making a note on Izzy’s fiery routine to see if she might want to incorporate parts of it into a routine for the squad when Isak leaned in close enough that I felt it before I heard it.

“My sister’s here,” he said. Low, the way you say a thing you’re nervous about. “She wants to meet you. Is that — can we — is that okay?” ??

He had the careful expression of a man asking permission for something that mattered and pretending it was casual, and I’d been around Isak Kingman long enough now to know the careful was the real one and the casual was the costume.

“Bring her down while we’re on the break.”

His whole face went bright like a kid in a candy store. I looked back at my clipboard before it could do the thing to me.

Jules Kingman came down looking like a second pea in a pod, a sharp-eyed college girl who shook my hand like she’d already formed seventeen opinions about me and was deciding which to lead with.

“Hi, I’m the very nosy little sister,” Jules said.

“Older brothers are the worst, right?”

She grinned, Isak’s grin exactly, on a face using it as a weapon instead of a white flag. “Oh, I like you.”

We were at the rail watching the floor reset when one of the ladies walked past on her way to the water station. Maybe twenty, round-faced, certain of herself in a way that took my breath, and across her chest in faded block letters over a silhouette of a woman mid-leap were swirly letters that read April De la Reine.

I felt Isak go still beside me. Not frozen. Still, the particular stillness of a body that’s been hit in an old wound.

I knew the shirt. Knew the name on it. The whole curvy unbothered glorious world the woman on that shirt cracked open for women like me was a world her own children inherited as a photograph and a name on other people’s chests.

I didn’t say any of the things. Didn’t say she changed everything, though she had. Didn’t say she is the reason I knew there was a door, though it was and that was a conversation for a quieter room than a stadium, a night that wasn’t this one.

The Kingmans looked at each other. A one-second glance, his eyes to hers and hers to his, something passing between them that had clearly passed a thousand times, a whole private liturgy about a woman they never got to keep. Then it was over and they were both watching the floor again.

The girl wearing their mother on her shirt laughed with some of the other girls getting water. She’d hit her tumbling pass during her audition like she’d been built for it, like the shirt was a promise she intended to keep.

“She’s a yes,” Jules said quietly, to no one.

“She’s a yes,” I agreed, and wrote it down, and let that be all I let myself do.

The day had already handed me a sixty-two-year-old in a perfect split, a woman who un-folded like a flower in the sun, and a solid yes audition wearing a dead woman’s name like a torch. I was standing at the rail of my own stadium feeling something dangerously close to joy, the squad in my head finally taking shape in front of me, mine, exactly as I’d drawn it.

Which is of course when Tiki found us.