Page 85 of The Tiger in the Sack

Except it was the only thing in two days that had counted.

Now I had a debut to run and a brain that kept skipping the track and playing the same eight seconds on a loop. His hands at my waist. The little sound. The way he’d said barefoot in a tree like it was the most ordinary sentence a man ever spoke.

Get a hold of yourself, Freeman. There are sixty-four thousand people and not one of them is here for your feelings.

“Clover.” Maya, my perfect, lovely Maya, who danced and tumbled and wore crop tops that showed her pretty rounded belly and stretch mark, sat at my elbow gentle as ever. “They’re calling us.”

I released the look. I put the clipboard down. I did not pick it back up, which took an actual physical effort I would not be describing to anyone.

“Okay,” I said, to my squad, to the tunnel, to the nine-year-old version of me who got left off a performance roster because she didn’t, quote, look like the others. “Let’s go be impossible.”

We came out at the first TV timeout and the noise hit like a wall I could lean on.

I’d put thirty-one women on that field. Thirty-one. Sizes the League had never once let stand on a sideline, ages from nineteen to sixty-two, Miss Patrice anchoring the back row like she’d waited her whole life for exactly this and intended to enjoy every second of it. Zahra up front. Maya stage left where I could see her unfold the way she had at auditions. The track dropped, the Kelsey Best sample I’d fought three departments to license, and they moved.

And they were extraordinary.

I was a trained engineer. I dealt in tolerances and load and whether a thing holds. And I stood on that sideline with my hands locked behind my back so I wouldn’t do anything with them, and I watched thirty-one women hold sixty-four thousand pounds of doubt on their shoulders and not so much as wobble.

The structure held, the structure I’d designed held, and I had to look at the scoreboard for a second because the scoreboard didn’t have feelings and I needed something that didn’t.

Across the field, the New York Pets were warming up their own sideline, and there was Reggie.

I knew it was Reggie before I placed why I knew. Tiki’s Reggie. Thirty-two, aging out, doing the slow careful stretch of a quarterback whose body had started sending invoices. Even from across a field you could see it on him, the thing nobody says out loud about an athlete in his last season.

That he was watching a younger guy’s stadium roar for a younger guy’s team and counting the Sundays he had left. Tiki had traded away from that man. Was right now, somewhere in this building in her pink leather with her Perrier dogs, watching the QB she left and chasing the QB she wanted, and I felt a flicker I had not expected to feel for Tiki Barbra Jackson, which was the smallest, most inconvenient flicker of understanding.

Then the first pig hit the field.

It came over the railing near the forty and landed with a wet rubber slap. A pig. A little pink rubber pig, the squeaky kind, the kind they sold three-for-twenty at the team store with WHEN PIGS FLY printed across the belly because Cincinnati turned its own history into a souvenir.

I thought, for one generous second, that it was an accident.

Then came the second one. And the third. A whole arc of them, raining down out of the lower bowl in the section right behind my squad, pink and squeaking, and over the railing a cluster of men, beers up, faces I’d seen before in a different form at auditions, cupping their hands the way that one heckler had cupped his hands.

You’re taking the flying pigs thing too far, Tigers.

That’s what he’d yelled at tryouts. And here it was again, organized this time, supplied this time, somebody had bought three-for-twenty pigs by the case and handed them out. The message landed exactly where it was aimed, which was at thirty-one women the world had decided were the joke.

Flying pigs. Get it?

The impossible thing. Look at them up there pretending they belong.

My squad’s formation rippled. Just a hair. Izzy’s chin came up, scanning, the captain reflex, and Maya’s count faltered for half a beat, and I watched thirty-one women feel the old shame land, the same one I’d felt at nine, the shame and fear and self-deprication that says “you knew, you always knew, this was never for you.”

And the reflex that had run in me since I was nine stretched and reached for the edges of the room, looking for where I was allowed to stand.

I told it to sit down, everything was going to be okay. Because I wasn’t nine. I wasn’t ashamed of who I was or what I looked like.

I was a proud, confident, black woman with a whole lot of junk in the trunk. And no one was going to take that away from me with a damn squeaky pig.

I did not have an item for this on the laminated sheet, but I had Venus Fever’s voice in my head from a folding chair three weeks ago, handed over on purpose.

A flying pig means a thing that shouldn’t exist does after all.

I keyed my headset.

“Dev. The pigs. Are you getting the pigs.”