Page 95 of The Tiger in the Sack

“Careful, Clover,” she said. “You’re going to want friends.”

I walked out of that office with my spine doing the work my legs were too angry to do, and I made it all the way to the parking lot before the list in my head finished reshuffling and showed me the new top item, the one that had been four and was now one, the one I could not solve with a spreadsheet.

They were going to come for the squad through me. Through Isak. Through the realest thing I had, which they’d photographed looking fake.

And the worst part, the part that put a cold hand on the back of my neck in a concrete garage, was that they weren’t entirely wrong about the facts. The relationship had started fake. The squad was mine. Gabi was my sorority sister. My dad was an old friend of Rich, the owner of Sunshine Chili. Every individual brick they’d handed me was real. They’d just built it into a wall with a door I could already feel closing.

I got in my car. I did not cry, because crying was item nine and I was nowhere near item nine.

I called Isak. He didn’t pick up. Game day tomorrow. He’d be in film study.

I texted him three words and sat in the dark garage looking at them after I sent them, because they were the truest and most terrified thing I’d said to anybody in years, and I’d said them to a man who’d started as a deal.

I need you.

STAY IN THE POCKET

ISAK

Igot the text in film study and couldn’t answer it for forty minutes because Coach was installing a new red-zone package and you do not look at your phone while Theo Roper is drawing on the board, not because he’d yell, he never yells, but because he’d go quiet and disappointed, and that quiet made grown men want to run laps to make it stop.

Clover

I need you.

Clover did not say I need you. In fourty-some days I had watched that woman handle a vandalized parking lot, a section of organized hecklers, and her own father’s table-for-four without once needing anybody. I need you was not in her operating system. I need you was the check-engine light coming on in a spaceship.

I called her the second Coach capped his marker. She told me about the office, the ambush, the video. The kiss and the rules.

I did not in that moment do anything useful. What I actually did was go very still in a hallway outside the film room and feel the precise horror of watching a thing you caused arrive on schedule, because she’d warned me. In that back hallway with the chair carts she’d laid it out like a structural engineer reading a load-bearing flaw, and I’d said nobody’s going to know, how would they know, nobody’s gonna know and she’d said They’re gonna know, and she’d been right, and I’d been a man telling a woman her fear was unreasonable approximately one nanosecond before it came true.

“I’m coming over,” I said.

“You can’t. Game tomorrow. You not staying at the hotel with the team tonight to be with me is gasoline.”

“Clover.”

“Isak.” She used my name the way I use jokes, to put something between us and the big bad. “Listen to me. They built it so that anything you do makes it worse. You defend me, it’s the QB protecting his girlfriend, proves we’re a couple. You stay away, it’s the QB distancing himself, proves there’s something to distance from. You can’t touch this without making it heavier. That’s the design. I recognize good design.”

She would. She built it.

“So what do I do?” I hadn’t known what to do all on my own since I was three and my mom didn’t come home from Christmas shopping.

“You let me handle the part that’s mine,” she said. “And you stay the quarterback. That’s the only move on the board that doesn’t help them.”

I hated it. I hated it with my whole body. Every instinct I had was to read the field and get the ball where it needs to go, and she was telling me the play was to stand in the pocket and do nothing while the people I⁠—

While the people I loved got hit.

“Okay,” I said, and it was the hardest okay of my life. Because that’s what Clover wanted, and if I wanted to do anything else, I needed her consent.

The machine started Thursday and it did not have my fingerprints on it anywhere, which is how I knew exactly whose fingerprints it had.

Monty didn’t say a word publicly. He didn’t have to. By Thursday afternoon two beat writers who’d never once cared about cheerleading had questions about “governance” around the squad.

By Friday a sports-talk show I used to watch and respect had a segment with a graphic, an actual graphic, with three boxes and arrows, mapping the conflict of interest. President. Sorority sister. Cheer director. Quarterback. The kiss photo. They didn’t have the party video yet. That was Tiki’s ace and she was holding it. Because Tiki understood drama the way I understand a two-minute drill, which is that you don’t throw deep until they’ve committed to stopping the run.

And here’s the part that made me want to put my fist through the Den’s drywall.