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“No, I’m thinking about that thing with manna. I don’t think you know the Bible very well,” she answered.
“Manna was in the desert,” I heard Chanel whisper. “It was warm there. I wish we were in the desert or at least inside one of the tents they set up for the football team.” Most of our heads swiveled to look at the large, white structures with doors, plastic windows, and most importantly, roofs.
In other years, the players had greeted the crowds inside the stadium while we’d performed outside, as I’d told Bowie. We’d been able to change in our locker room and then after our performance, we’d had a tent to hang out in to meet our own fans. But this season, with renovations still ongoing, the football team been pushed outside, too, into the tents. Unfortunately for the Wonderwomen, that had left nothing for us to use.
“Are you telling me that an organization as old and storied, a team as rich as the Woodsmen, has no shelter for these ladies? No one thought through this at all?” Sam had asked the man from Facilities and Maintenance who was in charge of the physical setup for the event. My coach had pretty much yelled that question, but his normal speaking voice was also loud. The answer was no, anyway. Everyone had trusted that the work on the building would be done by now and no, there was no other tent, no canopies. Also, there was no way for us to even use our locker room, not with the construction blocking the hallway that led to it.
So we were out in the cold for Fan Day, literally. It hadn’t actually started out badly, because the temperature wasn’t that low. But after we’d rehearsed, our muscles had cooled and our costumes stayed wet. We started shivering.
“Wonderwomen, circle up,” Sam barked. “You’ll get warm when you start dancing again.”
We edged closer together and I was glad for the body heat. Coach Rylah ran through a critique of the rehearsal, doing the nitpicking that she was famous for, and then asked her counterpart if he had anything to add.
He glanced at the low platform where we’d be performing. “Don’t fall on your ass—behinds,” he ordered us. “I’ll wipe down the stage again before you girls get on it, but it’s going to be slippery.”
“Sam, are you sure we should perform?” our captain Danni asked him. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
“Neither do I!” he barked at her. “I talked to my boss and he says we’re a go. There’s nothing that we can do about it. So don’t fall on your asses and don’t get hurt! I meant butts,” he growled at Rylah before she could correct him, and then he stalked off.
“Ok, ladies,” Danni told us. “Put on your team warmups and stay loose.”
We donned our jackets and tried to keep moving. Then Sam’s friend Lyle, the head of security, let us sneak into the hallway inside the stadium that led to the players’ family lounge, where their relatives waited after games. It was a tight squeeze to get all the Wonderwomen in there but it was much better than standing in the rain. I was at the front, closest to the glass door, and I watched the event set-up frantically continue as Woodsmen employees in orange polo shirts raced around with tarps and brooms. Sam had amassed a huge pile of towels and I also watched him pacing, talking on his phone, and then laying into several people who approached him. This wasn’t how things usually went on Fan Day, and I could hear in the nervous chatter of the other girls that they felt it, too.
I saw the football players arrive with their families and support staffs and disappear into the tents, famous name after famous name. Bowie got there and paused to look around before he also went under cover. Not too much later, fans started streaming in, too.
“Looks like there are a lot of people. I thought the rain might keep them home,” Quinn said. “I hope I don’t fall in front of them. I hope nobody does.”
So did I. I flexed my foot and turned it in circles. During our rehearsal, it had started to twinge a little, but it was probably just the wet weather making it act up. It was all good and I was fine.
Danni led us in a short, very confined warm-up in the hallway and then when we saw Sam stalking back toward the stadium, she told us to leave our jackets in a pile at the door.
“It’s showtime, Wonderwomen!” she called cheerfully. “Let’s do it!”
We did our team cheer as we ran out to the stage. Despite the rain, it was easy to get excited for our performance, the real beginning of our season. We had all new routines, of course, and the one we were starting with was the toughest for me. Everyone else was crouched low and I was supposed to come bursting in with my tumbling pass.
That was a problem today because the stage was smaller than the area where we’d perform on the football field during games, and it was a lot smaller than the space we’d used at Fan Day last year and in the years before that. There were two steps up to reach it, which meant getting the running start I needed was also difficult. Sam and I had worked at practice to modify the elements, but it was still going to be hard.
He grabbed my arm before he cued the music. “I just wiped the floor but it’s not as dry as it should be. Can you do this?”
My foot gave another twinge. “I can do it,” I told him, and he nodded and let me go.
I can do it, I told myself. I took my place a few yards away from the stairs at the spot where Sam and I had calculated that I would need to start, and when the beat dropped, I ran. I landed out of my front handspring and felt it in my foot, but I didn’t fall and I kept the smile on my face. The routine passed by in a blur, like they always did, but I could tell that we were doing ok with it. I saw Sam’s expression as we took our final position and he looked ticked off, but that was normal for him. When we’d done badly, he didn’t just look mad. He threw things.
We danced to two songs, our performance cut from the usual four due to the weather. It was in the second one that things went sideways. Actually, Trinity went sideways, her tennis shoes slipping until she crashed into Sidney N., who fell into Sidney H. Then it was like dominos, or maybe bowling pins, all through the back line. The girls in the front were absolute professionals and kept right on dancing, but Chanel and I got distracted and nearly missed our cue to come in for the last tumbling pass, where we met in the middle of the stage in the splits. When the music cut, we weren’t the only ones on the ground and I could hear the muffled sounds of Coach Sam swearing into his Woodsmen baseball cap.
The audience applauded politely and we waved. The girls on the ground, the ones who weren’t supposed to be there, hopped up and waved too, smiling like everything was great. I could hear more than one of them trying not to cry, though. Chanel and I stood and I took Sidney N.’s arm to help her walk back towards the stadium.
“Everyone ok?” a deep voice asked us.
Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to find Bowie suddenly beside me, not after how he’d helped after I’d had the accident on the loading dock. Sidney N. was fully crying and did not seem ok, and I shook my head at him. “Can you take her other arm?” I asked.
“Thank you,” she sniffed as he did, and he said it was his pleasure, just like he’d said to me at my sister’s wedding reception.
“I was worried about somebody falling on that stage. They should have put it under a cover. They should have put all you ladies under something,” he said.
“They saved the tents for players and your families,” I explained.
“Could you guys slow down?” Sidney N. asked us. She was barely making any forward progress, even with our help.
