Page 110 of The Tiger in the Sack

“Mom,” I said. “Do you want to get lunch? There’s a chili place. You have to learn the numbers. It’s a whole system.”

“Baby,” my mother said, standing, “I would love to learn the numbers.”

I’d walked in alone on purpose.

I walked out with all of them, which it turned out had been the actual point the whole time, and the nine-year-old who’d gotten left off a roster for not looking like the others walked out in the middle of the group instead of at the edge of it, and nobody had to tell her she was allowed to be there.

She just was.

JUST EXISTING ISN'T BRAVERY

CLOVER

The fan vote results came in during the third quarter, and I missed them, because I was watching a sixty-two-year-old woman do a grapevine into a hip bump in front of sixty-four thousand people and land it.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about getting the thing you spent your whole life being brave about not getting. You’re not looking at the scoreboard when it happens. You’re looking at Miss Patrice.

It was the last home game of the regulation season, the one Monty had circled on a calendar in a shell account as the day I’d fail. The clean fan vote he’d been certain would bury the squad under its own audacity was here and he wasn’t here to see it.

He’d engineered the finish line in confidence that I couldn’t cross it. Then he’d resigned for personal reasons three weeks ago and gone wherever men like that go, and the finish line had stayed exactly where he’d drawn it, and now it belonged to us.

The brand new Stripes Squad took the field at the start of the fourth quarter.

Not the Tigerettes. Not the polished pro squad, though they were there too, and they’d been the first to vote for this, which is its own whole story I’ll tell some other time. This was the other one. The community squad. The one we’d built so nobody would be afraid to show up.

Big Tony led them out, all six-foot-four of him in a Tigers shirt, captain of the Cat-Dads, chin up, hitting every mark he’d practiced very hard to hit and clearly intending to get every one of them again.

Behind him came the Cat-Ladies and the Tiger Grannies, the workshop grandmothers who’d named themselves, Miss Patrice in the front row of them. Maya and Quincy. Jasmine, seventeen, who could go pro and would, but who wanted this first. Dave from the café, who cannot dance and did it anyway. A row of kids from Zahra’s studio, the little Black girls from the photos on Studio Loretta’s wall, mid-leap, except now the leap was real and it was happening at PlayCore in front of the whole Tiger Nation.

I stood on the sideline with my clipboard I didn’t need, because Zahra was running it. Zahra in front with the count, the captain I’d met across a conference table a lifetime ago who’d looked at my whole concept and kept her eyebrow down, which from Zahra is a standing ovation. She caught my eye once. Didn’t smile. Just lifted the eyebrow, finally, all the way, and went back to the count.

The music hit.

And sixty-four thousand people did the thing I will spend the rest of my life trying to deserve.

They chanted it.

“When pigs fly!”

The thing Monty’s hired pigs had been thrown to mean. The insult was engineered to make a field full of women small. Venus had coined it back as a joke, a dare, a what-if, and the crowd had picked it up on debut day and run with it, and now sixty-four thousand people were on their feet screaming it as the Stripes Squad hit their marks, and it wasn’t an insult anymore.

It wasn’t a clapback either. It was the Tiger Nation claiming us as their own, the way a city claims a thing it has decided is theirs, loud and a little unhinged and completely without qualification.

When pigs fly.

We did. We flew. A whole field of us, the bodies they said couldn’t, in the air at once.

I cried on the sideline and I did not add it to a list for later. I just let it happen at the appropriate time, in public, where anybody could see, which for me is thirty years of work in one sentence.

The vote wasn’t even close.

It came up on the big board at the end of the quarter, the number, the franchise’s official fan referendum on whether the body-diverse squad initiative continued into the season, and I’d braced for a squeaker, because I brace for everything, it’s a reflex I was slowly learning to let go.

It was not a squeaker. The city had decided. The thing Monty handed me as a guillotine had turned in his hand and become the loudest yes I’d ever been part of.

Gabi found me on the sideline.

“You did that,” I said.