"The mat doesn't know," Rosie agreed, sagely.
Dani laughed despite herself. Then she bent and kissed Rosie on top of the new braid, and looked at Tom, and for a moment it seemed like she might say something real. Then a voice over the loudspeaker called the 135-pound semifinalists to the on-deck area, and the moment closed, and she pulled her hood back up and went.
* * *
Tom had never seen his daughter wrestle in person at this level. He had seen her at a couple of home duals her freshman year, in the Cutler Springs gym, where the stands held three hundred people and you could hear the coaches' individual words. He had seen clips. He had watched the stream yesterday on his phone in the snow. None of it had prepared him for the thing itself.
They found seats about twenty rows up, behind mat seven, wedged between a family from Moses Lake with a cowbell and a pair of grandparents in matching purple Puyallup sweatshirts. Rosie stood on her seat with her headphones on and the pizza-box sign held against her chest. Down on the mat, Dani and the girl from Spokane shook hands in the center circle. The Spokane girl was taller by three inches, with long arms and a long neck, and she moved like a heron.
The referee blew his whistle.
What happened next took two minutes, and it felt to Tom like a very long time and also like no time at all. The Spokane girl immediately reached out and grabbed Dani behind the head with one long hand and tied up Dani's wrist with the other, and leaned on her, and Dani leaned back, and for twenty or thirty seconds they stood in the middle of the circle like two people trying to hold up the same wall. Dani's hands kept moving. They slapped and pushed and snapped at the Spokane girl's wrists, and the girl kept regripping, and Tom could hear Ortega from twenty rows up yelling "MOVE HER! MOVE HER! CIRCLE!"
"She's doing the conversation," Rosie said, leaning into his ear.
"The what?"
"The hands. It's like—" Rosie made a face of concentration, searching for her mother's words. "If you just hold on, the other person gets to decide. So you have to keep talking with your hands until they say something wrong."
Down on the mat, the Spokane girl reached for a new grip a half-second too slow, and Dani's hand snapped her elbow up and Dani was suddenly not in front of her anymore but beside her, under her arm, and then behind her, and the Spokane girl was on her stomach on the mat and the referee was holding up three fingers.
"Takedown," Rosie said with great satisfaction. "Three."
Tom looked at his younger daughter.
"Since when do you know the scoring?"