And you saw, if you knew where to look, the young man holding the phone, in the corner of the frame for the last two seconds, reflected in the glossy orange door of the car. A skinny kid in a black hoodie and a backward cap with his mouth open in shock.
The federation's ethics and conduct committee convened its review by video conference at nine o'clock in the morning, three days before the national team trials.
There were five members of the panel, all of them former athletes or coaches or administrators, sitting in a row in a conference room at the federation's headquarters, visible on the screen of Coach Imura's laptop, which sat on the kitchen table of the lake cabin. Dara sat in front of it in a navy blue blazer she had borrowed from Jasmine, which was too short in the sleeves, with her hands folded on the table and her back very straight and her braids, which Tasha had redone the night before over a video call, talking her through each one, gathered at the back of her neck. Coach Imura sat beside her. Her grandmother, who had driven three hours north the previous evening in Dara's rattling compact car to be there, because she said she was not going to sit at home and watch her granddaughter get tried by a bunch of strangers on a computer, sat in a kitchen chair against the wall behind them, out of view of the camera, in her church hat, with her arms folded and an expression on her face that would have stopped a room full of seventh graders dead in their tracks.
The panel had watched both videos. They had read the police report, including the second statement that Brooke Halston had given to Officer Pruitt in the patrol car, the one in which she said, after he showed her Theo's video, that she had grabbed the nozzle first and wished to withdraw her complaint. They had received a written statement from Mr. Farouk, along with the footage from the gas station's own security camera, which was mounted on the canopy directly above pump one and which showed, in grainy black and white from above, the nozzle shifting in the filler neck and the dark splash of fuel spreading on the ground before the kick. They had received a letter from a captain of the city fire department, who had been sent the footage by Officer Kim, and who wrote in plain official language that pulling an active fuel nozzle from a vehicle filler neck during dispensing, in proximity to a recently operated high-performance engine, presented a credible risk of fuel spray, ignition, and serious injury to all persons in the immediate area, and that the actions taken to prevent the nozzle's removal appeared, in his professional opinion, to have reduced that risk.
And at nine-fifteen, they received a request to add a sixth participant to the call.
Her face appeared in a small square in the corner of the screen. Pale. Freckled. No makeup. Blonde hair dark at the roots, scraped back in an elastic band. A gray sweatshirt that said the name of a small-town high school four hundred kilometers away. Sitting at what looked like a kitchen table, in what looked like a small, old, cluttered kitchen, with a calendar on the wall from a local feed store and a woman with short gray hair hovering at the edge of the frame.
"My name is Brooke Halston," she said. "I'm the woman from the gas station. I asked if I could speak. I won't take long."
The chair of the panel, a former Olympian named Dr. Angela Ruiz with silver hair and reading glasses, looked at her for a long moment over the top of them. Then she nodded.
Brooke did not take long. She said much of what she had said in her video. That she had started it. That she had grabbed the nozzle. That Dara had warned her and she had not listened. That Dara had used, as far as Brooke could tell, the least force she could have used to stop her, and had then stayed with her and taken care of her until the police came. And then she said something that was not in her video, something she had not said to anyone, and her voice went very quiet.
"I've been thinking about what she could have done instead," Brooke said. "Everyone online keeps saying she could have done something else. Let go. Stepped back. Grabbed my wrists. And maybe she could have. I don't know. I'm not a fighter. But I keep thinking. If she'd let go, I'd have had the nozzle. I was pulling so hard I'd have fallen backward with it. In those shoes. On that ground. With it spraying. And if she'd grabbed my wrists, I'd have fought her. I know I would. I was so angry I couldn't see. I'd have fought her right there over the open tank." She swallowed. "She had half a second, and she picked the thing where the only person who got hurt was me, and the only way I got hurt was a sprained ankle and some bruised pride. I don't think she picked wrong. I think she's the only reason I'm sitting here."