The New Girl They Tried to Break: A Navy SEAL's Daughter, a Cheer Squad, and the Night the Whole Stadium Froze
Alana Johnson had a system for first days.
She had developed it over six of them, in six different schools, in six different states, over the course of eleven years, and she had refined it each time the way her father refined a plan after an exercise, keeping what worked and throwing away what did not. By now it was almost a ritual. She knew it the way she knew the count of a cheer routine, eight beats at a time, every movement in its place.
One. Arrive early, but not too early. Ten minutes before the first bell. Early enough to find your locker without rushing. Not so early that you end up standing alone in an empty hallway looking like you have nowhere else to be.
Two. Wear something forgettable. Not ugly. Not interesting. Jeans, sneakers, a plain top in a plain color. Nothing with words on it. Nothing anyone could make a joke about. You did not want to be the girl in the loud jacket on the first day. You wanted to be the girl nobody noticed until you were ready to be noticed.
Three. Walk like you know where you are going, even if you do not.
Four. Look at faces. Not for long. Not so long that anyone thinks you are staring. Just long enough to start sorting them. Who looks back and smiles. Who looks away. Who looks at you a second too long and then says something to the person next to them.
Five. Say your name clearly when anyone asks. Do not apologize for it. Do not explain it.
Six. Do not cry. Not in the building. Not until you are home, in your room, with the door closed, and even then only if you absolutely have to.
Seven. Find the gym.
Eight. Breathe.
She was seventeen years old. She had lived in San Diego, California, and Norfolk, Virginia, and Coronado, California again, and then for two long gray years in a town outside Tacoma, Washington, where it rained so often that she forgot what the sun felt like on her shoulders, and then in Pensacola, Florida, where the sun felt like a hand pressing down on her head, and then, for the last eighteen months, in a rented townhouse in Chula Vista, California, near the border, where she had finally, for the first time in her life, made the varsity squad of an all-star competitive cheer team and stood on a podium at a regional championship with a medal around her neck and her whole team screaming around her and thought: this. This is mine. I am finally going to get to keep something.
And then, eleven weeks ago, her father had come home on a Thursday evening and sat down at the kitchen table across from her and her mother and folded his big hands on the table in front of him and said, in the careful, gentle voice he used only for news he knew they were not going to like: I got orders.
Virginia again. Not Norfolk this time. A town she had never heard of, twenty minutes inland from Virginia Beach, called Westfield. He was being assigned to a training command at Dam Neck. It was a good job, he said. Shore duty. Three years at least, maybe four. No deployments. He would be home for dinner almost every night. He had asked for it, he admitted, quietly, looking at his hands. He had asked for it because Alana was going to be a senior next year, and he had missed so many things, and he did not want to miss that.
Alana had said, that's great, Dad.
She had meant it. She had also gone up to her room afterward and closed the door and lain on her bed with her medal from the regional championship clutched in her fist so hard that the edges left marks in her palm, and cried for an hour without making a sound, because the walls in the townhouse were thin and she did not want him to hear. She had not wanted him to feel worse than he already did. He always felt bad enough about the moves. He never said so, but she could see it, in the way he packed the boxes himself, every time, late at night, after she was asleep, as if he could take some of the weight of it onto his own shoulders by carrying them.
Her father was a commander in the United States Navy. He had been a SEAL for nineteen years. That was not something Alana ever said out loud to anyone, at any of her six schools, because she had learned early that the moment you said it, people stopped seeing you and started seeing it. They asked if he had killed anybody. They asked if he had been on the mission where. They asked if he could do the thing they had seen in a movie. Boys wanted to fight her to see if she was tough. Girls wanted to know if he was handsome. Teachers looked at her with a mixture of admiration and wariness, as if she might at any moment produce a combat knife from her backpack. So she did not say it. When people asked what her father did, she said he was in the Navy. That was true. Most people assumed that meant he worked on a ship, or in an office, and lost interest. She preferred it that way.