It did not slip the way a foot slips on ice, slowly, with warning. It went all at once. Shot sideways, as if someone had yanked a rug, and her whole weight, coming down hard from the back handspring, came down on the outside edge of her right ankle instead of the sole of her foot. She felt it roll. She felt the brace take the first of it and then give, and she felt the ankle go over, and there was a sound, a soft, wet, terrible pop that she heard not with her ears but from somewhere inside her own leg, and then she was down. Not in the layout. Not anywhere. Just down, on her side, on the blue mat, her right leg folded under her at an angle that was wrong, and a white hot bar of pain running from her ankle all the way up the outside of her leg to her hip.
She did not scream. She bit down on it. She bit down so hard that she tasted blood from the inside of her cheek.
The gym had gone completely silent.
She lay there for a second with her cheek against the mat. The mat was wet. She could feel it. Under her cheek and under her hand and under her hip, cold and slick on the blue vinyl. A puddle. Not big. A splash, spread thin, on the third panel of the mat, exactly where she had planned to plant her feet for the layout. Exactly where anyone who had watched her walk through her pass in her head, standing at the far end of the mat, mapping it, would have known she was going to land.
She lifted her head.
Madison Cross was standing at the edge of the mat, beside the third panel, about eight feet away. She was holding a clear plastic water bottle. It was empty. She was holding it loosely by the neck, the way you hold something you have just finished with, and she was looking down at Alana on the mat, and her face was arranged into an expression of perfect shocked concern. Her eyebrows were drawn together. Her mouth was a small round O.
"Oh my God," Madison said. "Oh my God, are you okay? Did you slip? That's so scary. Somebody must have spilled something. I was just bringing water over for the girls." She held up the empty bottle, as if it explained everything. And then she looked down at Alana again, and for one second, one second only, so quickly that no one else in the gym could possibly have seen it, the concern on her face went away, and underneath it was something else. Something small and bright and satisfied. A smile that did not need to move her mouth to be a smile.
"I guess Pacific Coast Elite doesn't practice on wet floors," she said softly. Too softly for anyone but Alana to hear.
And then the concern was back, and she was turning toward the judges' table and calling, "Coach! Coach, she slipped, I think she's hurt!" in a high, worried voice, and Coach Williams was on her feet and coming fast down the side of the mat, and the assistant coach was running for the first aid kit, and the girls on the bleachers were standing up, and the varsity girls on the floor were standing up, and Britney Walsh was standing at the back of them with her arms folded, looking at Alana on the mat with no expression on her face at all.
Alana understood.
She understood it all at once, lying there on the wet blue mat with her ankle screaming. She understood the clear plastic water bottle on the judges' table. She understood Madison standing up and walking down the side of the mat with it while Alana was setting up her pass. She understood Madison bending down by the bleachers with her back turned, by the side of the mat, at exactly the right place. Bring your own water, Coach Williams had said. Don't drink anything anybody hands you.
It had never been about drinking.
Coach Williams knelt down beside her. "Johnson. Don't move. Where does it hurt?"
Alana looked up at her. She looked at the coach's sharp dark eyes, and saw in them that the coach had not seen it. The coach had been looking at her clipboard. The coach had been talking to her assistant. The coach had looked up only when Alana was already in the air.
She could have said it. She could have said, right then, in front of everyone: she did it. She poured it. I saw her. She could have pointed at the empty bottle in Madison's hand. And Madison would have said, it was an accident, I was just bringing water, I must have spilled some, oh my God, I'm so sorry. And Britney would have backed her up. And the varsity girls would have backed her up. And it would have been the new girl from California, on her first day, the girl nobody knew, against the captain of the state champion squad whose mother was on the school board and whose father built the gym they were standing in.
She thought of her father. Patience, Lani. Most people lose because they move too soon.
"My ankle," she said. "Right ankle. I rolled it. I think it's a sprain."
"Can you move your toes?"