She moved her toes. It hurt so much that her vision went white at the edges. But they moved.
"Okay," said Coach Williams. "Okay. We're going to get some ice on it. And then we're going to call your folks and get you to urgent care. Don't try to stand."
"I can stand."
"Johnson—"
"I can stand," said Alana again, quietly.
And she did.
She pushed herself up off the wet mat with her hands. She got her left foot under her. She let the coach take her arm, and the assistant coach take the other, and she stood, slowly, on her left foot, her right foot held off the ground, her ankle already swelling against the straps of the brace like something trying to get out. Her face was gray. Her lips were pressed together so hard they had gone white. Her eyes were dry.
She did not look at Madison Cross. She did not look at Britney Walsh. She did not look at any of them. She looked straight ahead, at the double doors at the far end of the gym, under the gold letters on the navy wall that said TRADITION — EXCELLENCE — PRIDE, and she began, with the coach on one side and the assistant coach on the other, to walk toward them. One hop. Then another. Then another. Thirty yards across the polished maple floor of the gym that Madison Cross's father had built, with every girl in the room watching her, and not one tear on her face.
She did not cry until she was in the passenger seat of her mother's car, forty minutes later, in the parking lot of an urgent care clinic on Laskin Road, with her ankle wrapped in an elastic bandage and propped on the dashboard and a bag of ice melting on it and an X-ray showing nothing broken, only a bad sprain, two weeks, maybe three, no tumbling for a month.
And even then, she only cried for about a minute. Then she wiped her face on her sleeve and took out her phone.
* * *
Six hundred and forty miles away, in a motel room outside Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, with a window unit air conditioner rattling against the humid night and a stack of training binders spread across the second bed, Commander Malcolm Johnson was ironing a shirt when his phone rang.
He looked at the screen. Lani. He set down the iron on its heel and turned it off at the wall, because he had once, in nineteen ninety-nine, in a barracks in Coronado, left an iron face down on a shirt while he answered a phone call and burned a hole through the uniform of a man who outranked him, and he had not forgotten the lesson. Then he picked up the phone.
"Hey, baby girl. How'd it go?"
There was a silence on the line. Not a long one. Two seconds, maybe three. But Malcolm Johnson had spent nineteen years of his life listening to silences on radios and telephones, in the dark, in places where silences meant things, and he knew this one. He knew it before she said a word. He sat down slowly on the edge of the motel bed.
"Lani," he said. "Talk to me."
"I'm okay," she said. Her voice was very steady. Too steady. The way his own voice got when he was holding something down very hard. "I'm okay, Dad. It's just my ankle. It's a sprain. Mama took me to urgent care. Nothing's broken. Three weeks, they said. No tumbling for a month."
"What happened?"
Another silence. Shorter.
"I fell. On my running pass. At the tryout." He heard her take a breath. "There was water on the mat. Right where I was going to land. A puddle. I came down out of the back handspring and my foot just went."
Malcolm did not say anything. He waited. He had learned a long time ago that when somebody was telling you something hard, the most useful thing you could do was wait, and let them get to it in their own time.
"It wasn't an accident, Dad," Alana said.
Her voice cracked. Just once. On the last word.
"They sabotaged me."
Malcolm Johnson sat on the edge of the motel bed in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, with the phone pressed to his ear and his other hand resting flat on his knee, and he went very still.
It was not a decision. It happened to him, the way it had always happened to him, ever since he was a boy. Something in him simply stopped. His breathing slowed. His heart slowed. His hand on his knee, which had been resting loosely, became perfectly motionless, as if it had been carved there. The rattle of the air conditioner, the hum of the minifridge, the faint sound of a television through the wall from the next room, all of it seemed to recede to a great distance. The whole world narrowed down to the voice on the phone. And far down inside him, in a place he had spent nineteen years learning to keep locked, something very old and very cold opened one eye.