"But you're right," Alana went on, before she could speak, in the same calm, curious, pleasant voice. "Your dad built the school. I saw the plaque. On the new wing. Cross Construction." She tilted her head, exactly the way Britney had tilted hers. "My dad was reading about it last night, actually. He likes reading about buildings. He said there was a vote. On the school board. Three years ago. For the contract for the new wing. And then another one, a year and a half later, for a lot more money. For the gym." She let it hang there for a second. "He said it was interesting. That your mom's on the board. And that she sat out the first vote. But not the second one." She looked up at Madison, wide-eyed, innocent. "Is that a tradition too? I'm still learning."
The hallway was absolutely silent.
Madison Cross's face did something Alana had not seen it do before. It went still. Completely still. Every trace of the bright, warm, delighted smile drained out of it at once, like water out of a sink, and what was left underneath was pale. Not blotchy, like Britney's. Pale. White to the lips. Her gray-blue eyes had gone wide and flat and fixed, and for one second, one second only, before she got it under control, Alana saw something in them that she recognized. Something she had seen in her own face in the mirror more than once, in more than one town, on the first day.
Fear.
Then it was gone. Madison took a step forward. Close. Very close. So close that Alana could smell her perfume, something expensive and floral, and see the faint line of foundation at her jaw. And when she spoke, her voice was very low, so low that nobody else in the hallway could hear it, and it was not bright or warm or silvery at all.
"You have no idea," said Madison Cross, "who you're dealing with. You think this is a game? I will ruin your life. You understand me? I will ruin it. By the time I'm done with you, you're going to wish your daddy had gotten shipped somewhere else."
Alana looked up at her. Into the wide, flat, frightened eyes.
"You already tried," she said quietly. "Yesterday. Remember?"
And she swung herself around Madison Cross on her crutches, swing, step, swing, step, the rubber tips squeaking on the waxed floor, past Britney Walsh, past Kelsey Tran and her phone, past the boys in letter jackets, who stepped back to let her through, and on down the long hallway toward chemistry, without looking back.
Behind her, nobody said anything at all.
* * *
At that moment, three miles away, on the second floor of the Westfield Public Schools administration building, in a small paneled office with a window that looked out over the parking lot and a framed photograph on the wall of a much younger man in a cap and gown, Principal Gerald Harrison looked up from his desk as his secretary knocked on the half-open door and said, in a slightly strained voice, "Mr. Harrison? Your nine-thirty is here."
"My nine-thirty?" Harrison frowned at his calendar. "I don't have a nine-thirty."
"You do now," said his secretary. "He called at seven this morning. He said it was regarding his daughter. I put him in." She hesitated. "He's, um. He's in uniform, sir."
Harrison looked past her, through the half-open door, into the outer office.
A man was standing there, beside the row of plastic chairs, not sitting. A very large Black man, six foot three at least, broad as a door, with a shaved head and a short gray beard and a white scar through his left eyebrow. He was wearing the dress blue uniform of an officer of the United States Navy, the jacket buttoned to the throat, the brass buttons gleaming, the gold stripes on the sleeves catching the light from the window. On his left breast, above a rack of ribbons so long it ran in five rows, was a gold insignia that Gerald Harrison, who had grown up in Virginia Beach, recognized immediately. An eagle, wings spread, clutching an anchor and a trident and a flintlock pistol.
The man was holding a slim black laptop under one arm. He was standing perfectly still.
He had flown back from Mississippi on the six a.m. flight. He had not told his daughter.
"Commander Malcolm Johnson," said the man in the doorway, quietly. "Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Harrison. I'll try not to take too much of your time."
* * *
Gerald Harrison had been the principal of Westfield High School for nine years, and in those nine years he had learned that there were two kinds of parents who came into his office without an appointment.
The first kind came in shouting. They were the easy kind. They were angry about a grade, or a detention, or a coach who had benched their son, and they said so at the top of their voices, and he let them say it, and nodded, and made sympathetic noises, and promised to look into it, and after twenty minutes they ran out of breath and went home feeling heard, and most of the time nothing changed at all. He was very good at the first kind. He had a whole system for them.