The cafeteria at Westfield High School was in the old part of the building, not the new wing, and it looked it: a long, low room with a scuffed linoleum floor and rows of tables with attached benches and a wall of tall windows on one side that let in a flat gray light. It was loud. It was always loud, Alana suspected, in the way every school cafeteria in America was loud, a constant roar of four hundred conversations bouncing off hard surfaces. She got her tray from the line, which was difficult on crutches, and which she managed by hooking one crutch under her arm and carrying the tray in the other hand and hopping, slowly, with the cafeteria lady watching her anxiously over the sneeze guard. Then she stood at the end of the line with her tray and looked out at the room.
Number seven on her old list, in the version she had used in middle school, had been: find somewhere to sit at lunch. She had taken it off the list in ninth grade, because it was never a problem you could solve with a system. You just had to do it.
She found an empty table near the windows, at the far end of the room, by the trash cans, where nobody ever wanted to sit. She lowered herself onto the bench and propped the crutches against the table and set the tray down. Spaghetti, a roll, a carton of milk, a cup of canned peaches. She was not hungry. She ate anyway, slowly, because her mother had told her that morning that if she did not eat lunch she would feel worse in the afternoon, and her mother was an ICU nurse and was usually right about things like that.
She had eaten about four bites when her phone buzzed on the table.
It was a text from a number she did not recognize. It contained nothing but a link. She looked at it for a moment. She knew she should not open it. She opened it anyway.
It was a video. It had been posted the night before, on an account she had never heard of, with no profile picture and a username made of random letters and numbers. It was called, in big white letters across the opening frame, NEW GIRL'S GREATEST HITS, followed by a row of crying-laughing faces.
It was a minute and twelve seconds long. It began with the four-second clip of her on the steps, the one Jake had shown her in chemistry, with Madison's voice saying very common. Then it cut to the gym. It must have been filmed from the bleachers, by someone sitting low, on a phone. Her running pass. The round-off, the back handspring, the beautiful high twisting layout, and then her feet going out from under her on the third panel, and her body hitting the mat. The video showed it in slow motion. Then it showed it again, at normal speed. Then it showed it again, in reverse, so that she seemed to fly back up off the mat into the air, and then again forward, so that she fell again, and someone had added a sound effect, a cartoon slide-whistle going down and a crash of cymbals, and a laugh track. Then it showed her lying on the mat. Then it zoomed in on her face, her mouth open in pain, and froze, and someone had drawn on it with a digital pen. Then it showed her hopping out of the gym with the coach and the assistant on either side of her, and someone had set it to a sad violin song, and written across the bottom: when you realize this isn't California.
It had been viewed eleven thousand four hundred times.
Alana watched it once all the way through. Then she scrolled down to the comments.
She had known, before she scrolled, what she would find. She had been one of very few Black girls in three of her six schools, and she knew what people wrote when they thought nobody would ever trace it back to them. But knowing a thing and reading it are not the same. She read it. Not all of it. There were more than three hundred comments. She read enough. She read the ones about her body and the ones about her hair and the ones about where she should go back to, though nobody seemed sure where that was. She read the ones about her father, which were the ones that made her hands start to shake. She read words that she had heard before, a few times in her life, shouted from passing cars or written on a bathroom wall in Pensacola, but had never in her life seen written down so many times, so casually, under a video of her own face.
She sat very still at the table by the trash cans with her phone in her hand.
She thought: do not cry. Number six. Not in the building.
She thought: Dad said document everything.
She took a breath. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.
Then she began, very calmly and methodically, to take screenshots.