She took a screenshot of the video's title screen, with the account name and the view count and the date. She took screenshots of the comments, one after another, scrolling slowly, making sure each screenshot showed the username of the person who had written it and the time it had been posted. Some of the usernames were random letters and numbers, like the account that had posted the video. But some were not. Some were real names. Some had profile pictures of real faces, faces she had seen that morning in the hallways of Westfield High School, in letter jackets and cheer hoodies. She did not let herself stop and look at them. She just took the screenshots. One after another. Click. Scroll. Click. It took her eleven minutes. When she was finished she had a hundred and four of them, and her spaghetti had gone cold, and her hands had stopped shaking.
She opened her email, and attached them all in batches, and sent them to her father with the subject line: Lunch. And then, because she was her father's daughter, she sent them to herself as well, at a second email address, and saved them to a folder in the cloud.
When she looked up, Jake Martinez was standing at the end of her table with a tray in his hands.
She had not seen him come over. She was annoyed with herself about that. He was very big, and the cafeteria was very loud, and he had somehow crossed the whole room without her noticing. He was looking at her phone on the table, and then at her face, and his own face was doing something complicated.
"Can I sit?" he said.
"It's a free country."
"That's not what I asked."
Alana looked at him. Then she moved her crutches over a few inches on the bench.
"Yes," she said. "You can sit."
He sat. His tray had two plates of spaghetti on it, three rolls, two cartons of chocolate milk, and an apple. He did not eat any of it. He sat across from her with his big forearms on the table and looked at her phone.
"You saw it," he said.
"I saw it."
"I saw it this morning. Before first period. I reported it." His jaw was tight. "Like six times. So did my sister. She's in college, she doesn't even go here anymore, she just saw it because someone tagged her. She reported it too. It's still up." He looked at the phone a moment longer and then looked away, out the window at the flat gray sky. "Are you okay?"
"No," said Alana. Then, because that sounded more dramatic than she meant it to: "But I will be."
Jake nodded slowly.
"I know who filmed it," he said.
"So do I," said Alana. "She had red hair and she was sitting in the second row of the bleachers and she had her phone up the whole time."
Jake looked at her.
"Kelsey," he said.
"Kelsey Tran. Yes." Alana picked up her fork and put it down again. "And I know who edited it. Or I know who told her to. And so do you. And so does everybody in this room. And it doesn't matter, Jake. Because nobody can prove it. The account doesn't have a name. That's the whole point."
"You took screenshots," said Jake, glancing at her phone.
"My dad told me to write everything down."
"Your dad sounds kind of intense."
"You have no idea," said Alana, and almost, very nearly, smiled.
They sat for a while. Jake began, finally, to eat, with the steady single-minded focus of a football player who has been told he needs four thousand calories a day and is taking it seriously. Alana ate a few of her cold peaches. The cafeteria roared around them. She was aware, gradually, that people were looking at them. More people than before. She could feel it the way you feel sun on the back of your neck. The quarterback of the football team, sitting by the trash cans with the new girl on crutches. She saw two girls at a nearby table put their heads together. She saw a boy in a letter jacket at another table stand up a little to see better, and then sit down. She saw phones.
"You don't have to do this," she said quietly.
"Do what?"
"Sit here. With me. People are looking."
"People are always looking at me," said Jake, with his mouth full of roll. "I'm the quarterback. It's literally my whole job to get looked at." He swallowed. "Besides. I like it here. It's quiet. Nobody wants to sit by the trash cans."
"It's not quiet. It's a cafeteria."
"It's quiet for a cafeteria." He looked at her across the table. His face was serious again. "Look. I'm not doing this to be nice. Okay? I want to be clear. I'm not doing you a favor. I sat in chemistry yesterday and watched you not even blink when I showed you that first video, and I thought, that's the toughest person I've ever met, and I've played football against kids who are going to the NFL. And then I heard what happened at the tryout. And