She looked at it for a second as she went past. She thought it was nice. She did not think about it again.
* * *
The stadium at Westfield High School was called Cross Field.
Alana saw the name as her mother pulled into the parking lot at a quarter to seven, in tall steel letters on an arch over the main gate, lit from below by floodlights, so that the letters threw long shadows up into the dark: CROSS FIELD — HOME OF THE COLONIALS. Under the arch a crowd was pouring through the gates, families in navy and gold, students in face paint, little kids on their fathers' shoulders waving foam fingers, old men in Colonials windbreakers that looked older than Alana. The air smelled of popcorn and cut grass and diesel from the buses that had brought the visiting team. Somewhere inside, a marching band was warming up, a ragged brassy noise that kept starting and stopping. Above it all the stadium lights blazed white against the black October sky, so bright they seemed to hum.
"Of course it's called Cross Field," said Renée, turning off the engine. "Of course it is."
Alana said nothing. She was looking at the arch.
Her mother looked at her in the dim light of the car.
"We don't have to go in, baby."
"Dad said to go."
"Your daddy says a lot of things." Renée sighed. "But he said trust me. Didn't he."
Alana turned and looked at her. "He said it to you too?"
"He said it to me too." Her mother picked up her purse from the floor and her reading glasses from the dashboard and put them on top of her head, where they would almost certainly get lost. "And when that man says trust me, I've learned to put my shoes on and go where he points. Come on. Get your crutches. And put your hood up, it's cold."
It was cold. It was the first really cold night of the fall, a hard clear Virginia cold that came in off the ocean after sunset and got into your bones. Alana was wearing her blue winter coat, the long one, and her mother's knitted scarf, and a wool hat, and her ankle brace under a loose pair of sweatpants, and she still shivered as they crossed the parking lot. Getting through the gate on crutches was slow. People moved around her. A few of them looked. A man in a Colonials windbreaker held the turnstile open for her, and smiled, and said, "Rough week, huh?" in a kind voice, and she realized, with a small jolt, that he had probably seen the video, and that he probably thought she was just a girl who had fallen.
They found seats in the home bleachers, about halfway up, near the forty-yard line, at the end of a row where Alana could stretch her bad leg out into the aisle. Her mother wrapped a blanket around both their laps. Below them, on the track that ran around the field, in front of the first row of the bleachers, the cheerleaders were warming up.
Alana had told herself she would not watch them. She watched them anyway. She could not help it. It was like asking a pianist not to listen to a piano.
There were fourteen of them on the varsity squad, in their navy and gold uniforms with the big gold bows, warming up on a long strip of mats laid out on the track in front of the home bleachers. They were doing their stretches, their jumps, their basic stunts. They were good. Alana could see that at once. They had been state champions three years running, and it showed in the sharpness of their motions and the height of their jumps. But she could see something else, too, from up in the stands, the way you can see a crack in a wall better from across the street than from right up against it.
They were afraid.
Not of falling. Not of the crowd. They were afraid of Madison.
She was standing in front of them with her back to the bleachers and her hands on her hips, and she was shouting. Alana could not hear all of it over the noise of the band, but she could hear enough. Again. No. Again. Are you kidding me? Again. Paige, if you drop me one more time I swear to God. Tessa, you're late on the count, you're always late on the count, what is wrong with you? Again. And the girls did it again, and again, and again, with their jaws tight and their eyes on Madison's face, watching for the next explosion. Alana watched a tall, thin, terrified-looking junior with a long dark ponytail, who must be Tessa, the second-string base Jake had mentioned, hold Madison up in an extension with her arms shaking, and saw Madison come down and say something to her, close to her face, that made the girl's chin crumple. She watched Britney Walsh stand at Madison's elbow and nod along to everything, and then turn and repeat it to the others, louder.