"That's the captain?" said Renée quietly, beside her.
"That's her."
Her mother watched for a while with her nurse's eyes, narrow and assessing.
"That girl is wound so tight she's going to snap something," she said. "And it might not be her."
On the far side of the field, the teams were coming out. The visitors first, Kellam, in white and red, to a smattering of applause from the small cluster of red in the visitors' stands. Then the band struck up the Westfield fight song, loud and brassy and slightly out of tune, and the whole home side came to its feet roaring, and the Colonials came running out through a big paper banner held up by the cheerleaders, tearing through it, helmets up, and at the front of them, number seven, Jake Martinez, big and fast and holding his helmet in one hand above his head, looking up at the crowd as he ran.
He looked up at the home bleachers. His eyes moved along them. Alana thought, though she could not be sure from so far away, that they stopped for a second at the forty-yard line, halfway up, at the end of a row, and that he grinned.
She sank a little lower in her seat.
"Who is that?" said Renée, with great interest.
"Nobody, Mama."
"That's a very big nobody. He's looking right at you."
"He's the quarterback. He sits next to me in chemistry."
"Mm-hmm," said Renée Johnson, and said nothing else, very loudly.
Down on the field, there was the coin toss. Alana did not pay much attention. It was done by somebody in uniform; she saw a tall dark figure walk out to the center of the field with the referees and the team captains and stand there for a moment under the lights while the announcer said something over the loudspeakers that was swallowed by the wind and the band. She was busy at that moment trying to get her crutches stowed under the bench in front of her without hitting anybody, and when she looked up again, the figure was walking off the field toward the far sideline and the captains were jogging back to their benches and the crowd was sitting down. She thought, vaguely, that it must be the military appreciation thing. She saw her mother watching the figure walk off the field with an odd expression on her face, and then her mother turned and saw Alana looking at her, and smiled brightly, and said, "Want some hot chocolate, baby? I'm getting hot chocolate," and got up and went down the bleachers before Alana could answer.
The first half was close.
Alana did not know a great deal about football, but she knew enough to see that Jake was good. Very good. He threw long, clean spirals that dropped into his receivers' hands like something being set down on a table. He ran when he had to, and when he ran it took two or three Kellam players to bring him down. Westfield scored first, on a long pass to the corner of the end zone, and the home side went wild, and the cheerleaders did a celebration stunt on the track below, and Alana watched Madison go up into the air in an extension and wobble, just slightly, at the top, and saw Tessa's arms shake under her, and saw her come down too fast, and saw her turn on Tessa as soon as her feet touched the mat. Kellam scored. Westfield kicked a field goal. Kellam scored again. With two minutes left in the half, Jake threw another long pass, and it was caught, and it was a touchdown, and Westfield went into halftime up seventeen to fourteen, and the home crowd was on its feet and stamping on the aluminum bleachers so that the whole stand shook.
Renée had come back with two hot chocolates and a bag of kettle corn. Alana held the cup between her hands for warmth.
"Halftime," said Renée. She was looking down at the field. She had been looking down at the far sideline, Alana had noticed, quite a lot, over the last half hour. "Big show, I guess. Homecoming."
"They'll do the court," said Alana. "Homecoming court. And then the cheer routine. The big one. It's what they've been practicing all week. Lily told me in Spanish. It's got a full pyramid and a basket toss at the end. Madison's the top of the pyramid and she's the one who goes up in the basket."
"Lily?"
"A girl. From the tryout. She's nice."
"Mm-hmm," said Renée, and squeezed her knee under the blanket.
The band played. The homecoming court came out onto the field in convertibles, a slow parade around the track, girls in sparkly dresses and boys in suits waving at the crowd, and the announcer read their names. Madison Cross was in the third car. She had changed out of her cheer uniform into a long pale blue gown, and her hair was up, and there was a sash across her chest. She waved at the crowd with a cupped hand, like a queen. She was smiling. Her mother, Alana assumed, was the blonde woman in pearls and a camel coat in the front row of the home stands, just above the fifty-yard line, standing up and filming with her phone held high over her head. Beside her stood a heavy, red-faced man in a quilted vest, not filming, looking at his own phone.