Jake was not in any of the cars. Alana noticed that. She did not let herself think too much about what it meant.
The homecoming king and queen were announced. The king was a boy Alana did not know, a lacrosse player. The queen was Madison Cross. The crowd applauded. Madison stood up in the back of the convertible and accepted a crown and a bouquet of roses and waved and blew kisses and smiled. Up in the front row of the stands, the woman in pearls was crying, and filming, at the same time.
Then the convertibles drove off the field. And Madison was out of her gown and back into her uniform in four minutes flat, in a tent behind the end zone, and running out onto the track with the rest of the squad as the announcer said, "And now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your three-time state champion Westfield Colonials varsity cheerleaders!" and the home side came to its feet again.
Alana watched from the bleachers with her hot chocolate going cold in her hands.
She watched them run out onto the long strip of mats laid down on the track in front of the home stands, fourteen girls in navy and gold, and take their positions. She watched the music start, loud and thumping out of the stadium speakers. She watched the first eight-count. Clean. Sharp. Good. The second. Good. The jumps. Very good. The tumbling, a line of back handsprings across the mat. Good, mostly. One of the girls on the end was slightly late, but you would not notice unless you were looking for it. Alana was looking for it.
Then the stunts. Then the pyramid.
She knew it was wrong before it started.
She would not have been able to explain how she knew. It was something in the way the girls were moving into position, a hesitation, a glance at each other, a fractional delay. It was in the way Madison, walking into the center of the formation to be lifted, turned and said something sharp over her shoulder to Tessa and to Britney, who were her bases, and the way Tessa's face changed. And it was in the count. The music was going one, two, three, four, and the girls were moving on a count that was half a beat behind it. Alana could hear it from the bleachers. She could feel it. She knew that routine count the way she knew her own heartbeat, and she knew it was wrong, the way you would know if someone was singing a song you knew in the wrong key.
"Something's off," she said out loud, to nobody.
"What?" said her mother.
"They changed the count. Somebody changed the count." Alana sat forward on the bench. "They're going to go on the wrong beat. Mama, somebody changed the—"
The pyramid went up.
It went up wrong. It went up in two pieces, the left side on the music and the right side half a beat late, so that for a moment the whole structure was lopsided, the girls on top on the left already in position and the girls on top on the right still rising, and at the very top, in the center, Madison Cross was lifted into the air by Tessa and Britney on a count that only one of them was on. She went up crooked. She tilted. Alana saw her arms go out, saw her try to save it, saw her body twist at the top. Saw Tessa, underneath her, panicking, trying to correct, pushing up when she should have been holding.
And saw Madison bail.
It was not a fall, exactly. It was worse than that. It was a decision. Madison, at the top of the pyramid, tilting, about to come down, did what flyers are trained never to do. She did not trust her bases. She did not stay tight and let them bring her down. She kicked out of it. She threw herself sideways, off the top of the pyramid, toward the right, toward the open mat, to save herself, and in doing so she put all her weight, suddenly and without warning, onto Britney's side.
Britney Walsh, underneath her, was not ready. She had no way of being ready. She was looking up, arms raised, waiting for Madison to come down into a cradle, the way they had practiced it a thousand times. And instead Madison came off the top sideways, all at once, and Britney lunged to catch her, the way bases are trained to do, always, no matter what, and caught part of her, and was carried down with her, and landed on the mat with Madison's full weight coming down on top of her and her own right arm bent under her at an angle that was very, very wrong.