Nobody had told her to sit there. She had simply walked to it, after the paramedics came, and sat down at the very end of it, in her uniform, with her crown in her lap. The other girls had not followed her. They were standing in a loose cluster at the other end of the mats, around Coach Williams, and some of them were crying, and some of them were talking in low voices, and Tessa had gone to stand beside Lily Pruett, who had come down from the stands, and none of them were looking at Madison. Up in the stands, Patricia Cross had left the railing. She was standing with her husband now, near the top of the row, talking fast and low into her phone with one hand over her other ear. Neither of them was looking at their daughter either.
Alana saw her, over her mother's shoulder. Just for a second. A girl in a navy and gold uniform sitting alone at the end of an aluminum bench under the floodlights, looking down at a crown in her hands.
She looked away.
* * *
Madison Cross sat in her white Range Rover in the dark, in the long curving driveway of the big white house on Linkhorn Bay, with the engine off, at eleven-forty that night, and read.
She had driven home herself. Her parents had taken the other car. Nobody had said anything to her in the parking lot. Her mother had looked at her once, across the roof of the car, with an expression Madison had never seen on her face before and could not name, and then gotten in and shut the door. Her father had not looked at her at all.
She had been sitting in the driveway for almost an hour now. The lights were on in the house. She could see her mother in the kitchen window, walking back and forth, on the phone. She had been on the phone since they got home. Madison did not want to go inside.
So she sat in the car, and read.
Someone in the stands had filmed it. Of course they had. Many people had filmed it. But one video in particular had been posted at ten-fifteen, from a high angle, near the forty-yard line, with clear audio, and by eleven-forty it had been viewed four hundred thousand times. It showed everything. The pyramid. The bail. Britney screaming. Madison standing over her shouting get up, stop being so dramatic. The new girl going over the railing on one foot. The splint. The announcement. The commander walking across the end zone. The phone. The grainy black-and-white footage on its little bright screen, which somebody had zoomed in on and slowed down and circled in red. And Madison's own voice, high and cracking, rising out of the silence: she didn't belong here. I just wanted to make a point.
It had been reposted by an account with two million followers, under the caption: The captain sabotaged the new girl. Then the new girl's dad showed up. Then the new girl saved the captain's best friend. Watch to the end.
Madison watched to the end. Then she scrolled down to the comments.
There were twenty-eight thousand of them.
She read them for a long time. She read the ones about her face, and her hair, and her body, and her mother. She read the ones that called her a word she had never been called in her life. She read the ones that said she should be expelled, and the ones that said she should be arrested, and the ones that said worse. She read people from all over the country, from all over the world, people who had never been to Virginia, never been to Westfield, never met her, telling her exactly what kind of person she was. She read her own name, typed by strangers, again and again and again.
At some point, around midnight, she realized that her hands were shaking so badly she could barely hold the phone. At some point after that, she realized that she had been crying for some time without noticing, and that she could not stop.
And at some point after that, sitting alone in the dark in a car her father had bought her for her sixteenth birthday, with twenty-eight thousand strangers telling her what she was, Madison Cross had a thought that she had never had before in her life. It came to her slowly, and it was very simple, and it made her feel sick.
She thought: this is what it felt like.
This is what it felt like for the new girl. Yesterday. On the bleachers. With the video. With three hundred comments. This is what it felt like for Kenya Bell, with the photograph. For Grace Kowalski, whose father was a janitor, whose name Madison had made into a joke in a group chat for a whole month. For Sofia and Destiny. For every girl who had ever walked into that gym and looked up at her and thought she might be safe.