And then the three of them stepped aside, all at once, as smoothly as they had stepped into her path, and Alana was standing alone on the steps with the doors in front of her, and they were already walking away down the steps behind her, and the girl with the ponytail was saying something low and the redhead was laughing and looking at her phone, and Madison Cross was not looking back at all.
Very common.
Alana stood very still on the steps for a moment. She felt the heat climb up the back of her neck. She felt her hands want to curl into fists at her sides and did not let them.
She thought about her system. Number four. Look at faces. Start sorting them.
She had sorted Madison Cross.
She thought about her father. Patience, Lani. Most people lose because they move too soon.
She breathed in, for four. Held it, for four. Breathed out, for four. Then she climbed the last three steps and pulled open the heavy door and walked into Westfield High School like she knew exactly where she was going.
* * *
Her locker was on the second floor, in a long hallway that smelled of floor wax and body spray and the faintly burnt smell of an old radiator that someone had turned on too early in the season. Number 2117. The combination was printed on a slip of paper the front office had handed her along with her schedule and a map and a pamphlet titled WELCOME, NEW COLONIAL! with a cartoon of a man in a tricorn hat giving a thumbs up. She found the locker. She opened it on the second try. She put her gym bag in the bottom and hung her jacket on the hook and stood for a moment looking at the bare gray metal inside, the faint scratches and the ghost of an old sticker someone had peeled off, and thought about the locker in Chula Vista, which had been covered from top to bottom in photographs of her team.
Then she took out her phone and texted her father.
Made it. Big school. Lots of columns.
The reply came almost instantly. It always did. She sometimes wondered whether he kept his phone in his hand all day on her first days, waiting. She suspected he did.
Columns are good. Columns hold things up. How's the terrain?
She thought about it. She thought about the steps, and the three girls, and the bright empty smile, and very common.
Mixed, she typed. Met the welcome committee. Head cheer captain. Her dad owns half the town apparently. She told me so.
There was a pause. Longer this time. She watched the three dots appear and disappear and appear again.
Copy that, her father wrote at last. Remember. First contact tells you what they want you to think. Second contact tells you what they actually think. Don't react to the first one. Assess. Be patient. You don't have to win today. You just have to see the field.
She read it twice. Then she typed: I know, Dad.
I know you know. I just like saying it. Proud of you. Text me after tryouts. And Lani? Ankle brace.
She smiled despite herself and put the phone back in her pocket.
The morning went the way first mornings go. She sat in the back of an American history class taught by a tired, kind, rumpled man named Mr. Ostrowski who called her Alanna, with two n's, three times, and apologized each time. She sat in the middle of a pre-calculus class taught by a brisk young woman who made her stand up and introduce herself, which she did in eleven words, and sat down again. In both classes she looked at faces, and sorted them, and found that most of them were the same faces you found in every school in America. Bored faces. Sleepy faces. Faces that looked at her with mild curiosity and then went back to their phones. A few that looked at her and smiled. One, a heavyset boy with a sketchbook in the back row of pre-calc, who drew something while she was talking and then quickly turned the page when he saw her looking. A few that looked at her a second too long and then said something to the person next to them. She did not see Madison Cross in either class. She was grateful.
Third period was chemistry.
She was late. Not very. Two minutes. She had gotten turned around on the third floor and walked the whole length of the science wing in the wrong direction before a janitor pointed her back the way she had come. When she came in through the door the teacher, a bald, cheerful man in a bow tie named Dr. Pruitt, was already writing on the whiteboard, and the class was sitting at long black lab benches in pairs, and every seat was taken except one.
The empty seat was at the second bench from the front, beside a boy.