She thought about the anonymous account. The one with no name and no profile picture. The one Kelsey had made for her in September, and given her the password to, and that she had used to post the new girl's greatest hits. She opened it. The video was still there, at the top. Eleven thousand views had become forty thousand. Under it, people had found it, the people from the other video, and they were posting her own name now, under her own video, over and over.
Her thumb hovered over the button that said delete.
It would be so easy. Two seconds. Nobody would ever know which account it had been. That was the whole point.
She looked at it for a long time.
Then she took her thumb away. She closed the app. She put the phone face down on the passenger seat.
She did not know why she did that. She would think about it for a long time afterward, and still not be sure. Maybe it was because the commander's daughter had taken a hundred and four screenshots, and Madison had heard about that at the end of the game, from a girl on the squad, and knew that deleting it would not make any difference. Maybe it was because she was tired of things being easy. Maybe it was something else, something she did not have a word for yet.
At twelve-thirty, the kitchen light went off. A minute later the front door opened, and her mother stood in the doorway in her robe, a silhouette against the hall light, and looked out at the car in the driveway. She stood there for a long moment. Madison waited for her to call her name.
She didn't. After a while, she went back inside, and left the door open.
Madison sat in the dark for a little while longer. Then she picked up her phone, and got out of the car, and went inside, past the silver frames in the front hall, and up to her room, and lay down on her bed in her uniform, and did not sleep at all.
* * *
Alana went back to school the next morning too.
Her mother did not want her to. Her mother said so several times, at length, at the kitchen table at six-thirty, over oatmeal, with the swollen ankle propped on a chair between them under a bag of frozen peas. Her father did not say anything. He sat at the end of the table in a gray sweatshirt with his coffee, looking about ten years less tired than he had the night before, and let Renée finish. Then he looked at his daughter.
"Your call, Lani," he said.
"I want to go."
Renée threw up her hands. "Of course you do. Of course you want to go. You're both impossible. I'm living with two of the same person." She got up and went to the counter and came back with the ibuprofen and a glass of water and set them in front of Alana with a bang. "Two of these. Now. And you're not taking the stairs. You're taking the elevator. I don't care if it's only for teachers. I called the front office at six. They know you're coming."
"Yes, Mama."
"And if it hurts, you call me."
"Yes, Mama."
Renée looked at her for a moment, and then put her hand on top of Alana's head, the way she used to when Alana was very small, and left it there.
"That was a very good splint," she said again, more quietly.
The steps were different that morning.
Alana noticed it from the car. There were people on the steps, as there always were, streaming up between the white columns toward the doors, and a few of them stopped when they saw her get out of her father's truck on her crutches. That was not different. But then a boy she did not know, a skinny kid with a skateboard under his arm, came down the steps toward her and said, "Hey, you want a hand with your bag?" and before she could answer, a girl she did not know took the gym bag her mother had insisted she bring with spare ice packs in it, and another girl walked up the steps beside her, on her bad side, one step below, the way you spot someone on a stunt. Nobody made a fuss. Nobody filmed it. They just walked up the steps with her, twenty-two of them, and opened the door at the top, and then went their separate ways into the building.
She stood inside the doors for a moment, breathing.
Her father had told her, on the drive in, what was going to happen. Madison would not be on the squad. Madison would not be at practice. Madison was not to approach her outside of class. There was an investigation, and investigators, and they would want to talk to Alana sometime the following week, with her parents, and she should tell them everything, exactly as it had happened, the way she had written it in her notes. She would also be asked, probably, whether she wanted to make a formal statement about the video. And the principal had asked him, very carefully, at the end of the game, whether Alana would be willing to accept a place on the varsity squad, when her ankle had healed. Coach Williams had already made the decision. It had been made, she said, at four o'clock on the day of the tryout, before the running pass, from the clipboard.