"What do you want me to say?" Alana had asked him.
"I want you to say whatever you want to say," her father had said. "It's your spot. You earned it. Nobody gave it to you." He had glanced over at her at a red light. "But you don't have to decide today."
She thought about it now, standing inside the doors. She found that she did not know. She found that she was not in a hurry.
She went to her locker.
She was putting her books away, balancing on her good foot, when she became aware that the hallway around her had gone quiet. Not completely. But the way it had gone quiet the morning before, when Madison Cross came down it with her formation.
She turned around.
Madison was standing about fifteen feet away, in the middle of the hall. She was alone. There was no Britney at her left shoulder, no Kelsey at her right. She was wearing an old gray sweatshirt with nothing written on it, and jeans, and sneakers that were not white. Her hair was pulled back in a plain ponytail. She was not wearing any makeup at all, and without it her face looked younger and blotchier and very tired, with dark smudges under her eyes. She looked, Alana thought with a strange jolt, like a girl on her first day.
A few feet behind her, standing against the wall with her arms folded, was Coach Williams.
"She asked me," said the coach, before Alana could say anything. "This morning. At seven. She came to my office and asked if she could speak to you. She knows she's not supposed to approach you. I told her I'd ask you first, and I'd stand right here, and if you say no, she walks away, and that's the end of it." She looked at Alana steadily. "It's your call. Nobody will think less of you either way."
Alana looked at the coach. Then she looked at Madison.
People were watching. Of course they were. Up and down the hallway, at their lockers, in the doorways of classrooms. Some of them had their phones out, held low. Alana looked at them. Then she looked back at Madison, who was standing very still, with her hands at her sides, not looking at the phones at all. Looking only at Alana.
"Okay," Alana said. "She can talk."
Madison came forward a few steps. Not all the way. She stopped about six feet away, which was, Alana noticed, exactly the distance the commander had stood from her on the mat the night before.
For a moment she did not say anything. Her mouth opened, and closed. Alana watched her try to find the first word and not find it. She had a feeling that Madison Cross had never in her life tried to say a sentence that had not been rehearsed first.
"I'm sorry," said Madison at last. Her voice was hoarse. "For the water. For your ankle. For the video. For what I said on the steps, and in the hall, and at lunch. For all of it." She swallowed. "I'm sorry."
Alana looked at her for a long moment.
She thought about her father. Second contact tells you what they actually think. She thought about the girl in the bathroom mirror that she had never seen, practicing a smile. She thought about the empty water bottle, and very common, and charity lunch.
"Are you sorry you did it," she said, quietly, "or sorry you got caught?"
Madison flinched. It was a small flinch, but Alana saw it. The hallway was so quiet she could hear the radiator ticking somewhere behind the lockers.
Madison could have said the obvious thing. Alana watched her consider it. She watched her consider saying I'm sorry I did it, of course, obviously, the way she would have said it a week ago, smoothly, with the right face. She watched her decide not to.
"I don't know," Madison said.
It came out very small.
"I don't know," she said again. "I've been up all night trying to figure that out. I think—I think yesterday, I was sorry I got caught. Mostly. I was sorry for me. I sat in my car for two hours and read what people were saying about me and I was sorry for me." She stopped. Her chin was trembling. She lifted it, with an effort. "And then sometime around one o'clock in the morning I thought about how you must have felt. Yesterday. At lunch. Reading what they said about you. Under the thing I posted. And I thought about Kenya Bell. And Grace. And I was sorry in a different way. And I don't know which one's bigger yet. I want to say the second one. I think it's the second one. But I've lied to so many people for so long, I don't trust myself to know." She took a ragged breath. "So I don't know. That's the truth. I'm sorry I don't have a better answer."