She had taken it in January, when her ankle healed, after thinking about it for eight weeks, and talking about it with her father on the back porch of the rented house more than once, late at night, with blankets and hot chocolate. She had made her decision on a cold clear night in December, when she realized that she had stopped being afraid of the gym, and that the only thing left that was stopping her was that she did not want anyone to think it had been given to her. And her father had said, "Lani. You're going to spend your whole life with people thinking things were given to you. Whatever you do. However hard you work. That's not something you can fix. All you can do is be so good they have to say it out loud when they're wrong." So she took it. Westfield had won regionals in February with Alana Johnson in the back row, second from the left, coming out of a round-off back handspring into a full twisting layout, and landing it, and hearing the crowd.
She had also started something.
It had begun as a group chat. In November, after the video, after homecoming, she had gotten messages. Dozens of them, then hundreds. From kids all over the country. Military kids, mostly. Kids who had moved six times, or eight, or eleven. Kids who had sat by the trash cans at lunch in Fort Hood and Okinawa and Camp Lejeune and Ramstein. Kids who had been called very common, and worse. Kids who wanted to know how she had done it. She had not known what to say to most of them. So she had started writing back. Then she had started a group chat, so she would not have to say the same thing two hundred times. Then Lily Pruett, who was very good with computers, had made it into a website. And Kenya Bell, who was very good with people, had started running the chat with her. And then a counselor at the high school, a quiet man named Mr. Diaz whose father had been a Marine, had asked if they wanted to start a club. They called it First Day. It met on Thursdays in Mr. Diaz's room. There were thirty-one members at Westfield now, and kids from nine other schools in the district had asked how to start their own. It did not do anything complicated. When a new kid enrolled at Westfield, any new kid, military or not, someone from First Day met them at the front office on their first morning, and walked them to their locker, and showed them where the gym was, and sat with them at lunch. That was it. That was the whole thing. On the website, on the front page, Lily had put a list. Alana had written it. It had eight items on it.
And Jake Martinez had asked her to the spring formal.
He had done it in chemistry, three weeks ago, in the middle of a lab on reaction rates, by writing it on the whiteboard at their bench in the form of a chemical equation that did not balance, and then, when she looked at it blankly, writing underneath it in his messy handwriting: it only works with you. Dr. Pruitt had seen it and laughed so hard he had to sit down. Alana had looked at the whiteboard for a long time. Then she had taken the marker and written underneath it, in her small, neat, even handwriting: That's not how chemistry works. Then: Yes.
He was sitting in the second row of the bleachers now, in his football jersey, with his sister, who had driven down from college for the day. When Alana looked over, he grinned and gave her a thumbs up, and she rolled her eyes, and her mother, sitting beside her, said "Mm-hmm," very loudly.
At the front of the gym, by the table with the white cloth, Principal Gerald Harrison stepped up to a microphone. He looked older than he had in October. He also looked, somehow, lighter.
"Thank you all for coming," he said. "We're here today for two reasons. The first is to recognize a member of our community. Commander Malcolm Johnson, of the United States Navy, was this month awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal for his service to the training command at Dam Neck. He has asked me to keep this part short." A ripple of laughter. "He has also asked, very firmly, not to be called up here to speak. I told him that was too bad."
More laughter. In the front row, between Renée and Alana, Malcolm Johnson closed his eyes for a second, in the expression of a man who has walked into an ambush and knows it.
But he stood up. He walked to the front of the gym in his dress blues, and he stood at the microphone, very tall, under the gold letters on the navy wall, and looked out at the full bleachers for a moment, and then down at the front row, at his wife, and at his daughter.