He was big. Not fat. Big, the way football players are big, broad through the chest and shoulders, with thick forearms and a thick neck, filling his chair and then some. He had warm brown skin and close-cropped black hair and dark eyes and an easy, open, slightly sleepy face, and he was wearing a Westfield Colonials football hoodie with the number 7 on the sleeve. When Alana stood in the doorway looking at the empty seat beside him, he looked up, and saw her, and moved his backpack off the stool and set it on the floor and pulled the stool out a few inches from the bench with his foot. An invitation. Without saying anything.
She sat down.
"Jake," he said quietly, out of the side of his mouth, without taking his eyes off the whiteboard. "Martinez. You're the new girl."
"Alana."
"I know. Everybody knows." He glanced at her sideways. "Madison posted you this morning. On her story. On the steps."
Alana went still.
"What did she say?"
Jake hesitated. Then he pulled his phone halfway out of the pocket of his hoodie under the bench, thumbed it open, and tilted it toward her for a second, keeping it below the edge of the bench so Dr. Pruitt would not see.
It was a video, four seconds long, shot from a low angle. Alana, on the steps, in her plain gray top, looking up. Madison's voice, off camera, bright and amused: very common. And then the video froze on Alana's face, and across the bottom of the frame, in white letters with a little sparkle emoji, someone had typed: new girl alert. And then a row of emojis that Alana did not want to think about too hard. It had four hundred and eleven views.
Jake put the phone away.
"Sorry," he said. "I thought you'd want to know. I'd want to know."
"Thanks," Alana said. Her voice came out steady. She was proud of that. "I did want to know."
They did not say anything else for a while. Dr. Pruitt talked about molar mass and wrote numbers on the board and made a joke about Avogadro that nobody laughed at except himself. Alana took notes. Her handwriting was very neat, very small, very even. She was aware of Jake beside her, big and quiet, taking notes too, in a messier hand. She was aware of the back of her neck, still warm.
"She does that," Jake said after a while, very low, still looking at the board. "Madison. To every new girl. Especially the ones who might try out."
"Try out for what?"
He gave her a look. A look that said, come on.
"The squad," he said. "There's a spot open on varsity. Kayla Henderson moved to Ohio in September. Her dad got transferred. Coach Williams is holding a tryout. Today. After school. In the main gym." He paused. "You're gonna try out."
It was not a question.
"How do you know?"
"You've got a gym bag the size of my little brother. And you walk like a flyer." He shrugged one enormous shoulder. "My sister cheered. Four years. You get to know the walk."
Alana looked at him. He was still looking at the board. His face was perfectly serious.
"I'm a base, actually," she said. "And a tumbler. I fly sometimes. But mostly I'm a base."
Jake nodded slowly, as if this were important information that he was filing away.
"Then she's really going to hate you," he said.
"Why?"
"Because Madison's a flyer. She's been the top of every pyramid since freshman year. And her two best bases are Britney Walsh and a girl named Hailey Chen, and Hailey tore her ACL in August and won't be back till spring. Which means Madison's been flying all season with a second-string base who's terrified of her and drops her about once a week." He finally turned his head and looked at Alana directly. "If you can base, and you can tumble, and you're any good at all, Coach Williams is going to want you. And if Coach Williams wants you, you'll be holding Madison Cross in the air four times a week. And Madison Cross does not like anybody holding her up who she doesn't own."
Alana thought about that for a moment.
"You know a lot about cheerleading," she said, "for a quarterback."
Something passed across Jake's face. It was there and gone very quickly. If she had not been raised by a man who could read a lie from the way you held a coffee cup, she would have missed it.
"Madison and I went out," he said. "Sophomore year. For like, eight months. It ended." He looked back at the whiteboard. "Kind of. It's complicated. Our moms are friends. Our dads do business together. Her dad built my dad's restaurants. Everybody kind of assumes we're going to get back together. Including Madison." He shrugged again, but the shrug was stiffer this time. "Anyway. I've watched a lot of practices."
"Okay," said Alana.
"Okay?"
"Okay. Thanks for telling me."
Jake looked at her for a long moment. Then he smiled, a small, surprised, crooked smile, as if she had done something he had not expected.
"You're not going to ask me why it's complicated?"
"No," Alana said. "It's not my business."