"Yes, ma'am."
"Good." Coach Williams stabbed another piece of lettuce. "Three-fifteen. Don't be late. And Johnson?"
"Ma'am?"
"Bring your own water," said Coach Williams, without looking up. "Don't drink anything anybody hands you."
Alana stood there for a moment, looking at the top of the coach's gray head. Then she said, "Yes, ma'am," and turned and walked out of the gym, and did not understand, until much later, that she had just been given a warning.
* * *
By three-ten, there were eleven girls sitting on the bottom row of the bleachers in the new gym, and every one of them was pretending not to look at Alana.
She was sitting at the end of the row, a little apart, lacing up her cheer shoes. White, with thin soles and a split in the arch for flexibility, worn soft at the toes. She had owned them for eight months. She had done every routine of the regional championship in them. She laced them slowly and carefully, the way she always did, pulling each crossing tight and even, and then she took the ankle brace out of her bag and fitted it over her right ankle, the one she had sprained twice in Pensacola, and fastened the straps. Then she took out her water bottle, a big steel one, dented, with a faded sticker from Pacific Coast Elite on the side, and set it on the floor between her feet where she could see it.
She had learned the music in the girls' locker room during fifth period, with one earbud in, mouthing the counts. It was a remix of a pop song she had heard on the radio, heavy on the bass, and the dance segment was thirty seconds of sharp, fast, precise choreography that Coach Williams had clearly designed to separate the girls who could move from the girls who could not. Alana had run it fourteen times in the locker room, in her socks, on the tile, while two freshmen stared at her from the sinks. She knew it now. She knew it the way she knew her own phone number.
She stretched. She did it the way she had been taught, every muscle, slowly, from her neck down to her toes. She was aware, while she did it, of the other girls watching her out of the corners of their eyes. Most of them were younger. Sophomores and juniors, nervous, chattering, in mismatched T-shirts and shorts and hair ties in their teeth. A few of them smiled at her. One, a small skinny freckled girl with braces and a long brown braid, came over and asked her shyly if she was the girl from California, and when Alana said yes, said, I watched your team on YouTube last night, you guys were insane, and then went red to the tips of her ears and ran back to her friends.
At three-twelve, the varsity squad came in.
They came in together, through the double doors from the locker room, in their practice uniforms, navy shorts and white tank tops with WESTFIELD in gold across the chest, their hair in identical high ponytails tied with identical navy and gold ribbons. Fourteen of them. They walked in step, without seeming to try, the way people walk who have practiced together for years. And at the front of them, in the center, walked Madison Cross, with her long blonde hair pulled up into a ponytail so high and so tight that it seemed to lift her whole face, and a white towel slung around her neck, and a clipboard in one hand and a clear plastic water bottle in the other.
The chatter on the bleachers stopped.
The varsity girls spread out along the far side of the tumbling mat and sat down on the floor in a loose line, stretching, talking in low voices, glancing at the bleachers. Madison did not sit down. She walked along the edge of the mat with her clipboard, slowly, looking at the eleven girls on the bleachers one by one, the way a general reviews troops. She stopped in front of the small freckled girl with the braid and said something that made the girl laugh nervously. She stopped in front of two juniors and told them they looked so cute. She stopped at the end of the row.
In front of Alana.
"Oh," said Madison. "Hi again."
Alana looked up at her. "Hi."
"I didn't know you were trying out." Madison's smile was very wide. "That's so brave. Coming in the middle of the season like this. Not knowing anybody." She glanced down at Alana's cheer shoes, and her ankle brace, and her dented water bottle with the faded sticker, and her smile did not change at all. "Where did you cheer before? Like, a rec league?"
"Pacific Coast Elite," said Alana. "In San Diego."
Behind Madison, a girl with brown hair in a ponytail tied with a white ribbon, the girl from the steps that morning, laughed. Not loudly. Just a short, sharp exhale through the nose.