"Pacific Coast Elite," she repeated. "Is that, like, a gym? In a strip mall?"
"It's an all-star program," said Alana. "Level six."
The girl with the white ribbon came closer. She stood beside Madison, a little behind her shoulder, the way a lieutenant stands. She was shorter than Madison, and stockier, with strong shoulders and thick, powerful legs, a base's body. Her face was round and pretty and very pale, with a dusting of freckles across the nose, and her eyes were small and blue and cold.
"Britney," said Madison, without looking at her. "Be nice."
"I am being nice," said Britney Walsh. She looked down at Alana on the bench. "I'm just saying. We do things a certain way here. At Westfield. We've won state three years in a row. We have standards. It's not like wherever you're from, where they just let anybody on the team because they need bodies." She tilted her head. "This is a different kind of program. For a different kind of girl. I just don't want you to get your hopes up and then be embarrassed. You know?"
There was a silence on the bleachers. The small freckled girl with the braid was staring at her own knees. The two juniors were looking at each other. Out on the floor, a couple of the varsity girls had stopped stretching and were watching.
Alana looked at Britney Walsh for a moment. She looked at the cold small blue eyes and the tilted head and the way Britney's weight was shifted slightly forward, onto her toes, the way people stand when they are hoping you will react. She heard her father's voice. First contact tells you what they want you to think. Second contact tells you what they actually think.
This was second contact.
She did not react.
"Thanks for the heads-up," she said pleasantly. "I'll try not to embarrass anybody."
And she bent down and went back to checking the straps of her ankle brace.
Britney stood there for a second longer, waiting for something more. When it did not come, she made a small disgusted sound and turned away. Madison lingered a moment. She looked down at the top of Alana's head with an expression that Alana could not see but could feel, a kind of cool, considering attention. Then she turned too, and walked back along the mat to the folding table at the far end where Coach Williams and a young assistant coach with a ponytail were setting up, and sat down beside them with her clipboard, and crossed her long legs, and set her clear plastic water bottle on the table in front of her.
Alana watched her set it down. She did not know why she noticed it. She just did.
Coach Williams blew her whistle at three-fifteen exactly.
The tryout went in order of the sign-up sheet, and Alana had signed up last, so she watched ten girls go before her. She watched them carefully. She watched the small freckled girl with the braid throw a back walkover that was clean and controlled and then wobble on her landing and look at the judges' table in terror. She watched the two juniors do a pretty good jump sequence and a not very good dance. She watched a tall, gangly sophomore throw a round-off back handspring back tuck on the running pass that was raw and unpolished and full of power, and land it, barely, and stand there panting with an expression of disbelief on her face. She watched each of them do a stunt with three varsity girls, a simple extension, the tryout girl basing while Madison flew, and she watched Madison, in the air, in every one of them, wobble a little. Just a little. Just enough. A small dip of the knee, a shift of the weight to one side, so that the girl basing her had to scramble to keep her up. Two of them dropped her. Madison landed lightly on her feet both times, and looked at the judges' table, and shrugged, and smiled, and said, it's okay, it's hard, as if she were being very generous.
Alana watched all of it. She sorted it. She filed it.
At three-fifty-eight, Coach Williams looked at her clipboard and said, "Johnson."
Alana stood up and walked out onto the mat.
The standing tumbling first. Standing back handspring, straight into a standing full. She did it without thinking, the way you breathe. Her feet hit the mat together. Her arms came up. She heard somebody on the bleachers say, oh my God, softly. She did not look.
The jumps. Toe touch, hurdler, pike, toe touch again, connected, on the counts. High and sharp and clean, toes pointed, arms locked. She landed each one in the same place she took off from.
The dance. Thirty seconds. She did not think about it at all. She let the music take her, the bass thumping through the floor, and her body did what she had taught it in the locker room, every count, every angle, every sharp hit and release, and when it ended she was standing in the final pose with her chest heaving and her arms up and there was silence in the gym, and then, from the bleachers, the small freckled girl with the braid started clapping, and then stopped abruptly, as if she had realized she was not supposed to.