It is dawn, Sunday morning. A woman has just awoken to the third day of a new world. She is a teacher, and a coach, and as of that morning calls herself Anna Holloway. In exactly 23 minutes and 47 seconds, she will be bathed and dressed. In exactly 51 minutes and 9 seconds, she will take her last bite of that morning's breakfast. In exactly 5 hours, 41 minutes, and 20 seconds, the newest team of cheerleaders would be meeting with Sarah McMillan, without her, for answers about their new lives. Fate had dictated as much.
Anna Holloway could read fate like an open book. Almost nobody out there could see things the way she could. And fate dictated that almost nobody ever would. They would all squabble about destiny and freedom of will and argue over their future, without the slightest real glimpse into what the totality of it all entailed. Anna Holloway was alone.
It is lunchtime, 24 years, 7 months ago. A girl is sitting alone, studying her book over her meal. She is a geek, and a recluse, and hasn't yet renamed herself to Anna Holloway. She will study hard, do well in school, and leave for the college of her choice. Her father and herself had willed it so, and fate would oblige in its time. But fate also arranged that Susan Upton should pity the lonesome old geek, and sit with her for the first time. Grudgingly, the geek allowed it. As with fate, Anna Holloway could read that history just as easily as she'd erased it.
It is 7 days and 21 hours ago. A woman is reading a news article over brunch. A drug scandal had broken. Almost every member of the Valley Lake High School cheerleading team had been caught up in it. Every member, but one. The woman would recognize Susan Upton's daughter anywhere. She knew her fate immediately. With a long, heavy breath, the woman touched her fingers to her own forehead and became Anna Holloway.
It is 19 years, 10 months ago. A girl is at her graduation party, saying farewells she won't ever forget. Susan Upton is almost in tears. Linda Madison hugs her tightly, and Sage Devries reflects how lucky they were that Susan had invited her to the cheerleading team. Laura says nothing, but stands somberly aside from it all. It is not a happy party; the cheer team is breaking up, once a core of friends as good and faithful as could be asked for, now to scatter across country and lead lives of their own. None would be moving farther away than the woman that would be Anna Holloway; fate had followed her father's design, and that night she was so affected she might have cursed it in her anger. She would later remember the 4 previous years as the happiest she'd lived, and have nothing but regret for this night.
It is 8 years, 3 months ago. A woman has just left Mark Gibson's funeral. Fate had just taken him from Linda, whom the woman had not seen in years. She feels alien; all these years later, her once-friends in Lake Point are all but foreign to her. Many married and started families; some were born again; some made mistakes and were raising children on their own; all of them were so different as to be almost unrecognizable. The woman is finding it strange that fate designs her best company to be Linda's own father. He is holding a strange stone in hand and asking her how life has been since she was on the cheer team with his daughter. She tells him: unmarried and lonely, she had simply gone right back to her reclusive ways once away from home. Nowadays it seemed nowhere was home, and everywhere felt like she was alone. He's sympathetic and he listens, watching with knowing, sorry eyes; and when in the end the woman has finished talking, the man grips the stone and wishes her well, before at last taking his leave.
It is 3 years, 6 months ago. Touching fingers to her forehead, the woman changes her identity; now she was once again, effectively, nobody. She knew well the magic she'd awoken to by now. Fate, to her, had become a thing to be read and written; and conversely she had become all too aware how inescapably fate had gripped her. Even then, she saw clearly how she would return to Lake Point, approach Sarah, change Jen, and do all the rest. Could she have stopped it, if she wanted to? It didn't matter; she wouldn't want to. She would choose it of her own free will, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She was too predictable; everyone had become too predictable. All are machines: See this, do that; feel this, say that; want this, wish that. And not seeing fate, few would ever realize that they never could fight it no matter what they did.
It is 5 days and 17 hours ago. The woman is being called Coach Holloway by a distraught cheerleader, the now-sole member of her squad. She looked, for all the world, just like her mother once did; and knowing the fated wave of sympathy was coming made it no less intense. Here before her sat the chance to mend the mistakes of 19 years and 10 months; and to do it, she would for 5 others what was done for her 24 years ago. It was no accident fate had chosen them; they were exactly whom Holloway was looking for. Outsiders and loners, stuck in shells of their own creation, who had the most to gain from a real sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves, whatever it was. The seeds she would plant here would bloom into something lasting well beyond graduation, that she knew; and already much of their past was changed for the better.
Not that they would ever truly understand any of that. To them, Anna Holloway was simply some interloper that had simply appeared at random to meddle in their lives, unasked for and unwanted. She was fully aware how afraid they would be that she would just write them out completely, how hesitant they were to embrace the change, or really examine what good simple acceptance would do for them. They'd hate her now, but they'd all thank her later, in their time. Yet only in the rarest moments of clarity might it occur to them that Holloway was simply doing what she had to do.
