She used to be loud, a girl with a voice so big that it stood out even in a stadium full of serious shouters.

And then Shannon Brackett went for a ride one August evening to Bridal Veil Falls. She wasn't wearing a seat belt when her friend's convertible swerved on the ramp at the mouth of Provo Canyon. According to a witness, she shot 15 feet up in the air before landing back on the pavement.The doctors told Judy and Lou Brackett that their daughter might never come out of her coma. So the family began its bedside vigil, urging Shannon to wiggle her toes, to open her eyes, to grab their fingers. Meanwhile, as Shannon lay there, quiet and still, summer came to an end and school started and the other cheerleaders on the Timpview High squad cheered without her.

Three weeks after the accident, Shannon's grandmother was standing by the bed, trying again to get a response. As usual, Shannon's body was motionless, except for an occasional, restless kick of her legs. "If you're going to cheer, you're going to have to kick higher than that," Grandmother said.

And Shannon did.

After that the fog began to lift. Shannon learned to swallow again and to breathe on her own, to stand, and then to walk, and then to cheer.

In mid-October, surprising her doctors and her therapists by the speed and the extent of her recovery, Shannon returned to school and to cheerleading. In the beginning she cheered sitting on a stool. The day she tried her first cartwheel, the squad lined up on each side of the mat to watch.

Cheerleading at its most basic, though, is about noise. And this is where Shannon's recovery has proved most troublesome. Apparently her vocal chords were paralyzed, either from a tracheotomy or from the accident itself. Yelling is out of the question. The best she can do is a loud whisper, and if she whispers too much she begins to choke. So Shannon just mouths the cheers.

But Shannon's squadmates have never considered replacing her. Cheerleading is what cheerleaders do best, and Shannon Brackett has 26 of them rooting for her.

"They have no idea what they've done," says Shannon's mother about the other cheerleaders. "They've given Shannon something to fight for."

On Saturday the Timpview squad, which took state in December, competes in California at a national cheerleading championship, where of course the judges won't be able to tell that the girl with the short brown hair in the front row isn't making a sound.

"She's my hero," says Judy Brackett, who has watched her daughter struggle to get along in a noisy world.

Last September, when her friends were busy going to football games, Shannon was lying in a hospital bed trying hard to be understood. Her voice was the tiniest of whispers then, even quieter than it is now, and there were days when she felt so frustrated she wanted to die.

Judy Brackett would sit on Shannon's bed and talk to her about surviving. Surviving is a lot harder than dying, she told her daughter.

Once as talkative as the next teenager, Shannon will find herself now in the back seat of a noisy carload of kids, everyone talking at once. Shannon knows it wouldn't do any good to try to join in, so she just listens.

Her short-term memory isn't what it used to be, which makes it hard to memorize dance routines and to study for tests. For some reason, her brain injury has also left her unable to cry tears.

But the biggest change is the most subtle: the kind of shift of focus you see in teenagers who have survived near-fatal accidents, who have pushed themselves through physical therapy, who find themselves in wheelchairs, who go to the hospital every few weeks for chemotherapy.

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"Before the accident," says Shannon, "a lot of things mattered, like `so-and-so said this about me.' Now I could care less."

Shannon spends her weekend nights with her mother and father and younger sister now. After she graduates in June she plans to become a nurse's aide.

Cheerleading helped her recover, was in fact her physical and emotional therapy, but the girl who once hoped to make the squad at the University of Utah now has other, quieter plans.

"Cheerleading," Shannon recently told her mother, "is not a way of life."

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