The visitor bleachers at Castine High School were the old kind, aluminum planks bolted onto a rust-freckled steel frame, and at four-fifteen on a Tuesday in late October they held the cold of the whole afternoon. Gerrit Moriarty felt that cold through the back of his hand when he put the new kid against them.
He felt it before he felt anything else, before the anger caught up with what his arms were doing, and later he would remember that detail more clearly than the kid's face. The metal was cold. It hummed a little when the kid's shoulders hit it. A low, tinny note, like somebody had flicked a pot lid.
"You want to tell me what you were doing in her car?" Gerrit said.
The kid did not answer right away. He was not small, exactly, but he was built like somebody who walked a lot and lifted nothing, long in the arms, narrow through the chest, with a gray hoodie that had a faded crest on it from some school in Pennsylvania that nobody at Castine had ever heard of. His name was Imre Yusuf. He had been at Castine for five weeks. He sat in the back of AP Chemistry and ate lunch in the library annex and, as far as Gerrit had been able to tell until Sunday, did not exist in any way that mattered.
Behind Gerrit, Huck Tamblyn said, "G," in the voice he used in the huddle when a play was about to go sideways. Gerrit did not turn around. There were maybe six or seven people in the lot behind the visitor side, a couple of sophomores waiting for rides, two girls from the volleyball team sitting on the hood of a Civic. He could feel them going quiet. He could feel the particular stillness of people deciding whether to get their phones out.
"Sunday night," Gerrit said. "Her car. In the lot behind the Kroger on Seventh. Forty minutes. You want to tell me that's nothing?"
"It's not nothing," Imre said.