"Of course you did." He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. "Merrin's going to want to be you when she grows up. Not a marine biologist. She's going to want to be you."
"She could do worse," Noor said, and then he reached out, and she reached out, and she held his hand there in the dark garage, his big quarterback's hand with the calluses on the inside of the fingers from the laces, and it was trembling, and so was hers.
They sat there until his mother's car pulled into the driveway at seven-forty, home early from a shift that had been cut short for low census, and Glenna Moriarty got out with her lanyard still around her neck and her hair coming loose from its clip and stopped at the edge of the garage and looked at the two of them, at her son's swollen eyes and Noor's set jaw and their joined hands, and said, very quietly, in the voice she used at work, "Okay. What happened?"
And Gerrit, who had spent three weeks telling no one, looked up at his mother and said, "I think I have a concussion. I think I've had it since Bellevue. I think it's bad," and then, after a moment, "I'm sorry," and Glenna set her bag down on the concrete very carefully, as if it were full of something breakable, and came and knelt in front of him and put both her hands on either side of his face and looked into his eyes for a long time, first one and then the other, not as his mother, Noor thought, or not only, but as somebody who had spent nineteen years watching people breathe.
"Okay," Glenna said. "Okay. Look at me. Follow my finger."
The athletic training room at Castine High was a converted equipment closet off the boys' locker room with two padded tables, a whirlpool tub that leaked, a mini fridge full of ice packs, and a framed poster of the bones of the human foot that someone had hung slightly crooked in 1998 and no one had ever straightened. Ms. Vashti Bettany had been the trainer for eleven years. She was a short, square woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain and the forearms of somebody who had taped ten thousand ankles, and when Gerrit and Noor came through the door at seven-twelve on Wednesday morning, with Glenna Moriarty behind them still in yesterday's scrubs, she took one look at the three of them and took off her glasses and said, "Sit down, all of you. I'll get the door."
Gerrit told her. He had decided in the truck that he was going to be the one to tell it, all of it, not Noor and not his mother, and so he did. He told her about the tunnel at Bellevue, and asking Huck the score twice. He told her he had memorized the answers before her penlight test. He told her about the headaches and the cafeteria lights and the English assignments and the film room. He told her about Thursday night, a conversation he could not remember having, that his girlfriend had to describe to him. He told her about the bleachers. He did not leave that part out, though he could see his mother's face change when he got to it. He told it in order, without decoration, and somewhere in the middle of it he realized he was telling it the way Imre Yusuf talked, and did not know what to do with that.