Gerrit lay in the dark for a long time after that. Then he got up, and went down the hall, and opened the kitchen drawer under the takeout menus, and took out the folder with the four MAC offers in it, and sat at the kitchen table in the dark and read them by the light over the stove, one by one, the way Bastian Yusuf had once sat on his bedroom floor and read his letters. When his mother came in at eleven for a glass of water, she found him asleep with his head on his arms and the letters spread out around him like playing cards. She did not wake him. She put a blanket around his shoulders and turned off the stove light and sat across from him in the dark for a while, the way she had sat with patients on the overnight shift, listening to him breathe.
He could not drive for a week, so on Saturday afternoon he asked Noor to drive him to Birchmont Avenue, and she looked at him across the front seat of the Corolla for a long moment and then said, "Does he know you're coming?"
"I texted him. Huck got me his number." Gerrit looked out the window. "He said okay. That's all he said. Just okay."
"That's a lot, for Imre," Noor said, and put the car in gear.
Things between the two of them were not simple that week. He would not have pretended otherwise. She had sat with him in the Tiffin waiting room on Thursday during the MRI, which came back clean, which Dr. Quarrier said was good news and Gerrit understood to mean that whatever was wrong with him was the kind of wrong you could not take a picture of. She had brought him his English assignments, written out on index cards in her small exact handwriting, because he was not supposed to look at screens. She had held his hand on the bench at school. And on Friday night, while the team played without him, she had marched at halftime with the band in her white plume and he had watched her from the sideline, where Coach Strickmann had let him stand in a team jacket with a headset he wasn't allowed to talk into, and she had not looked up at him once. Not because she was angry. He knew that. Because she was concentrating, because she was second clarinet and the halftime show had a key change in the third song that she had been practicing for a month. Because she had her own things. He had been, he realized, standing there on the sideline in the cold, so used to being the center of Friday night that he had not, in three years, once stood still and watched her do something she was good at.
Castine had won, twenty-four to seventeen. Bodhi Mbeki had thrown two interceptions and one touchdown and run for another on a broken play where he simply refused to go down, and afterward, in the locker room, he had found Gerrit and hugged him so hard that Ms. Bettany had to come over and pry him off, saying, "Not the head, Mbeki, for God's sake, not the head."
On the drive to Birchmont Avenue, Noor said, "Can I tell you something, and you just let me say it?"