"Yeah."
"What'd he say?"
"He said take care of myself." Gerrit turned his glass of milk around on the table. "He said we'd talk after I'm cleared. He didn't say anything else."
Bastian nodded slowly. "That's what they say." He was quiet for a while. "I'm not going to tell you it doesn't matter. It matters. I know it matters. I've got a box under my bed that says it matters." He looked down at his hands, which were big and scarred across the knuckles, a linebacker's hands, and which were not, Gerrit noticed, entirely still. "But I'm going to tell you something nobody told me. You get one of these." He tapped his temple. "Just one. You can get a new scholarship. There's a hundred schools. There's next year. There's a whole lot of ways to have a life. There's no way to get a new one of these."
"I know," Gerrit said.
"You don't, yet," Bastian said, without unkindness. "But you will. And you'll know it way better than I did, because you went in at three weeks instead of three years." He picked his fork back up. "That's the whole difference. That's everything. Okay? You did the right thing. Late, but you did it. Somebody made you, but you did it." He nodded at Noor. "Hang on to her."
"I'm not a thing you hang on to," Noor said. "I'm right here. I can hear you."