Then he picked up his backpack from where it had fallen on the gravel, slung it over one shoulder, and walked toward the bike rack by the field house without looking back.
"What does that mean?" Gerrit called after him. "Try to remember it? What does that mean?"
The kid did not answer. The two girls on the Civic were looking at their knees. Huck let out a long breath through his nose, and the aluminum bleachers ticked as they cooled, and somewhere on the other side of the stadium the marching band was running the same eight bars of the fight song over and over, never getting to the end.
Castine, Ohio, was a town of nineteen thousand people that had built its sense of itself, for about sixty years, on two things: a glass plant that had closed in 2009, and Friday nights. The glass plant was a fenced lot of cracked concrete out past the rail yard now, with a sign that said a logistics company was coming soon, and the sign had said that for four years. Friday nights were still there. Friday nights were, if anything, bigger than they had been when the plant was running, because there was less of everything else.
Gerrit Moriarty had been the starting quarterback at Castine since the third game of his sophomore year, when the senior ahead of him broke his collarbone on a rollout and Coach Strickmann had looked down the sideline and pointed. He had thrown for two hundred and eleven yards that night and lost by a field goal, and the next morning a man at the Marathon station on Route 9 had refused to let him pay for his Gatorade. That was how it started. That was how it was explained to him, by the town, without anyone ever explaining it: you belong to us now, and we will be good to you, and in exchange you will carry this.
He was a senior now. He was six-two and a hundred and ninety pounds and he had a verbal offer from a Big Ten school whose name the town spoke the way people in other towns spoke the names of saints, and four more offers from schools in the MAC that his mother kept in a folder in the kitchen drawer under the takeout menus. The Big Ten offer was the one that mattered. It had come in June, after a camp where he had thrown the ball better than he had ever thrown it in his life, and it had come with a sentence from the quarterbacks coach that Gerrit could recite in his sleep: We love what we see, and we want to see you finish strong.
Finish strong. That was the season. Castine was eight and one. The playoffs started in a week and a half, and the regional bracket ran through Sandusky, and if they got to Sandusky the Big Ten coaches would be there, in person, in the press box, with clipboards. Coach Strickmann had told him that in August, standing on the forty-yard line with his whistle in his teeth, and Gerrit had nodded and gone back to the huddle and thrown a slant into the dirt because his hands were shaking.
His mother, Glenna, worked twelve-hour shifts as a respiratory therapist at Mercy Regional in Tiffin, three days on, two off, alternating weekends. His father had left when Gerrit was eight and now lived in Arizona with a second family and sent birthday cards with fifty dollars in them that arrived, reliably, about a week late. His little sister, Merrin, was eleven and wanted to be a marine biologist, a goal Gerrit thought was hilarious given that she had never seen an ocean, and also the best thing about her. The math of their house was not complicated. His mother had explained it once, at the kitchen table, when he was fifteen and had asked whether they could afford for him to go to a summer passing camp in Columbus. She had not said no. She had just laid it out: what she made, what the house cost, what the car cost, what Merrin's teeth were going to cost when she needed braces. Then she had said, "So you see why the scholarship is a big deal," and he had said yes, and she had said, "I don't want you to feel like it's on you," and he had said he didn't, and they had both known he was lying.