Sandusky was in eight days, if they won tonight. He would not be playing in it. He knew that now, had known it since Wednesday, when Dr. Quarrier had laid out the steps on a sheet of paper and he had done the arithmetic on the drive home and then put the paper in his pocket and looked out the window for a long time. The Big Ten coaches might still come to Sandusky. They might watch Bodhi Mbeki, and watch the Castine defense, and look down at the sideline and see a tall kid in a team jacket with his hands in his pockets, and they might remember him, or they might not. The quarterbacks coach had texted him once, on Tuesday, three words, Thinking of you, and nothing since. The MAC schools had all called. Two of them had said, without being asked, that the offers stood regardless. One of them had a sports medicine program his mother had looked up on her phone and then read aloud at dinner, twice, until Merrin told her to stop.
He did not know where he would be next fall. For the first time in three years, he did not know. He had expected that to feel like falling. It felt, some nights, a little bit like that. Other nights it felt like standing on a field with nobody in the stands.
In the third quarter, with Castine up by a field goal, the band came out to the track to play the fight song after a long Bodhi Mbeki run, and Gerrit looked over and found Noor in the second row of clarinets, in her white plume, her cheeks red with cold. She was watching the drum major. She did not look at him. Then, at the end of the eight bars, at the very end, just as the band cut off, she turned her head and found him across the track and looked at him, steadily, for about two seconds, the way she looked at things she had decided about. He did not know what she had decided. He was not sure she did. But she looked, and he looked back, and that was something.
Then he turned around and looked up at the visitor bleachers across the field.
They were mostly empty. Port Clinton had not traveled well. But up near the top, in the last row, where the aluminum planks met the railing and the wind came through, there were two figures sitting close together under a single blanket, one narrow in a gray hoodie and one broad in a Steelers stocking cap, and the broad one had his hands cupped around his mouth and was yelling something at the field that Gerrit could not hear over the crowd. The narrow one was not yelling. The narrow one was just watching. As Gerrit looked, the narrow one raised a hand, not high, just enough.
Gerrit raised his hand back.
On the field, Bodhi Mbeki was calling the next play. Huck Tamblyn was settling into his stance with his big hand on the turf. The lights were clean and white and steady. Gerrit stood on the sideline in the cold, with nothing to do, for once in his life, but watch, and he watched. He did not know how the game would end. He did not know how any of it would end. But he could see the whole field from where he was standing, and for now, he thought, that would have to be enough.