So that was the pressure. It was not a thing anyone yelled at him. It was a thing he breathed. It was in the man at the Marathon station and in the folder under the takeout menus and in the way Coach Strickmann said finish strong at the end of every practice, and in the way his mother looked at Merrin's teeth when Merrin smiled.
And then, on the Friday three weeks ago, against Bellevue, he had taken a hit.
He did not like to think about it. It had been a normal hit, which was part of why he did not like to think about it, because if a normal hit could do this, then anything could. He had stepped up in the pocket on a third-and-seven and a linebacker had come free on a stunt and Gerrit had seen him too late and turned his shoulder, and the linebacker's helmet had caught him on the side of the head just above the ear. He remembered the sound. A crack, flat and enormous, like a door slammed inside his skull. He remembered being on his back looking at the stadium lights, which had halos around them, rainbow rings like the ones you get when you look at a streetlight through a wet windshield. He did not remember getting up. Huck told him afterward that he had gotten up on his own, fast, and jogged back to the huddle and called the next play, and that the next play had been a perfect thirty-yard post for a touchdown, and that the crowd had lost its mind.
He did not remember the post. He had watched the game film on Sunday and seen himself throw it, and it had been like watching someone else, someone with his number and his arm and his particular hitch in the release, a stranger who happened to be very good at the thing Gerrit did.
The trainer, Ms. Bettany, had come down the sideline at halftime and asked him how he was feeling, and he had said fine, and she had held up a penlight and he had followed it with his eyes, and she had asked him what quarter it was and who they were playing and he had known all of that. He had known all of that because he had made Huck tell him, twice, in the tunnel on the way in. He had not planned to do that. It was just that he had come into the tunnel and realized he was not sure whether it was halftime or the end of the game, and the not-knowing had been so frightening that he had grabbed Huck by the jersey and said, "What's the score, what quarter, who are we playing," and Huck had looked at him funny and told him, and then Gerrit had made him say it again.
He had passed. Ms. Bettany had frowned a little but she had let him go back in, and he had finished the game, and they had won by twenty, and he had gone home and slept for fourteen hours.
That was three weeks ago. Since then: headaches, most days, not bad, a kind of pressure behind his eyes like a thumb pushing out. The lights in the cafeteria had started to bother him, so he ate in his truck. He had missed two assignments in English and did not remember being given them. On Wednesday he had walked into the film room and sat down and realized he had no idea which opponent they were preparing for, and had to wait, sweating, until Coach put the first clip up and he could read the jersey colors. He had told no one. He had not told Huck, who knew about the tunnel and had not brought it up again, which Gerrit was grateful for and also suspected was not an accident. He had not told his mother, who was a respiratory therapist and would know, immediately, exactly what all of it meant. He had not told Noor.
That last one was the hardest, and the one he was least honest with himself about. He told himself he didn't want to worry her. That was true. It was also true that Noor Castellano was the smartest person he had ever met, and that if he told her any part of it, she would put the parts together in about four seconds, and then she would look at him with that steady dark-eyed expression she got when she had decided something, and then it would be real.