So he did not tell her. And then, on Sunday night, his cousin Jaxtyn, who worked the overnight stock shift at the Kroger on Seventh, had texted him a blurry phone photo of Noor's blue Corolla parked at the far end of the lot under the broken light, with two people in it, and the message: isnt this ur girl? whos the guy
Gerrit had sat on the edge of his bed and looked at that photo for a long time. He had zoomed in until it was pixels. He had recognized the gray hoodie. He had felt something go cold and narrow in his chest, and the headache had come up behind his eyes like a tide, and he had not texted Noor, because he had not trusted what he would say.
He had spent Monday not talking to her. She had texted him three times and he had answered with single words. On Monday night she had called and he had let it ring. And on Tuesday, after practice, he had seen the gray hoodie walking across the visitor lot toward the bike rack, and his body had made the decision before the rest of him was consulted.
Ask her, the kid had said. And when she tells you, try to remember it.
Gerrit sat in his truck in the Castine High lot for twenty minutes after Huck left, with the engine off and the heater off and his breath fogging the windshield, and turned that sentence over and over like a stone in his pocket.
Noor Castellano heard about the bleachers eleven minutes after it happened, which was, she thought later, a fairly slow time for Castine.
She was in the band room, because she played second clarinet in the marching band and the marching band was running the halftime show until five, and she had stepped out to the hallway to refill her water bottle when Leilani Paske from the volleyball team came around the corner at a fast walk with her phone in her hand. Leilani did not say anything at first. She just held the phone out. It was not footage, thank God, because Leilani had been one of the two girls on the hood of the Civic and Leilani was decent; it was a text thread, eight or nine messages long, from the other girl, describing it. Gerrit had the new kid up against the visitor bleachers. Gerrit was yelling about Noor's car. The new kid said something nobody could hear. Huck pulled Gerrit off. The new kid just walked away.
"I didn't film it," Leilani said. "Saffron didn't either. I made sure. But you know people are going to talk."