"Is Imre okay?"
Leilani blinked. Noor watched her register that that was the first question, and not the other one, and file it away. "He walked off. He looked okay. He looked," she searched for the word, "really calm, actually. Kind of weird calm."
"That's just how he is," Noor said, and handed the phone back, and went back into the band room and put her clarinet in its case with hands that were perfectly steady, and told Mr. Voskuil she had a family thing, and walked out to the senior lot.
She did not cry. She was aware of not crying the way you are aware of holding something heavy, a constant small effort in the arms and shoulders. She was not, at the moment, sad. She was furious, and frightened, and underneath both of those there was a third thing that she did not like at all, which was a hard little knot of vindication. Because she had been right. She had been right about all of it, and she would have given almost anything to be wrong.
She sat in the blue Corolla with the engine running and the heat on high and took out her phone and opened the notes app and scrolled to the note she had titled, three weeks ago, with a single letter: G.
The note was long now. It had started the Saturday after the Bellevue game, when she had gone over to his house in the afternoon and found him asleep on the couch at two p.m. with the blinds drawn and a dish towel over his eyes, and when he woke up he had called her by his sister's name. Just once, just for a second, and then he had laughed and said he was still dreaming. She had laughed too. That night she had lain in bed and remembered the sound of the hit, which she had heard from the band section all the way across the field, that flat enormous crack, and she had remembered the way he jogged back to the huddle afterward, too fast, with his head tilted a little to one side as though he were listening to something. And she had opened the notes app and typed:
Sat 10/3. Asleep 2pm, lights off, towel over eyes. Called me Merrin. Said dreaming.
Then, under that, because she was the kind of person who could not stop once she started: