Friday hit 3rd qtr, left side of head. Got up fast. Head tilt? Ask Huck re: halftime.
She had asked Huck on Monday. Huck had looked at her for a long, uncomfortable time, a big kind boy with a face that hid nothing, and then he had said, "He asked me the score in the tunnel. Twice," and then, "Don't tell him I told you," and walked away.
That went in the note.
Then the cafeteria. Then the English assignments, which she knew about because they had English together and she had watched Mrs. Tilney hand them out, and watched him write them in his planner, and then watched him, a week later, look at Mrs. Tilney with honest blank confusion when she asked where they were. Then the night at Applebee's after the Clyde game when he had ordered, and then ten minutes later when the waitress came back, ordered again, the same thing, and the waitress had laughed and said, you already got that, hon, and he had laughed too, a beat late. Then the time in her driveway when he had sat in his truck for five minutes before coming in and she had watched him through the front window with his forehead on the steering wheel.
She had tried to talk to him. That was the part that would matter later, to her, and that she would hold onto when people asked her, as people eventually would, why she had done it behind his back. She had not started behind his back. She had started in front of him. The Sunday after Bellevue she had said, carefully, at the kitchen table at his house with his mother at work and Merrin in the next room watching a documentary about octopuses, "How's your head?" And he had said, "Fine." And she had said, "You took a big hit," and he had said, "I take a big hit every week, Noor, that's football," in a voice with an edge on it she had never heard him use with her.
The second time was a week later in the truck. She had said, "I think you should tell Ms. Bettany about the headaches," and he had gone very still and asked how she knew about the headaches, and she had said, "Because you've taken Advil every two hours for nine days and you think nobody can see you do it," and he had said, "It's not a concussion," and she had not said anything, and he had said, "It's not, okay? I passed the sideline test. It's tension. It's stress. I'm not sleeping. You know what the next three weeks are," and she had said, "I know," and he had said, "If I go to Bettany she has to report it. If she reports it I'm out for the protocol, minimum. That's Sandusky. That's the scouts. That's everything, Noor," and she had said, "I know," and he had looked at her with his eyes wet and said, "So please," and she had not been able to answer that. She had just put her hand on the back of his neck and he had leaned his head against her shoulder and they had sat in the truck in her driveway until her father flicked the porch light.
After that she stopped asking him. Not because she agreed. Because she could see that asking him was making it worse, that every time she brought it up he dug in further, and that the digging-in itself had a strange rigid quality that she did not think was entirely him. Gerrit had always been stubborn, but he had always been stubborn the way a good quarterback is stubborn, about things he could see and argue for. This was different. This was a wall.
So she did the thing she always did when she could not solve something by talking. She went looking for information.