Bastian had been a linebacker at a high school outside Pittsburgh, a school with a crest like the one on Imre's hoodie. He had been good. Not Big Ten good, Imre said, but good enough for a Division II scholarship, good enough that people in their town had known his name. He had been hit a lot. That was the job of a linebacker, Imre said, to be hit a lot and to hit back. In his junior year he had taken what everyone, afterward, agreed had probably been his first concussion, and had told nobody, because there was a playoff game in nine days. In his senior year there had been at least two more, maybe three. He had told nobody about those either. He had gotten very good, Imre said, at the sideline test. He used to practice it in the mirror, the penlight, the questions. He used to make Imre quiz him.
"I was twelve," Imre said. "I thought it was a game. He'd say, ask me what day it is, ask me who the president is, and I'd ask, and he'd get it right, and I'd give him a point. I kept score in a notebook." He was quiet for a second. "I still have the notebook."
Bastian had gone to college in the fall. He had lasted one semester. The headaches had gotten worse, and then the light had started to hurt, and then he could not read for more than ten minutes without the words sliding off the page, and then there was a night in December when he had driven to a gas station forty miles from campus and called home from the payphone at two in the morning, crying, unable to remember how he had gotten there. He had come home. He had been home for three years now. He had seen a lot of doctors. Some days were fine. Some days he could not stand the sound of the dishwasher. He had a part-time job stocking shelves at a hardware store on Route 20 and the manager was patient with him. He had a shoebox full of letters from the college coaches who had recruited him, and he kept it under his bed, and once Imre had found him sitting on the floor reading them.
"The thing nobody tells you," Imre said, "is that a lot of the time he's still him. That's the hard part. If he was just gone it would almost be easier, is what my mom says, and then she feels terrible for saying it. But he's not gone. He's funny. He makes pancakes. He's just also this other thing, sometimes, and you never know which one's going to come downstairs."
They had moved to Castine in August because Imre's father, who was an electrical engineer, had taken a job at the new solar panel plant outside Fremont, and because it put them an hour and a half from a brain injury program in Cleveland that had accepted Bastian into a study. Imre had not wanted to move. He had not wanted to be the new kid in his senior year in a town where, as far as he could tell, the only thing anybody cared about was football. But his brother had wanted to go, and so they went.
"So when I see somebody hold his head like that," Imre said, and did not finish the sentence. He did not need to. He had been watching Gerrit, too. He had sat in the bleachers for the Clyde game, alone, at the top of the student section, and watched Gerrit walk to the line with his head tilted a fraction to the left, and he had gone home and written HA PHOTO SLEEP IRRIT MEM on the back of his chem lab without quite meaning to, the way some people bite their nails.
"Why didn't you say something?" Noor asked. "To someone. A coach. Anyone."
He looked at her. "I've been here five weeks. I don't know him. I sit in the library annex. If I walk up to the head football coach in this town two weeks before the playoffs and say, I think your quarterback has a brain injury and he's hiding it, what happens?"