Ms. Bettany listened to all of it without interrupting. When he was done she was quiet for a while. Then she said, "I want to tell you something, and I want you to hear it right. I'm not angry at you."
He looked up.
"I'm angry," she said. "Don't get me wrong. I'm angry at myself, mostly, because I watched you get up from that hit and I had a feeling, and I let a sideline test talk me out of my feeling. I'm going to be thinking about that for a long time. But I'm not angry at you. I've been doing this for eleven years. You are not the first kid who memorized the answers. You're not the tenth." She put her glasses back on. "You're one of the very few who ever walked in here and told me so. Most of the time I find out from a parent. Or I don't find out until it's a lot worse than this." She looked at Noor. "Or from somebody who loves them and decides that's more important than whether they're mad."
Noor looked at her hands.
"Here's what happens now," Ms. Bettany said, and told them. A full evaluation today, with the sports medicine physician the district contracted with in Tiffin, who would see him at noon if Ms. Bettany called her in the next ten minutes, which she was about to do. A symptom inventory. Probably imaging, given the duration and the memory loss, mostly to rule things out. Then the return-to-play protocol, which was not a suggestion and not something any coach in the state of Ohio could override: no contact until he was symptom-free at rest, then a graded series of steps, light exercise, then sport-specific drills, then non-contact practice, then full contact, each step at least twenty-four hours, with a physician's written clearance at the end. "And the clock," she said, "doesn't start until the symptoms stop. Not from Bellevue. From when you're clean. You understand what that means for next Friday."
"It means I'm not playing next Friday," Gerrit said.
"It means you're not playing next Friday."