"And Sandusky."
Ms. Bettany did not soften it. He would be grateful for that, later. "I don't know about Sandusky. Honestly. Three weeks of symptoms, with memory involvement, I'd be surprised. But I've been surprised before. What I know is that if you'd walked in here three weeks ago, you'd probably be cleared by now. Brains heal better when you let them. They heal a lot worse when you keep knocking them around." She held his eyes. "You hear what I'm saying? I'm not saying that to punish you. I'm saying it because there's going to be another kid in this room someday, and I want you to be able to tell him."
Coach Strickmann found out at seven-fifty, because Ms. Bettany walked down the hall and told him, and at seven-fifty-five Gerrit was sitting in the coach's office with the door closed and the blinds down while the noise of the hallway filled up outside.
Coach Strickmann was fifty-eight years old and had coached at Castine for twenty-two years and had a reputation, across the whole of northwest Ohio, for two things: a brutally simple offense that ran the same nine plays out of four formations, and never, ever raising his voice in public. He raised it in private. Everybody knew that. Gerrit had been on the receiving end of it a handful of times in three years and had walked out of the office each time feeling like the paint had been sandblasted off him.
Coach Strickmann did not raise his voice. He sat behind his desk with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a cold cup of coffee in front of him and looked at Gerrit for a long time without saying anything. Then he said, "Three weeks."
"Yes, sir."
"You sat in my film room for three weeks."