Right now Jeff was working on the pegboard, which was a thick plywood panel mounted up on the weight room’s back wall with a six-by-six grid of holes drilled into it and a numeral painted above each hole. To use the pegboard you held a pair of dowels like ice picks and stuck them into the holes to support your weight, and then by swinging from side to side to transfer weight off one hand, you removed that peg and reached it into another hole, then swung your weight in the other direction and moved the other peg, and in this way moved yourself around the grid.

There was a basket of dowels affixed to the wall, and taped next to it was a laminated sheet of different strings of numbers outlining routes of varying difficulties around the board. Football, wrestling, basketball, and crew spent a lot of time on the pegboard, and each team would have competitions, with two people spelling their names or swearing at each other numerically, or just traveling back and forth for minute after minute, trying to set a time up on the board that no one else could beat.

Jeff was having trouble. He had to stand up on a chair to comfortably reach the bottom row of holes, and although he was ascending relatively easily, he couldn’t seem to come back down without missing a peg. Ben watched Jeff hang from one arm as he tried to fit the peg into a hole just above his eyes. Three, then four, then five times Jeff missed a hole and fell, always to his feet, but leaving a peg still up in the board. Ben walked closer, and Jeff finally sat down on the floor to the side of the board and leaned back against the wall. He kept his eyes closed and seemed to let his music submerge him, and Ben sensed that he was in the kind of exhaustion that brings a person past the categories of triumph or disappointment. Jeff’s hair and face and neck looked like they had come out of a trough of sweat, but his clothes were fairly dry.

Jeff opened his eyes, looked at Ben, then pulled the gray tab of the yellow headset arm out of his ear. “What?”

“Oh, nothing, sorry. Just looking.”

“Take it away, man.”

Jeff held out the peg and Ben took it. It was soft with his sweat.