Ben looked up at the board. The wood around the rim of each hole had been worn down so each hole had a kind of funnel into it, and the ones on the bottom of the board were more worn than the ones at the top. Ben reached up on his tiptoes to fit the dowel in the first hole. He tried to elongate himself to get it in, and it fit, and the peg cantilevered snugly and he hoisted himself up. He swung back and forth gently and took hold of the other peg already up on the board with his left hand, then removed the right peg and it rose right up to the hole directly above, and he slotted it in there, and almost without his intention the other peg came out and rose up to the row of holes above that. Then he moved to his right by reaching over two holes and bringing his other peg over, and then back to his left.

“All right, but see if you can come down,” Jeff said. Ben couldn’t see him but knew the exact look on his face.

Ben looked at the hole near his right shoulder and placed a peg there. All his weight was hanging from his left hand, and he had to somehow place his weight onto his right hand to lift the left peg out, but his right arm was already curled up and didn’t have much room to move. But he forced himself to lean over on his right even more and lifted out the left peg. Just as all his weight began to drop onto his right hand, almost definitely enough to break his grip, the other peg glided into a hole parallel to the right one and he was still up. He came down to the bottom of the board and whipped his body up to take the slightest amount of weight off his hands, then slipped both pegs out at the same time and dropped down and landed on his feet. There was just a slight twinge in his left leg through the boot but he felt steady.

He turned around expecting just to have Jeff glaring at him, but the whole squash team had come up to watch him in two sloppy rows, and a couple kids applauded with an inscrutable mixture of admiration and sarcasm. If only she were here to see him; if only the pegboard could be subtracted from his tuition. Mr. Markson clapped as well.

And behind them now stood seven members of the wrestling team, all with the same rolled-up towels wrapped around their necks and tucked into their sweatshirts. Almost all of them had crew cuts, and so it looked for a second like Ahmed was also on the wrestling team. To one side at the front of the group was Simon Paulson, one of Ennis’s best friends and his replacement as wrestling team captain.