Ben’s mom, Helen, would hear Ben come in at eleven p.m. on a Wednesday, and it occurred to her what a strange kind of worry she felt. She knew he wasn’t out doing drugs and breaking windows. She knew he wasn’t getting the neighbor’s daughter pregnant. Instead he was digging into some deep solitude, some absorption that she worried he wouldn’t be able to extricate himself from. Harry told her to let it go; didn’t she remember being a kid, being caught in little fixations? She did. Days during the summer when it would have been too much effort to actually begin any real activity—practicing the piano like her mother kept reminding her to do, going to the beach with friends—she remembered taking out all of her jewelry—the thin chain with the St. Christopher on it, the charm bracelet with the flexible fish and the spinning Ferris wheel, the thin strand of freshwater pearls—then heaping everything all together and mixing it around until it was tangled, then untangling it all again. “See?” Harry said. “All kids do that, he’s just doing it with squash.”

And still, what if this rule-bound thing shaped him to its shape? What if he never felt the pull of rulelessness? And she knew that Harry wasn’t impartial about this, that he would have responded differently if the fixation had been something other than squash. So for a couple years Ben played, and he and his Um Club friends stayed toward the bottom of the middle of the pack.

But then, in the early nineties, US squash got tired of being a backwater, and colleges wanted to be able to recruit international players, and so gradually everyone started playing softball on narrow courts. And then when colleges and clubs one by one started renovating their courts, they went International-size, and suddenly Ben didn’t have to adjust. When he reached for the ball, his racquet was there, when he forgot himself the default was right. All of the Um Club kids went up in the rankings, but Ben had spent the kind of time that none of the rest of them had spent, and so he could always get to one more ball, always made the better choice, always had the decisive half inch.