“Just, like, why does Ahmed have to play squash? Why can’t he do something else?”

“Ahmed?”

“Yeah. He could choose any other sport, but he just has to be right on me all the time.”

“Well, maybe he can’t just play another sport.”

“What do you mean can’t?”

“For you, maybe for us, squash might be fun and interesting and what we played because we weren’t on the hockey team,” Markson said. “But for a lot of the world, you can get out of a bad neighborhood by being good at squash. My roommate in college was from Chennai, in India, and he was playing a different game than the other kids on the team. It’s like basketball in LA or Baltimore. If you go to Mexico or Egypt or India or Pakistan, that’s what the level of competition is like. Like survival. You get out by playing squash.”

“I guess. But it’s not like Ahmed has to lift himself out of poverty.”

“Right, but also in those places it’s the way for the recently successful to move to a higher social position. If you’re a Pakistani family that’s gotten rich by, I don’t know, making and selling bricks, then how do you become respectable? How do you get to be around the people who’ve created ‘society’ there? British people. How do you gain prestige? You drill, and you get really good. It’s fucked up and imperialistic, but it’s how it is.”

“I just need some distance.”

“Really? That doesn’t seem like enough of a reason. What else would you do in the winter?”

Ben had already agreed. The day before he had showed up to wrestling practice in squash shorts and a T-shirt and gone right into drills on the dense mats.

“I was thinking about wrestling.”

“Wrestling! Huh.”

For a moment Ben sensed how strange it was for an adult to be having a serious conversation about what sport a fourteen-year-old was going to play in the winter. They walked up on the footbridge across the meandering channel between Sluice Pond and Library Pond, and the sound of their footsteps traveled over the water and back.

“Why wrestling?”