Something changed as he started beating the Um Club kids and then going on to win tournaments. Before, they had all just been hacking around, turning up the Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin on the shitty all-in-one stereo unit behind the Um Club court, clapping for each other during hard-fought losses in the quarters. They had all sat on the thin carpeting of various college gyms and private club lounges, stretching and making fun of each other, folding over gauze pads and taping them to the undersides of their feet where the calluses had pulled off in a flap as thick as an orange rind, eating PowerBar after PowerBar in miniature bites so as never to get on the court too full, pressing sweat-soaked clothes into plastic shopping bags and squeezing the air out, tying them shut and forgetting to open them when they got home, then discovering civilizations of mildew. They made jokes together about the preening kids in the top five whose parents went paper-faced when they lost.

But when Ben started winning, winning by a lot, the faces of the other guys went a little quieter toward him, and soon a kind of lacquer began to come over their eyes when they looked at him. When he was still on court, Ben saw all of them sitting together, showered and in long sweats. Suddenly there were jokes that he hadn’t been around to help invent. The only one this didn’t seem to happen with was Tim, but then Tim never really seemed to care about squash that much to begin with.

And now when his mom came to see him play, when she saw him beat the other kids, she worried that maybe Ben was getting too used to it. He seemed to expect the awe already; she saw him compress his lips into a smile after coming off court early in a tournament, treating the applause almost as a sudden rain shower. To her he looked so beautiful—thin but strong, those flash-gray eyes—but she truly couldn’t tell if this was just a mother’s bias or real information in the world. And so even though she rooted for him, when he came off court and looked for her, she could feel herself trying to be a little clay-faced, to stand on the other side of the scale, to convey to him that winning was important but not more so than other things, not more than being respectful and kind and not thinking too much of oneself.