Weber was quiet for a few seconds. Ben wondered if he would bring up “Decision-Making.” “They’re going to ask me,” Weber said. “The AD is going to ask me, and Phelps is going to ask me, ‘Did wrestling do it?’ If I say no, and you’re lying to me, then I’m going to be lying too. Are you ready for me to lie on your behalf?”

Ben raised his hand and then realized how stupid that was. “We’re really not lying, Coach. It really was basketball this time.”

Simon and Weber looked at him. It was as though both of them had agreed beforehand to have the same expression of anger and surprise.

“No one fuckin asked you, Weeksy.” Simon seemed to be trying to bury Ben with his gaze. Ben looked away and Simon looked back to Weber.

“I’m going to give you until tomorrow morning to think this over,” Weber said. “Then you, Simon, are going to come to my house and we’ll decide what to do. Now let’s get our heads together for St. Mark’s.”

*  *  *

An hour and a half later Ben stood in the dark locker room passage, behind the wooden double doors that led out into the public hallway, leaning against the cinder block wall with his eyes closed. He had made weight, then eaten three PowerBars and drunk two Nalgenes of water. Until he stepped onto the scale, the match had seemed abstract, something that would exist always in the future. But once he weighed what he needed to weigh, then it had to happen. He had hung his clothes in his locker and pulled on the singlet, and now with a half hour to go he waited in the hallway, riding out the dread that pressed his body in long, slow squeezes. He had felt this before—for big tests and important squash matches—but nothing close to this level. He wanted the match to happen now so he could finally confront it and not have to wait like this anymore, but he also wanted to stop time so that he would never be out there on that mat, about to end up on his back humiliated in front of his team and his friends, such as they were.

Above the locker room’s unkillable scent of mildew, sweat, and bleach hung the smell of two stories of old open space. The locker room had high ceilings for no good reason that Ben could think of, and kids regularly lobbed sopping socks or half-eaten apples or wet soap across the expanse. The lockers were arranged back to back in freestanding rows with aisles in between like a supermarket.