Earlier that day Ben had come through the door to the room and met eyes with Ahmed, this brown boy wearing a magnificent plum-colored dress shirt, and Ben had been quietly shocked by what was there in his face, in such contrast to all the other faces he had ever seen at St. James: a pure enthusiasm, a near-complete absence of guile. Now Ahmed closed his fists and released them, close-release, close-release, close-release, close-release. Ben watched Ahmed, and Ahmed watched Ennis. Still Ennis paced, still he said nothing, and it seemed like some mechanism was broken inside him.

Ben had so much to rely on. He took himself back to the living eyes of the crowd behind his court as he faced them, right arm above his head, after winning the last point of the Under-15 Junior National Squash tournament. Ben tried on that triumph again, tried to let it take him. Manley Price, the St. James squash coach, had been waiting for him to arrive on the team. Ben saw his brother Teddy’s face, utterly free from doubt, describing St. James’s classes, late nights in friends’ rooms, afternoons deep in the woods. He saw Hutch’s face across the Camp Tongaheewin canoe shed, telling the other kids how sweet St. James was going to be. Ben saw the class photos of his uncle and father and grandfather, all the Weekses who looked like him, all the way back. Fear was natural, fear was even part of the appeal, but he belonged, he belonged, this was the correct beginning for all of it.

“Newbs!” Ennis finally called out in a whisper. “We are going to see who is the toughest among you!”

Again Ennis lapsed into fixated silence, and all of Ben’s assurance went away.

“We are going to find out who is the bravest! The strongest! The fastest! The best! The best! The besssssssst!”

Ennis curled his fists in front of himself and lowered his head toward his chest now, chanting to himself, “The bessssssst! The bessssssst! The besssssssssst!” The morning of that day seemed very long ago.

*  *  *

After two hours on the blazing highway, Ben’s dad had taken Exit 20 into Doverton’s strip of car washes, mattress stores, drive-thru banks, the Pizzeria Uno, the Staples, the Boston Chicken. Ben wondered when the school would build its own exit off of 93 so you didn’t have to drive through all this, the hectic electrical wires across the sky, the parking lots without a single car surrounding restaurant-shaped buildings with no glass in the windows. They passed Doverton’s dignified red-brick mental hospital, the tan public high school, the Citgo station crouched in its concrete lot.

The road narrowed. Now the houses on either side sagged as though underneath the clapboard they were built of sodden foam.