When the soccer vans pulled onto Turnbull’s campus later that day, Ben still had Ahmed’s hair on the cuffs of his shirt and in the eyelets of his running shoes. He was trying to get through Tartuffe but he couldn’t concentrate. The varsity team was in the van behind, and it felt strange to have JV in the lead, coming onto the campus first. Even just twenty-five minutes farther south from St. James the trees hadn’t started to turn. THE TURNBULL SCHOOL, EST. 1893 was in white letters on a broad, powder-coated orange metal sign. Ben knew that the JV soccer game didn’t matter at all, especially that day, but still his hands were sweating as they always did and the van was quiet.

Turnbull’s lawns were so green that it looked like they had cannibalized other lawns, and the rails of the fences suspended between granite posts had been painted almost iridescently white. All the signs—for each building and intersection—were the exact same orange powder-coated metal with white typeface. Ben realized that each sign at SJS was slightly different and kind of ad hoc. They passed an enormous glass cube with a sign, ALSTEAD LIBRARY, in backlit stainless steel letters on a marble block in front.

As they pulled up to the Turnbull gym, Ben was amazed at the twisting shape, the smooth slate-gray exterior, the three-story windows. The St. James gym was just a cinder block rectangle; this looked like a contemporary art museum. The team walked into the gym lobby and enormous banners of the Turnbull school clubs moved in the air conditioning above them, along with a suspended crew shell which had, according to a bronze plaque on the wall, won the Henley Regatta in 1966 and 1971. A helical staircase led them up to the visitors’ locker rooms, which were bright and clean and had row after row of wide lockers painted Turnbull Tiger orange.

Both SJS teams changed into their uniforms and put their bags away. Only a few kids had remembered to bring combination locks but the idea of anyone stealing their stuff here was beyond imagining.

Coach Johanssen gave them a talk. They went down the back stairs out to the fields, an ocean of grass marked off into discrete rectangles. They passed the Wong Swimming Pool, a dome-roofed brick building with another set of enormous windows. Wide water was divided by blue-and-white lane lines, and there was a separate diving pool with two springboards and two platforms, like the Olympics. Ben could understand Phelps’s fear, Aston’s fear. Ben kept his head turned toward the windows and saw an Asian girl step to the edge of the high concrete platform, turn her back to the empty space, and after an impossible pause, hop backward and tuck her body into a single forward flip before elongating again and slipping out of view behind the windowsill.