Ben loved the feeling that people were going to respect him, that he could lift his shoulders and feel a mantle of dominance laid over them. But to talk too much about oneself was bad, to have too much self-regard, and so when he smiled about winning, lifted his arm above his head as he turned to the crowd—eventually that would feel natural. It was like a demented eddy in him when the triumph that he had wanted for so long, that all the other players around him worked so hard for, that his father was incandescent for on his behalf, didn’t feel exactly the way he thought it was going to. Ben could sense that every time these people looked at him, they were trying to assess how closely the real thing lived up to what this Weeks kid was supposed to be. He hoped those cusp-pretty girls were noticing him, feeling him feel kinship with them.

All at once everything was up in the room, and so Ben and his dad decided to go see the new courts. As soon as they walked down the steps at Hawley’s back entrance, Ben again expected Manley Price to be there, knowing exactly how long Ben had already been on campus. Slowly they went up the rise toward the new building.

The game of squash—two players in a room the size of a two-car garage hitting a rubber ball off a wall, each trying to hit a shot that bounces twice before the other can reach it—started in England in the 1830s and soon spread throughout the British colonies. St. James, from the beginning almost desperately imitating England in its architecture, curriculum, and pastimes, built in 1885 the first court in the United States. There was no standard court size at the time, and St. James’s court happened to be narrower than the ones taking shape in England. St. James, and then clubs and schools in Philadelphia and Brooklyn Heights and Canada, were playing in the winter before reliable heating, and because cold rubber doesn’t bounce easily, the Americans developed dense balls that retained heat well and moved fast even when you could see your breath on the court.

But in the rest of the world, a wider, shorter court became standard. A ball developed that you could pinch between your fingers and that wasn’t overactive in warmer climates like India and Hong Kong. And so the two games existed in parallel: “hardball” in America and “softball” around the world, and the American game became a strange, isolated variant.