I spent more time together with Penny and Emily in the summer: they would come and sunbathe by the lake and giggle over Blair, who was the only one allowed to drive Tad’s boat. Blair, reserved and handsome, was three years older than Luke and me and felt impossibly far ahead of us at sixteen, on the precipice of manhood. This was heightened by his being especially adultlike for a teenager, particular about everything from his clothes to his cross-training workouts, destined even then to be a tech skier.

“You’re such a dude,” Penny said to me as she watched me horse around with Luke on the Duncans’ dock that summer.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said, giving her a crooked smile. Luke was sputtering in the water beneath me, after I’d pushed him in. I cannonballed into the water next to him as Penny rolled her eyes.

Penny and Emily wore floral bikinis from the Delia’s catalog and slathered too-weak sunscreen on their fair freckled limbs. I never understood how they could waste the whole day there with their copies of YM and Seventeen and endless, meandering gossip. They’d both liked running around outdoors when they were kids, but in the past few years they’d moved into the mysterious girly world of adolescence.

My parents never gave me a hard time about not fitting in. They never wanted my sister and me to be anything in particular, only happy and safe. They were the opposite of so many sports parents I met—Tad included—who deposited the full weight of their own unrealized ambitions onto their children’s young shoulders.

Tad Duncan believed in excellence with a religious fervor. He would do anything for his kids, but it was always conditional on them being the best. Kristina, their eldest, was a near-perfect student and champion volleyball player who only went off the rails once she’d decided it would be the best way to spite her father, after he abandoned their family to live in Sun Valley with a woman scarcely ten years her senior. The rebellion didn’t land; by then, Tad was too focused on his boys. Luke and Blair were both at the top of their age group in juniors but were good for different reasons. Blair was quiet and precise, absorbing our coaches’ feedback and fine-tuning his technique ever closer to perfection, whereas right from the start Luke couldn’t be told anything. When we were younger, the coaches discouraged us from going too fast, wanting to hone our technique to protect us. But Luke defied both orders and physics by getting down the mountain faster than anyone else in spite of, not because of, his technique. Watching him, it seemed like there was no chance he actually had control of his skis, and sometimes he didn’t: the only thing more spectacular than his wins were his crashes. The Duncans’ divorce only stoked his rebelliousness.