The Expectations

by Alexander Tilney

  “Too much waving. And his family is just rich, he’s not royalty. And that’s ridiculous.”

  “Au contraire.”

  “Ben, even students at St. James should not say ‘au contraire.’”

  “Au contraire, mon frère.”

  “I ain’t yer frikkin frère, bud.”

  “I don’t know the French word for ‘sister.’ I’m taking Latin for some reason.”

  “I’m taking Spanish, as though I were going to some plain old high school at home.”

  “Hm.”

  “College-consultant-Dale told me he wished I were taking Japanese. ‘Spanish doesn’t stand out,’ he says.”

  “Japanese seems cool.”

  “I agree. Japanese seems totally cool. And it’s not like I adore Spanish. But now I’d rather kill myself than take Japanese. The Japanese language does not need me speaking it badly just so I can seem more interesting.”

  “Yeah, do I really have to want to make varsity soccer?”

  Alice laughed. “Dude, exactly.” Ben almost closed his eyes with pleasure. “Can’t I just watch reruns of The Cosby Show for the rest of my life?”

  They came up to the Two-Laner, and Ben wanted to take a right and drive out with her to somewhere he hadn’t been before. To show her the mundane litter in the long grass, to find out what was in the white barn. Alice considered him as he turned away to look for coming cars. He didn’t have the lacquer over him yet, but he seemed a little less like a nine-volt battery against the tongue.

  Ben sped across the road and scritched to a stop in the sandy parking lot in front of the gym.

  Alice turned to him and delivered a smile. He looked startled to be there with her; she felt reassured, and she wanted to give some of that reassurance back to him.

  “Thanks, Ben.”

  It was all Ben could do not to lean over now and try to breathe her in, and not to look at her chest as she stepped down.

  “Sure. Cover a spotlight with a stencil of a crutch and aim it at the night sky, and I’ll come.”

  She laughed and waved and turned, and even though her butt wasn’t anything in particular, he watched her walk away. He exhausted himself.

  She turned back, and he managed to look up just in time. “Don’t let them be mean to him.” She didn’t wait for him to react before she faced ahead again.

  He considered the reality of actually trying to ask her out. He would almost prefer not to have more than this; just this could be exactly what he had been preparing for. Hawley was right on the other side of the Two-Laner, and he waited until the doors closed behind her to let up the brake again and pull away.

  8. Basic Oxygen

  THANKSGIVING APPROACHED. NOW GOING TO SEATED ALL THE well-off boys wore Gore-Tex jackets with the tails of their blue blazers sticking out the bottom. Ben got his cast off and went into a gray-plastic walking boot fastened with Velcro. Still Hutch talked about a way to get back at the school, but it had started to seem abstract. Worry about money sat constantly in Ben’s chest, but after the weeks on crutches, he felt a leap there when Rory told him they were going to have another captain’s practice. He went over to the courts, waiting to feel that unease with his father’s overreach or with Price’s bargain for him to earn his place at the school. But as he passed the Dragon he was just psyched to hit.

  About a dozen kids were already sitting on the carpeted stadium steps, chatting quietly. Ahmed hadn’t mentioned that he was planning to play squash, but there he was, in all-whites. Ben rode out his annoyance as Ahmed nodded briefly to him, but Ahmed continued talking to the two closest kids, and they seemed to be talking back. It was the most normal social interaction Ben had seen him have in weeks.

  The captain was Colin McCaffrey, a sixth-former, a solid, athletic player whom Ben had seen play in the Under-17s and was positive he could beat. As soon as Colin came into the stadium area of the courts, with his short hard steps and his brown hair in front of his eyes, Ben could tell that he had been named captain because there wasn’t really anyone else. Cole Quinlan, the sixth-former who would have been captain, had shattered his jaw and the floor of his eye’s orbit in a grad-party car accident and likely wouldn’t come back to school. Rory was clearly next, but he was still in fourth form. Colin seemed to have removed speaking from the room.

  Price as head coach was expected not to attend a captain’s practice, but Mr. Markson, who had been tapped as the team’s strength-and-conditioning coach, came into the courts and said they were going to the weight room at the gym: nothing too crazy but just a quick intro. Markson wore boxy gray sweats, the elastic cuffs of the pants tight around his ankles. Everyone seemed a little relieved that Price wouldn’t be coming.

  As they walked over, the older guys said that Price had tried to get the team to lift, too, but the squash team in the weight room was never a directed affair. The players suspected that lifting weights would make their reactions slow, and there was also something sort of townie about lifting. Mostly the team had just talked and sat on the equipment so that when Price told them they were wasting time they could say they were taking their recovery between sets.

  But Markson had a very particular circuit for them to work through: first leg press, then military press, then sit-ups, then pull-ups, then the rowing machine. Everyone started at one of the stations and rotated, so everyone was doing something specific, and Ben was surprised that Markson was right on top of them, not letting anyone dawdle or goof off. At the rowing station the three guys on side-by-side ergs would race to see who could get the most meters in four minutes. Even Colin looked relaxed, and Ben saw Ahmed laughing as he sat back into the padded chair of the leg press machine. Ben felt hopeful despite himself, but he waved off some of the exercises, saying his leg was still throbbing a bit.

  Markson asked him if he just wanted to sit it out, but by moving, Ben was realizing how stir-crazy he’d felt over the previous weeks.

  Another kid, not on the squash team, Jeff Snyder, was also in the weight room, by himself, with a bright yellow Walkman on and a rolled-up gym towel wrapped around the back of his neck and tucked into the collar of his sweatshirt. He was a small, night-eyed person, and Ben couldn’t tell what the purpose of the towel was, but it gave Jeff the big-neck appearance of a bouncer or a bull, and there was something admirably non-St.-James-y about it.

  Ben learned from the other guys that Jeff was the coxswain for the JV crew team, and he was trying to make varsity, and so he was ostentatiously at the gym alone in November because it was a point of pride for coxes, who on the day of the race are just cargo, to be in better shape than anyone else on the team. Their erg times had to be competitive, they had to run out to the Long Pond boat docks fast, and they always, always had to be able to do the most pull-ups.

  Right now Jeff was working on the pegboard, which was a thick plywood panel mounted up on the weight room’s back wall with a six-by-six grid of holes drilled into it and a numeral painted above each hole. To use the pegboard you held a pair of dowels like ice picks and stuck them into the holes to support your weight, and then by swinging from side to side to transfer weight off one hand, you removed that peg and reached it into another hole, then swung your weight in the other direction and moved the other peg, and in this way moved yourself around the grid.

  There was a basket of dowels affixed to the wall, and taped next to it was a laminated sheet of different strings of numbers outlining routes of varying difficulties around the board. Football, wrestling, basketball, and crew spent a lot of time on the pegboard, and each team would have competitions, with two people spelling their names or swearing at each other numerically, or just traveling back and forth for minute after minute, trying to set a time up on the board that no one else could beat.

  Jeff was having trouble. He had to stand up on a chair to comfortably reach the bottom row of holes, and although he was ascending relatively easily, he couldn’t seem to come back down without missing a peg. Ben watched Jeff hang from one arm as he t
ried to fit the peg into a hole just above his eyes. Three, then four, then five times Jeff missed a hole and fell, always to his feet, but leaving a peg still up in the board. Ben walked closer, and Jeff finally sat down on the floor to the side of the board and leaned back against the wall. He kept his eyes closed and seemed to let his music submerge him, and Ben sensed that he was in the kind of exhaustion that brings a person past the categories of triumph or disappointment. Jeff’s hair and face and neck looked like they had come out of a trough of sweat, but his clothes were fairly dry.

  Jeff opened his eyes, looked at Ben, then pulled the gray tab of the yellow headset arm out of his ear. “What?”

  “Oh, nothing, sorry. Just looking.”

  “Take it away, man.”

  Jeff held out the peg and Ben took it. It was soft with his sweat.

  Ben looked up at the board. The wood around the rim of each hole had been worn down so each hole had a kind of funnel into it, and the ones on the bottom of the board were more worn than the ones at the top. Ben reached up on his tiptoes to fit the dowel in the first hole. He tried to elongate himself to get it in, and it fit, and the peg cantilevered snugly and he hoisted himself up. He swung back and forth gently and took hold of the other peg already up on the board with his left hand, then removed the right peg and it rose right up to the hole directly above, and he slotted it in there, and almost without his intention the other peg came out and rose up to the row of holes above that. Then he moved to his right by reaching over two holes and bringing his other peg over, and then back to his left.

  “All right, but see if you can come down,” Jeff said. Ben couldn’t see him but knew the exact look on his face.

  Ben looked at the hole near his right shoulder and placed a peg there. All his weight was hanging from his left hand, and he had to somehow place his weight onto his right hand to lift the left peg out, but his right arm was already curled up and didn’t have much room to move. But he forced himself to lean over on his right even more and lifted out the left peg. Just as all his weight began to drop onto his right hand, almost definitely enough to break his grip, the other peg glided into a hole parallel to the right one and he was still up. He came down to the bottom of the board and whipped his body up to take the slightest amount of weight off his hands, then slipped both pegs out at the same time and dropped down and landed on his feet. There was just a slight twinge in his left leg through the boot but he felt steady.

  He turned around expecting just to have Jeff glaring at him, but the whole squash team had come up to watch him in two sloppy rows, and a couple kids applauded with an inscrutable mixture of admiration and sarcasm. If only she were here to see him; if only the pegboard could be subtracted from his tuition. Mr. Markson clapped as well.

  And behind them now stood seven members of the wrestling team, all with the same rolled-up towels wrapped around their necks and tucked into their sweatshirts. Almost all of them had crew cuts, and so it looked for a second like Ahmed was also on the wrestling team. To one side at the front of the group was Simon Paulson, one of Ennis’s best friends and his replacement as wrestling team captain.

  Ben suddenly got angry—why should he feel scared to attract the attention of someone like Simon even when he had done something well? He thought of the Companion. Why couldn’t this be known to all? One of the other wrestlers whose name Ben didn’t know strode up, took the pegs from Ben—his palms suddenly felt cold without them—and proceeded to hoist himself on two arms and then tried to use the same body whip to take both pegs out and move them to the higher row of holes. He missed and came back down, and in the process of crouching forward to take the impact of the fall, butted his head into the cinder block wall. He fell and then sprawled on his back with his hands over the right side of his forehead, but he was laughing.

  “All right, squash,” said Markson. “Let’s finish one more station and then we’re through.”

  Ben headed back to the military press stand that he and Rory had sort of been using, and Simon advanced and clapped him on the shoulder. He had Ennis’s same build and buzz cut, but his face was flatter and his hair reddish brown.

  “You’re going to wrestle, Weeksy.”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to wrestle this winter.”

  “I’m playing squash.”

  “He’s playing squash,” said Rory, there at Ben’s shoulder.

  “You’re going to wrestle,” said Simon, not looking at Rory. “For real, it’s happening. We need someone at one thirty-two.”

  “I weigh a hundred and forty pounds.”

  “You weigh a hundred and forty pounds now.”

  “I don’t want to wrestle.”

  “You don’t want to wrestle now.”

  “All right, kiddos,” Markson said, standing in front of them, “one last effort and then you’re free.”

  After the last circuit they pulled the weight plates off the barbells and leg press machine and haphazardly put them back on the A-frame racks. They filed out behind Markson.

  When Markson was safely out of the room, one of the wrestlers yelled, “Fuckin lightweights!”

  In the dry clear sun they walked back to do some drilling. The Dragon stood in front of the courts with stoic cheer.

  Ben was overjoyed that he was in his rehab boot. There was no way that anyone could judge his performance seriously, but at the same time he could swat the ball and feel that same rightness coursing through him. He felt happy from the pegboard. He and Martin Bowles and Neil Gossamer were laughing as they came up to the courts again.

  Colin the captain descended the stadium stairs, sat down on the bottom step, then started tying his shoes and prepping in some private, elaborate way, and the rest of the guys kept chattering. Martin and Neil were asking Ben whether he had any plans to play internationally; they had heard of a few guys training in England over summers. The attention felt good, and Ben said he had thought about it but still had more research to do on where would be the best place to go.

  And then Manley Price came in through the double doors at the top of the stairs, smiling as though covering some recent mischief. Price wore the khakis, docksiders, and navy sweater that had all come to seem like part of his body.

  Immediately everyone sat up straighter, and Rory seemed to vibrate with suppressed activity. Colin seemed to dim. Markson and Price shook hands, but they might as well have been from different species.

  Rory almost pantomimed the act of looking around to see if everyone was present, even holding out his pointer and middle fingers and counting the assembled kids by twos. Price stepped to the side of the double doors and leaned against the wall, designating himself an observer but clearly relishing his influence on the room. Markson walked a little way in and sat on one of the top stadium steps. Rory nodded with satisfaction that they were all there.

  Rory cleared his throat. “All right, should we start with boast-drop-drive?”

  No one seemed to mind that the captain wasn’t directing this, and everyone started shifting and taking up their stuff in a way that was like a collective nodding.

  “Okay, cool,” continued Rory. “Gary, why don’t you, Josh, and Sam take Court One. Ben, you’re cool to hit? All right, you, Neil, and Josiah—”

  “Let’s have Ben and Colin hit,” Price said just loudly enough for everyone to hear. Rory went quiet, and Colin seemed to pull further into himself.

  Ahmed looked at Ben. Even through his hope to fit in with the rest of the team, his wondering whether everyone was looking at his all-whites with appreciation or scorn, he saw a change in Ben. As soon as Price spoke, it seemed as though the particles of Ben’s body cohered into a dense lattice.

  Ben looked back at Price and Price nodded. Markson was looking down, folding and refolding a bandanna.

  Ben came down the stadium steps with his racquet in his left hand and smiled to Colin in a way that he meant to be respectful.

  Walking on court, he tested his weight on the leg. It felt
okay. As he tossed the ball out and felt it spring to the front wall, he heard Colin come on court behind him, and the door latch clinked closed. Ben punted the cold ball over to where he sensed Colin had moved, and then turned around to walk farther back in the court and saw all the team there behind the glass wall. None of them were going anywhere for any drills. Price was still smiling and Markson was still looking down.

  Colin hit a couple backhands to himself and then hit a crosscourt to Ben, and soon the ball was warm and they turned to each other to decide what to do. Ben offered to feed Colin for straight drives, and for a couple minutes they did this. Then Colin turned to him and offered to feed him (“Your leg okay?”) and Ben nodded, and with each rail Ben brought the ball closer and closer to the wall until Colin struggled to hit a clean shot.

  And then with a sense of no choice, Colin asked if Ben wanted to play a few points. Ben did. Colin asked Ben up or down and Ben called “Up” and Colin spun his racquet and it was down. Ben moved to the backhand court to receive the ball. Colin hit a high looping serve, Ben put a return flush against the wall, and Colin barely scraped it out of the corner. Ben had already walked to the front of the court to await the ball, and he easily put it away. Ben served and Colin couldn’t return it. They played four more points like this, Colin unable to get past one or two balls.

  Ben kept himself from looking through the back glass. Suddenly the idea of Colin having a tantrum on court arose to him, and he pledged to himself that he would throw a couple points.

  But he couldn’t. He saw the ball rise off the front wall, and everything in him hit it crosscourt into the nick. He foresaw how insulting and shabby it would seem if he started serving balls out.

  And then Colin anticipated Ben’s serve and hit a good rail in return, and Ben gallop-hobbled to the back corner and hit a ball a few inches out from the wall, and Colin in turn volleyed a crosscourt drop shot. Ben saw it leave Colin’s racquet; he knew exactly where it would arrive, how far away it was from where he stood at that moment, exactly how he would have to lunge to retrieve it, and he knew he should let it go, leave it to the fact that his leg was still recovering, that no one expected him to play full out. But then he was halfway across the court, taking full long strides as the ball caromed off the front wall. He set all his weight with sincere momentum on the boot heel as he reached for the ball.