the locker room, continued: stressing the pubertyizing skeleton
Hal, Stice, Troeltsch, Struck, Rader, and Beak are all rhythmically squeezing tennis balls with their racquet-hands, as per Academy mandate. Struck's shoulders and neck have furious purple inflammations [...] which ankle is faintly swollen and has a blue tinge. He keeps flexing the ankle whenever it occurs to him to.
Context
Even at rest the bodies are under mandate — "rhythmically squeezing tennis balls with their racquet-hands, as per Academy mandate" — while the injury-inventory accumulates around them: Struck's "furious purple inflammations," a boil on Schacht's thigh, and Hal's own faintly swollen, blue-tinged ankle he keeps testing. Stice's fear names the cost directly: "stressing the pubertyizing skeleton like this" so that "when I'm twenty and in the Show playing nonstop" he'll be "skeletally stressed and injury-proned." The regimen loads growing bodies past their limits and calls it preparation; the Show it's aimed at is itself imagined as more of the same damage.