The smallest boy on the locker-room bench

texture · 3 Nov YDAU, ~1640h

• When: 3 Nov YDAU, late afternoon, after P.M. challenge matches.
• What: In the locker room's long post-drill bitch session, Blott sits with the other two youngest — Peter Beak (twelve) and Evan Ingersoll (eleven) — up on the blond-wood benches in towels, elbows on knees, pointedly not taking part in the older boys' ritual complaining. When Freer's and Tall Paul Shaw's racquets clatter off the bench, it is Beak and Blott who "move fast to pick them up and stack them back on the bench" — littleness as service. The scene also fixes his institutional slot: under the Big Buddy system, "Beak, Blott, and Arslanian are all in Hal's Big Buddy group for Y.D.A.U." (with Possalthwaite traded to Axford off the books for Ingersoll, so the whole bench trio orbits Hal).