But no beam—no sun, even. A cloudy dusk in late spring in an Upstate New York suburb interlocked with many others, around a city like many other cities. At night, from the window of a plane, their lights look like seams of gold ore in black rock. And among the tens of thousands of suburbs surrounding some three thousand American cities, there might be, from April onward, seven or eight hundred boys standing at home plate at any particular time, each emulating the batting stance of whatever hero’s poster hangs above his bed, and a throng of parents, some ringing cowbells, some getting nasty—stories of bad parental behavior are part of a picture that turns generic the instant you cease to have a stake in it, as in: The boy at bat is your boy.
His name is Ames Hollander. Middle son, squashed between godliness above and eccentricity below. People forget his name. They forget he exists—that he can see and hear and remember like they can. His mother frets, knitting the brown V-neck sweater he’ll reject in winter when she presents it to him （No one wears knitted sweaters, Mom!）： How can the love and dread she feels for her middle son be converted into something tangible, something that can help him? One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others. There are so many boys in the world. From a distance they look alike even to her, especially in uniform.
It’s 1991, and a lot of things that are about to happen haven’t happened yet. The screens that everyone will hold twenty years from now haven’t been invented, and their bulky, sluggish predecessors have yet to break the surface of ordinary life. No one in this crowd has ever seen a portable phone, which gives to this moment the quality of a pause. All these parents gathered in the fading light, and not a single face underlit by a bluish glow! They’re all here, in one place, their attention burning toward home plate, where Ames Hollander stands looking smaller than usual, compressed by the grim facts that have converged upon him: two outs, bases loaded, bottom of the ninth, the visiting team ahead by three. The game is surely lost, yet the possibility of victory still exists, should the batter—Ames, that is—manage to hit a home run. And although Ames is the last player on the home team likely to manage such a feat （he hasn’t hit once all season）， every home team member and home team parent is seized by wild, irrational faith that he can. They wrote him off three games into the season, but now they scream his name and stamp their feet on the chilly metal bleachers in a communal howl of conviction.
Strike one. Didn’t swing. Possibly didn’t even see the ball.
Like every team, this home team has a story that would render comatose anyone without a stake, but for those who do, its minutiae are inexhaustible fodder for passionate, intricate discussions over beers （the dads, mostly） or telephones attached to walls, their coiled rubber cords knotting and tangling when extended to their full length so that moms can talk behind closed doors without their sons hearing. Over beers or twisted cords, these conversations have certain identical refrains:
The sons of present company don’t get enough playing time and/or are in the wrong positions.
The coach rewards his own son beyond his abilities.
Present company excepted, parents are overly invested in the team and its performance.
Strike two. Swinging, at least.
Ames is oblivious to these parental confabs. What he does feel, in the form of amorphous bouts of unease, is his own precarious suspension between childhood and whatever comes next, and between two brothers who jostle him from above and below, barely leaving him room to breathe. People’s eyes slide over Ames and settle on Miles, two years older, whose advantages are so laughably clear （better athlete, better student, better-looking） that he’s actually kind to Ames, no more threatened by him than a king would be by his valet. Or they settle on Alfred, the “baby,” already making an art of his quirky displeasure. There are moments when Ames’s own startled face in the bathroom mirror looks unnervingly blank, like nothing. Should he exist? What could he be worth, if he is nothing to himself? There is a perilous quality to these thoughts, a dizzy weightlessness like the moment of releasing the rope they all use to swing out over the lake from “the cliff” at the abandoned summer camp—shut down after a boy died swinging from that very cliff （the myth so much more fun than the truth: declining enrollments and an embezzling bookkeeper）。 But from somewhere deep within Ames, an answer rises to his rescue: He is special, and that specialness is a secret. The void he sees in the mirror is a disguise of invisibility that conceals a volcanic strength. So immense are the doubts Ames’s inner voice must quell that his self-advocacy approaches the titanic. He is awesome in the thunderous sense of that word—not the vague, ubiquitous positivity it will soon assume in casual conversation. He can do it, whatever it is! Of course, he can’t always do it, but when he doesn’t （hit the ball, for example）， the failure lies in some hindrance to the cataclysmic power of his swing; it was thrown off by the wind, a light in his eyes, an itch on his hand—there is always a reason Ames doesn’t hit when he doesn’t hit （which is always）， making each nonhit a freak exception to a norm he alone expects.