Cam’s parents were at the lake; he had the house to himself. Before it got dark he and the dog, Sammy, had walked all the way around the Artichoke reservoir—five solid miles, with hills—and they were both tired and content. He was waiting to hear from Alexa. She said she’d call him when she was finished babysitting. Cam had thought at first that he might be invited to go over while she was babysitting, but in the end he was glad, in a self-preserving way, that he hadn’t been. He didn’t want to compromise her babysitting reputation.
Cam was so attracted to Alexa. He couldn’t even believe it. He understood in a way he never had before why people did crazy things for love: why they killed for it, died for it, ruined their lives or the lives of other people over it. Why they fought wars! He had never comprehended, when they were assigned The Illiad in high school, just how it was that Helen of Troy’s beauty could have caused such havoc between the Trojans and the Achaeans. Now, though? If some guy named Paris of Newburyport tried to make Alexa fall in love with him and take her away from Cam forever . . . yeah, he’d put up a fight. He’d start a war.
Cam showered and settled on the couch with the Golf Channel on, Sammy’s head resting on his bare feet. Some people liked to put on golf to sleep but to Cam there was nothing peaceful about it—golf, to Cam, represented edge-of-your-seat drama. In what other sport was utter concentration so necessary that even a small noise from the crowd, even a puff of wind moving in an unexpected direction, could change the entire course of the game?
The Golf Channel was showing a tape of Phil Mickelson’s 2004 Masters win, one of the all-time bests. Even though Cam knew exactly how this would play out, even though he’d watched it dozens of times, maybe more, he watched, tense, as Mickelson and DiMarco strode toward the eighteenth hole. He listened to the tweeting of the birds and the whispered commentary of the announcers. The quiet of the spectators was so very quiet that it was almost a sound unto itself.
DiMarco putted, missed. With Mickelson gearing up for his final, tournament-winning, history-making putt, Cam’s phone rang.
When he’d first started hanging out with Alexa, his friend Dex had said, “That girl? Bro! She is so far out of your league I don’t even think your two leagues are in the same universe.”
“I know,” said Cam. “I know.”
“Dude,” Dex went on. “One day that girl is going to wake up, and she’s going to look in the mirror, and then she’s gonna look at you, and she’s going to come to her senses. And that will be the last you see of her. You ugly bastard.” Dex laughed and punched Cam on the arm—this was a habit he’d taken up after pledging Alpha Sigma Phi at Boston University.
“Okay, Dex,” said Cam. “I get it.”
Deep down, Cam wondered if Dex was right. Cam’s parents raised him and his two older brothers to be respectful of girls and women, to be good Catholics, to undertake at least one service project a season, to work hard and play sports fairly, and to have some idea of the direction they wanted their lives to take so they were always marching along on a plane that was straight and sure. He could not believe that someone like Alexa Thornhill had ever given him the time of day, much less spent the better part of the summer with him.
Cam wasn’t completely green when it came to the opposite sex, obvs. But he had heretofore dated girls like Shelby McIntyre: sincere, smart, pretty-but-not-so-pretty-you-couldn’t-concentrate-on-anything-else girls, girls who took their sports and their grades as seriously as he took golf and his own grades. AP Bio girls, girls who made his mother sigh with happiness and say things like, “I like her, Cameron. You hang on to that one.”
And then Alexa Thornhill came hurtling into his world, with her contemptuous smirk and her YouTube channel and her perfect, perfect body, and her skin that smelled like lavender, and her way of looking at him from underneath her lashes.
At Salisbury Beach the other night they had spread a blanket far back, close to the dunes. It was twilight. The sand belonged to the dog owners, the water to the whales or the sharks, if you believed the rumors. Nobody was paying them any heed. They took it easy at first, some kissing, some through-the-clothes stuff, more kissing, then it all started to heat up. Alexa was wearing one of her sundresses that fell to midthigh when she was standing, but inched up alluringly, up and up, when she was prone, offering, when the moon allowed, a glimpse of lace panties in virginal white. She pressed harder against him as they kissed, and, with his hand on the captivating protrusion of her hip bone, he thought he could die a happy man.
And then she had said, “It’s my first time, Cam.”
He couldn’t be the first. Of course she had slept with Tyler. Right? Hadn’t she?
“No,” she said, shrugging her beautiful, beautiful shoulders in answer to his questions. And into his neck she whispered, “You’re the first.”
He said, “Are you sure? Are you absolutely one hundred percent sure you want this?” Because he’d been raised by two solid parents and he’d come of age in the #metoo movement and he understood his responsibilities to retain decency in a world that didn’t always value it.
“Yes,” she said. “I want this.”
The awkward fumbling with the condom was the worst part of the whole business, especially considering the sand, but obviously necessary, and when that part was done he put one thumb on each of her perfect temples, and he asked one more time: “Okay?”
“Yes,” she said, “okay.”
And he didn’t understand anyone who thought Alexa Thornhill wasn’t nice. What people didn’t see about Alexa was that beneath her tough exterior, beneath her beauty, she was actually smart and funny and even vulnerable, tender, like a lobster that had shed its old shell and hadn’t yet grown a new one.
He paused the television to answer the phone. His heart jumped when he saw Alexa’s name on the screen.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s up? Are you done babysitting? You can come over here, if you want, nobody’s here, my parents are at—”
She cut him off. “I’m not done babysitting,” she said. “I called to warn you. Tyler’s coming. To talk to you. He’s on his way now, from my house.”
Cam stood up, disturbing Sammy, who roused and looked blearily up at Cam, offended. The remote fell to the floor.
“Tyler?” said Cam. “Tyler is coming here?”
“He’s all worked up,” Alexa said. “He came over here and he was, like, threatening you, and then he took my mom’s keys, right from the bowl, and then he just took off in her car—”
“Wait,” said Cam. “Where’s your mom?”
“She’s at Brooke’s end-of-summer party. I had her car here. And Tyler is on the warpath. He’s drunk or something. High. I don’t know. It’s like he’s coming to challenge you for me. He called me his girl. Blech. How gross is that? And now I think he wants to fight you for me.”
“He’s coming to fight me?” A decade ago, Cam was briefly obsessed with martial arts; he went thrice weekly to Tokyo Joe’s on the Bridge Road, where he’d made his way to the junior advanced level. But he was not, in general, a fighter. Tyler played lacrosse; he was a big guy, six one, at least, and strong. “And he’s driving drunk?”
“Maybe high. Just don’t engage with him, okay? And don’t let him drive away, it’s not safe.”
Adrenaline surged through Cam. He stepped on the remote, and the Masters recording unpaused. Mickelson putted. Thirty-four years old, and he’d finally won his first major tournament. The crowd went wild. “Got it,” he said.
“Do whatever you have to do, just take the keys and hang on to them. Promise? I really need you to promise.”
“I promise,” said Cam. “I’ll take the keys; I won’t let him drive home. What should I do with Tyler, though? Is there somebody I should call?”
“Throw him in the bushes, I don’t care.”
“I’ll bring the car back to you. How about that?”
“No! No, Cam, don’t do that.”
“Why not? Are you okay, Alexa? You sound scared. Are you scared about something, besides Tyler?”
“Just stay where you are, okay, Cam? I’ll call you later, and we’ll deal with the car. Just take the keys, and stay where you are.”
She disconnected the call, and now Cam’s doorbell was ringing, and ringing, and in between rings someone was pounding on his door.
To call their exchange brief was a bit of an understatement, like calling a long iron shot into the wind moderately challenging.
Cam said, “Keys?”
“What the fuck?” said Tyler.
“Keys,” said Cam firmly. He stepped out onto the front porch, held out his hand, and Tyler dropped the keys into it.
“What am I supposed to do now?” Tyler sounded petulant, like a little kid who had his electronics taken away by a parent.
“Call somebody for a ride, I guess.” Cam made a great show of locking the door behind him. “I’m going to take this car back to Alexa’s house.”
She had told him not to. But he would go anyway.