The person on the other side of the door had given up on the bell and was now pounding directly on the door. Hard, again and again and again. Then the person was shouting her name. “Alexa! Are you in there? Alexa. Alexa. Alexa!” Alexa realized, as she disentangled herself from the net of her fear, that she recognized the voice.
It was Tyler. It was just Tyler. She opened the door and leaned against the doorjamb for support.
“Tyler! What the hell? You scared me.” Her knees were shaking but the rattling of her heart began to subside. “What are you doing here?”
Tyler was wearing a Newburyport Clippers Lacrosse T-shirt, jeans, and a Red Sox baseball hat. Under the glow of the porch lights—she had decided to keep them on, after much internal debate—his eyes were bloodshot and at half-mast. Pot eyes. “I just wanted to talk to you,” he said. “Can I come in?”
Alexa thought about Caitlin. He’s pretty broken up about how things ended with the two of you. She looked in the driveway, and out on the street. She didn’t see his car. She stepped aside, and Tyler entered the house. She closed and locked the door behind him. “How’d you get here?”
“I walked. I was downtown.”
“By yourself?”
“Yeah. I mean, I was with some of the guys. But they all stayed down there.” He leaned in, too close. “So what’s really going on with you and that golfer kid?”
She stiffened. There was something she didn’t like in Tyler’s voice. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her—it was more of a sneer, actually.
“Nothing,” she said. “We just hang out sometimes.” The sneer deepened, and Tyler stepped toward her. She backed away.
“I know you’re lying. I know where he lives too. Off Turkey Hill. I’m going to go talk to him.”
“Talk to Cam? About what?”
“About you.”
“How’re you going to talk to him? You walked here. Are you going to walk all the way out to Turkey Hill? That’s like three miles.” She crossed her arms and she was briefly so irritated that she almost forgot to be scared.
“Can I take your car?”
“No. Of course not. No way. Anyway, mine has a flat. I’m driving my mom’s.”
“Can I take your mom’s car?”
“Definitely not.”
And here was where things got complicated. Tyler had known Alexa and her family for a long time. He’d been in this house, what, zillions of times. He knew where they kept the extra toilet paper and the backup pool towels and the Cap’n Crunch her mother bought for Tyler to have as a snack, dry, by the handful. He knew that you had to pull up on the handle of the door that led to the back patio to lock it and that the window screen in Alexa’s bedroom fell out when a stiff wind blew. He knew that car keys went inside the small blue bowl on the hall table that came from Fireside Pottery in Maine, and that was where he reached, before Alexa could stop him.
“Tyler. Give me the keys. You can’t just take my mom’s car.”
But it was too late. He was already out the front door, and she saw that past the porch lights it was fully dark, with no moon to speak of. Blacker than the inside of a cow, as Peter used to say, until the motion-sensor driveway lights went on. With her eyes she swept the driveway and then the slice of High Street she could see. No black SUVs.
Then she remembered. She’d sent that text to Sherri. Except she hadn’t told Sherri that she had moved the girls to her own house, so if Sherri was on her way anywhere it was to her own house.
“I’ll bring it back safe, don’t you worry,” Tyler was saying from the driveway. “I just want to talk to the guy. Cam. See what I can do about getting my girl back.”
“Ugh. Tyler, I’m not your girl. I was never your girl. I’m not anyone’s girl.”
“We’ll see about that,” said Tyler.
She heard him peel out of the driveway in the Acura. If anything happened to her mother’s car, her mother was going to freak out. She’d just gotten that dent fixed.
Once again, she closed and locked the door. She peeked in on the girls—they were off the couch, and doing their own dance to Freedom along with Anna Kendrick and the rest of the Bellas. Katie had decent rhythm.
Okay. Deep breath. In, out. Everyone was safe.
She sent another text to Sherri. So sorry. False alarm.