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.”