Jenna. He felt disgusted. “Been busy.” He turned his back on Jimmy for the rest of the 
shower, hoping the other boy would leave to go swim in the pool. But Jimmy toweled off, 
and began dressing just as Owen turned off the water. He slipped his shorts on, and 
reached for his t-shirt.
  “You’ve been working out a lot. Me, too. I run every morning. I play tennis.”
  “Swim,” Owen said. He walked back to the toilet to take a leak.
  “Swim?”
  “I swim.”
  “Ah, a complete sentence out of the Mooncalf,” Jimmy chuckled.
  “That’s the first thing I noticed about you, you know.”
  Owen said nothing; flushed the toilet. Sat down on one of the chairs, and reached for 
his shirt.
  “You talk in bits of sentences. Well, that and your hair.”
  Owen twisted back to look at him, his t-shirt shirt half over his head.
  “My hair? What’s your problem?”
  “You’ve got pretty hair. It’s soft, too. Most guys’ hair is like bristles.”
  “Weirdo,” Owen said, then, “Sleep in the guest room much?” He pulled the shirt down, 
and then went to grab his socks. Jimmy followed him, sitting down on a short bench.
  “No. That bother you?”
  “No. It’s weird that her parents don’t care.”
  “They don’t. Well, her mother doesn’t. Her father’s still down in the city. And I 
thought you were hot for Jenna. That’s the third thing I noticed about you.”
  “We’re friends. That’s all.”
  “Boys can’t just be friends with girls.”
  “Okay,” Owen said. He laughed, but it was a fake. It echoed off the turquoise tile and 
sounded less genuine as it went. He looked at Jimmy, who was watching him with a sort of 
paternal take — the way Owen’s father would look at him when he didn’t understand him.
  “You know, Mooncalf, you comb your hair to the left a little more — make the part 
slightly higher, and you’d look top drawer. You really would.
  Your chin’s strong, your body’s in excellent shape. You need to get rid of these,” 
Jimmy pointed at Owen’s red t-shirt, “and start wearing some oxford cloths, button-downs. 
With sleeves. Short sleeves are for kids. It would show your best side. And maybe some 
khakis. When you grin, don’t show all your teeth.”
  “Bite me.”
  Jimmy laughed, and reached out, pressing his hand against Owen's shoulder in what could 
only be a casual and friendly — even brotherly — gesture. “Good. Some spirit. I’m just 
trying to help. You look good, but you look too island. You need a little charm. All guys 
do. Swimming only goes so far, after all.” Jimmy, ever-annoying, kept up the jabber. “I’m 
not much of a swimmer. I sail, but the idea of water, well, let’s just say I do a 
passable dog paddle. But you’ve got those biceps. Amazing shoulders for such a 
Mooncalf runt. Pretty good. How much you bench?”
  “Who cares?”
  A brief silence.
  Then, “I do.”
  “Well, not all that much,” Owen said. “I just stack the weights on and push. I don’t 
notice how much.”
  “Don’t notice? My god, sport, you mean to say your goal isn’t the weights?”
  Owen shrugged. “I never think about it. I just want to be powerful. I mean strong.”
  “You said powerful.”
  “Same thing.”
  Another brief silence.
  “You ever up for tennis?” Jimmy asked.
  “Not really.”
  “I can teach you if you like. It would be fun to play a doubles match one day. Early, 
before it’s too hot. You, me, Jenna, and maybe you could find a friend to bring. We could 
have a good match. It’s always fun to play doubles,”
  Jimmy said. Owen noticed the combination of arrogance and nonchalance, as if none of 
this mattered. Even this small talk was something to fill some empty space. Jimmy 
probably screwed Jenna on a nightly basis. But he never thought about Owen, or Owen and 
Jenna. He probably lived in the moment.
  Completely.
  “Saturday should be fun,” Jimmy said, wiping the last of the spray from his shoulders 
as he pushed his feet into the cheapest sneakers that Owen had ever seen. “You bringing a 
date?”
  Owen glanced up. “Her birthday?”
  “Yeah, you know, the whole crowd’s coming from the Cape, and then we’ll just do tequila 
shots til dawn. You got a girl off-island?”
  Owen began to lie, just to fill that emptiness between them. Yes, he had a girl. Yes, 
he was excited about Jenna’s birthday party, even though he had not been invited to it. 
Yes, he was considering his options as to which colleges he was looking into — Middlebury 
looked promising, he didn’t think he had quite the grades for Harvard, but his uncle had 
been a Dean at Middlebury, and yes, they could all go skiing in the winter up there in 
some distant holiday.
  The whole time, Jimmy reached into his shaving kit; went over to shave at the mirror, 
and then applied some kind of lotion to his face. He finished it off with a spritz of the 
most obnoxious cologne that Owen had ever smelled. While they small–talked it, Owen knew, 
standing there in the diminishing steam of the changing room, he knew.
  Owen knew just by standing there with Jimmy in the shimmering mist.
  Jimmy had a weakness.
  He began spending time, after that, thinking about that weakness.
  Thinking about how he could get Jenna back.
  3
  Owen’s shift at the Salty Dog began at three and lasted until eleven, six days a week. 
He emerged sweaty and stinking of grease, because half his job was cleaning out the 
fryers and grease pits at the end of the night, and when he got off shift in early July — 
it was nearly two a.m. — he went down to the jetty to stare out at the early morning mist 
of the Sound, smoke some cigarettes, and chill.
  He didn’t turn around when he heard the footsteps coming up behind him.
  “Mooncalf.”
  “Hey Jimmy.”
  “Got a cig?”
  “Take one,” Owen tossed a cigarette back.
  “Thanks. I guess you want to be alone.”
  “Didn’t know you smoked.”
  “I don’t. Not when anyone looks, anyway.”
  “That’s nice. Anything else you do when no one’s looking?”
  “If I told, you’d know my secrets.”
  “How’s Jenna?”
  “She’s okay. She fell asleep early. I just needed to wander a little. How's the job?”
  “Good. You can smell it on me. You wander late. It’s almost morning.”