I stole a glance around the yard, as if someone could be looking over my shoulder at what I was doing. This was ridiculous. I got out of the car and practically ran into the house.

Mom was on her computer, shopping, so I merely waved to her and went into my room, cell phone clutched in my hand like it was a bag of drugs. I closed the door behind me, perched on the edge of my bed, took a deep breath, and started typing.

Fair enough. So what, a selfie? A tossed-hair, pouty-lipped, coyly-tilted-head snapshot? Hmm, I wasn’t crazy about that idea. I glanced around the room, and found a purple teddy bear in a Canton T-shirt. Perfect. I clicked, then sent it along.

For a few minutes, there was no response, and I wondered if I was boring him. The teddy bear was probably the wrong move.

When another minute went by with no response, I tossed the phone to my bed and got up. This was silly. Last night was last night, and we’d decided even before we started that it would only be last night. I was hardly an expert in the art of one-night stands, but I was pretty sure that afternoon-after texting was probably not a standard part of the game.

I opened my laptop and logged onto the blog. I might as well write up my take on Render, though I’d hold off posting for a bit, until whatever that director Sam Rowland’s memory might have been of me faded, and there was no way he’d connect me to The Final Girl. Not that he’d have much to complain about. It was going to be a good review.

I was deep into the third paragraph, which was all about the manipulation of time to emphasize the heroine’s growing awareness of her plight, when I heard the buzzing. I turned around and looked at the phone. The indicator light was blinking white, which meant a new message.

Why was he doing this to me? Or rather, why was I doing this to myself? I could have just not texted him back. He’d basically said as much. I could have ignored him and just let this whole thing go.

My phone buzzed again.

Dammit. I leaned over and grabbed it.

Wow, he didn’t mess around, did he? Even during our game at the bar last night, he’d been perfectly upfront about what he wanted. Sex. With me. Pickup truck optional. I was not used to guys being this forward. Was this what men were like outside the college scene? Or did Boone feel free to put himself so far out there because there was no emotion invested in our relationship? I was a newbie to one-night stands, but also to purely physical affairs, too. I typed:

A minute later, he replied with a smiley face and then:

My breath caught in my throat and my fingers froze on the screen. I had no snappy comeback. Another text came through, and then another.

Yes! said my nether regions. No, said my brain. The rest of my body started taking sides. Results were inconclusive, but thrilling. Boone was supposed to be this crazy thing I did that one time. The European fling I didn’t actually manage to have in Europe.

If I didn’t write him back, would that be it? Would he stop texting?

Could I not write him back? I must have stared at the phone for another two minutes before it buzzed again.

I ground my teeth together in frustration. Why did he have to be so charming? Don’t do it. Do it. Don’t. Do. Ugh. I took a deep breath, steadied my nerves, and snapped a simple, smiling selfie. Then I typed in a message and pressed send.

For a minute, there was no response. Then:

There was that blushing smile again. Someone needed to slap me or something. A picture buzzed through.

Uh-oh. If he sent me anything R-rated, that would kill everything. I mean, I would look and all, but then I’d delete the picture, block his number, and probably get a new phone, just to be safe. Because if anyone found dick pics on the phone of Hannah Swift, I’d die.

I clicked and Boone’s face grinned up at me. Nice, sweet pic. He even had a shirt on.

Darn. He even had a shirt on.

I flopped back on my bed and stared up at the ceiling as if I’d find answers there. What the hell was I doing? Had I gone completely mad?

What if I’d told Emily and Caitlin this afternoon? Emily and Caitlin, who seemed more willing to jump to the conclusion that I was sleeping with some middle-aged married dude in my neighborhood than a handyman I’d met next door. Because that’s not what Hannah Swift would do, right? She dated society boys and brilliant college students and guys with good prospects and… What had Boone accused me of yesterday? Guys with good majors, career plans, and bank accounts.

Boone was not those things. Boone was a handyman who sometimes slept in his truck because wherever he lived was so crappy it didn’t have air-conditioning.

But I liked him anyway. He may not have gone to college, but he was obviously smart. Our conversation at the bar had been clever. He didn’t use text-speak, and had messaged me in complete sentences. With punctuation, even. He had a line from a poem tattooed on his stomach.

Of course, that didn’t mean he’d actually read the poem in question. I knew half a dozen girls who had Chinese symbols tattooed on their bodies but didn’t speak a word of Mandarin. I always thought it was kind of silly. I mean—how were they sure that the symbol actually meant “star” or “destiny” or “love” or whatever they’d been told at the tattoo parlor? For all I knew, Boone had picked that line off a wall of designs in a shop.

I sat up. This was not an idle question. I went back to my computer and did a search on “They only live who dare.”

Okay, so it was not a poem. It was apparently a quote from Voltaire. I didn’t know much about Voltaire, since I was only a history major for three weeks, but my understanding was that he was a French philosopher and political writer—not a poet.

Bummer. Well, bummer for Boone, anyway. On the other hand, who cared if it was really from a poem or not? The line obviously spoke to him in some way, even if he had just picked it off a wall. I hoped he never found out. Though the likelihood of him hanging out with people who knew Voltaire was probably slim. If I had that tattoo, some pretentious Canton philosophy major would probably call me out on it in twenty seconds, and give me a hard time about not getting it in the original French.

Speaking of Canton, I supposed I should look at the course catalog. I really needed to pick a major. For real this time. The problem was that every time I chose a department, I found myself surrounded by people who were actually passionate about it, in a way that I wasn’t—about anything. I was a business major and had been baffled by the way the other kids couldn’t wait to get to Wall Street and start wheeling and dealing. I was a marketing major and marveled at how passionate my classmates were about selling stuff—any stuff. I’d been an English major, a history major, a psychology major…none of it stuck.

Maybe Boone had a point yesterday about how pointless college was if you didn’t know what you wanted out of it. But what were my options? I was a Swift. Swifts went to Canton. Even non-Swift Swifts like Tess apparently went to Canton. I didn’t like what it said about me that my sister, who’d been given nothing, knew exactly what she wanted and I, who’d been given everything, had no idea.

I was spoiled. I mean, I’d always known that, and I joked about it, but in the past I just meant it like my parents gave me things. Cars, clothes, money, opportunities. I’d used it to mean “privileged.” But maybe I was actually spoiled, like a fruit that sits in a marble bowl looking pretty while its insides turned to mush.

I was home for practically the whole summer, and it hadn’t even occurred to me to get a job. Tess was working, out in Denver. Of course, she was working at her dream company—some bioengineering firm where she’d be up to her safety goggles in algae—but she worked as a waitress back here in Canton, too. I could be a waitress. Heck, I could be a French tutor, and actually make a little use of my European adventure. I could do something, even if it was something mundane.

I clicked over to my half-finished review of Render. That writer-director hadn’t cared that his budget was shoestring and some of his actors were wooden and his effects were cheesy. He still had a tight script and good directorial sensibilities and he made the best of what he could out of the things he had. And it worked. The movie had scared me and entertained me and he’d done it. He’d made a movie that people were watching. A movie that scared them.

Maybe doing was the whole point. I chuckled to myself. Yeah, Boone definitely had it right.

They only live who dare.