Sam lurked in the hallway until he was pretty sure that at least two of the three boys were sleeping. From the doorway, he could see Sarah’s and Eli’s cars in the driveway. He’d left his car up on the street, poised for an easy exit.
Finally, here was the moment he’d been planning since his arrival.
Sam was still on West Coast time, still wide-awake, eager for the adventure he’d been imagining for weeks. But, suddenly, the idea of going to Provincetown to trawl for men—or even just to watch other men trawling for men—struck him as tawdry. Ridiculous, even. Forget it, he thought. He’d just brush his teeth, read until he felt sleepy, get an early start in the morning, and—
“Sam?”
He looked up to see Ronnie calling him as she leaned over the third-floor banister.
“Can you see if there are any lightbulbs in the closet?” she stage-whispered. “One of the bulbs up here just blew out.”
Sam went to the utility closet, rummaged until he found a single lightbulb and a stepstool, and carried them both up the stairs.
“Oh, perfect,” said his mom. Sam climbed onto the stepstool, unscrewed the burnt-out bulb, and, with his sister and his mother both offering suggestions （“Careful! It might be hot!” “Should I get the oven mitts?”）， successfully replaced it.
“Try it now,” he said. His mother flicked the switch. The new bulb lit up. Everyone cheered. An instant later, the bulb beside it burnt out with a loud pop. Everyone groaned.
“Were there any more bulbs?” asked Sarah.
“That was the last one,” said Sam, and thought, Maybe it’s a sign. “How late’s the Stop & Shop open?”
“You’re going to go out now?” asked his mother, as if he were still sixteen, with a brand-new driver’s license.
“It’s not a big deal,” Sam said. “I’ll go pick up a bunch of bulbs, so we’ll have them for the weekend.” Five minutes later, Sam was back in his bedroom, with the credit card his mother had insisted on giving him in his pocket and his heart pounding hard. I don’t have to do anything, he told himself, as he brushed his teeth and shaved with extra care and patted cologne onto his cheeks. I’m not going to do anything, he thought, as he pulled on a pair of khaki shorts and, after extensive consideration, a short-sleeved button-down seersucker shirt, in a dark-blue check, and slipped his feet into his loafers. I can just look. He could hear Tim’s voice in his ear, telling him that no self-respecting （if extremely tentative and still entirely closeted） gay man would ever miss the chance to hang out in P-town. You don’t have to do anything, his inner Tim assured him, as he drove along Route 6. You can just see what it’s like.
Sam went to the Stop & Shop for the lightbulbs, then drove down Bradford Street and found a parking lot two blocks from the center of town, where he paid a shocking thirty dollars to park. “Have a delightful evening,” the young person who handed him his ticket cooed with a wink of a glitter-dusted eyelid. Sam felt like he’d wandered into another world, a snow globe that some unseen hand had flipped upside down and shaken hard.
On a Thursday night in the summertime, Commercial Street was as packed as Times Square on New Year’s Eve. There were drag queens, seven feet tall in their heels, resplendent in their wigs and their gowns as they called out to passersby and handed them flyers for their shows. There were men in pairs and in threesomes, men walking hand in hand, or with their arms around each other’s shoulders, tall men and short men; clean-shaven men and hairy-chested, bearded men wearing T-shirts that said SAVE THE BEARS; men slender as ballet dancers, in teeny-tiny cutoff shorts and hot-pink tank tops, and men who were as burly as linebackers, with leather harnesses across their otherwise bare chests.
At first Sam tried not to stare, then he gave up and let himself look his fill. He walked until his feet were sore, then he bought himself an ice-cream cone, and found a spot on a bench outside of Town Hall, near the buskers and the itinerant poets with their top hats and their old-timey typewriters who’d write you a poem on the spot. He sat, and watched, remembering what he’d heard over the years: about what happened after last call at the bars, when the men who hadn’t yet paired up would gravitate toward Spiritus Pizza. （“I’ve heard people call it the garage sale,” Tim had said. “You know, when all the stuff that no one wants gets its price reduced.”） Sam already knew about what went on underneath the deck of the Boatslip Resort, colloquially known as the Dick Dock, and along the sandy paths that passed through the dunes, but he was one hundred percent certain that he wasn’t interested in public sex. He didn’t think he was ready for any sex at all.