After dinner the boy lays on his bed and listens to the latest CD by a forlorn-sounding British rock band. "Love’s all or nothing, it’s a shame when it falls away," the lead singer observes over soft piano. "Love’s all or nothing, I need you to stay." The boy closes his eyes, descending into his thoughts.

All or nothing--maybe that's how it has to be. Maybe this world of plaintive misery and unfulfilled longing should end now. Quit the girl cold, like he did with homework, and look for someone else. Could he really do that? Just stop seeing her? Stop calling? What would she think?

He turns down the music. His father is banging on the locked door. The boy gets up and opens it uncertainly. His father is a small man, with graying hair and a V-necked sweater and creases in his forehead that look like pictures of canals on Mars.

"You have a phone call," he says impatiently. "If she's still there. I've been knocking for five minutes..."

The boy hurries to the phone. The girl's quiet voice makes his heart jump. Just the sound of it can do that, not even her words, but her timbre, her sweet lilt. He's so focused on the redemptive powers of her voice that he doesn't really hear what's she's saying, something about a dog and cupcakes and her leather boots.

"What?" he says, trying to clear the mist from his head. "What?"

"Just please get over here," the girl says, and he hears her desperation. "I need you to drive me somewhere."

The dog: black-nosed, pink-tongued, the kind of docile-looking adversary that lulls you into lettting your guard down. Sitting in the boy’s car, the girl thinks about how the dog's benign appearance masked its sudden charge and ferocious strength. Never approach strange dogs, one of her older sisters warned her when she was little. Now she understands why.

"Let me get this straight," the boy repeats for what seems like the fourteenth time. He slows and parks across from the white ranch house. "The dog’s name is Cupcake?"

"It doesn't matter," the girl snaps. "It's dangerous."

“What kind is it?”

She seems unsure for a moment. “Black.”

He looks at her oddly, taking off the silver-rimmed glasses he wears for driving. She can tell that whatever was bothering him this afternoon is still there. She knows it has something to do with her.

"Why not just knock on the door?" the boy suggests. "Why do we have to sneak into the yard?"

"Because the owner is weird.”

“How weird?”

The girl hesitates. “He’s like that guy in "The Silence Of The Lambs."

The boy squints in disbelief. "Hannibal Lecter?"

"No, the other one. The guy with the little dog."

"But I thought...," the boy stops, realizing that the decision has been made.

"It’s his voice," the girl says, shuddering. "It was like a parrot’s. And he tried to give me soup.”

"Maybe he was just being nice.”

The girl scowls at him as she opens her door. "Let’s just get this over with, all right?"

So this is it, the boy thinks. Adrenalin--the girl has talked about the rush during 110m hurdles when she feels she could jump over parked cars. That’s how he feels now. He can't get over it. Forty-five minutes ago he was lying in bed, feeling dejected and alone. Now they're together and she wants his help. His body pulses. He's not sure which pleases him more--that she called, or he's the only one she felt she could turn to. It's like winning the lottery. In fact, if he had to choose right now, he would choose this.

They climb over the fence. The house is dark. The boy has brought a flashlight, but the girl gestures to leave it off. "How are we going to find the boot?" he whispers, lips brushing her ear. Her hair is down, and he gets a whiff of honeysuckle conditioner. She’s wearing runing shorts and a purple T-shirt that shows the curve of her chest. He feels a jolt all the way down to his fingertips.

"It has to be right around here," the girl says, pointing at a section of yard. "The dog didn't take it into the house. Look by the fence."

She moves a few feet away. They both get down on their hands and knees, searching in the faint glow of the streetlight. The boy hears the drone of crickets, and the whine of a small plane overhead. He spreads his arms out in front of him like a blind man, scraping the soft ground. Nothing--the yard is big enough that at this rate the search could take hours.

"Let's try over toward those bushes," the girl says, moving toward a hedge line. "Cupcake was sniffing them before."

"But that's right by the house."

He feels the heat of her eyes penetrate the darkness. "Do you want to help me, or not?"

"I just don't want to get caught."

“We're not going to.”

A nervous twinge develops in the boy’s stomach. He knows the boot is important, but can't she just buy another one? Still, if it weren't for that he wouldn't be here. He realizes he doesn’t have anything to fend off the dog with, should they encounter it. The girl's probably exaggerating, anyway. Rocky, his border collie who the vet had to put to sleep last year, barked at strangers but was fine with people he knew. Dogs defend their territory and protect their owners. They don't question. They act. And they don't back down unless a bigger dog forces them.

The girl gets on her knees again and digs into the hedge. "Give me the flashlight," she says. The boy hands it to her. She shines the beam toward the foundation of the house. The boy watches it sweep back and forth a few times, then stop. "I see it!" the girl says excitedly, reaching into the hedge. "I just can't..."

A screen door opens at the back of the house. The boy tenses. He hears the sound of running paws, of long toenails scraping concrete. And then, with the speed of a truck bearing down, a stout Rotweiller turns the corner, as startled to see him as if he were a ghost. Everything stops. And for a moment, the boy wishes he had won the lottery instead, or was back in his room, listening to music and thinking about the girl, about the end of the world, about anything except what he knows he has to do to get them out of this unharmed.

The boot: dirty, dog-slobbered, six inches out of the girl's reach. She pushes deeper into the hedge. Twigs poke at her hair. Her T-shirt slides up, creating what she suspects is quite a show for the boy. Six inches, now four, now two...needles prick her arms. Her shoulder aches like it’s about to pop out of the socket. This is worse than shot put, she thinks.

One final lunge, and she grasps the boot’s oiled surface. The boy yells her name. She tries backing out of the hedge, but the branches restrain her. She hears a bark and thinks: Oh, shit.

Another sound, like a running stream, and then a noise so abrupt and harsh and vicious that she drops the flashlight. It's another dog, growling, snarling. A voice bellows fiercely: "Get back! Get back!" It doesn't sound like the boy’s. It's deeper, meaner, the voice of a lion tamer trapped in a cage. More barking--throat-clenching, ear-prickling barks that sound like howls of pain. Maybe the boy is hurt. Or the two dogs are fighting.

The girl scrambles back, taking branches and needles with her. The entire hedge shudders. She falls on her behind, barely clutching the boot by its hard, slick heel. The dog, Cupcake, stands less than ten feet from her, ready to spring on its thick haunches. Even in the dimness, the girl can see its razored teeth, hear its low, steady growl. But it doesn’t move. The boy is on his hands and knees, backing slowly toward the fence, one palm extended like a shield. "Stay!" he orders sharply, and the depth and authority of the voice is like nothing she's ever heard from him. "Stay!" It's the voice of a man, a voice that has taken control and will not let go. The dog obeys.

The boy begins to climb unsteadily over the fence, one leg, then another. He’s not leaving, is he? He barks, a guttural torrent of sound, his mouth moving like a ventriloquist's dummy. Then he's on the other side, calmly looking back at the girl.

“Don’t move,” he calls to her. “I’ve got him under control.”

A floodlight hits the yard. The screen door at the back of the house slams. The dog's head turns and cocks. A high voice and a series of garbled words, one of which sounds like “soup” to the girl. It’s as if a starter's pistol has been fired. The fence is less than twenty yards. She knows she can make it.

"Stop," she hears the boy yell. And then, "Watch out!"

Physics, the boy's father has said, explains things. An apple falls out of a tree; a home run travels four hundred feet; a bird flies into a plate glass window. Gravity, acceleration, momentum--they're all part of the natural order, the unseen world. They establish limits, but also provide a threshold beyond which nothing is certain.

The boy has never really thought about his father's musings, which usually occur in restaurants and involve diagrams drawn on napkins. Despite his examples physics seems too abstract, too unconnected to anything he usually thinks about. At school he ducks out of labs and skims his textbook. I don’t have time for this, he thinks. It doesn’t matter. Until now, when his father’s work, his father’s passions, suddenly become important.

The dog growls, a raw, threatening sound. The boy glances toward the hedge--the girl seems unaware of its presence. The only part of her that’s visible is the pale curve of her lower back. It must be a mirage, he thinks, because he sees her bare hips.

He has to act fast, before the dog charges. He unzips his fly and urinates, a steady flow that he spreads in a semi-circle. It feels strange, especially with the girl so close. He calls her name to alert her, and Cupcake barks once, as if uttering an expletive. Then its nose twitches, taking in the foreign scent. The boy launches into the game he used to play with Rocky in the backyard when he was ten. "Big Dog," he called it. He would pretend to be the new leader of Rocky’s pack. Sometimes the boy would pee on the ground to establish his territory. Being a border collie, Rocky stood at attention, listening for orders. The game was about instinct, about scent and sound, about wishing you were a dog and not a boy. It worked because the boy knew that dogs were always waiting for commands, that they wanted to be bossed around. A childish, embarrassing game, now at sixteen, but Cupcake gives him no choice. How could the girl not have known that he was a Rotweiller?

He drops to the ground and becomes Big Dog. “Get back! G-et...baack!” Since his voice changed, the sound seems brasher, more powerful. The barks feel furious, not friendly the way they did with Rocky. Cupcake takes a few steps, poised and agile but clearly confused. He’s used to being Big Dog, the boy surmises, and now I’m taking over. The boy starts backing toward the fence. He can get them out of here one at a time if he keeps this up. He barks again—his throat seizing, the barks less confident and raspy. He puts his arm out with his palm extended to show he’s still in charge. “Stay!” He’s nearly at the fence.

Up now, but not too quickly—any sudden movement will break the spell. The fence is chest-high, and it takes a few awkward leg shifts to get over it. Splinters poke through his pants near the crotch. He’s never going to be an athlete like the girl, able to leap and vault. She’s out of the hedge now, with the boot. He barks a few more times for good measure, laying down cover fire, and drops to the other side.

Floodlights go on--two of them above the front steps, beams of blinding light. A man now, coming around the side of the house, wearing the ugliest bathrobe the boy has ever seen. It’s sort of a shoddy pink, frayed at the bottom with exposed stomach in the middle, where the cinch fails to keep it fully closed. The girl was right; there’s something about this guy that reminds him of the serial killer in “The Silence Of The Lambs.”

The dog looks back at the man, who seems startled. The man says something, but all the boy can make out is the tinny pitch of his voice. And with that, the girl is out of the blocks, sprinting toward the fence.

Time slows to a frozen stop. Even as he sees her arms pumping and the backlit outlines of her flushed legs, the boy realizes that Cupcake is also in motion, galloping toward her. He tries to bark but the sound catches again in his throat.

“Stop!” he screeches at the girl, as the dog swings left to cut her off. Rottweilers are effortlessly fast, faster than any human could ever hope to be. It doesn’t matter who “Big Dog” is anymore. This is Cupcake’s territory, his house, and any thought of ceding it has been overridden by instinct—attack the intruder.

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