Eric Puchner - Model Home

“Ms. Cross,” Camille said, “do you have any input?”

Lexie lifted her head slowly, as if wishing not to disturb the silver scorpion pinned to the lapel of her jacket. “I don’t know,” she said in her well-dressed British accent. “This whole idea. Isn’t it a bit, um, silly?”

“Silly?”

“I mean, kids dressed as sperms?”

“They’re not dressed as sperms. They’re wearing T-shirts.”

“Well, I don’t know. It still seems a bit juvenile.” She pursed her lips. “These are fifth graders, right?”

Camille frowned. “Well, I don’t think ‘juvenile’ would be the right term. ‘Interactive,’ maybe. ‘Educationally hands-on.’”

“Have you asked the kids what they think?”

“What?”

“The kids. How do they feel about the video? Do they fancy the idea?”

Camille blinked. She looked at the other committee members, who seemed to find this a reasonable question. “Well, I’m not sure their input’s relevant. I mean, I think we’re better equipped to demonstrate the ins and outs of conception. As adults, I mean.”

Lexie Cross smiled. “I’m not sure we should go so far as filming the ins and outs.”

The auditorium rippled with laughter. Even Rabbi Silverberg seemed to enjoy the joke, his beard twitching up and down in the fourth row. Camille did her best to ignore the blaze in her cheeks, wondering how she was ever going to please such a ridiculous group of cretins. She was about to give up, resigned to go back to the drawing board, but the mood seemed to have shifted. With a few concessions to Father Gladstone, Camille’s script was halfheartedly approved, if only because no one could think of a different one. She was too humiliated to feel victorious. She slipped away after the meeting and ducked briskly to the exit. Wasps rose from the Passiflora and buzzed at her face, their hind legs dangling like twigs. Dodging these hideous creatures, she felt like she might cry. Strangely, it was not the laughing faces of the committee members that she pictured but those of her children, their mouths pink with filling.

She touched her stomach. Even if Warren wanted to start over, a new beginning, she couldn’t imagine going through another love affair with a baby, setting herself up for rejection.

Someone called Camille’s name, and she turned to see Mikolaj running to catch up with her, panting for breath. The nebula in his eye had spread into a galactic event. Camille glanced around the deserted campus, wondering if anyone could see them.

“These committee people are very bourgeois,” Mikolaj said with disgust. His breath no longer smelled of mouthwash but of something stale and wonderful. Tobacco. Camille searched his body for evidence of a pack. “Don’t worry about these mentally retardeds and their jokes.”

“Can you picture me doing something bad?” Camille asked him.

“What?”

“Something bad. Anything. Running off with somebody’s fiancé.”

Mikolaj closed his eyes. “Yes, I picture. Very easy. We are all bad people. The dangerous is the leaders who tell us always they are good.” He opened his eyes, staring at her with a curious look. “I make you happy?”

Lyle couldn’t sleep. She was sick, crazy, a living girl wreck. She checked the clock radio by her bed: 5:02 a.m., the enormous numbers buzzing in her face. That was something to add to her hate list (clocks that buzzed), but she couldn’t muster much contempt because visions of Hector kept clogging up her thoughts. All night long she’d dreamed of him. There was Hector, kissing her with his sad-looking mustache. Or Hector again, playing a song on the piano—“Tiny Dancer”—while Lyle did a striptease onstage. Or Hector and her little brother, Jonas, hiding out in the woods and waiting for vodka-slamming Soviet mercenaries to attack them with rocket launchers.

The Soviet mercenaries were from the movie they’d seen last night at the Courtyard Mall. Hector had met her there after work. (She’d insisted on seeing something with rocket launchers, because they’d be less likely to run into any of her classmates from PV High.) Hector had fidgeted throughout the movie, his girlish hands resting on his knees. During the sex scene, a brief glimmer of breasts, he’d yawned from nervousness. Lyle began to despise him. He wasn’t attracted to her; why had he asked her out? She wondered if he was gay. Earlier, on the phone, he’d told her he wrote poetry. Afterward, walking back to the parking lot, he’d grabbed her by the arm and kissed her ferociously on the lips, pinning her against the wall as though in a fever. His mustache felt large and petlike. When he stopped for a breath, Lyle had rushed to her car before anyone could see them together, telling him she had a ten o’clock curfew.

She was ashamed at her shame. Why did she care what her classmates thought? Justifying it now, she decided it was the kiss itself that had frightened her.

Lyle opened her bedside table and took out the poem he’d given her before she ran off. It was still crinkled from his pocket. She’d already memorized it, but there was something about seeing the actual words on paper, the earthquakey wobble of Hector’s handwriting, that was like a drug.

bones

she is beautiful, when I see her in the light

skin the color of clouds

the color of my bones

she hides inside her clothes

she makes me laugh

her body is serious: breasts hips freckles

we are serious, laughing

my favorite thing to be

i want to take off her clothes and burn them in a fire

i want to count her freckles like stars

i want to eat her for dessert and then spit out the bones

lick them clean

It was a bad poem, but Lyle didn’t care. She read the last two lines again, an agreeable sort of fear kindling in her chest. It was exactly the way the boys looked at Shannon Jarrell, the ones who wandered into The Perfect Scoop — as though they could eat her for dinner. But would they spit out Shannon Jarrell’s bones and lick them clean? Lyle doubted it. That was another thing entirely. It wasn’t enough to devour her: Hector wanted to taste every morsel, like a dog.

It was useless, trying to sleep. Lyle got up, bleary-eyed, and padded to the bathroom in her DEATH TO SANDWICHES T-shirt. She flipped on the light and squinted at herself in the mirror. Miraculously, she looked the same as always: red hair, Vampira skin, arms a warp-speed blur of freckles. The word she thought of was “plain.” Not ugly or hideous. Plain. When she was younger, fourteen, she used to pray to God to get rid of her freckles. She’d made outlandish promises: I’ll chop off one of my toes or I’ll dress like my mother for a year. But the freckles were still there, and now someone wanted to count them like stars.

She was suffering physically. She wanted to touch herself. She wanted to lie on top of her stuffed giraffe, Giggles, like she used to do when she was four.

Lyle closed her eyes and pictured herself as an X-ray, a blue window of bones. Once, at The Perfect Scoop, she’d overheard a boy with bad acne bragging to some of his friends: I was eating her out and she went, like, totally haywire. Such a dutiful way of putting it. Eating her out. There were other expressions: “munching carpet,” “dining at the Y,” “yodeling in the valley.” Inventive, maybe, but not very illuminating. They were about the yodeler and not the yodel. They did nothing to unravel the mystery — the exquisite torture — of what it would actually feel like.