Eric Puchner - Model Home

Under the cliffs, near the chain-link fence, was a skinny man sitting in a beach chair and fiddling with a boom box at his feet. Hector. He was with his grandmother. Lyle’s first reaction was relief. A burst of heavy metal drifted down the beach. When he turned to face the sun, she saw that he was wearing cutoff jeans and a belt, wet from the water. A delta of black hair glistened on his chest.

Hector looked in her direction, starting in surprise before bursting into a smile. He waved at her. Damp, his mustache looked dead and stringy. His grandmother was wearing a down vest the color of antifreeze, sprinkling sand on her feet, oblivious to the music roaring from the stereo. Lyle put her head down and kept walking.

“Who was that?” Shannon said.

“Who?”

“That guy that just waved at you.”

“I don’t know.”

Shannon looked at her strangely. “Does he work on your house or something?”

“I’ve never seen him before.”

“Wee- yerd .” Shannon glanced behind her. “He’s staring at us. What a perv.” She leaned toward Lyle, pretending to whisper in her ear. “I think you should fuck him.”

“What?”

“Go over there and fuck his brains out.”

Lyle tried to laugh. “Yeah, right.”

“Watch this.”

Shannon turned around so that she was walking backward and pulled down one side of her bikini top, flashing a white triangle of breast in Hector’s direction. It was almost as pale as Lyle’s legs. She flipped around again, laughing.

“Now we’re screwed,” she said, tugging her baseball cap over her eyes. “He’s going to rape us.”

There were over seven thousand nerve endings in each of your feet. Lyle had read this somewhere. She tried to feel them as she walked. She wondered if it was a form of protection, to have so many nerves in such an impractical place.

“Are you all right?” Shannon asked.

“Yeah. Just a headache.”

At the Snack Shack, Shannon ordered a Snickers bar from the cashier, who had bad skin and owly glasses steamed into bedroom winks. He looked like the guys at school who wore trench coats in spring and played D & D in the quad every afternoon. “Five dollars for the potentate,” he said in a fake British accent, when Shannon handed him her money. He snapped the bill with two hands. “Not much of a ransom, but he’s not much of a king!”

“What a dork,” Shannon said afterward, sitting at a picnic table. “What does that mean anyway? Potentate?”

“Like a ruler,” Lyle murmured.

Shannon sucked some chocolate from her fingers and pulled her lab notebook from her bag. Lyle watched some kids playing paddleball in the breakwater, feeling sick to her stomach. When she glanced back at Shannon, she’d added a word to her list: POTINTATE. For some reason, it made Lyle feel even worse. She told Shannon she’d spelled it incorrectly.

“Doesn’t matter. I just have to recognize it.”

“What do you mean?” Lyle said.

“On the PSATs. It’s multiple choice.”

The sickness wobbled up her throat. Shannon put the notebook back in her bag. She smiled and then touched Lyle’s hand. “Let’s go find our friend the stoner. I bet he’s got something to wash down this Snickers.”

“Go ahead,” Lyle said. “I think I left my wallet by our stuff.”

She sloped up the hot sand again toward the fence. It wasn’t too late. She could go back and apologize, she could kiss him on the lips, she could explain somehow that she hadn’t recognized him through the tint of her sunglasses. Perhaps he’d believe her. Lyle’s towel fell from her waist but she didn’t stop, jogging toward the cliffs, though she could see already he was gone.

That evening, in the living room, Lyle sprawled on the lounge chair her dad had dragged in from the backyard. Her skin was on fire, radiating from every pore. It was like a machine she couldn’t turn off. If she moved an inch, if she tried to lift an arm to scratch her nose, her body responded with a torturous ripple. She wondered if you could actually die from sunburn. It was a comforting idea. Her legs were particularly bad off. Visually, there was no way to describe them. They were “red” in the way that the universe was “large.” Lyle closed her eyes and dreamed of shedding her skin like a snake, slithering into the cool, cool grass, leaving it in a burning puddle on the floor.

She was shivering. Which was weird, since she was pouring out heat. There was a contradiction there, but Lyle couldn’t think clearly enough to resolve it.

On the TV, Mr. Roarke was talking to a little girl whose parents had been killed in a plane crash. Tattoo, that lovable midget, stared poignantly at his feet. She’d thought a Fantasy Island rerun might distract her, but the tropical sun and bikini-clad tourists were making her feel even worse. The remote control lay on the rug near her feet, where it had fallen off the armrest. For the past twenty minutes, she’d been trying to reach it with her toes, managing only to further its migration across the room.

She closed her eyes again. Her heart was beating more quickly than usual, actually stinging the sunburn on her neck. She tried to distract herself by thinking of a time when she could still move. In an earlier life, when her skin was cool and touchable, she used to sit at the foot of the couch, shirt pulled up to her neck, while her mother wrote delicious things on her back. First the touch of her fingernail, gentle as an ant, then the mysterious back-sized line that formed into a letter, fading like a secret as soon as it appeared. They did this for a whole summer when Lyle was small. It was better than talking, because her mom said things she never would have spoken out loud: not just I LOVE YOU, but MY BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER IS FIVE and LOVELIEST GIRL IN THE GALAXY LIVES HERE. It was as if her mind was talking and not her mouth. But Lyle’s favorite sentences were the ones she lost track of or couldn’t follow, the words turning strange and doodly and complex, containing her whole mother inside of them. When the sentences ended — a gentle poke for a period, as though her mom were pressing a doorbell — Lyle could never be sure they’d happened at all.

Beyond the velvety lilt of Mr. Roarke, Lyle heard the back door open, a tumble of boys entering the kitchen. Their voices rang with good health. Mr. Leonard made some fainthearted attempts at a bark before the voices floated into the locality of Lyle’s head.

“Jesus. What happened to you?”

She opened her eyes. Dustin, munching on an apple, was standing there with Mark Biesterman and Brent Tarwater. They looked impossibly vertical.

“Please leave me alone,” Lyle whispered.

“UV exposure,” Biesty said. “Leading cause of skin cancer.”

“You shouldn’t keep this on the floor,” Tarwater said, picking up the remote and placing it conscientiously on top of the TV set. “Someone might break it.”

“Wow, you really are bad off,” Dustin said, squatting next to Lyle. His eyes widened in pity or alarm, she couldn’t tell. “Your face is all, like, swollen. Haven’t you heard of sunscreen?”

“Will you please please all just fuck off and leave me alone?”

“What’s with you lately?” Dustin turned to go. “Some guy called earlier. I came in to tell you, but I guess you don’t care. Victor or something.”

He signaled to Biesty and Tarwater, who flicked off the TV on his way out. The screen fizzed in the silence. Alone again, Lyle outlined the steps of her mission. Operation Roomward Advance ment. If she made it to her room, she could call Hector and ask his forgiveness. She would explain the situation — basically, that Shannon had brainwashed her, that she hadn’t recognized him at first and then was too humiliated by Shannon’s behavior to say hello — and he would understand and continue to love her from the underness of his heart.