Eric Puchner - Model Home

First, though, she had to move. She had to decamp from the chaise and make her way through the kitchen, risking the perilously feeble attacks of Mr. Leonard. She gritted her teeth and tried to sit up in the chaise, arms stinging with pain. She did this twice before chickening out. Even though it wasn’t His specialty, she prayed to God for a random act of kindness and tried a third time and managed to work herself into an upright position, shivering with pain, feeling as though an enormous Band-Aid had been ripped from her body. Her teeth were chattering. She waited to catch her breath. Haltingly, she shimmied on her ass to the edge of the chaise, feeling a vague sense of triumph. The feeling grew as she stood up and began to walk. The meagerest steps seemed like a victory. Maybe she wasn’t an atheist after all. She minced her way to the kitchen, an excruciating voyage, shorts scraping like sandpaper against her thighs.

Luckily, Mr. Leonard was fast asleep in the sunlight from the window, twitching his ears and whimpering into the pillow of his doggy bed. Lyle crept past him and tiptoed across the deliciously cool tiles until she reached the safety of her room, closing the door behind her. Panting, she sat on the bed and looked out the window. A peacock was roaming the backyard, hobbled by feathers, dragging its glamorous carpet of eyes through the grass. She listened to its demented meows, feeling an affinity for its plight.

Before she lost the nerve, she picked up the phone and called Hector’s house. It took her a long time to punch in the number. It rang five times, an eternity. She was about to hang up when Hector answered the phone, breathless as usual. For a second, she imagined he’d already forgiven her.

Lyle tried to explain everything — the beach, Shannon, how miserable she felt — but it just came out in a jumble of words. Hector’s breathing had stopped. Static on the line, a distant mouse patter of voices.

“Hector? I don’t know what I’m doing. What I’m trying to say.” Her plan for blaming Shannon had deserted her, vanished as soon as she’d heard his voice. She had to keep herself from crying. “I guess I wouldn’t blame you. If you hated me.”

His grandmother yelled in the background, ranting at the TV. Something about the police and their ugly sunglasses. He’d be eating dinner right now, getting ready to go to work.

“I’m scared. I’m so sunburned I can’t move.” Hector’s breathing returned, faint as a whisper. “My arms are swelling. They’re going to blister, I think. I think maybe I need to go to the hospital.”

“It hurts?” he said finally, in a tender voice.

“Yes.”

“Your whole body?”

She felt a voluptuous relief. “Everywhere. I’m like a beet.”

“Good,” he said. “I hope you die of sunstroke.”

He hung up. She put the phone on its cradle, thinking he might call back. Anything was possible. She was shivering, nauseated, unfathomably thirsty. She needed to take a bath, a cold one, but how could she possibly wiggle out of her clothes? Lyle opened the drawer of her bedside table, pulling out the pair of scissors she used to make decals for her T-shirts. Gingerly, she began to cut off her shorts, starting at the waist and snipping down each leg like a paramedic. They were her favorite shorts, but she didn’t care. She did the same to her T-shirt and bikini bottoms, leaving them in a Lyleless puddle on the bed.

Naked, she walked to the bathroom. She still had the scissors in her hand. She had them, strangely enough, when she stepped shivering into the cold water of the bath. The water soothed her skin at first, cooling it for a minute or two before the burning came back again, patient as a shark. She opened the scissors and touched one of the blades against her thigh. She wished her mother would come home. She was always at work, making those ridiculous videos. Lyle remembered the scene in Depression Hits Home when Jill, the troubled teen who “just wants to disappear,” pours the bottle of pills plaintively into her hand. It was one of Lyle’s and Dustin’s favorites: they still watched it sometimes when her mom wasn’t around, shouting, “Do it! Do it!” at the TV.

But Lyle did not want to disappear. If this were Fantasy Island, she would tell Mr. Roarke what she wanted: to be around afterward. To watch her family pull her out of the blood-marbled water, sobbing like children. Understanding, for the first time, what they’d lost. Wasn’t it everyone’s fantasy? She imagined the grief, ugly and delectable, of her mother’s face. And Hector. Hector would never recover. I hope you die, he’d said. He would love her forever, crippled with remorse.

But this wasn’t Fantasy Island . No supernatural hoteliers would bring her back to life so she could savor her revenge.

She put the scissors on the rim of the sink, where she wouldn’t step on them.

On the shelf over the toilet, still plugged in from yesterday, was the radio Hector had given her. She’d forgotten to turn it on. Lyle slid diagonally in the tub, groped one foot up the wall, and then pushed the power button with her toe. The music blared on, startling her. “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya.” She’d considered it to be a new low in the Culture Club oeuvre, but listening to the lyrics for the first time— Downtown we’ll drown, we’re in our never splendor— the song seemed intriguingly apocalyptic. Experimentally, she slid down to her chin in the water and walked her other foot up the wall as well, seeing if she could grip the radio between her feet. It was a game called Pinch the Radio. Object: to pinch the radio with her feet. By sinking to her earlobes, Lyle managed to grip the radio on either side with her toes, raising Boy George’s voice an inch or two off the shelf.

Then she began to nudge it. It was an extension of the game, to see how easy it would be. Just for kicks. She wasn’t serious or anything. She just wanted to get a taste, like the tiny spoonfuls they gave out at The Perfect Scoop. She nudged the radio until it peeked over the side of the shelf. This didn’t seem to do much — no bells or alarms — so she nudged it again. Cyndi Lauper was conjugating the verb “bop.” Lyle nudged the radio farther and farther, an inch at a time, until it was nearly halfway off the shelf, perched thrillingly over the tub.

It started to tip. In the tub’s direction.

Lyle straightened her legs, pinning the radio to the wall. She’d managed to trap it with her feet. It hung there perilously, tilted like a seesaw. Lyle’s heart was racing. She tried to think calmly. She considered maneuvering the radio somehow to her hands, but she was so deep in the tub that she couldn’t reach up without bending her knees. Too risky. The other solution was to push it, ever so gently, back on the shelf. She tried to tilt the radio upright with her feet, flexing her knees the tiniest bit, but the radio began to slip even farther and she pinned it to the wall again, legs quivering with fear.

She was trapped. Like the radio. In the Hollywood showdown of life, they were taking each other with them. A briny bead of sweat trickled into her eye. Cyndi Lauper’s chipper voice faded into the sultry thwunk of “99 Luftballons.” Lyle wasn’t sure what “luftballons” were exactly, but somehow they seemed like the solution to her escape.

She yelled for help. Screamed and screamed. Dustin was probably in the garage, practicing his ear-melting songs.

Her legs began to throb in a way unconnected to her sunburn. A trembly sort of muscle ache. Water dripped from her calves into the tub, plink ing ominously. She wondered how long she could remain like this. Ten minutes? Fifteen? Her feet were falling asleep: if they went completely numb, as they seemed to be intending, she didn’t know whether she could keep her grip.