Eric Puchner - Model Home

“Mr. Leonard’s going to be all right,” he said softly, as if to console her.

Lyle surveyed the room of drunk-looking UCLA students. A college party, her first. She’d been anticipating it all week — so bored out in the desert she thought her brain would die, would actually drain out of her ear like sap — and now she was here. At an apartment in Culver City. With actual undergrads. In her tedium-fueled fantasies, she’d imagined skinny men in vintage shirts, their legs crossed at the knees, listening to squawky jazz and firing off bon mots. She had not imagined a group of overgrown boys throwing a Ping-Pong ball into one another’s beer. But this was what was happening in the living room, to the strains of “Addicted to Love.” The boys stood at opposite ends of a table, adorned in baseball caps, kissing a plastic ball with their eyes closed before lobbing it at a triangle of cups. As she watched the triumphant stupidity of their faces, any second thoughts she’d had about dropping her SAT class were gratifyingly squashed.

“Beer Pong,” Shannon Jarrell explained. She’d been here for a while and was already drunk, a beige barrette snagged in her hair like a moth. It was Shannon who’d told Lyle about the party, claiming it would make high school ones look like Romper Room. Lyle had promised to meet her here. She’d convinced Bethany and her French boyfriend, Gérard, to come along as well. He was visiting for a month, starved no doubt for a bit of culture. Shannon turned to him helpfully. “If it lands in one of the cups, you have to chugalug.”

“Chugalug?” Gérard asked.

“Drink. Slam. Down the snatch.”

“You mean ‘hatch,’” Lyle said.

“Right,” she said. She turned to Gérard. “‘Snatch’ means vagina.”

Gérard nodded thoughtfully. This was his first time in America. “If they are so wanting to drink, why they don’t just chugalug the beer instead?”

Shannon looked at Bethany with compassion. Lyle had not understood how plain her best friend was — the peculiarity of her face, with its long chin and faint nests of fuzz under her ears — until she’d seen her beside Shannon. “Doesn’t he like sports?”

“Actually,” Bethany said, “he’s very athletic.”

“He does look a bit like a jockey,” Shannon said. She put her bottle of Miller Genuine Draft down on the mantel, where it promptly tipped over. “Fuck me! Shit! Pardon my French.”

Bethany smirked and whispered something to Gérard. Lyle was beginning to regret the whole evening. She’d invited Bethany because she hadn’t wanted to show up alone, but now she saw that this was clearly a mistake. Bethany did not understand her persistent friendship with Shannon. Lyle had tried to explain it, but the truth is she did not understand it herself. It had something to do with Shannon’s beauty. Not just the long, flattering, irresistible shadow it cast, but the loneliness hidden inside it like a pearl.

Bethany and Gérard began to speak French, as if to exclude her and Shannon from the conversation. Gérard said, “Pardon my English,” and they both laughed. He did look a bit like a jockey, with his large ears and Gaulishly tight pants. Lyle might have felt guilty thinking this if Bethany hadn’t pretty much deserted her since he’d arrived, leaving her in the desert to rot.

“What do you think of that one?” Shannon said to Lyle, nodding at one of the Beer Pongers. He was wearing sunglasses on top of his cap. “He keeps looking at me.”

“I don’t know,” Lyle said. “Kind of a douche bag.”

“I know,” she said enthusiastically.

“How many beers have you had?” Lyle asked.

Shannon shrugged. “Five or six.”

At the far end of the table, a bearded guy leaned backward to chug a beer, exposing a dark-haired sag of belly. He looked like one of those football players whose popularity hinged on their willingness to eat strange things. He slammed the empty cup down, his beard glistening with beer. “What about that one?” Shannon said. “With the beard?”

“Are you serious?”

“He’s kind of cute, in a Where the Wild Things Are sort of way.”

Lyle did not know what to say. It heartened her somehow that Shannon could find him attractive.

“Just joking, ” Shannon said, laughing. “Jesus. I’m not into crossbreeding.”

The guy with the sunglasses on his cap said something to Shannon, inviting her to play, and she moseyed over to join the table. No one invited Lyle. She was relieved and also offended. Failing to get Gérard’s and Bethany’s attention, she left the living room and went out the kitchen door to a courtyard surrounded by identical apartments, where a string of guests stood drinking around a dingy-looking pool. The pool was littered with cups and beer cans and an array of half-submerged garments, indistinguishable in its debris from the few high school parties she’d been to in ninth grade.

Lyle closed her eyes and let the breezy Pacific air remind her what it felt like to be cold. In less than an hour, she’d gone from being giddy with excitement to woozily depressed. A guy in a shirt that said CANCúN PARTY PATROL on it wobbled up to her and began telling her a racist joke featuring the Queen of England. Excusing herself, Lyle rounded the pool and ran into a handsomely disheveled boy sitting all alone by the deep end. Mark Biesterman. She hadn’t recognized him in the dark. His professorial glasses were gone, and he’d grown his hair into a tangle of Byronesque curls. He was about to scootch his chair back to let Lyle by when he saw who she was, almost spilling his beer in surprise.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Discussing the British monarchy.”

He put his beer down on the deck, as if he’d been doing something wrong. He did not appear to be having much fun either. Overhead, a police helicopter roamed the starless smog, its spotlight twitching back and forth like an antenna.

“Is this what college parties are like?” she asked, sitting next to him.

“Not really,” Biesty said, relaxing. “Usually there are Jell-O shots and more people going wooooh !”

He took a sip of his beer and watched the pool, avoiding her eyes. On the other side of the deck, a girl kicked her high heels into the shallow end, one at a time, like a stripper. A boy in a tank top began to yell at her, grabbing a net from the bushes to fish them out.

“How’s Dustin doing?”

Lyle shrugged. “Do you want the honest answer?”

“I don’t know.”

“He never leaves his room. The only people he’ll talk to are Hector and John Wayne.”

“Who’s Hector?” Biesty asked.

“His best friend.” She glanced at Biesty. “I mean, now that you’re in college.”

He stared into his cup, as though something had caught his attention there. A bug paddling its last. “I tried taking him to a party, to hear my new band. He put on quite an act.”

“You should call him,” she said angrily.

“Didn’t he want to come out tonight?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t invite him?”

Lyle stared at the deck. It hadn’t even occurred to her. “He wouldn’t have come anyway,” she mumbled, tossing a bottle cap into the pool.

Biesty’s face softened. He seemed sad and lonely and perhaps not as happy at UCLA as he’d led Dustin to believe. He put his beer down and it wobbled a bit before he could rescue it, his eyes catching for a moment on Lyle’s leg. She realized for the first time that he was drunk.

“We used to make fun of you sometimes,” he said, “me and the band. When you weren’t around. We called you the She-Yeti. And Dustin would always get mad at us and stick up for you. He said you were smarter than all of us combined.”