Eric Puchner - Model Home

Lyle felt sick. She slid her leg over, letting it rest against Biesty’s. She watched herself do this, mysteriously, as though in a dream. She was not the agent of her leg but a helpless onlooker. Biesty flinched away and sat up in his chair.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t know.” She felt like crying.

“Whoa. Perfect. Just what I need.” He threw his empty cup into the pool, where it floated toward a raft of other cups flotsamed in the corner. “Everything that seems cool and momentous when you’re a kid is a load of crap. You’ll understand when you get to college.”

“I’m not going to college,” she said quietly.

“What do you mean?”

“We can’t all, like, grow our hair out and go to frat parties.”

Biesty did not tell her what a noble sacrifice this was or that she was a wonderful sister for doing it. She got up without saying good-bye and went back inside the party, wading through a crowd of people dancing to “Takin’ Care of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. The puritanical work ethic espoused by the lyrics seemed deeply at odds with the dancers themselves, one of whom was wearing a box on his head that said NATURAL LIGHT. The words on the box struck Lyle as forlornly beautiful. When the singer of the song got to the part about “working overtime,” the crowd erupted in cheers.

Lyle went down the hallway in search of a bathroom, stepping over a guy in madras shorts passed out on the floor. He smelled unpleasant, and Lyle wondered if he’d shit his pants. She tried a door that turned out to be a garage before finding one off the living room that looked promising. She knocked loudly. When no one answered, she cracked the door and was astonished to see Shannon Jarrell praying on the floor, kneeling by a sink with her head bowed. Her face was hidden behind a curtain of hair. Lyle felt a queer zag of joy. Quietly, she opened the door farther and saw a boy standing in front of Shannon with his arms akimbo, head tossed back as if he were admiring a cathedral. His jeans were at his ankles, exposing his hairy ass to the mirror. The burly guy with the beard.

Lyle closed the door and went back down the hall and left the party, squatting in the bushes behind the parking lot before climbing into the Renault. She felt dizzy. She forgot to switch on her headlights in the unfamiliar glow of streetlamps until someone honked at her from the other lane. It wasn’t until she’d turned off the freeway and seen the lone light of her house in the distance that she remembered Bethany and Gérard, that she’d stranded them at the party. Somehow she did not regret this.

She might have run over Jonas in the garage if he hadn’t stood up at the last minute. An acoustic guitar lay on some newspapers at his feet. She left the Renault in the driveway and got out.

“The coyotes have gone crazy,” he said. “They’re killing their own young.”

“I don’t want to hear about it,” Lyle said.

“I found the remains of one out by the dump today, torn to shreds.”

“What’s wrong with you? Are you deaf?” She looked at the can of spray paint in Jonas’s hand, wondering if he’d turned into some kind of aerosol huffer. Given how little she knew of his life, it wouldn’t have shocked her. “What on earth are you doing?”

“Repairing this guitar. For Dustin.”

“At twelve-thirty in the morning?”

“It’s a surprise,” he said. “I don’t want him to find out.” He jiggled the spray can. “I’m stenciling the name of his band on it. Toxic Shock Syndrome. Do you think he’ll like it?”

“You’re ruining Dad’s scissors,” Lyle mumbled, bending down to pick up the BladeCo scissors, freckled with orange paint, that were sitting on the floor. She walked inside and wandered down the hall toward the kitchen, pausing at Dustin’s door. The TV murmured from inside; he often fell asleep with it on. She turned the knob gently and stepped into the room. Dustin was sitting up with a beer in his hand, the murky light of the TV flickering over his face. In the corner of the room, surrounding the wastebasket, lay a solar system of empty cans.

“Have you come to kill me?” he asked, eyeing the scissors in her hands.

“No.”

“Damn.”

Lyle put the scissors on the bedside table and got into bed and lay down beside him. He didn’t object. She pulled an empty beer can from under her back and tossed it at the wastebasket, where it joined the other cans.

“I went to a party,” she said.

He frowned. “Did you party till you dropped?”

“No. I left early. It was beyond depressing.”

Dustin looked at her. His breath smelled like beer, warm and bean-sprouty. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. They were playing Beer Pong. And I saw this drunk girl giving some football player a blowjob.”

“Party head.”

“What?”

“That’s what you call those chicks. If you play Beer Pong. Party head.”

Lyle stared at the ceiling. She could feel his misery coming off him like a vapor. It fogged up the room and made it hard to think.

“Biesty was there, too,” she said.

“Goody gumdrops.”

“He misses you a lot. He told me he’d written you some letters, but was too embarrassed to send them.”

Dustin’s face brightened for a second, despite himself. It was worth the lie. On TV, Leonard Nimoy was pondering the existence of Bigfoot, analyzing the blurry footage of a man in a gorilla suit. The gravity of his voice was so at odds with the subject matter that it made Lyle angry: somehow, it summed up everything that was wrong with the world, its continual misadvertisement.

“I want life to be as interesting as it is in books,” Lyle said. “That’s my problem.”

“Everyone’s got some problem like that. A glitch. Something they can’t fix.” Dustin put his hand on her head, as if to suck out the problem. He was drunk.

“I thought you didn’t like me anymore,” Lyle said.

“I don’t.” He rolled over, facing the wall. “That’s my glitch. I don’t like… anyone.”

“What about Taz?”

“I used to,” he said. “Now I just want her to go away.”

Lyle didn’t move. It had never occurred to her that he wanted to like people but couldn’t. Those lists she’d kept of people she hated: it made her ashamed now, all that righteous, delectable loathing.

“Can I sleep in here tonight?”

He didn’t say no. The TV went newsy with voices and Dustin sat up to turn it off, the room going dark as a closet. Lyle kicked off her shoes. Some coyotes were howling in the distance. They sounded as if they were not only killing their young for the fun of it but frolicking in their blood.

“I’m not going to college next year,” she said. “I’m going to stay here.”

“Why?”

“To be around. Help out.”

Dustin didn’t respond. What she’d meant to say was: Ask me to stay. Her brother’s breathing thickened in the dark, steady as a pulse. Lyle wondered if he’d fallen asleep. As a kid, he’d kick her by accident sometimes as he was drifting off, jerking for no reason, sometimes two or three times in a row. She lay there with her eyes open, waiting to feel his helpless blows.

“Don’t be a moron,” he said.

“Did you know that Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time?”

“Where do you get this stuff?”

Melody shrugged. “It’s important to exercise your brain.”

They were lying in Melody’s room, the blinds parted just enough that Warren could see the small, penned-in yard of the trailer next door, her neighbor’s pet pig lolling in the dirt. Warren had taken an irrational dislike to the pig, whose name was Twinkle. It was always lying around in the middle of the day and reminding him of himself. Like himself, too, it was unemployed and relied on the charity of others. It wasn’t even a real pig but a miniature one, roughly the size of a rottweiler. For a week or so, Warren had been watching to see if it ever raised its head; Melody had told him that it was physically impossible for pigs to look at the sky.