Model Home (20 page)

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.

She knew something, though. She wanted to live. She wanted to jump through a sprinkler. She wanted to try cocaine. She wanted to smell a towel fresh from the dryer, to rewind a cassette tape with her pinkie, to drop snow on unsuspecting skiiers from a chairlift. She wanted to read
Ulysses.
She wanted to rot her brain with Billboard hits. It didn't matter that the songs were terrible. She wanted to hear the next one, and the next, and the next.

Her mother came home during “Cruel Summer.” Lyle heard the lock turn in the back door, her legs limp and Jell-Oey. The radio had slid into a perpendicular axis to the tub. For a second, listening to Mr. Leonard scrabble to his feet, she was so relieved she almost dropped her legs by accident. She called her mother's name. After a long minute, Lyle's mom appeared in the doorway of the bathroom, wearing her absurd-looking poncho with little fringes on it.

Her eyes shifted from Lyle's naked body to the radio and then back again. In the first moments, before the gravity of the situation had presented itself, Lyle thought she saw an untamable
I told you so
cross her face.

“Could you get the radio, please? Before I die?”

Her mother snatched the radio from Lyle's feet, yanking the plug out along with it. Lyle's legs collapsed. She was really shivering, an all-out spasm. It was only now, saved from certain death, that she remembered her sunburn. Lyle hobbled from the tub, her
fingers white and croneish from the water. How could she describe her mother's face? It was alarmed and lonesome and wonderfully momlike. It wasn't until she saw the tenderness of this face—a face that would never wish her dead—that Lyle felt the tears on her cheeks. She stepped into the poncho, her mom's arms spread like wings. Tightly, Lyle's mother held her to her body, squeezing her without knowing—not even the slightest clue—how much pain she was in.

“I'm not really a witch,” Taz said.

“What are you?”

“Good question.”

They were sitting outside of the Sea View Condominiums, waiting to go into a party. The name of the place made Dustin laugh. Not only were they in Torrance and nowhere near the sea, the only view to be had was of a lopsided Dumpster overflowing with pizza boxes, a rusted bicycle frame chained to its foot. There was something depressing about it that made Dustin feel unwholesome. Actually, he felt wonderfully despicable. He'd just had sex with his girlfriend's sister, despicably, in the back of his car. He'd helped her sneak out of the house behind Kira's back, waiting down the block while Taz climbed out the window and then making a strategic getaway through the streets of Herradura Estates, Taz crouched in the front seat of the Dart like a convict. The whole plan had been his idea. He'd called the Shackneys' house while Kira was out shopping with her mom, hoping Taz would answer the phone. When she'd told him about the party being thrown by one of Breakfast's friends, he'd offered to give her a ride. Dustin didn't know where this ranked in the annals of bad behavior—he was too happy to quantify it—but it was certainly up there.

Now they were parked outside a condo, in a beautifully shabby part of L.A. Taz's eyeliner was smeared under one eye, like a bruise. They'd done it quickly, fumbling at each other's pants and then attacking each other so ferociously he almost forgot to get a Trojan out of the glove compartment, so intent was he on getting
rid of her smirk. But something had happened afterward. She had clung to him without letting go, so fiercely that it hurt, cinching her arms around him like a boa constrictor. He'd worried at first that she was trying to kill him. He'd done something wrong and she was trying to break his ribs. It was only when she stopped squeezing and let go of him, looking almost surprised to see him on top of her, that he realized she wasn't angry. Ten minutes later, his ribs were still sore to the touch. He had never felt anything like this from Kira, who hugged him as though he'd be around forever.

Dustin lit a cigarette and rolled down the window so he wouldn't stink up the Dart. There was an uneasiness in his chest, a thickening haze of guilt, but he was choosing to ignore it. “How did you get sent to boarding school?” he asked.

“You really want to know?”

“Yeah.”

Taz shrugged, blowing the white forelock away from her eyes. “I pulled my fingernails out.”

“What?”

“With pliers.” She shook a cigarette from Dustin's pack and then plucked the one from his mouth in order to light it. “They had to take me to the ER.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Kira doesn't even know that.”

The haze in Dustin's chest grew thicker. “You pulled out all ten of your nails?”

“Only my left hand. I'm not ambidextrous.” She laughed, as if it were all a big joke. “It took me a week—I didn't do it all at once.”

“Why the hell did you do it in the first place?”

She shrugged. “Fashion statement. Who the fuck knows.”

“You're bleeding right now.”

“What?”

“Your ear. Shit. I wish you wouldn't do that.”

Taz scowled, dabbing her ear with the collar of her shirt. “You sound like Kira. She's always on my fucking case about it.”

Dustin looked at the used condom, bloated and forlorn, on the metal floor by his feet. He couldn't imagine wanting to pull out his fingernails. It occurred to him that “wanting” was not an applicable verb. “It's our anniversary tomorrow,” he said, trying to change the subject.

“You and Kira?”

“A year.”

Taz looked at him, a flash of anger. “Do you want a fucking
present
?”

She got out of the car, tugging her shirt down before trekking off to the party. Dustin was amazed. He'd imagined she'd enjoy knowing how she was fucking up her sister's life. He finished his cigarette and then followed Taz into the party, which smelled like cookies. Taz, Suzie, and some other people were hanging around the living room, drinking Milwaukee's Best from cans. A girl about Taz's age sat in front of the couch, her face bent toward the floor as though in prayer. Behind her, a guy with tattooed arms was crouched over her neck with what looked like a pen attached to a melted toothbrush; a sewing needle poked out from the tip of the pen, which he kept dipping in a little saucer of ink. There was something—a little motor—taped to the other end.