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“Craniotomy.” She glanced at him for a second, as if he might challenge this. “Brain tumor.”

Warren felt a vague tug of hope. “My father had a brain tumor,” he said.

“Was it benign?”

“No. I don't think so. He died when I was seven.”

“Probably an astrocytoma,” Melody said. “Actually, there are no benign ones. They just call them that, to classify them, but they can still kill you.” She looked down at her necklace. “I just wear it to remind me, you know, where I've been.”

Warren peered at the shard of skull. There was an intimacy about it that seemed somehow comforting. Something about the way she was holding him, cradling his elbow and gripping his index finger like a baby, compounded this feeling.

“I lied,” he said. “This isn't my first day on the job.”

“I know,” Melody said.

“You do? Why were you critiquing my pitch?”

She shrugged. “You don't often get the opportunity,” she said thoughtfully. “Oh, great. Dad's up. I just heard his door.”

A man with bushy eyebrows entered the kitchen, wearing paja
mas and no teeth. You could see Melody's face in him like a dirty joke. She introduced Warren, explaining why he was there. The man's eyes took in the scene in front of him—Melody holding Warren's arm over his head, the first aid kit open on the table—before moving to Warren's shirt, which was covered extravagantly in blood.

“Make sure you get the free spatula,” he said before leaving the kitchen.

“I wish all my customers were like that,” Warren said.

“He'll buy anything,” Melody said, “so long as he gets something free.”

Warren laughed. The noise—his own laughter—sounded foreign to him. “Has it stopped bleeding?” he said, looking at his finger. His whole arm was asleep.

“Oh yeah. A while ago.” She blushed. “Not sure why I'm holding it.”

Lyle was bored bored bored bored bored bored bored. She tried to imagine that the boredom itself might be interesting, or even have some sort of artistic significance, but after taking eleven photos of her big toe exhibiting a range of human feelings—sleepy, awestruck, etc.—she decided that being bored out of her mind was not leading to greatness. It was leading to mental dysfunction. Whoever said that only boring people get bored should be whacked on the head with a bat. Obviously, the person had never lived on an abandoned block in the middle of the desert, a place so hot and miserable the mailman flipped them off every afternoon and the nearest library was thirty miles away, stocked with the complete works of Robert Ludlum but not a single immortal novel by George Eliot or Charles Dickens.

The thought of the library in Palos Verdes, with its luscious rows of books, made her head swim. The coolness between the stacks. The smell of perfume and beanbag chairs and hot Xeroxed paper. She missed the place like a lover. She could be there right now, reading to her heart's content, if her dad hadn't lost all their money and condemned them to a living death.

She glanced at the copy of
Ulysses
sitting on her bedside table. A glass of water was perched on top of it, staining the cover. The book had been there for two weeks, gathering rings inside rings, like a mass of dividing eggs. Lyle felt she'd better read it, especially if she was going to go to Columbia next year—her dearest fantasy—but for whatever reason couldn't bring herself to crack the cover.

To keep herself from taking any more pictures of her feet, Lyle
rolled out of bed and got dressed for work at The Pumpkin Patch. She'd found the job in the paper two weeks ago. It was her father, in fact, who'd shown her the ad.
Servers needed: seeking naturally gifted team members who were “born to serve.”
Though she'd wondered who exactly was born to serve—oxen?—she'd been intrigued by the idea of using her natural gifts.
As it turned out, this meant unbuttoning her shirt to a nebulous point that maximized her tips but was not obscene enough to offend people. In the year since Dustin's accident, something had happened to Lyle's body. Or rather, something had happened to her
perception
of it, which amounted to the same thing. Mainly, she was no longer completely disgusted by it. She could look at herself in the mirror and not want to crawl under the bed. In fact, she'd begun to realize that she might actually attract a certain species of male: she'd heard boys use the term “stacked” before, whistling with a jokey sort of reverence, but was only beginning to realize she fell into this category.

Pow,
they said, cupping their hands in front of their chests, as though they were firing weapons.

Stripping out of her T-shirt, Lyle pulled a white oxford from the closet and buttoned it to the top of her bra, revealing a pale chink of cleavage. It was hard to imagine this had any power over men's hearts. Since Hector, she'd slept with several boys from school, mustacheless kids who'd asked her out to the movies during lunch or had caught up with her in the parking lot, staring at the ground in embarrassment—boring, fidgety, half-popular boys, the kind who listened to U2 with their eyes closed and wore concert T-shirts the day after they'd seen a show. They were in bad cover bands called The Rhythm Method or Möbius Striptease. She felt nothing for these boys but was too flattered to resist: the way they trembled before unbuttoning her shirt, their hands clumsy as a toddler's, made her feel like Shannon Jarrell.
Expensive
. Like that day at The Perfect Scoop, watching Hector suffer through his ice cream. Afterward, it was always the same: they'd climb off of her with a gentle push and she'd feel beyond miserable, not just cheap again but disgustingly buglike, paralyzed with shame, as if she couldn't bear to crawl out of the backseat or turn on the lights.

She'd confided this last April to Bethany, who'd suggested her sleeping around might have something to do with guilt. The worst part wasn't even that she'd said “sleeping around”; it was the rea
son she gave for Lyle's supposedly feeling guilty. After all, wasn't Lyle living there, in Bethany's house, while Dustin was stuck out in the desert? And—
Please don't take this the wrong way, I'm not saying you're a pervert or anything
—but didn't the three boys she'd slept with even look a little like her brother? Brown hair, and weren't they, like, musicians, too? It was so ridiculous Lyle had laughed in her face. She'd ended up insulting Bethany's boyfriend, calling him a scrawny little two-timer, even though he wrote her every week from France and was coming to visit later in the summer. She may even have said something about his teeth. The argument just about ruined their friendship, though in truth living together all spring had already pulled it to the snapping point.

Now, stranded out in the desert like her brother, Lyle stared at herself in the mirror until she couldn't bear to anymore and then wandered off to find Hector, who was visiting Dustin for the third time that week. She was bored enough to see what effect she might have. She didn't want to get back together with him—she had a hard time believing they'd ever dated—but she liked to tempt his unrequited love for her, drifting in and out of range like a song.

Lyle found him in the kitchen, stooped in front of the cabinet with a tube of something in his hand. At the sound of his name, Hector spun around quickly, the creepy rodent he went around with peeking out of the pocket of his T-shirt. Lyle found the animal profoundly unnerving—what a rat might look like in the afterlife. Neither Hector nor the creature so much as glanced at her breasts.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Putting on contact cement. The laminate's coming off.”

“It's been like that for months!”

Hector shrugged.

“We don't fix things around here,” Lyle explained. She pointed at the sink. “The sprayer's been busted since January.”

“I fixed it a while ago. Just needed a new nozzle head.”

He turned around again and began to fiddle with the tube, shaking it with one hand. Lyle stood there for a while longer, bending over conspicuously to pet Mr. Leonard, but Hector failed to appreciate her presence. Why the hell was her ex-boyfriend—who lived in Wilmington—doing handiwork on their house? There was something going on here that she didn't understand. Maybe the toxic fumes were making everyone insane.

She wondered, a bit morosely, if he was no longer in love with her.

Since it was Saturday, Lyle stopped by her mother's room to verify that she actually existed. Sure enough, she was kneeling on the lumpy futon she slept on, taking shirts from a laundry basket and sorting them into towers. A surprising number of the shirts were gray or black. Lyle didn't know why her parents had decided to sleep in different rooms but blamed it entirely on her mother. It was another example of her deranged behavior. Having a mother who chain-smoked was not at all as wonderful as Lyle had expected. She missed her old mother, the one who spoke Spanish and wore pink cardigans and didn't think she was too good for Lyle's dad.

Her mom looked up from the laundry she was folding and stared at Lyle's clothes, eyes resting on her unbuttoned shirt. Something old and lonely drifted into her face. Having your mother look at your tits was a bit like hearing your own voice on a tape recorder trying to sound sexy.

“What are you doing after work?” Lyle's mom said. “I thought we might drive into Lancaster and see a matinee.”

“Can't,” Lyle said, relieved not to have to lie. The idea of sitting in a dark movie theater with her mom, possibly enduring a sex scene, was more than she could handle. “I've got to go to the library and research volunteer opportunities.”

Her mother sighed. “Don't you think you've got enough going on at home?”

“What am I going to write my college essay about? A day in the life of a desert tortoise? Mrs. Silverberg says I need some more extracurricular interests, to distinguish me from the pack.” Mrs. Silverberg was her college adviser.

“Tortoises might be interesting, actually.”

“Right. Just what Columbia's looking for.”

Her mother stopped a shirt in midfold. It was uncanny: just say “Columbia” and she froze like a statue. “We still need to talk about this. I mean, have you even thought about how much a school like that costs?”

“Dad says I can get a scholarship. Or loans.”

“Loans! Your father isn't living in the real world, if you haven't noticed. He still thinks we'll be able to move back to Palos Verdes.” Lyle's mother frowned. Annoyingly, you couldn't dismiss
her opinion the way you used to be able to—not like when Lyle's dad made all the money and she was merely embarrassing. She folded the sleeves she was still holding, crossing them like a dead person's arms. “Anyway, didn't Mrs. Silverberg say something about Columbia being a long shot?”

“I signed up for an SAT course. It starts next week.”

“I suppose your dad will take out a loan for that as well?”

Lyle scowled. “I'm a professional waitress,” she said. “I paid for it myself.”

She undid another button of her shirt, belligerently, before backing out of the room. Her mother wanted her to rot out here forever. In fact, it was her mom's fault that Lyle had screwed up her SATs last spring. She'd insisted she come home for the weekend, for Jonas's birthday, meaning that Lyle had to get up at 5:00 a.m. and drive an hour and a half to get to the testing center in time. She'd spent the four hours in a daze, filling in bubbles randomly when she ran out of time.

Lyle peeked into Dustin's room, hoping to gripe about their mother, but he was watching
The Searchers
for the hundredth time. “That'll be the day,” he said to the TV. Lyle couldn't be sure he was reciting a line from the script and not having an actual conversation.

“Why's Hector repairing our kitchen?” she said, interrupting him.

“Beats me.”

“Don't you think it's weird he's over here all the time?”

Dustin looked at her for the first time, his droopy eye lingering on her shirt. She fumbled at the button she'd undone. “No weirder than your trying to seduce him all the time.”

“Jesus. I'm not trying to seduce him. Is that what he thinks?”

He shrugged and went back to his movie.

“Maybe he wishes,” Lyle said.

Dustin laughed. “He's been over you for months.”

This was so obviously true that Lyle looked down at her feet. “Anyway,” she said, “I'm just saying it's weird. He's always bringing you things.”

“Somebody needs to open my beers,” he said.

“You talk like he's your personal assistant.”

Dustin frowned, turning up the volume with his remote. “Can I go back to my movie? Or did you come in here for a reason?”

“Maybe I should just kill you and put you out of your misery,” she said.

It was too late to take back. Dustin's face turned into a hideous smirk. Lyle left the room and went to gather her things for work. She should have known better than to try to talk to him; all they ever did was argue. A year ago, if someone had told her that her handsome older brother would be injured beyond belief, that he'd need to be cared for like an invalid, it would have seemed like a fantasy: a chance to recover what they'd had as kids. She would never have imagined that she'd be applying to a college in New York, more desperate than ever to get away, or that Hector would be the one taking care of him.

Just picturing Dustin in his bed, so bitter and self-pitying and remote, made her want to shake him. It was infuriating. Still, she hadn't meant to say what she did.

Driving to work, Lyle tried not to let the monotonous brown vistas lull her into a coma. She distracted herself by touching the Columbia bumper sticker on the dashboard. She made an effort to touch it whenever she could, so that its Ivy League juju would enter her fingers and climb upward to her brain, transforming her into the perfect applicant. She liked to fantasize that she was the only one to get a sticker in the mail: so eager was Columbia to have her as a student, they'd slipped it into her application materials like Willy Wonka's golden ticket. Lyle had stuck it on the dashboard to remind herself—while she was driving through the barren, dream-sucking desert—that she wouldn't be living out here forever.