Model Home by Eric Puchner

around the deserted campus, wondering if anyone could see them.
    â€œThese committee people are very bourgeois,” Mikolaj said with disgust. His breath no longer smelled of mouthwash but of something stale and wonderful. Tobacco. Camille searched hisbody for evidence of a pack. “Don’t worry about these mentally retardeds and their jokes.”
    â€œCan you picture me doing something bad?” Camille asked him.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œSomething bad. Anything. Running off with somebody’s fiancé.”
    Mikolaj closed his eyes. “Yes, I picture. Very easy. We are all bad people. The dangerous is the leaders who tell us always they are good.” He opened his eyes, staring at her with a curious look. “I make you happy?”

CHAPTER 6
    Lyle couldn’t sleep. She was sick, crazy, a living girl wreck. She checked the clock radio by her bed: 5:02 a.m., the enormous numbers buzzing in her face. That was something to add to her hate list (clocks that buzzed), but she couldn’t muster much contempt because visions of Hector kept clogging up her thoughts. All night long she’d dreamed of him. There was Hector, kissing her with his sad-looking mustache. Or Hector again, playing a song on the piano—“Tiny Dancer”—while Lyle did a striptease onstage. Or Hector and her little brother, Jonas, hiding out in the woods and waiting for vodka-slamming Soviet mercenaries to attack them with rocket launchers.
    The Soviet mercenaries were from the movie they’d seen last night at the Courtyard Mall. Hector had met her there after work. (She’d insisted on seeing something with rocket launchers, because they’d be less likely to run into any of her classmates from PV High.) Hector had fidgeted throughout the movie, his girlish hands resting on his knees. During the sex scene, a brief glimmer of breasts, he’d yawned from nervousness. Lyle began to despise him. He wasn’t attracted to her; why had he asked her out? She wondered if he was gay. Earlier, on the phone, he’d told her he wrote poetry. Afterward, walking back to the parking lot, he’d grabbed her by the arm and kissed her ferociously on the lips, pinning her against the wall as though in a fever. His mustache felt large and petlike. When he stopped for a breath, Lyle had rushed to her car before anyone could see them together, telling him she had a ten o’clock curfew.
    She was ashamed at her shame. Why did she care what herclassmates thought? Justifying it now, she decided it was the kiss itself that had frightened her.
    Lyle opened her bedside table and took out the poem he’d given her before she ran off. It was still crinkled from his pocket. She’d already memorized it, but there was something about seeing the actual words on paper, the earthquakey wobble of Hector’s handwriting, that was like a drug.
    bones
    she is beautiful, when I see her in the light
    skin the color of clouds
    the color of my bones
    she hides inside her clothes
    she makes me laugh
    her body is serious: breasts hips freckles
    we are serious, laughing
    my favorite thing to be
    i want to take off her clothes and burn them in a fire
    i want to count her freckles like stars
    i want to eat her for dessert and then spit out the bones
    lick them clean
    It was a bad poem, but Lyle didn’t care. She read the last two lines again, an agreeable sort of fear kindling in her chest. It was exactly the way the boys looked at Shannon Jarrell, the ones who wandered into The Perfect Scoop—as though they could eat her for dinner. But would they spit out Shannon Jarrell’s bones and lick them clean? Lyle doubted it. That was another thing entirely. It wasn’t enough to devour her: Hector wanted to taste every morsel, like a dog.
    It was useless, trying to sleep. Lyle got up, bleary-eyed, and padded to the bathroom in her DEATH TO SANDWICHES T-shirt. She flipped on the light and squinted at herself in the