Model Home by Eric Puchner Page A

mirror. Miraculously, she looked the same as always: red hair, Vampira skin, arms a warp-speed blur of freckles. The word she thought of was “plain.” Not ugly or hideous. Plain. When she was younger,fourteen, she used to pray to God to get rid of her freckles. She’d made outlandish promises: I’ll chop off one of my toes or I’ll dress like my mother for a year. But the freckles were still there, and now someone wanted to count them like stars.
    She was suffering physically. She wanted to touch herself. She wanted to lie on top of her stuffed giraffe, Giggles, like she used to do when she was four.
    Lyle closed her eyes and pictured herself as an X-ray, a blue window of bones. Once, at The Perfect Scoop, she’d overheard a boy with bad acne bragging to some of his friends: I was eating her out and she went, like, totally haywire. Such a dutiful way of putting it. Eating her out.There were other expressions: “munching carpet,” “dining at the Y,” “yodeling in the valley.”Inventive, maybe, but not very illuminating. They were about the yodeler and not the yodel. They did nothing to unravel the mystery—the exquisite torture—of what it would actually feel like.
    By the time Hector called, after his shift, Lyle had convinced herself that he was going to back out of their plans to get lunch. She’d spent the morning imagining him in the tiny guardhouse, alone with his thoughts, the truth of her ugliness flowering in his mind. “Your parents need to put my name on the visitor list,” he said on the phone. “I can’t get through the gate.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œBud’s right here. In the guardhouse.”
    Lyle laughed. “But you work there!”
    â€œIt’s the rule.”
    â€œI’ll walk up and meet you.”
    She was secretly relieved. Her parents were at work, but she hadn’t figured out how to explain Hector to Dustin should he emerge from the garage unbidden. Hector met her by his truck, a little pickup that shone like a limousine. He was still dressed in his guard uniform: pinned to his breast, like a toddler’s toy, was a sheriff’s badge that said CARTER SECURITY. Lyle looked away, embarrassed. She was dismayed to see that his license plate said KAMELION . Perhaps it wasn’t his car—he was borrowing it from a sorority girl.
    She climbed into the truck, which smelled like the inside of a sandwich. Hector pushed a tape into the stereo: a mad crunch of guitars, slow and furious. They drove for a while without talking.
    â€œWhy does your license plate say ‘KAMELION’?” Lyle asked finally. She had to shout over the music.
    â€œThey’re my favorite animal.”
    He seemed serious. She retied one of her Doc Martens. “Where are we having lunch?”
    â€œI’d like to change, do you mind? I forgot to bring my street clothes.” He eyed her sleepily, though not so sleepily that the carnivorous look had gone from his eyes. She felt like a pork chop: Bugs Bunny, stranded on an island and changing into the fulfillment of Elmer Fudd’s fantasy. “I was thinking maybe I’d fix something at my place.”
    â€œCook at your place?”
    â€œIf that’s, um, cool with you.”
    He frowned, chewing one end of his mustache. It had never occurred to her that he lived somewhere. They took PV Drive North toward the freeway, coasting down the great green hill of Palos Verdes until they reached the mini-malls and gas stations along Anaheim Street, descending into a smoggy world of derricks and smokestacks and oil flares flickering like candles. Glowing through the grayness was a tremendous orange tank painted like a jack-o’-lantern. A painter was hanging from a rope, whiting out a giant pyramidal eye. Lyle had driven this way many times, to get to the freeway, but soon they passed the on-ramp and entered an area she’d never been, a neighborhood of