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Shannon looked at Bethany with compassion. Lyle had not understood how plain her best friend was—the peculiarity of her face, with its long chin and faint nests of fuzz under her ears—until she'd seen her beside Shannon. “Doesn't he like sports?”

“Actually,” Bethany said, “he's
very
athletic.”

“He does look a bit like a jockey,” Shannon said. She put her bottle of Miller Genuine Draft down on the mantel, where it promptly tipped over. “Fuck me! Shit! Pardon my French.”

Bethany smirked and whispered something to Gérard. Lyle was beginning to regret the whole evening. She'd invited Bethany because she hadn't wanted to show up alone, but now she saw that this was clearly a mistake. Bethany did not understand her persistent friendship with Shannon. Lyle had tried to explain it, but the truth is she did not understand it herself. It had something to do with Shannon's beauty. Not just the long, flattering, irresistible shadow it cast, but the loneliness hidden inside it like a pearl.

Bethany and Gérard began to speak French, as if to exclude her and Shannon from the conversation. Gérard said, “Pardon my English,” and they both laughed. He did look a bit like a jockey, with his large ears and Gaulishly tight pants. Lyle might have felt guilty thinking this if Bethany hadn't pretty much deserted her since he'd arrived, leaving her in the desert to rot.

“What do you think of that one?” Shannon said to Lyle, nodding at one of the Beer Pongers. He was wearing sunglasses on top of his cap. “He keeps looking at me.”

“I don't know,” Lyle said. “Kind of a douche bag.”

“I know,” she said enthusiastically.

“How many beers have you had?” Lyle asked.

Shannon shrugged. “Five or six.”

At the far end of the table, a bearded guy leaned backward to chug a beer, exposing a dark-haired sag of belly. He looked like one of those football players whose popularity hinged on their willingness to eat strange things. He slammed the empty cup down, his beard glistening with beer. “What about that one?” Shannon said. “With the beard?”

“Are you serious?”

“He's kind of cute, in a
Where the Wild Things Are
sort of way.”

Lyle did not know what to say. It heartened her somehow that Shannon could find him attractive.

“Just
joking,
” Shannon said, laughing. “Jesus. I'm not into crossbreeding.”

The guy with the sunglasses on his cap said something to Shannon, inviting her to play, and she moseyed over to join the table. No one invited Lyle. She was relieved and also offended. Failing to get Gérard's and Bethany's attention, she left the living room and went out the kitchen door to a courtyard surrounded by identical apartments, where a string of guests stood drinking around a dingy-looking pool. The pool was littered with cups and beer cans and an array of half-submerged garments, indistinguishable in its debris from the few high school parties she'd been to in ninth grade.

Lyle closed her eyes and let the breezy Pacific air remind her what it felt like to be cold. In less than an hour, she'd gone from being giddy with excitement to woozily depressed. A guy in a shirt that said
CANCúN PARTY PATROL
on it wobbled up to her and began telling her a racist joke featuring the Queen of England. Excusing herself, Lyle rounded the pool and ran into a handsomely disheveled boy sitting all alone by the deep end. Mark Biesterman. She hadn't recognized him in the dark. His professorial glasses were gone, and he'd grown his hair into a tangle of Byronesque curls. He was about to scootch his chair back to let Lyle by when he saw who she was, almost spilling his beer in surprise.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Discussing the British monarchy.”

He put his beer down on the deck, as if he'd been doing something wrong. He did not appear to be having much fun either. Overhead, a police helicopter roamed the starless smog, its spotlight twitching back and forth like an antenna.

“Is this what college parties are like?” she asked, sitting next to him.

“Not really,” Biesty said, relaxing. “Usually there are Jell-O shots and more people going
wooooh
!”

He took a sip of his beer and watched the pool, avoiding her
eyes. On the other side of the deck, a girl kicked her high heels into the shallow end, one at a time, like a stripper. A boy in a tank top began to yell at her, grabbing a net from the bushes to fish them out.

“How's Dustin doing?”

Lyle shrugged. “Do you want the honest answer?”

“I don't know.”

“He never leaves his room. The only people he'll talk to are Hector and John Wayne.”

“Who's Hector?” Biesty asked.

“His best friend.” She glanced at Biesty. “I mean, now that you're in college.”

He stared into his cup, as though something had caught his attention there. A bug paddling its last. “I tried taking him to a party, to hear my new band. He put on quite an act.”

“You should call him,” she said angrily.

“Didn't he want to come out tonight?”

“I don't know.”

“You didn't invite him?”

Lyle stared at the deck. It hadn't even occurred to her. “He wouldn't have come anyway,” she mumbled, tossing a bottle cap into the pool.

Biesty's face softened. He seemed sad and lonely and perhaps not as happy at UCLA as he'd led Dustin to believe. He put his beer down and it wobbled a bit before he could rescue it, his eyes catching for a moment on Lyle's leg. She realized for the first time that he was drunk.

“We used to make fun of you sometimes,” he said, “me and the band. When you weren't around. We called you the She-Yeti. And Dustin would always get mad at us and stick up for you. He said you were smarter than all of us combined.”

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.