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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 her
classmates 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 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.”

“What?”

“Bud's right here. In the guardhouse.”

Lyle laughed. “But you work there!”

“It's the rule.”

“I'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.

“Why does your license plate say ‘KAMELION'?” Lyle asked finally. She had to shout over the music.

“They're my favorite animal.”

He seemed serious. She retied one of her Doc Martens. “Where are we having lunch?”

“I'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.”

“Cook at your place?”

“If 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 Spanish billboards and Mexican taquerias and stores called Pepe's Pants and Car Aroma Supply and Food 4 Less Carniceria. There was some graffiti on the side of a Laundromat that said
CHRIST JESUS IS YOUR ONLY HOPE.
Lyle wondered if it was a mistake but was too embarrassed to ask Hector.

Eventually they turned onto a smaller street lined with stucco houses, nestled behind fences and painted bright as Easter eggs. Even though it was the middle of summer, Christmas lights hung in squiggly vines from many of the houses. There were wet clothes draped over the fences and dogs sleeping on the sidewalk and signs on the telephone poles that said
CASH FOR YOUR HOUSE
or
SUPER BAILAZO.
Hector kept his eyes glued to the street, driving on the wrong side because everyone's trash cans were pulled mysteriously into the road. As they turned north, he pointed at the nearby hill with its Mediterranean haze of red-tiled roofs.

“We're neighbors, basically. You can almost see your house from here.”

“Really?”

“If it wasn't for the smog.” He turned down the music. “Did you know Wilmington was this close?”

“No.”

Actually, she hadn't even known it existed. At Hector's house, they pulled into the driveway and parked next to a weight bench covered in clear plastic and surrounded by neatly stacked disks. The blinds were drawn in all the windows, like a serial killer's. Lyle's palms were sweating. For the first time, she wondered if his poem wasn't intended as metaphor: perhaps he really wanted to eat her. He'd kill her first, then dine on her flesh. She thought of Mandy Rogers, her oblivious gnomish grin. Lyle's throat felt dry. She glanced behind her at a trash-strewn alley, wondering if she could make a dash for it in her Doc Martens.

Hector cut the engine, which guttered to a stop. Surprising herself, Lyle grabbed his uniform and pulled his thistley mustache toward her mouth. They kissed like blind people, knocking teeth. He pulled back, glancing at the house.

“My mother's here,” he said apologetically. He blushed. “I'm going to get my own apartment. Soon as she sells the house.”

Hector's mother met them at the door, impossibly old, brown scalp visible through a scorch of hair. She was holding a bouquet of wilted sunflowers. She grinned rapturously and yelled something in Spanish:
“Estoy casi muerta!”
I'm almost dead. Lyle stepped backward.

“Hola, Abuela,”
Hector said calmly. He turned to Lyle, tapping his head. “She's not totally in charge.”

The old woman handed Lyle the flowers and ducked into the kitchen, where she began pulling things out of the refrigerator and sniffing them theatrically. Hector ushered Lyle inside and then went to answer the phone. The living room was small and dark. Hanging on the walls, like an exhibit, were pieces of religious memorabilia: a sculpture of the pietà, a naked saint calling for help from a sea of fire, a framed picture of John Paul II waving Miss America–style from the Popemobile. A man's photo stood on the fireplace behind a wall of prayer candles, their glass containers Brailled with wax. The place gave Lyle a sludgy, unreal feeling, as though she were watching soap operas on a beautiful day.

Another woman appeared—Hector's mother, she realized
with relief—and Lyle introduced herself. The woman was much stouter than Hector and surprisingly beautiful, her arms clinking with bracelets. She had Hector's same dainty-looking hands. She squinted suspiciously at the sunflowers in Lyle's fist, which were gray and droopy, their petals crinkled into little flames.

“Thank you. You don't need to bring flowers.”

“These aren't . . . I didn't buy them,” Lyle said.

“We have some just like.”

Hector's mom took the dead flowers and stuck them in a glass of water on the kitchen table, arranging them as best she could. She ignored the old woman, who was unwrapping a stick of butter like a candy bar. Lyle wondered if she'd be forced to watch her eat it. At the last minute, Hector's mom snatched the butter from the old woman's hands and put it back in the fridge.

“She eats them like Popsicle,” his mom explained, unembarrassed.

Hector returned and said something to his mother, a brisk stream of Spanish. They seemed to be arguing. Outside of her name, Lyle couldn't follow a word. Hector smiled awkwardly and then showed Lyle his room, a dark, cockpitty space at the back of the house. The walls were covered in posters, mostly of chameleons: satanic-looking lizards, perched on branches and eyeing Lyle like pinups. The colors made her eyes swim. Even the window had been postered over, a blood-red chameleon glowing translucently in the sun.

Hector sat on the bed next to a little cage made out of wire mesh in the corner. It was filled with leafy branches. She couldn't see anything inside, but then he pointed at a gaudy, tie-dyed creature basking under a lightbulb, its tail curled up like a rope of Play-Doh. Its eyes were looking in different directions. Lyle laughed out loud: it was preposterous, like something God had cooked up after a head injury.

“This is Raoul,” he said, as though introducing her to a buddy.

“Your chameleon's named Raoul?”

He shrugged. “He's a veiled chameleon. You can tell by the crest on his head.”

“How many kinds are there?”

“Over a hundred.” He checked the thermometer hanging in the cage. “I used to have a terrarium, a glass one, but it was driving him crazy. Kept attacking his reflection.”

“Really?”

“They can't stand looking at themselves.”

Lyle was liking the creature more and more. Hector reached into his bedside table and pulled out a little ziplock bag filled with suspicious white powder.

“Want some?” he asked.

Lyle's heart tripped in her chest. “Okay.”

“I was joking. It's vitamins for Raoul.”

Walking to his dresser, he opened a Tupperware container filled with crickets and then jiggled a few of them into the bag of powder. He shook the ziplocked bag in one hand. Then he dumped the powdered crickets, white as snowflakes, into a bowl at the bottom of Raoul's cage. The lizard clung to his branch without moving. Just when Lyle decided he was uninterested, perhaps even dead, his tongue swelled into a bubble and spat across the cage like a spurt of tobacco and flew back into his mouth, all before you could blink, the hind legs of a cricket squirming from his lips.

“He can snag a cricket from thirty centimeters away,” Hector said proudly.

“Wow.” Lyle felt a little queasy. “I thought he might, you know,
chameleon
himself. Camouflage.”

“They don't camouflage themselves,” Hector said. “That's a myth.”

“They don't change colors at all?”

“Only if they're angry or emotional. Or sick.”

Someone—his grandmother—yelled from the other room. If it was Hector's name, Lyle didn't recognize it. He got up finally and then returned a minute later, carrying a pair of sunglasses.

“Sorry. I've got to hide these or she'll stand there by the door like a movie star. I usually take her to the beach on Fridays. She likes to watch the seagulls.” He looked at Raoul, who was still gnawing on the cricket. “Maybe you could come with us sometime?”

“I hate the beach,” Lyle said. He seemed disappointed. “I'm not much for sunbathing.”

“Me neither. God. Mostly I just sit there and write poems.”

Hector reached under the bed and pulled out a stack of notebooks bound by a rubber band. There must have been four or five notebooks. Lyle wondered if he'd forgotten about lunch.