Model Home Read Free Page B

drawer out to the register.
    â€œChrist. You didn’t sleep here.”
    Shannon smirked. “Me and Charlie.”
    â€œYour boyfriend?”
    Shannon nodded, pleased with herself.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œWe were playing Yahtzee.” She laughed. “What do you think? His parents are cool, but not that cool.”
    So that’s why she’d enticed Jared into giving her the key. Lyle started to refill the syrup dispensers, watching from the corner of her eye as Shannon unstacked the tables and dragged them to their places. How did she make screwing on the floor of an ice cream shop seem glamorous? If Lyle had done the same thing, it would have swept PV High that she was a miserable slut. It wasn’t fair or just or randomly kind. Lyle watched the boys who came in for ice cream, how their faces changed when they saw Shannon: a wide-eyed slackening, as though they’d been conked in the head. It made Lyle want to tip them over like a row of bikes.
    â€œYou should give Jared the keys back,” she said now, snipping open a bag of caramel topping.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œOtherwise we’ll have to start charging by the hour.”
    A flash of outrage crossed Shannon’s face before dissolving into a smile. As an object of male worship she could afford not to be angry, which drove Lyle crazy. Shannon picked the People off the windowsill and started to flip through it nonchalantly.
    â€œYou’re a virgin, aren’t you?”
    â€œNone of your business.”
    She narrowed her eyes, smiling. “You are, aren’t you? I knew it.”
    Lyle ignored her, carrying the pillow-sized bag of caramel back to the fridge. For the rest of the morning, she tended to customers while Shannon inspected her nails or browsed through magazines or whispered to friends on the phone as if she were selling nuclear secrets. ( I work with a virgin! Lyle imagined her saying.) Once two people came in at the same time and Shannon made no move to get off the phone, letting the second customer wait until Lyle was available. It was the sort of thing Lyle would have had fun complaining about to Bethany, her best friend, mocking Shannon’s urgent whispering. Besides herself, Bethany was the only Californian she knew who didn’t like the beach. It was Bethany’s idea to make T-shirts with fake slogans on them, thinking up the brilliantly inspired PLEASE BUY THIS SENTENCE . Now that she’d moved to France for eight months, because of her dad’s business, Lyle had no one to complain to but herself. She’d failed to anticipate the depth of her loneliness. Her old friends in Wisconsin had betrayed her after she left, falling in love with football players or pimple-faced tenth graders; they’d stopped writing very much, and then altogether. Now the same thing was happening with Bethany. Only a month and a half had passed, but already her letters had grown shorter: last week she’d sent a single paragraph and a picture of her “sort-of petit ami, ” a boy with large ears and Dickensian teeth.
    Eventually, when she’d exhausted all sources of leisure, Shannon went out to get something from her car. Lyle knew she’d be gone for thirty minutes but didn’t care. It was a relief. She sneaked into the back room and picked up where she’d left off in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. She felt a certain affinity for Tess. Actually, she couldn’t help being a little attracted to Alec D’Urberville’s “black mustache with curled points.” Just as Tess was baptizing her dying son by candlelight, the door chimed; Lyle slipped the book back in the drawer, pained that she was too embarrassed to read it in front of Shannon.
    It was the gatekeeper. Hector. He looked startling outside of his little guardhouse: a real person, rigid and wiry, his uniform ironed to a crisp. He looked like the inside of a closet. She smiled at him uncertainly, and he lifted his finger