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They chose a spot near the lifeguard tower. Shannon took off her baseball cap and actually shook out her hair, like someone in a beer commercial. Lyle sat down without taking off her towel.

“Aren't you going to lie out?”

“In a minute,” Lyle said. “I'm just resting.”

“Here,” Shannon said, handing her a bottle of sun stuff. Lyle took off her sunglasses. It was Hawaiian Tropic Dark Tanning Lotion, SPF 6.
For the Natural Tan of the Islands,
the label boasted. This seemed racist or overly egalitarian, Lyle wasn't sure which. She handed the bottle back.

“I can't wear that. I'll fry to a crisp.”

Shannon frowned. “No, you won't. I use it every day.”

“I've got my own,” Lyle said.

She rummaged through her bag and took out her SPF 30. Shannon shook her head in disgust, smearing a greasy glob of Hawaiian Tropic into her shoulder. It smelled sweet and dangerous, like a piña colada.

“That stuff's like for little kids,” Shannon said. “You might as well wear a blanket. Don't you want to get tan?”

Lyle did want to get tan; she'd even bought a bikini at the mall. She watched Shannon slather herself in Hawaiian Tropic and then rub it into her skin, working slowly down her body—chest, stomach, legs—greasing each part to a buttery shine before moving to the next. It was like watching someone turn blissfully to glass. Maybe Shannon was right; maybe Lyle was just paranoid. Maybe she'd underestimated her ability to tan like an islander. If Shannon could use SPF 6, why couldn't she? After all, it was
six
times her natural skin protection. If you thought about it mathematically, six times was a lot. Lyle would have paid good money to be
twice
as unghostly as she was. She put the SPF 30 back in her bag. When she asked for the Hawaiian Tropic, Shannon seemed almost proud of her, nodding in approval before offering to rub the warm, coconuty grease into her back.

Fully greased, Lyle undid the towel at her waist and fixed herself a bed in the sand. She'd been too embarrassed to bring a book, so now she had no choice but to lie there like Shannon, the sun roasting her face. It was sort of relaxing at first, living the life of an islander, but before long she began to sweat. Or rather, began to melt like a glacier. Liquid streamed from her armpits. It puddled in her neck. It stung her eyes and trickled down her temples. It filled her ears, gradually, until she could hear the distant
swoosh
of her heartbeat. She peeked at Shannon, who was lying perfectly comatose. She seemed content to lie there forever. Lyle closed her eyes again and tried to think of how tan she was going to get,
to ignore the sensation of being roasted on a spit, but her body seemed to expand against her will, inflating to three times its size, getting bigger and bigger until she felt like the Michelin Man in the Rose Bowl parade, untethered and monstrous. She opened her eyes again, trying to get rid of the feeling. A little hot tub of sweat had formed in her belly button. She could feel herself getting burned—horribly, irrevocably—but perhaps this was just in her head as well.

She wondered what Hector would say if he could see her. The thought filled her with shame.

A boy with scraggly wet hair was jogging in their direction, carrying a surfboard under one arm. Lyle put her sunglasses on but did not have time to cover her thighs. The boy walked up to Shannon and shook his head like a dog, drizzling some water on her face. Shannon sprang onto her elbows, scowling. The boy had little coronas of hair around his nipples.

“You're killing me,” he said. “I can't sleep.”

“Don't be stupid,” Shannon said. She was laughing.

The guy scrunched his forehead, as though in pain. “I'm like a Jewish kid at Christmas.”

“Who was that?” Lyle asked after he'd left.

“Some stoner. He goes to Miraleste.”

“Does Charlie know about him?”

“Kidding?” Shannon said, making a face. “He's jealous enough already.”

Lyle watched the stoner jog up the beach and seek out a crowd of other surfers. The four boys all glanced at Shannon, like a meal they couldn't afford. Maybe that was what it was like to be beautiful: overpriced. You flirted with whomever you felt like, because you knew they didn't have the money.

“What are you doing this weekend?” Shannon asked. “I'm thinking of having a little party. Just some friends. My 'rents are going to be in Ireland.”

Lyle was too flattered to speak. The strength of her pleasure embarrassed her. “Ugh! I can't. We're going camping.”

Shannon shrugged. “No biggie.”

“Joshua Tree. My family does it every year. Four hours in the car with my mom, it's a real fucking blast.”

“Your mom's a drag?”

“No. Just a racist bitch.”

Shannon looked at her, visibly impressed. “I'm burning up,” she said. “Let's go in the water.”

“Go ahead. I think I'll stay here.”

“Suit yourself.”

From her towel, Lyle watched Shannon amble down to the water and wade out into the ocean before diving into a delicious-looking wave. She surfaced as a floating head, sleek and seal-like. The truth is, Lyle wanted to go swimming more than anything. She wanted to dive into the water like Shannon and escape the misery of heat and boredom. But she was too embarrassed. It would mean walking down to the beach with her white stomach and tuberous ass. She knew it shouldn't matter, that no one really cared who she was, which made her hate herself even more.

Later, Shannon wanted to head down to the Snack Shack for a frozen Snickers bar. Lyle put her T-shirt back on, cinching the towel carefully around her waist. She'd hoped that lying on the beach for an hour would somehow make her less self-conscious, but it had only increased her feelings of ugliness. Not only was she freakishly pale, she smelled bad from sweating so much. A group of junior lifeguards were gathered on the beach, chasing one another with a mammoth entrail of seaweed, and Lyle and Shannon had to hike up the beach to get around them. The boys looked in their direction and giggled. Lyle imagined they were laughing at her appearance. As they neared the Snack Shack, the beach grew more crowded, a maze of bodies: it seemed like everyone was staring at her and Shannon, wondering how in the hell they could possibly be friends.

Under the cliffs, near the chain-link fence, was a skinny man sitting in a beach chair and fiddling with a boom box at his feet. Hector. He was with his grandmother. Lyle's first reaction was relief. A burst of heavy metal drifted down the beach. When he turned to face the sun, she saw that he was wearing cutoff jeans and a belt, wet from the water. A delta of black hair glistened on his chest.

Hector looked in her direction, starting in surprise before bursting into a smile. He waved at her. Damp, his mustache looked dead and stringy. His grandmother was wearing a down vest the color of antifreeze, sprinkling sand on her feet, oblivious to the music roaring from the stereo. Lyle put her head down and kept walking.

“Who was that?” Shannon said.

“Who?”

“That guy that just waved at you.”

“I don't know.”

Shannon looked at her strangely. “Does he work on your house or something?”

“I've never seen him before.”

“Wee-
yerd
.” Shannon glanced behind her. “He's staring at us. What a perv.” She leaned toward Lyle, pretending to whisper in her ear. “I think you should fuck him.”

“What?”

“Go over there and fuck his brains out.”

Lyle tried to laugh. “Yeah, right.”

“Watch this.”

Shannon turned around so that she was walking backward and pulled down one side of her bikini top, flashing a white triangle of breast in Hector's direction. It was almost as pale as Lyle's legs. She flipped around again, laughing.

“Now we're screwed,” she said, tugging her baseball cap over her eyes. “He's going to rape us.”

There were over seven thousand nerve endings in each of your feet. Lyle had read this somewhere. She tried to feel them as she walked. She wondered if it was a form of protection, to have so many nerves in such an impractical place.

“Are you all right?” Shannon asked.

“Yeah. Just a headache.”

At the Snack Shack, Shannon ordered a Snickers bar from the cashier, who had bad skin and owly glasses steamed into bedroom winks. He looked like the guys at school who wore trench coats in spring and played D & D in the quad every afternoon. “Five dollars for the potentate,” he said in a fake British accent, when Shannon handed him her money. He snapped the bill with two hands. “Not much of a ransom, but he's not much of a king!”

“What a dork,” Shannon said afterward, sitting at a picnic table. “What does that mean anyway? Potentate?”

“Like a ruler,” Lyle murmured.

Shannon sucked some chocolate from her fingers and pulled her lab notebook from her bag. Lyle watched some kids playing paddleball in the breakwater, feeling sick to her stomach. When she glanced back at Shannon, she'd added a word to her list:
POTINTATE
. For some reason, it made Lyle feel even worse. She told Shannon she'd spelled it incorrectly.

“Doesn't matter. I just have to recognize it.”

“What do you mean?” Lyle said.

“On the PSATs. It's multiple choice.”

The sickness wobbled up her throat. Shannon put the notebook back in her bag. She smiled and then touched Lyle's hand. “Let's go find our friend the stoner. I bet he's got something to wash down this Snickers.”

“Go ahead,” Lyle said. “I think I left my wallet by our stuff.”

She sloped up the hot sand again toward the fence. It wasn't too late. She could go back and apologize, she could kiss him on the lips, she could explain somehow that she hadn't recognized him through the tint of her sunglasses. Perhaps he'd believe her. Lyle's towel fell from her waist but she didn't stop, jogging toward the cliffs, though she could see already he was gone.

That evening, in the living room, Lyle sprawled on the lounge chair her dad had dragged in from the backyard. Her skin was on fire, radiating from every pore. It was like a machine she couldn't turn off. If she moved an inch, if she tried to lift an arm to scratch her nose, her body responded with a torturous ripple. She wondered if you could actually die from sunburn. It was a comforting idea. Her legs were particularly bad off. Visually, there was no way to describe them. They were “red” in the way that the universe was “large.” Lyle closed her eyes and dreamed of shedding her skin like a snake, slithering into the cool, cool grass, leaving it in a burning puddle on the floor.

She was shivering. Which was weird, since she was pouring out heat. There was a contradiction there, but Lyle couldn't think clearly enough to resolve it.

On the TV, Mr. Roarke was talking to a little girl whose parents had been killed in a plane crash. Tattoo, that lovable midget, stared poignantly at his feet. She'd thought a
Fantasy Island
rerun might distract her, but the tropical sun and bikini-clad tourists were making her feel even worse. The remote control lay on the rug near her feet, where it had fallen off the armrest. For the past twenty minutes, she'd been trying to reach it with her toes, managing only to further its migration across the room.

She closed her eyes again. Her heart was beating more quickly
than usual, actually stinging the sunburn on her neck. She tried to distract herself by thinking of a time when she could still move. In an earlier life, when her skin was cool and touchable, she used to sit at the foot of the couch, shirt pulled up to her neck, while her mother wrote delicious things on her back. First the touch of her fingernail, gentle as an ant, then the mysterious back-sized line that formed into a letter, fading like a secret as soon as it appeared. They did this for a whole summer when Lyle was small. It was better than talking, because her mom said things she never would have spoken out loud: not just
I LOVE YOU
, but
MY BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER IS FIVE
and
LOVELIEST GIRL IN THE GALAXY LIVES HERE
. It was as if her mind was talking and not her mouth. But Lyle's favorite sentences were the ones she lost track of or couldn't follow, the words turning strange and doodly and complex, containing her whole mother inside of them. When the sentences ended—a gentle poke for a period, as though her mom were pressing a doorbell—Lyle could never be sure they'd happened at all.

Beyond the velvety lilt of Mr. Roarke, Lyle heard the back door open, a tumble of boys entering the kitchen. Their voices rang with good health. Mr. Leonard made some fainthearted attempts at a bark before the voices floated into the locality of Lyle's head.

“Jesus. What happened to you?”

She opened her eyes. Dustin, munching on an apple, was standing there with Mark Biesterman and Brent Tarwater. They looked impossibly vertical.

“Please leave me alone,” Lyle whispered.

“UV exposure,” Biesty said. “Leading cause of skin cancer.”

“You shouldn't keep this on the floor,” Tarwater said, picking up the remote and placing it conscientiously on top of the TV set. “Someone might break it.”

“Wow, you really are bad off,” Dustin said, squatting next to Lyle. His eyes widened in pity or alarm, she couldn't tell. “Your face is all, like, swollen. Haven't you heard of sunscreen?”

“Will you please please all just fuck off and leave me alone?”

“What's with you lately?” Dustin turned to go. “Some guy called earlier. I came in to tell you, but I guess you don't care. Victor or something.”

He signaled to Biesty and Tarwater, who flicked off the TV on his way out. The screen fizzed in the silence. Alone again, Lyle outlined the steps of her mission. Operation Roomward Advance
ment. If she made it to her room, she could call Hector and ask his forgiveness. She would explain the situation—basically, that Shannon had brainwashed her, that she hadn't recognized him at first and then was too humiliated by Shannon's behavior to say hello—and he would understand and continue to love her from the underness of his heart.