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“What the hell are you doing?” Dustin said. He was standing in the door to the bathroom, wearing flip-flops and a plain brown T-shirt. He might as well slather himself in blood and limp around like a wounded deer.

“Practicing for mountain lions.”

“We're going to Joshua Tree,” his brother said. “To roast marshmallows.”

Jonas pointed at Dustin's flip-flops. “If you fall down, a mountain lion will ambush you from behind and sever your spinal cord.”

“Don't get my hopes up.”

This was typical of his brother's attitude lately. His entire family seemed to be having some sort of meltdown. Despite the fact that Dustin hoped to get eaten by a mountain lion, despite the fact that his dad had been arrested for a mysterious reason no one would talk about, despite the fact that his sister was still covered in blisters and would have to stay in her tent to avoid the hundred-degree sun—despite all this, they were going to spend the weekend in the desert
because they did it every year.
His mother had explained this to him several times, as if trying to convince herself it was a good idea. Jonas wondered if perhaps their family were a dying organism. It was like those praying mantises who end up
getting eaten by their partners but keep mating anyway, out of habit, despite the fact that they were missing a head.

His family thought he was strange, a weirdo, but it was everyone else that was crazy. Why did people take trips into the desert, where there was no water or electricity and you were even more likely to feel like someone's imaginary friend? Jonas had a hard enough time believing in himself at home. Sometimes he'd spend all day around the house, practicing his fencing moves or watching TV while his family swerved around him, barely glancing his way as they rushed to the phone or slammed out of the house. It was as if the real Jonas had been picked up by a stranger and whisked away for good, locked up somewhere nobody could find. It was a feeling he could not explain to anyone, because he did not understand it himself. His mother had begun to kiss him lately, as if to make sure he was still there, but her need to keep proving it all the time only made him feel more like a ghost.

Jonas went into the kitchen, where Lyle was filling water bottles in the sink. A bag of marshmallows sat untended on the counter. After ripping the bag open with his teeth, Jonas impaled one of the marshmallows on a skewer and turned the stove up all the way, the burner sparking into a squiggling blue jellyfish. There was a real science to marshmallow roasting. The trick was to turn the thing ever so slowly, ten to twelve inches from the fire, so that it bruised magically but never crisped. He glanced up at his red-skinned sister, hoping to impress her, but she was already staring at the browning marshmallow. There seemed to be a connection between them. Jonas inched the skewer closer to the flame, and she winced. To get her attention, he was not above inflicting mental distress.

“Do you
have
to do that in here?” Lyle asked him.

“The stove's in here. I'm practicing my technique.”

His mother popped into the kitchen, Mr. Leonard limping at her heels. She eyed Jonas's marshmallow with lovely spellbound interest before bending to kiss him on the head. Jonas waited for his mother to look at him that way, so that his missing self would return. Instead she grabbed a marshmallow from the bag on the counter and stuck it in her mouth, chewing it like a horse. Lyle and Jonas stared at her.

“Did you just eat a marshmallow, Mom?” Lyle said. “For
breakfast
?”

“Big whoops.” His mother grabbed the bag off the counter, turning to Jonas before heading back outside. “We're leaving in five minutes. Don't forget to turn the stove off.”

Jonas nodded, returning his attention to the marshmallow. It had gone black on one side, hopelessly crinkled.

“Did Mom just say ‘big whoops'?” Lyle asked.

“I think she meant one whoop,” Jonas said. “Singular.”

Lyle left the kitchen, slow as an astronaut, and he sat down with his burned marshmallow at the table. As he ate, tears of marshmallow dripped onto the open newspaper in front of him. Jonas closed the newspaper, trying to hide his mess, and a stillness uncurled around him. On the front page was Mandy Rogers's father, a bouquet of microphones pushed into his face. He was standing in front of his house, holding a photo of her in his hand. The headline said:
MANDY ROGERS FOUND DEAD IN ANAHEIM; MAN ARRESTED FOR FIRST DEGREE MURDER
. Below the picture of Mandy's father was a quote, a single sentence, that read:
I hope they kill this sick animal even if he's the last man on earth.
The house was perfectly quiet. Jonas glanced at his orange cords and wrinkled orange Izod and felt a sudden desolate click, like a door being locked. He went into his room to change his clothes, his legs strange and flimsy, afraid to glance at the mirror in his closet. The air seemed to pass through him, a trickle of dust. Someone honked from the driveway. He parted his curtains and looked outside, where his family was waiting for him to appear.

Lyle's idea of infernal punishment was riding in the backseat of the Volvo, still hobbled with sunburn, while the Boys of Killarney piped from the stereo. Even in her wildest imaginings of hell, she'd failed to incorporate any elbow horns. She'd failed to include a tin whistle performing the vocal line to “Hotel California.” She recalled her near-death experience in the bathtub, wishing now that the radio had fallen in the water and fried her like a doughnut. She could have spared herself the Boys of Killarney, not to mention a weekend in the Mojave Desert.

“Can we listen to the news?” she asked, interrupting a jiglike rendition of “Go Your Own Way.” Her mother was still snacking from the bag of marshmallows on the dashboard. Perhaps no one had informed her that they were made of sugar and pork skin.

“It's all Mandy Rogers,” her mom said, wiping some marshmallow dust from her fingers. “I don't want Jonas listening to that.”

“It's so awful to think about,” her father said. “That poor girl being—”

“Warren!” her mom interrupted him. She turned up the stereo.

“Being what?” Lyle asked.

“D-I-S-M-E-M-B-E-R-E-D.”

Dustin laughed. “Hate to break it to you, Dad, but Jonas can spell.”

“What does ‘dismembered' mean?” Jonas asked.

Before Lyle could answer him, her mom twisted around in her seat. “Like when you, um, stop remembering something.”

“Right,” Dustin said. “Like ‘I dismembered my old teacher today.'”

Jonas frowned, as though forgetting about Mandy Rogers was somehow worse than anything. “They don't know for sure it's her.”

“Her clothes were buried in the guy's yard,” Dustin said. “Who else would it be?”

“She might have escaped. A long time ago.”

“Get real,” Dustin said. “They found garden shears with blood all over them.”

“Dustin!” their mom said.

“Sorry.
S-H-E-A-R-S
.”

A patch of sunlight was resting on Lyle's pants, scorching her like an iron. The Boys of Killarney launched into a Gaelic version of “Feelin' Groovy” that could only be described as avant-garde. Mr. Leonard began to yowl along from the back. After the bathtub incident, Lyle had briefly entertained the thought that she loved her family, that she might even go to college within a hundred-mile radius of them. Her best friend was in France; Hector despised her; she would never be Shannon Jarrell no matter how much Lyle pretended to like her. Her family was all she had. This had turned out to be a fit of lunacy. They were indeed all she had, but this was by no means a comforting thought.

By the time they pulled off the freeway for lunch, the Boys of Killarney had been replaced by
Sharing the Light: Hits from the Sofia Orphanage Children's Choir
. Lyle's father veered into a McDonald's and stopped at a life-sized statue of Ronald McDonald. The statue was missing one of its arms, which had done nothing to diminish the psychotic grin on its face. “Be with you in minute, please,” it said in a Mexican accent.

“
Gracias,
” her mother said, leaning over her father's lap.

“Mom,” Lyle said. “Do
not
speak Spanish.”

“Why not?”

“Because you're talking to a machine. It's ridiculous.”

“It's not ridiculous. This is a Latino area. Eighty percent of fast food employees in California are Latino.”

Lyle pointed at the disabled clown preparing to take their order. “Ronald McDonald is
not
Latino!”

“How do you know?” her mother said.

Lyle looked at her, incredulous. “Does ‘Ronald'
sound Spanish to you?”

“I don't know,” Dustin said. “Ritchie Valens changed his name.”

“It might have been Ronaldo in his country,” Jonas said, nodding.

“That's not the point!”

Her father shook his head. “McDonald. Sounds Scottish to me.”

Lyle got out of the car. She had no idea where she was going but knew that another second with her family would result in violence. The sun was so hot she could feel her skin through her clothes, a slow sizzle of pain, linked in her mind with the smell of french fries. She crossed the parking lot without looking back, her eyes tearing as she walked. There were no sidewalks and she had to walk along the shoulder of the road. People stared at her as they whooshed by in their trucks. If she could find a pay phone, she would try Hector. She would call him for the eleventh time this week. Maybe if there was the roar of traffic, if she were homeless and roaming the streets, he'd feel a prick of concern and not hang up at the sound of her voice.

She found a pay phone outside a store named Cigarettes Cheaper! and called Hector's house, only to get a recorded voice telling her to deposit sixty more cents. She began to beat the receiver against the phone. Just as she realized it wouldn't break, Lyle looked up and saw Dustin walking toward her in the shimmering heat, brandishing a red-and-white-striped arm. The hand at the end was raised in a wide-fingered salute.

“Look what I found,” he said, holding up Ronald McDonald's arm.

She couldn't help laughing. Or rather, a laugh came helplessly out of her. “Where was it?”

“In the Dumpster behind the parking lot. Poking out like a zombie's.”

Dustin threaded a cigarette between two of the yellow fingers and held it up to his mouth to light it. He passed the arm to Lyle, like an offering. It was surprisingly light. They passed the arm back and forth for a minute, smoking the cigarette in Ronald McDonald's hand, pressed against the wall in order to keep to the shade.

“Remember when I taught you to smoke?” Dustin said.

“You never taught me to smoke.”

“Are you kidding? I showed you how to blow smoke out your nose, without choking to death.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Lyle said.

Dustin frowned. He looked at the arm he was holding. “Look at the size of that hand, will you? I bet the Fry Girls are psyched.”

A man in a cowboy hat came out of the store and Dustin waved at him with the plastic arm. For a second, Lyle couldn't believe that she and Dustin were teenagers. It seemed like yesterday they were playing Cats vs. Dogs under a flipped-over raft, or working feverishly in their room on
The Land of Underwater Birds,
the book they'd written one summer when she was seven. She could picture the cover almost perfectly: strange birds swimming in the ocean or squatting in underwater nests, a flock of fish soaring through the sky above them. What a blast they'd had together, thinking up a world where everything happened in reverse. They'd spent a whole month poring over the details, giddy with creation, thinking up an endless litany of facts.
In the land of underwater birds, skydivers leap into planes. People sing “Miserable Birthday to You.” Movie stars have terrible faces.
How lovingly they'd written it all down, diligent as monks, illustrating every page like a textbook. Lyle could not remember ever having so much fun.

Now, of course, she and Dustin would never be able to write a book together, it wasn't something teenagers did—just as in a year or two, probably, they would no longer be able to pull things from a Dumpster and use them as cigarette holders. Whatever was happening to them, it seemed unbearably tragic.

“Who were you trying to call?” Dustin asked.

Lyle looked at her feet. “A guy. Who despises me.”

“Are you in love with him?”

“I don't know,” she said. “He's got a mustache.”

Dustin passed her the arm. “I've got one of those, too.”

“A guy with a mustache?” she said, suddenly interested.

“Kira, I mean. Someone who won't talk to me. Dad stole their answering machine, and now Mr. Shackney won't even put her on the phone. Told me never to call again or he'd have me arrested, too. The actual words were a bit more graphic.”

“I thought Dad broke into their house because you left something there. Your wallet.”

Dustin laughed. “Is that what Mom told you?”

Lyle frowned, feeling foolish. Frankly, she'd been in too much
pain to care about the details. It occurred to her she knew almost nothing about her brother's life.

“I'm sorry about your sunburn,” he said.

“It's okay.”

“Does it still hurt?”

Lyle nodded. She was sweltering in her jeans, sweat trickling down her legs. The car, at least, had air-conditioning. It was starting to seem marginally better than homelessness and starvation.

“We'd better not let Mom see this place,” Dustin said, looking up at the Cigarettes Cheaper! sign buzzing over the entrance. “Dad pulled into the 7-Eleven. I think so she could buy more marshmallows.”

“Not really.”