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“Did you cash in the register?” Lyle asked.

“No. I was waiting for you.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “You always do it.”

Lyle swore under her breath and went into the back to get the cash drawer. She had to do everything. If the tubs were empty, Shannon would just tell the customers they were out of chocolate or vanilla chip or pralines-and-cream rather than get a new tub from the freezer. Not that Lyle gave two shits about the people who came in—but she couldn't afford to slack off like Shannon, because nothing would get done. And whose well-concealed ass would Jared fire?

She spun through the combination on the safe and retrieved the drawer of money. The back room was small and cozy, a home away from home, stocked for some reason with a shelf of cheap
liqueurs. On slow afternoons, when she was working by herself, Lyle would sit back here with her feet up and sip Kahlúa from a mug, lost in whatever novel she was reading, so wrapped up in the vicissitudes of beauty and despair that she wouldn't notice the
bee-bong
of the door as a customer walked in.
Hello?
the customer would yell into the void.
Are you alive back there? Not exactly,
Lyle would yell back. Sometimes, if it was a good enough book, she'd put it down in a daze and wobble out to the front, greeted by a world—faces, movement, squares of sunlight on the floor—that seemed less real than the one she'd been reading about. It was as if God had decided to phone it in.

Locking the safe again, Lyle glanced at the corner of the room and noticed a sleeping bag rolled into a strudel, propped beside a pillow. A flash of proprietary anger went through her. She carried the cash drawer out to the register.

“Christ. You didn't
sleep
here.”

Shannon smirked. “Me and Charlie.”

“Your boyfriend?”

Shannon nodded, pleased with herself.

“Why?”

“We 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.

“You should give Jared the keys back,” she said now, snipping open a bag of caramel topping.

“Why?”

“Otherwise 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.

“You're a virgin, aren't you?”

“None 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 and wiggled it like a worm. She laughed.

“I was wondering if I could get some ice cream.”

“Sorry. We only sell corn dogs.”

He seemed flustered. “I mean, I'd like to get an ice cream cone.”

“Never mind. A joke.” She frowned. “What flavor do you want?”

He looked at her closely, studying her face instead of the tubs of ice cream displayed in front of him. His mustache, impossible to describe, reminded her why she only liked them in books. The word that popped into her head was “illegitimate.” If mustaches had parents, this was definitely an orphan. “I don't know. What's your favorite?”

Lyle shrugged. “Pistachio?”

“I've never tried it.”

“Here. Have a taster.”

She grabbed a spoon and handed him a fluorescent green smudge of ice cream. His face fell. He eyed the smudge suspiciously and then sucked it from the little spoon, wincing for a second before he could recover.

“I'll have that,” he said. “A sugar cone.”

Lyle bent over the tub with her scoop, curling the ice cream from the sides and then packing it into a green snowball. By the end of the day, her arm would ache so badly she'd have trouble sleeping. She glanced up and was surprised to discover Hector looking at her breasts. She stood up straight, pressing the snowball into a cone. For the first time, it occurred to her that he hadn't just wandered into the store by accident.

He didn't leave, which surprised her as well. He sat at one of the plastic tables in the corner, eating his cone. He hunched on his elbows, closing his eyes to swallow. It was like watching someone eat his own shoe. Lyle took a weird delight in watching him suffer. Heroically, he licked the scoop down to an eroded-looking dune and then crunched through the cone, finishing the last bite without looking up. Lyle walked over.

“You've got green in your mustache,” she said, offering him a napkin.

Hector blushed. He was younger than she'd thought: nineteen or twenty, though it was hard to tell with the hair on his lip. While he wiped his face, dabbing the ice cream from his mustache, Lyle stood patiently in the sunlight from the window. It was a feeling like being onstage. She knew that if she waited long enough, something would happen. The air was filled with glit
tering specks, like snow. Gravely, he asked if he could have her phone number.

“Yours,” Lyle said, surprising herself.

She wrote his number on her hand and then went to hide in the back. Her heart was pounding—not from nerves but from a cold rush of power. He was still there; the door hadn't chimed. Lyle retraced the number in darker pen. She wanted Shannon to see it, but also wanted Hector to take off before she saw who it belonged to.

“How about the Turpitudes?” Biesty said.

“What the hell does that mean?” Tarwater asked.

“My poor coxcomb.” Biesty shook his head. “Think depravity, but times ten.”

Band practice. Sunday morning. They were standing in Dustin's garage, trying to come up with a name that would reflect the intelligence of the band while defining its commitment to rocking one's ass back into the womb. So far in their six-month history, the perfect one had eluded them. (They'd been happy with the Deadbeats, or at least communally okay with it, until some hippie at a party had asked them if they covered Grateful Dead songs.) Dustin shot a weary look at Biesty, his best friend, whose glasses were perched on top of his head like a tiara. Biesty was the only person he knew who could quote Heidegger while tripping on three hits of acid. As a summer project, he'd decided to read
The Riverside Shakespeare
in its entirety while smoking large amounts of Royal Afghani, a project that had started to affect his sanity. Now he grinned at Dustin, as if the Turpitudes was really the best name since the Sex Pistols.

Dustin sighed. The garage was cluttered with bikes and ski equipment and at least one dartboard, which Starhead—their drummer—had placed on his stool to make himself taller. One of Starhead's tom-toms refused to screw tight and drooped from its stand like a giant flower. Then there was the issue of Tarwater's bass, which still had Twisted Sister and Def Leppard stickers on it from his formative musical years, circa last year. Occasionally, when they were tuning up, he'd break into the bass line of “Rock
of Ages.” At times like this Dustin wondered whether they were really destined to write the next chapter in punk history.

“Turpitude is singular,” Starhead said. True to his nickname, he'd shaved a star into the top of his head, which he ducked down to show people whenever he introduced himself. “You can't just add an
s
to it.”

“Who says?”

“It's like being called the Friendships. Or the Moneys.”

Biesty shrugged. “You can say that. ‘Moneys.' If you have different kinds of currency.”

“All right,” Dustin said, trying to avoid an argument. It often occurred to him that his main function as bandleader was keeping the peace. “So we've got the Turpitudes, Viet-Nun, and Toxic Shock Syndrome. We each get two votes, the rule being you can't choose the same name twice.”

“What about mine?” Tarwater said. The fact remained that Tarwater was a good bassist, so you had to take his suggestions seriously no matter how stupid they were. If you pissed him off, he might threaten to leave the band or refuse to turn on his amp until you performed one of the dreadful ballads he'd written, perhaps “Despair Is My Silent Angel” or “Brothers Won't Be Shackled (White, Red, or Brown).”

“Okay, Tarwater,” Dustin said equably. “What's your idea?”

“The Butt Hawks.”

“The Butt Hawks?”

“Yeah.” He smiled proudly, despite the silence.

“What signifies this breed of hawk?” Biesty asked.

“What do you
think
?”
Tarwater said.

Dustin cocked his head, trying to look encouraging. “Is it, like, a hawk that flies out of your butt?”

“No. Jesus.”

“I'm just trying to get my mind around it.”

“A bunch of guys who like women's butts?” Starhead offered.

“No, you fuck-brains.” Tarwater paused, perhaps for emphasis. “It's a
mohawk that grows out of your butt.
”

“Wow,” Dustin said.

“That's disgusting,” Biesty said. Dustin shot him a glance over Tarwater's head. “Disgusting, but ambiguous.”

“How about Asshawk?” Starhead suggested. “Just for, like, brevity.”

To settle things, Dustin shredded a piece of paper into little pieces and then handed them out. Everyone wrote down their top two choices and stuck them in a baseball cap. Dustin had a sense of something historic in the making. He tallied the votes. In the end, Toxic Shock Syndrome won out narrowly with three ballots. (The Butt Hawks got two, which could only be explained by illegal voting.)

So began the first official practice of Toxic Shock Syndrome. Dustin tuned his Stratocaster with a feeling of long-awaited departure. He'd worked all spring at Randy's Audio Emporium so he could have enough money to take the summer off, his last before college, and steer the band toward greatness.

“Are you going to tell your dad our new name?” Starhead asked, twirling a drumstick.

“Why?”

“He's our number one fan.”

Dustin frowned. “He's not a fan. He likes barbershop quartet records. I think he's just had a head injury or something.”

“It's pretty weird,” Biesty said, wedging a cigarette between the strings of his fretboard. “The way he veges on those steps. I'm waiting for him to shotgun one of those Cokes and start moshing around the garage.”

They warmed up with some covers—“Los Angeles,” “TV Party”—but the image of his father, nodding along to the beat and tapping his foot, kept messing with Dustin's groove. Who'd ever heard of a punk band whose biggest fan was a forty-three-year-old real estate developer in boat shoes? He was impossible to avoid, because you never knew when he was going to be home anymore. If Dustin turned up the amps to an ear-blistering ten, his dad would just shut his eyes and lean his head back against the wall. The louder they played, the more he seemed to enjoy it.

Today, sure enough, he wandered into the garage in the middle of “Mandy Rogers,” Dustin's paean to loss and suffering in a godless universe.
(You prayed to Him at night like a good little nun, the one person, you thought, who wouldn't shun or make fun.)
As usual, his dad got a Coke from the fridge and then sat on the steps with that lost look on his face, as though he were waiting for a life-changing message to wash up on the beach. Biesty grabbed the mike from its stand and began prowling the garage while he belted the chorus, as though searching for Mandy or God or both; nor
mally Biesty's stage antics inspired Dustin, but now they seemed dumb and overwrought. It was his father's fault. Somehow, just by sitting there, he had a way of making everything seem ridiculous. Why couldn't Dustin just have a normal dad like Biesty's, who never took any interest in anything and jerked off in his bedroom all the time to his ten-year stash of
Hustler
s?