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At The Pumpkin Patch, Lyle's boredom grew even worse. In retaliation, she sighed murderously and stared out the window while people ordered and gave the general impression that she'd rather be nailing tacks into her eyeballs. It occurred to her, not without shame, that she was behaving like Shannon Jarrell. Of course, Shannon Jarrell would never consent to work at The Pumpkin Patch. You had to actually
do
something, though it would have been hard to guess that from today's shift. Lyle had only four tables, all of them female except for a group of old men accompanied by an oxygen tank. She wondered if there was any way to turn her job at a crappy chain restaurant into a college essay. She could call it “Serving Others: Finding Myself in The Pumpkin Patch
.”
Perhaps someone would come in off
the street—a homeless person, say—and dispense some poignant, hard-won advice, teaching her the true meaning of nourishment.

She was hopeful when a girl in a wheelchair came in, pushed by her mother, though these hopes were dashed when she got a good look at the kid's face. The girl wouldn't be dispensing any advice. Her head sagged listlessly to one side, her hands curled in like tarantulas. Her mouth gaped open in a permanent yawn. Lyle had never thought of a mouth being “ajar” before, but that seemed like the right word to describe it. In general, she looked like she might be better off dead. With mounting dread, Lyle watched the hostess lead them to a table in her section and prop a menu resourcefully in the girl's lap.

“You know, it's not nice to stare,” the woman said when Lyle approached to take their order. She wore heavy mascara that made her eyes seem like they might flap away.

“I wasn't staring.”

“Yes, you were. You've been watching us since we came in.” The woman unfolded her napkin and wiped some drool from the girl's chin. “How do you think it feels to be stared at all the time?”

“You should ask my brother,” Lyle said softly.

The woman's face changed. “Does he have CP?”

“He was burned last summer. He almost died.”

The girl in the wheelchair laughed, a wheezy, elaborate production. Why did Lyle care what this woman thought of her? Her daughter, too, made her feel ashamed. She tried to take their orders, but the woman seemed uninterested in letting her escape.

“You're in high school?”

“College,” Lyle said, not sure why.

“Nearby?”

“Back East. I live in New York.”

“So you came back here to take care of your brother.” Lyle did not deny this. The woman put her hand on Lyle's elbow. “You won't regret it,” she said warmly. “He may not always see it, but the real gifts in life aren't always visible.”

The woman smiled at her daughter, who strained her head in the woman's direction for a few seconds before collapsing again like a marionette. It was a gesture of such onerous affection that Lyle felt dizzy.

“Are you all right?” the woman asked.

Lyle shook her head.

“He's lucky to have you. You should see how many kids with disabilities get dumped in homes. If I'd listened to Jaynee's father—God knows, I don't think she'd be alive right now.”

Lyle took their orders—“french fries,” the girl said passionately, startling Lyle with the lusty warble of her voice—and then went to the waiter station to type in the codes. She stared out the back window at the parking lot. Someone had traced some extra letters on the door of the Renault, running a finger through the filth, so that it read
LE CARCASS
. She thought of the Columbia sticker on the dashboard. Dustin had ridden in the front seat with her several times. What must he have thought? Not just that she wanted to abandon him:
she couldn't fucking wait.

Lyle buttoned up her shirt. She tended to other customers, avoiding the mother and her atrocious daughter as much as she could. She was startled, after they'd left, to find a 25 percent tip. The money made Lyle feel even more despicable. At one point a guy in mirrored sunglasses walked into the restaurant: Lyle's heart leaped, but his face was smiling, handsome, not a thing like her brother's.

“How can you stand the smell?” Taz said, holding her nose. There was something heartbreaking about her face—some change in its appearance—that Dustin couldn't put into words.

“You get used to it,” he said.

“It's like something died. But in a sauna.”

They were walking around the desert because there was nothing else to do. Taz had driven all the way out in her car, the white BMW she'd inherited from her parents, telling them she was going to Venice Beach with some friends. Dustin didn't understand her desire to visit him but had decided to tell her not to do it again. The sight of her made his soul hurt. He was disappointed in the BMW. He was disappointed in her hair. He was disappointed that she hadn't sprouted a tail and avoided the unadventurous fate of being a teenager. Everyone was a letdown; the trick was to escape before they could squash your image of them completely.

Taz's mascara had begun to melt down her cheeks. She was wearing a giant Hanes T-shirt, stirrup pants, and Jelly shoes. He wondered if the clothes were really what they pretended to be, a sign of recovery, or further proof of how unstable she was. To keep his scars out of the sun, Dustin had on a cowboy hat he'd found in the Dumpster behind the video store; he'd taken to wearing it around Lancaster and calling people “Boss” or “Missy.” Taz kicked over a rock with her shoe, revealing a pocket of darker soil.

“Watch out for rattlesnakes,” he said.

“Do you always have to wear that thing?” she said, looking at his Jobst shirt.

“Why?”

“I'm just wondering. It must get hot.”

“At least I don't fucking wear Madonna bracelets.”

She glanced at the rubber bracelet around her wrist and then stared at her feet. “It's from Teen-to-Teen,” she mumbled. “My support group.”

“Support group?” he said, laughing. It was easier to hurt her feelings than to explain his disappointment.

“It's supposed to remind us not to do things. ‘Self-injurious behavior.'”

“Like swallowing glass?”

She didn't answer him. “There's a girl in my group, Kendall, who broke her own arm. Stuck it in a vise and then tightened it till her bone crunched.”

“Jesus,” he said.

“Sounds lame, I know. My parents are making me go.”

Dustin tried to picture Taz crushing her own arm. It occurred to him that what he'd thought was romantically deviant in her character—screwing her big sister's boyfriend, for example—might to other people look like despair. “They tried to get me to go to a support group,” he said. “At Torrance Memorial. I told them they'd have to tie me to a bed again and wheel me in there.” A breeze wafted from the direction of the dump, and Taz winced. “Think this smells bad, wait till you spend some time in a burn unit.”

“I know,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I came to visit you. At the hospital.” She kicked over another rock, and a lizard slithered away from her foot. “I snuck out and took the bus.”

Dustin looked at her in amazement.

“You were all strapped down,” she said, “zonked on morphine. I remember how hot it was, all those lights around your bed. The nurse called them french fry lamps.”

“When was this? Right after the accident?”

“I told them I was your sister.”

The felt inside Dustin's hat was spongy with sweat. He remembered that night at Breakfast's party, when he'd thought he was dying and Taz had looked at him as if she were in love with him but would rather kill them both than admit it. Now she'd told him, of her own free will, that she'd visited him in the hospital.
She'd sneaked out of the house when her dad was at his most murderous. She could tell him now, unsmirkingly, because there was nothing at stake. He was safe and unlovable.

That was the heartbreaking change, Dustin realized. She no longer smirked at him but smiled almost with approval.

At the dump, Taz stopped in front of a Joshua tree tall as an oak. A rabbit dangled by its armpits from one of the forked branches, maybe eight feet off the ground, its hind legs crossed dapperly at the ankles. Where its eyes had been were two empty holes, bubbling with flies.

“Did it jump up there itself?” Taz asked.

“Maybe a hawk dropped it,” Dustin said.

“Dazed by the smell, I bet.”

They peered through the chain-link fence surrounding the dump. In the unspeakable heat the reservoir looked beautiful, its spotless water opaque as a mirror, a movie of clouds. It was the kind of blue you might see in a lagoon. It was hard to match it with the stench, so powerful it made Dustin's eye water.

“What's the pond for?” Taz asked.

Dustin shrugged. “The sludge settles to the bottom, I think.”

Taz wiped the sweat from her face. “All I can say is, it looks pretty inviting.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“I'm serious. Don't you sort of want to take a dip?”

“No thanks.”

“We'll keep our mouths closed,” she said. “Come on, let's hop the fence.”

She's still crazy, Dustin thought with relief. He pointed at his arm and reminded her how long it took him just to hang up his hat. She frowned, unable to conceal her disappointment.

“I'll just cool off for a second and come right out.”

Taz gripped the fence and began to scale it like a burglar, easing herself over the top. There was no barbwire, which surprised Dustin until he remembered they were in the middle of the desert. Anyway, who in their right mind would sneak over the fence for a dip? Nimbly, Taz leapt down and walked around to the far side of the reservoir and then took off her shirt and pants and underwear, reaching behind with two hands to undo her bra, until she was standing there in only her Jelly shoes. She looked ridiculous that way and somehow more naked. On her arm, like a smudge of
charcoal, was the botched tattoo she'd gotten at Breakfast's party.

She wandered down the tarp-covered embankment that sloped to the reservoir. He could see the veins in her breasts, faint as the ones in a leaf. The pond reflected even the veins. She peeled off one shoe, hopping to keep her balance, and dipped her foot in the gorgeous blue water.

“Wow,” she said. “Your foot just, um, disappears.”

He felt suddenly frightened. “I wouldn't go in there.”

“Why not?”

“What if you . . . I don't know. Die?”

“I'm not going to
die.
Not right away, at least.”

She peeled off her other shoe, leaving it on the embankment. Then she dove into her own reflection, a four-legged creature folding up like a card. Dustin waited for her to come up for air. A breeze rippled the water, erasing any evidence of her splash. The fear in Dustin's throat froze into an icy dread. Maybe the toxins had dissolved her like a pill. Insects droned all around him; the effect was to make the silence seem even greater. As he was beginning to panic, wondering if he should run to the highway for help, Taz's head broke through the water and she came up in the middle of the pond, gasping for breath.

Smiling, she swam back to the embankment and pulled herself out, her scarless body dripping in the sun. She got dressed and scaled the fence again and jumped partway to the dirt. Her hair was dark from the water. Dustin couldn't help feeling there was something enchanted about her, as if she'd just returned from another world. He had the odd sensation that he shouldn't look at her too closely.

“You smell terrible,” Dustin said.

“How many years did I shave off my life?”

He shrugged. “Five?”

“Let's keep track. I want to die at twenty-five.”

Dustin noticed that her left ear was stippled with tiny scabs, just as he remembered. He wondered what he could possibly offer this sixteen-year-old girl, or why on earth she would want to visit him. He felt barely alive himself. Starting back, they passed the dead rabbit swaying gently in the breeze. Its face was aswarm with flies. The shape of it kept changing, a black mask simmering in the sun. Dustin found it almost beautiful, this face that wouldn't stop moving, but decided not to mention this to Taz.

At work, Mikolaj was premiering his video about reproduction,
Even Educated Fleas.
Camille had suggested calling it
Conception Is FUNdamental,
a far better title, but he'd either forgotten her suggestion or ignored it on purpose.
As for the video itself, Camille had watched a few minutes of it in the editing room: a little redheaded boy with a lisp talking about his “penith.” She felt bad for Mikolaj, of course, but some wicked part of her looked forward to the advisory committee's verdict. He believed he could make a better video than hers; he'd have to learn the hard way, as Camille had, how unforgiving they were.

At least she'd bear no responsibility for it. They'd moved her out of visual media last September, after she'd returned from her month off tending to Dustin. It had been packaged as a promotion—senior text editor—but in hindsight she suspected it was because of the debacle with
Earth to My Body: What's Happening?
It was hard to be too offended at the time, what with Dustin so much on her mind. And she had to admit she was good at her new job: in particular there was something about putting together the newsletter, assembling the jigsaw puzzle of graphics and text, that appealed to her. It was only recently, when they'd asked Mikolaj to direct something, that she'd started to feel betrayed. It wasn't only his newfound competence that annoyed her. He was always stomping down the halls in that ridiculous ponytail, dropping names of directors she'd never heard of, as if he were God's gift to the production department. He'd taken to wearing sunglasses on his way to the parking lot. He had an especially annoying habit of jotting ideas down on his hands, some
times when you were speaking to him, so by the end of the day they were tattooed with words.