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“We're not called that anymore.”

“You're not?”

“It's a dumb name,” Dustin said. “We're trying to think of a better one.”

He turned his back to Warren, searching for something in the fridge. Warren was very familiar with this back. He had whole conversations with it. It was a strong back, beautiful in its gentle slopes and mesas: he'd gotten to know it the way you get to know a favorite view or painting. A back, even a silent one, was better than nothing. Still, there was a certain amount of faith involved: you had to trust it was listening, hunched over a guitar or a surfboard as if you weren't even there.

His wife had disappeared from the kitchen. Warren got up from his stool at the counter and went to find her. The hallway, like their room itself, was decorated with shell sculptures and turd-colored macramé things and paintings not unlike the splotch of oil staining the driveway. Camille had bought them all at a store called Creativity Unleashed, which sold art by developmentally disabled people. Mandy Rogers's disappearance had inspired her to invest in heroically unattractive art. She'd wanted to hang it all over the house, but the kids had refused to adorn their walls with “retard paintings” and the bulk had ended up in their bedroom. When Warren objected, wondering if some types of creativity weren't better off leashed, Camille had called him hardhearted. He couldn't tell her it was the waste of money that frightened him.

Now he found his wife in the bathroom, tugging at her tennis skirt instead of getting dressed for work. He had to remind himself it was Saturday. Camille made educational videos for the public school system, and Warren often felt guilty for not taking it as seriously as she did. It was her goodness—her belief in higher rewards than money—that he'd always been attracted to.

“Where did Jonas get orange socks?” he asked, watching her put on some lipstick.

“He picked them out at Nordstrom's,” Camille said.

“You bought them for him?”

“How was I supposed to know he'd dress up like that?”

Warren sat on the bed to untie his sneakers. “Given the choice between a slow kid and a genius who dresses like a carrot, I might have chosen the former.”

“Any word from the police?” she asked.

“What?”

“About the Chrysler! Did they learn anything?”

Warren shook his head. “Probably scattered all over the state by now,” he said.

Thankfully, Camille didn't seem to question this and began dabbing her lips with a Kleenex. A little pink T, like a cat's nose, stained the middle. She was still lovely: blond hair and the sort of wholesome, cheerleadery face, freckled and wide-eyed and slightly bucktoothed, that caused people to smile at her from their cars. She was a Midwesterner in the way Blackbeard was a pirate: iconic to the species. Even when she was angry at Warren she seemed hopelessly preppy, her face a cardigan pink. He wanted to tell her that his project in the desert—for which he'd sacrificed everything, his family's own future—was a disaster. Everything they had was in peril. If she knew, they could face down the debt collectors—the angry phone calls and investors—together. It would be like before they were married, when Warren was in law school in Chicago and they were living in a run-down studio in Rogers Park, so poor they'd been forced to eat a moose Camille's brother had shot in Michigan. They'd survived on ground moose meat all winter, using Hamburger Helper to mask the flavor. Moose Helper, they'd called it, laughing at the TV commercials they'd thought up as a joke.

Warren got up from the bed and kissed Camille's neck, holding the faint bulges that had recently formed at her waist. She turned around in surprise.

“Camille . . .”

The surprise on her face melted to concern. “What is it?”

“There's something . . .”

He couldn't meet her eyes. Last week, making love, she'd said something to him strange and terrible, a confession of despair.
I want to die.
Through the bedroom window, he could see Dustin waxing his surfboard in the backyard, kneeling on the lawn while Jonas practiced his fencing moves. The sun had broken through the mist, lighting the persimmon tree near the garden into a blaze of orange fruit. Beneath it, lunging in the sunlight, his fruit-colored son looked weirdly beautiful.

“Mr. Leonard,” Warren said quietly. “Maybe it's time we had him looked at.”

Lyle's mother had to drive her to work, a universe of suck, because her dad's car had been stolen from the driveway and he'd had to borrow Lyle's Renault, which despite having the words “Le Car” stencilled on the door in bubble letters was infinitely less embarrassing than riding with her mom. They drove through the hills of Herradura Estates, slow as a hearse. An anemic-looking cyclist overtook them on John's Canyon Road. Lyle slid down in her seat. There were several things that embarrassed her about her mother's Volvo: (1) it had her mother in it; (2) there was a Post-it note on the steering wheel that said
RECYCLE BOTTLES
; (3) the stereo was typically playing something called “Come, Ye Makers of Song”; (4) they were often mistaken for people with special needs
,
because her mom insisted on signaling before pulling into a parking space. Worst of all were the slogans plastered all over the back bumper:
NO APARTHEID, KEEP YOUR LAWS OFF MY BODY, GOOD PLANETS ARE HARD TO FIND,
and the more bluntly confessional
I BRAKE FOR SPOTTED OWLS
. (Dustin wanted to replace it with
I DON'T NEED TO BRAKE, BECAUSE I'M BARELY MOVING
.) Last week her mom had added
COMMIT RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS
, which to Lyle perfectly summed up her psychotic brand of cheerfulness.

There was someone jogging on the wood-chipped trail that ran along the road. Jennifer Boone, a senior at Palos Verdes High who lived down the street. Lyle slid even lower in her seat. Her mother honked as they passed, which caused Jennifer to startle like a deer and veer dangerously toward the bushes.

“I can't believe Dad's car got stolen,” Lyle said sullenly, hoping her mom was unrecognizable in tennis clothes. She was wear
ing a pink Izod, a skirt fringed with Lilliputian pom-poms, and a see-through visor that made her look like a bank teller from
Bonanza.
“Isn't that why we live in a gated community? To prevent theft?”

“This isn't a gated community, honey. It's an equestrian village.”

“There are gates, right? They go up and down?”

“That's for the horses,” her mother said. “Otherwise people would drive through all day and scare them.”

Lyle squinted at her mom, wondering if she really believed they lived on a dude ranch in the suburban hills of L.A. An intriguing theory, since it might explain the visor. Lyle would not have been surprised if the horseback riders who occasionally ambled by their house were stooges brought in by Herradura Estates. She couldn't help being impressed by the marketing genius involved—just paint some horse crossings on the street, call yourself an “equestrian village,” and rich people came running.

“This is all Dad's fault for moving us out here,” she said. “The car getting stolen.”

“In Nashotah, you always complained about how boring it was. I seem to remember you saying you couldn't wait to leave.”

“Anyway, the guards don't do jack. They're rent-a-cops. All you have to do is give the name of a resident.”

Her mom sighed, checking the rearview mirror. “Do you really have to be
so
negative? As long as people believe it, what does it matter?”

It mattered deeply. Lyle's mother, of course, was one of the deceived. She read books with “healing” or “mindfulness” in the title. She went on check-writing sprees to save various birds of prey. Once she'd bought a newborn calf for a poor farmer in Mali and was shocked to receive a picture in the mail one day, a wordless thank-you, showing the meat drying in lurid strips from the farmer's roof. She'd rushed to the bathroom in tears.
He's starving to death!
Lyle wanted to shout.
Of course he's going to eat it!
Most infuriating of all was her mother's optimism: whenever Lyle said she disliked someone, her mom looked at her with her eyebrows pinched into a V, head cocked to one side as if she were draining an ear. “You don't really hate that person,” she'd say. “You just have different values.”

But Lyle
did
hate people. Hating people was one of her biggest
hobbies. Just last night, in fact, she'd started a list of things she despised:

1. People who call old women “cute”
   
2. People who talk about dead relatives as if they're happier now
   
3. Anyone who refers to herself as a “chocoholic”
   
4. DBCs (Dumbshits in Baseball Caps)
   
5. The adjective “hot” for anything except weather
   
6. People who use the term “110%”
   
7. Song titles with numbers in place of words
   
8. People who own Smiths records and don't know the lead singer is gay
   
9. Volleyball
   
10. Convertibles
    
11. Bob Marley
    
12. Anyone who uses the word “ganja”
    
13. Dogs small enough that they shiver when they take a dump
    
14. People who look at you funny when you use the word “ingratiate”
    
15. People who order in Spanish at Mexican restaurants (Mom)
    
16. People who say “Decisions, decisions” when looking at a menu
    
17. Bathroom graffiti that rhymes (“Wine me, dine me, 69 me”)
    
18. The Beach Boys
    
19. People who check their car for scratches before getting in
    
20. People who refer to little boys as “boss” or “chief”
    
21. Anyone who says the sentence: “And WHO do we have here?”
    
22. Volleyball (x2)
    
23. CALIFORNIA
    

This last one she'd written in big letters and retraced again and again until the letters engraved several pages of her journal, fading gradually like a wound. She detested it, this land of Jeeps and joggers. The Golden State. What kind of stupid nickname was that? Perhaps it wasn't supposed to describe the place itself so much as a fascist condition. If you weren't golden, you had no right to exist. Lyle used to go to the beach when they first moved here, hoping she might get a tan like the Audras and Stephanies in her
class, her skin turning brown and luscious. She lay in a deserted corner of the beach, sweating and miserable, terrified someone from school would see her and notice how pale she was. A circus freak: the Whitest Girl in California. She was determined to stay until she looked like the other girls, the ones with butterflies of sand stuck to their asses, running into the waves and twirling around with a squeal. Instead she burned herself so miserably she couldn't sleep. Her skin blistered and peeled off like Saran Wrap, leaving her whiter than before. After a month of suffering, she realized it was hopeless and gave up completely.

She'd been bored in Wisconsin, bored living on the same puny lake her whole life, but at least she hadn't felt like a freak of nature. She hadn't cried herself to sleep because some DBC had called her Vampira at school.

On their way out of Herradura Estates, Lyle's mother pulled up to the guardhouse and its red-striped gate, which lifted magically as they approached. She brought the car to a stop in order to say hello to Hector, the new gatekeeper. Lyle waited with mounting dread as her mother rolled down the window. Please don't speak Spanish, she thought. Please don't please don't please don't please don't please don't.

“Hola,”
her mother said in a cheerful voice.
“Cómo estas?”

“Bien, bien,”
Hector said, smiling through his mustache. He looked vaguely amused, as though doing his best to conceal the fact that he spoke perfect English.
“Y usted?”

“
Nosotros estamos yendo a la
shopping mall.” Her mother actually said “shopping mall” in a Spanish accent.

Hector cupped his ear.
“A donde?”

“The mall,” Lyle's mother said. “The Perfect Scoop. For my daughter's job
. Ella vende helado.
”

Hector ducked down and smiled at Lyle in the passenger seat, as though she were six years old. She felt like flashing him her tits.
“Que bueno.”

“
Le gustan los libros. Siempre.
How do you say it? A worm.”

Lyle's mother stuck her finger out the window and began to wiggle it around. Hector squinted at it from the guardhouse.

“She still goes to work?” he said finally, looking concerned.

“Claro que si!”
her mother said, smiling.

She said good-bye and Hector relaxed back into his chair, believing no doubt that Lyle had worms. Lyle wanted to murder
her mother. She would strangle her slowly and then dump her out of the car and drive to New York, where she'd never have to wear shorts and where it was okay—sophisticated even—not to be tan. She'd never actually been to New York, but she was sure that paleness was a sign of cachet. Certainly there was no volleyball. If you tried to play volleyball in New York, people would throw things at you from the street. They would stone you with cigarettes and umbrellas.

At the mall, Lyle's mother dropped her off at The Perfect Scoop Ice Cream Parlor and then drove off to commit more random acts of Spanish. Lyle was surprised to find Shannon Jarrell already inside the store, sitting with her legs crossed by the tower of plastic tables and reading a
People
magazine. Shannon's being there on time was a miracle of Newtonian physics, but she lifted her eyes casually, as if it were an everyday occurrence. “Hey.”

“How did you get in?” Lyle asked.

Shannon looked back at her magazine. “Jared. He gave me the keys.”

Jared was the manager, who had a crush on Shannon and was always staring at her ass. Today she was wearing cutoff jeans to show off her tan, a direct violation of the company dress code. Her legs were long and slender and glowed like hot dogs. She'd rolled the sleeves of her Perfect Scoop T-shirt over her shoulders, which had the same Oscar Mayer tan. A flip-flop dangled insolently from one foot.