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and wiggled it like a worm. She laughed.
    â€œI was wondering if I could get some ice cream.”
    â€œSorry. We only sell corn dogs.”
    He seemed flustered. “I mean, I’d like to get an ice cream cone.”
    â€œNever 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?”
    â€œI’ve never tried it.”
    â€œHere. 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.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œYou’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 glittering specks, like snow. Gravely, he asked if he could have her phone number.
    â€œYours,” 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.

CHAPTER 3
    â€œHow about the Turpitudes?” Biesty said.
    â€œWhat the hell does that mean?” Tarwater asked.
    â€œMy 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