Model Home by Eric Puchner

animals with human feet. A few of them were very good artists. Above the couch, on the far side of the room, someone had written MANDY ROGERS PHONE HOME . Dustin followed Biesty into the party, impressed by the general ugliness of the guests. In particular, he was impressed by the girls, who looked like refugees from a nursing home. They wore granny glasses and cardigans and witchy striped stockings pulled up to their knees. He found them sexy in a way he couldn’texplain. Contributing to this ugliness was the music, a swarm of noise and backward lyrics that made the Stooges seem like Donny and Marie.
    There was a dead lobster in the middle of the floor. Dustin wondered if the music had killed it. The lobster appeared to move, infinitesimally, and he realized it was engaged in a catatonic crawl. Saddled to its back, like a rodeo rider, was a naked GI Joe, one arm raised in the air.
    â€œWhat’s this music?” Dustin asked loudly.
    â€œButthole Surfers, I think.”
    â€œWow.” He’d never heard them before, but the name had always filled him with a vague sense of awe. He felt weirdly like his father.
    â€œI was hoping we’d get to sledgehammer some walls,” Biesty said, depressed. “Something more aerobic.”
    Dustin nodded, though actually he liked the party better the way it was. Like some wonderfully deranged kindergarten.
    Biesty perked up when he spied a girl in leopard-print creepers smoking by herself in the corner, the scorched, caramelly smell of hash drifting from her direction. He sniffed his armpits and went over to greet her. Dustin roamed off to see if he could find something to drink. He bumped through a knot of skinheads with homemade tattoos, asking them if they knew where the beer was. They paid no attention to him. He found this keenly attractive. He wandered into the kitchen, which was stripped of belongings except for a tower of boxes beside the refrigerator. Leaning against the wall was a poster-sized chart showing a black couple with Afros illustrating different sexual positions. It struck Dustin as racist, but then he decided he might not be hip enough to appreciate its irony. It was easy to be liked, but it had never made anyone famous.
    He nodded at a group of people sitting across the room. One of them—a wasted-looking girl racooned in black eyeliner—seemed to have a wire sticking out of her mouth. She had her head against the wall, as if she were asleep. Sitting beside her was a boy in a plaid shirt with the sleeves cut off, his arm thrown around a beautiful girl in a cowboy hat. The boy was wearing a dog tag around his neck. Dustin recognized immediately, the way you might see your own face in a dream, that he’d always wanted to be like him. The boy oozed the sort of coolness—predatory and smoke-wreathed and as physical as breath—Dustin only felt in the garage with his guitar.
    â€œIt’s deep in the night and I’m lost in love,” the girl with the wire sticking from her mouth said.
    â€œPay no attention,” the boy said. “She only speaks rock and roll.”
    He introduced himself to Dustin, explaining with a straight face that his name was Breakfast. The way he said the word made it seem like the coolest name in the world. “And this sorry husk of a girl is Suzie, evictee.”
    â€œWhat’s up with the wire?” Dustin asked.
    â€œYou’ll have to ask Miss Orthodontist over here.”
    â€œIt was her idea,” the girl in the cowboy hat said. “She’s all, ‘Take them off! Right now!’ Then I bring out the pliers and she’s like, ‘Oooh, quit it, you’re hurting me.’”
    â€œNow I’m gonna be twenty-two,” Suzie said. “Oh my, and a boo-hoo.”
    The girl in the cowboy hat scowled. “She’s getting on my nerves.”
    â€œYeah, Suze. Shut up or we’ll rape you.”
    â€œGoody gumdrops,” Suzie said.
    The other