What Happened to Lani Garver (11 page)

Message from God: Don't wish for good luck.

I froze in terror, and some thought shot up to the heavens that I hadn't meant anyone should have bad luck just so I could have good luck.

Before I could scream, the fog opened more and I saw only the top of the head on the person carrying Macy. It was even more wet and dripping drops down through her hair. I realized she was kissing the face underneath it.

Tony Clementi was swatting her foot and saying, "Told ya nothin' would happen."

I trudged up to the bus terminal the next morning, trying not to limp from my bruised hipbone, but the pain made my eyes water. I was still very sure I would not go with Lani. But the bruise where I rolled with Tony was huge. My heart had fallen through the floor when I saw it that morning.
Leukemia bruise.
It scared me enough to make me go to the bus station, hoping for something to overcome my fears about going.

It would have to be miraculous, because the whole concept of this trip was freaking me out. I was getting on my first bus
and
cutting school. My mom had gotten stuck next to a drunken horn-toad on a bus trip to the casinos once. She forbid me to ever get on a bus. If we got caught, I'd hear from all four of my mother's sisters, who would want to know what drugs I was on. Beyond that, Lani had talked about being able to get answers right away at a research clinic, and I was freaked by how fast my life could come crashing down.

I saw him first thing when I came up to the Hackett bus terminal. It's just a huge tin roof on steel legs, with four benches underneath. He sat on a bench, staring off to the side at a Greyhound pulling out. Its sign read,
NEW YORK CITY/ATLANTIC CITY
.

He looked funny to me again—hair of a girl; shoulders of a guy; hands of a girl, folded across the chest of a guy; crossed, skinny legs dangling army boots. It seemed strange that all these mismatched parts could be topped off with rosy, Indian-like skin and deep chocolate eyes. The sight stopped me cold, but I trudged on after a minute.

Lani finally looked at me, and I could see his eyebrows shoot up. He shook his head, giving me a "dad" look, despite his dimples showing up.

"Don't pass judgment." I eased myself down beside him.

"Okay. But, uhm, your bangs are standing straight up in three spots. Looks like a crown."

I could read amusement on his face as I tried to flatten them for the tenth time since last night. "It's a butterfly bandage that's caught in my bangs," I said, feeling humiliated.

"Have some fun last night?"

"I ...
yeah.
It was fun. Nothing happened. To anyone except me. I'm the bad-luck queen. I ... uhm..."

I looked for the words to tell him I was too freaked out—I wanted to go home and crash out on my bed as soon as my mom left for work. He was staring at that Atlantic City bus for all he was worth. It pulled onto Hackett Boulevard. He let out a sigh, like he was relieved.

"A few people on that bus just got off to use the soda machine, take a potty break. I saw some guy I hadn't seen in ... a lot of years."

There was an urgency in his voice that made me stare. "Old friend?"

"Not exactly. It was some guy from one of the schools I used to go to. He was, like, three years older than me. Can I ask you something? Did you know what
oral sex
was in eighth grade?"

He leaned over and almost whispered the
oral sex
part. I could feel my eyebrows shooting up, scrunching my butterfly. His face turned kind of red, like he was embarrassed by the terminology.

"Yeah. Didn't you?"

He shook his head.

I had to laugh in spite of myself. "Everyone knows that by eighth grade."

Then I remembered him telling me how he avoided the street corners and locker rooms and spent more time in the library. I looked him up and down, thinking,
How in hell could somebody understand the theory of relativity but not know about oral sex?

"Anyway, the guy who told me what oral sex was just got off that bus for a minute. I really, really wish I hadn't seen him. He used to flip out on me in the school yard, you know,
'You're gay, you stupid faggot,'
and then if he saw me alone, he'd try to get me to do stuff with him."

"You mean like..." I wanted to say
sex,
but the story had me kind of rooted to the spot. I didn't have to say it.

"Like
yeah,
like
stuff.
" Lani took in the ceiling for a moment. "And he had all these words for it that I'd never heard of. I had never even heard of oral sex."

"So ... the same guy who called you a faggot in public came on to you in private?" I tried not to sound too interested, but this was far juicier than anything Macy had ever come up with.

Lani stood up, but I just froze in my seat, not wanting him to change the subject. He was filling in my junior high knowledge holes big-time.

He nodded. "And, one day, all of a sudden, I heard a voice behind me. I never even turned around. But I knew his voice. And right there in the library he gives me this, this endless blow-by-blow description ... Sorry about the pun."

I might have laughed, but this hypnotized me. "He
did
come on to you."

"For sure. I was so ready to puke." He crossed his arms, rubbing them.

"Did you say anything to him just now?"

"He got off the bus with some girl. Our eyes locked, and you could tell he remembered me and was, like, ready to die. He was all scared I would do something in front of this girl to let on about his dirty little secrets. I just looked away again. I mean, I could have winked or smiled or something just to be a jerk—but what's the point? People create their own little hells. They don't need my help."

He leaned back against the side of the bench, staring wide-eyed at the floor. "I walked out of the library, and two months later, I walked out of Shinoquin."

"Shinoquin?"

"The little town we were living in. Stuff like that happened all too often in Shinoquin. It's a lot like Hackett, only replace fishermen with coal miners. I'm really glad we're going to Philly today, Claire. I had forgotten how little towns can make me feel so ...
out there,
and freakish and lonely. I need a break already. we're killing two birds with one stone here. Funny how things can work out, you know?"

Lani started trudging toward the bus pulling in, without waiting for me to answer. I opened my mouth, but a muttered curse rolled out instead of an argument.
What kind of a bitch would I be to back out now?

He half turned to wait for me but looked lost in his own thought. "So, my looks make strange people feel like they want to proposition me. So what? If it gets on my nerves, too bad. I can always move on."

"Yeah, but what is up with people who proposition you one minute and gay bash on you the next? That's too weird."

"Yeah." He meandered slowly toward the bus and I fell in. He said, "But that's one thing I love about the cities. It's becoming almost taboo in the cities to gay bash. Because if some guy gay bashes, people there get suspicious that he is ... how can I say it ... a closet gay? Or ... a person who has those tendencies subconsciously? Something like that."

The whole scenario was pretty juicy. So juicy that I missed the fact that he'd just hinted he could run away again. It went right over my head. I asked, "You've been propositioned more than once?"

He snorted a laugh. "l forget how naive most people are. Stay that way, Claire. It's cool."

"No, it's not cool. It's getting old. My friends always laugh at me." I shook my head, embarrassed by my curiosity but more embarrassed by how none of this made sense to me. "We're talking about a guy with a girl, who propositioned
you
once, and then called you a faggot. What
is
a person like that?"

"Do you mean, is there a clinical name for someone like that?"

"Well ... yeah."

"Dunno. I think they call it 'hypocritical.'"

He got on the bus, leaving me at the foot of the steps, entranced ...
homophobic homo ... gay gay basher...
It didn't bother him there was nothing to call a person like that. Yet, the way he told it, this thing happened to him more than once. I thought maybe I could get wonderfully caught up on my education if I got on this bus.

Yet, I was still freaked. I put one foot on the step, and it felt like walking into the gas chamber. My supposed leukemia bruise screamed. I think the fire that shot up to my head scared me just enough to make me do the right thing. It gets hard playing the denial role when your body keeps kicking you in the brains. I took a deep breath and forced myself up the steps.

I plopped down beside Lani in silence, watching, wide-eyed, as the bus pulled out. I needed to think about something other than me. So I drove the conversation around quickly to where we'd been outside. "So ... did you ever ... like anyone?"

"Romantically?"

"Yeah." I was careful not to say girl or boy. I know that sounds funny. I mean, it was all but a no-brainer. But he hadn't actually ever said he was gay. He said other people had called him that.

He kind of laughed. "I like being alone."

"Well ... that's not normal," I argued. I'd heard people say, all haughty, "I don't want to be with anyone right now," but that always changed the first time somebody halfway decent showed any interest. I wanted to tell him that, but it occurred to me that maybe he'd been grabbed or molested a few times, what with all this propositioning going on. Maybe it left him kind of messed up about romance.

The best I could come up with at the moment was "D'you ever think of another haircut? Not to be mean, or anything, but—"

"—but don't I bring a lot of my problems on myself?"

"Well..."

He shook his head, then nodded, then shook his head again. "I don't know. How do you
not
be yourself? One of my earliest memories is having a Barbie in my hand. I think a haircut would be like ... I don't know ... like using a Band-Aid on someone who'd been gored by a rhino."

I laughed, mostly because he was laughing, but there was a sadness in his face. I took up one of his hands and squeezed it, as much for him as for the fact that I could use some comfort myself.

He turned sideways in the seat, leaning his cheek against the backrest, and grinned at me sleepily. "I don't like to talk about my life very much. It's so ... rad. If you don't mind, I'm done."

I nodded, feeling like a pry queen all of a sudden. "You brought it up."

"I know. But you need to go to the clinic and face the music. I just wanted to make sure you got on the bus."

I watched him smile at me victoriously. I didn't want to smile back, because I was too busy thinking,
Smart, smart bugger...
But his smile beamed so easily. It looked strong, yet in an innocent way. I wasn't used to being with people who seemed strong.

"I hate you," I said, but we ended up grinning together.

I dropped off to sleep to escape my bruises. I dreamed that I was arguing with my dad, that he was trying to get me to stay with him while doing chemo again.

His new wife, Suhar, stood beside him, twirling her wedding ring without meeting my eyes. Her blond hair flowed down her back, and her eyes glowed with their usual sweetness. But when I looked down at her wedding ring, it was cutting into her skin like it had a razor edge. Blood ran over her palm, her wrist...

I woke up with a jolt. Lani had fallen asleep in a strange position—with his back almost completely to me, and his forehead pushed into the glass. It looked so ... symbolic—people wanting to be helpful, yet turning their backs.

I tried to ignore his position and think through the spiderweb of my own problems. My stomach sank low, as if a relapse was already confirmed and I was having to make impossible choices, based on impossible memories.

Starting a new school while I was on chemo last time had seemed crazy. It seemed crazier now. Last time, I had been put on the homeschooling network, and my dad had hired a tutor who came every day, but only between noon and two. There were no kids in my dad's building. I only stayed in the hospital once, for a week. A head cold had turned into pneumonia, so I had to stay in an isolation ward. In other words, I had not been exposed to many kids with my illness—very few kids at all during that whole time.

The guitar was what kept me sane. My dad had kept a game going when I felt good enough. Before he would go to his teaching job at University of the Arts, he would record some acoustic stuff for me. I was sure I could never learn anything that difficult. He would say, "Come on, it's easier than it looks." It was never easy, but it wasn't impossible, and the stuff was so pretty you couldn't stay away from it.

All day long, I would sit there trying to get my fingers working like his had. When I got tired, I would fall asleep with that guitar under my arm, then wake up and try some more.

I would complain to my dad about finding new definitions to
lonely
and
feeling like crap.
He would tell me, "There are times in life to grow, and there are times in life to shine. One can't grow and shine at the same time; it just doesn't work that way. Now you're growing. Tomorrow you'll shine."

I was always
Aw, bull,
and it was kind of comforting to get back with my mom at the end, who understood the importance of having fun
now,
before you get too old or too socially retarded.

I supposed I "shined" from learning all that guitar playing, if you can call a gig in a glorified island bakery during the off-season months "shining." Definitely, it was not worth losing most of junior high. And since I wasn't about to go through another year of staring at walls and a guitar ... the other option was I could stay with my mom—and probably send her into cardiac arrest this time.

Her life had revolved around me and my friends and my parties, even before she and my dad split up, when I was four. My friends said she was the most fun of all the moms. Grownups agreed. In her senior yearbook from Coast, she was voted Person Most Likely to Party, and islanders kept feeding off her energy even after some of them got married and had kids, after she and my dad split up. I saw her "get happy" many Saturday nights when I was a kid. But she always made other people happy, too—and me happy. It was a trip being with her at a party. I was real proud that my laughing, popular mom was all mine.