What Happened to Lani Garver (25 page)

"Then play something somebody else wrote."

I can crack the knuckles on my right hand without using my left hand. I eyed him as I cracked, actually tempted to spew some basement lyrics, for what purpose, I didn't know. Except that this was starting to seem like a place to be honest.

"Play anything you want," he said.

Truth was, I didn't want to play any basement lyrics. I didn't want to think about girls victimizing themselves. I wanted to kick somebody's foul ass. I just didn't know whose.

I broke into "Classical Gas," Mason Williams, because it kicks butt, and because the challenge of working out that classical mess on twelve strings gave my keyed-up anger something to light into. The guitar totally worked like my six-string, only it sounded like six guitars. My dad taught me to play guitar while watching the ceiling instead of my fingers. He had said that your feelings work better than your eyes, and you get good faster that way.

So I was scrunched down, and I laid my head on the back of the chair, which would partially explain why I missed all this blood splattering over the mouth of the guitar. I figured I had gotten some blister on top of my calluses that stung like a bitch. I totally forgot about running my thumb through with a plastic fork the day Lani first showed up in the cafeteria.

I finished, put my thumb to my mouth, and tasted blood. Ellen had crawled off the couch and was sitting on the floor in front of Erdman's desk, watching. Their jaws kind of hung, and their eyes went back and forth from me to the guitar. I was afraid to look down.

I just stuck my bloody thumb out to him. "I forgot to show you this cut, back when I was showing you my stitches and ... everything else."

"Do you have any idea how proficient you are on that instrument?" he asked.

I looked down finally. It wasn't too bloody. The six bass strings were shiny red, and a few drops had splattered below the mouth, creating a small stream. I licked my pinky and tried to wipe the mess up fast.

"My dad says I'm pretty good for my age."

"So, your father taught you?"

"He taught me some. But we fight too much. Too much alike."

"Then who taught you?"

I never knew what to say when people asked me that. I let the long silence speak for itself. And since we were all telling the truth today, I added, "Pretty damn scary, isn't it?"

After a minute he sat up slowly and searched through his Rolodex. Ellen broke out of her freeze, fell on her side, and started laughing again. I watched Erdman toe at her under the desk, saying, "Ellen. I think we determined you should not take life so seriously, but I'm afraid I'm creating a monster ... Would you like to be in a rock 'n' roll band? One that actually finds decent-paying work around here some weekends? Some University of the Arts guys, with some older?"

I thought he was talking to Ellen. But he held this little card out to me.

Ellen and I walked down South Street, gazing into store windows. I would catch her reflection in the glass, watching me as much as the stuff. She was smiling.

Finally she spoke up. "So how do you feel about jamming with those University of the Arts guys?"

"I'm still in shock. Give me a few more minutes." I glanced down at the thirty dollars in my hand that my dad laid on me as we left Erdman's office a few minutes before. Ellen and I were supposed to be going shopping, but I barely even knew what I was looking at in these windows. At the moment, it was bizarre jeweled platform shoes. I shuddered.

She giggled. "You're not getting with them till tonight. So if you're going to jump for joy like a high school kid, do it beforehand. And, uhm ... lose the jacket, maybe?"

I stared at a window reflection of my bright green-and-white cheerleading jacket that read erialc. I tied it around my waist, turning the
COAST CHEERLEADING
lettering in to face my butt. Fortunately, the warm weather had gotten just plain hot. I felt great in my T-shirt.

"I should look for something to wear down here. Though I didn't bring much money to add to what my dad just—"

"We can go shopping if you want, just don't look like you're trying to impress them. They won't be trying to impress you."

I stuffed the bills down in my jeans pocket, along with the twenty I had of my own, and cracked up. "I'm dreaming this whole thing. It's like, too good to be true. There's got to be a catch. D'you know these guys?"

She shook her head. "No, but if they're from the University of the Arts, they're definitely good."

"I mean, will they be, like, covered with body piercings and stuff?"

"Probably." She snorted out a laugh like I was some kind of silly. "You talked to that one on Erdman's phone. Did he sound all strung out?"

"No. Jason French." I looked at the guy's name on the card. "He was really nice. I kept getting scared he was going to ask my age. Erdman never told him that part."

"So, don't ask, don't tell."

I shook my head, sighing and laughing. "Sorry. I'm just having ... brain overload, here. How do you think Erdman knows the guys in the band? I didn't even ask. Maybe half of them are, like, creatures crawling in and out of his office every week."

Her smile wandered away, and I started apologizing left and right, but it was kind of late. "Did Lani mention to you that I always have my foot in my mouth? They're called dumb-stupid-Claire remarks. I didn't mean anything by that, Ellen. I think you're really together, like, so comfortable with yourself and all. I'm just overloading."

She pulled me along down South Street, shrugging. "You have to stop thinking of people in therapy as the losers. Probably ninety percent of the population would profit by some 'tweaking.' Only about three percent either bites enough dust or swallows enough pride to get it. You're ahead of the herd."

"Brain overload ... serious brain overload..."

Her cell phone rang, and she pulled it from her pocket and looked at the number. "It's Lani."

I waved my hands a little, begging.

"Hey. Wassup? ... She's not here ... No, she's not ... Would I lie to you? ... Hold on."

She put her hand over the receiver. "What's up? Are you still freaked out about the first conversation we had this morning?"

I had called her about the angel costume, like Lani had asked. She had told me, yes, Abby's mom had sent him the costume along with the book. Then I had told her about the conversation I'd had with Lani—especially the part where he said he enjoyed wearing the stupid nightgowns. We had talked for half an hour about the definition of a drag queen before Erdman and this appointment even came up.

I rolled my eyes, motioning with my hands like
magnanimous headache.

"Your little cross-dressing episodes have given her a migraine," Ellen said into the phone, to my horror. But then she grabbed hold of my arm, shaking it a little while talking. "Hey. I can't blame her. If it weren't for my parents' divorce, I'd still be shucking clams in the summers in southern Connecticut. You don't find too many guys out that way who will go onstage in three nightgowns. Yes, darling, I know you were acting-not-cross-dressing. But I have video footage of you backstage, twirling in that thing ... Yes,
twirling,
like a girl. Even Cooper was starting to bitch ... So, what's up? Did you find the stupid things, or what?"

Long silence. She stopped walking. Her eyes floated over to me. "She was talking about a Macy today in the session with Erdman ... Yeah, she went ... It was fine."

I beckoned with my fingers for her to give me the phone. She started going, "
Ew
... the girl did
what?
... Welcome to the islands, post–Labor Day. Did I tell you to stay up here with us? Somebody's parents would have put you up—"

I snatched the phone away from her. "What did Macy do?"

I thought he might give me a ration of crap for trying to avoid him, but he just ignored Ellen's first lie about me not being here. "I just did what you said, and went over to Sydney's once the morning crowd cleared out. She said she only saw two of your friends this morning ... Macy and the one with the straight blond hair—"

"Eli."

"Yeah. They told Sydney they came to pick up your mom's doughnuts."

"My mom gets a dozen doughnuts from Sydney every Saturday, eats five or six, and throws the rest out on Sunday if no one shows up to help eat them," I explained our family ritual with a groan. "Guess my mom and Macy have been talking, as usual.
Feeding
off each other."

"Sydney had gotten your message last night about getting that guitar player from the mainland to fill in for you, so she knew you weren't around. She said Macy was trying to give her a ration of grief about you not working tonight. Macy said you weren't really sick, you were just losing it. And you were being really irresponsible to not work."

"Wow!" I felt that knife cut through my back. "She told Sydney I was irresponsible? You would not believe how many times Macy has tried to get me to blow off work. It breaks Saturday nights in half, and I can't cruise around for a couple hours."

"Sydney stuck up for you. I think she knows what's up—maybe you're outgrowing these people, and it was bound to come to a head. She told Macy to give you some breathing room—in other words, mind her own business—and maybe you just needed to get off the island for a while."

"Sydney's way cool."

"Yeah, but Macy was still mad. She told Sydney your mom is ready to kill me."

"Kill
you?
She hasn't even met you! The whole bus thing was my idea—"

"No, no, no.
You're
brainwashed, darling. I brainwashed you to do crazy things like getting on dangerous buses and leaving town."

"Dangerous buses, where silver-haired ladies give you lacy handkerchiefs? To clean up the bloody mess Vince Clementi made of you?" I groaned, remembering all of that. "I bet I know what happened to my mom on that bus the one time she supposedly got molested! I'll bet she'd had a few drinks."

"Maybe. But here's the best part. Sydney said Macy went out front with Eli, and the two of them stood on the sidewalk hollering things at my house."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. I slept right through it." He chirped a good laugh. "They didn't know I was in there. They still think I'm with you. But I asked Sydney if she saw any box on my porch while they were yelling stuff. She said she thought so. But her place had gotten kind of crowded, so she wasn't watching after that."

I shut my eyes, leaning back against a storefront, trying to decide what might have happened next. "I would not normally think of Macy taking a box off somebody's porch. When someone in our crowd gets klepto out at the mall? She gets all disgusted and tells them they're juvenile. But this is a little different ... For one thing, she's so controlling. And she used to be able to control me so well, and I don't think she likes the fact that all of a sudden, that isn't working out."

I paced in a circle, letting myself get sidetracked on an Erdman-inspired thought. "I've loved hanging with Macy, but ... I think it took a while for me to wake up from junior high. I feel like last year, I spent most of the time—" I broke off, looking for the words.

"In a stupor?"

"Yeah. Like that time between when you've been asleep and you're all the way awake. But if that was a stupor, what the hell am I in now? Today, I'm, like..."

"You finally got out of bed and cracked your head on the floor."

"Yeah. That's good, Lani."

"Least you're out of bed. Congrats."

I laughed a little. "At any rate, I really don't know what Macy would do. But you can be sure of this much. If there was a box on your porch, and Macy was out there yelling stuff, she definitely saw it. And she's so bloody curious about everything."

"I kind of got that impression when she came up to me in the school hallway and was having a coronary when I wasn't, uhm,
forthcoming
about my gender." He laughed in that high-pitched way. I guessed he'd known all along why she started talking to him that day. I felt embarrassed, but it was good to hear him laugh.

"What's the worst that can happen?" I shrugged. "She could come over to my house, all haughty, all shoving nightgowns under my nose, and I would tell her it was a costume. That would bring her down a couple notches. Where's the angel book?"

He laughed. "I'm really scared it's gone forever. It was with the costume."

"A shame. We would need that book to prove the nightgowns were meant to be a costume."

"Oh, they wouldn't want to hear that part, anyway." He blew it off, and I got the same sludgy feeling in my gut as with all his awful predictions. "They would just decide they didn't believe it. And there's one more thing, another thing Sydney said. I asked her to be really honest, because I have to know what I'm dealing with here. This place can be kind of dangerous—if you're me. So she laid out the whole conversation for me. According to Macy I
threw
a porn magazine at Vince Clementi last night."

"'
Threw
'?"

"Yeah. Tried to shove it into his pocket, before God and man. It was going
into
his pocket when it showed up, not
coming out.
"

I paced in circles, I don't know for how long. He had predicted this on the bus last night—that by today, my friends would have seen something that hadn't happened, just so life could make sense to them. I finally stumbled out with "You really think Macy totally believes this stuff ... like, she really, really thinks that's what she saw?"

"Either that or she knows she's lying."

I got a shudder that started in my ankles, went all the way up my shoulders. "Either way, she's being totally uh ...
queer!
When I come home, I'm gonna sit her down and talk to her. For once,
I'm
doing the talking, not her. Just try not to worry about her big mouth in the meantime. Okay? You wanna try to get here today? Some excitement."

I told him about the band. "I get to sit in on a session with them tonight. Erdman says if it gels, I might get to do some weekend gigs with them. They call themselves Calcutta."