The Decoding of Lana Morris (3 page)

It’s as if Veronica hears the thought, because she smiles and says, “Whit can’t keep secrets from me any better than you can.”

This is a typical Veronica exit line, and the screen door flaps closed behind her.

“F.U. squared,” Lana says under her breath, and Tilly, who’s been through this drill before, says in her happy, thick voice, “F.U. cubed!”

This produces laughs from both of them, and afterward, when it’s quiet and Lana looks over at Tilly, she sees something surprising. Tilly is gazing sedately out, calm and still. From this particular angle and in this particular light, she looks pretty and normal-seeming, and Lana has the eerie feeling that she’s being given a glimpse of the
other Tilly, the Tilly that would’ve been here today if there just hadn’t been the genetic bungle.

And then, abruptly, Tilly’s head cocks. “I hear something, Lana. Do you hear something, Lana?”

Lana does. It’s a car without a muffler, a car Lana has ridden in before and hopes to ride in again.

T
he emerald green LeSabre turning the corner and coming this way is old, enormous, and belongs to a slackly handsome boy named K.C., who at Two Rivers High is the magnet around which kids of a certain type collect. It’s the type Lana has always been: not normal enough to have kids over after school, not hip or competent or confident enough for cheerleading, sports, or student government. She could tell these kids at a glance, the ones whose parents had died or gone to drugs or just plain cut and run, but in Two Rivers, when it came to weirdness, Lana is in a league of her own: she is the one who lives in a foster home for retards.

As he rolls up to Chet’s house next door, K.C. leans on the LeSabre’s horn, which has been tricked out for exceptional loudness.

Lana says, “There’s Chet’s eleven a.m. wake-up call,” which might’ve gotten her a laugh in quicker company, but all Tilly says is, “I like Chet, Lana. Yes, sir.”

“Chet’s okay,” Lana says.
Okay,
in her mind, is a term that slides on a loose line between bad and not so bad. Chet is a lank, straw-haired boy whose looks aren’t helped by the dark bulbous mole tucked into the side fold of his
nose. Last night, around two, when she went down the hall to pee, Lana looked out the hall window and saw that Chet’s light was still on. Through the open windows of his upstairs room she could see him pacing, wearing earphones, and talking, or singing along, or something, because his mouth was moving. Now, though, the blinds to the two windows are shut tight. Sleeping.

This isn’t the first time she’s noticed Chet’s pattern of staying up late and snoozing till noon. “What do you do up there in the middle of the night anyhow?” she asked him one afternoon.

Chet had given her one of his distant grins and said, “What goes on in Chet’s room is between Chet and his larger public,” which didn’t take Lana far in terms of explanation, so she said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Chet’s gaze had drifted to the far reaches. “Chetteroids mean what we mean,” he said, “but … we don’t always dot our
i
’s.”

Lana had looked exaggeratedly around and said, “You talking to me or to aliens hiding in nearby trees?”

Chet’s eyes widened for a moment, and then he’d begun nodding lazily and chuckling to himself. “That’s it, all right, in and out of the nutshell. The Chetster’s talking to aliens hiding in nearby trees.”

At which point Lana had left him to his own amusements.

K.C. leans again on the megahorn. His girlfriend, Trina, is sitting sideways on the front seat with her back against the passenger door. Trina has dyed red hair that she wears with bangs that make a perfectly straight line across
her forehead. She goes in big for jewelry: rings for her ears, nose, toes, and fingers and brightly colored fake jewel necklaces that draw attention to her cleavage and creamy white skin. (“You have to admit,” Chet once said of Trina to Lana, “her breasts
are
majestic.” To which Lana responded that she didn’t have to admit anything.) When Lana first enrolled at Two Rivers High, Trina was so obviously the queen of the outsiders that Lana expected—hoped for—kinship. For a while, Lana even tried big jewelry, but the only thing Trina ever said to her was, “I have a cousin who was raped by a retard. I’d be scared shitless if I was you.”

Poking up behind Trina and K.C. is somebody else’s head. Probably Spink, is Lana’s guess, based on the gelled, vertical do. He’d dyed it white a while back and now, with the brown roots growing out, the stiffened hair looks like porcupine quills.

Next door, the blinds on the upstairs window go up and Chet pops his head out to say he’ll be right down. He’s been asleep, all right—his hair is sticking up in ways even more than normally weird.

Lana folds her tablet closed and hands it to Tilly. “Stay here,” she says. “I’m gonna check this out.”

As she approaches the car, she sees that Trina has her ringed toes in K.C.’s lap, her knees bent so her short skirt has nowhere to go but up. Spink is on the far side of the backseat staring out through the slits of his bulgy, half-closed eyes. Nobody even looks at Lana, and Lana doesn’t ask any questions because she knows they won’t answer her. They have a policy.

K.C. leans on the horn one more time (it really is
loud—Lana would cover her ears if it weren’t such a nerdy move), and Chet comes out in an unbuttoned shirt carrying his comb and smokes and wallet in his hands. He passes on Lana’s right, so she gets a good view of the mole ballooning from the crease of his nose. He gets right into the backseat opposite Spink without even asking where they’re going. On the theory, Lana supposes, that anyplace is better than here. A theory she believes in herself.

“Can I come, too?” Lana says to Chet, and Chet says to K.C., “Lana wants to come.”

This is the procedure. K.C. and Trina and Spink won’t talk to Lana, but Chet, because he’s her next-door neighbor and sometime friend, will, so he acts as the go-between.

K.C. says, “Who’s Lana? You mean Foster?”

Foster, as in foster kid.

“Yeah,” Chet says. “She wants to come.”

K.C. glances at Trina, who gives a who-cares shrug and says, “Trunk only, though.”

“Tell her okay,” K.C. says, “but trunk only.” He leans forward to punch the trunk release. The trunk door springs open.

Spink says in a monotone, “The LeSabre’s capacious trunk accommodates all your cargo needs.”

Lana looks at the trunk—empty except for a couple of old cushions she’s never seen before—and says, “When can I ride in the seat?”

Chet repeats the question to K.C., who says, “When she grows tits,” which gets a good snort from Trina, and Lana’s face burns. She tries to remember what Whit told her once—that thin girls stay pretty longer, that the Trina types turn into Pillsbury doughgirls—but it doesn’t help much. She thinks of saying,
F.U., K.C., and your slutty
buddies, too
, but the truth is, she believes that even if K.C. and his friends are scummy, they at least have a look of their own and they stick close, and Chet is okay, so maybe if she pays her dues, they’ll see she’s got something to offer and let her into their creepy club, so she just stands glaring at Chet’s nose mole, which always makes him self-conscious.

“I threw in some cushions the other day,” he says. “To make it a little softer in there.”

Lana glances at the frayed and faded red cushions—patio discards, without a doubt—and says, “Thanks heaps.”

From inside the car Spink says, “How ’bout we move on dot-com?”

“Tell her she’s got five seconds to get in,” K.C. says. “This train’s leaving the station.”

Lana runs halfway to the porch and says to Tilly, “Lunch is all made, it’s in the refrigerator, and if Veronica asks, I went to the library,” then she runs back and climbs into the trunk. When Chet comes around to close it, he looks at her and his eyes go gentle and he whispers what he always whispers.

“Don’t worry, okay?”

Then he closes the trunk tight.

I
t’s hot in the trunk, but not so much once you get moving, and otherwise it’s not bad. It’s roomy enough, and the cushions actually help with the sharp corners. It’s true the trunk is pitch-black, and it gives off an oily smell, but there isn’t any oil or grease that actually gets on you, and if K.C. plays the music loud enough, you can hear it through the backseat.

Lana has been out with K.C. and the others maybe a dozen times, and the drives always divide into two types. Either they’re out to break into a house and steal stuff (Spink calls this “a wealth redistribution action”) or they’re just out cruising. Lana can tell which it’ll be by the way K.C. drives. If it’s a break-in day, he stays on the surface streets, slow-driving, checking out houses from a list they buy from a paperboy telling the addresses of people gone on vacation.

Lana doesn’t like the housebreaking stuff, but there’s one part of it she doesn’t mind. K.C., Spink, and Trina are the ones who actually go in and bring the goods out, while Chet walks up and down the street with a cell phone in his pocket so he can give the others a quick heads-up if anyone shows at the house. When Lana’s along, she walks
with Chet, but it looks funny, them just walking up and down the street like stiffs, so on one of their first times doing it, Lana said, “It’d be better if we looked like a couple or something,” and Chet said, “What do you mean?” and Lana said, “Well, we could just hold hands or something,” which is what they’d done, and is something she now more or less looks forward to, not that she’d say so to Chet.

Today, it turns out, they’re just cruising—Lana can feel the car wheeling onto Highway 20, picking up speed. If Chet and the others talk loud enough, Lana can hear what they’re saying, which can be interesting in a secret-agent kind of way, but on the highway the road noise swallows up most of the conversation. Up front, they’re passing a hash pipe—a trace of its sharp smell seeps into the trunk—and Lana hopes it won’t soak into her clothes and hair because Veronica has the nose of a police dog. In another way, though, she’s relieved. These trips are aimless. Chet and the others just get on the highway and smoke their stuff and drive until they find something that in their altered state they think is worth stopping for—someone painting a
WELCOME TO LAKE
LITTLETON
highway sign with five-foot-high ducks gliding onto the water, for example, or a livestock truck unloading old horses at a rendering plant (which K.C. and Spink, in particular, found hilarious). Usually, though, they will drive an hour or two or even more before stopping at all, most often for food.

Suddenly the car slows enough for Lana to hear Trina say, “Whoa, check it out! That’s one maximum dust devil,” and Spink adds, “Or one mini-tornado.”

Chet in his stretched-out voice says, “Let’s follow that dudester to wherever it takes us.”

The LeSabre lurches right and Lana’s head and shoulders thump against the side of the wheel well as the car slides down onto a dirt road. Gravel pops the undercarriage. Lana wishes she were somewhere else, even Bible camp, which was where one of her mother’s boyfriends was always joking about sending her.

“You better crank it,” Trina yells. “That sucker’s
moving!
”

The car bounces down the road and in the trunk Lana’s whole body feels like chattering teeth. “Hey!” she yells. “Slow down!” but nobody hears.

Finally the car slows slightly and she hears K.C. say, “Where’s it at?”

They’re all quiet and Lana thinks maybe they’ve come to their senses, but then Trina says, “Thataway, buckaroo—by the butte!” and the car races off again, Trina laughing like an idiot and shouting, “Ride ’em, cowboy!”

To keep from bouncing around, Lana pushes against one end of the trunk with her legs and against the other end with her hands. It helps, but it’s tiring, and she’s about to give out when the car slows again and in the relative quiet she hears K.C. say, “We lost it.”

The car moves slowly ahead and then Trina says, “Anyone know where we are?”

Spink says something that has “uncharted territory” in it, which makes K.C. peevish. “No, I mean it. Does anyone know where we are?”

Chet seems amused. “In the hinterlands is where we are.”

After a silence, Spink says, “There are weeds growing in the road. I don’t think there are weeds growing in your well-traveled roads.”

K.C. says there are weeds growing out of every crack in Spink’s brain, and Lana has to laugh.

Up front, Trina says, “There’s a sign that says Hereford that way, eleven-point-two miles.”

Spink says, “How do we feel about the practice of installing mileage signs for upcoming cows?”

After a second or two, Chet says, “I call it badly thought out.” Then: “I mean, what if the cow decides to
move
?”

Lana smells the sulfur smell of lighted matches followed by the more intense smell of burning hashish and the riders fall quiet. The car turns and climbs onto a slightly smoother dirt road. Lana runs a hand over her body, searching the sore spots for blood, but finds only the tenderness that she supposes will turn to bruise. She scooches the patio cushion up behind her and makes herself comfortable. There is the low drone of the car rolling along the road, the occasional tick of gravel on metal beneath her. Otherwise there is nothing to hear, nothing to see, nothing to do, nothing to think. She feels again the pleasant emptiness she’d felt after the dust devil swept over her this morning.

She yawns and yawns again.

Then she is asleep.

D
oors slam.

Lana’s eyes shoot open.

The car has stopped; the engine is off.

This is the worst part. Trina would never let her out—she wouldn’t give Lana the satisfaction—and K.C. and Spink never give Lana a thought, so it’s up to Chet, and one time he forgot for a few minutes, which threw Lana into a screaming-kicking-sobbing panic, so now, whenever they stop and the engine falls quiet, she screams, “Chet! Chet! Chet!” until he opens the trunk.

“Okay, okay,” he says today when he pops the trunk open.

The light is harsh. Lana climbs out and straightens herself and looks blinkingly around. She feels sweaty. Wet hair sticks to her forehead. A half block away, in a patch of grass installed in the middle of the wide main street, a brown and white cow stands staring forward. It isn’t moving. “Is that a statue of a
cow
?” she says.