What Happened to Lani Garver (15 page)

"You're saying what black leather you
don't
like, but what kind
do
you like?"

"I guess a lot of people use black leather to make some kind of a statement," I said, thinking of all the groups I had just named. "I don't want to make a statement. It would have to be just 'Claire' black leather."

"When you find it, you'll know." He laid his spoon down in his empty cup and looked at mine. I hadn't yet hit ice cream. It was starting to melt down into the sides. Part of me wanted to throw something else at him. He was looking at me like
This is not working.
Yet the bigger part of me knew he was only trying to help.

Something over my shoulder caught his eye. He started to wave and grin from ear to ear. "Classic. She's got Cooper with her. Hey, Ellen!"

I turned, grateful for a distraction. A tall girl and a shorter, skinny guy waved back, trotting across South Street. They were dressed normally, when compared to other people we'd seen on the street. In fact, the girl looked like a J. Crew model. She was as tall as I was with long, beautiful red hair. The guy was black, and despite the unusual heat, he had on a sweater that came down to his knees and a long, silky scarf knotted up near his neck. I watched them coming closer and started feeling myself wanting to become invisible.
Kids from art high school.
It was like watching actors jump out of the screen and tumble into our space.

The guy spread his hands out when he reached us, and shouted, "Lani, sweetheart, you can't just disappear and leave us all hanging. My
god,
you've really got that do working." He bounced the bottom of Lani's hair, and the J. Crew–looking girl hugged Lani.

Cooper held out a hand to me, which he sort of dropped in my hand. "Who's your girlfriend? She's
darling.
" He was being completely dramatic, cracking me up, despite my sudden feeling of shyness.

"This is Claire. Claire, Cooper. Claire, Ellen."

"So, what are you doing down here?" Ellen asked Lani as she dropped into the seat beside me. "Yeah, I kept your dirty little secret. I never told anyone you were moving to
Hackett Island
for the dead of winter. What a concept. Catching any fish?" She shuddered.

Lani said, "Shh, Claire's from there."

I threw a polite smile, despite that they were studying me like
I
was something to behold, instead of them.

And to make matters worse, Lani stood up, picked up my spoon, and dropped a bomb. He got the spoon full of melting ice cream and brought it so close I went cross-eyed. "The doctor over at Franklin thinks she might have an eating disorder, but we're trying to prove her wrong."

I was nervous anyway, from wondering if I might do something awful, like hurl mayonnaise on these art school kids' laps. I could not believe he just spewed like that. I grabbed the spoon and out of my mouth came, "Do not feed me. I am not a baby. Just back the hell off."

It wasn't the way I wanted to impress these people. To my shock I heard laughter.

"Yeah, Lani, back off," Ellen said. She took the spoon out of my hand. "Hot fudge sundae. That is a very tall order for an EDO. Who'd you see at Franklin? Lowenstein?"

I nodded. "What's an 'EDO'?"

"Eating disorder. And Lowenstein? She's a witch. If you had seen Erdman, you wouldn't be here right now. He's a shrink, so he gives some leeway for the head-case elements of EDO. He would have told you something easier, like a greasy cheese sandwich. Do you heave or just starve?"

My eyes floated over to Lani, who looked like this whole conversation was perfectly normal. I threw my head back, thinking,
You sly bastard. You brought this girl here because of me, not you.
But I had already let loose once, and they were all waiting for my answer.

I stumbled, "I ... never throw up food."

"Did Lowenstein even ask her?" Ellen asked Lani, waving the spoon. "This is why she refers people to Erdman so fast. She doesn't have five minutes to know what she's talking about. If you were bulimic, this would be no problem to eat. You're a starver." She turned to Lani. "There is probably no way in hell she can eat this whole thing. So just back off."

His eyebrows shot up as the whole spoonful of ice cream went into her mouth. She turned back to me and handed me the spoon. "See? You can do it eventually. I was EDO all last year. I could never have eaten this. Even now I'm not sure I could eat half."

I watched in fascination as she started pushing hot fudge off to the side, giving me some strategy on scraping up the ice cream only as it melted, eating it like soup and avoiding the chocolate.

Cooper prattled on to Lani about why they had cut their last class of the day, like this whole eating ordeal was no big thing. I took smaller spoonfuls, scraping like Ellen had done, listening as Cooper went on and on—something about their drama teacher gay bashing on him. I didn't have a whole lot of time to stay mad at Lani, because Cooper's story got too hypnotizing.

"She keeps telling me I need to round out my persona, and so, she's got me playing all these
really
masculine roles. Yesterday I was Octavius in
Julius Caesar.
"

He straightened up, swung a fist in the air, and this girly little voice suddenly dropped into the black hole and out came a deep, booming, masculine one.

"'
When think you that the sword goes up again?
Never,
till Caesar's three and thirty wounds be well avenged, or till another Caesar have added
slaughter
to the sword of traitors.
'"

Lani giggled, but I sat there frozen. It was like watching magic—one person disappears and another appears.

"'
Defiance, traitors, hurl we in your teeth; If you dare fight to-day, come to the field: If not when you have stomachs.
'"

"Oh my god ... how did you do that?" I stared as he plopped down again.

He waved me off. "Oh, honey, I got a million voices. Wanna hear Clinton?" He went off on a Bill Clinton fest that sounded so real you almost forgot for a minute the kid was black. "At any rate, I'm cutting drama to boycott. Dr. Sykes thinks if she keeps giving me these masculine roles, eventually she'll stop catching me painting my toenails in the back of her class. I'm a good Octavius, and that's never going to stop me from painting my toenails. Wanna see? Today they're green."

"We'll pass on your stink fest." Ellen held up her hands, like
stop,
because he was already untying his sneaker. "I cut drama in Cooper's honor. Not that any old excuse won't do right now. Last week Erdman told me to quit making everything in life into such a serious goddamn big deal. So Friday we cut for 'therapy.'"

She giggled, like that was supreme. I watched these people laughing at their faults and weirdnesses, which were laid out in plain view of everyone. It made me freeze into my invisibleperson mode, lest they call on me to be next. There was a long silence, and I decided I'd better fill it with a question.

"So ... you were in therapy because you had an eating disorder?" I asked Ellen.

She shook her head and swallowed. "I was in therapy because I lost four friends in one year. All unrelated deaths, too. Very freaky. My girlfriend Cher got hit by a car and dragged about thirty yards. Broke her neck. Four days later a friend from junior high died of a heart defect no one even knew he had. That weekend, my cousin Aleese died in a diabetic coma, and no one knew she was diabetic. Three funerals in nine days. Who feels like eating, okay? I think that was the start of it. I shrunk my stomach way down, so when the real traumatic one happened, like six months later, I was prime for deciding I was too big a target for a car, a mugger, or a bolt of lightning—"

"Uhm ... those first three sound very dramatic," I said.

She nodded, but then shook her head. "Me and a bunch of my friends went camping, and there were these train tracks. This guy I'd known since forever was trying to reach out and touch the moving train. He forgot that the caboose has one of those steps that sticks out.
Way out.
The last thing out of his mouth was 'Yeee-haaaa!' and this step from the caboose got him. At first we thought he'd lost his balance and was just fooling around on the ground. I was only standing about six feet from him when it happened. But when I reached him, he was so far from alive, I don't even want to describe it."

There's not too much to say after something like that. But it got me thinking about what my dad had told me once. About how somebody gets diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness, and before they die, people who were expecting to live another sixty years have died.

"We're all dying, baby," he'd said. "But we're all living, too." It made me miss my dad and wish I could visit him. But he'd know I was cutting school, and if I told him the whole truth, he'd start in on me to get some therapy.

Lani finally broke the silence. "When you take drama at CAPA, Dr. Sykes makes everyone do these sessions where they sit around and confess experiences like that to each other. It's supposed to help your acting."

"How's that?" I took a spoonful of actual ice cream, not soup, feeling braver.

"It's supposed to keep all your emotions right on the surface," Ellen said. "And when you have to act, they're, like, really available to you. I told that train story in class and started screaming as loud as I screamed when it happened. Only this time, I'd had some time to get mad about it, so I was throwing stuff, too."

I watched her, kind of rooted in horror. "What did the people do?"

She shrugged. "A lot of them had something to scream about, so it wasn't, like, out of place. It was, like,
Okay. Ellen went through four deaths. Ellen got an eating disorder.
Nobody tries to explain why bad things happen. But there's got to be something behind that theory that pain is useful. Because it got really obvious by the end of the year. People who had something to scream about were usually better actors."

Cooper raised his hand like he was in class and said, "My dad used to hang me from this hook in the closet and beat me for borrowing from my sister's hat collection. I've got this thing for ladies' hats. I can't help myself. If I see one, I have to possess it."

He said it kind of braggingly. It was hard to know whether to be more shocked at his dad's violence or his very honest confession.

I decided on: "Did he hurt you?"

"Sure. But not as bad as my mom hurt him. My daddy? He's a junkyard dog. My mama? She's a rhino. No contest between a dog and a rhino. Don't be picking on my mama's babies, man. She'd have him all down on the ground, all taking shit out on his face. I'd be hanging up there screaming, 'Mama! Don't hurt Daddy.'"

I laughed, probably as hard as Ellen and Lani. It was like laughing on a roller coaster, where something feels dangerous but too funny to pass up the laugh. Some little bad part of Hackett started peeling away from me—that part that feels the need to look and smell like everyone else, and to hide all your bullshit that doesn't fit or you're nothing. These people were not nothing. They were funny, and somehow so ... relaxed, so like-me-or-ask-me-if-I-care.

Ellen pointed a long finger of judgment at Lani as she finished a sentence I hadn't caught the beginning of. "... instrumental department, yeah, right. You play decent drums, but drummers are a dime a dozen."

"And actors aren't?" Lani laughed. "I'm not meant to be an actor. I'm too ... honest."

"But he can act the part of
anybody,
speaking of people who have been traumatized." Ellen turned to me. "He did a screaming three-year-old in one of our classes. At his size. You, like, totally forgot about it. And in another show? He did this sort of mean, dastardly angel, who came down to pass judgment on all the lowlifes. What kind of angel was that?"

Lani sat, absently twirling his sundae cup, like all these compliments didn't matter. But his eyes now flashed to mine, and he grinned a little.

"Floating angel," he finally said.

"You played a floating angel onstage?" I asked in surprise.

"He even had a book with pictures of them!" Ellen turned from me to him. "That book you passed off to Abby so she could make your costume. The costume was almost as authentic as the performance."

I wished I could have seen this. "What'd you do, Lani? Like, breathe fire?"

Cooper shook his finger, going, "Nuh-nuh-nuh, honey. The boy never ... even ... raised ... his voice. You ever seen that soft-spoken character Nurse Ratched in the movie
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?
That nary-an-emotion, cold-as-ice, glaring, judgmental, hell-raising creature? All I can say is this. If you were at that performance, and you had ever knocked a crutch out from under a cripple, told a bum to get a job, bullied a skinny faggot like me, fed your sister's pet guinea pig to your brother's pet snake ... you were scared. You figured you better haul your ass down to that pet store and buy your sister some new, improved guinea pig before some house landed on you. Or before you burst into flames like some accidental-but-not-really, spontaneous combustion."

Ellen shuddered. "
And
he did it in some huge, billowing, angel costume. You'd think he would walk out onstage and everyone would be all 'Too much faggotry, let me go be sick.' Not even CAPA is so above it all, okay? But he was already so in character that you just ... froze. Didn't even think about it."

Lani had been watching me this whole time, kind of bored or lost in other thoughts, with his fingertips pressed together again in front of his lips. I couldn't tell whether they were hiding a grin. His eyes looked to be laughing. A chilly spot grew inside me as I watched his eyes bask with some sort of victory, like we shared a deep, dark secret. The smile got bigger and bigger until his dimples dug into his cheeks.

"I wanna see that book." I nudged Ellen, who was rambling about how this Abby still had the costume and Lani forgot to get his book back. "This is not my first conversation today about floating angels. I just want to see it ... make sure Lani's not in it."

"Yeah, I'll get the book back from Abby," she said, "and the costume, too. Now that you have a zip code, Lani. Write down your address." She reached in her back jeans pocket and tossed him a pen.