What Happened to Lani Garver (10 page)

After a minute, I couldn't resist temptation any longer and looked at my blood on the paper towels. When I had been sick, one doctor had cheerily explained that healthy blood was a darker red, while mine had an orange tinge to it. The spots on the paper towels looked dark red now, like healthy blood, but it was dark in here, and I was practically seeing double. The universe was being sucked into this place I sometimes called the Claire Zone of Bad Luck.

Bad luck that Scott Dern looks like he does.
Despite that I was tall, here was a blond, green-eyed version of Superman, who looked down on my forehead, despite his feet being spread out to get himself eye level. If someone took a picture of us from behind me, it would show Scott Dern on three sides. He eyed the wound, and the slightly cross-eyed effect made him look focused and serious. Laying the butterfly on, he scrunched his nose in disgust—a freckled, permanently sun-scorched nose that spelled
To hell with what I look like. So I'm lucky, so what.
From that sun mouth I smelled Wrigley's Spearmint, and I watched a piece flatten in perfect teeth as he grimaced and pressed on the bandage.

Bad luck. You could lose him.
The thought tried to back up on me, but I jammed it down.

I knew he'd hit my hairline on the top, and my own aim would have stopped the bleeding better. But I wanted to be this smaller person whose worst problem was that my butterfly was tangled in my hair, and who could be saved by someone big and strong and so much the hunk you could hardly stand it.

I grabbed on to the sleeves of his jacket, almost feeling myself shrink in size as his arms curled around me. He kissed my forehead below the bandage, then started kissing me big-time. Kissing him had never been this easy—so not strewn with teeth and spit. After a minute I realized,
That's it. That's the secret. It's what Geneva does to make guys kiss great. She acts ... small. Nothing like a big dude saving a helpless girl to bring on the gallant routine.

I tried to ignore an overwhelming sense of doom by gripping his neck harder. But the noises from the deck wafted in—the growing sounds of laughter and hollers, and either Vince or Tony Clementi was already daring the guys into a round of chicken. Like we hadn't already had one accident. Yeah, I was too good.

This doom feeling grew. I could almost hear the problem out loud.
You're not Geneva. You're not small. You're not helpless. You've been through more stuff in your life than these people have. Their crap is naive—you're not naive. You didn't realize it before because there hadn't been any accidents.

It wasn't the type of thought that I wanted to have right then. I gripped Scott's neck like it was the only thing in the world that mattered. If he'd kicked the bathroom door closed and got a big, bad idea in his head, who knows, I might have done the old "back flop" as Macy called it. I might have done anything to hang on to the people I loved and everything that was familiar.

One great redeeming value about these guys I learned from Mary Beth—they lie. They don't screw girls half as much as they'd like you to think, and if a girl isn't half raping them, they're usually pretty cool. Scott finally ended this kissing, and I could see he was still shook up, not thinking at all about finding a crew bunk. "If you want to go home or anything, I'll get Vince. That was—
whew
—way nasty."

Part of me wanted to go home. But my hair was wet. I wanted my bangs to dry before I went running in to Mom, all "Hi, did you pay your bills," with a butterfly bandage plastered in plain view. Why give her another reason to knock off a late-night vodka...?

"I'll be okay, thanks. Just ... let's destroy the evidence."

I got stuck with most of the cleanup, because it was Scott's dad's boat, and this game of chicken sounded like it might actually happen. I stayed in there alone, cleaning stray drops of blood. I found a Bunny's Market plastic bag under the sink and shoved everything in. I went out into the warm wind and tossed it over the side. The wind meant the current would carry it far out to sea by sunrise.

Scott had been sitting cross-armed on the stern, shaking his head. He pulled me up to him and said, "Hey, Claire needs to go home!"

Since we just had this conversation about how I didn't want to go home yet, I took it he was trying to keep them from playing chicken.

Tony's laughter rang out from above, where he straddled the hoist, swinging a beer up to the moon. "How long does a chicken round take, Dern? Don't be a flake. Krilley, we're doing
sea
chicken ... no girl's game."

Tony jumped down off the hoist in front of Phil, sloshing beer. Scott flew up to them. "Uh-uh, nobody goes in the water. Warm air don't mean warm water. Look." He pointed at his dad's large, night-glow digital barometer. "Water temperature, fifty-two degrees. He'll go into fuckin' shock—"

"He'll be toasty! Took those people on the
Titanic
twenty minutes to die, and the water was thirty-four degrees. We're talking about a couple minutes. Fine seaman you're going to make, Dern."

I sympathized as Scott cracked a smile he couldn't control. It was hard to think of these people having two accidents in one night.
Good luck. That's what these people have. They can dive off flybridges at low tide and not break their necks, and I can just be minding my own business and end up way sick.
I shook off my pity party, despite a headache that made it hard to laugh with them. Then I heard what this chicken involved.

"You jump in the fishing net, Krilley. We submerge you for three minutes. So you got three minutes to either get out of the net or hold your breath." Tony moved to the crank of one of the two huge fishing nets. "If you come up in the net, you're still chicken. You gotta come up first. And I don't need to tell you. The more you fight the net, the more tangled up you can get. You ready?"

"Make it two minutes," Mike shouted. "Three is for those Olympic guys' lungs—"

"We did three minutes at sea. None of us was chicken. Almost got fired, but—" He let out a high-pitched laugh at the moon, then turned to Phil. "You in, Krilley?"

Phil grabbed Tony's beer can, downed the rest, squashed the can in one hand, and tossed it over the side. Then he took off his jacket and tossed it into Tony's gut. But you could hear hesitation in his nervous laugh.

I looked at this dangling net and some feeling of doom shot through me ... the same feeling of doom as when a nurse came toward me with an IV. I stood frozen until I had to twist my shoulders to start breathing again. The net hung like an open jaw of a shark.
Somebody could die in that net...

I tried telling myself I was still in shock from cutting my head. We had yet to see somebody get hurt diving off a bridge or any of the other chickens these guys carried out. Yet I backed up and grabbed hold of the ladder as if there would be some need to run.

"How are you gonna know if I'm drowning?" Phil asked.

"We watch your bubbles." Tony shrugged. "If we don't see any, we know we gotta haul you up fast."

"That sucks! I gotta, like,
die
before you see I'm in real trouble? This ain't no chicken. It's suicide.
Three minutes?
"

They talked it over, hushing Macy every thirty seconds, because she hates these games of chicken. They got the time down to two-and-a-half minutes, but my stomach still felt uneasy. Two-and-a-half minutes, in the freezing water, in a tangled net ... I kept waiting for Tony to say he was joking, but he looked deadly serious.

I turned my head as Phil finally dived into the net. His bulk brought the net down to only about two inches above the deck. I could still see the spotlit shadows of Vince and Tony, all distorted on the bridge, as they took turns getting underneath him and tossing his body, head over heels. When they finally stopped, he must have been three feet off the ground.

He kept begging, "Don't go so crazy!"

"I don't have to watch this." Macy spun on her heel and burst past me, climbing onto the dock. "G'night, Phil! Come on, Claire!"

Myra, Eli, and Geneva were doing the screaming-and-covering-their-eyes routine that made these guys feel magnanimous, and they ignored Macy.
It's not any boyfriend of theirs.
Macy jammed her hands on her hips, watching me, and I climbed onto the dock.

"They only do this stuff to hear the girls get off on it," she told me, pushing me in front of her. "If we wouldn't get all panicked, then they wouldn't have any fun! And
this
one is for
my
benefit. It's got nothing to do with Phil. It has to do with
me.
Except Phil agrees to be an asshole—"

"What'd you do? Something while I was in the bathroom?"

"Couldn't you hear me? I called Tony a psycho queen. You could hear me at the toll bridges."

"Oh, well..." I stumbled, looking over my shoulder. They were about to drop her boyfriend into water so cold it made cramps in your feet if you stepped in it. "Sticks and stones, you know? So what?"

"Stop looking at them!" She jerked me around, and at that point I realized she was basically running her mouth so she wouldn't give the guys any attention. "Do you know what Tony said back to me? He says, 'Maybe I'm a psycho, and maybe I'm proud of it. I ain't no queen. People could get killed for saying less.'"

Despite her jabbering, my mind flashed to Lani. I felt glad I didn't get some giant brain flake to bring him along, try to make people like him. She pushed at me because I wasn't on her wavelength. "So, next thing you know, he's pulling a chicken on my boyfriend. He's getting even with
me
by using
Phil.
"

I said the only thing that came to mind that made total sense. It even made my feelings of doom go away. "These guys have been hanging out together since they were born. They're not going to drown each other. Phil would not have jumped in a fishing net if he thought they wouldn't pull him up in time."

They have good luck. I have bad luck.
We heard a slight splash, and I jumped around to see they had lowered the net enough so that Phil's shoulders and back hit the water. His cursing screeched through the air. Despite what Tony had said about Phil being "toasty," the truth is you'd rather walk naked into twenty-degree air than land fully clothed in fifty-two-degree water.

She grabbed hold of both my arms, like she could squash them. "Tony's gotta pull this? Just because someone called him a queen? What's wrong with him?"

"I don't know, Macy." I just listened as she kept babbling, knowing her two worst problems had backed into each other. She hated times when she wasn't in charge, and these chicken games were some honor thing with the guys that had nothing to do with her. Second, if she couldn't figure out somebody's behavior, then she couldn't control that, either. Not that Tony could ever be figured out. I didn't think he needed motives.

"Macy, they're acting like a bunch of retards. But your boyfriend will not drown. You see those people down there? Their lives are perfect. You guys just don't have bad luck."

I heard a much bigger splash over my shoulder. Macy started reciting curse after curse as I turned and saw the net had gone under. In the spotlight, the normally green surface of the water was a mass of white bubbles. I watched, trying to decide how they would tell which were Phil's air bubbles and which came from the net. One of Mrs. Whitehall's lectures backed up on me. She was the only mom of our crowd that gave lectures worth hearing ...
You kids, you get hurt because you never think of the details!
Eli, Myra, and Geneva were missing the details, screaming and throwing themselves on shoulders of guys who acted like they couldn't care less, but you knew differently.

Macy ran for the boat. She couldn't take the suspense anymore, and this was a scary enough chicken to let Tony watch her scream. I walked toward Vince's car because I didn't need to watch their good luck. Phil would surface, while I, on the other hand...

I slammed the back door of the Impala and threw my aching head back, thinking the silence would have been great. But I hated my own pity party so much that I wished I had stayed down there. The types of questions I most hated started backing up on me.

Can a trauma like falling out of a moving car bring on a relapse? If a relapse is already happening, can head trauma speed it up?

I sat there with my eyes shut.
Bad luck.
I couldn't ignore how things had actually gone that night. Any girl in that car would have loved to be the one with her head out the window, getting all that attention. It just so happens, it's me.
I
end up with my scalp hanging open.
They
end up partying and laughing. Phil could get thrown into a tangled fishing net and not drown, then I'd be minding my own business and wind up sick.

I searched my head for something not so self-pitying. The only thing to surface was a recent nightmare, and lyrics that started to form, almost out of nowhere.

Tracy's staring at the mirror...
Parts her hair with Daddy's razor...

I thrashed forward, reaching for Vince's MP3 player, which sat on the dash.
Empty.
After feeling for the glove box and finding it locked, I flopped back again and thought to amuse myself by counting stars out the window. But the Hackett night fog had come on Indian-summer thick, and I couldn't see much of anything except twirling ghosts. I shut my eyes again. As much as I was horrified by the stuff I dreamed about and wrote about, I was also drawn to it ... drawn to the shock of what would fly through my head if I just let go.

Parts her hair with Daddy's razor.
Opens up a dark red river.
Combing blond and blood together
Never ceases to amaze her.

"Claire, you are out to fucking lunch," I said. I laughed and wished I hadn't, because it sounded evil. "You deserve your bad luck."

I heard shouting from the dock. Then footsteps with louder screams and shouts. I couldn't see them at first because of the fog. Nine people started coming clear almost all at once, about thirty feet from the car. I lurched up as I saw Macy being carried in somebody's arms. Her blond hair hung down, and drops of water were falling off of it.