What Happened to Lani Garver (18 page)

"
Don't
come back and say I just ruined your life," he repeated, like somehow that could ruin my life.

"What in the hell was that?" I breathed.

"That, darling, was phone sex."

And of course, the next question from me was supposed to be, "You were having phone sex?" I suppose I looked shocked because he read my mind.

"Did I
look
like I was having phone sex when you came in here?" he blasted.

I shut my eyes and sighed. He'd been sitting with the door half open and a bunch of stupid-looking philosophy paperbacks open on the bed.

"No..." But the truth started to strike me: Somebody was seriously harassing him, and unless it was some rich old fart who didn't care how high his long-distance bill was, it would have to be somebody from Hackett.

I let out a laugh at the enormity of this scandal. It was a crime, Lani going through that mess last night and now having to put up with this so soon after. There was only one explanation if it was somebody from Hackett. And that explanation made me grab my cheeks to keep from smiling. Christ, if Macy could hear this ...
Some guy in school was a closet gay—and enough of a perv to actually say this shit—who had seen Lani from afar, took a liking to him...

I covered my mouth with my hand, but my eyes were probably laughing, and he glared. The phone rang again.

He ripped it from my fingers and hit the off button. "I'm glad you're so amused by my life."

"I'm not laughing at you, really. I'm sorry!" I defended myself, but I couldn't wipe the smile completely off my face.
I'm human, too. The question tickled my insides:
Who in the hell is the mystery lover?

"Let's grow up and forget the toilet humor." He flopped over on his side, away from me, and I could see he was really tired of this.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry." I lost the grin and massaged his shoulder, but I couldn't just let the conversation drop. "If you want, I'll try to find out who it is."

"I already know who it is."

"He said his name?"

"Uh-uh." He kept his back to me.

"You ... got a love note to go with?"

After a few seconds of silence, he turned over and looked at me like I was nuts. "Claire, I can see why Macy thinks you're dense sometimes. I hit star sixty-nine."

He flopped back over, and my eyes popped. I laughed again, but silently to myself. "Whoever it is, he's a dumb ass. Wouldn't a perv think to have his line blocked? There's star sixty-nine, caller ID....
Doyee.
"

"He doesn't care that I know. He
wants
me to know. For some strange people, that's part of the fun ... the danger. He thinks I'm over here all by my lonesome, shaking in my little pink bedroom slippers." His voice sounded more annoyed than scared. I glanced down at his army boots, still on his feet, and I rocked his ankle some, trying to think.

"Can you call the cops?"

"Even if they believed it, it wouldn't be worth what would happen to me later. He knows that."

"Lani, you're making some puny little coward sound like an enormous threat. You're overreacting." I think, like everybody else, I went with a stereotype in my head of a guy who looked more like a ballerina than a fisherman. I had my first rude awakening, hitting star sixty-nine.

It was Vince and Tony Clementi's phone number. I had just seen Vince at football practice. My eyes bugged out. I stared at the receiver, turning it over in my hand, numbly, and if there was any question in my mind about having misheard, he had caller ID right there on the back.
Clementi, Josephine...
That was the name of Tony's widowed mother, and it was followed by their number, which I knew from Macy mooching us rides places.

Lani's story started out like I figured. He had been walking home from the library and passed by the Rod 'N' Reel, not knowing it was a shaky place for him to be. A very loaded Tony had decided it would be a good idea to crash out in this little patch of grass on the far side of the parking lot, which was not a totally unusual sight.

Since Tony's father had died in a drunken fall from his dock, the owner of the Rod supposedly watched Tony like a hawk, and took his keys more often than not. But Tony never minded a little attention. He would fall out in the grass and start sleeping it off, which made him stand out like a sore thumb to people on the street and sidewalk. And a couple of his fishing buddies would be driving past, all "Look, there's Clementi ... Guess he's looking for a ride home again."

It was, like, island legend to us natives, but he could give a good-hearted tourist a jolt sometimes—wondering if an honest, upstanding person was in cardiac arrest.

Along comes Lani.

As he told it, he squatted over Tony and said, "Are you all right?" And Tony opened his eyes, which Lani said were full of something more profound than booze—maybe ecstasy, or coke, or some injured fisherman's prescription of Percodan. There wasn't too much Tony wouldn't try. He asked Lani, "You that new kid around here?" Lani said yeah. Tony reached up, and the rest lies between haze and the unknown, because Lani would not be specific about it. All I know is he had this little red mark on his chin I would have taken for a zit, and Lani said it came from the zipper of Tony's jeans. When Tony heard the sound of Vince's Impala coming around the corner, he didn't have enough reflex reaction working to get them both to their feet.

Yet, like I always knew, Tony starts hatching intelligence when it really matters. He made it look like he was fighting off Lani. Hence, the speech Macy heard about never, ever coming on to "no Hackett guys and especially no Clementis, if you know what's good for you."

I felt like the universe had changed shape and color. I sat on the edge of Lani's mattress, still staring at that caller ID to remind myself that this version of the story had to be true—unless the caller had been Mrs. Clementi, who was overheard at Mr. Clementi's funeral telling one of Mom's
Les Girls,
"Mother of God, at least now I don't have to worry about that gross bedroom stuff anymore." I kind of doubted her involvement.

"I don't know the first thing about smoke rings." Lani repeated it for a second time, as if to drive home his point.

"But ... Macy wouldn't lie." I didn't say it to start an argument—I was just way beyond confused—but he didn't look upset.

He stuck a pillow in his lap and rested his chin on his hand with a sigh. "She didn't lie. A lie is intentional. She totally believes what she told you."

"But ...
smoke rings?
How is she even supposed to come up with a concept like that? It's so out there..."

"Not really. Did she tell you there were three enormous guys there?"

"Yeah." I felt relieved that the stories agreed on some points. "Her boyfriend, Phil Krilley; my boyfriend, Scott Dern; and Tony's brother, Vince."

"Which one of them smokes?"

"Vince," I said.

"Well, first off, she was not as close as she's letting on. These guys were, like, all over me, and there was no way she could have seen and heard it as clearly as she's remembering."

"Okay..." Maybe I could buy that much of an error out of Macy.

"I noticed her only when I turned my head because Vince blew all this smoke in my face."

"Did you say
anything
back to Tony? Or to Vince about not ... blowing smoke in your face? Did you even mention the word smoke?"

"I don't remember. Probably. I probably said, 'Stop blowing smoke in my face,' or something like that."

I rubbed my forehead, hard.

"See why I don't defend myself when stuff like this happens?" he asked. "See why I didn't want to defend myself when you first came in here? If I just spouted off my side of the story, like my word was supposed to be good enough, would you have believed it?"

The thing that got me was staring at this caller ID. I would have felt torn between his word and Macy's word if it weren't for that.

"It's not as crazy as it sounds, Claire, her pulling a line like that out of her ear. It happens in courts all the time. People are under oath, swearing as good American citizens ... a white killer was black, that a guy in a red hooded sweatshirt held up the 7-Eleven, when it was a girl in a black leather jacket. 'I hate Johnny Jones' turns into 'I killed Johnny Jones and dumped his body in the river.' You know how many innocent people are sitting in jail right now because they were heard or seen wrongly by somebody? People don't decide they're going to make stuff up. They see things as..."

He got off the bed, trudged to the mirror hung over his dresser, and studied his face. "They see the truth like I'm seeing my reflection. The cut on my chin from Tony's jeans looks to me like it's taking up my whole face."

I had hardly even noticed the cut until he mentioned it. I trudged up behind him to see if maybe his mirror was somehow magnifying the thing. It looked the same to me in the mirror.

"And you? Claire, you look incredibly ... thin."

I grabbed a handful of fat from under one arm, then stood on tiptoes to see a roll of fat I grabbed from one hip. "No way. I've got fat all over the place."

"And you truly believe that." He walked back to the bed and flopped down on it. "The whole world is smoke and mirrors, Claire. Maybe Macy heard that fact about smoke rings in some movie and banked it away in her brain, or something. I'm not saying it isn't true about gay pickup lines. I'm just saying that I wouldn't know. Believe me, if I didn't know much about sex in eighth grade, I wouldn't know this, either."

I kept watching him, wanting to believe all this, but it was like trying to shove fifty pounds of spaghetti down my throat. The arguments kept gushing back up. I dropped down beside him, staring at the ceiling.

"But
why?
Macy always has her eyes wide open, and she doesn't like Tony much. If she saw anything to hint that Tony Clementi was hitting on boys, she wouldn't twist it around. She would laugh so hard, it might kill her. She'd be a dead woman from laughing. She'd just be sure to live long enough to spew it all over the island—"

"But she didn't see Tony force me down on him." He shook his head. "All she saw was a guy like Tony barking at someone like me. What would you think was going on?"

"Are you defending her?" I faced him in disbelief. "Cuz I'm going to call her when I get home and let her have it."

"No, don't." He put up his hands, like
Stop.
"Don't ever try to tell a person their recollections are convenient. They totally believe themselves and will never believe you."

"Macy's my best friend. She listens to me, even though she pretends she doesn't."

"Claire, people who are friends with Tony will never, ever believe that I was an innocent bystander and Tony Clementi tried to molest me. I can't believe you can't see that. It's so simple." He flopped back on the mattress, rubbing his eyes and swallowing. "I can't wait until I can get out of here again."

I couldn't blame him one bit. The thought of being mauled by some drunk ... I wanted to hurl. I said, "Maybe you can graduate early."

He just laughed. "Graduate. That would be cute, wouldn't it? I don't need to graduate. It's not about graduating. It's about figuring out where to go next."

I got what he meant. "You can't just run away again. That sucks!"

He studied the ceiling for a while, and I listened to cars passing by outside. The strange heat wave still cooked, so he had the window wide open. One car seemed to stop right out front, and I got scared for a minute we were going to have some face-to-face problems. But fortunately, the car rolled on again.

He rubbed at the bridge of his nose, looking even more tired. "Claire, I know this is going to sound unbelievable to you. But ... I always come out on top."

Yeah, it sounded unbelievable. Especially after what happened next.

We lay there listening to the roar of surf, getting more and more bummed out, and finally his mother came back from wherever she had been, and we heard the front door slam. Footsteps trudged up the stairs and she appeared in the doorway.

"May I speak to you in private?"

He blinked at her with swollen eyes. "If you really want to get me up off this bed, I'll do it, but I'm beat, and Claire won't care, whatever it is."

Her gaze wandered over to me, and something in her eyes made me want to get out of there, fast. Something like betrayal.

"Are you Lani's new
best friend?
"

I stood up slowly, wondering what gave her the right to look at me like that.

"Wherever we've lived, Lani's
always
had a best friend, you know. It's
always
a girl. I thought maybe things had changed."

My chest flashed with hurt, though I tried to think of how she could clump me in with some pattern. We hadn't exactly asked to be each other's friend. She was obviously missing the fact that we were agonizing over something. For once, no nice chatter erupted from my throat. I might have even glared.

She must have noticed, because she leaned her head into the side of the door frame. Her eyes filled up. "You look like a nice girl, and I'm sure you are. It's just that..."

She turned her teary eyes to Lani and brought from behind the door frame a magazine, which she held up, only by the very corner, with two fingers. There was a guy in what looked like a bathing suit on the cover. She tossed it on the bed, then said, "I just found this on the front porch."

Lani touched it with the same two fingers as she had, but his disgust didn't seem to register with her, either.

She wiped her eyes and asked in this trembling, pleading little voice, "Are you starting in again already?"

He gasped a little as something like snot dripped onto the floor, missing the mattress by less than an inch. He opened his fingers so the porn magazine dropped to the floor. Then he threw his head back on the pillow and said in the same singsongy voice he used on me. "Yeah, that's it, Mom ... I must be starting in again..."

"Don't forget to tell your mom that I'm meeting you right where the bus pulls in. Let's ward off any of her madrapist lectures." My dad's laugh buzzed through the receiver.