What Happened to Lani Garver (7 page)

"I have plenty of fun. Just not with sugar and dead cows."
I tied my cheerleading jacket around my waist because Indian summer had definitely hit and the air had grown thick with wet heat. I hiked up my backpack with a jerk to help me ignore my stomach's begging. Since I lost weight for cheerleading, I had stuck pretty well to a regimented plan—fruit for breakfast, salad for lunch. Dinner, I ate whatever I wanted, so long as it didn't include anything fried, too much red meat, or any desserts. My stomach was telling me this gravy could definitely be on my diet, but I'd already eaten red meat once this week. "I look like I just woke up from a hundred-year sleep. Your mom's going to think we did the nasty up here."

"And that would be the end of the universe?"

I giggled, traipsing after him and his sarcasm. When we got to the foot of the stairs, his mom came through the kitchen door.

"Would you like to invite your friend for dinner, Lani? I've kept it warm."

My eyes felt all swollen from sleep. I was afraid to say no, because moms take that sort of thing like personal rejection. But Lani piped up.

"She already said no thanks. She needs to get on home."

His mom walked right up to me and stuck her hand out. "It was very nice having you. I hope you come back soon."

Having
me. I had hardly said a thing to her. I looked into her eyes as I shook hands, and I saw something there. Almost an urgency. She
was
hoping we did the nasty up there. As if my presence made her son not gay.

"You have a really nice house ... and your cooking smells really great ... Some other time, okay? My mom is waiting for me—"

Lani pulled me out the door almost before I finished blathering. He let out an uninterested half giggle, which seemed more directed at me than his mother.

"You know what she's thinking, don't you?" I started.

"Yes."

"And you're not embarrassed? She's your
mom.
Moms create guilt."

"Yeah, you're right." He nodded genuinely. "Except she's not really and truly my mom. I'm adopted. Which means I can always tell myself,
She's just a lady who is nice to me when the mood strikes her,
and I can believe myself. I don't have as much guilt."

"Wow, you're adopted..." I didn't know what I wanted to say about that. I still had starch in my head from sleep. "You've had a very unusual life."

"Yeah, it's an epic classic."

"Can I hear some of it?"

"Maybe sometime." Before I could ask what was wrong with
now,
he cleared his throat and jumped back on my life. "So you're scared you're sick again. Your friends are helpless, your mom is hysterical, God is a jerk, and your father has a do-not-disturb sign plastered to his forehead."

I cracked up. "You're making it sound horrible."

"So ... how would you feel about getting tested without anybody knowing? If it turns out to be something else, then you won't freak your mom out, and your friends wouldn't know, either. And you wouldn't have to bother your dad."

The concept almost stopped me in my tracks. But I was very familiar, by this point in my life, with the arrival of a thousand insurance forms in the mail every time I had a check-up. "There's no way for me to get tested without my parents knowing."

"There might be. We could take a bus. It's a long ride. Do you know how you get a test done at your doctor's office and you have to wait, like, ten days for results?"

I had to nod. "Story of my life."

"That's because they send those samples up to research labs. If you go right to a big city clinic at a research hospital, you can get your results in a couple hours. And some of those clinics also treat kids without parental permission."

"Why?"

"Because a lot of them are runaways, and everyone knows it."

I stopped and stared. He was streetwise beyond my wildest dreams. Getting on a bus and going far away seemed way radical. But I wanted to make sense out of his mixed-up personality. The only gay people I had ever met were summer tourists. They were usually businessmen from Philadelphia, who would rent duplexes for a couple of weeks and have all their friends down. You could tell who they were because they used beach chairs instead of towels, and smelled like expensive sunblock, and they smiled a lot, and some of them giggled, and they wore those awful, plastic flip-flops instead of Reefs. I tried to fit Lani in with this picture and it didn't work out very well. He seemed more "raw" and stripped down. A guy who seemed happy with a mattress and didn't use a pillow would go to the beach with a towel like us natives, and get all sandy and sunburned, and not care. "You don't ... fit any of the usual categories."

His grin looked irritated. "You're trying to stereotype me. Don't do that. I hate it."

"I am not." I'd had a public-school education. I knew better. "There's a difference between stereotyping and deciding where somebody fits in."

"What's the difference? It's all for the purpose of passing judgment."

"I wouldn't say that. It just helps you get to know somebody better." I thought of his weird wording in school that day.
Not a girl.
"It's easier to say what you're
not
like than what you're like. You're not like a lot of the guys around here, but you're not like a girl, either. You don't look like a grownup. You don't act like a kid. You're definitely not a dork. But I couldn't see you running for class president somehow—" I stopped because I could sense annoyance rolling off him.

"I don't like being put in boxes. Boy, girl, dork, popular—those are boxes."

"Sorry. But..." I wanted to know
something.
"How old are you?"

"Age is a box."

I watched him, stumped. "Age is kind of important. If you were, like, twenty ... I don't know how I'd feel about being your friend."

"What difference does it make?"

I sighed as an annoying thought dawned on me. "Let me guess. You're one of those super geniuses who's got everything figured out all differently than the rest of us."

"Genius is a box."

"Okay..." I felt caught in some game—one I was losing. I thought of a question having to do with actions rather than labels, or his "boxes." "If you read Albert Einstein, would you understand him?"

"I've read Einstein. I understand him."

I didn't want to call him a liar, though I figured he had to be one. "What's a kid doing living on the streets and reading Einstein?"

"It happens." He shrugged easily. "There's no correlation between homelessness and stupidity."

I supposed he was trying to tell me that I was using boxes again. I kept quiet.

"As for me and the library, that started in about fifth grade ... whenever it is that boys need to look like boys, and girls like girls. I had to find hideouts where I could be in peace for a while. The school playgrounds, the street corners, the places most people hang, are not really safe if you're too different from everybody else. The library was good. The dangerous kids won't show up there. Librarians are nice. They'll talk to you ... and one librarian told me once, 'If you can understand human behavior, it can't hurt you nearly as much.' That just always stuck with me. Besides, if you're a runaway, the seats are comfortable. I've spent days and days reading in libraries."

"Interesting." I would never have put together runaway kids and libraries before. But hearing him put it that way, it made a lot of sense. "So ... what all did you read?"

He sighed uncomfortably and mumbled out a bunch of mishmash, which I started to realize were last names. The only ones I recognized were Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Hegel.

"Jesus Christ," I breathed.

"Yeah, him, too. But listen. This is very important." He stopped and turned a finger in my face. "You cannot tell anybody that I know a lot of stuff. I'm trusting you with secrets that I don't usually tell people, and only because you're such a pro at keeping your own secrets. I need for people to think I'm less sharp than I am."

"But why?" I figured he deserved some kudos. He wasn't going to get any kudos on his looks—not around here, where muscles "rule the cule."

"Because seeing through human behavior is, like, a blessing and a curse." He started talking fast, like his mouth had to keep up with his thoughts. His graceful hands moved to emphasize his thoughts. "I
had
to understand why kids bullied, or I would have been completely ... helpless. Knowing bullies were once bullied, knowing they depend on your fear, knowing that they hate their own feelings of victimization and not really you and that none of this has changed one speck since Moses managed to walk out of Egypt ... all that stuff makes you react differently than if you're just using your gut."

"Like how?"

"Because..." His hands kept moving in that graceful way. "... your gut would tell you to be afraid. Fear is what bullies feed off, and it paralyzes you, too. If you're thinking
pity
instead of
fear,
they don't get such a charge. And sometimes you can think on your feet and figure out how to get away. You can't if your mind is paralyzed."

"Oh." I watched him with a little more respect. He had hinted that he wasn't a very good fighter, but maybe in a way he was. He might not land hard punches—not with those hands—but it sounded like he had a pocketful of tricks.

"At the same time"—he shuddered—"when people realize you can see past their eyes and into their heads? They don't take kindly to that. In the city, you could get mugged. Around here? Forget mugged. You could get lynched. So, you can't tell."

"Okay." I wanted to be polite but felt kind of insulted by his statements about Hackett. "I don't think you have to be worried about getting lynched around here, Lani. People just want to have fun—"

"You're laughing."

I realized I was. "I just think you're overreacting."

"Yeah? Believe me, you wouldn't like it much if I started looking inside your head at
your
hidden garbage. I won't. But just put yourself in the shoes of somebody whose hidden garbage is over the top—"

"Wait ... What about me and my 'garbage'?" I slowed down to stare at him.

"See? You're defensive already—"

"That's because I'm fine. I don't have 'garbage.'" I forced a laugh, which sounded half strangled. I had told him about cancer. Not that cancer qualifies as "garbage." But I sensed he thought it could bring on some psycho-weirdness after-affect in my case. I stopped and put my fingers up to my forehead, covering my face, remembering what a jerk I'd been in his bedroom. "
I have nightmares. They're bloody...
"

"That's called the 'defensive stance.'" He pulled on my arms, grinning. "Did you know the people most afraid of their own thoughts spend half their lives with their arms crossed? Put your arms down, here." He flopped them down. "Now. Look me in the eye and tell me you don't have any hidden garbage in your life."

I wanted to say it. But I'm a bad liar and had a strong sense it would come out all muddled. I settled on "I can see why people would totally hate you."

"If you're going to hate me, you might as well hear all my thoughts about you."

"I don't want to." But I felt suddenly scared that maybe he could see into my basement. See my "bloody lyrics." See my electric guitar that only Macy knew about—and only because I was cranking it so loud one day I couldn't hear her come in upstairs. I had just been ripping on some blues runs, thank god. No razor-blade lyrics. "Go ahead ... say what you were going to say." I curled my toes to brace myself.

"I think you would do yourself a favor to go see a shrink."

I did my standing-stock-still routine, but he was right in my face. It was not a situation where you can become invisible. My insides started exploding. "I think you have nerve. It's not your business, telling me a thing like that."

"Claire, simmer. A shrink is a status symbol. It's like having a masseuse."

"'A masseuse'?" I let myself boil over. "The only masseuse on the island goes back to Philly in the winter. Cuz the only people that come to her are rich lady tourists and faggots—"

I threw a hand over my mouth, and he raised a hand to his. I got the impression his was to keep from laughing. I sunk down onto the lawn beside the sidewalk. I could not believe I had just spewed that word in his face.

"That's another version of the defensive stance," his voice went off, muffled, behind his fingers. "You just lowered yourself out of my gaze and turned away."

"Up yours."

"Honestly, I understand. This is part of the reason why I could never become a shrink. I'm too blunt."

"You're a bloody nightmare." Since I knew nothing about psychology, or any of the stuff he had read, I got paranoid. "What is it ... that you know about me?"

He sat down cross-legged on the sidewalk, facing me. "Only that you've been through a trauma, you've never talked it out, and you're having nightmares."

"That's it? That's all you think you know?"
Doyee.
I had just implied that there was something else.

"I'm not a shrink, Claire. But it's probably not as bad as you're thinking it is."

And I am not going to see one.
"You could
make
people nuts."

"I guess that's it."

"Don't be sarcastic. Tell me. I want to hear what you think you know about my hidden garbage."

"I—" He stopped for a minute. Then he got that crankingmind look again, and things started spilling out in half sentences. Like his mind was working so fast, only parts could break the sound barrier. "You're not a criminal, for pete's sake ... had illness and trauma ... no one to talk to ... but the shit always comes out somewhere. Mutilation dreams, you said ... Gone beyond dreaming, or you wouldn't be so crazed ... Music. You've got artistic tendencies so probably ... don't know if you're old enough to be writing music yet ... Sixteen-year-olds dump in poetry ... same part of the brain as dreams ... You're writing bloody poetry."

It was close enough to make my jaw hang. It was like being naked while he decided if my headlights were pink or brown. The only reason I didn't slap him is that he could have predicted it. "You're a regular nightmare."