Yet, I was still freaked. I put one foot on the step, and it felt like walking into the gas chamber. My supposed leukemia bruise screamed. I think the fire that shot up to my head scared me just enough to make me do the right thing. It gets hard playing the denial role when your body keeps kicking you in the brains. I took a deep breath and forced myself up the steps.
I plopped down beside Lani in silence, watching, wide-eyed, as the bus pulled out. I needed to think about something other than me. So I drove the conversation around quickly to where we'd been outside. "So ... did you ever ... like anyone?"
"Romantically?"
"Yeah." I was careful not to say girl or boy. I know that sounds funny. I mean, it was all but a no-brainer. But he hadn't actually ever said he was gay. He said other people had called him that.
He kind of laughed. "I like being alone."
"Well ... that's not normal," I argued. I'd heard people say, all haughty, "I don't want to be with anyone right now," but that always changed the first time somebody halfway decent showed any interest. I wanted to tell him that, but it occurred to me that maybe he'd been grabbed or molested a few times, what with all this propositioning going on. Maybe it left him kind of messed up about romance.
The best I could come up with at the moment was "D'you ever think of another haircut? Not to be mean, or anything, but—"
"—but don't I bring a lot of my problems on myself?"
"Well..."
He shook his head, then nodded, then shook his head again. "I don't know. How do you not be yourself? One of my earliest memories is having a Barbie in my hand. I think a haircut would be like ... I don't know ... like using a Band-Aid on someone who'd been gored by a rhino."
I laughed, mostly because he was laughing, but there was a sadness in his face. I took up one of his hands and squeezed it, as much for him as for the fact that I could use some comfort myself.
He turned sideways in the seat, leaning his cheek against the backrest, and grinned at me sleepily. "I don't like to talk about my life very much. It's so ... rad. If you don't mind, I'm done."
I nodded, feeling like a pry queen all of a sudden. "You brought it up."
"I know. But you need to go to the clinic and face the music. I just wanted to make sure you got on the bus."
I watched him smile at me victoriously. I didn't want to smile back, because I was too busy thinking, Smart, smart bugger... But his smile beamed so easily. It looked strong, yet in an innocent way. I wasn't used to being with people who seemed strong.
"I hate you," I said, but we ended up grinning together.
9
I dropped off to sleep to escape my bruises. I dreamed that I was arguing with my dad, that he was trying to get me to stay with him while doing chemo again.
His new wife, Suhar, stood beside him, twirling her wedding ring without meeting my eyes. Her blond hair flowed down her back, and her eyes glowed with their usual sweetness. But when I looked down at her wedding ring, it was cutting into her skin like it had a razor edge. Blood ran over her palm, her wrist...
I woke up with a jolt. Lani had fallen asleep in a strange position—with his back almost completely to me, and his forehead pushed into the glass. It looked so ... symbolic—people wanting to be helpful, yet turning their backs.
I tried to ignore his position and think through the spiderweb of my own problems. My stomach sank low, as if a relapse was already confirmed and I was having to make impossible choices, based on impossible memories.
Starting a new school while I was on chemo last time had seemed crazy. It seemed crazier now. Last time, I had been put on the homeschooling network, and my dad had hired a tutor who came every day, but only between noon and two. There were no kids in my dad's building. I only stayed in the hospital once, for a week. A head cold had turned into pneumonia, so I had to stay in an isolation ward. In other words, I had not been exposed to many kids with my illness—very few kids at all during that whole time.
The guitar was what kept me sane. My dad had kept a game going when I felt good enough. Before he would go to his teaching job at University of the Arts, he would record some acoustic stuff for me. I was sure I could never learn anything that difficult. He would say, "Come on, it's easier than it looks." It was never easy, but it wasn't impossible, and the stuff was so pretty you couldn't stay away from it.
All day long, I would sit there trying to get my fingers working like his had. When I got tired, I would fall asleep with that guitar under my arm, then wake up and try some more.
I would complain to my dad about finding new definitions to lonely and feeling like crap. He would tell me, "There are times in life to grow, and there are times in life to shine. One can't grow and shine at the same time; it just doesn't work that way. Now you're growing. Tomorrow you'll shine."
I was always Aw, bull, and it was kind of comforting to get back with my mom at the end, who understood the importance of having fun now, before you get too old or too socially retarded.
I supposed I "shined" from learning all that guitar playing, if you can call a gig in a glorified island bakery during the off-season months "shining." Definitely, it was not worth losing most of junior high. And since I wasn't about to go through another year of staring at walls and a guitar ... the other option was I could stay with my mom—and probably send her into cardiac arrest this time.
Her life had revolved around me and my friends and my parties, even before she and my dad split up, when I was four. My friends said she was the most fun of all the moms. Grownups agreed. In her senior yearbook from Coast, she was voted Person Most Likely to Party, and islanders kept feeding off her energy even after some of them got married and had kids, after she and my dad split up. I saw her "get happy" many Saturday nights when I was a kid. But she always made other people happy, too—and me happy. It was a trip being with her at a party. I was real proud that my laughing, popular mom was all mine.
If it's possible, I think, she started drinking too much because she cared too much. She would get all looped when I was sick, saying a couple of drinks helped her to sleep. Fine. But she'd be crashed out by nine o'clock, then wide awake at two. I would jump awake in the night, realizing she was standing right over top of me, like, breathing Old Sweat Sock right in my face. I would ask her what was wrong, and she'd say, "I just love you, that's all," and leave the room again. One time I heard her on the phone right after, and my dad was yelling at her. I couldn't hear what he was saying, but I could overhear her sniffing, all "... sorry, Chad, I just have this overwhelming fear she's going to stop breathing..."
I felt like her stupor drinking was all my fault, though I still kept going home some weekends, for a while, because I missed her and the island. But it got to be too hard to watch, and my big hope was that she didn't drink so much while I was at my dad's. I stayed away entirely the last few months. It didn't help. She never went back to her old self. If I was sick again now, she might take an even bigger fall—turn from a night drunk into an all-day drunk. There didn't seem to be any way I could stay with her.
I could have elbowed Lani in the back and woken him up, but instead I sat there muttering curse after curse under my breath, because there was not much else to say about my choices.
I quit cursing when I fell hypnotized under the sky blue girders as we came onto the Ben Franklin Bridge. Those steel girders always had that mood-boosting effect on me. They reached so high that a few white, silky clouds wandered through the suspensions and touched the tips, which looked like steeples. It was such a contrast to Hackett's little drawbridges, which had to rise and back cars up for half a mile when any decent-sized boat passed into the bay.
All the islanders hated waiting in their cars when the Philadelphia people's beautiful yachts passed. The fish frat and their parents called huge yachts "fag hacks," and the wait for a toll bridge to go down "faggots on parade."
The water under the Ben Franklin was so far down that an enormous navy ship could pass underneath. And I look
ed ahead at the six lanes of traffic dotted with all sorts of blinking signs and lights.
It made me feel like the city was a bigger and better sort of "island" ... a magical place full of skyscrapers and other proof of how people thought harder and bigger here. I started feeling relieved that I was coming back. Maybe a cure for cancer had been discovered in Philadelphia just last week.
The waiting room of this real-life, no-pay clinic changed my mind about that. It was nothing like Children's Hospital, where I had done chemo, and I was freaked by the hullabaloo of people who looked like they had very big problems. Sick babies cried, methadone addicts twitched, pregnant teenagers sat stone-faced with toddlers running around their feet. There was an AIDS clinic within this clinic, and so beyond the serious-faced people, there was a silent majority of pale, unhealthy-looking adults, some so thin that their sad eyes took over their faces.
I stared at my feet most of the time, playing invisible patient.
And Lani, who had seemed like such a freak show in Hackett, kept running into people in there that he actually knew by name. Before I went off to get my blood taken, he had talked to a guy, then a pregnant girl who yackety-yacked in his ear like they had months to catch up on. Both conversations were long and made me feel more isolated.
He just kind of left me sitting there stewing for almost the whole hour. When they finally called me for blood testing, I felt so snubbed that I didn't even holler to him to go with me. Big comfort he was turning out to be.
I sat there in a stupor while they took my blood, trying to answer their questions with the least amount of words and not get all upset by them. I had already accepted the worst. Some Dr. Lowenstein came in, a woman, who looked busy and barely smiled at me. Last, a triage nurse appeared, because the first nurse had seen my butterfly and wanted to know about it.
"Could all this dizziness be caused from hitting your head?" she asked, pushing at the wound.
"No. I did that last night, and I've been dizzy for three weeks."
She kept playing with the butterfly and didn't look happy. "Butterflies work best when they're applied properly. Look ... you've got hair in it, and—Who did this to you? A blind person?"
Scott, the neurosurgeon. "My boyfriend. I fell out of a moving car. We were trying to solve too many problems at once. It's not his fault."
"Whose fault is it?"
Mine. All I'd wanted to think about was kissing Scott. "Don't lecture me, okay?"
"Kids..." She shook her head. "Did you bother cleaning it out? Butterflies don't work at all when they're covering an infection—"
"Excuse me. I know how to clean a wound," I busted in, but I could feel my bangs sticking up again, making me look like a horned toad. It was too much. I yanked the buttefly hard, thinking, So long, hairs. But it had been catching hairs all night and morning, and I ended up ripping the wound wide open again trying to twist and pull.
I was uttering curses as fresh blood dripped down my face, and the nurse's attitude eased up finally when I started to cry. "I just wanted to show you how clean it was! It was really, really clean!"
"I'm sure it was." She sounded serious and not sarcastic as she tried to squeeze the wound together with her fingers. "We would have probably ended up doing that anyway. You can't be walking around with a butterfly that's half in your hair. Now that you've reopened it, we'd better stitch it. Or you'll end up with a charming scar."
I sputtered and spit blood off my lips as she handed me a cold pack, saying, "I'll find a medic. Just try to stay calm."
She left me alone again with my on-fire wound and half my bangs hanging off a butterfly gripped in my bloody palm. Lani's out there in the waiting room busy talking to everybody else ... This day cannot get worse, I decided. I thought you could wait forever to get treated in a clinic this size, but a medic showed up fast. Less than five minutes after the nurse ran out, a huge African American medic yanked back the drape, asking, "You the dingle-wop that jumped out of a moving car last night?"
"That's me." I was too stressed to argue with him.
"You trying out for Deep Thinker of the Universe?"
"Don't beat me up. I'm kind of ... way tired."
"Then why don't you kids stay home some nights? You got a home?"
"Yes."
"You got a bed to sleep in?"
"Yes."
"Then you got more than most around here. What are you doin', bein' way tired?"
I told him the head wound was a sidebar and what the real problem was.
"Oooo, damn. Okay. You can be way tired."
I could see a syringe on the tray he carried in, and I shut my eyes until he'd shot my forehead full of some numbing agent. I hardly blinked, used to being stuck. He'd stayed quiet through that part, but then started in again. "You need to go out in the waiting room and find yourself a floating angel."
"A what?"
"They come with you on visits like these. They hold your hand and they tell you good stuff and make sense of this world so you realize it's not so bad—"
"Oh, I came with a friend. He's out there." I jerked my thumb toward the waiting room. "Thinks he's at a family reunion. Not much help."
"That's cuz he's a friend. Floating angels aren't friends; they're real angels. They're real. Didn't you see any of 'em out there?" His beaming smile flashed, and I gathered he was pulling my leg, the other option being that he was nuts. I decided to be polite and not hate myself more.
"Uh, no. What do they look like?"
"Like faggots."
My eyebrows shot up. I waited for him to laugh, but he was slick. He kept banging stuff around on his cart and whistling until I cracked up, and then he looked all surprised.
"What're you laughing at? There's nothing funny about that. Not if you got your common sense working. Angels don't have a gender. Remember that from church school?"
"I'm Protestant," I responded. "We've got the no-frills religion. No angels, no art, no saints, no Mary—"
"That's not Protestant. That's just white-people trash," he informed me. "Angels don't have a gender. So what they gonna look like?"
He kept staring like I was supposed to answer. Being that I hate examining tables, I switched to the stool that was supposed to be for him, thinking that would distract him. But he kept staring.
I finally said, "My mom watches Oprah. She says angels are people who do good deeds."
He slammed the needle and thread down on the tray.
"You are trying for Deep Thinker of the Universe. 'My mom watches Oprah,' therefore angels are people? Where do you go to school, so's they teach you logic like that?"
"Uh, the islands." I giggled.
"That explains a lot. Don't see too many floating angels down at the shore. Likely to get themselves killed, something. Too many rednecks."
I tried to will my grin off my face, but it wasn't working. So, I was a dingle-wop, white-trash Protestant, retard, redneck. Somehow it was worth it, to run into someone who could make my grin work. I decided to play back.
"So, if an angel is not a person, how do they get themselves killed by rednecks? I thought angels aren't supposed to die."
"Well, they're like the Good Lord, you know? They killed him, but he just jumped back up again when nobody was looking, see? Faked 'em all out."
I guessed I appreciated this medic's dedication to screwing up my pity party.
"So these angels look like ... f-faggots." I shot a glance into the corridor, and he seemed to enjoy watching me smile over my own nerve.
"Yes. Floating angels, that is. There's all kinds of angels. You got your cherubs, what look like fat babies. Then there's big ones, fighter angels; they look like ... water towers or something. Big. You don't want to mess with them. Floating angels look like humans."
"Except they float."
He cleaned out the wound again, pressing on my forehead to see if it was numb. When I flinched, he glanced at his watch and sighed.
"They could float in the air if they wanted to, I s
uppose. But they're more modest than that. And they're way smarter than humans, so they'd rather outsmart them. They're called floaters because they float from person to person, you know? This one's in trouble, so they float here. They fix up that person's life, so they move over there. They float around, not up and down."
"Like a ... vagabond?"
"Yeah, 'cept they ain't dirty. Floating angels like to be in the shower."
I totally cracked up, but he just turned his back and started cleaning his scissors with an alcohol wipe. I felt my eyebrows shooting up and got an awful thought. What if he's nuts? Should I let this guy sew up my face?
The curtain pulled back and Lani stared at me. "Couldn't find you."
"I've only been back here for half an hour," I couldn't resist saying. "Where have you been?"
"For the past fifteen minutes, I've been over at the research lab, making sure they can finish your blood work today, like they promised."
"Thanks, Dad. And before that?"
"Don't be jealous." He giggled like I was oh-so-touching, circled around behind me, and put his arms around my neck so we were cheek to cheek. "I've got other friends besides you."
Out flew: "I'm in a foul mood, so I might as well tell you. They look creepy."
"Maybe. But then, you sound bitchy."
"Gawd."
He giggled in my ear, and this enormous black guy giggled in my face. I was being taken apart. The medic started laying sutures in, but my forehead was pretty numb, and if I shut my eyes, all I could feel was pricks and tugs.
"Lani Garver. I'm trying to tell this good woman that she needs to find herself a floating angel. She won't believe me that they're real."
My eyes flashed open as I realized these two knew each other. I turned my eyes sideways to take in Lani's nose without moving my head. "Is there anybody here you don't know?"
"Yeah, lots of people. This is a luck-out job. I know Marcus, and you lucked out, Claire. Marcus has won Medic of the Year three years in a row. He won't even leave a scar." I felt better on hearing that news.
What Happened to Lani Garver Page 9