"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.
14
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 trie
d 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..."
15
"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.
I leaned against my kitchen counter, trying to laugh back. "You mean the ones about how Hackett is the only safe place in the universe? And even getting on a bus out of here is unsafe?"
"You're bringing back bad memories." My dad groaned. He was raised on Hackett, too, and didn't share our enthusiasm for the place. "At any rate, I'm glad you're coming. I've been waiting for the day when you felt like you could come back to my house."
"I'm not saying I can come all the time," I put in quickly. "I've got my job at Sydney's now, and ... lots of times I have Sunday cheerleading practices."
"You're very busy," he agreed, though I sensed that he knew that was not the real problem. Certain places give you terrible flashbacks after you've had chemo. For lots of people it's the hospital. For me it had been my dad's town house. Somehow, those flashbacks didn't seem quite as important right now.
"And thanks for helping out my friend. You'll like him. He just needs somewhere to think in peace. We both kind of do." I flinched a little, because this visit sounded like such a use-job on him and Suhar, and I suppose it was. But he didn't seem to mind.
"You're sixteen. We would expect that when you show up, it won't be alone."
"He's really, really gay, Dad," I repeated again, just because I didn't want to hear a ration of surprise once I got up there.
"Claire, I'm a session musician. If I let people's lifestyles bother me, I probably wouldn't work much."
"But don't bring it up around him, okay?"
"I wouldn't. I take it ... he hasn't accepted his sexuality yet?"
I laughed and realized how much I missed my dad sometimes—probably because he asked blunt questions that made you think, instead of acting like a dad. After a minute of scratching my head, I said, "I think he's fine with who he is. He, like, takes serious offense if you try to tie him up with any adjective."
"Hm. Sounds like he's either in an identity crisis or he blew way past all of that."
"Way past. Which isn't to say he's going to have a ton of friends, you know?"
I heard the screen door opening softly behind me and saw Macy coming through. My stomach twisted up. My thought had been to get some clothes together and be out of the house in three minutes or less. You should have had this conversation in Philly.
"I have to go, Dad."
"Call your mother at work, Claire. Do not leave her a note. I'm not up for any backlash reactions over you taking a bus, and she has my cell phone number—"
"Hey. Who married her? You or me? Why am I the whipping boy?"
He sighed. I felt Macy move behind me, leaning against the counter, as I tried to calculate how much of this conversation would make sense to her. I held my patience while knowing she was trying to get closer so she could hear my dad as well as me. Somehow, Macy having to know everything had never bothered me until this point.
"Okay, compromise," Dad said. "Leave your mom a note. I'll make sure we're at the end of the line fifteen minutes early, so I have nothing to feel guilty about. And Suhar and I will, uh, forget to bring my cell phone to the restaurant. Tomorrow ... you and I will speak to your mom together if she reacts badly. Fair enough?"
"I don't know...," I teased him. "I think you should have to do all the talking, being that you're the grown-up and all."
"Did I ever explain to you the difference between a grownup and a god?"
"Save it." I cast Macy a glance out of the corner of my eye. She was watching me like crazy. I avoided saying, "See you soon," before I hung up. No question, I was in a very treacherous spot, which would not be easy to get out of.
She didn't stop watching me after I hung up the phone. "What happened to you after cheerleading?"
I slithered down to the floor on my butt and spouted quickly, "I just needed to be alone. No offense or anything." I didn't want an uproar about where I had been.
"I couldn't find you anywhere! You're giving us heart attacks lately, Claire." She slithered down beside me. She threw an arm around my neck, and I slumped over until my head was on my knees.
"How's your ... food thing? Are you all right?"
Food. I worked myself back up off the floor, went to the microwave and popped it opened. Baked lasagna. Oh puke. Mom had said she was baking lasagna for Mrs. DeGrossa's party tomorrow night, and she liked to heat it twice before she served it. Tasted better the second time around. This mega slice was from the first time around. I pulled it out, swallowing spit, reasoning that if I ate it cold, the cheese and sauce would be more chewy, less slimy.
I flinched as I realized, You're going to miss your token appearance at Mrs. DeGrossa's party. Mom will freak. You have to make health salad. You have to ditch Macy
. You have to be out of here in— I glanced at the clock on the stove—in fifteen minutes. Claire, even your wanting to help somebody can mess up the works.
I swallowed more spit, shoved the lasagna into the refrigerator without bothering to cover it, hauled out the cabbage, celery, and carrots.
"Claire, what are you doing?" Macy rose slowly to her feet. "Why'd you put that lasagna away?"
"I have to make health salad for Mom's party tomorrow night. I'll eat it while I'm—"
"There is not a single calorie in that stuff!" She marched over and snapped open the refrigerator. "Okay, lasagna is fat-people food. It would make me sick, too. Look, hot dogs. I'm making you a hot dog, okay?"
I squashed my eyeballs with my palms. Don't be this nice, please don't be this nice.
"I'll eat lasagna." I just didn't want her doing anything nice for me.
She dumped the plate back into my hands. "Go on, sit while you eat that. You can make health salad afterward. The gang will wait for you. They're over at Sydney's, doing the usual nothing. Scott's dad is taking an overnight to the canyon. The boat won't be back until tomorrow."
I glanced at the clock on the kitchen stove. Thirteen minutes. Screw health salad. Mom will live without it. Eat, fool.
I trudged into the living room and sat down in my mom's TV chair, catching a fork Macy tossed at me before she plopped down on the couch.
"Please stop watching me like that. I can eat without an armed guard. But when I'm done eating, I can't go with you. I'm, uhm ... going to my dad's."
"On a Friday night? Why?"
I took a couple of good-sized bites of lasagna, while she sat there patiently-unpatiently shifting around. According to Lani, there was no point in trying to tell someone that their ears or eyes are inaccurate—they will not buy it. I decided to maneuver things; so like him, I was starting with the facts about Tony Clementi first.
"I'll tell you something, but you have to swear you won't tell."
"Why would I tell? When have I ever told your secrets?"
What Happened to Lani Garver Page 14