What Happened to Lani Garver

by Carol Plum-Ucci

  To my surprise a laugh squirted out of her nose, and she pulled my cheerleading jacket off my butt to glance at the lettering. "I don't think you'd like that place at all. But I'm game ... Guess we're about to have a close encounter with RazorBacks."

  I handed back her phone, and we trotted down South Street.

  21

  As soon as I passed through the door to RazorBacks, I could see why Lani had said I would find something here I liked. And I could see why Ellen would not quite get it. She hadn't heard the conversation about black leather between me and Lani.

  The place was a clothing boutique where, like, seventy-five percent of everything was made of leather. There were some very tiny leather outfits I wouldn't be caught dead in, along with things like candles and lotions and other South Street rages. There were also racks of leather jackets, leather pants, leather dresses. The smell of leather wafted up my nose and sunk into my gut, making me feel nervy.

  Ellen followed along as I moved past the aisle of lotion and candles and went directly for the leather jackets. I spun past a few that were either longer, or belted, or covered in chains. They didn't really look like anything I would wear. I got my hand around a black one that I almost skipped past because it looked so plain. It was just simple black leather that was gathered where it ended, at the waist. There was no huge zipper, no ornaments that made it stand out—just five metal snaps on black leather. It had a leather collar. I pulled it down and checked the size. Small. I took it off the hanger wondering if it meant girl's small, or guy's small.

  I asked Ellen.

  "I don't think the jackets in RazorBacks are gender specific," she said, then cracked up laughing, eyeing this jacket like she was reading my thoughts. "It's plain but unique. Go for it. You'll drive the islanders crazy, looking like nobody else."

  I giggled back, sending my arms into the sleeves. The leather cracked as it wrapped around my shoulders. I liked the overall effect. It was plain and genuine but didn't really make any other statement.

  "Sleeves are too short," I noted in disappointment.

  "Try a bigger size." A salesclerk appeared out of nowhere, leafing through the mediums. I noticed he had a pierced lip. It was just a tiny silver stud, but once I saw it, I couldn't stop looking at it.

  "No medium left," he said. "Want to try a large?"

  "Sure." I tore my gaze from him. I imagined myself with a ring through my lip and decided I would be picking at it constantly. I would not want one of those face piercings if I were being totally myself, I decided. But I liked the way it looked on him.

  I took the size-large jacket from him and shot my arms through the sleeves. It hung on me. Very, very baggy. I felt disappointed.

  "You could wear it with a very big sweater." Ellen giggled.

  But by now I had a picture in my head. This black leather jacket, size medium, with a white tank shirt. Ribbed, really expensive tank shirt. I sighed. "You're sure there's no medium?" I asked him.

  He nodded. "If it's not here, we sold it."

  He looked sympathetic, but that didn't make my disappointment go away. I loved this jacket. But then I got to looking at the salesgirl's clothes as she fussed over the shelves of candles. She was dressed mostly in black—black platforms, black leather pants, black vest, black T-shirt. She was tall and thin, like me, so I got to imagining myself in that outfit. I would be six foot in those platforms and would feel like a rhino queen. The black vest looked a little like jailbait to me. But the jeans looked really good on her slender frame.

  I turned slowly to look at this jacket again and wondered if my mother, miracle seamstress, could take it in. Maybe, if she wouldn't faint over my raw nerve at bringing black leather home.

  "Do you see those pants on that girl?" I asked the salesclerk.

  "Yeah," he said. "They're Kira's high-huggers." I guessed he was referring to how they came all the way up to her waist, which wasn't really the style around here, it seemed. On Hackett, it was still okay.

  "Did she buy them here?"

  He turned slowly to another rack, and I gathered Ellen thought leather pants an outrageous request, because she was giggling again. "Don't be laughing at me." I nudged her, begging. "I would never buy black leather pants. I just ... I wanted to try them on and see what they feel like."

  She kept laughing but said, "I'm not laughing at you, I'm laughing with you, and I hope you find a pair that fits."

  The clerk held out a pair very similar to Kira's, draped over a hanger. I could see immediately that they were waist high and not hip high.

  I said, "Oh my god," as Ellen stomped her foot.

  "These are size five," the guy said, "and they run tight. Leather is like that."

  I was a perfect size five and snatched them from him, heading toward the dressing room as he pointed.

  Ellen trailed along. Her eyes popped when I got them on. "Actually? They fit perfectly ... if you're into clothes fitting like a glove."

  "Yeah, well ... I'm not." I glanced at her J. Crew–type outfit, which was cute and expensive looking, but in no way smacked of sexy.

  "This tightness is definitely not me. Looks horny." I stuck my head out the door and spotted the salesclerk, still going through the rack. "You got these in a seven?"

  The guy shook his head. "I just looked for one, but all I have is a nine."

  I took the pair from him but got a weird feeling in my gut. My perfect sizes were not there, almost like a sign of fate. You shouldn't be trying on weird outfits, Claire. You don't need to be any bigger a laughingstock on Hackett.

  The nine was too big, but not so big that I couldn't get a good sense of what the seven would have looked like. Just big enough for a few ripples. A medium jacket and size seven pants would have been perfect. So perfect that, yeah, I probably would have bought them, despite that I'd just sworn to Ellen that I wouldn't.

  Ellen noticed my disappointed look and tried to make me feel better. "I might mention that RazorBacks is way, way expensive, anyway. I can't afford to buy stuff here ... but I know all the good sales at Abercrombie, J. Crew ... Gap. Wanna head over to Liberty Mall?"

  I checked the price tag just to be sure. My eyes popped. The pants alone were more than a hundred dollars. The jacket was almost three hundred.

  I jammed my legs into my jeans, moaning to her about Lani sending me to this store. "Lani's got runaway-child syndrome. A fun afternoon for him is probably gazing at stuff he could never afford to buy and getting a charge out of just gazing. I can't do that, sorry. I can't gaze without..."

  I trailed off in disappointment, but Ellen finished for me. "Without lusting." She giggled supremely.

  "Yeah. I get shopping lust." We went out of the dressing room as I eyed Kira's high-huggers as she set up bottles justright on a shelf about six feet away. "Can you lust after somebody else's clothes?"

  "Oh sure, you can lust after anything," Ellen said easily. "Hey, is your name Kira? Claire, here, is lusting after your pants."

  My mouth fell to the O shape, but Kira only laughed along with Ellen. I guessed the word lust had a different meaning than down at the shore, where it meant bad biblical sex or something. She grinned, all proud of her pants. "And ours are too expensive, so you want me to cut you a cheap deal on mine, right? Ain't gonna happen. They're from my honey. He likes the way I sound in them." She walked in a circle, all swishing her butt, making squishy noises with her thighs.

  I laughed hard at her response, feeling like you could say just about anything in these parts and people didn't look at you weird.

  I put the pants back on the rack. "I guess I should be grateful to Lani for sending me down here," I told them. "I found the definition of Claire black leather."

  "Did you say the name Lani?" Kira asked.

  "Yeah, he told me to come here."

  "Okay, you're that Claire." She smacked her forehead "Were you going to pick up your present? There's a present for you behind the counter."

  I followed her in kind of a stupor. She dropped
the box on the counter with an annoyed splat, and I kind of froze. I was expecting a bottle of perfume or something. This was an enormous box. Something black leather, I just knew, even before Kira nudged me. "Open it! Looked a little like some of the stuff you were trying on. Maybe you lucked out. Maybe you can exchange it for what you tried on and not owe anything."

  "This guy is too nice," I said, frozen.

  "He? I thought it was a she." Kira laughed.

  "He's sort of ... a he-she." Ellen told her.

  She hooted. "I know a lot of he-she people, but usually I can guess what they are with some accuracy. Especially if I spend half an hour on the phone with he-she—who's got our catalog but insists on calling the boutique instead of the warehouse. He kept me running for half an hour."

  "Where'd he get the money?" I wondered.

  "Now I'm feeling my guilt." Ellen winced a little. "Last thing he said to me before he went back to his mom's to live was that his dad had left him a little money. We were all busting his stones, all 'What, you're going home so you can get the money?' He just ignored us. Never said he planned to, like, give it away buying gifts for people."

  I pulled back the lid. I didn't want to exchange it, whatever it was. It was such a nice thing to do that I would keep it and wear it, even if he'd pegged me all wrong. As I pulled the two pieces out, Ellen was dead quiet for once, not giggling. I don't think I said a damn thing, either. The two of us stared and stared, trying to decide how something that seemed this impossible could even happen.

  22

  We trudged back up South Street toward my dad's place, and Ellen found her voice first. She tried to give me sanity-inducing statistics, which made me glad I hadn't said anything yet. She was turning out to be a good friend who had put up with a lot of my craziness back at Erdman's office. I didn't want to push my luck and say anything outlandish, like that the guy is simply not human. Or better, He's a real floating angel.

  "Cooper and I eat together at my house lots, because both our moms work late," she said. "I can't tell you the number of times I've called to have pizza delivered, and Cooper walks in with a pizza. Same with sushi, same with gyros."

  I agreed that was weird. But I didn't think friends showing up with the same food was as colossal as Lani picking out the very stuff I had tried on.

  "I'm so grateful, don't get me wrong," I finally spouted. "I just feel so crazed and so ... not me right now. I almost wish I didn't have to deal with an experience that seems so twilight zoney. It's not helping me feel less crazed."

  "You're not crazed; you're readjusting." She tried to assure me. I'm not sure I looked any more convinced. She went on, "Besides. RazorBacks is a small, exclusive boutique. It's not like when you walk into the Gap and there's fifty million of the same thing. There were many in different sizes, but how many styles of black leather jackets were they selling in there?"

  "Maybe ... five," I mumbled.

  "So, he had a one-in-five chance of picking the one you would have picked. That's not so outlandish."

  I guessed it wasn't. I felt my brain relaxing a little. "And the others weren't like anything I would have ever bought."

  "There you go. And the pants? They were plain, like the jacket. Logical match. You still feel like you're in the twilight zone about it?"

  "I guess not." I laughed, watching her toss her red hair in a confident way. I liked her a lot, so I let the subject go without further questions, such as the big one bothering me: How would he have guessed my perfect sizes, on top of my perfect taste? Is that just something gay guys are good at?

  The sizes were as perfect as I imagined. I modeled for Ellen back at the house, and I think she was as awestruck as I was. Then we started watching a video on my dad's couch, and I fell dead asleep. I started to have one of my recurring nightmares. In it a girl I didn't know took a guitar string and stuck the end of it up to the palm of her hand. Guitar string is very sharp, and you can cut yourself with the points. Even in the dream I could feel my stomach getting all weird, because this girl had been in other dreams. Sometimes she would thread guitar string in and out of her palm, making an X, hold it up to me, and smile. I moved toward her in the dream, and this time I tried to stop her.

  "Don't," I said, reaching for her hand. "Why are you hurting yourself?"

  She held up her palm. Instead of an X, she had somehow carved in this beautiful tattoo of a little bird or butterfly, something with wings in pastel colors.

  She asked, "What makes you think I'm hurting myself?"

  I woke up in a stupor, finding the house almost dark. Only snow on the TV screen lit the living room. I shot up, wondering how long ago the movie had ended. Ellen was gone. I turned on the lamp and spotted a little note on the coffee table. "Call if you need anything. El." It had her cell phone number underneath. Under that was scribbled Lani's number, as if he had called, and a note from my dad that said he had left to play with his band, Suhar was with him, and she had made Japanese food, which was in the microwave. The little clock on the wall read 7:10. I was supposed to be at the Calcutta practice in twenty minutes.

  I flopped back, staring at the ceiling, not freaking over the little time I had to get ready. I felt like I had two clear choices. I could take time to eat or I could try to make myself look awesome in my new black leather to go jam with these college guys. Ellen's words rang in my head: Don't try to impress them. They won't be trying to impress you.

  I stumbled toward the kitchen, deciding I could throw on the leather pants, leave on the T-shirt I slept in. It was too hot for the jacket, anyway. I would get to wear part of my new stuff without looking like I was trying to impress anyone.

  I started in on Suhar's Japanese food and plowed through half the plate before dialing Lani's number. "You are the best. I cannot believe you bought me that beautiful stuff."

  "I thought you'd like it." He giggled.

  "'Like it'?" I opened my mouth to tell him I'd tried the very stuff on. But my eyes shot to my watch again. Fifteen minutes until practice, and I had to walk with two guitars.

  "I'm almost late for rehearsal. We'll talk a lot more later. I just wanted to know if you found your missing nightgowns."

  "I got the book back."

  I almost choked on the milk I was downing furiously. "How?"

  "It was in the gutter in front of the house this afternoon. Kind of like it had always been there. Guess there's no question that the package on the porch was from Abby."

  "But do you think somebody took the time to dump the book back in front of your house? That's diabolical. I'll bet the book fell out in the gutter..."

  He chuckled. "Claire, you're naive, but I love you, anyway."

  "You actually think some rip-off artist put it back there."

  "To let me know they had the nightgowns. Only they didn't have Tony's nerve, to make their delivery onto the porch. They had to leave it in the gutter, and then flee—"

  "Cowards!" I blasted, pushing my plate away in frustration. "I'm calling Macy."

  "She's your friend, and you can do what you want. But what would you accomplish by calling her?"

  "I'll tell her off! I can't believe she knifed me in the back like that to Sydney ... and then this? Do you really think it was Macy?" I couldn't get over this.

  "I saw her this time."

  "You saw her? Why didn't you tell me that right off?"

  "I was afraid you would think I was having a convenient recollection." He laughed, but I didn't see anything funny.

  "You saw Macy throw that book in the gutter?"

  "Yeah. She opened the passenger door of Vince Clementi's car, got one foot on the ground, and heave-hoed."

  I shut my eyes and swallowed spit, having a complete flashback of eighth grade. Not that Macy had ever done a mean thing to me. But back then I hadn't known about the thin lines cutting through her versions of good and evil. She could rip on and on about a fat kid pigging out on potato chips and totally terrify me that I could be her next victim.

  "What
did you do when you saw her leave the book?"

  "Oh, I just watched." His voice picked up more happily. "But after she jumped back in Vince's car and the whole truth struck me, I started to laugh hysterically."

  "What whole truth?"

  "If they had simply gone online for ten minutes? That volume of Andovenes is worth about nine hundred dollars."

  My jaw dropped. "No way. You own a book worth nine hundred dollars?"

  "Check it out on eBay sometime. Instead, she could have had a decent down payment on a car. She's playing gutter games."

  I laughed my side off. "Care if I tell her that?"

  "Do not tell her that. I don't want anybody rifling my room for their next trick. And I've got a better idea than you calling her."

  "What's that?"

  "Go to band practice."

  He wanted me to rise above it.

  "I just wish I knew what she was doing with those nightgowns," I muttered, heading into the bedroom to change. "Is she going to bring them into school on Monday and, like, totally humiliate both of us?"

  "Do you really care?"

  All of a sudden I couldn't answer that. But I admired Lani's courage. And if that was the worst that could happen, I supposed I could live with it. I thanked him again for the black leather, and we hung up pretty quick.

  I got to this upstairs empty room over a restaurant where Calcutta rehearsed, and all I noticed at first was the run of good news. First, these guys did not play any hip-hop, which thrilled me to no end. They had a horn player, and yet, they were so much about rock 'n' roll that I got to try out both the electric and acoustic guitars. Second, they were very nice, but in a professional way. No one went gaga over my guitar playing, like Erdman, but how they filled in around it said a lot.

  They knew mostly eighties and nineties stuff, and I knew mostly sixties and seventies. But we discovered they and I both knew some Elton John. My dad had burned "Rocket Man" onto one of those practice CDs back when I was sick. It starts out with just piano and a voice, and then everything comes in at the first chorus. I gripped a guitar pick, listening to their lead singer, this Jason French, laying out clean vocals to the piano, waiting for that chorus. And it occurred to me, I had never played with a backup before that wasn't on a CD or MP3.