The Decoding of Lana Morris

by Laura McNeal

  Now, on the front porch, on this normal-seeming Saturday morning, Tilly shouts gleefully, “Slinky winky coming after us!”

  3.

  The swirling dust devil has swept along the street, lifting leaves and candy wrappers, moving past Chet’s house next door, veering north and now, suddenly, it is whooshing toward the Winterses’ house, toward the front porch, toward Lana and Tilly.

  “We’d better go in,” Lana says, snatching the two-dollar bill from her ear, clapping a hand over her drawing tablet, and standing up.

  But Tilly stays where she is, grinning, exultant, wearing her red tornado pack and sucking on a Froot Loop.

  Lana hunches over the sketch pad, closes her eyes, and waits. The hot wind pours through her clothes and goes right inside her, finding all the little corners, sucking up stray thoughts and idle notions, and then abruptly it is gone, leaving behind a feeling Lana can’t remember feeling before. A lightness, she thinks. A pleasant emptiness that makes her feel strangely hopeful.

  She opens her eyes.

  Papers litter the yard, the Froot Loops box is upside down on the driveway, and Tilly is still grinning. Sheer pleasure beams in her face. “We were in the slinky winky!” she says.

  Lana nods and wipes at her skin to see if she’s dusty. She is, a little. She slips the rolled two-dollar bill back into place behind her left ear. The odd elation still fills her.

  Tilly says, “Did it carry us away?”

  Lana thinks she did get a little carried away by the dust devil, but not in the way Tilly means, so she says, “We’re still here, aren’t we?”

  Tilly nods. Then she smiles her usual satisfied smile and says, “It was fun!”

  Lana thinks that in a way, it was. If Tilly hadn’t been here, she would have gone inside and missed the whole thing. “You weren’t scared?”

  “No!” Then, “You was here!” Then Tilly opens her tornado pack, takes out one of her emergency granola bars, and starts to eat it.

  Lana says, “You’d better put your pack in the window seat before Veronica sees it.”

  Tilly evidently sees the wisdom of this—she starts zipping up the pack’s compartments. Lana folds open her tablet to the drawing of Whit. There’s nothing wrong with doing a portrait of him, she tells herself. She’s drawn faces before, though not of men, certainly not her guardians.

  But Whit is different. Back in December, at Lana’s arrival, Whit smiled and said, “Well, hello, Miss Morris,” while Veronica stared with cold gray eyes at Lana for about a minute. Lana stared right back. Veronica’s lips, unglossed, had a faintly bluish tone.

  Finally Veronica said, “One more L.M.A.”

  Don’t ask, Lana thought, but she couldn’t help herself. In a sullen voice she said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Veronica seemed pleased that Lana had taken the bait. “It means one more Little Miss Attitude,” she said in an icy voice. Then, “We’ve seen a few, just so you know. They come and they go.”

  And Lana, feeling something close down inside her, said, “F.U.” She made a small, stony smile. “But just so you know, F.U. doesn’t mean anything personal toward you—they’re just my adopted middle initials.” She kept her hard little smile. “They stand for Faith and Unity.” She narrowed her gaze on Veronica.

  Veronica, satisfied that her worst expectations had just been confirmed, gave a cold, knowing nod and walked away. But Whit Winters just stood there with a loose grin on his face.

  He was a man, Lana knew, but his look was boyish, and he had narrow hips and skin so smooth Lana wondered if he ever had to shave. His eyes were frisky and deeply brown and exerted on Lana what felt like an actual pull. Still, he was connected to Veronica, so Lana stared at his mouth and said, “I would call that grin moronic.” A word her father had liked to use.

  Whit Winters seemed actually amused. “You’re kind of a desperado, aren’t you?”

  Lana stared over his shoulder, away from his eyes.

  He said, “Lana Morris. Is that what you said your name is?”

  Lana wouldn’t even nod. She kept her eyes drilling into the wall behind him.

  In a mild, almost playful tone, he said, “Well, you know what? I’m going to make it my personal mission to learn the Morris code.”

  These words affected Lana, but she didn’t want to show it. She said sullenly, “That’s the Morse code. My name isn’t even spelled like that.”

  Whit Winters shrugged. “Didn’t say it was.” He waited until she was looking at him again and then, when she was, he said, “Everybody’s got their own secret code and then one day”—his grin slid up on one side—“along comes the Decoder.”

  That was how it all started.

  Now, six months later, Lana puts her pencil lead on the line of Whit’s mouth and begins to make a shadow. Tilly, who has stopped eating her granola bar and recovered the Froot Loops box from the driveway, reaches into it, rummages, and says, “I like Froot Loops and Trix, Lana. But I don’t like Kix and Chex. Not really.”

  “Okay by me,” Lana says, and sneaks a glance at the house next door. Chet’s house. The blinds of Chet’s bedroom are still pulled.

  “Chet’s a sleepyhead!” Tilly says, and Lana realizes Tilly is on to her.

  “He keeps late hours,” Lana says, and—does she actually hear Veronica approaching or just sense it?—she casually folds back the page on her yellow legal pad and quickly begins a crude sketch of the dust devil. A few seconds later, Veronica pushes open the screen door.

  “You’re lunch duty, Lana,” she says.

  In fact, Lana has already made the sandwiches—bologna with mayo and mustard for everyone except Carlito, who screams if you give him mustard—but she doesn’t say so. She doesn’t want to give Veronica the satisfaction.

  “Did you hear me?” Veronica says with an edge to it.

  Lana says, “I nodded, didn’t I?” though she knows she didn’t.

  “It’s bologna and cheese,” Veronica says, “but we’re out of cheese.”

  “Then it’s not really bologna and cheese, is it?” Lana says. She knows it’ll go on Veronica’s report as bologna and cheese, or maybe ham and cheese.

  “Technically, yes, it is,” Veronica says. “We’re just out of cheese.”

  Lana gives Veronica a look, but she’s not going to argue. She herself wouldn’t eat the cheese even if they had it, because what Veronica buys is a horrible, Velveeta-like knockoff she gets at some big-box store in Rapid City. This isn’t anything unusual. Veronica’s always whining about money, and Lana’s noticed that Veronica makes a habit of cutting corners on the Snicks’ food. Once she bought a cheap Froot Loop knockoff and put the stuff in real Froot Loop boxes, but none of the Snicks would eat it.

  “And no mustard for Carlito,” Veronica says, and Lana under her breath says, “Thanks for the mighty advice.”

  A mistake, because Veronica must’ve heard it. She steps out onto the porch, and when Lana glances up, Veronica’s eyes are on the drawing paper.

  “What is that?” she says in her cool voice, and then, “No, don’t tell me, I already know. It’s a pathetic doodle. But that’s okay, because I’m sure that out there in the real world, there are all sorts of really great opportunities for pathetic doodlers.”

  “Faith,” Lana says in the droning, stretched-out voice she imagines to be in the style of a chanting Himalayan monk. “Unity.”

  Veronica presents a frosty smile. “What exactly is that behind your ear?” she says. “Is it a dollar bill of some kind?”

  Lana says, “Of some kind, yeah.”

  “What denomination?”

  Sullenly Lana says, “I can’t recall.”

  Veronica’s eyes brighten slightly. “Really? Isn’t it a two-dollar bill? Isn’t it a two-dollar bill that you unfold and hold flat in your hand when you want to feel the presence of whoever it was who was once, ever so briefly, your father?”

  These are things Lana has told Whit privately and confidentially, and when they c
ome back at her from Veronica’s lips, the sensation is that of a puncture wound. How could Whit have passed these things on to her?

  It’s as if Veronica hears the thought, because she smiles and says, “Whit can’t keep secrets from me any better than you can.”

  This is a typical Veronica exit line, and the screen door flaps closed behind her.

  “F.U. squared,” Lana says under her breath, and Tilly, who’s been through this drill before, says in her happy, thick voice, “F.U. cubed!”

  This produces laughs from both of them, and afterward, when it’s quiet and Lana looks over at Tilly, she sees something surprising. Tilly is gazing sedately out, calm and still. From this particular angle and in this particular light, she looks pretty and normal-seeming, and Lana has the eerie feeling that she’s being given a glimpse of the other Tilly, the Tilly that would’ve been here today if there just hadn’t been the genetic bungle.

  And then, abruptly, Tilly’s head cocks. “I hear something, Lana. Do you hear something, Lana?”

  Lana does. It’s a car without a muffler, a car Lana has ridden in before and hopes to ride in again.

  4.

  The emerald green LeSabre turning the corner and coming this way is old, enormous, and belongs to a slackly handsome boy named K.C., who at Two Rivers High is the magnet around which kids of a certain type collect. It’s the type Lana has always been: not normal enough to have kids over after school, not hip or competent or confident enough for cheerleading, sports, or student government. She could tell these kids at a glance, the ones whose parents had died or gone to drugs or just plain cut and run, but in Two Rivers, when it came to weirdness, Lana is in a league of her own: she is the one who lives in a foster home for retards.

  As he rolls up to Chet’s house next door, K.C. leans on the LeSabre’s horn, which has been tricked out for exceptional loudness.

  Lana says, “There’s Chet’s eleven a.m. wake-up call,” which might’ve gotten her a laugh in quicker company, but all Tilly says is, “I like Chet, Lana. Yes, sir.”

  “Chet’s okay,” Lana says. Okay, in her mind, is a term that slides on a loose line between bad and not so bad. Chet is a lank, straw-haired boy whose looks aren’t helped by the dark bulbous mole tucked into the side fold of his nose. Last night, around two, when she went down the hall to pee, Lana looked out the hall window and saw that Chet’s light was still on. Through the open windows of his upstairs room she could see him pacing, wearing earphones, and talking, or singing along, or something, because his mouth was moving. Now, though, the blinds to the two windows are shut tight. Sleeping.

  This isn’t the first time she’s noticed Chet’s pattern of staying up late and snoozing till noon. “What do you do up there in the middle of the night anyhow?” she asked him one afternoon.

  Chet had given her one of his distant grins and said, “What goes on in Chet’s room is between Chet and his larger public,” which didn’t take Lana far in terms of explanation, so she said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Chet’s gaze had drifted to the far reaches. “Chetteroids mean what we mean,” he said, “but … we don’t always dot our i’s.”

  Lana had looked exaggeratedly around and said, “You talking to me or to aliens hiding in nearby trees?”

  Chet’s eyes widened for a moment, and then he’d begun nodding lazily and chuckling to himself. “That’s it, all right, in and out of the nutshell. The Chetster’s talking to aliens hiding in nearby trees.”

  At which point Lana had left him to his own amusements.

  K.C. leans again on the megahorn. His girlfriend, Trina, is sitting sideways on the front seat with her back against the passenger door. Trina has dyed red hair that she wears with bangs that make a perfectly straight line across her forehead. She goes in big for jewelry: rings for her ears, nose, toes, and fingers and brightly colored fake jewel necklaces that draw attention to her cleavage and creamy white skin. (“You have to admit,” Chet once said of Trina to Lana, “her breasts are majestic.” To which Lana responded that she didn’t have to admit anything.) When Lana first enrolled at Two Rivers High, Trina was so obviously the queen of the outsiders that Lana expected—hoped for—kinship. For a while, Lana even tried big jewelry, but the only thing Trina ever said to her was, “I have a cousin who was raped by a retard. I’d be scared shitless if I was you.”

  Poking up behind Trina and K.C. is somebody else’s head. Probably Spink, is Lana’s guess, based on the gelled, vertical do. He’d dyed it white a while back and now, with the brown roots growing out, the stiffened hair looks like porcupine quills.

  Next door, the blinds on the upstairs window go up and Chet pops his head out to say he’ll be right down. He’s been asleep, all right—his hair is sticking up in ways even more than normally weird.

  Lana folds her tablet closed and hands it to Tilly. “Stay here,” she says. “I’m gonna check this out.”

  As she approaches the car, she sees that Trina has her ringed toes in K.C.’s lap, her knees bent so her short skirt has nowhere to go but up. Spink is on the far side of the backseat staring out through the slits of his bulgy, half-closed eyes. Nobody even looks at Lana, and Lana doesn’t ask any questions because she knows they won’t answer her. They have a policy.

  K.C. leans on the horn one more time (it really is loud—Lana would cover her ears if it weren’t such a nerdy move), and Chet comes out in an unbuttoned shirt carrying his comb and smokes and wallet in his hands. He passes on Lana’s right, so she gets a good view of the mole ballooning from the crease of his nose. He gets right into the backseat opposite Spink without even asking where they’re going. On the theory, Lana supposes, that anyplace is better than here. A theory she believes in herself.

  “Can I come, too?” Lana says to Chet, and Chet says to K.C., “Lana wants to come.”

  This is the procedure. K.C. and Trina and Spink won’t talk to Lana, but Chet, because he’s her next-door neighbor and sometime friend, will, so he acts as the go-between.

  K.C. says, “Who’s Lana? You mean Foster?”

  Foster, as in foster kid.

  “Yeah,” Chet says. “She wants to come.”

  K.C. glances at Trina, who gives a who-cares shrug and says, “Trunk only, though.”

  “Tell her okay,” K.C. says, “but trunk only.” He leans forward to punch the trunk release. The trunk door springs open.

  Spink says in a monotone, “The LeSabre’s capacious trunk accommodates all your cargo needs.”

  Lana looks at the trunk—empty except for a couple of old cushions she’s never seen before—and says, “When can I ride in the seat?”

  Chet repeats the question to K.C., who says, “When she grows tits,” which gets a good snort from Trina, and Lana’s face burns. She tries to remember what Whit told her once—that thin girls stay pretty longer, that the Trina types turn into Pillsbury doughgirls—but it doesn’t help much. She thinks of saying, F.U., K.C., and your slutty buddies, too, but the truth is, she believes that even if K.C. and his friends are scummy, they at least have a look of their own and they stick close, and Chet is okay, so maybe if she pays her dues, they’ll see she’s got something to offer and let her into their creepy club, so she just stands glaring at Chet’s nose mole, which always makes him self-conscious.

  “I threw in some cushions the other day,” he says. “To make it a little softer in there.”

  Lana glances at the frayed and faded red cushions—patio discards, without a doubt—and says, “Thanks heaps.”

  From inside the car Spink says, “How ’bout we move on dot-com?”

  “Tell her she’s got five seconds to get in,” K.C. says. “This train’s leaving the station.”

  Lana runs halfway to the porch and says to Tilly, “Lunch is all made, it’s in the refrigerator, and if Veronica asks, I went to the library,” then she runs back and climbs into the trunk. When Chet comes around to close it, he looks at her and his eyes go gentle and he whispers what he always whispers.
>
  “Don’t worry, okay?”

  Then he closes the trunk tight.

  5.

  It’s hot in the trunk, but not so much once you get moving, and otherwise it’s not bad. It’s roomy enough, and the cushions actually help with the sharp corners. It’s true the trunk is pitch-black, and it gives off an oily smell, but there isn’t any oil or grease that actually gets on you, and if K.C. plays the music loud enough, you can hear it through the backseat.

  Lana has been out with K.C. and the others maybe a dozen times, and the drives always divide into two types. Either they’re out to break into a house and steal stuff (Spink calls this “a wealth redistribution action”) or they’re just out cruising. Lana can tell which it’ll be by the way K.C. drives. If it’s a break-in day, he stays on the surface streets, slow-driving, checking out houses from a list they buy from a paperboy telling the addresses of people gone on vacation.

  Lana doesn’t like the housebreaking stuff, but there’s one part of it she doesn’t mind. K.C., Spink, and Trina are the ones who actually go in and bring the goods out, while Chet walks up and down the street with a cell phone in his pocket so he can give the others a quick heads-up if anyone shows at the house. When Lana’s along, she walks with Chet, but it looks funny, them just walking up and down the street like stiffs, so on one of their first times doing it, Lana said, “It’d be better if we looked like a couple or something,” and Chet said, “What do you mean?” and Lana said, “Well, we could just hold hands or something,” which is what they’d done, and is something she now more or less looks forward to, not that she’d say so to Chet.

  Today, it turns out, they’re just cruising—Lana can feel the car wheeling onto Highway 20, picking up speed. If Chet and the others talk loud enough, Lana can hear what they’re saying, which can be interesting in a secret-agent kind of way, but on the highway the road noise swallows up most of the conversation. Up front, they’re passing a hash pipe—a trace of its sharp smell seeps into the trunk—and Lana hopes it won’t soak into her clothes and hair because Veronica has the nose of a police dog. In another way, though, she’s relieved. These trips are aimless. Chet and the others just get on the highway and smoke their stuff and drive until they find something that in their altered state they think is worth stopping for—someone painting a WELCOME TO LAKE LITTLETON highway sign with five-foot-high ducks gliding onto the water, for example, or a livestock truck unloading old horses at a rendering plant (which K.C. and Spink, in particular, found hilarious). Usually, though, they will drive an hour or two or even more before stopping at all, most often for food.