What Happened to Lani Garver, a 2002 young adult novel by Carol Plum-Ucci, destabilizes conventional ideas about gender, sexuality, and identity. After missing school for more than a year to undergo treatment for leukemia, sixteen-year-old Claire MacKenzie returns to high school in her small community on Hackett Island, near Philadelphia. Despite lingering insecurities, she triumphs: she is welcomed into the popular clique; she is a cheerleader; she is thinner than ever. But when Claire’s friends ostracize the mysterious, androgynous newcomer, Lani Garver, she is compelled to examine her community’s intolerance and, with Lani’s help, to embrace difference – not least of all, her own. Macy Matlock, the queen bee at Coast High, takes a liking to Claire on her first day back at school, securing Claire a place in the popular crowd. Although Macy is controlling and expects Claire’s compliance in all matters, Claire, who is battling her own demons, is content to follow Macy’s lead. Another new student, Lani Garver, doesn’t receive Macy’s stamp of approval. Lani’s smooth complexion, well-defined cheekbones, and bobbed haircut put into question other gendered features that signal a male identity. Without compunction, Macy asks Lani if “she” is a girl, to which Lani replies, “No, not a girl.” For Macy and her friends, this leaves only one option: Lani is a boy and definitely gay. This is an immediate disqualifier for social inclusion at Coast High. Lately, Claire has been suffering from fatigue, and then, while walking home from school, she feels light-headed. As she is trying to collect herself, Lani comes along and notices her distress. Unwilling to leave Claire by herself, Lani takes her home. Claire is uncomfortable going into Lani’s bedroom, but she is too exhausted to protest. Once Claire is settled, Lani asks about her health. She is reluctant to talk, but as she slowly opens up about her experience with leukemia, Claire finds it is a relief to share her adversities. She admits she is worried the cancer is returning but has not told anyone else, not even her mother. After Claire’s parents divorced, she continued to live with her mother, who drank heavily during Claire’s leukemia ordeal. Claire can’t mention her concerns to her mom for fear of triggering more alcohol abuse. At night, Claire’s anxiety is expressed in bloody dreams of people cutting themselves. Claire asks about Lani’s life and learns that Lani moved frequently while growing up and, most recently, left home to live on the street while attending a performing arts school in Philadelphia. After Lani’s father died, Lani’s mother moved to Hackett Island, where Lani has joined her. When Claire returns to the question of Lani’s gender identity, Lani remains evasive, refusing to be pigeonholed as “he” or “she.” (Because the novel’s first-person narrator, Claire refers to Lani as “he,” this summary does, as well.) Lani knows of a free clinic in Philadelphia where Claire can be tested to determine if the leukemia has relapsed. He suggests they meet the next morning to take a bus to the city. Later that evening, Claire goes out with friends from school, including two brothers, Vince and Tony Clementi. The Clementi boys have a daredevil reputation. The teens pile into Vince’s car, and Vince drives excessively fast along a curvy road. Sitting beside an open window, Claire falls from the moving car when Tony pulls a prank. She is left to bandage her own wounds while the others swim in the ocean. The next day, Lani takes Claire to the clinic in Philadelphia. She learns that the leukemia is still in remission, but she is underweight and malnourished. Because of her desire to fit in as a cheerleader with the cool kids, Claire has developed an eating disorder. The medic, Marcus, also introduces an unexpected topic: “floating angels.” He tells Claire that these angels visit people who are struggling and need help. According to Marcus, a floating angel often appears in the form of a sexually ambiguous person who is resolutely kind and tolerant. Claire starts to wonder if Lani is a floating angel. Repudiating labels and “boxes” as too reductive, Lani is enigmatically sexless and, to some extent, ageless. Moreover, while Lani’s streetwise know-how sets him apart from the provincial kids on Hackett Island, so does his deep wisdom about the ideas of Einstein, Freud, and Jung. Lani exposes Claire to new ideas and new people. Through him, she meets Ellen, who has overcome an eating disorder herself and understands Claire’s struggle. Lani also connects Claire with Dr. Erdman, a Philadelphia-based therapist Lani admires. As she becomes familiar and comfortable with Lani’s friends in Philadelphia, Claire realizes how narrow-minded her own high school friends are. Macy, Vince, Tony, and the other “fish frat” boys view Lani’s non-conformity with great suspicion and try to turn Claire against him, as well. Tony then accuses Lani of sexually propositioning him, fabricating this lie to cover his own guilt. As Claire knows, Tony is harassing Lani with phone calls and pornographic pictures, suggesting Tony has homosexual desires he can’t admit to. Lani gracefully endures Tony’s abuse, as well as cruelty from others, and Claire asks if he is indeed a floating angel. Ever evasive, Lani declines to answer. Instead, he refers to his favorite (fictional) philosopher, Andovenes, who advises, “Be kind to everyone. Because you never know when you’re meeting an angel and you’re just not aware of it.” Lani once played an angel in a school play, and he kept the costume – designed from a picture in his Andovenes book – because, he confesses, he “felt right” wearing it. Tony’s malevolent obsession with Lani spirals out of control. He masterminds a plan to abduct Claire and Lani and take them to his father’s fishing boat, where, together with other fish frat boys, he will give them a good scare. They throw Claire and an angel-costumed Lani overboard, but the prank turns deadly when the pair becomes tangled in the fishing net. Tony vindictively severs the net from the boat; the net sinks, and only Claire resurfaces. Lani has disappeared, but has he died? His mother believes he ran away again because some of his bags are gone. Finding his costume on the beach, Claire wonders if Lani is dead or a floating angel after all. She moves to Philadelphia to live with her father and joins Lani’s friends at the performing arts school. Kirkus Reviews observes that Plum-Ucci’s “characterizations are superb, from Claire’s troubles to her over-the-top friends’ shallow concerns to Lani’s fierce individualism and his artsy, eclectic city friends. The hint of supernatural only adds to the appeal.” Plum-Ucci recognizes Stephen King’s supernatural literary works as influential on her work.

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