Belzhar

by Meg Wolitzer

  Our eyes closed, and our faces moved together in that awkward way that I remembered from Seth Mandelbaum. Our shoulders touched too, and I felt the rustle of his creased cotton shirt.

  This was nothing like Seth Mandelbaum.

  Reeve’s soft lips stuck to mine for a spongy second, then unstuck with a little click. Feelings were gathering in me very fast. He pulled back and made a sound, like ohh, and then I did too; neither one of us felt self-conscious. Only thrilled. We kissed endlessly in the space above the dollhouse.

  This turned out to be the night we fell in love. We’d known each other for sixteen days. We’d have only twenty-five days left.

  • • •

  I open the journal now and pick up the pen, but I can’t bring myself to write a word.

  CHAPTER

  4

  JUST PAST MIDNIGHT, SHRIEKING AND CRYING wake me up. “DJ, what’s that?” I say, suddenly surfacing.

  She grunts from across the room. It takes her forever to get out of bed and stagger into the hall, but I’m out there right away along with a bunch of other girls, all of us in nightshirts or nightgowns, saying, “What’s going on? What’s happening?” No one knows. Jane Ann Miller, the history teacher who’s also our houseparent, appears in her hot-pink shortie bathrobe and strides down the hall. She takes the stairs in the direction of the noise, while all of us follow behind her like ducklings.

  The sound is coming from one flight up. Room 43. Beside the door is a nameplate: JENNY VAZ AND SIERRA STOKES. Jane Ann bangs hard and Jenny, who I’ve never spoken to, appears. The screaming and crying—mostly crying now—continue, so it’s Sierra who’s in distress.

  Jane Ann turns to all of us and says in a stern voice, “Go back to bed. There’s nothing to see.” But even after she goes inside and shuts the door we all linger, and soon the crying calms down, and finally there’s silence.

  • • •

  In the morning everyone feels kind of hung over from being awakened in the night, and at breakfast I’m standing on the oatmeal line, my eyes half closed, almost swaying, when I see Sierra two people ahead of me, talking to a girl I haven’t met. “Yeah, I know, of course it seemed real,” the girl is patiently telling her. “You wouldn’t believe the one I had this summer. I was taking a big exam, like the SAT or something, and all of a sudden I realized I’d forgotten to bring a pencil—”

  “It was nothing like that,” Sierra interrupts.

  “Oh, I know, they always feel like they’re actually happening,” says the girl.

  “Just forget it,” Sierra says, turning away.

  At the table during breakfast, DJ tells me, “It’s no surprise that Sierra Stokes had a really bad dream, given what she’s been through.”

  “What’s she been through?”

  DJ looks at me, uncomprehending. “Oh. You don’t know. Right.” She has three grapes and a piece of almost black toast—emo toast—on her plate. She takes a bite of the toast, swallows, then says, “I’m actually not supposed to talk about it. It goes against Wooden Barn policy. People are supposed to reveal their own stories to other people here only if they want to. You know her?”

  “She’s in Special Topics in English with me,” I say.

  “She got in and I didn’t? Oh, whatever. Well, all I’ll say is that she arrived here last year in a real state, and maybe the nightmare means that she’s not doing much better.”

  “This ‘thing’ that she went through,” I say. “Is it something really bad?”

  “Yes,” DJ says. “The worst.” I feel myself clench inside, though of course I don’t know what “the worst” means.

  We go off to our first-period classes, and during Special Topics in English I glance across the oak table at Sierra, who seems upset, distant. Casey’s late again, and she bangs into the room in her wheelchair in the middle of a discussion of the first-person narration in The Bell Jar.

  There’s a long pause, and I think we’re all nervous. “Casey,” Mrs. Quenell finally says. “The world will not wait.”

  This is the world?

  “Sorry,” Casey mutters.

  Mrs. Quenell turns back to the class. “As I’ve said, the book was written over fifty years ago,” she says. “But can any of you relate to it today?”

  “Sure,” says Casey. “You could say I’m trapped in my own little bell jar on wheels.”

  Me, I think, I’ve got my own version too. I think about how, after Reeve died, I used to lie in bed all day hearing my family and friends talk about me out in the front hall or the living room. I began to feel as if my bed were its own island, and I was floating farther and farther away from everyone with only my thoughts about Reeve to accompany me.

  “The isolation is just so hard,” I say, and right away I’m embarrassed that I’ve spoken.

  Mrs. Quenell looks at me. “Yes,” she says. “And you’re all so young. Plath’s protagonist is young too. To be on the verge of your life and not be able to enter it . . . that ought to be prevented whenever possible.”

  Everyone is paying very close attention to her. We’re talking about the novel, right? But maybe we’re not. We’re talking about ourselves. And I guess that’s what can start to happen when you talk about a book.

  I remember reading Charlotte’s Web with my mom when I was little. I was sitting next to her on the brown couch in the den when Charlotte died. And it was as if that little barn spider was my actual friend. Or even as if she was me. I guess I suddenly knew that I was going to die someday too. I really, really knew it for the first time, and I was shocked, and I cried.

  Just the way Sylvia Plath’s character Esther’s depression now makes me feel: Oh, I get it. And her isolation reminds me of how I’ve been feeling since the whole thing with Reeve.

  “Yeah,” says Griffin, nodding. “It’s like you can’t talk to other people. What do they know about what you’re going through? Nothing.”

  “Nothing at all,” I agree.

  “So other people know nothing at all,” says Mrs. Quenell. “And Esther seems to feel that way too, and she’s alone inside her despair. Nothing changes for her. Which, I guess, is the opposite of life.”

  “Isn’t death the opposite of life?” asks Sierra. It’s the first time today she’s joined the conversation.

  “I think not changing is sort of like dying,” says Griffin, and I can tell he’s uncomfortable actually taking part in a vaguely literary discussion. I bet he’s never done that before in his life. “But maybe I’m wrong, Mrs. Q,” he adds quickly.

  Mrs. Q! A couple of people laugh nervously. Yet right away the name fits, and it stays, just the way Leo started calling me Jam, and it stayed.

  “You know much more than you think, Mr. F,” she says. “Change can be crucial. Everything is changing all the time. Your cells are changing this very minute. The view from that window is slightly different from how it was a few seconds ago.”

  I automatically look toward the window, and almost as if Mrs. Quenell planned it, a leaf blows off the tree and slaps the glass. It clings for a second, before spinning away.

  “We can’t be afraid of change,” she tells us. “Or else we’ll miss out on everything.”

  Class is almost over. Mrs. Quenell peers at her watch, seeming to want to bring herself back into the moment. We’ve all been far away, thinking about Sylvia Plath, and her alter ego, Esther Greenwood, and, of course, ourselves. This class is like one of those twenty-four-hour convenience stores, except the only thing this one sells is depression. If it were actually a store, it would be called Bleak Mart.

  And I do feel bleak. That discussion has worn me out, I realize after we’re dismissed and I’m walking slowly across campus. Maybe I’ll just sleep during physics class today. There’s no point in being awake anymore. Without Reeve, I’m hardly even a person.

  I turn the corner and I’m alone on the lea
fy path, walking in silence among the trees. I know the colors here in Vermont in the fall are supposed to be a big deal, and yet I just don’t care. The colors actually seem to be taunting me, saying, Here we are, Jam, all the colors of the spectrum. Roy G. Biv, remember? And yet you can’t appreciate us one bit. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

  I shove my hands deep into my pockets, finding a dime that’s coated with lint. As I turn it over and over between my fingers, I notice Sierra up ahead hurling stones against a tree. Again and again she winds up and then torpedoes a stone against the tree’s surface, using all her force. She’s driven, focused, as though throwing stones is some kind of release for her.

  “Hey,” I call, breaking her rhythm.

  She turns and looks at me, suddenly self-conscious. “Hey,” she says back.

  “You’ve got a good arm.” I come closer.

  “Thanks.”

  We stand awkwardly together, and I say, “You must be really pissed at that tree. Did it give you a communicable disease or something? Dutch elm? Root rot?” But she doesn’t even smile at my pathetic joke.

  Instead she says, “I had a rough night. I guess you know that.”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  Sierra studies me, as if trying to figure out whether it’s okay to talk to me or not. Then she says, “Have you ever had an experience that made no sense?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I mean an experience that’s so surreal that if you told anyone, they’d be like, ‘What the hell is wrong with her?’”

  My heart is quickening. I did go through something intense after I lost Reeve. And some people did look at me funny because they weren’t used to seeing that kind of intensity, and that kind of grief, in someone my age. But Sierra means something else. I’m not about to reveal the story of Reeve right now.

  All I say is “Could you say more?”

  “Never mind,” she says. “It doesn’t matter.” She picks up her backpack, looping it over her arms, and turns away, done with me. She’d tried to see if I was a kindred spirit, and apparently I’m not. I was put to a test, and I’d failed it.

  • • •

  On Friday night there’s a social. This is about the saddest idea in the world: a bunch of psychological misfits gathered awkwardly in a gym at night with house music playing as if this is some normal “teen time” get-together, while on the edges of the room a few bored teachers chaperone. Like everything at The Wooden Barn, this social is probably supposed to be “healing,” and we’re meant to actually get something out of it. Like, learn how to be social.

  “Oh God, these things are the worst, I should’ve warned you,” says DJ, who stands beside me, surveying the grim room.

  “How long do we have to be here?” I ask.

  “Until the next millennium.”

  “But what’s the point?”

  “That is the million-dollar question.”

  DJ’s hair is so deeply in her face that it’s more like a wall of hair now than a curtain. She wears a pink miniskirt and Doc Martens and an army jacket, and somehow it all pulls together and looks cool on her. She stands with her arms folded across her chest. I’m in my usual jeans and sweater and Vans.

  Suddenly I remember Reeve’s brown sweater, the soft chocolate wool and the particular sweet-and-sour smell of him. And though I’m forced to remain at this social, in my mind I start doing this thing I sometimes do, which is to go back over the forty-one days of our relationship in detail. The forty-one days that I’ve memorized, and that in times of stress or boredom I replay in a loop in my head, like a movie on repeat. I start to remember every single thing we did together:

  The morning he showed up in gym class for the first time.

  The afternoon in art class when I was drawing on the hill, and he came and sat beside me.

  The night we kissed above Courtney Sapol’s dollhouse.

  The time he showed me a DVD of his favorite old Monty Python sketch about the dead parrot.

  And there were other things we did too, but as the thoughts start to bunch up in my brain, my throat feels kind of choked. And if I don’t stop thinking of the forty-one days, then I might start to cry right here in the middle of this stupid-ass social.

  Stop thinking about him, I tell myself. Be social.

  But it’s too hard. There’s no point to being here; it’s insane that they force us. Casey Cramer has shown up late again, parking her wheelchair beside the exit. It doesn’t matter that she can’t dance. No one else here is dancing either. The music blares, and there’s even a disco ball spinning pathetically overhead. What, was someone on staff sent out to a place called Vermont Party Supplies to buy one? But the twirling shards of light from the disco ball only call attention to the fact that we’re all standing around like emotionally fragile lumps.

  “Someone could take a photo of this scene,” Casey says, “and call it ‘Tragedy.’”

  Griffin is standing not too far away. In the low light of the gym at night, with his hood off, his face looks even more sullen than usual, and I wonder why he’s this way—whether he was always like this, or whether it’s the result of whatever brought him here.

  “What are you looking at?”

  Griffin’s voice startles me. “Nothing,” I say, but I was still looking at him without even realizing it.

  “Yeah, you were,” he says. “You were looking at me.”

  “I wasn’t,” I insist, and I don’t even know why it’s so important to me to deny it. It’s like the way little kids say to each other, “Was not!” “What did you think,” I say to him, “I was desperate to discover the soulful self inside your hoodie?”

  “Well, whatever,” he says, the most meaningless response in the world. Then he turns and lopes out the door of the gym.

  “What was that about?” Casey asks as we watch him go.

  “No idea.”

  Around us, a few kids have started to move onto the dance floor, and to distract myself from the bad moment with Griffin, I try to focus on the scene. Even though the people here are obviously kind of a mess, some of them still want to take part in these basic human activities. I have no idea why.

  The music gets a little louder and the room fills. Kids form couples or clusters and begin to dance. “So you’re just going to leave him out there?” Casey asks.

  “Who?”

  “Griffin. He went outside.”

  “So he went outside. Fine.”

  “I’m just thinking about what Mrs. Quenell said. About how we should look out for one another. And we all said we would.”

  I don’t really want to deal with Griffin any more than I have to. My feelings would have to be pulled apart and examined. Sometimes in the summer my mom or dad would give me and Leo a job in the kitchen shucking corn. We’d have to remove the silk from between the mosaic of kernels. Pull it out, strand by strand, and it always took forever. This would be like doing that, but with my feelings instead of corn silk, and who wants that?

  In the doorway behind Casey, the outer doors to the gym are open onto the night. And under the outdoor phosphorous light, with his hood up again, Griffin stands hugging himself in the cold.

  Casey’s right, I ought to go out there and say something to him.

  But I take too long to decide what to do, and by the time I’m out on the porch, Griffin is gone. We’re not supposed to leave the social until it’s over, but unlike Marc Sonnenfeld, Griffin isn’t big into rules. If I had my way I’d leave the social too, and the school. I’d get on a Greyhound bus late tonight, leaving behind all these people and their sad pasts, and I’d head back home to New Jersey and climb into bed for the rest of my life.

  Behind me under the buggy, yellow porch light someone says my name, and when I turn around, Casey’s there, looking so tiny in her wheelchair outside at night.

  “Thinking of making a break for it?�
� she asks.

  “It’s not a bad idea.”

  “It won’t be so terrible here for someone like you,” Casey says.

  “Like me?” Casey Cramer doesn’t even know me.

  “Someone who can walk,” she explains. “You know what we call you guys? TABs.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “It stands for temporarily able-bodied. No one ever knows when something might happen to them, right? I mean, look at me. I never expected this. So live it up while you can,” says Casey. “Go hook up with angry young Griffin.”

  “I wasn’t going to hook up with him,” I say primly. “Only be nice to him.”

  “Sorry,” says Casey. “I get a little bitter. It’s not like anyone’s ever going to be attracted to me again.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Yeah, right, Jam, a guy’s really going to be into me when I can’t even move half an inch. And he’s going to just love carrying me to the bathroom and putting me on the toilet. That’s a big turn-on, right?”

  I start to say something, but it would just be pointless babble. There’s nothing I can tell her to make her feel better. I know this from experience. Both of us are lost and fragmented. We stand in the cold, shivering a little and saying nothing at all.

  CHAPTER

  5

  FINALLY, LATE ONE NIGHT, I GO TO BELZHAR FOR the very first time. I don’t call it Belzhar right away; none of us does. After I go there—after “it” happens to me—I’m naturally terrified to let anyone know. At first it seems too wild and incoherent and absurd to tell anyone.

  One time in ninth grade when Jenna Hogarth and I got high on her uncle’s medical marijuana, I imagined that the cat-shaped lamp in her parents’ den meowed. That flipped me out for about thirty seconds, until I was able to calm down and laugh it off. (To this day, I am not particularly into smoking weed, or losing control.)

  But there’s no way to laugh off Belzhar. It’s too huge for that. Belzhar comes out of nowhere and changes everything for all of us in Special Topics in English. Before we go there for the first time, we’re all just innocently wading into the semester at The Wooden Barn, following the monotonous rhythm of homework and dorm life and meals. I miss Reeve with a deep bone ache that doesn’t go away, no matter how I try to distract myself.