Belzhar

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Go get a little mountain air, all of you,” she says. “Mrs. Q here insists. It’s pointless trying to teach you when your beautiful brains are all somewhere else far, far away. Go see if you can focus on nature.”

  But the mountain air can’t help me sort this out. What I really want to do is call my parents and confess what happened to me last night. Before I met Reeve, I used to tell them so much. Something would happen at school when I was a little kid—like, Dana Sapol would “accidentally” bang into me as we walked past each other, or else push me out of the lunch line—and I’d come home and unburden myself to my mom and dad at the dinner table. They’d always be so supportive.

  There’s a pay phone on the first floor of the dorm, and I have a calling card. You almost never see pay phones in the world anymore, which is probably a good thing. I read that somebody did a study and found that the receivers are swarming with millions of disgusting bacteria. Fecal bacteria, if you must know. But here at The Wooden Barn, which is like living in Amish country, pay phones are the only way to connect to the outside world.

  It’s the morning of a school day, a workday for my mom, so I call her office number. She answers, saying, “Karen Gallahue,” in her businessy voice.

  Just hearing her makes my throat tighten and my eyes flood. “Oh, Mom,” I say.

  “Jam?” she says. “Is that you?”

  “Yep, it’s me. Can I come home? There’s a bus. And maybe you and Dad could even get a tuition refund.”

  “Now, babe,” she says, “we talked about this. Remember that family meeting with Dr. Margolis? We all agreed you needed to try it for at least one semester. To get away from home, to get out of your bed. To be someplace where they’re good with adolescent—”

  “But, Mom,” I say. “You don’t understand.”

  “I think I do, Jam. You feel homesick—”

  “That’s what you think?”

  “Well, yes. Because you’re outside your comfort zone. Thrown into a new situation, after being in a cocoon for so long.”

  “Listen, Mom, it’s not like that at all.” I gather in a breath and then, in a quiet voice, I say, “I was with Reeve last night, okay? We were together, and he was right there, and we were holding each other—”

  “Jam,” my mother interrupts sternly. “You know that isn’t true. If you remember, Dr. Margolis said we were likely to see certain behaviors, but that we shouldn’t validate them.”

  “Certain behaviors?” I cry into the receiver, and immediately I feel bad for speaking so sharply to my mom. But I just can’t take it. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about! You’ve got to let me come home. I’m starting to unravel here—”

  “Jam,” she interrupts again. “You have to give it time. One semester at least.” She is serious. I am really and truly not allowed to come home.

  When I hang up, I’m shaking hard. Should I go to the infirmary and try to sleep it off? Or go upstairs to my room and try to get back to Reeve?

  I start to head blindly out of the dorm now, and I run into Sierra, who’s just coming in. We’ve been sort of awkward with each other since we had our moment in the trees. When I saw her that day, she’d wanted to know if I’d possibly had an experience like hers. If I’d experienced something “surreal.” I hadn’t known what she was talking about then. But maybe now I do.

  I block her way in through the front door, and I say, “I have to ask you something.”

  Sierra looks at me without much interest. I’d had my chance, and I blew it. It’s like she can’t imagine that what I’m going to ask her now can be very interesting; she thinks she’s all alone. But maybe I can pull her back from her isolation. Or else maybe I’ll just seem unhinged.

  “The thing you were trying to ask me that day when you were throwing rocks,” I say. “Was it about something you saw? But something that you really couldn’t have seen?”

  Sierra keeps looking at me. “What do you mean?” she asks.

  I look around to make sure we’re alone. “I saw things last night,” I say, knowing I’m going really far here. “There’s no good explanation. It didn’t feel like I’d been drugged. It wasn’t like that.”

  Sierra quickly pushes me into the front hall, then off into an alcove. “Here’s the thing,” she whispers. “If something like this happened to you too, then maybe . . . I don’t know. But, yeah, it’s exactly what I was trying to ask you over by the trees. And I didn’t have anyone to talk to.”

  “You can talk to me.”

  “Where were you going just now?” she asks.

  “Just for a walk. I had a bad phone call with my mom.”

  “I could come with you,” Sierra says.

  So we walk, not saying anything more about it. It’s like we both know it would be too intrusive to ask, “So what exactly did you see?” Of course I’m dying to know the specifics of Sierra’s hallucination or whatever you call it. Maybe it’s connected to what DJ said happened to Sierra—the “really bad” thing. And maybe she’s dying to know what I saw and who I am too. And to find out what landed me at The Wooden Barn.

  There’s so much to say, but instead we say almost nothing, except to tell each other how relieved we are to have someone who went through a similar, shocking experience. Sierra and I continue to walk, mostly in silence. I’m still buzzing inside about everything, but I’m also relieved. Finally we wind up at the steps of the library, where she needs to pick up a book. Heading into the stacks with her, I look across the main reading area and see everyone with their heads dipped down in concentration or daydream or nap.

  One boy sits alone at a study table, his head in his hands. It’s Marc, and even from across the room I can tell that something’s wrong. He glances up and sees Sierra and me. A look passes between us, a silent communication.

  Something’s happened to Marc, not only to Sierra and me.

  Maybe something’s happened to all of us in Special Topics in English.

  Marc stands up, shoves his papers into his backpack—neatly, of course—and heads over to us. “Hey,” he whispers.

  “Outside,” Sierra says.

  On the wide stone steps of the library, we confront him in as vague but direct a way as we can. “You look wrecked,” Sierra says.

  “Haven’t slept,” says Marc.

  “Too much work?”

  “Nah. Workload’s pretty light here.”

  “Seeing things?” I ask.

  Marc looks from me to Sierra, trying to figure out what’s going on.

  “It’s okay,” says Sierra. “You can say it, Marc. We just admitted it to each other.”

  “What if someone slipped us drugs?” he says tensely. “Did that ever occur to you?”

  “It’s not that, and you know it,” says Sierra. “This is something else. What’s your best guess?” she asks him.

  He looks at her helplessly and says, “I just don’t know. And I usually have answers for everything.” Then Marc asks, “So, when did it happen to both of you? Exactly what were you doing? Because I was sitting at my desk writing in my journal.”

  I tell him I was writing in my journal too, and Sierra nods. So: the journals.

  “Is it the whole class? Casey was upset at breakfast,” I say. “Griffin’s harder to read.”

  “We could get everyone together and ask them,” says Sierra.

  “And what if the two of them don’t know what we’re talking about?” Marc says. “They could tell the administration what we said.”

  “Oh, come on, they’re not going to do that. Anyway, I’m willing to take the risk,” Sierra says. “I don’t know what else to do.”

  So we agree to hold an emergency meeting in our classroom that night at ten o’clock, in the brief slice of time between study hours and lights-out. “The classroom buildings are kept unlocked,” Sierra says. “So it shouldn’t be a pro
blem.”

  The classroom is a good spot, she explains, because the trees outside the window will protect us from being seen when security makes its nightly rounds.

  We decide that Marc will be responsible for getting Griffin there, and Sierra and I will be in charge of Casey. We make our plan, and then we wait.

  During the rest of the school day I sit in classrooms and look out over trees and mountains and sky, recalling how it felt to be with Reeve last night. Thinking that, maybe, when I write in the journal next, I’ll be swept up to be with him a second time.

  That night, everyone shows up at ten. Marc brings Griffin, who appears to be in a quiet, controlled state of annoyance, his hood up as usual. But Griffin would probably be in that state if you woke him up and told him he’d won Powerball. Casey seems relieved to be here. We can’t turn on the overhead light in the classroom because it might be seen through the trees. Instead, Sierra lights the big, fat, hazelnut-scented candle she’s brought, and Marc unfolds a comforter with a Marc-like geometric pattern, and we all sit on it on the wooden floor of the classroom with the candle casting a dim glow around us.

  The hazelnut smell is strong and artificial, but I like it. I remember going to the Yankee Candle Company with Hannah and Jenna when we were thirteen. We walked around the store picking up every single candle and sniffing it. “Smell this one!” we said to one another. “Now this one!”

  It’s cold in the classroom, and I loosen the wobbly knob on the old radiator. Maybe we can get some food from the teachers’ lounge, I suggest, so Sierra goes out and returns with the best she can find: a half-empty box of Wheat Thins, and an almost-full liter of diet root beer. Probably neither one will be missed.

  The heat starts to seep in and the room grows warmer, and we sit on the comforter passing around the soda bottle and taking unhygienic swigs. We’re all on the floor except for Casey, who looks down upon us from her wheelchair.

  “So what is this?” Casey finally asks. “Why are we here?”

  “Don’t you have any idea?” Marc asks.

  “Maybe,” she says. “But I want someone else to say it, not me.”

  “Yeah, what the hell is this?” asks Griffin. “It better be good.”

  Sierra says, “Just listen, okay?” Then she asks him, “Have you been having visions? Because we have.”

  Griffin is sitting very still with his arms wrapped around himself. Casey’s the one who finally nods. “All right, sure,” she says. “I did have an experience that I guess counts as a ‘vision.’ And I was worried that it could happen again. And that someone could find out and say there was something seriously wrong with me, and then I’d have to leave The Wooden Barn. But I don’t want to leave. I couldn’t take it if they sent me home.”

  Me, I’d begged my mom to let me leave. And yet I also know what Casey means.

  “So are you all actually saying that this happened to you too?” she asks, and we nod. “But it can’t be the same thing that happened to me,” she says. “That wouldn’t make sense. What I saw—it has to do with my life. I’m assuming what you all saw has to do with yours.” She looks around at us, her eyes bright in the stuttering candlelight. “Okay, somebody say what happened to them,” Casey says. “Just say what you saw. I can’t be the one to go first. I’m not good at that. Somebody else go.”

  We all sit stiffly, and no one wants to speak. I notice that Griffin is listening as closely as the rest of us. The silence goes on and on.

  “All right,” Sierra finally says. “I’ll start.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  “YOU’LL NEED SOME BACKSTORY,” SHE BEGINS. “THE first thing you have to know is that André was eleven when he disappeared.”

  I don’t know who André is or was, but I can guess, and I get a little panicky.

  “I was fourteen,” she goes on. “It was three years ago, so he’d be a teenager now. But back then he was a kid.”

  I studiously stare at a point just to the left of Sierra’s head. This story can’t be going anywhere good.

  Sierra and her brother were extremely close, she says. Their relationship was obviously very different from the one I have with Leo. I love Leo, even though we’ve never had anything in common. But Sierra and André were both dancers at the Washington Dance Academy, where they’d been taking classes for a long time.

  Sierra’s talent was ballet, and André’s was jazz and hip-hop. Three days a week after school they rode the city bus together to their dance classes, and then they rode it home.

  Nearly three years before we all sat in the dark classroom at night at The Wooden Barn, Sierra and André Stokes were on the bus heading home from dance class. “It was that time of day in late fall, right before dinner,” Sierra explains, “when it’s gray and cold and really depressing out. I had a ton of homework, and I wanted to get down to it.

  “So when André asked me if we could make chocolate chip cookies tonight, I told him we didn’t have any cookie dough in the house, and that I couldn’t go to the store because I had to get home and work on my history report. He started whining, so I told him he was welcome to go buy a roll of cookie dough himself. There was a convenience store in our neighborhood called Lonny’s. It was four blocks from our apartment, and for the past few weeks our parents had been letting André go there alone.

  “So he got off the bus at the stop near the store, while I stayed on for the two remaining stops. I went home, and my mom was there, but my dad was still at work. I set the table and then sat at my desk to do my report. When I heard a key in the door I assumed it was André, but it was only my dad. He said, ‘Where’s your brother?’ And I said, ‘At Lonny’s.’

  “And time passed, and dinner was ready, and now it was dark out, but André wasn’t home yet. Finally my dad and I put on our coats and went back outside. We speed-walked to Lonny’s, looking into every store window along the way, because this is the route André would’ve walked, and some of it’s not great, though of course he knew not to talk to strangers, et cetera. The guy behind the counter at Lonny’s knew him and said he’d been in a while ago, and that, yeah, he’d bought a roll of cookie dough. So my dad and I hurried back to the apartment thinking my brother would be there by now, but he wasn’t.

  “Then we had to break the news to my mom that we couldn’t find him. She was hysterical. We called all of André’s friends, but no one had seen him. My dad called the police, and two of them came to the apartment, and then they sent a patrol car out. A while later the doorbell rang, and when my mom answered it, another policeman said something like, ‘We found this on the sidewalk near the convenience store.’ And he held out a clear plastic bag with a roll of chocolate chip cookie dough inside.

  “My mom just gasped and reached for it, but the policeman said, ‘No, sorry, we have to take it in for fingerprinting. It’s evidence.’ And my mom collapsed and gashed her head, and there was a lot of blood. Blood and tears and a roll of cookie dough. That’s what I remember from that night.”

  All I can think, listening to this, is that I need to know the ending right now, and I need it to be okay. Maybe it isn’t as bad as I’m afraid it is. Maybe André was found a few hours later, having been roughed up by a few older, thuggish kids, but not seriously. And although Sierra is still emotionally shaky because of that experience, and other experiences we haven’t yet heard about, maybe her little brother is okay, and back in Washington, dancing.

  But of course Sierra started off this story by saying “He’d be a teenager now.” If he’d been found, she meant. Or if he was alive.

  “What happened to him?” Casey gets up the nerve to ask. “Did you ever find out?”

  “No,” says Sierra. “He became one of those missing child cases. A task force was set up. The detective, Sorrentino, gave us his card and told us to call him if anything occurred to us, even in the middle of the night. So I tried to think about what I’d see
n that day after class, anything I could remember or anything that occurred to me about people in the neighborhood. Whenever I phoned him with a detail about a bike messenger who looked suspicious, or the old man with the purple birthmark on his face who’d once yelled at André and his friend for littering, he always took the call, no matter what time of day or night. I once woke him up at two a.m., and he was really nice about it.

  “But after a while, he told me I had to stop calling so much. He thought I was the girl who cried wolf, but I wasn’t. And I’m not. He started taking longer and longer to call me back. He said he had other cases too, and that, no offense, I was being a nuisance.

  “But I was just doing what he’d told me, and I’ll keep on doing it as long as I have to. Sometimes I even call him from the pay phone in the dorm and leave a long message on his voice mail, asking if they’ve looked into this thing or that. I’m desperate, and so are my parents. We can’t bear being without André, and not knowing what happened to him.”

  “Oh, Sierra, I’m so sorry,” I say with a cry, and there are similar sounds coming from all around me. Sierra puts her hand up to her eyes as if trying to shield her vision. Marc loops an arm around her, and Casey reaches down to pat her shoulder. Griffin looks shell-shocked, and he just sits grimly. None of us really knows one another, yet here we are, all intimate all of a sudden, in a little improvised huddle.

  “How do you get through it?” I ask Sierra. I need to know how she wakes up every day and gets out of bed and takes a shower and eats a waffle and goes to class and behaves like a human being. Does she actually care about anything she’s doing? Does the water from the shower feel good when it pounds down on her head? Does the waffle even have a taste or a texture? Does the world hold anything of interest now?

  Sierra says, “I’ve barely gotten through it. Same with my parents. But I guess there’s some part of me that just keeps going. The only reason I’m at The Wooden Barn is a scholarship fund that pays for the whole thing. The fund sends everyone else to really academic boarding schools. I’m the only one at a boarding school for people who are messed-up.” Then she adds, “And if they knew about what I’ve seen, they’d probably take away my scholarship and send me home.”