Belzhar

by Meg Wolitzer

  “So what have you seen?” Casey asks, but we all know the answer.

  “You saw André,” I say.

  She nods. “Yes,” she says. “And after I did, after I had the ‘vision,’ everyone in the dorm insisted it was a dream. Jane Ann made me some Sleepytime tea and told me about a very realistic dream she’d once had, about losing her teeth. But I knew I’d seen my brother, even though I couldn’t explain it.”

  “Do you remember what you were doing?” Casey asks. “I mean, when it started?”

  “Writing in my journal.”

  Casey’s face changes slightly, and I know that the journal was the way in for her too. For all of us. Even, I bet, for Griffin.

  “I was sitting at my desk in the middle of the night, with only my little lamp on,” Sierra tells us. “I’d been awake for hours, lying in bed, but I couldn’t sleep, so I got up. My roommate, Jenny, was asleep, and I opened the journal and wrote a line. And it was like the whole desk suddenly started to vibrate. And then I wasn’t at my desk anymore. I was on the bus in DC again, and it was moving, and I was heading home from dance class. I know that, because I had my dance bag with me; it was banging against my leg. I was sweating in the cold, the way I often do after practice. It was the end of the afternoon, and right beside me on the crowded bus was my little brother. He was still eleven, the age he’d been the last day I’d seen him.

  “At first I just stared. My heart was beating so hard! He was leaning his head against me, half asleep. We were somewhere between dance class and home. And I just kept staring. I could practically feel my blood going through my arteries. I thought I might have an aneurysm. Finally I shook him awake really frantically, and said, ‘André!’

  “He opened his eyes and in a crabby voice he said, ‘What, Sierra? I was napping.’

  “And I said, ‘You’re here.’

  “And he said, ‘No shit, Sherlock.’

  “And I said, ‘But that’s just amazing, you do know that, right?’ And he mumbled something about how there were other things that were more amazing. Like Sojutsu, which is apparently a kind of Japanese spear-fighting. And black holes.

  “I realized that I didn’t need to argue with him. He was here, and he knew he was here, but he was still André, just a regular eleven-year-old, so he wasn’t going to get all sentimental. And then I asked him, real casually, ‘How long do you think this can go on? Me being here with you. Or you being here with me. However you want to look at it.’

  “He said, ‘I don’t know, probably not too long,’ and he opened his mouth and yawned, and I could see his two fillings.

  “‘Can you tell me what happened to you?’ I asked him.

  “He looked up at me and said something that I’ll never really get over. He said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Please don’t make me.’

  “‘Are you sure, André?’ I said. ‘Sometimes talking about things is better.’ Believe me, I’d been hearing that one for quite a while.

  “I just needed to find out whether in real life—and not just in this weird other-world—he was alive somewhere. Or whether, you know,” she said, her voice catching, “he wasn’t. I needed to know, but he didn’t want to talk about it. It was too hard for him.

  “‘Let’s just sit here on the bus for the rest of the ride, okay?’ André said.

  “And I told him okay. So we sat like that, both of us with our backpacks and our dance bags, my little brother and me. We used to have this whole fantasy story going about how we’d grow up and become a famous dance team called Stokes & Stokes. The name would have an ampersand in it. That’s the ‘and’ symbol. We’d play huge arenas and charge a fortune for premium gold-circle tickets that would include a champagne reception with us afterward. Our YouTube videos would get millions of hits. It was such an idiotic fantasy.

  “And what I wanted now was so much simpler than that. I wanted to stay beside my brother, riding that bus, sitting there with him in this other reality. I was relaxed there. All the terrible feelings I’d had since the day he disappeared were gone.”

  In the dim classroom, Sierra shifts position and rolls her shoulders, the way dancers sometimes do without even thinking, and says, “So we rode together for a long time, just feeling the vibrations of the bus. And after a while I looked out the window, and I wasn’t looking at a street in DC any longer. I was looking at the view from my dorm window here at The Wooden Barn. I was back at my desk, and André was gone, and that’s when I started screaming. To have found him and lost him again, it was just grotesque—and the entire dorm woke up and came to see what had happened. I told a few girls that I’d seen my brother, really seen him, spent time with him, but everyone just said it was a dream. And they told me about teeth dreams, and test-taking dreams, and going-onstage-naked dreams. They wouldn’t shut up about all their stupid dreams.”

  Beside her, Marc nods. “I had my version of that. And when it was over and I told my roommate, he insisted I was dreaming.”

  “In my case,” I say, “I tried to tell my mom, but she wouldn’t listen.”

  “We’ll listen,” Casey says.

  “Okay,” I say. “Thank you.”

  But I don’t like talking about Reeve. It’s so much easier to go over the story in my head, instead of having to say it out loud. I’m not going to go into detail, like Sierra. But I have to tell them at least a little of it so they’ll understand the basic outline of what I’ve been through.

  “I had a boyfriend,” I say in a quiet, careful voice. “His name was Reeve Maxfield. He was an exchange student from London, and we fell in love.” I can hardly say anything more, though everyone is listening closely, and waiting.

  “What happened to him?” asks Sierra. It’s amazing that she’s concerned about me and my story, even right after telling us about André. But she’s waiting. All of them are. There’s a circle of glittering eyes in the dark room.

  “Oh my God, he died, didn’t he?” says Casey, when I don’t reply to Sierra’s question. “Jam, I’m so sorry.”

  I can’t bring myself to speak. I feel my mouth start to pull downward into that pre-crying expression.

  “What you’re telling me is a story of loss,” Dr. Margolis had said to me in his office, the first time my parents made me go see him. There was a dead cactus on the windowsill behind his head. I didn’t know cacti could die. I thought it took almost nothing to keep them alive. If a psychiatrist couldn’t keep his cactus alive, how was he supposed to help his patients?

  He wasn’t a bad guy, though. He tried to help, but he couldn’t. After that first time, telling him what he called a “story of loss,” I stopped trying to explain anything to him. Instead, I sat there twice a week and said very little, but of course my mind was basically jabbering with thoughts about Reeve. And here now, in the classroom at night, even after so much time has passed, it still is.

  “Falling in love with someone and losing him like that,” says Marc. “That must have been devastating, Jam.”

  “It was,” I say. Devastating. I prefer that word to trauma. What happened was devastating. And because of it I was devastated, and I guess I still am.

  “Was it sudden?” Casey asks. “If you don’t mind my asking,” she quickly adds.

  “Yes, very sudden,” I say.

  We sit, everyone reflecting on what’s happened to us, and what’s been said tonight. Marc looks at his watch—one of those thick, technical-looking silver ones where you can read not only the time, but also probably how many nautical knots you are from somewhere. He says, “The houseparents are going to start bed check soon, before lights-out. We have to get back in . . . four and a half minutes.”

  “Remember, nobody tell anyone anything,” Sierra says anxiously. “Not even your roommates. Everybody promise.”

  Everybody promises. Then Marc says, “And everybody also has to promise that they won’t write in their jour
nals again until we’ve gone over things carefully, okay?”

  “Why?” Griffin asks. “What’s going to happen?”

  “No idea,” says Marc. “Which is why I said it. We just don’t know enough yet.”

  I can tell that all of us are scared of that other place, yet we also want to go back to it. But who knows if it would even be the same next time? For all we know, when we write in the journal again, something entirely different might happen.

  Or nothing might happen at all.

  We’re supposed to write in the journals twice a week; we all know that. But despite what Mrs. Quenell asked us, we all decide not to write in them “until further notice,” as Marc puts it. Then we arrange to meet here again tomorrow night at the same time.

  Griffin leans forward and blows out the candle with one sharp blast, leaving us in the dark.

  CHAPTER

  8

  BACK IN MY DORM ROOM AFTER OUR LITTLE nighttime meeting, DJ says to me, “Where were you?” and all I tell her is “Out.”

  “With who?” she asks.

  “Whom,” I correct her, which is a stupid thing to do.

  “Ooh, Miss Special Topics in English,” she says in a sarcastic voice. “Is that what you learn in that class? When to use ‘whom’?”

  “Something like that.”

  Jane Ann pokes her head in. “Hey, guys, homework done, et cetera? You’re both good to go?”

  “We’re fine,” I say, though, no, I’m not at all good to go.

  DJ turns off the light and we just lie there. After a long, uncomfortable silence she says, “Jam?”

  “Yep.”

  “Can I talk to you about something?”

  Oh God, now she’s going to confront me. She’s going to say, “Something’s going on with you, something totally over the top, and I want to know what it is.”

  “Sure,” I say, and then I wait.

  There’s another long, stressful silence. We both just keep lying there, and finally DJ says, “Did you happen to notice anything unusual about me at the social?”

  “What?” I ask, surprised. The social? I try to remember. “Well, you were dancing. I guess that was kind of not what I expected.”

  “Oh, you think I don’t dance, I just sulk?” DJ says, and she snorts lightly. Then she continues, “No, I meant who I was dancing with. Did you happen to notice that?”

  She isn’t asking me anything about myself at all, and I’m so relieved. I vaguely remember that she was dancing with a girl that night, the way that girls do, just for the hell of it, or to show off.

  “A blond girl, is that right?” I say. “Her name’s Rebecca?”

  “Yeah, Rebecca Fairchild. I think she’s very cute. Hot, I guess I’m saying.”

  “Oh!” I say. It’s never occurred to me for one second that DJ might like girls. Or that dancing with Rebecca Fairchild meant anything at all. “It’s fine, of course,” I quickly reassure her.

  “‘It’s fine’? Gee, Jam, thanks for your approval,” she says. “Now I don’t need to feel like such a circus freak anymore, or worry about being shunned by you.”

  “Oh, shut up, DJ. I just said that because I know I sounded surprised. And, okay, I was.”

  “I surprised myself too,” DJ admits. “Calling another girl hot. I’ve never said anything like that in my life. I sort of still can’t believe I said it out loud.” This is the first time DJ has made herself vulnerable in front of me in any way. Usually she hides everything so carefully. The real, true DJ Kawabata is kept buried like the junk food she’s placed out of sight around our room.

  We lie in silence for a while, but it feels less tense now. “You’ve liked other girls before?” I ask.

  “Oh, sure,” she says.

  “Boys too?”

  “Not like that.”

  “Did you always know?”

  DJ rustles around for several seconds and then says, “The first thing I remember is that I loved my third-grade teacher, Miss Clavel. Seriously, that was her name, like in Madeline. She wasn’t a nun, though. She was sort of a leftover hippie who put wildflowers in her hair. She quit her job at the end of the year to move to California with her boyfriend, and when I found out, I cried so hard.”

  I lie in my bed picturing DJ as a freckled little girl, yearning for her pretty, young teacher. It’s easy to imagine, actually. “That’s sad,” I say.

  “And you know what? My food issues began that spring.”

  “Really?”

  “No! Jesus, I was joking.”

  “Oh!”

  We laugh together a little. Then she says, “What about you?”

  “What?”

  “Who was, like, your first big love?”

  I get very uncomfortable suddenly. “Oh,” I say, trying to sound vague, “it’s complicated. But anyway, we were talking about you, not me.”

  “Actually,” DJ admits, “Rebecca is the first time I’ve ever, you know, liked someone and felt she might actually like me back.”

  “Well, that’s a big deal.”

  “But I honestly have no idea if she feels the way I do. That night at the social, I thought there was something between us. We kept catching each other’s eye. And now she keeps giving me these looks, like we have this private joke going. But if I’m wrong, then we’re stuck in this tiny little incestuous community, where everyone eventually knows everyone else’s business, and how would I deal with that?”

  My eyes have gotten used to the dark now, and I can see that DJ is facing me on her bed, straining toward me as she tells me things that are important to her.

  “I think you should say something,” I say.

  “Even if it could screw everything up really bad?”

  “Trust me, life is short. Someone gets taken away from you, and then you can never say anything to them again.”

  “Wow,” says DJ. “That’s true. I’ll have to think about it. In the meantime, when I see her next I’ll be, like, ‘Hey, Rebecca, what’s going on?’ I’ll just be normal.”

  “Normal for you,” I say with a little laugh.

  “Yeah, normal for me.”

  We yawn, one after the other, because yawning is so contagious. Soon we’re each turning over, facing away from the other person, and then, like two people jumping off a rock into water, I guess we both fall helplessly into sleep. I’m not sure which of us gets there first.

  • • •

  In the morning, it’s hard to believe that the sunlit classroom is the same place where, the night before, all five members of Special Topics in English sat by candlelight trading stories of trauma and hallucination. Mrs. Quenell greets us as if today is just a regular morning, and she doesn’t seem to notice the few little droplets of candle wax that spatter the floor.

  “I hope everyone’s feeling lively and rested today,” she says. “Who’d like to kick off the in-class presentations?” She looks around the room. “Jam,” she says. “Why don’t you begin?”

  I am so not up for this.

  Everyone looks at me. I could be wrong, but Griffin seems amused. I’m going to try not to let him bother me. I’d gone to the library in the past couple of days and read up on Plath’s life, and I’d also read a few of her poems. It’s not like I put a lot of time into the assignment, because I just don’t care enough, but still I understand the main ideas, I think. Now, for some reason, I’m actually nervous. What if everything I’m about to say is wrong?

  They keep looking at me, waiting, and I flip through my pages of notes, not really wanting to make eye contact. “Sylvia Plath’s father kept bees as a hobby,” I start. “He was this huge figure in her life, and he died when she was eight. This was really upsetting to Plath, who was left with her mother and her brother, and I guess a feeling of, you know, sorrow.

  “Look at the poem called ‘Daddy,’ where she
curses her father, and the power he has over her, even though he’s been dead for a long time. I mean, she’s furious at him in the poem. I don’t know that it’s him exactly,” I go on, “or even if it’s her. It’s a lot bigger than that, and it uses images of Nazis, and makes these points about history, and World War Two. It’s really angry, and really complicated. And I think that even though the poem is filled with incredible rage, it’s also got, like, heartbreak in it.”

  I shuffle through the papers I’m holding, and I find the poem. “‘Daddy, I have had to kill you / You died before I had time,’” I read aloud. And then I recite another line, from later in the poem: “‘At twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you.’”

  I lower the page. “I think that’s what she wanted,” I say. “To get back to him.”

  Mrs. Quenell asks, “Do you think Plath’s depression is a kind of unfinished grief?”

  “Well,” I say nervously, “I’m not an English teacher. Or a psychiatrist.”

  “But you’re a thinking person, Jam,” says Mrs. Quenell. “And besides that,” she says, “you’ve had experiences that qualify you to weigh in on these matters. You all have. Don’t be afraid to use them. Use whatever it is you bring to the table. Literally, in this case,” she adds, knocking on the oak surface of the oval table where we sit.

  “I guess I feel like grief is this huge part of everything,” I say in a burst. “But you’re supposed to act like it’s not. Like, if you lose someone, how are you supposed to go on caring about stupid day-to-day things? Like whether a test will be hard, or whether you have split ends, or had an argument with your friend. How is Sylvia Plath, or Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, whose father died too, supposed to just be in the world?” I ask.

  What I really want to know is: How are any of us in this room supposed to care about anything, when we’re constantly being pulled back by unbearable thoughts and feelings?