by Meg Wolitzer
“She might have,” says Sierra. “And maybe that’s why we were chosen for the class. Because she thought we each needed it. The red-leather-journal cure.”
“I’m not cured,” says Casey. “My life still blows. Though I guess for a little while when I was there, it didn’t. I want to go back,” she suddenly says. “I know you said not to, Marc, but I want to go back right now.”
“Well, hold off,” Marc says. “I think there are three possibilities concerning Mrs. Q. Possibility one: She has no idea what these journals do. And if we tell her, she’ll report us. The journals would be taken away, and we’d never have our ‘visions’ again. We’d probably even have to leave school. Possibility two: She does know what the journals do, and maybe she made it happen. And she chose us on purpose because out of everyone at The Wooden Barn she thought we could benefit the most.”
“Okay, fine,” says Sierra. “But even if that’s true and we ask her, she might still deny it.”
“But there’s also possibility three,” says Marc. “Which is that she does know, and she’s just waiting for us to bring it up with her. Now this seems to me really, really unlikely. My suggestion is that we act like nothing’s going on at all. It’s too risky to try and talk to her about the trance.”
“I don’t think of it as a trance, exactly,” I say. “It’s almost more of a place. I feel like I went to a place where people go when they can’t take reality, because it’s just too depressing.”
“People who can relate to The Bell Jar,” says Sierra.
“We should have a code name for it,” Marc says. “Like Casey and her sisters did when their mom was trashed, remember? Mom took out the trash. In case other people are around when we need to mention it.”
“Or even a name to call it when it’s just us,” says Casey.
“We could say ‘I went to Bell Jar,’” offers Sierra.
“That’s lame,” Griffin says.
“Maybe we could do a riff on ‘Bell Jar,’” I put in. “Something kind of exotic. Make it sound like . . . the name of a foreign country. Which it sort of is.”
We all think for half a minute. “Trance-Land?” says Marc.
“Sounds like a crappy amusement park,” says Griffin.
I feel like we’re a group of grade-schoolers trying to name their crime-solving or bottle-recycling club. And yet naming it feels like it’ll make it a little more manageable, and a little more real.
“Belzhar,” I say.
“That’s what I said before,” Casey says.
“No, Belzhar,” I repeat. “Like the zhuh in Jacques in the middle. It would be spelled B-e-l-z-h-a-r.”
“Belzhar,” pronounces Sierra. “‘I went to Belzhar.’ It does sound exotic.”
Griffin says, “I guess I could live with it.” His “compliment”—a rare thing—pleases me.
“Okay, so we’ve got the name,” Casey says. “Fine. But what about going back there? Is it okay to give in to a delusion? Because I really, really want to.”
And so do I. Belzhar is the only way we can each have what we want. The only way to get back whatever it is we’ve lost.
“There have to be rules,” Marc says with a little anxiety.
“Why are you in charge?” asks Griffin.
“Fine, you be in charge. Go right ahead.” Griffin doesn’t reply. “I didn’t think so,” says Marc. “Look, someone has to steer this thing, and that’s all I’m trying to do. I did it with student council. I’m just trying to make sure it doesn’t take over our lives or make other people suspicious. Remember, the journals could be taken away from us. We could lose this thing for good.”
Sierra takes out a pen and a few sheets of loose-leaf paper. Together we start to come up with a set of rules to live by.
CHAPTER
10
AND SO WE ALL DECIDE TO FOLLOW THE SAME simple guidelines: Visit Belzhar twice a week; and, just to be consistent, only on the days we’ve each chosen; gather every Sunday night at 10:00 p.m. in the dark classroom around the candle in order to discuss whatever might have come up during the week; and, finally and crucially, never tell a single outsider about any of this.
I’ve chosen Tuesdays and Fridays to go to Belzhar. This coming Friday is the next day that I’ll write in my journal. I can’t wait, though I’m also anxious to the point of feeling sick to my stomach when I think about it.
My journal sits in my desk drawer, practically throbbing like a little disembodied heart. Whenever I run into one of the other Special Topics people on campus, we behave kind of low-key and no-big-deal on purpose. “Hey,” we say to one another. But truthfully we are all jumping inside, dying, impatiently waiting.
DJ is so smart; she seems to know something’s up. Sometimes when we’re both in our room she looks at me funny. “What?” I say one afternoon when she sits watching me, all owl eyed.
“You act like you’ve got a secret,” DJ says.
“You’re the one with the secret.”
“True,” DJ agrees. She and Rebecca Fairchild got involved quickly, and the only two people in the world who know about it are me and Rebecca’s roommate. The school discourages “intimate” relationships between students, and PDAs are forbidden. Although there’s a rule that boys and girls can only be together in the common rooms of dorms and not in the dorm rooms, girls can be with girls everywhere, luckily for DJ and Rebecca.
And so, in the brief time since they’ve been seeing each other, they’ve been lying around both of their rooms together, sprawled on beds, painting each other’s toenails, drawing mehndi patterns with a fine-line henna tattoo pen on the backs of each other’s hands, and when no one else has been around, presumably kissing or going further.
I would’ve liked to go further with Reeve if we’d had more than forty-one days. I would’ve liked to let myself feel whatever feelings came up, and to follow them wherever they went. But I never had the chance.
• • •
Friday night at 8:00 p.m., a movie is shown in the gym, some totally idiotic comedy about identical twins who rob a bank. I’ve decided not to go. Instead, I’m going to wait for the dorm to clear out, and then, if it works the way it did the last time—and it just has to— I’ll be able to be with Reeve again. Leave, I silently say as everyone takes forever to head off to the movie. Leave. Just leave.
Jane Ann seems concerned that I’ve chosen to stay behind in my room. “Don’t you like movies, Jam?” she asks me.
“Yeah, but I’m just not in the mood.”
“If you change your mind, come on over,” she says. “Tonight we’re handing out bags of roasted soy nuts!” she adds, as if this is an amazing detail that will definitely make me change my mind.
“Great,” I say.
“I’ll send someone to check on you in a while,” she says, and after the slightest hesitation she leaves.
Finally the dorm is quiet. The only other people around are DJ and Rebecca, who are upstairs in Rebecca’s room, and a girl named Jocelyn Strange, who, no surprise, is extremely strange. Casey and Sierra have gone to the movie; both of them are planning on returning to Belzhar much later, after lights-out.
In the silence of the empty room I go to my desk and slide my journal out of the drawer. I turn it over and over in my hands, feeling the cool skin of its leather. I pick up a pen and sit on the bed against the study buddy. When I open the journal, it makes that familiar, soothing cracking sound.
But what if going to Belzhar was a one-time thing? What if I write in the journal and nothing happens? It would be an enormous disappointment. Our rules would have proved pointless. All the anticipation would have been for nothing. Reeve would never appear again, which might actually be another trauma.
Quickly, anxiously, I find the first free page, and I begin to write:
By the time I left Dana Sapol’s party, I knew that I loved thi
s boy, and I started to think that he loved me too.
I have to wait only a fraction of a second. And then, just like last time, his arms are around me. It happens swiftly, almost naturally, and this time I’m shocked again, but not too shocked. Reeve holds me from the front, not the back, and I say into his neck, “I’m here.”
“I know, I was waiting,” he says. “It took so long.”
I stand back and look at him. He’s wearing the same brown sweater, and he’s watching me as though I were the one whose presence here is a miracle. We look at each other for a long time, and then I lean my head against his chest, and there’s that feeling again, that spill of happiness and relief.
“How have you been?” I ask when I can finally lift my head.
“Better now. Maybe I ought to know when you’re planning to come next time. I hate not knowing. It gets me all agitated.”
“Tuesdays and Fridays. It’ll always be twice a week,” I say, “probably at night, though the time can change depending on what else I have going on.”
Reeve blinks at me with sleepy brown eyes. “Only twice a week,” he says. “Why that schedule?” He pronounces it like shed-ule.
“Oh,” I say, “it’s what we decided.”
He looks at me without understanding, and I explain how my whole class is involved, and I tell him about naming the place Belzhar. I also describe the other students, but I see that he’s only half listening. The only person who seems to interest him at all is Griffin.
“The arrogant one, is he better looking than me?” he asks, and he turns his head in profile for me to admire. He’s joking, but not totally. They couldn’t be more different, Griffin so rude and blond and angry; Reeve lanky and witty and brown haired and kind.
“Griffin? Are you kidding?” I say.
We sit on the grass and lean together like two lovebirds on a branch, and Reeve suddenly says, “Oh! There’s something here for you. At least, it ought to be here. Let’s go have a look.”
He takes my hand and leads me down a sloping hill toward a large object in the distance that I can’t make out yet. It’s a big blocky thing, but it’s in the shadow of a tree, and only when we get near do I see that it’s Courtney Sapol’s amazing dollhouse, plopped down on the grass.
“Oh, how weird, the dollhouse,” I say, puzzled, but kind of pleased. “What’s it doing here?” We kneel down and take up our dolls. Within seconds, we’re moving them around the house as if we’re little kids, and then we settle them into bed, side by side.
Reeve turns his doll to face mine and moves it around so it seems like they’re kissing. “Oh, Mama,” he says in a deep voice, “you have a smoking hot bod.”
At first we’re laughing, but then we abandon the dolls in their little bed and start kissing for real. Very quickly it gets serious, and then we’re not laughing. But because we’re out in the open I worry about whether anyone can see us. And then I remember that there’s no one here to see us at all.
I think of that night at Dana Sapol’s party, how the kiss kept heating up, and Reeve’s hand slipped under my shirt, moving slowly, as if to make sure it was okay with me. Then it slipped beneath my tank top, and I heard my breath catch. I put my hand under his shirt too, and felt his warm, hard chest, which shuddered and vibrated.
We didn’t do much more than that kind of kissing and touching at the party, but it was a revelation. Once again, all alone but out here in the open in Belzhar, Reeve and I are kissing and touching, and I sit in his lap. Our mouths are together, and soon our hands are under each other’s shirts, and all I can think is that this is the most exquisite feeling anyone could possibly ever feel.
But now I feel like I want more from him. I get the idea that I want him to see me without my shirt on and, even though it’s not exactly the same thing, I want to see him without his shirt on too. I want us to look at each other as we sit entwined in Belzhar.
But when I try to reach down and pull off my shirt, my hand is frozen, paralyzed, unable to move.
I look down at my hand, opening and closing it. It seems to work fine. I snap my fingers. Again, no problem. But when I try to take off my shirt a second time, the hand still won’t work.
And now I get it. All that Reeve and I can do in Belzhar is basically what we’ve already done in real life. We can’t go further in any significant way. When I tried to talk to him about the new things in my life—specifically about Special Topics, and the kids in the class—he wasn’t interested, and the conversation faded.
Belzhar lets you be with the person you’ve lost, or in Casey’s case with the thing she’s lost, but it keeps you where you were before the loss. So if you desperately want what you once had, you can write in your red leather journal and go to Belzhar and find it. But apparently you won’t find anything new there. Time stops in Belzhar; it hangs suspended.
Reeve and I can play with a dollhouse, and we can do some of the other things we did during our forty-one days together, but nothing more. It’s odd, though, that he doesn’t seem to mind the limitations. “What’s the matter?” he asks, as I think about how my hand won’t allow me to take off my own shirt.
“Do you ever feel like you want to do something more with me?” I ask him.
“Like what?”
“You know,” I say, embarrassed. “Like, see each other, gasp, unclothed from the waist up?”
Reeve tilts his head and looks at me in slight confusion. “What we do together is incredibly great,” he says. “I love it.”
“Okay, good,” I say. “Just checking.”
What I can have with Reeve now isn’t newness. It’s only old experiences, revisited. But I’ll take them, of course. I’ll take however much of him I can get. He and I lie down on the brown grass and whisper to each other, none of it new or deep, but all of it just what we need.
The sky starts to change color again, and it’s like the intermission during a play, when the houselights blink, and you have to hurry back to your seat.
“Oh no,” I say. “The light.”
“Shite. It’s too soon, Jam,” Reeve says.
“I just want to stay here,” I say. I know that I have to study for my math test tonight, even though I couldn’t care less about math or school or much of anything in the real world.
This world, this other-world here with Reeve, which consists entirely of little pieces from the past, is enough for me. So what if we never do anything new together? If I were given the choice, I’d stay here with him forever, and never go back to The Wooden Barn. In fact, good riddance, Wooden Barn. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass.
But the light has dimmed, and in a moment I’ll be forced away from him. “Come back to me soon,” Reeve says. “Please, Jam. Please.”
His voice has gotten different in the middle of a sentence; it sounds like a girl’s. I look up sharply, and Sierra is standing over my bed in my dorm room, saying, “Please, Jam. Please. Come on, wake up.”
I blink several times. “What are you doing here?” I ask.
“Jane Ann sent me to check on you during the movie. I knocked, but you didn’t answer. And when I came in, you were writing in your journal, but you were making these little noises. It was weird, Jam. You’ve got to be more discreet. What if Jane Ann had found you? Or someone else from the dorm?”
Looking down, and flipping quickly through the journal, I see that once again I’ve filled in five whole pages. I’ve somehow managed to write about what we were doing while we were doing it. Yet I have no memory of writing more than the first line.
Sierra sits down beside me and we’re both quiet, and then she says, “Are you okay? It seemed like it was such a big moment, whatever was happening to you there.”
“I can’t even describe it.”
“You don’t have to.”
She doesn’t want anything from me. She’s just looking out for me. I certainly
never had a moment with Hannah as strong and personal as the one I’m having with Sierra. Not even close. Best friends: That’s what we’re becoming.
“And look at this,” she says, flipping lightly through the pages of my journal, making a point of not reading any of it. “If you keep going twice a week, it’s going to fill up fast.”
We’re both silent, and I expect we’re wondering the same thing, which stupidly hasn’t occurred to me before. What happens to Belzhar when our journals are finished?
CHAPTER
11
Dear Jam,
Dad and I think about you all the time and hope things are settling down for you. I bet that by the time you read this, you’re totally involved with your schoolwork, or a new friend. Or both. You sounded so much better when I called the other evening, and I was glad to hear that. It seems as if that panicky episode—when you called me, wanting to come home—is behind you now. Good for you, babe.
Jam, there’s something I wanted to write to you about. As you’ve heard, Leo has come out of his shell lately because of a boy at school named Connor Bunch. At first Dad and I were thrilled. You know your brother hasn’t had many friends, and that he’s been teased. But Connor is a bit of a “wise guy,” and some of that seems to have rubbed off on Leo. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but I’m not thrilled. I wish you were here, Jam, to tell us, “Oh, lighten up, you guys. Twelve-year-old boys are total jerks, don’t worry about it.”
So I thought maybe you could write to Leo, reminding him that he can always talk to you about what’s on his mind. It would be terrific if you let him know you’re there for him, even though you’re away in Vermont. And I think it would be great for YOU to have something like Leo to focus on—something outside your own problems.