by Meg Wolitzer
Finally Alby and me (Alby and I?) left. Standing in the road it was so peaceful it was awsome. Alby didn’t want to go home yet, and I said he could hang at my place for a while. So we rode his dirt bike to my farm, and we lay in the straw in the barn with the goats. Man I loved those goats, but especially Ginger, who’d recently been born, and who kind of thought she was a dog. She had such a dog face, it was so cute.
I was petting her, and Alby lit a joint like he always did, and we lay around talking about how we’d be the prisoners of our parents for only a few more years, and then we’d be liberated. I said, “But what if being on our own is too hard? My mom makes all my meals. I don’t even know how to do anything like that. I only know outdoor stuff. But I still want freedom.”
He said, “We should learn to cook, man.” And I said “Yeah.” We made a plan that we would get together and teach ourselfs to cook 3 things: eggs benedict, pan-fried steak, and chicken any style. We talked like this until really late. And then he left, and I went to bed. And the next thing I knew my mom and dad were screaming, “The barn’s on fire!”
We couldn’t get inside, it was too late, and the fire trucks took a while to come, so the goats died of smoke inhalation. Every single one of them. When the flames were out I went into the barn and saw them laying there, and it was just the worst thing I’ve ever seen. It’s been imprinted on me forever. I see it all the time. Poor Ginger was in the corner, and her eyes were open. She was staring at me.
My parents were yelling, “How did this happen?” And then one of the firemen said, “Come look at this,” and he showed us the joint end. And I felt a chill go across my whole body. Without thinking, I said, “Fuck.”
“It was you?” my mom said. “You killed the goats, Griffin?”
“Yeah, I’m a goat murderer, Mom,” I said. “That’s exactly what I am.”
“How could you do this?” my dad shouted. “Smoking your stupid pot like that. You know how we feel about it. Get out of my sight. Tomorrow I will deal with you.”
I was freaking out. They were blaming me, not knowing the facts. Not knowing that Alby was the one with the weed. The one who must have thrown the joint out, and it smoldered. Plus, no matter what they said, blaming me wasn’t going to change anything. The goats couldn’t be brought back to life.
I felt like I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t see. Later, when the firemen and the police were gone and my parents had finally gone to bed, the animals still lay all around because nothing could be done with them until morning. Ginger would be out there staring at nothing all night long. Nobody had even closed her eyelids like they do with dead bodies in movies.
I lay in my own bed, staring at nothing too. My eyes were dry though. I couldn’t cry. They were dry and wide open.
So the next day my dad would “deal with me.” Oooooooo, I thought, I’m shaking. Big angry Dad.
But I wasn’t going to stick around for that. I snuck out of the house with the keys to my Dad’s pick-up truck at 4 AM. I had a learner’s permit, but no plan. I just knew I had to get away. I drove on the highway heading north, up to Maine, blasting a heavy metal station the whole way. Finally I was so wiped that I pulled over at a rest stop. I closed my eyes and fell asleep with my head on the steering wheel.
Suddenly two cops were banging on the window. I rolled it down, and they said “your under arrest for possessing a stolen vehicle.”
WTF?
My parents had called the cops on me and reported their truck as stolen, in order to teach me a “lesson.” I was brought back to Vermont in cuffs, which is very painful, and I spent a few hours in a special cell with other “minors.” There was a crazy violent kid in there who looked like a teenaged meth head. He literally had black teeth, and he called me Blondie and punched me in the nose because he said I was looking at him funny.
Yeah well, buddy, I thought, maybe you should try not having black teeth, and then no one will look at you funny.
Finally my parents came to pick me up, and they were shocked to see my bloody nose. My mom started crying. I was, like, what did you think was going to happen? We were all screaming at each other again, and I couldn’t stand it.
So over the next few months I stayed quiet. I just did not engage. And then there was a court date about the stolen truck, and the judge said my family had “a lot of anger,” and that I had to go attend school at The Wooden Barn.
So here I am. Lucky, lucky me. Griffin Foley, professional goat killer and truck stealer, unloved by his mother and father both.
That’s where the last entry ends. I close the journal and tell him I’m done, then he gets up from the desk and comes over to me. “You want to start yelling at me too?” he asks. “Tell me how I fucked everything up?”
“Stop it. You sound like—”
“Such a dick?”
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“But you thought it. It’s only when I’m in Belzhar that I feel okay.”
“Well, me too, Griffin. It’s the same for all of us. I know you haven’t talked about it—”
“It’s not easy for me.”
“I know,” I say. “And no one’s going to make you.” But it occurs to me that maybe, now, he wants to tell me. “What happens to you when you go there?” I ask. “Can you say?”
“I’m in the barn again,” he says. “Me and Alby. The old barn, not the new one, and we’re talking about life, and I’m stroking Ginger’s head, and everything’s cool. The goats are safe. The original goats, not the replacements. And no one’s blaming me for everything. I’m not this monster. I feel good.”
I wish he could have that good feeling all the time, not just when he’s in Belzhar. I want to feel good, too; when I’m here, not just when I’m there. And I suddenly have the idea that it’s possible. Without stopping and trying to think it through, I stand up and kiss Griffin on the mouth, hard.
“Whoa,” he says, backing up. Then he touches his own mouth and laughs. I’ve shocked him; I’ve shocked myself. But then he comes forward and we kiss again. I know that he is a big, inexpressive, withholding boy and that I am in love with Reeve and should not be doing anything like this. But I am.
We sit on his bed together, looking and looking at each other. I remember the way Griffin had angrily said to me at the social, “What are you looking at?” Now I’m allowed to look, and I take my time. We touch each other’s face and hair and hands, and then he unbuttons his shirt and shrugs out of it. Both of us just want to feel good again, that’s all we want. I take off his hoodie that I’m wearing, and then with a shaky hand I remove my own shirt, and then even my tank top.
I never got to do this with Reeve, and because of the rules of Belzhar, I never can.
But in this attic room with Griffin, I can do what I want. My hand is free to move wherever my brain instructs it to. Griffin and I lie down together, our arms around each other, and I feel his warm skin, his cold belt buckle. When we kiss again, it lasts. For a few minutes in this place and time, we’re both actually so happy.
In the distance, then, we hear voices. “Griffin? Jam? Are you up there?”
“Oh, fuck,” says Griffin, leaping away, climbing over me to grab his shirt. His face looks guilty, and I’m sure mine does too, as I grab my own shirt. He’s got his parents to worry about, but I’ve got Reeve, which is worse.
There’s no way to make what’s just happened be okay. I can’t do this with Griffin when I’m still in love with Reeve. It will never happen again.
I quickly glance into the mirror over the dresser, and that’s when I see the very small hickey that Griffin has left on my neck. Boys can’t seem to help but leave marks; they scatter them as carelessly as pebbles in a pond. I run my hand across it, expecting it to fade instantly like the one Reeve gave me in Belzhar. But this one stays, because it’s real.
CHAPTER
14
; “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” REEVE SAYS WHEN I finally get back to Belzhar. “I thought you’d be here days ago.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, which is a totally inadequate reply. He doesn’t make a move toward me, but stands in the field with his arms crossed. “See, what happened,” I say, “is that I accidentally left the journal at school. It was a disaster.”
Reeve just keeps standing there, looking at me, trying to decide whether or not to forgive me. And when, after thirty seconds he does forgive me, I know it’s not as if he even had a choice. He’s been here agitated and waiting, while I’ve been out in the world. He doesn’t ask a single question about the journal, or where I was when I wasn’t with him. He’s never showed much interest in how I travel to and from Belzhar. Or even that I call it that. He just knows that somehow I always get here, and that’s what counts.
It’s Sunday afternoon, not a day that I ever go see him, but I’ve just returned from the long weekend at Griffin’s farm, and I didn’t want to wait any longer. Girls have been trickling into the dorm with their suitcases. DJ isn’t due back for at least an hour, so I have time to write in the journal I left behind and make the trip uninterrupted, instead of having to wait until late at night when she would be asleep.
So here in Belzhar, after Reeve forgives me, we walk together through the brown fields and gray day arm in arm, but he’s still distant. “You don’t seem like you forgive me,” I finally say.
“It was a bit much,” he admits. “Give me a little time.” We walk farther, and then he says, “I wondered if you were ever going to come back.”
“You really thought I might not?”
“Sort of.”
“I wouldn’t do that to you,” I tell him.
But our lives are so different. I’ve got people around me all the time, and school. Mrs. Quenell’s class has picked up speed. We’re deep into analyzing Sylvia Plath’s poetry, and line after line is so tricky and surprising. Plath uses words that you’d never expect; they just seem to come out of nowhere, and when I’m reading her I often think, How the hell did you come up with that, Sylvia Plath?
Even when I can’t relate on a personal level, she makes me know what she feels, and that’s really something. To find out what another human being feels, a person who isn’t you; to get a look under the hood, so to speak. A deep look inside. That’s what writing is supposed to do.
Then there’s Mrs. Quenell herself. I wasn’t sure of what to make of her at first, but I’ve come to see that she’s an interesting person and a great teacher. I think everyone in the class would agree by now. I know that Sierra does; she and I talk about Mrs. Q fairly often, and about how involved we are in Special Topics.
Casey’s been arriving on time every day too. Somehow she’s figured out a way. We all show up and throw ourselves into the discussion, even Griffin. We might have an argument about a line of poetry from Plath’s collection, Ariel, but sometimes I know in those moments that we’re really arguing about something much bigger and harder to describe.
Everyone seems like an exaggeration of themselves during Special Topics. Marc gets ultralogical, Sierra sees the sad beauty in everything we read, and Casey always defends Plath’s “edginess,” as she calls it, while Griffin is really big on anything he considers “blunt.”
And me, whenever there’s something on the page that’s about love, I’m there right away, practically in tears.
We still don’t know why Mrs. Q chose us, what she saw in us, or if she has a clue about the journals. But we do know that the journals are saving us, and the class discussions are making us better too.
We all have a lot to occupy our thoughts, and Reeve has very little. I feel the difference, and maybe I’m guilty about it because now, in Belzhar, when he’s obsessing about his fear of being abandoned by me, I remind him, “Being with you is what I want,” and I make sure my voice sounds forceful and true.
“There was one point when you were gone this weekend,” Reeve says, “when I thought I heard your voice. But it couldn’t have been you, because you were a giant. It was very frustrating.” He pronounces “frustrating” with the accent on the second syllable. Frustrating. Reeve and his British-speak.
“That was me,” I say. “We were stuck in different worlds.”
“I didn’t know what to do,” Reeve says, sounding vulnerable and uncertain. Which is appropriate, considering. I’ve betrayed him with Griffin, and he didn’t do anything to deserve it. “I’m sort of beat,” he goes on. “Mind if we take it easy today?”
“Sure.”
“I thought we could watch something,” he says, and in the distance I see a couple of folding chairs set up on the grass, and a flat-screen TV. A telly, as Reeve would say. I sit down beside him, relieved that now we won’t have to talk. He presses the remote control and the show starts. It’s the dead parrot sketch from Monty Python that he and I have already seen together. He’d wanted to show it to me early on in our relationship because it was something that was important to him.
On-screen, the comedian John Cleese enters a pet shop and says, “’Ello, I wish to register a complaint.” And there’s some back-and-forth conversation, and he says, “I wish to complain about this parrot what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.”
The pet shop owner asks him what’s wrong with the parrot. And John Cleese says, “It’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it!”
And the owner says, “No, no, it’s resting, look!”
But I’m a little bored watching it again now; I know everything that’s going to happen in the sketch, just as I know everything that can possibly happen in Belzhar. Or at least I know the rough outlines of what can happen. When the sketch ends, Reeve says, “Come here, you,” and pulls me down onto the grass. We stay like that, lying on our backs and looking up at the sky.
There isn’t all that much to talk about today. What’s he supposed to say to me? “Let me tell you some stories you’ve already heard a few times? And you can laugh and murmur and respond to them as if they’re new?”
And what am I supposed to say to him? “Let me tell you what happened between me and Griffin?”
Instead I say, “Hey, news flash from my life. Guess what I did over my Thanksgiving vacation?”
“No idea.”
“Had my hand in a goat’s vagina. But then again, who didn’t?”
Reeve raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t ask me what the hell I’m talking about.
“You’re not even curious about what I mean by that?” I ask. “A goat’s vagina?”
“Of course I’m curious,” he says, and I launch into the story about helping to deliver the kid. But of course he isn’t really interested. The goat exists outside the world of our past, the world of him and me.
But it’s right inside the world of Griffin and me. I look down at the swirl of Reeve’s hair, his sweater, his eyes, and his nose and mouth. His philtrum. Then, for lack of anything more to say, I start to touch his face, running my hand along the curling lips, the chin, hoping we can get over the strangeness between us.
When we kiss, it seems a little off, because I’m distracted. No matter what angle I approach him from, it doesn’t feel right.
“Something’s different about you,” he says after a moment.
“No, nothing.”
But I remember the kiss between Griffin and me, and how it felt, and how we took off our shirts, and looked and looked at each other. The way our chests touched like two hands meeting in prayer.
Two hands meeting in prayer? That’s like the crappiest line of poetry that Sylvia Plath might’ve written when she was twelve years old and then immediately thrown in the garbage. What happened between me and Griffin wasn’t poetic; it was unthinkable. Yet it’s also something I keep thinking about.
Reeve says, “Promise me everything’s sorted between us.”
And at t
hat moment the light does its predictable big fade, so luckily I don’t have to promise.
• • •
Back on my bed at The Wooden Barn, I’ve barely had time to recover, when I hear a loud thump out in the hall. The door swings open and DJ appears, lugging in her giant suitcase. She’s a little sunburned from her trip home to Florida, and a sunburn looks out of place on a girl who mostly dresses in black, with the occasional flash of startling color.
“DJ, you’re here! And you’re early. I’m so glad to see you.” It’s true. All I want is for her to talk to me about her vacation and tell me funny, snarky stories and cheer me up. But DJ starts to cry.
“Oh, Jam,” she says. “Everything’s destroyed.”
“What do you mean?”
“Between me and Rebecca.”
“What happened?” I sit her down on her bed and hand her a box of tissues.
DJ blows her nose emphatically and then says, “She went home to Connecticut, and we were texting each other like crazy, right? Getting my phone back was dope. It was like . . . discovering penicillin all over again.”
“Yes, I remember when you discovered penicillin the first time.”
“You know what I mean. Technology, remember that?” she says through her tears. “I’ve been starved for it. Anyway, we sent each other a ton of sexy texts.”
“Okay,” I say, waiting, afraid that I know what’s coming.