by Meg Wolitzer
Sierra and I both nod, not saying anything.
“Then they put me in the ambulance, and I was slid forward, and the light dimmed and it got really quiet. I was, like, where are the EMT guys? They were here just a second ago. But I was alone. And I sat up and looked around, and I was back in my bed in my dorm room here at school, with my journal next to me. It was all filled in; there wasn’t a single line left to write on.
“And I knew that that was that. I’d relived the worst thing I’d ever been through, and then I came out the other side. So for me, that’s the end of Belzhar.
“I was just sort of sitting there in a daze. I looked over and saw my wheelchair folded and leaning against the wall. I saw the gray rubber handgrips, the silver wheels. It made me want to cry. But I was also relieved that I was back. That I’m here. At school, with my friends, and with Marc. He doesn’t take the place of being able to walk. Nothing can. And I’ll always miss that so badly. Walking, running. But I’ll never forget what it felt like. Oh wait—” she says, looking up.
Marc comes toward our table, and Casey backs up and wheels herself over to him. They meet in the middle of the room, and Sierra and I watch as he bends down and says something to her.
“Could you actually do that?” I ask Sierra. “Go there for the last time and go through the whole thing all over again? And then come back here and be like, ‘Okay, now it’s time for me to get on with the rest of my life.’”
“No, I couldn’t,” Sierra says.
“So what are we supposed to do?” I ask her. “Mrs. Q is going to collect the journals. One way or another we’re going to have to do something.”
“It’s a hopeless situation,” Sierra says. “I can’t go to Belzhar, and I can’t not go. You know, I snuck downstairs yesterday to call Detective Sorrentino. I left him another voice mail saying the same thing I already said to him over Thanksgiving: ‘Please, please try to track down that scrawny guy who came to the show at the dance academy.’”
Griffin appears at the table now, near the end of breakfast. He’s in his hoodie again, and right away I can see that he looks closed up and miserable. Not being able to meet in the classroom at night has been a strain for all of us. “Hey,” he says, sitting down.
“Bad night?” asks Sierra.
Griffin nods. “Yeah, but keep talking, I don’t want to interrupt.”
“I was just telling Jam about calling the detective in DC again. He’s not interested in what I have to say. I don’t know what else to do.”
“You’ve got to keep pushing him,” I tell her.
“But I’ve gotten nowhere. Going to Belzhar is basically the only thing I have. I can’t pull a Casey and Marc.”
“What does that mean?” Griffin asks.
We explain that Casey and Marc each went to Belzhar the night before, and that it was the last time for them both, and that, no, there’s no way to ever go back. And we tell him how they each had to live through their traumas and end up with the journals all filled in, and the rest of life—that imperfect thing—waiting.
“It sounds rough,” Griffin says.
“I just can’t imagine seeing André walk off that bus,” Sierra says. “Just letting him go, knowing something was going to happen to him.”
“So don’t, this semester,” says Griffin. “Keep trying with the detective, but don’t write another word in your journal. Why would you put yourself through that, Sierra?”
“Well, she has to,” I say. “Because Mrs. Q is going to take back everybody’s journal on the last day of class.”
“She’ll have to rip it away from me,” Sierra says, and abruptly she stands and carries her tray off, not even saying good-bye.
When she’s gone, Griffin says to me, “I just made a decision. I’m never going back to Belzhar. I’m going to hand in the journal to Mrs. Q with the last five pages empty, and say sayonara. I can’t go through the fire again, Jam. And that whole fucking night. My parents always want to make me talk about it, but I am done.”
“I think what your parents want,” I say, “is for you to see the whole thing.”
“Yeah, right.”
“They do.” I don’t know how I know what I know, but I keep talking. “They aren’t bad people. I met them. They’re not trying to torture you.”
“Then why do they keep bringing it up?”
“Maybe they need you to admit you made a big mistake.”
“It wasn’t me, it was Alby,” he says with self-righteousness.
I don’t say anything. I just keep looking at him, and he gets uncomfortable. He knows he can’t dump all this on his friend Alby, and he knows that I know he can’t. Griffin was there too, he smoked that joint in a barn full of straw and living goats. It was his barn, his goats; he was in charge of himself and his friend.
He looks more uncertain, and he says hoarsely, “I wouldn’t know how to apologize.”
“Yes you would.”
“I’d probably break down crying or something. That would be pathetic.” And he probably would cry. He’d have to see the devastation, and feel his part in it, even though it wasn’t on purpose, and even though he’s not bad. It was just a stupid, careless teenaged thing. An accident.
He’d have to feel everything all over again and not shut down the way he did after it happened. He’d have to get high with Alby once more, then go to sleep for the night and wake up smelling smoke, and seeing all the goats lying dead, including Ginger, his favorite. And he’d have to feel the rage of his parents, and hold himself accountable.
“Go back there,” I tell him. “Just do it. And then come out and call your parents and say what you have to say. And then maybe you can love the goats again. The ones that died, and the new ones. Frankie, the new kid.”
For the first time in this conversation, Griffin smiles very slightly. “The kid that you delivered,” he says. “My girlfriend, the goat obstetrician.”
My girlfriend. The words are startling. I can’t be his girlfriend; I love someone else. Someone very different. But whenever I’m alone in my room, I wrap myself tightly in Griffin’s hoodie.
Griffin agrees to go back to Belzhar early that evening, before the winter concert begins; I’ll be performing with the Barntones. “When you see me after the concert,” he says, “it’ll be done.”
He doesn’t want to have to wait until much later when his roommate, Jack, is asleep, the way he usually does. Instead, without being seen, Griffin is going to close himself in the closet in his room, among the gym shoes and damp boots and fleeces and crumpled hoodies. And under the dim light of the bulb he’s going to write in his journal and disappear into another world one more time.
I tell him I’m so glad he’s decided to do this. That I think it’s a very good idea.
“If it’s so good,” he says, “then you do it too.”
“Not yet” is all I say.
• • •
At night the auditorium is all decorated for the winter concert, with little lights scattered around, and tinsel in the aisles. I wait backstage with the other Barntones during the jazz band’s performance and then the acoustic guitar duet. Everyone in the a cappella group is dressed in a white shirt, black skirt, and heels. Glancing at myself in the mirror before we’re about to go on, I realize I look slightly older than when I came here. My hair is longer than it’s ever been in my life—halfway down my back—and it shines a little, and my face seems more angular.
Sierra comes out onstage in a black leotard and black silk dance skirt. The program lists her as a soloist for A Dance for André, which I’ve seen her practice several times. Now, as the music teacher accompanies her on piano, Sierra performs the ballet again, sometimes dragging around like a person who’s half dead from grief, other times propelled by manic hope. She does a few hip-hop moves too, in a nod to her brother’s dance style. At the end, when she takes a
bow, the applause goes on for a long time. Sierra hurries into the wings, where I’m standing. We collide and hug, and her body is boiling from exertion.
“You killed!” I say. “You’re such a big talent.” I know that Sierra will go really far in her life.
Finally, it’s the Barntones’ turn to perform, and though I have no illusions about how talented we are (average to above-average), we walk single file onto the stage and into the white spotlight. After all my complaints about the Barntones, I’m actually excited, and though I can’t see anything past the stage, I know Griffin’s out there somewhere.
Later, he’ll tell me all about his final visit to Belzhar, and I’ll praise him for what he’s done. But now he’ll have a chance to hear me sing, and maybe he’ll be a little bit impressed. I wish Reeve could hear me too. But he can’t ever hear me, and in fact he’ll never really know all that much about me.
Adelaide leads us in our three songs, ending in the fast-paced, raplike Gregorian chant. In the audience, several of the youngest boys at the school start to make those howling and woofing sounds, and a whole foot-stomping thing gets started. This room contains two hundred of the most extremely fragile, highly intelligent people around, and we’ve all been cooped up away from our normal lives and our families and technology and civilization for so long that we’re starting to burst out of ourselves. The foot stomping gets louder and louder, shuddering the floor of the auditorium, as if trying to send it crashing down around us.
CHAPTER
18
MUCH LATER, AFTER PUNCH AND COOKIES AT THE reception, and after Griffin tells me he went to Belzhar for the last time and that it was a hard thing but he thinks he’s all right now, and after he and I stand with our arms wrapped around each other in the cold night until a teacher pries us apart, I’m sleeping a sleep so deep that I’ve left a little circle of spit on the pillow.
Everything has accelerated in speed and intensity, and I need to be unconscious. No Griffin, no Reeve, no Belzhar, no end of journal, no thoughts about reliving the terrible day back in Crampton. Just sleep. Sleep, and a pool of saliva on the pillow, when voices suddenly break through and wake me up.
“Someone call the nurse. I’ll stay with her!” I hear Jane Ann yell, and I spring up from bed and hurry out of my room to see what’s going on.
“It’s Sierra,” says Maddy from across the hall. She’s standing in a pack of worried, excited girls.
“Same as last time?” I ask.
“No, not a nightmare,” she says. “I heard she’s sick. Like a seizure or something.”
I take the stairs two at a time. Several girls are milling around outside Sierra’s door, and I push through even as a bossy senior says, “You can’t go in there, Jam—”
But I’m already in. The room is dim, and Jane Ann and Jenny Vaz, Sierra’s roommate, are standing over Sierra’s bed. Sierra is sitting up with her eyes open, staring straight ahead. One hand is in the air, moving jerkily back and forth.
“Sierra!” I say sharply. There’s no reply. “Sierra, it’s Jam,” I say right into her face. Again, no reply, so I turn to Jane Ann frantically and say, “What’s wrong with her?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Sierra!” I try again, but she doesn’t respond at all. “Oh, come on, Sierra,” I say in a softer voice. “Please don’t do this. Whatever’s going on with you, snap out of it, okay?”
Then I think, What if this somehow has to do with Belzhar? I pat the bed around her, lift up the blanket, checking for the journal, but it isn’t there. “Sierra, I need you here,” I tell her. “Come on.” I realize that I’ve started to cry a little, and then I can’t stop.
Jane Ann has to come over and put an arm around me and pull me away. “Honey, it’s going to be all right,” she tells me.
“But why can’t she hear me?” I ask, as Sierra remains in her twitchy fog, her face blank, her hand restlessly moving.
“I don’t know. I’m sure the doctors will figure it out.”
“But what if they can’t?”
Jane Ann says, a little stiffly, “There’s no reason to believe that’s going to happen.”
But we both understand that what’s wrong with Sierra is obviously very serious. My tears go on and on, and I start to talk obsessively. I tell Jane Ann, “I was much closer to her than even to Hannah Petroski. Much closer. It was a really deep friendship. We shared things. Our real feelings. I’ve never had that before at this level.”
And Jane Ann says, “I know,” even though she’s obviously never heard of Hannah Petroski and has no idea of what I’m talking about. I let her pat my back and say kind mom-like words to me. Soon the nurse hurries in, and I quickly move out of the way.
I watch as she removes a few items from her black bag, then crouches down beside Sierra. First she shines a little light in her eyes, then she wraps a blood-pressure cuff around Sierra’s arm and squeezes that bulb thing, and then she takes her temperature with an ear thermometer.
“Sierra, have you taken a drug?” the nurse asks in a very loud voice. “And if so, which one? Ecstasy? Ketamine? PCP?”
“She doesn’t take drugs,” I say, cutting her off. “She hates drugs.”
When the nurse is done, she shakes her head and frowns, then murmurs something to Jane Ann that I can’t hear, and finally she says, “I’m calling an ambulance.”
Jane Ann lets me stay with Sierra until the ambulance arrives to take her to the local hospital. “I know you really love her,” she says as I stand helplessly patting Sierra’s shoulder, or occasionally taking her hand in mine—the hand that’s not moving.
“I do,” I say, but already I’m thinking, I did.
I’ve never seen anyone just disappear so deeply into herself the way Sierra has. When the EMTs arrive, they lower her onto a gurney and fasten the straps with authoritative clicks. Sierra doesn’t resist, and barely seems to notice that she’s being taken away. Her arms are strapped to her sides, and from beneath the blanket I see a tiny bit of motion, and realize that it’s Sierra’s hand, still subtly twitching under there.
Jane Ann says I’m not allowed to go in the ambulance, and that I have to go back to bed now. “I promise to let you know as soon as I hear anything,” she tells me.
But she still looks very upset as she heads out to send the other girls off to bed too. Sierra’s roommate is out in the hall, so I stand alone in the room for an extra few seconds, looking around, and then I go to Sierra’s bed and peer down into the space between the mattress and the wall. It’s narrow and dark, and I can’t see a thing. I plunge my arm in; it barely fits, and my fingertips graze the dusty wooden floor. Suddenly I brush against something.
It’s smooth and cold, and even before I pull it up I know it’s the journal.
I still think it’s possible she was writing in it just before the seizure. Did something go badly wrong in Belzhar, and that’s what this is about? I’m dying to look at the journal right now, but I know I should get out of here. I slip it under my arm, then head quickly back downstairs to my own room.
DJ has miraculously slept though the commotion. So in the darkness, leaning against my study buddy and with my book light switched on, I speed-read through the pages of Sierra’s journal. Her handwriting is so different from mine; it seems much more mature, the words leaping across the page.
Forgive me for invading your privacy, Sierra, I think. But this is an emergency.
I read and read until I find the last entry, which of course begins five pages from the end. The entry is dated tonight. Like Casey and Marc and then Griffin, Sierra made the decision to go back to Belzhar for the last time, even without an actual “plan” in place.
And while she was in Belzhar tonight, she wrote and wrote like she always did, and her last entry describes what happened. She had to relive the night that André went missing, which she’d said she couldn’t bear to do
. But who could? Did the experience of losing him all over again send her into shock? Into a permanent seizure?
I see that she filled in the journal to the last line at the bottom, and that there’s no room left.
Her journal is done. This is exactly what she said she didn’t want to do, and yet she’s done it. I squint into the darkness, and read the last paragraph:
Suddenly he stands up and tries to get off the bus, just like when it really happened. And this time, instead of saying, okay, get that cookie dough, I say to him, nah, we’ll make chocolate chip cookies another time. And the light gets dim in the way it always does here, but I hold onto his arm and don’t let go. I have to see if this will work; it’s the only thing I can come up with. In dance class we do improvisations, and this is like one of them. I’m still holding on now, and we’ll see what hap
And there it ends, right in the middle of a sentence. Right in the middle of a word.
Is that what happened? When her journal ran out, Sierra held on to André, and was able to stay in Belzhar?
Of course. She’s still there now. Her hand isn’t moving because of some seizure. It’s moving because she’s still somehow writing in her journal, or at least writing in the air.
Sierra tried a frantic experiment in Belzhar; when the light dimmed, she refused to let go of André’s hand. She didn’t even let go when she felt that sharp suck of pressure pulling her away from Belzhar and back toward this world. And she managed to keep her grip on André with one hand. The other hand is the one that’s still writing in an imaginary journal, writing and writing long after the real journal got all filled up.
And maybe, as long as she keeps doing this, she can stay there with him and protect him. He never has to get off that bus, and neither does she.