Belzhar

by Meg Wolitzer

  She doesn’t have to go through her own trauma again, the way Casey and Marc and Griffin went through theirs. But she also has to stay there with André forever.

  Sierra’s in Belzhar for good, having given up the chance to get older and dance and have experiences and explore all the possibilities of the world. This world, not the other one.

  • • •

  I’m agitated for the rest of the night, turning in my bed, flipping the pillow, not knowing what to do. At dawn I finally get an idea, and I become so excited that I hurry downstairs to the pay phone, calling the hospital, asking to speak to someone about Sierra Stokes, who was admitted last night.

  The nurse who gets on the line is really nice and doesn’t even question whether this is a legitimate call. To my surprise she agrees with my peculiar and very specific request. “Sure, honey,” she says. “It’s worth a try. We really don’t know what’s going on with this gal.”

  So she puts down the phone at the nursing station, and a lot of time passes. Finally she gets back on the line and tells me that she did what I asked, but it didn’t work. She had gone to Sierra’s room, stood over her bed, and followed my instructions, shouting, “Sierra, come out of Belzhar!”

  I’d had the idea to try this because I remembered that when I got trapped in that horrible goat version of Belzhar after writing in Griffin’s journal, he’d shouted something to me like “Come out of Belzhar!” And it had worked.

  But the nurse got no response from her. No sudden spike in alertness. Nothing registered on the monitor. “Sorry, sweetheart,” she tells me over the phone. “No luck.”

  I’m all out of ideas.

  • • •

  In the morning the campus is somber, with everyone whispering at breakfast about the terrible thing that happened to Sierra Stokes in the night. There’s a rumor floating around that Sierra OD’d on Xanax, and had to have her stomach pumped.

  Then another rumor starts going around that Sierra had a “major seizure” and is permanently brain damaged. On the oatmeal line, people are talking about what a loss it is. Sierra was such a talented, smart girl, they say, using the past tense. Such an amazing dancer. So intelligent. A real winner.

  I just want to scream in their faces, “Shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  A few girls are crying and embracing, even though most of them know Sierra only superficially, because she keeps pretty much to herself with everyone but us. In the dining hall I look for Marc and Casey and Griffin, and I go over to each of them individually and whisper exactly what I’ve figured out.

  “She stayed there,” I say. “She held on to André. She’s there right now.” I explain the whole thing, and, like me, their first reaction is shock. But they also understand why she did this.

  After breakfast Dr. Gant calls a special assembly for the entire student body. He and the nurse and a couple of teachers get up and give us a talk about relying on one another for companionship and strength when something difficult happens. They remind us that they’re here for us too. By the time the fairly useless assembly is over, we’re running so late that Dr. Gant cancels all first-period classes.

  Now that there’s no Special Topics today, the rest of the free period gives the four of us who’ve been grounded a chance to huddle outside in a patch of cold sun and talk a little.

  “I don’t blame her for doing it,” Marc says right away. “It makes sense.”

  “I don’t blame her either,” says Griffin. “Going back that last time is hard for anyone. It was hard for me.”

  “Mysterious you,” says Casey. And I’m reminded that Griffin hasn’t told anyone but me what happened to him in the past. No one else knows about the fire, or what his version of Belzhar is like. And they only know slightly more about me and my past. Griffin and I have both remained pretty opaque, and the others have allowed it. I’m grateful to them.

  But Sierra told us the whole story. “I think she did the right thing,” Griffin says.

  “I just can’t imagine her not being here anymore,” I say. My voice starts to crack apart a little. We’re talking about Sierra as if she’s dead, and has taken her own life.

  Griffin puts an arm around me, and I think about how, unlike Sierra, he’s here with me, and he’s not going anywhere. I know it, but I can’t quite believe it. Sometimes you think people will be around forever, and then you lose them with no warning at all.

  • • •

  In the evening, after a day in which none of us is able to concentrate, our class is driven downtown in a van to attend Mrs. Quenell’s retirement party, which is held in the restaurant of a big old hotel called the Green Mountain Arms. Sierra had really been looking forward to the party; she’d said she was glad to have the opportunity to dress up, and to walk around the room like a normal person at a normal party.

  I’d been looking forward to the food; I am beyond sick of meals at The Wooden Barn. It’s basically all quinoa, all the time. And I’d liked the idea of celebrating Mrs. Quenell. We’ve all been granted special permission to leave our rooms for the evening, despite being grounded. Now, of course, none of us is in a party mood at all. Yet here we are.

  The hotel is stately and grand. Our teacher looks grand too as she receives guests at the entrance of the glittering restaurant. She wears a red silk blouse and an emerald necklace. Christmas colors. “My wonderful students,” she says, lightly hugging each of us. Behind her I can see glittering silver and candles. Waiters circulate with trays of hors d’oeuvres, and though I’m wearing my best clothes—among the only good clothes I have with me—I feel awkward and unhappy to be here at this party, which is basically a roomful of dressed-up teachers.

  “Come in, don’t be shy,” Mrs. Quenell says to us. “Stuff yourselves with canapés. Take some back to the dorms for your poor deprived roommates.” But we hesitate at the door, and she quietly says, “I know.”

  A pause. What does she know? Obviously, she knows that Sierra has fallen ill, but does she know any more than that?

  She looks at us. “I know how hard it is for all of you, attending a party when Sierra is sick. I’m thinking about her tonight too. Please know that.”

  But she doesn’t know what we know—at least I don’t think she does. Sierra made her own decision, and though, yes, we’re all upset, we understand it and respect it. All we can do now is thank Mrs. Quenell, and then head inside. Griffin hits up a waiter for a couple of puff pastries. The serving staff has been instructed not to let us drink any alcohol whatsoever, so all we get offered is “sparkling water.”

  “When did seltzer become sparkling water?” Griffin asks.

  “Oh, around the time that impact became a verb,” says Mrs. Quenell with a smile, then she walks off to greet some newly arriving guests.

  I pop a canapé into my mouth whole. I don’t even know what it is—maybe a scallop? And is that cream cheese in it?—but it may be the best thing I’ve ever eaten. I haven’t realized how much I miss “real” food. I think about my dad’s excellent cooking. And the dumb “Chef Dad” apron he wears, and how when Leo was little, Dad always let him drop a fistful of spaghetti into the boiling water.

  Leo. My dad. My mom. I picture my whole family in the kitchen at home in a life I used to be part of and no longer am.

  “I want to talk to you,” Griffin says, pulling me so suddenly toward the side of the room that my sparkling water sloshes over the side of the glass. When we sit down on a sofa he says, “Everyone’s journal is done except yours.”

  “I know.” My voice is soft and ashamed.

  “We’re leaving for break, Jam.”

  “I know.”

  “Go there and say good-bye to him,” Griffin says. “Get it done already.”

  There’s a horrible silence. I just can’t speak.

  “Don’t you want to be with me?” Griffin asks.
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  Of course I do. Griffin and his soft, worn hoodies. The way he feels so much, and feels so much for me. I nod, but I can’t tell him that I also still want the funny and ironic English boy in the brown sweater who I am certain is waiting frantically in Belzhar, having no idea of what’s taking me so long, or if I’ll ever be back.

  Griffin just wants me to go there and get it over with. Go there and end it.

  But what if I go there to end it and realize I can’t? We all know now that there’s a way to stay. Sierra held on to André and didn’t let go as the light dimmed. They were like two people making a human chain during a hurricane, bracing themselves against being uprooted and torn apart.

  I could go back there and do the same thing.

  The idea starts to form for real as I sit on the fancy sofa at the fancy party with a crumpled cocktail napkin in my fist. I wish I could grab one of the pale pink cocktails the waiters are passing to the teachers, who as far as I can tell are starting to get a little buzzed, their voices growing louder. I hear the usually mousy Latin teacher start to shriek. The drinks are cosmopolitans—pretty ironic since we’re in rural Vermont, which is not exactly the most cosmopolitan place in the world. If I had one I would just guzzle it down, and maybe even a second one, and then I’d feel more certain about whether I should go back to Belzhar and stay.

  “So you’re going to end it?” Griffin pushes. I nod weakly. “You promise, Jam?” And I nod again.

  “There you are,” says Mrs. Quenell, appearing above us. “Come say hello to Dr. Gant.” Griffin and I reluctantly get up, and all the Special Topics people stand together uncomfortably with our teacher and the headmaster.

  Mrs. Quenell says, “John, you should know that this is perhaps the most gifted group of students I’ve ever taught.”

  “That’s saying a lot, Veronica,” he says. He looks at us and says drily, “I hope you’re enjoying being ‘sprung’ for the night.” We tell him we are. “Well,” he goes on, “when you come back from Christmas break in January, it will be time for a clean start.”

  By January, of course, Special Topics will have been over for weeks. Whatever is going to happen to me will have already happened.

  Someone calls everyone to attention now, and the guests gather; several toasts are given. A few teachers tell inside jokes about Mrs. Quenell and quote lines from books that she loves.

  An old lady who works in the kitchen gets up and says how polite Mrs. Quenell has always been to the kitchen staff. “She always separates her plates and silverware,” she says, “unlike some people.”

  Yes, Mrs. Quenell is good. She’s good and kind and she expects the most of us. But above all, she’s still a mystery.

  What does she really know? Will we ever be told? Soon our class will end, and winter break will begin, and when we return in January, Mrs. Quenell will be gone. Some new family with little kids will move into her house, and they’ll probably put up a swing set in the yard.

  Suddenly Casey bangs on a glass with a spoon, and everyone looks over at the small girl in the wheelchair, surprised. She unfolds a little square of paper in her lap. “I just want to say,” she says, reading aloud, “that being in Special Topics in English has meant everything to me.”

  She stops, then looks up from the paper and says, “We had a real shock with what happened to Sierra. But we’re a tight group, Mrs. Q, and that’s because of you. Remember at the beginning of the year, that thing you said? How we should look out for each other?”

  I glance over at Mrs. Quenell, who nods. She’s absolutely focused on Casey, the way she’s always absolutely focused on each of us when we talk in class around the oval oak table. Like we are the only people in the world for her. Something surges in me, makes me feel that I might cry.

  “I think we’ve done that, Mrs. Q,” Casey continues. “And that included looking out for Sierra. But I guess, you know, there are some places a person can go where no one else can follow them. And sometimes you just have to trust that they know what they’re doing.”

  None of this is actually written on Casey’s piece of paper. She’s just improvising, trying to tell Mrs. Quenell something without saying it out loud: If you do know about the journals, then you should also know that Sierra went there and stayed. She did it on purpose. And maybe it’s not the worst thing in the world, because she’s with her brother now.

  “Mrs. Q,” Casey goes on, looking back down at the page, “you’re an awesome teacher. At first I thought you were too strict. But I’m really glad you were. Because I got a lot out of it. And I also got a lot out of all the class discussions, which could be fierce. And, of course, out of the journals.”

  She mentions the journals lightly, waiting to see whether this gets a reaction from Mrs. Quenell. But it doesn’t. Not even a glimmer.

  “I know that I’m speaking for the whole class when I say that you made a difference,” Casey says, and then she’s done.

  “Hear, hear,” calls the Latin teacher, and then all the teachers raise their glasses and drink to Mrs. Quenell, though I’m sure that none of them has a clue as to what Casey was really trying to say.

  CHAPTER

  19

  OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS I CARRY MY JOURNAL with me everywhere, as if I’m afraid someone will steal it, or I’ll lose it, and I’ll never be able to see Reeve again. Despite what I promised Griffin, I’m still not ready to go to Belzhar for the last time. I’m the holdout, because I’m split.

  One half of me wants to go there, make the break, leave Reeve for good, and come back to Griffin. The other half thinks, fuck it, I’m going to stay with Reeve. Just the two of us in our neutral territory, standing in a field embracing. The brown wool sweater. The curling mouth. The way we joke around, and then get serious and lie down together, turning toward each other. Reeve’s long arms, and his whole body, slender, familiar, magnetized to mine. We can have this forever. No stress, no change, no problems, and nobody else to complicate our simple life.

  I don’t know which half of me will get its way, and I won’t know until I go there. But I do have to go there, one way or another. If I hand in the journal with the last five pages empty, then I’ll be leaving Reeve in a permanent waiting state, which would be torture for him, and for me.

  Whenever I see Griffin walking alone across campus, his shoulders hunched, his long blond hair blowing, his boots leaving deep impressions in the snow, I wave and hurry over to him in relief. No one else in my class was as paralyzed as I am about the decision to make a final trip to Belzhar; everyone just finally went there and did what they had to do.

  I’m different.

  “Go already,” Griffin says when we stand together one day in the bluish late afternoon, under a tree hung with icicles. When I don’t say anything, he says, “You’re not actually thinking of doing what Sierra did, are you? You’d better not.”

  I think of Reeve in Belzhar now, a place where there are no icicles and no snow. I picture him sitting next to me that day in art class, and how I drew him. And then how we kissed at the party over the dollhouse. And how he showed me the Monty Python sketch. How he gave me a jar of jam because of my name. How we fit together.

  I’ll go to Belzhar after lights-out, I suddenly decide. I don’t have any idea whether I’ll ever return to The Wooden Barn again.

  It’s suddenly much too cold out here under the frozen trees, and I need to get back inside. “I’ll go there tonight,” I promise Griffin.

  • • •

  At dinner, sitting at a loud, chattering table, I barely eat the mound of bow-tie pasta on my plate, and I keep to myself. Griffin somehow knows to give me a little distance. He’s sitting with a few guys at a table across the way, and he slowly raises a hand to wave to me, and I raise mine back. We don’t take our eyes off each other, and I nod to him, as if to say, don’t worry, I’m going to do what I said I would.

  And then, finally,
the end of the long day comes, and DJ and I are lying in our beds before going to sleep when she says to me, “The thing about adulthood that I keep thinking about is that there’s never lights-out. At least, not a mandatory lights-out. That sounds really great, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it does,” I say.

  “You make your own decisions. I’ll be totally ready for that,” she adds, and yawns a big, unselfconscious DJ yawn.

  I’m not ready to make my own decision about Reeve, but I have to.

  “Can you believe the semester’s about to end?” she goes on. “People say ‘Time flies,’ and I’m, like, ‘No shit.’”

  “I know,” I say. “It’s pretty unreal how fast it went.”

  We adjust ourselves in our beds in the dark, and I suddenly say to her, “You’ve been a really good roommate, DJ.”

  “Thanks, Jam. You haven’t been an axe murderer either. But we’re not done. We still have next semester.”

  “I know that,” I say, but I think, I may never see you again. And if I don’t, good luck in life. I hope you and Rebecca stay together for a long time, or forever, if that’s what you want. I hope you continue to get over all your food issues. I hope you do enjoy the fact that adulthood has no lights-out. I hope you get the chance to do everything you want to do, because you deserve it all.

  I wait for her to drift off, and I listen to her breathing get regular and loud in that way of hers. Then, feeling afraid and alone but steadying myself as well as I can, I sit up and lean against the study buddy and place my journal in my lap, switching on the little book light.

  By now, Reeve has been waiting so long for me; I wonder what he thinks has happened.

  I can feel the cool leather cover of the journal against my knees. There are five pages left blank, and at the top of the first one I carefully write:

  I’m off to be with him again, finally.