by Meg Wolitzer
And then I’m there. But this time his arms aren’t around me. I’m not holding him, and he’s not holding me. Instead, I feel only the wind, which is blowing more strongly than usual. I remember that there was a strong wind on the last day I was with Reeve in New Jersey. As I left the house that morning for the school bus, my mom had called out, “Take a hat!” But I’d ignored her, because I hate hat hair. All that static electricity hangs around your head with a crackle. I’d gone sprinting out into the cold, hatless and excited, not knowing that everything was going to change that day.
That I would lose him.
Now the playing fields in Belzhar are empty and silent. I call his name tentatively. “Reeve?” I try, but he’s nowhere. Something’s not right, and I start walking more rapidly along the field. Then I remember Casey said that when she went back to Belzhar for the very last time, it was just like the time that the bad thing had happened to her. She’d had to relive it fully.
That’s right. This is just like my last day with Reeve. It’s beginning again automatically, now that there are only five pages left in my journal. I didn’t even have to do anything other than show up; it’s all starting on its own.
I’m not ready for this. Why did I think I was? All I can do is walk along the grass in an inevitable march toward something bad, the way I did that last day in New Jersey. I walk and walk, heading toward the conclusion to my own story, and there’s nothing to see up ahead, until suddenly there is.
Someone stands in the distance. As I get closer, I see that it’s actually two people, wrapped up in each other. A girl and a boy, her hair flowing around them both. His head is buried in her neck, and her head is thrown back. He’s laughing as he kisses her.
I feel my jaw lock, my fingers stiffen with tension. I wish I could crack my knuckles, each one as loud as a warning gunshot. I keep walking toward them. I know why the girl is here, though I really don’t want to know at all.
“Sometimes it’s easier to tell ourselves a story,” Dr. Margolis had said to me in a kind voice that made me want to hit him, the day my parents brought me to his office. I did not want to listen to a word he said.
The girl on the field sees me now, and she says something to the boy, who turns around.
It’s Reeve. Reeve Maxfield has been kissing Dana Sapol, the girl who has hated me ever since I was the only one who knew she’d forgotten to wear underpants that day in second grade. I mean, what kind of sick person holds a grudge like that? And at this point, it’s obviously no longer about the underpants. She was never once nice to me until she found out Reeve liked me. And then she invited me to her party, where I kissed him above her sister Courtney’s dollhouse. The party where he gave me the jar of jam.
Though I feel like my head might crack apart along the sides of the skull from seeing Reeve and Dana together, I’m still steady enough to keep walking toward them. And instead of looking guilty or shocked or saying something like, “I can explain,” the way Marc’s dad did when he was caught with that porn tape of himself, Reeve just hangs on to Dana, and she hangs on to him, stretching the sleeve of his brown sweater.
They stand and look at me, and with a smirk Dana says, “Well, well, look who we have here.”
“Be nice,” says Reeve.
I didn’t know what to do when this happened that day in New Jersey, out in the real world. I just did not know what to do. The boy I loved had been hooking up with this dreadful, mean girl, which made no sense at all.
“Reeve,” I say to him now, exactly as I said to him that day. “What are you doing?”
“Come on, Jam,” he says softly.
“But I thought . . .” I let my voice fade out.
“You thought what?” His accent is as British as ever, but he sounds exasperated, as if he wishes I’d just say it and get it over with. And then he can say what he has to say too, and then we’ll be done.
“I thought we were together,” I say miserably.
Dana Sapol hoots. She lets out a sound like one of the exotic birds at Pets ’n’ More Pets at the mall. Reeve grips her arm tighter, as if to quiet her.
“Jam,” he finally says. “We’re not together. You know that, right?”
“But what about what we had?” I say. “Starting with that night at her house. At her sister’s dollhouse.”
“You know what really happened that night,” says Reeve. He doesn’t seem like he’s being cruel, or trying to humiliate me.
I shake my head no.
“Do I have to remind you?” he asks. “You can’t recall?”
I close my eyes in the wind, not looking at the beautiful face of Reeve, and the pointy, unkind face of Dana. Can I recall that night at the Sapols’ house?
At first I can’t. I can only see it exactly the way I’ve always seen it, all the details lined up as neatly as a row of polished stones. Arriving at the party. Seeing Reeve in his wrinkled shirt standing with those other guys. Going down the hall with him, where he gives me the jam. Kissing him and feeling so much. Letting him touch me under my tank top. Groaning in the dim light of that little girl’s bedroom, as blissful as I’ve ever felt.
What I’ve been doing is telling myself a “story,” as Dr. Margolis said.
Telling yourself a story is always easier, he continued.
Yes, it’s definitely easier for me. Because when I let go of the story I’ve been telling myself, and just try to think about what’s objectively true, I can barely get a grip. But even so, I go way, way back in my mind to much earlier than that night at Dana Sapol’s house. I go back in my mind to the first day I ever met Reeve.
I was in gym class playing badminton that day, and there he was, the exchange student from London in the long shorts and the Manchester United T-shirt, ducking as the birdies whizzed by his head. And at the end of class I said to him, “Good strategy.”
He looked at me with a squint. “And what strategy was that?”
“Avoidance.”
He nodded in agreement. “Yeah, it’s basically how I’ve gotten through life so far.”
We half smiled at each other, and that was the end of it. I saw him around school during the week, and I made excuses to talk to him, and he made excuses to talk to me. That was exactly the way it happened. I thought about him so much, and whenever I did I felt light and excited and hyperalert.
And one day in the cafeteria, Reeve was sitting with a bunch of people, and instead of sitting with Hannah and Ryan and Jenna like I always did, I slipped in at the other end of the bench where he was. None of those kids even noticed me; I just sat there with my tuna fish sandwich—the quietest food ever invented—eating and listening as he talked. Reeve was the center of attention at the table, because he was new and cute-looking and funny and had an accent. Dana Sapol was at the table too. I think she was sitting right next to him; it’s hard for me to remember the details, after everything that’s happened.
“My host family, the Kesmans,” he said to everyone, “enjoy singing rounds. Do you know what rounds are?”
“Rounds?” I suddenly said, trying to make my voice heard in the loud cafeteria. “Oh, like ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat.’”
But I was all the way at the other end of the table, and my voice didn’t carry that far. No one seemed to notice I’d even said a word, so I just went back to softly chewing my sandwich, trying to make it last a really long time. I listened to Reeve talk in that accent, that scrape, feeling as if he and I were having our own private conversation, and that no one else was there.
“It’s excruciating. After dinner,” Reeve went on, “we all have to stay at the table, and we sing rounds for hours. Or maybe it only seems like hours. This is the most wholesome family I’ve ever met. Are all American families as bad as that?”
“No,” I said, in a louder voice. “Mine isn’t.”
This time he heard me, and looked down the table. “Lucky girl,” said Reeve
.
Dana Sapol said, “Yeah, Jam Gallahue is so lucky. That’s how everyone thinks of her.”
There was a momentary murmur of surprise and embarrassment, which always happened when Dana took a little jab at me. Everyone knew that, for some unexplained reason, Dana hated me. Over the years she’d take any opportunity to say something casually nasty. So each time it happened, there would be this weird, uncomfortable pause.
No one understood why she did this. I wasn’t a loser. I wasn’t like Ramona Schecht, who’d been sitting alone at lunch ever since the day in seventh grade when she’d been found picking a crisp scab off her elbow and eating it like a kettle chip.
Reeve was new, and had never seen Dana make fun of me before. It was awkward, but then the moment passed. A couple of kids leaned in to talk to Reeve, and my view of him was blocked. Then finally, when they leaned back, I saw that Reeve had already left the cafeteria. It was such a little thing, him not saying good-bye to me, but it just made me feel so forgotten.
I went to the garbage pail to throw out my crusts, and the tears in my eyes blurred the entire room. Blurry Hannah saw me and said, “Why weren’t you sitting with us today, Jam?” I couldn’t even answer. “What’s the matter?” she said. “Jam, are you crying?”
There was no way to explain it to her. I felt so much for this boy, but even after he’d been so nice to me that first day in badminton, and every day since then, he was suddenly indifferent now. Didn’t he like me? It was urgent that he did.
And then there was that day in art class, when we were drawing landscapes, and Reeve came and sat next to me. Well, okay, he actually sat next to me only because Ms. Panucci, the art teacher with the dangly earrings, said, “Reeve Maxfield, I want you separated from Dana Sapol.” So Reeve stood up with his pad and pencil, and Ms. Panucci pointed to me and said, “Go sit there.”
Reeve flopped down hard beside me, and Ms. Panucci said to the class, “No talking. I am serious, people!”
He turned to me with a sly smile. What we had was special and subtle. We sat in stillness, not talking, not touching, though I wanted him to touch me more than anything. I wanted his shoulder against mine. I could easily imagine kissing him, feeling the chocolate-brown sweater wool, his bright face, his neck, his mouth.
I stopped drawing the hills in the distance like I was supposed to. They were just too boring, and didn’t deserve to be immortalized. Instead, my hand that was holding the charcoal began moving across the pad like it was a Ouija board.
I barely knew I was drawing, until someone said, “Yo, Reeve, you’ve got an admirer.”
The drawing wasn’t even that good. I accidentally forgot to give him a shirt. Instead I just drew his face and his bare shoulders. His clavicle, which is the real name for the collarbone. I made him look kind of buff, even though he’s pretty skinny. Suddenly there was all this laughter around me, and Ms. Panucci came over, took the pad from me, and said, quietly, “Jam, what’s going on? It’s not like you to act out. To deliberately do what you’re not supposed to.”
I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t tell her I hadn’t even known I was drawing Reeve, because it wouldn’t have made sense to her. Everyone was laughing and looking at the half-naked drawing of Reeve Maxfield, the British exchange student.
He didn’t say anything to me, but just got up and walked off. I had displeased him, which made me want to gouge out my eyes. But maybe, beneath his displeasure, he was also flattered and excited. He just had to be.
Please God, make this be okay, I thought, even though I’ve gone back and forth between believing in God and being an atheist ever since I was nine and my friend Marie Bunning’s dad had a heart attack and died. If there really was a God, I sometimes thought, He would never have taken Mr. Bunning, who used to actually make paper dolls for Marie, with little ski outfits and everything. Why wouldn’t God have left Mr. Bunning on earth, with the people who loved him?
• • •
At home that night after art class I didn’t want to eat dinner, and my dad, who likes to cook dishes with one weird ingredient (“You catch the undertone in this stew?” he’ll say proudly. “I poured in a can of Dr Pepper!”), was concerned. “What’s going on?” he and my mom wanted to know, but I couldn’t tell them that I had dropped into a deep, dense cloud of feeling, and that I was still in free fall.
Later, in bed, I pretended that Reeve was beside me. I felt his arms, and his long torso. In the morning, getting dressed, it was almost as if he whispered to me, “Wear the black jeans. I like those.”
The next time I saw him at school he didn’t seem mad at me at all, and I was so happy I could have danced down the hall. Maybe I did dance a little, because Ryan Brown said to me, “What’s with you? You look all hyper. Are you ADHD?”
And later on, in the few minutes of freedom between history and Conversational French, when Reeve glanced across the hallway, I was sure he was looking at me. But maybe he wasn’t. It’s like when you’re at a concert and you think the singer is singing directly to you, and all the thousands of other teenaged girls don’t even exist. I was inside that cloud of feeling and I couldn’t see or feel anything else.
I suppose Dr. Margolis was right, and it was easier to tell myself this story, because what was true was just not acceptable to me. Like that day at the lockers, when Dana Sapol looked up and said, “My parents and Courtney the brat are going to our grandparents’ this Saturday, so it’s par-tay time. You should come.”
All right, so maybe she wasn’t only talking to me.
Or maybe she wasn’t talking to me at all.
Maybe thinking that she was talking to me was just part of the “story.”
Dana generally never talked to me except to say something mean, but I tried to make myself think we’d turned a corner because she saw that Reeve and I obviously had something between us. Finally, I thought, I was no longer hated by Dana. My locker was five lockers down from hers. Jackie Chertoff, who was a less powerful version of Dana, was two lockers down.
“Excellent,” Jackie said about the party, and she pumped her fist in the air.
I started to think about what it would be like if I could go to that party. Maybe Dana really was including me in the conversation; her eyes always did kind of look into the distance when she talked, like she couldn’t really commit to one person. Maybe she was telling everyone at the lockers about her party, not just Jackie Chertoff. It wasn’t clear to me at the time which it was. I thought about how maybe I’d been invited, and I pretended that being invited was no big deal. Though of course it was huge.
And then Dana added, meaningfully, “The hottie exchange student will be there.”
And this had to have been directed at me, because clearly I was very into Reeve, and everyone knew it since art class. All morning I’d been drawing his name over and over on the cover of my history notebook, in different styles: bubble letters, Olde English calligraphy, and even the Greek alphabet, which I looked up online. This is how his name looks in Greek:
Everyone knew I was into him, and to most people this made sense, because even though I wasn’t in the most popular group, I was a nice, cute girl who had a close group of friends. In no way was I like Ramona Schecht, Devourer of Scabs. So I told myself a story that I’d been personally invited to Dana Sapol’s party. I could even picture an invitation, engraved with my name on the front, just like the bar and bat mitzvah invitations I’d received in seventh grade, which came in the mail and always weighed a ton. In my mind the invitation said:
The presence of your company is requested
At the home of Dana Helene Sapol
Saturday night at half past the hour of eight o’clock
Dress: casual but sort of slutty, because Reeve
will be on the premises
No gifts, please, since Dana Helene Sapol owns everything already. Also, this isn’t a birthday, it’s just a tee
ns-getting-wasted party
Be prepared for something momentous to happen
• • •
I stood at my locker feeling so excited that I couldn’t even speak. I just closed the shaky metal door quietly and gave the dial a spin, so no one could break in and steal—what? My clarinet? My rain poncho? Nothing in that locker would interest anyone, least of all me. All I could think about was being with Reeve at that party, and what would happen there. Something momentous.
I turned down the usual offer to hang out with Hannah and Jenna on Saturday night. No doubt all we would’ve done was click on a bunch of different websites, some where you had to press a button certifying you were at least eighteen. And then we’d go on Facebook and laugh at people’s dumb posts. And we’d watch TV and order stuffed crust pizza and individual molten lava cakes, and finally fall asleep at 1:00 a.m. in sleeping bags on the rug in the Petroskis’ den, beneath the framed poster of the sad-looking diner by the artist Edward Hopper, where we’d slept a thousand times.
“What are you doing instead?” asked Jenna when I told her and Hannah that I wasn’t free. “Something with your family?”
“I’m going to Dana Sapol’s party.”
They were shocked. “No offense, but you couldn’t have been invited to that,” Jenna said. “Dana Sapol has never hidden her feelings about you, even if they are twisted.”
“Well, I was invited,” I said.
“But anyway, why would you go?” asked Hannah, to which I could only look at her in amazement.
Why would I go? Didn’t she know anything?
“Oh,” said Jenna coldly. “Because of your crush.”
“He’s not a crush,” I said, equally coldly.
“Get over it already, Jam,” said Hannah. “And I say this as your best friend who cares about you.”
I looked at these two girls I’d been through everything with since the beginning of time. We’d had so many sleepovers, so many hours of flat-ironing our hair and doing dance moves, and so many sleepy Saturday afternoons at the mall, waiting for someone’s mom or dad to come pick us up in the rain. But now it all seemed far behind me. They couldn’t understand where I was in my life. They couldn’t know the connection I had with Reeve, and how I had to see it through.