Belzhar (17 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.”