Belzhar (7 page)

The hazelnut smell is strong and artificial, but I like it. I remember going to the Yankee Candle Company with Hannah and Jenna when we were thirteen. We walked around the store picking up every single candle and sniffing it. “Smell this one!” we said to one another. “Now this one!”

It’s cold in the classroom, and I loosen the wobbly knob on the old radiator. Maybe we can get some food from the teachers’ lounge, I suggest, so Sierra goes out and returns with the best she can find: a half-empty box of Wheat Thins, and an almost-f liter of diet root beer. Probably neither one will be missed.

The heat starts to seep in and the room grows warmer, and we sit on the comforter passing around the soda bottle and taking unhygienic swigs. We’re all on the floor except for Casey, who looks down upon us from her wheelchair.

“So what
is
this?” Casey finally asks. “Why are we here?”

“Don’t you have any idea?” Marc asks.

“Maybe,” she says. “But I want someone else to say it, not me.”

“Yeah, what the hell is this?” asks Griffin. “It better be good.”

Sierra says, “Just listen, okay?” Then she asks him, “Have you been having visions? Because we have.”

Griffin is sitting very still with his arms wrapped around himself. Casey’s the one who finally nods. “All right, sure,” she says. “I did have an experience that I guess counts as a ‘vision.’ And I was worried that it could happen again. And that someone could find out and say there was something seriously wrong with me, and then I’d have to leave The Wooden Barn. But I don’t want to leave. I couldn’t take it if they sent me home.”

Me, I’d begged my mom to let me leave. And yet I also know what Casey means.

“So are you all actually saying that this happened to you too?” she asks, and we nod. “But it can’t be the same thing that happened to me,” she says. “That wouldn’t make sense. What I saw—it has to do with
my
life. I’m assuming what you all saw has to do with yours.” She looks around at us, her eyes bright in the stuttering candlelight. “Okay, somebody say what happened to them,” Casey says. “Just say what you saw. I can’t be the one to go first. I’m not good at that. Somebody else go.”

We all sit stiffly, and no one wants to speak. I notice that Griffin is listening as closely as the rest of us. The silence goes on and on.

“All right,” Sierra finally says. “I’ll start.”

“YOU’LL NEED SOME BACKSTORY,” SHE BEGINS. “THE
first thing you have to know is that André was eleven when he disappeared.”

I don’t know who André is or was, but I can guess, and I get a little panicky.

“I was fourteen,” she goes on. “It was three years ago, so he’d be a teenager now. But back then he was a kid.”

I studiously stare at a point just to the left of Sierra’s head. This story can’t be going anywhere good.

Sierra and her brother were extremely close, she says. Their relationship was obviously very different from the one I have with Leo. I love Leo, even though we’ve never had anything in common. But Sierra and André were both dancers at the Washington Dance Academy, where they’d been taking classes for a long time.

Sierra’s talent was ballet, and André’s was jazz and hip-hop. Three days a week after school they rode the city bus together to their dance classes, and then they rode it home.

Nearly three years before we all sat in the dark classroom at night at The Wooden Barn, Sierra and André Stokes were on the bus heading home from dance class. “It was that time of day in late fall, right before dinner,” Sierra explains, “when it’s gray and cold and really depressing out. I had a ton of homework, and I wanted to get down to it.

“So when André asked me if we could make chocolate chip cookies tonight, I told him we didn’t have any cookie dough in the house, and that I couldn’t go to the store because I had to get home and work on my history report. He started whining, so I told him he was welcome to go buy a roll of cookie dough himself. There was a convenience store in our neighborhood called Lonny’s. It was four blocks from our apartment, and for the past few weeks our parents had been letting André go there alone.

“So he got off the bus at the stop near the store, while I stayed on for the two remaining stops. I went home, and my mom was there, but my dad was still at work. I set the table and then sat at my desk to do my report. When I heard a key in the door I assumed it was André, but it was only my dad. He said, ‘Where’s your brother?’ And I said, ‘At Lonny’s.’

“And time passed, and dinner was ready, and now it was dark out, but André wasn’t home yet. Finally my dad and I put on our coats and went back outside. We speed-walked to Lonny’s, looking into every store window along the way, because this is the route André would’ve walked, and some of it’s not great, though of course he knew not to talk to strangers, et cetera. The guy behind the counter at Lonny’s knew him and said he’d been in a while ago, and that, yeah, he’d bought a roll of cookie dough. So my dad and I hurried back to the apartment thinking my brother would be there by now, but he wasn’t.

“Then we had to break the news to my mom that we couldn’t find him. She was hysterical. We called all of André’s friends, but no one had seen him. My dad called the police, and two of them came to the apartment, and then they sent a patrol car out. A while later the doorbell rang, and when my mom answered it, another policeman said something like, ‘We found this on the sidewalk near the convenience store.’ And he held out a clear plastic bag with a roll of chocolate chip cookie dough inside.

“My mom just gasped and reached for it, but the policeman said, ‘No, sorry, we have to take it in for fingerprinting. It’s evidence.’ And my mom collapsed and gashed her head, and there was a lot of blood. Blood and tears and a roll of cookie dough. That’s what I remember from that night.”

All I can think, listening to this, is that I need to know the ending right now, and I need it to be okay. Maybe it isn’t as bad as I’m afraid it is. Maybe André was found a few hours later, having been roughed up by a few older, thuggish kids, but not seriously. And although Sierra is still emotionally shaky because of that experience, and other experiences we haven’t yet heard about, maybe her little brother is okay, and back in Washington, dancing.

But of course Sierra started off this story by saying “He’d be a teenager now.” If he’d been found, she meant. Or if he was alive.

“What happened to him?” Casey gets up the nerve to ask. “Did you ever find out?”

“No,” says Sierra. “He became one of those missing child cases. A task force was set up. The detective, Sorrentino, gave us his card and told us to call him if anything occurred to us, even in the middle of the night. So I tried to think about what I’d seen that day after class, anything I could remember or anything that occurred to me about people in the neighborhood. Whenever I phoned him with a detail about a bike messenger who looked suspicious, or the old man with the purple birthmark on his face who’d once yelled at André and his friend for littering, he always took the call, no matter what time of day or night. I once woke him up at two a.m., and he was really nice about it.

“But after a while, he told me I had to stop calling so much. He thought I was the girl who cried wolf, but I wasn’t. And I’m not. He started taking longer and longer to call me back. He said he had other cases too, and that, no offense, I was being a nuisance.

“But I was just doing what he’d told me, and I’ll keep on doing it as long as I have to. Sometimes I even call him from the pay phone in the dorm and leave a long message on his voice mail, asking if they’ve looked into this thing or that. I’m desperate, and so are my parents. We can’t bear being without André, and not knowing what happened to him.”

“Oh, Sierra, I’m so sorry,” I say with a cry, and there are similar sounds coming from all around me. Sierra puts her hand up to her eyes as if trying to shield her vision. Marc loops an arm around her, and Casey reaches down to pat her shoulder. Griffin looks shell-shocked, and he just sits grimly. None of us really knows one another, yet here we are, all intimate all of a sudden, in a little improvised huddle.

“How do you get through it?” I ask Sierra. I need to know how she wakes up every day and gets out of bed and takes a shower and eats a waffle and goes to class and behaves like a human being. Does she actually care about anything she’s doing? Does the water from the shower feel good when it pounds down on her head? Does the waffle even have a taste or a texture? Does the world hold anything of interest now?

Sierra says, “I’ve barely gotten through it. Same with my parents. But I guess there’s some part of me that just keeps going. The only reason I’m at The Wooden Barn is a scholarship fund that pays for the whole thing. The fund sends everyone else to really academic boarding schools. I’m the only one at a boarding school for people who are messed-up.” Then she adds, “And if they knew about what I’ve seen, they’d probably take away my scholarship and send me home.”

“So what have you seen?” Casey asks, but we all know the answer.

“You saw André,” I say.

She nods. “Yes,” she says. “And after I did, after I had the ‘vision,’ everyone in the dorm insisted it was a dream. Jane Ann made me some Sleepytime tea and told me about a very realistic dream
she’d
once had, about losing her teeth. But I knew I’d seen my brother, even though I couldn’t explain it.”

“Do you remember what you were doing?” Casey asks. “I mean, when it started?”

“Writing in my journal.”

Casey’s face changes slightly, and I know that the journal was the way in for her too. For all of us. Even, I bet, for Griffin.

“I was sitting at my desk in the middle of the night, with only my little lamp on,” Sierra tells us. “I’d been awake for hours, lying in bed, but I couldn’t sleep, so I got up. My roommate, Jenny, was asleep, and I opened the journal and wrote a line. And it was like the whole desk suddenly started to
vibrate.
And then I wasn’t at my desk anymore. I was on the bus in DC again, and it was moving, and I was heading home from dance class. I know that, because I had my dance bag with me; it was banging against my leg. I was sweating in the cold, the way I often do after practice. It was the end of the afternoon, and right beside me on the crowded bus was my little brother. He was still eleven, the age he’d been the last day I’d seen him.

“At first I just stared. My heart was beating so hard! He was leaning his head against me, half asleep. We were somewhere between dance class and home. And I just kept staring. I could practically feel my blood going through my arteries. I thought I might have an aneurysm. Finally I shook him awake really frantically, and said, ‘André!’

“He opened his eyes and in a crabby voice he said, ‘What, Sierra? I was
napping.
’

“And I said, ‘You’re
here.
’

“And he said, ‘No shit, Sherlock.’

“And I said, ‘But that’s just amazing, you do know that, right?’ And he mumbled something about how there were other things that were more amazing. Like
Sojutsu
, which is apparently a kind of Japanese spear-fighting. And black holes.

“I realized that I didn’t need to argue with him. He was
here,
and he knew he was here, but he was still André, just a regular eleven-year-old, so he wasn’t going to get all sentimental. And then I asked him, real casually, ‘How long do you think this can go on? Me being here with you. Or you being here with me. However you want to look at it.’

“He said, ‘I don’t know, probably not too long,’ and he opened his mouth and yawned, and I could see his two fillings.

“‘Can you tell me what happened to you?’ I asked him.

“He looked up at me and said something that I’ll never really get over. He said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Please don’t make me.’

“‘Are you sure, André?’ I said. ‘Sometimes talking about things is better.’ Believe me, I’d been hearing that one for quite a while.

“I just needed to find out whether in real life—and not just in this weird other-world—he was
alive
somewhere. Or whether, you know,” she said, her voice catching, “he wasn’t
.
I needed to know, but he didn’t want to talk about it. It was too hard for him.

“‘Let’s just sit here on the bus for the rest of the ride, okay?’ André said.

“And I told him okay. So we sat like that, both of us with our backpacks and our dance bags, my little brother and me. We used to have this whole fantasy story going about how we’d grow up and become a famous dance team called Stokes & Stokes. The name would have an ampersand
in it. That’s the ‘and’ symbol. We’d play huge arenas and charge a fortune for premium gold-circle tickets that would include a champagne reception with us afterward. Our YouTube videos would get millions of hits. It was such an idiotic fantasy.

“And what I wanted now was so much simpler than that. I wanted to stay beside my brother, riding that bus, sitting there with him in this other reality. I was
relaxed
there. All the terrible feelings I’d had since the day he disappeared were gone.”

In the dim classroom, Sierra shifts position and rolls her shoulders, the way dancers sometimes do without even thinking, and says, “So we rode together for a long time, just feeling the vibrations of the bus. And after a while I looked out the window, and I wasn’t looking at a street in DC any longer. I was looking at the view from my dorm window here at The Wooden Barn. I was back at my desk, and André was gone, and that’s when I started screaming. To have found him and
lost
him again, it was just grotesque—and the entire dorm woke up and came to see what had happened. I told a few girls that I’d seen my brother, really
seen
him, spent
time
with him, but everyone just said it was a dream. And they told me about teeth dreams, and test-taking dreams, and going-onstage-naked dreams. They wouldn’t shut up about all their stupid dreams.”

Beside her, Marc nods. “I had my version of that. And when it was over and I told my roommate, he insisted I was dreaming.”

“In
my
case,” I say, “I tried to tell my mom, but she wouldn’t listen.”

“We’ll listen,” Casey says.

“Okay,” I say. “Thank you.”

But I don’t like talking about Reeve. It’s so much easier to go over the story in my head, instead of having to say it out loud. I’m not going to go into detail, like Sierra. But I have to tell them at least a little of it so they’ll understand the basic outline of what I’ve been through.

“I had a boyfriend,” I say in a quiet, careful voice. “His name was Reeve Maxfield. He was an exchange student from London, and we fell in love.” I can hardly say anything more, though everyone is listening closely, and waiting.

“What happened to him?” asks Sierra. It’s amazing that she’s concerned about me and my story, even right after telling us about André. But she’s waiting. All of them are. There’s a circle of glittering eyes in the dark room.

“Oh my God, he died, didn’t he?” says Casey, when I don’t reply to Sierra’s question. “Jam, I’m so sorry.”

I can’t bring myself to speak. I feel my mouth start to pull downward into that pre-crying expression.

“What you’re telling me is a story of loss,” Dr. Margolis had said to me in his office, the first time my parents made me go see him. There was a dead cactus on the windowsill behind his head. I didn’t know cacti could die. I thought it took almost nothing to keep them alive. If a psychiatrist couldn’t keep his cactus alive, how was he supposed to help his patients?

He wasn’t a bad guy, though. He tried to help, but he couldn’t. After that first time, telling him what he called a “story of loss,” I stopped trying to explain anything to him. Instead, I sat there twice a week and said very little, but of course my mind was basically jabbering with thoughts about Reeve. And here now, in the classroom at night, even after so much time has passed, it still is.

“Falling in love with someone and losing him like that,” says Marc. “That must have been devastating, Jam.”

“It was,” I say.
Devastating.
I prefer that word to
trauma
. What happened was devastating. And because of it I was
devastated
, and I guess I still am.

“Was it sudden?” Casey asks. “If you don’t mind my asking,” she quickly adds.

“Yes, very sudden,” I say.

We sit, everyone reflecting on what’s happened to us, and what’s been said tonight. Marc looks at his watch—one of those thick, technical-looking silver ones where you can read not only the time, but also probably how many nautical knots you are from somewhere. He says, “The houseparents are going to start bed check soon, before lights-out. We have to get back in . . . four and a half minutes.”