by Meg Wolitzer
The night I first go to Belzhar feels like any other night. Casey and DJ and I are in our T-shirts and sweatpants doing homework in the first-floor common room of our dorm. The three of us have started hanging out, though we never discuss anything personal. Instead, we all just sit around in the evening studying and talking about nothing much. Sierra never joins us.
“So now that you’ve been in it a while longer, what’s the big deal about Special Topics?” DJ asks when Casey and I start to talk about the upcoming Plath presentations we have to give. No matter how many times I’ve assured DJ that the class is very ordinary, she still can’t let go.
“Who says it’s a big deal?” asks Casey.
“Everyone,” says DJ. “But Jam says it isn’t. Maybe she’s keeping something from me.”
“DJ, you are insane,” I say.
“Jam’s right,” says Casey. “It’s no big deal. Mrs. Quenell is kind of interesting, though. All the other teachers here handle us oh-so-gently. And I love the reading.”
I do too. But I’m not crazy about any of the other students besides Casey.
Griffin and I have mostly avoided each other since the social, and Sierra has been quiet and distant to everyone. Marc has looked surprisingly wiped out for a day or two. I overheard him at dinner telling another boy he’s been having trouble sleeping. So, the class is a bad mix, but at least reading Sylvia Plath is worthwhile.
“Okay, time for me to rock and roll,” Casey finally says when it starts to get late. “Especially roll.”
She wheels herself to the door, and we open it for her, and help her leave the room and go into her first-floor double. A little while later, DJ and I make our way back upstairs, and once we’re in our own room for the night, without asking me if it’s okay, she reaches over and suddenly snaps off the light, leaving us in total darkness.
“Thanks a lot, DJ,” I say.
“You’re welcome.”
“Did it occur to you that I might like to keep the light on a little longer? So I can finish my useless homework without needing to do it in Braille?”
“Then go back downstairs, Jam,” DJ says from under the covers.
“I don’t want to go back downstairs. I want to stay here.”
“So stay. I’m going to sleep.”
I think about getting up and snapping on the light, but of course all DJ would do is snap it right off again. And besides, I just don’t care enough. In a way, the darkness suits me; it suits my mood tonight and every night. I don’t really care if I spend the rest of my life in a pitch-dark room.
And here’s where it all begins. I’m sitting in the darkness, staring at the form of my rude roommate who’s under the covers across the room, and I think about how trapped I am in this place, and how sad it is that everything’s ended up like this. I’m supposed to be living in New Jersey, walking on the playing fields behind the high school with my boyfriend, Reeve Maxfield, our arms around each other. That’s supposed to be my life, but it was taken from me.
I sit on my bed now with my study buddy behind me. I remember that at the end of class the first day, when we were talking about our journals, Mrs. Quenell had said that everyone had something to say, but not everyone could bear to say it. Our job was to find a way.
In the darkness, I go to my desk and root around for my journal and the little book light that my mom made sure I took with me to school. “You never know when you might want to read in the middle of the night,” she’d said. As if reading was still a top priority of mine.
Sitting back down on the bed, leaning against the study buddy, I open the journal. Maybe it’s time to write about Reeve for real. Maybe it’ll help, even a little. I click the pen, and the first words I write are these:
Reeve Maxfield was the person I’d been waiting to meet since I was born, but of course I didn’t know it.
And, then, having written that, I feel the arms of the study buddy start to soften and bend.
The corduroy material seems to change texture, the ridges getting filled in, the whole thing becoming more like wool.
The arms start to feel like human arms.
I must have fallen asleep, and now I’m dreaming about the boy I loved, who died.
And yet I’m sure that I’m awake, and that something’s happening to my thoughts.
Turn around, I tell myself.
But I can’t bring myself to do that, because the arms that hold me have become confident and familiar, and the thing I want more than anything—the thing that’s impossible—seems to be happening. And if I’m wrong, I’ll be devastated.
Turn around.
I do, and he’s there. I take in a sharp breath as I look at his sleepy eyes and rumpled brown hair. This isn’t a dream sequence, and I’m not doing what’s known as lucid dreaming. Instead, my boyfriend Reeve, who has been lost to me, is just simply there, here, with me.
We’re not in my room at The Wooden Barn now; instead we’re outside somewhere on a neutrally gray day. Where exactly are we? For a few seconds I can’t figure it out. It’s cold where we are, and I look around and realize there are no tall Vermont trees with leaves on them or collected around them in drifts. Instead, we’re standing on the vast stretch of playing fields behind my old high school in Crampton, New Jersey.
“You’re back,” I say to him, my voice cracking, and then I begin to cry. It’s not that I haven’t cried since the last day I saw him—I’ve cried constantly, boiling my eyes, inflaming my face, keeping my family awake at night, worrying everyone sick.
But this crying is different. It’s relief crying. The last time I cried like this, I think I was five years old and had gotten lost in Price Cruncher. Suddenly I saw my mom come around the corner of the aisle with her cart, and I began to sob, as if she’d returned home from war.
“Oh, shh, Jam, shh,” Reeve says, and he pulls me against him, letting me cry as he strokes my hair.
“Thank you” is all I can think to say. “Thank you.”
“The lingering effects of trauma,” the phrase my parents wrote on my school application, have kicked over into a new state. I’m like the demented old lady in Crampton who sometimes sits on a bench at the bus stop, babbling at people who walk by, saying to them, “Angela, when are you coming home? Angela, my little girl, I’ll leave the light on for you.”
But unlike that old lady, I feel suddenly happy. Her daughter Angela will probably never come back to her, but Reeve has somehow come back to me. And because of that, this new state isn’t such a terrible thing.
“Jam,” he finally says. “Are you all right?” His voice is the same as always: the English accent, the scrape.
“You’re asking me? How about you?” I say. “Are you all right?”
He nods. “Now I am.”
“I can’t believe you’re here,” I say, and I start to cry again.
“Where else was I going to go,” he says with a sad smile. “Back to the Kesmans’ house to sing rounds?”
I’m unable to get over how he’s simply been returned to me like a lost object that I’d long ago misplaced. Maybe the trick is that you have to grieve hard enough—you have to make yourself absolutely sick with crying—and then your mind finally just blows and takes on magnetic properties, and you can actually make someone come back to you.
“It’s been horrible,” I tell him.
“I know. But please don’t cry anymore, Jam,” he says. “Because I’ll cry too. And we don’t have a whole lot of time. Do you really want to spend all of it crying like one of those teenaged girls in an American PG-13 movie?”
“I’m not like one of those girls. And what do you mean, we don’t have a whole lot of time?” I ask, wiping my eyes. “Aren’t you back?”
“Not entirely.” Reeve shakes his head apologetically, and that’s when I see that though this is definitely him, down to the sweet face and bea
utiful mouth and the elongated place between his lips and his nose that I know is called the philtrum, because he once told me—“It’s in the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary; go look it up”—he looks a little more delicate, as if he’s been washed with watercolor.
“I mean, I’m back, yeah, but only for a while,” he says. “I think you probably already know that,” he adds. And I guess he’s right; I do seem to know that.
“But what is this place?” I ask. “I get that it’s the fields behind the school, but it just goes on and on. It looks different.”
“I think you already know that too,” he says.
He takes my hand in his—I feel the long fingers, the calluses, the dry, curving cup of his palm—and we walk along the hard, brown playing fields, which now seem to be the place where you can go if you’ve lost someone and desperately need him back. If not having him back has just caused you too much sorrow.
And it’s true that I fell apart when I lost Reeve, and was sent into a state of flatness, a kind of agonizing, dead-inside Bell Jar state.
This wide-open space, all gray sky and flattened, dry grass, is as bleak as anywhere I’ve ever been, but it’s also a wonderful place, because he’s in it. I wonder what we should do in this limited time we have together. Kiss? Touch each other? Talk? Crack each other up? Lie very still on our backs, each of us with one iPod earbud in an ear, listening to the opening chords of a song by Wunderkind, the British indie band that Reeve loved?
“Come here, Little Scarlet Strawberry,” he says, and I cry in gasps against his shoulder, my tears falling on his brown sweater.
“I’m sorry, you’re going to smell like a damp dog,” I say when I can speak.
“I think damp dog smell is underrated,” he answers. “I just hope people don’t start, you know, following me around to sniff my arse.”
“Arse!” I say. “You’re the same.”
But we both know he isn’t, not totally. And when he said we didn’t have a whole lot of time, he was warning me not to get too comfortable. Are you ever allowed to get comfortable with love? My mom and dad always seem really comfortable, sitting on the old brown couch in the den after dinner. Rubbing each other’s feet after a long day at the office where they’re both accountants. Not dwelling on the fact that one day one of them will die and the other one will be heartbroken.
Reeve and I don’t have a lot of time even now; maybe no one ever does. We lie on the ground together, and though it’s a little too cold, we kiss, and he tells me stories he’s already told me, like about how he always wanted to grow up and be in a Monty Pythonish comedy troupe. I’m happy to hear everything all over again.
I want to ask him, Have you been thinking about me all this time, the way I’ve been thinking about you? But I don’t. If we lie together like this, so light and tender, maybe somehow we’ll never have to get up, and it’ll never have to end.
But it does end, suddenly. The sky gets sharply dimmer, and Reeve says in a strained voice, “You should get back.” He stands up, and I look him over, seeing the skinny-boy body, the unmanageable brown hair, the face that’s smooth and kind and too exposed.
He kisses my hands and then my mouth, and I don’t have the chance to ask how I can see him again. I don’t even know how I got here in the first place. All I know is that I’ve left my unbearable inner life for a little while, and I’m starting to panic at the idea of being without him again.
I close my eyes for the barest second, a blink’s length, and when I open them I’m sitting in bed again in my pitch-dark dorm room at The Wooden Barn. The old red journal is open in my lap. But although I remember writing only one line, page after page has now been filled up with my handwriting, telling the story of Reeve and me and how we first met. And also the story of us now, when we’ve found each other again.
At various places the ink is smeared and running, as if someone has been leaning over the page, crying and crying.
CHAPTER
6
“DJ,” I HISS INTO THE DARK ROOM. THERE’S NO answer. “DJ,” I try again, urgently.
After a few seconds I hear her turn over in bed, and then she says, “What’s the matter, Jam?”
I’m about to tell her what just happened to me, but I stop short. Somehow, I know I shouldn’t say anything.
“Nothing,” I finally say. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“You couldn’t sleep? You actually woke me up to tell me you couldn’t sleep?”
“Yeah” is all I can say.
“Why don’t you try counting little images of me jumping over a fence to slap you,” she says. Then she mutters something I can’t hear and rearranges herself in her bed. Within seconds her breathing has changed and she’s asleep again.
I sit unmoving in bed in the dark room. Probably I ought to go confess everything to Jane Ann, the houseparent, and she can call the nurse, and I’ll have to sit shivering in a bright room in the middle of the night and explain everything to those kind, concerned women.
“I saw my boyfriend,” I’d say while the nurse looked into my eyes with a little light.
“Mm-hmm,” she’d say, humoring me.
“No, I was with him again, don’t you get it? We were together. It really happened. I’m not making it up.”
Because the school doesn’t believe in medication, no one would try to sedate me unless it was an absolute emergency. But they might decide I was too unbalanced to stay here, and I’d wind up in a mental hospital like Sylvia Plath did, with electrodes sending shuddering impulses through my brain.
So I’m not going to tell anyone at all.
• • •
Somehow I manage to fall asleep, but in the morning when I wake up I immediately remember what happened the night before, and I reach onto my desk and grab my red leather journal to make sure it really did happen. Five full pages are filled in with my handwriting. There’s a long description of Reeve on the day we first met in gym class, and another description of the moment when I saw him again in that strange version of the playing fields behind my old high school.
It happened.
“You seem weird today,” DJ says as we get dressed. She strips off the big My Chemical Romance T-shirt she slept in, and puts on a bra and boys’ plaid boxers. “I mean weirder than usual,” she adds.
“You should talk.”
“I’m well aware of how weird I am,” she says.
I feel out of it this morning, the way Sierra seemed after her bad dream. At breakfast I sit in a corner by myself, facing the wall eating a banana muffin that’s as solid as a doorknob, not wanting to talk to a single person. Everyone seems to know enough to leave me alone. People get into funks here, and everyone is respectful.
I eat in silence, slowly gnawing off the muffin top, allowing myself to go over every minute of what happened last night, to remember how the arms of the study buddy morphed into Reeve’s arms, and then we were together again. I might have stayed lost in this for the entire breakfast, but suddenly there’s a crash.
“Shit!” I hear. Casey has backed her chair away from a table straight into Marc, whose tray has flown to the floor. His cereal bowl wobbles like a top, then finally goes still. “For fuck’s sake, Marc,” says Casey. “Look where you’re going.”
Marc, pinned between the wheelchair and the next table, says, “It was an accident. Cool your heels.”
“They’re cooled.”
“You know what I mean.”
Without even thinking, I hurry over and grab the handles of the wheelchair to help Casey move.
“Leave it, Jam,” she says, as if talking to a disobedient dog. And then, with great difficulty, she extricates herself, and all I can do is watch her go. When she’s gone, Marc crouches down to start cleaning up the food and scattered silverware, and I help him.
“I don’t know why she got so upset,” he says. “She’s real
ly on edge.”
“She’s not alone.”
He gets a dustpan and a broom, and we finish cleaning up, then we leave together and walk toward English class in silence. I predict that class isn’t going to go very well today, and when I get there I’m proven right. Casey’s in a crap mood, and so are Marc and Sierra, and so am I. Griffin’s always in a crap mood, and today’s no different.
Mrs. Quenell looks at us from her place at the table and finally asks, “What’s going on?”
No one has an answer for her.
“I see,” she says, but of course she can’t possibly see.
I’m bursting out of my skin. If there’s a teacher on earth who I would want to tell what happened to me last night, Mrs. Q is the one. After all, I’d been writing in my journal when it happened. Maybe somehow she’d understand. But I couldn’t possibly explain something that I can’t even figure out myself.
“Shall we pick up where we left off last time?” Mrs. Quenell asks. “I believe Sierra was—”
“No offense, Mrs. Q,” says Sierra. “But I just can’t focus on this.”
“Me neither,” says Marc. “Sorry.”
“It’s like the words on the page mean nothing,” Griffin says.
Mrs. Quenell looks around at us. Will she be irritated and say, “It doesn’t matter whether you can focus or not. You are here to learn.” Or will she be understanding?
Then she really shocks us all, saying, “You know what? I’m going to dismiss you early today.”
“Really, are you sure?” says Marc. He looks panicked, like, Isn’t it against the rules?
“You heard Mrs. Q,” says Griffin.
