by Meg Wolitzer
“We weren’t sexting—that’s gross—but we’d write ‘u r hot in your Dora the Explorer T-shirt.’ Or, ‘sneak into my bed when u get back and say it wuz 1 on 1 tutoring.’ Well, her mom read the texts and did a big freak-out. And she told Rebecca that she can’t come back to The Wooden Barn, because it’s turned her into ‘a female homosexual’! That’s how she put it! Like someone might think she’d turned into ‘a male homosexual!’”
“She’s making Rebecca leave school?” I say. “In the middle of the year?”
DJ nods and wipes her hand across her face, smearing her mascara in a big black wave like a calligraphy brushstroke. “I’ll die if I can’t be with her.”
“I understand.”
“No offense, but I doubt it,” she says. And then without warning DJ strides over to her bed, flips up the mattress and goes rooting around under it. She grabs an armful of hidden loot: granola bars, Fruit by the Foot, and packets of those bright orange cheesy peanut butter crackers. Then she goes to her desk and pulls out a bag of shortbread cookies and a bag of M&M’S and even the squeeze bottle of Hind’s ketchup.
“What are you doing?” I ask. She doesn’t answer. “DJ, stop,” I say, but she keeps going around the room, hunting and gathering. She yanks open my top dresser drawer and roughs up all the underwear inside, searching.
“Look!” she says, brandishing the treasure she’s found: the jar of jam Reeve gave me.
“STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY TIPTREE LITTLE SCARLET STRAWBERRY!” I scream in a voice I never knew I possessed. DJ and I look at each other, equally shocked. In a much more sane and controlled voice, I add, “It’s just that it’s kind of a memento, this jar. I don’t want anyone opening it, okay?”
I take a deep breath, then take the jar from her, burying it deeper in the drawer. When I turn around, DJ has already gone back to plundering the room for food.
Finally she seems to have enough. She flips down her mattress, plants herself on her bed cross-legged with her bounty in front of her, and begins to make her way through the pile, crying while she does. I’ve never seen someone cry and eat at the same time.
“Come on, stop,” I say, but she ignores me, and just chows down cookies and crackers, methodically pushing them into her mouth without any pleasure. “Please, DJ,” I say. “You’ll just get sick and puke like a frat boy.”
I grab some of the food from her, but I can’t manage to get all of it, and she eats what she can. Appalled, I watch as she pops open the ketchup, tilts back her head, and squeezes. The bottle makes a loud farting sound, and she lets a long, slow red stream of ketchup descend into her open mouth.
The door bursts open then, and we both look up. DJ’s girlfriend, Rebecca, stands there in her white winter coat and long violet-colored scarf, her face bright with cold. DJ leaps up. “You’re back?” she cries. “No shit?”
“No shit.”
“But what about your mom?”
“I told her if she didn’t let me come back to school to be with my girlfriend, she’d regret it. I said I’d send e-mails to every member of the Connecticut Moms for Traditional Values Club, telling them I was a proud member of the LGBTQ community. But course she was like, L-G-what? So I had to explain what LGBTQ meant in order to get her flipped out enough to let me come back to you.”
“But you did come back,” says DJ.
“I did.”
She and Rebecca embrace, but then after a few seconds Rebecca pulls away and looks at her and asks, “What’s that red junk on your face?” DJ says it’s nothing, she’ll tell her later. Finally Rebecca notices me and says vaguely, “Oh, hey, Jam,” and then she and DJ walk out of the room together and go off to draw on each other’s hands with henna tattoo pens or make beautiful love or whatever.
I plan on giving DJ a lecture later about how she can’t use a crutch—in her case junk food—to calm herself down every time there’s a bump in the road. But as a student of Mrs. Quenell’s, I’m embarrassed by those clichés and mixed metaphors—“crutch”; “bump in the road.” And anyway, I’m hardly one to talk. I used Griffin to feel better about not getting to see Reeve over Thanksgiving vacation.
Isn’t that what I did? Just used him for his looks and how aloof he is? When someone’s withholding, it makes you want them more. I’m just not sure of anything now. I wish I could binge out on food like DJ did, going over to the pile on her bed and taking comfort from some tasteless old granola bars and a long drink of ketchup. But I know that none of it would help at all.
CHAPTER
15
IN SPECIAL TOPICS THE NEXT MORNING, ON OUR first school day after break, it’s obvious that so much has changed since we were all together last. I barely look over at Griffin, afraid that if I do, someone might notice what’s happened between us. As we all sit at the oval table waiting for class to begin, Griffin is no longer slouched down, his head in his hoodie. Instead, the hoodie is off and he looks over at me, his eyes alert and questioning. But I keep my expression neutral and turn toward the window. I don’t want anyone to know what’s happened.
But it isn’t just us. Casey enters pushed by Marc, and both of them distinctly seem to have a secret. Even Sierra seems different. Though we’d hung out when she got back from break, she seemed quiet. And now she keeps to herself before class begins, busying herself with her papers, shuffling them a lot more than necessary.
When Mrs. Quenell comes in, she sits down, looks around at us with a slow smile, and then says, “Together at last.”
“How was your break, Mrs. Q?” Casey asks.
“Oh, fine, Casey, thank you for asking. I got a head start on packing, because as you know I’m moving out of my house right after classes end. Right now I’m still swimming in a sea of bubble wrap. How about the rest of you?”
Everyone says vague, positive things about Thanksgiving.
“You all seem a little . . . heightened,” Mrs. Quenell says, and that’s an accurate word. But nobody’s willing to say specifically what’s going on with them.
The odd energy in the classroom carries over into our discussion about Plath, who we return to as if she were an old friend. Today we’re talking about an early poem called “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” She wrote it in college, and Mrs. Quenell asks Casey if she would read the first three stanzas aloud. Casey takes a breath and starts to read:
“‘I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite
insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)’”
During the short but intense reading, I can barely move or think. I feel my heart knocking inside me. Sylvia Plath understands everything about love. What it does to you. What it did to me.
She knows me.
For a little while after the poem gets read, I sit very still, trying to calm the knocking. I see that Mrs. Quenell is looking at me, and I feel sure she knows something. Just like Plath, she seems to know everything.
I remember some meditation trick that Dr. Margolis taught me—how if I start to feel overwhelmed, I should just focus on my breathing. “Breath goes in, breath goes out,” he’d said in a slow, hypnotic voice. “Breath goes in, breath goes out.”
I keep breathing rhythmically now and try not to think of anything at all. At first it seems to work, and my thoughts of Reeve start to disappear. But then a new batch of thoughts arrive. Thoughts about Griffin, who’s sitting only two seats away from me. I didn’t want to sit right next to him today, because it would have been too much.
Belzhar can’t be explained, but what went
on between Griffin and me can’t really be explained either.
I think I made you up inside my head, I think, and the line refers to Reeve and Griffin equally.
• • •
After class, Griffin stops me in the hall and says, “You left something at the farm.” It’s the first time we’ve talked since we’ve been back at school. He reaches into his backpack and pulls out the maroon hoodie he’d lent me.
“No, that’s yours.”
“You take it. I have others. Like, five hundred of them.”
“I noticed.” He presses the hoodie into my arms. “Listen, Griffin,” I say. “The thing that happened when we were at the farm? It can’t happen again.”
He looks hard at me. “Oh,” he says. “Okay.” Then he pauses and adds, “Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m sorry,” I tell him, and then I turn away before he can say anything else. I’m still carrying his hoodie in my arms, and I don’t have the heart to give it back.
But late that afternoon, alone in the dying light of my dorm room, trying to make sense of my French homework, I put on his hoodie again. It’s much too big, but it keeps me warm, and it smells human, physical, as if another person’s arms and chest have been inside it day after day. A specific person. Him. I like knowing that. Wearing the hoodie makes me feel as if he’s nearby.
Which is somehow what I want, despite having told him that what we did can never happen again.
• • •
That night the five of us gather in the dark classroom, a special Monday night meeting because Marc got back late the night before. The meeting feels as urgent as our very first one, back when we were all trying to make sense of what was happening to us.
Marc helps Casey out of her chair, then positions her beside him. “Well, we have an announcement,” he says.
“We?” says Griffin.
“Marc and me. We kind of got together,” Casey says shyly. “But it’s more than that. It’s become something big.”
“That’s excellent,” says Sierra. “How did it happen?”
“Oh, we started texting over break,” Marc says. “And I asked if I could take the shuttle down and see her in New York. It was too depressing in my house. We went to the Museum of Natural History to look at the dinosaurs, and out for Chinese dumplings. We had a great time.”
“So it’s serious?” I ask.
“Oh yeah,” says Casey. As if to demonstrate, she leans her head against Marc, and they look like the most serene, long-term couple in the world.
Sierra lifts a paper cup of green Gatorade in their honor, and says, “This is the best news.” Then, when Casey and Marc have said everything they want to say, Sierra says, “Now I have to tell you all something too.”
Has she fallen for someone? Have love and sex swept over our entire class the way Belzhar did? But when she leans forward I can tell this isn’t about hooking up or falling in love. This is something else, but I don’t know what.
“I think I might know who took my brother,” she says.
“What?” I say.
“I went to Belzhar over Thanksgiving, of course,” Sierra says in a rush, “and I was sitting on the bus with André, like always. When he fell asleep, I started looking around at other people. I’ve been to Belzhar a lot, of course, but I’ve only really focused on my brother. I can’t believe it took me so long. And I noticed this one guy in his fifties—white, scrawny, gray hair. He was just sitting there kind of watching André like it was the most interesting sight in the world.
“I said to him, ‘Excuse me, can I help you?’ He just turned away from me. So I spent the rest of the ride thinking about where I’d seen him before, because I knew I had.
“And then I remembered. He’d been to one of our dance concerts. They’re open to the public, and tickets are free. But I remembered that he’d been to both performances, the early one and the late one, and that he’d sat up front. And when I noticed him on the bus, looking at André, something clicked.
“So over Thanksgiving, after I went to Belzhar, I called Detective Sorrentino again and described this guy to him. And he said something like, ‘So I’m supposed to believe that after three years, you suddenly remember a particular person on the bus that day?’ And I said yes. And he said, ‘So what is it, a recovered memory?’ I said I didn’t know what that meant, and I begged him to try and track down this guy. But when I called back on Sunday, he admitted that he hadn’t done anything, like interview the staff of the dance academy again, or talk to people who said they’d been to those shows back then. ‘I decided it isn’t a high-value lead’ is what he said.”
“But you saw the guy,” says Casey. “What could be higher value than that?”
“I saw him in Belzhar,” Sierra reminds her. “What am I supposed to tell Sorrentino?”
“But it’s infuriating,” I say. “It could be a real lead. Can’t you get your parents involved?”
Sierra shakes her head. “No, not anymore. Every time I think I have a lead and then it turns out to be nothing, it’s so hard for them. I can’t involve them again. They’re worn out, they’re barely functioning. Just because this guy was looking at André on the bus in Belzhar doesn’t prove anything. But I have to get Sorrentino to follow up. I’m going to keep calling all the time from the pay phone. But I don’t have a lot of faith in the system, to put it mildly.”
She stops talking and we’re all silent, and she looks over at Griffin, and then at me. Then she does it again. Sierra is a perceptive person, and since we’ve gotten so close, she knows me. “Wait, what’s the deal?” she asks.
“What do you mean?” Griffin says.
“Come on,” says Marc. “I saw something in class today too. You and Jam. What’s going on?”
I can’t imagine what to say, but I don’t have to say anything, because Griffin does. “Something happened between us,” he says, and I’m shocked.
“Griffin, that was private,” I say. “And besides, I told you it can’t happen again.”
Everyone is totally fascinated by our little soap opera, and they just keep looking back and forth between us.
“I’m sick of keeping everything in, okay, Jam?” he says. “Walking around feeling things, and then they can’t be talked about. I’m just sick of it.”
“But you still didn’t have to announce it,” I say.
We stare at each other. “It can really never happen again?” he asks.
I can’t believe we’re talking about this in front of everyone. “I don’t know,” I finally say, which is the same as saying, Yes, Griffin, it can happen again. And if you want to know the truth, I want it to happen again.
The others are still watching us, and I realize I’m not mad at him anymore. It’s done now; it’s out. I take his hand. It’s past time for us to go back to the dorms, but no one wants to get up. We all sit for a little while longer in this close and glowing circle.
CHAPTER
16
SNOW FALLS ON VERMONT, BUT NOT ON BELZHAR. Griffin and I walk along wet, white paths together in our down jackets and boots. Only when we’re deep in the woods do we hold hands or stop to touch or kiss, and our hair and eyelashes become dotted with snow. We barely talk, because he knows what I’m thinking, and there’s nothing we can say that will make me feel okay about my double life.
In Belzhar, the air is cool but not cold, and the grass remains brown, without a single flake of snow. Each time I go there, Reeve is tensely waiting. He has no idea about Griffin, and though I’ve explained to him how the journals work, he doesn’t understand what all of us in Special Topics fear: that a rapidly filling journal is like a ticking clock.
Back and forth between worlds I go, like a demented, hallucinating bigamist.
One afternoon during mail call, I receive a letter from my mom that upsets me further:
Dear Jam,
> We were so sorry to miss you over Thanksgiving, but Christmas will be here before you know it, and we’re all THRILLED that you’ll be home for two and a half whole weeks. First, a little news. I ran into Hannah’s mom at the mall, and she told me that Hannah and Ryan broke up. Naturally, that was a surprise, and I thought maybe you’d want to drop Hannah a line. I’m sure she’d love to hear from you.
Now, on to what I really wanted to discuss. As I told you, Dad and I have been concerned about Leo since he’s been hanging around with that Connor Bunch. Then this week something shocking happened. I’m just going to go ahead and write it: Leo was arrested for shoplifting at Price Cruncher. Yes, that’s right, LEO.
Introverted, nerdy, twelve-year-old Leo, arrested? She’s right; I’m shocked too. Far more shocked than I am about Hannah and Ryan, which is also pretty shocking. After I read my mom’s news about Leo, I have to put down the letter for a full ten seconds before continuing:
He stole a can of orange spray paint, can you believe it? He shoved it down his shirt, and Connor did the same thing, and they were caught on video. Store security hauled them into a special room in the back for shoplifters that’s like a little jail cell with bars, and they actually called the cops. Because they’re both so young, the store was persuaded not to press charges, but you can imagine how Dad and I feel.
Jam, what I want to say up front is that I really can’t wait for you to be back in Leo’s life. Lately I wonder if we did the right thing, sending you to The Wooden Barn. Maybe you won’t feel the need to go back up there for spring semester. Maybe you’ve been able to deal with what happened last year a little better by now.
After a rough start this fall, it sounds like things have gotten easier. You even sounded chipper on the phone this week. Dr. Margolis thinks it’s great that you’re so involved with your a cappella group and your Special Topics in English class. We told you it was important to try living there. But maybe, because you’re doing so well now, you’ve gotten all you can get out of it. We’ll have to have a sit-down and discuss this in person.