Belzhar (10 page)

Dear Jam,

Dad and I think about you all the time and hope things are settling down for you. I bet that by the time you read this, you’re totally involved with your schoolwork, or a new friend. Or both. You sounded so much better when I called the other evening, and I was glad to hear that. It seems as if that panicky episode—when you called me, wanting to come home—is behind you now. Good for you, babe.

Jam, there’s something I wanted to write to you about. As you’ve heard, Leo has come out of his shell lately because of a boy at school named Connor Bunch. At first Dad and I were thrilled. You know your brother hasn’t had many friends, and that he’s been teased. But Connor is a bit of a “wise guy,” and some of that seems to have rubbed off on Leo. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but I’m not thrilled. I wish you were here, Jam, to tell us, “Oh, lighten up, you guys. Twelve-year-old boys are total jerks, don’t worry about it.”

So I thought maybe you could write to Leo, reminding him that he can always talk to you about what’s on his mind. It would be terrific if you let him know you’re there for him, even though you’re away in Vermont. And I think it would be great for YOU to have something like Leo to focus on—something outside your own problems.

Well, that’s all I wanted to say. Bye for now. We love you lots.

xoxo

Mom

I fold the letter back into its envelope. My family feels so far away from me, and I can barely even picture the way our house looks. What color exactly is the rug in the den? I try to see it in my mind, but I can’t quite do it. I hope Leo’s okay. I will definitely write to him tonight.

I’m so caught up with my own life, but not in the way my mom thinks. Though I’ve only been to Belzhar twice so far, I’m already obsessed with my new fear of finishing the journal eventually and what that will mean. I try to remind myself that there are plenty of pages left, and many more visits before I have to think about what happens when the last line is filled in.

I’ve already done the math. Because each trip takes five pages, we’ll get through the semester, and at the very end the journal will be completely done.

And then what? How will I be with Reeve?

Don’t obsess about this, I tell myself. Remember that you’ve got Reeve back for now.
Enjoy
him.

And each time I go to Belzhar on a Tuesday or Friday, I do enjoy him. But after a while the light gets dim, and I’m thrust back into the world of boarding school and homework and increasingly cold weather. And now, as of this week, into the world of a cappella
singing.
Against my will, I’ve been forced to join the girls’ a cappella group, the Barntones.

“Every student needs a club,” Jane Ann tells me one evening. “And this one had a slot to fill, so it’s the club for you.”

“That’s not in The Wooden Barn handbook,” I complain.

“We’ll be sure to put it in the next edition.”

I have to say that I am no fan of a cappella. Some people can’t get enough of voices singing without any instruments behind them, but I am not one of those people. Reeve wasn’t one either. We both disliked how all a cappella groups sing the same unoriginal set of songs. “‘Moondance’?” he’d exclaimed after a concert at the high school in Crampton. “‘Good Vibrations’? Are they pensioners?”

“I don’t know what that means,” I said.

“Old people.”

“Yeah, it’s like listening to one of the XM oldies stations in the car. And they just
smile
so much.”

But despite the way I feel about a cappella singing, I’m given no choice about joining the Barntones. The first practice is Monday afternoon in the music building. I’m just okay as a singer, not great, and I resent that I have to be in this group, so I enter the practice room in a particularly unfriendly, closed-off mood—even more so than usual. The leader of the Barntones, a girl named Adelaide, blows on a little pitch pipe and gathers us together to start rehearsing our first song.

To my surprise, it isn’t some cheesy golden oldie, but instead it’s a Gregorian chant from the tenth century. “And we’re going to do it with a speeded-up tempo,” says Adelaide.

This seems peculiar to me, and when we take our places and start to learn the music and the words, which are in
Latin
, it does sound kind of terrible. I wish I could just slip out the door. I’m sure no one would even notice I was gone.

I don’t belong in the Barntones. The only place I belong at school is in Special Topics. But it’s a strange kind of belonging, because I don’t really understand why I’m there. What Mrs. Quenell saw in me. Why she chose
me,
out of all the people at The Wooden Barn.

Everyone in my class has theories about why we were chosen, but truthfully we have no idea. And we also don’t know what Mrs. Quenell does or doesn’t know about the journals. We’ve dropped hints all over the place, saying things like, “This is turning into the most intense class ever, Mrs. Q,” or even, “We’ve all been having big experiences when we write in the journals.”

When we drop these hints, Mrs. Quenell asks if anything is “too much” for us.

“Does anyone here find the experience of writing in the journal overwhelming?” she wants to know. “Please tell me right now.” She searches our faces.

The question can be taken on two different levels. Is she talking about the journals the way
we’re
talking about them? Or does she think the journals have a power over us because of the intensity of what we’re writing about?

We still don’t know. And the more we’ve gotten used to going to Belzhar, the more it doesn’t matter.

I was such a mess after I lost Reeve. And now, twice a week, he and I are together again.

I don’t even hate eating all my meals in the dining hall that much anymore. Or not being able to text people or go online, which, at least in the beginning for me and everyone else here, was really hard. And I don’t even hate not being able to live in the same house as my parents and Leo.

Leo.
Oh, no, I realize that I never wrote to him, like my mom wanted me to. Once again, I vow to write to him tonight.

I don’t even hate singing with the Barntones, I suddenly realize as the rehearsal comes to a close. Finally, at the very end, the singing starts to sound better. I hear my own voice poking through, and it’s loud and clear and surprisingly decent.

• • •

On the following Sunday night our class meets once again in the classroom at 10:00 p.m. Everyone is on time. Casey has brought a box of miniature peanut butter cups with her, and we all eat. Soon there are little brown wrappers scattered all over the floor, and then Griffin pulls a big orange can of Four Loko from under his coat. At first no one says anything.

“Where’d you get that?” Marc finally asks.

“A trip to town. I have my cousin’s ID.”

The penalty for drinking at The Wooden Barn is getting expelled. There are kids here who have substance-abuse issues, and the school has a zero-tolerance policy, even if you’re found with some gross, sweet, alcoholic energy drink. “This is a bad idea, Griffin,” Marc says. “And that stuff’s disgusting, and people drink it till they get smashed.”

“Oh, calm down,” says Griffin. “Getting a little smashed isn’t going to lower your grades.”

“It’s not that,” Marc says.

“Then what?”

Softly and uneasily Marc says, “Casey.”

“
Shit.
Sorry, Casey,” Griffin says.

“Don’t sweat it,” she says lightly. “It’s not like I’m never going to be around people drinking to get drunk. Just not yet.”

Griffin stows the can, and I’m sure that alcohol will never again make an appearance at one of our late-night meetings. Casey looks over at Marc and nods, and he nods back. They’ve become close in this one instant; it’s amazing how that can happen. It happened to Sierra and me too. A single shared moment.

“Okay,” Sierra says. “Time is limited, so no offense but I really want to change the subject.” Everyone turns their attention to her. “This has been on my mind. Jam and I were talking one day, and we wondered what happens when you fill the journal up. We got kind of worried that it means you can’t go to Belzhar again.”

“I’ve been worried about that too,” says Casey. “Because we can’t even control how much we write. It’s five pages a pop.”

“Which is why,” I say, “we should definitely stick to the twice a week rule. The journals will last us through the semester, and that’s it.”

“I know,” says Marc. “I did the math too.”

“Of course you did,” says Griffin.

The remaining journal pages, and the remaining weeks left in the semester, still work out perfectly and unexplainably, the way some things do in life.

Suddenly I remember one of the only things that stayed with me from Dumb Math: Fibonacci numbers. They go like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144. To get a number, you add up the previous two numbers. So 0 plus 1 equals 1, and 1 plus 1 equals 2, and 1 plus 2 equals 3, and so on and so on.

Our teacher told us that for reasons no one has ever been able to explain, Fibonacci numbers can be found throughout nature. They’re in the leaves on a stem, in the flowering of an artichoke, in the way a pinecone is arranged. A
pinecone
! How random is that? It makes no sense that you can find evidence of Fibonacci numbers everywhere, but it’s true.

Thinking about this makes it seem less improbable to me that there could be a bunch of journals that take the people who write in them back to the place where they need to be. Some things just can’t be explained,
ever,
and your brain could burst if you think about them too hard.

Thank you, Mr. Mancardi, I think, remembering my cute Dumb Math teacher, who I’ll probably never see again, now that I’m living so far away in Vermont. Dumb Math seems like it took place hundreds of years ago. And Reeve—he too is from the past, and yet because of Belzhar I’m able to keep him with me in the present.

Marc says, “I don’t know about any of you, but I can’t handle the idea of not going to Belzhar when the semester ends.”

Casey asks, “What’s the deal for you there, Marc? You haven’t said yet. No pressure or anything, of course.”

“You really want to know? Now?”

“Sure. If you want to say.”

“All right,” he says. “I have to give you a few facts first, or it won’t make sense.”

As Marc starts to talk, he seems to be telling his story to Casey alone, and the rest of us are basically eavesdropping.

“Whenever we had to write those essays in grade school answering the question ‘Who Is Your Hero?’” Marc says, “my answer was always ‘Jonathan Sonnenfeld.’ My dad was so smart. He knew everything! He was a lawyer, and late at night he’d be in his study, on the computer.”

Marc takes a long gulping breath, as if he were a swimmer who’s just surfaced. And then he says, “It was last April. A school night. I’d said good night to my parents—my mom was already upstairs, and my dad was working late down in the study. I’d gone up to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I had all these plans for the next student council meeting, and I wanted to ask my dad’s advice. He was once student council president too.

“So I went down to his study, and the door was half open. He wasn’t in there. I could hear him in the kitchen getting himself a snack. But his computer was on, and it was tilted toward me. And this is the part I can’t deal with.”

Marc stops, his mouth drawn tight. “There was porn on the computer,” he finally says. “A sex tape. A woman was
doing
a guy. And I was like, wow, my dad watches porn. And then I thought, okay, big deal, I’ve seen my share of it too. My friends and I used to search the web at Harrison Sklar’s house, when our moms thought we were making flashcards. So what if my dad watches porn? That’s none of my business.

“But then I realized . . . I can’t believe I have to say this out loud . . . the guy in the sex tape, getting stuff done to him? He
was
my dad. And the woman definitely wasn’t my mom.”

Everybody is silent. “Shit,” says Griffin.

“My dad came back into the den carrying a plate of crackers and cheese and a bottle of beer, and he saw me looking at the screen. He lunged forward and shut it off. It was just the worst moment. And then he said that horrible thing that people in TV shows always say. Want to guess what it was?”

He looks around at our faces. I don’t want to guess. But Casey says, “Your dad said, ‘I can explain.’”

Very subtly, Marc smiles at her, nodding. “That’s right. And I told him, ‘I really doubt it, Dad.’

“And then my dad—my
hero
—said, ‘Well, your mom and I have been having some problems.’

“And I said, ‘So, wait, in order to solve these problems—which I bet Mom knows nothing about—you decide to go to some woman who’s probably a
hooker,
and have sex while filming yourself?’

“And he said to me, ‘This whole thing has got to be between us. Please. I’m begging you.’

“‘Don’t fucking
beg
me, Dad,’ I told him. ‘You’re just this middle-aged loser. You’re not my hero
.
Not anymore. And not ever again.’ I started yelling, and I grabbed my dad’s beer and threw it at his computer. The screen shattered, and my mom came rushing downstairs in her robe.

“She said something like ‘What in the world is going on here?’ My dad and I had never once had a fight in our lives.

“And I shouted, ‘Dad and some woman made a sex tape!’

“And she said, ‘No.’

“And I said, ‘
Ask him.
’

“So Mom looked at him, and in this little voice, she said, ‘Jonathan?’

“I don’t even remember the rest of the night. There was a lot of yelling and crying. My sister got into it too. And finally my mom kicked my dad out. He moved into the Marriott, and I haven’t seen him since. He’s called and begged me to see him, but I said no. So why am
I
at The Wooden Barn, when my dad is the one with the problems? Because I stopped sleeping and couldn’t concentrate on school or anything. My mom was crying all the time; my dad kept calling me. And the psychiatrist they sent me to suggested I get out of the ‘toxic family environment.’ She recommended this place, which she thought would be ‘gentle.’ Not to mention far away.”