Belzhar (11 page)

“I’m glad she did,” Casey says.

“I broke up my family in one night,” says Marc. “If I hadn’t come downstairs, my parents would still be married. My family would be together. My dad would be my hero.”

We’re all quiet, taking this in. “Tell us about Belzhar,” I say. “What happens to you there?”

“I’m saying good night to my parents,” says Marc. “I have no idea that within half an hour my family is going to be ruined, and that I’m the one who’s going to ruin it.

“The first time I went there, I stayed on the stairs, just hanging out, and my mom was up in bed calling good night to me, and my dad was downstairs calling good night. I know that sounds really feeble for a fantasy, right? It’s like . . . the opposite of porn. Standing on a staircase hearing your parents say good night to you. But the fact that nothing bad had happened, and nothing bad was
going
to happen,
ever
 . . . it was huge.

“The second time I went there, I realized I could walk around more,” Marc continues. “I talked to my parents, and my sister, and I called a couple of friends, and played a video game. The whole house was mine to roam around in. I had no worries. Which will never be the case again in real life.

“Because in real life my mom’s depressed, and so is my dad. She put the house on the market; she doesn’t want us to live there anymore, because the memories are too painful. She even had a yard sale, and people went in and out,
buying
things that belonged to us. One family bought our
Ping-Pong table
, just carried it away. We used to play doubles, Dad and me against Mom and my sister. That’ll never happen again.

“The worst part is that even though my dad won’t say it, I know he’s really pissed at me. Because he begged me not to tell my mom, and I refused, and then the whole family exploded. My sister has checked out emotionally. She was so relieved to go off to Princeton. I always thought I’d follow her there eventually, except after this happened I started getting Cs in school, so there goes Princeton. Me—Cs! I was the biggest grind you ever saw. Anyway, that’s all over. So here I am at The Wooden Barn. Like everybody else here, I’m damaged goods. And the only time I get to feel okay now is when I go to Belzhar.”

Marc leans back against the wall, worn out. Beside him, Casey touches his hand, a quick gesture, and then her own hand darts away like a little bird. All of us say sympathetic things; we tell him we’re glad he told us about this, and that we admire his honesty.

“I don’t think you’re damaged goods,” Casey says.

“Thanks.”

“I mean it. You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” she tells him.

“What happened to me,” says Marc, “I know it isn’t in the same league as you and Sierra. It’s not a car crash or a brother getting abducted. Or,” he says, directly to me, “a death.” I look down at my hands; I can’t bear to look anywhere else.

“Maybe not,” says Casey. “But it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to
you.
”

The only ones who haven’t really told our own stories are Griffin and me. When Sierra asks if anyone else wants to talk now, both of us stay silent.

“
OH, I WANTED TO TELL YOU THAT THE BARNTONES
performed at morning assembly,” I tell Reeve one day in November, as we lie together on the unchanging grass of Belzhar. “And despite the fact that it’s a cappella, I don’t think the group is a total embarrassment to our species. I know you’ll probably find that hard to believe, considering that we share the same views about a cappella singing.”

“The Barntones,” he says without recognition.

“I told you about them. How I was forced to join?”

“Right.”

But he doesn’t ask any questions, and I wonder if he was paying attention when I told him about the group in the first place. It’s not that I
like
being a Barntone, I say to him, but I’ve gotten used to it. And the musical selections that Adelaide picks are usually pretty good. Gregorian chants, Elizabethan songs, a couple of recent indie numbers. It’s hard to ignore how little interest Reeve seems to have in anything that goes on in my current life. If I mention something from The Wooden Barn, he gets that glazed look. I know it’s not his fault; Belzhar just seems to be set up this way.

“I have a surprise for you,” he suddenly says. Then he reaches out a hand. We walk together across the flat, hard fields toward a point in the distance where two soccer goals have been set up. “A quick match?” he asks, and though I’m not in the mood, I agree to play a little.

He pulls off his sweater, revealing his red Manchester United T-shirt underneath. Then he takes a soccer ball from where it’s been lying in the grass, and we kick it around, the same way we did once back at school. Though he’s so much better at this than I am—“football,” he calls soccer, in that British way—I actually make a goal, and I do a two-second happy dance.

“Manchester’s going to sign you,” he says, pleased.

“I’m not so sure,” I say. “I think Arsenal has their eye on me.”

Standing on the makeshift soccer field with Reeve, both of us a little windblown, I wish I could hurry home to my house on Gooseberry Lane in Crampton and take a quick shower, then get dressed up and go to dinner with him at the Canterbury House, the one really good restaurant in our town.

I’d always had a fantasy of taking Reeve there as a surprise. People say that you’re given your own little hot loaf of bread on a slab of wood, and a silver cup of whipped honey butter. Maybe we’d go for our two-month anniversary, I’d thought. I was going to try and scrounge up the money to pay for it.

But dinner at the Canterbury House never got to happen in real life, so of course it can’t happen here in Belzhar.

Reeve is oblivious to the limitations. He drops the soccer ball back into the grass and we walk together through the damp, cool afternoon, our hands linked. He tells me about the first time he saw me in gym class. “You were adorable,” he says.

“No, you were.”

“You were.”

“You.”

“‘They had to agree to disagree about their mutual adorableness,’” he says, as if quoting from a famous book about our relationship.

We come together and kiss, and it gets serious and deep, our mouths together and then pressed against each other’s face and neck, breathing unsteadily and harder. Once in a while we pull back to look, then come forward again.

But then the sky dims, and Reeve says, “Bloody hell,” and I say, “Oh shit,” and I’m thrust out of Belzhar without even saying good-bye.

Back in my room, it’s late at night. DJ’s deeply asleep, breathing loudly. Some instinct causes me to go pick up the hand mirror lying on my dresser. I take it over to the window, and in the moonlight I have a look at myself. On my neck is a small purple hickey. I reach a hand toward it, startled, but it starts to fade, and within seconds it’s completely disappeared.

Whatever happens in Belzhar leaves no trace in the real world. No shadow, no residue at all. I let my hand stay on my neck and I just want to cry.

• • •

The next morning Sierra pops into my room to exchange phone numbers so we can stay in touch over break. It’s the week of Thanksgiving vacation, and everyone will be leaving in the next couple of days. I’ll miss her even during that short period of time. “Hey,” she’ll sometimes say when we’ve been hanging around together and she can see that something’s made me suddenly shut down. “You’re thinking about Reeve, right?” And I’ll nod, and then we’ll just stay in silence for a while, neither of us needing to say anything more.

Other times I’ll sit in the dance studio watching her rehearse, and I always admire her grace and her force
.
She has these amazing, tough dancer’s feet. And we’ve gotten into the habit of walking back from the library together during the time of day when the shadows get long and you can drop hard into a gloomy mood if you don’t have a friend with you.

I tell her I’ll definitely call her when I’m home. But some people at school are getting a little worried that they won’t make it home for Thanksgiving at all. A big snowstorm is blowing in from Canada, and will arrive just in time to maybe screw up travel. Some girls are asking permission from the administration to get out early. Me, I’m not concerned, and truthfully I’m in no hurry to leave. While I miss my family sometimes, I still haven’t gotten over how my mom wouldn’t let me leave school when I’d called and begged her.

Also, I’m a little worried about what it will be like at home. It’ll feel strange sitting at Thanksgiving dinner keeping my enormous secret and pretending that I still fit in there, when I don’t.

I just want to stay at The Wooden Barn, and in Belzhar with Reeve, but my parents know none of that. They think I had an “episode” the day I called home, and that somehow it passed.

They think I’m recovering from the “trauma” of Reeve. That I’ve begun to accept that he’s gone. They have no idea of what’s happened to me, and where I go twice a week, even if it’s just inside my mind.

I’m also a little worried about running into my old friends at home. It would be so awkward to see Jenna, Hannah, and Ryan at the mall. “Hi, Jam . . . ,” they’d say, tilting their heads to one side and making identical “concerned” faces. The kind of faces they might have learned from a pamphlet called “How to Talk to the Emotionally Troubled Teen.” They all feel sorry for me, but I know they’ve moved past me too. When they see me, a memory will lick at their brains, but then they’ll go back to thinking only about themselves.

I actually haven’t thought of any of
them
too much either since I’ve been here. Now I wonder whether Hannah and Ryan have had sex yet, or whether he’ll be carrying around that ancient “reservoir tip” condom (“
Ugh!
” we’d shrieked when Hannah told us) for the rest of his life. And if they
have
had sex, whether it was as meaningful as Hannah had wanted it to be, or whether it was awkward, like a trying-too-hard a cappella concert. It’s sad that I know almost nothing about Hannah anymore, even though for a long time she was my best friend.

The only thing that will make the trip home okay is knowing that I’ll have my journal with me. Once we’ve gotten through the big Thanksgiving dinner, and I’ve helped load the dishwasher and scrubbed the crust from a couple of pans, I’ll be able to go to bed. And the next morning, when Friday arrives, I’ll join Reeve again in Belzhar.

“You missed Thanksgiving!” I’ll say to him when we’re face-to-face.

“I’m British, Jam, did you forget? Thanksgiving is as meaningless to me as . . . Boxing Day is to you.”

“Boxing Day? That’s not a real holiday. You made it up.”

“Did not.”

“Did so.”

“Ooh, our second fight.”

• • •

By Tuesday at The Wooden Barn, the snow is coming down hard, and many people have already left. My parents call and beg me to get on a bus “ASAP,” but I don’t want to spend an extra day at home if I can help it.

The bus I have a ticket for doesn’t leave until Wednesday afternoon. But on early Wednesday morning, with more than half the school gone including DJ, who flew home to Florida the night before
,
I’m starting to pack my bag when there’s a knock at my door. Jane Ann is gathering everyone who’s still left for a meeting in the common room.

“Bad news, chickadees,” she tells us. “The highway has just been closed. Everything’s a sheet of ice.”

“What?” someone says, not getting it, but the rest of us understand that no one in this room is going home for Thanksgiving.

“But stay positive,” says Jane Ann. “We’ll have a lot of fun here. We’ll have our own Thanksgiving. I make a mean cranberry sauce. And
lentils,
” she adds. “Mean, mean lentils.”

All of sudden, though I’d been nervous about going home, I feel like I might cry. I slip away from the common room, put on my coat, and push through the front door. The snow is really packing the sky, and I can barely see anything, but with my head ducked down I plunge right into it, wanting to be alone and feel sorry for myself.

I am stuck here, a holiday prisoner. I won’t be going home at all. As I trudge along the path in the snow, someone standing in the distance waves to me, but I can’t make him out. He steps closer; it’s Griffin. He stands with his hands in his pockets, his boots planted in the snow.

“Wait, why didn’t you go home?” I ask. “I heard that everyone else in Special Topics got out.”

“I live right nearby,” Griffin says. “My dad’s coming to get me with the snowplow. He’ll be here any minute. Why are
you
still here?”

“I didn’t take an early enough bus, and now I’m trapped,” I tell him. And then, idiotically, I start to tear up for real. The tears ice up my eyelashes almost immediately.

“You’re crying,” he says, confused. The idea of being faced with a crying girl in the middle of a snowstorm just doesn’t compute. He won’t know what to say or do. Except, after a few seconds, he does. “Come home with me,” he says.

“What?”

“You can fit into the cab of the plow if we squeeze you in. You’re small.”

I look at Griffin through the snow. He’s never said anything particularly kind to me before. But I guess the sight of me looking so pathetic, freeze-crying in a snowstorm and stranded on a major holiday, has made him remember that Mrs. Q wanted us to look out for one another.

My parents, naturally, are crushed that I won’t be coming home. But on the phone they say at least they’re glad I’ll have a family to go to on Thanksgiving, even if it isn’t them. I’m sent up to my room to quickly finish packing. I do, and then by the time I hurry downstairs, the snowplow has arrived. It’s a big, quivering orange monster with an extremely loud motor. Griffin’s already inside, and he reaches down and pulls me up.

Suddenly I’m sitting high up in the plow, but with horror I realize that I’m sitting on Griffin Foley’s lap
.
There’s nowhere else. His dad’s at the wheel, a thicker, bigger, shorter-haired version of Griffin, still good-looking. He shouts something I can’t hear, then guns the engine and we’re off, shoving snow out of the way with the big curved silver plate of the plow for the entire mile and a half.

I don’t move or speak until we pull up at the gate.
FOLEY FA
RMS
, I can barely read on the hanging wooden sign.
HAND-CRAFTED ART
ISANAL GOAT CHEESES
.

In the big main room that’s crisscrossed with wooden beams, a fire pops and claps in the hearth, and Griffin’s mom, a pretty, delicate woman, comes to greet us.

She shows me to my bedroom. It’s small, neat, and a little bit on the freezing side, but there’s a thick patchwork comforter folded at the foot of the bed. I unpack quickly, taking out my clothes, my toothbrush, and my subject notebooks.

I stop.

My journal’s not here.

I paw around inside my weekend bag, but there’s nothing else in it. In my hurry to go to Griffin’s, I left my red leather journal in the desk drawer in my dorm room, and now I won’t be able to go to Belzhar this Friday. This is disastrous, not only for me, but also for Reeve, who’ll be waiting, and starting to lose it when I don’t show up. Twice a week isn’t enough for either of us, but we’ve both come to accept the schedule. It’s still only Wednesday now, and this means I won’t have my journal in hand until Sunday afternoon. An eternity.

I turn around to see Griffin in the doorway. “What’s the matter?” he asks.

“I forgot my journal.”

“Oh,” he says. “Well,” he adds, not very convincingly, “it’ll be okay.”

“No it won’t. I’m sure you’re going to write in your journal while you’re here, right?” I ask him. “You wouldn’t want to go too many days without doing that.”

“Yeah,” he admits. “I go on Friday.”

“I was supposed to go then too.”

“No one would believe how much I write in that thing,” he says. “I always had to go to the learning specialist in grade school. I hated to write. One sentence would take me half an hour.” He shifts from leg to leg uneasily, and finally he says, “I know you’re upset. I don’t know what to say.”

“There’s nothing.”

“Sorry.” He pauses. “Want me to show you around or something?”

“Sure.”

The snow has let up a little, and as we walk around the grounds, I see flashes of well-kept white wooden buildings partially poking up from beneath the snow. The barn looks much newer than all the other buildings on the property.

“Is that where the goats are kept?” I ask, and Griffin nods. “Can we go in?”

“What for?”

“I don’t know, just to see them.”

Griffin shrugs and says, “Whatever,” and we go inside. Goats are everywhere, milling around in clusters or alone. I’m overcome by the sharp, strong smell, which, after a second, I realize I actually sort of like.

“Look at this place,” I say. “It’s like a goat cocktail party. Can I pet them?”

“If you want.”

I pet a few heads, and I think how easy it would be to go through life as a goat. You don’t have any problems. You don’t fall in love, so you don’t get crushed by loss. You just have your simple, farm-animal life, which I envy now.

I go over to a small goat and kneel down, stroking its narrow head. The goat regards me with inexpressive eyes, but doesn’t move away. Nearby, a lumpy-looking goat is kept separate from the others in a stall. “What’s with that one?” I ask.