Belzhar (18 page)

Reeve flopped down hard beside me, and Ms. Panucci said to the class, “No talking. I am serious, people!”

He turned to me with a sly smile. What we had was special and subtle. We sat in stillness, not talking, not touching, though I wanted him to touch me more than anything. I wanted his shoulder against mine. I could easily imagine kissing him, feeling the chocolate-brown sweater wool, his bright face, his neck, his mouth.

I stopped drawing the hills in the distance like I was supposed to. They were just too boring, and didn’t deserve to be immortalized. Instead, my hand that was holding the charcoal began moving across the pad like it was a Ouija board.

I barely knew I was drawing, until someone said, “Yo, Reeve, you’ve got an admirer.”

The drawing wasn’t even that good. I accidentally forgot to give him a shirt. Instead I just drew his face and his bare shoulders. His clavicle, which is the real name for the collarbone. I made him look kind of buff, even though he’s pretty skinny. Suddenly there was all this laughter around me, and Ms. Panucci came over, took the pad from me, and said, quietly, “Jam, what’s going on? It’s not like you to act out. To deliberately do what you’re not supposed to.”

I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t tell her I hadn’t even
known
I was drawing Reeve, because it wouldn’t have made sense to her. Everyone was laughing and looking at the half-naked drawing of Reeve Maxfield, the British exchange student.

He didn’t say anything to me, but just got up and walked off. I had displeased him, which made me want to gouge out my eyes. But maybe, beneath his displeasure, he was also flattered and excited. He just had to be.

Please God, make this be okay
, I thought, even though I’ve gone back and forth between believing in God and being an atheist ever since I was nine and my friend Marie Bunning’s dad had a heart attack and died. If there really was a God, I sometimes thought, He would never have taken Mr. Bunning, who used to actually make paper dolls for Marie, with little ski outfits and everything. Why wouldn’t God have left Mr. Bunning on earth, with the people who loved him?

• • •

At home that night after art class I didn’t want to eat dinner, and my dad, who likes to cook dishes with one weird ingredient (“You catch the undertone in this stew?” he’ll say proudly. “I poured in a can of Dr Pepper!”), was concerned. “What’s going on?” he and my mom wanted to know, but I couldn’t tell them that I had dropped into a deep, dense cloud of feeling, and that I was still in free fall.

Later, in bed, I pretended that Reeve was beside me. I felt his arms, and his long torso. In the morning, getting dressed, it was almost as if he whispered to me, “Wear the black jeans. I like those.”

The next time I saw him at school he didn’t seem mad at me at all, and I was so happy I could have danced down the hall. Maybe I did dance a little, because Ryan Brown said to me, “What’s with
you
? You look all hyper. Are you ADHD?”

And later on, in the few minutes of freedom between history and Conversational French, when Reeve glanced across the hallway, I was sure he was looking at me. But maybe he wasn’t. It’s like when you’re at a concert and you think the singer is singing directly to you, and all the thousands of other teenaged girls don’t even exist. I was inside that cloud of feeling and I couldn’t see or feel anything else.

I suppose Dr. Margolis was right, and it
was
easier to tell myself this story, because what was
true was just not acceptable to me. Like that day at the lockers, when Dana Sapol looked up and said, “My parents and Courtney the brat are going to our grandparents’ this Saturday, so it’s par-tay time. You should come.”

All right, so maybe she wasn’t only talking to
me.

Or maybe she wasn’t talking to me at all.

Maybe thinking that she was talking to me was just part of the “story.”

Dana generally never talked to me except to say something mean, but I tried to make myself think we’d turned a corner because she saw that Reeve and I obviously had something between us. Finally, I thought, I was no longer hated by Dana. My locker was five lockers down from hers. Jackie Chertoff, who was a less powerful version of Dana, was two lockers down.

“Excellent,” Jackie said about the party, and she pumped her fist in the air.

I started to think about what it would be like if I could go to that party. Maybe Dana really was including me in the conversation; her eyes always did kind of look into the distance when she talked, like she couldn’t really commit to one person. Maybe she was telling
everyone
at the lockers about her party, not just Jackie Chertoff. It wasn’t clear to me at the time which it was. I thought about how maybe I’d been invited, and I pretended that being invited was no big deal. Though of course it was huge.

And then Dana added, meaningfully, “The hottie exchange student will be there.”

And this
had
to have been directed at me, because clearly I was very into Reeve, and everyone knew it since art class. All morning I’d been drawing his name over and over on the cover of my history notebook, in different styles: bubble letters, Olde English calligraphy, and even the Greek alphabet, which I looked up online. This is how his name looks in Greek:

Everyone knew I was into him, and to most people this made sense, because even though I wasn’t in the most popular group, I was a nice, cute girl who had a close group of friends. In no way was I like Ramona Schecht, Devourer of Scabs. So I told myself a story that I’d been personally invited to Dana Sapol’s party. I could even picture an invitation, engraved with my name on the front, just like the bar and bat mitzvah invitations I’d received in seventh grade, which came in the mail and always weighed a ton. In my mind the invitation said:

The presence of your company is requested

At the home of Dana Helene Sapol

Saturday night at half past the hour of eight o’clock

Dress: casual but sort of slutty, because Reeve
will be on the premises

No gifts, please, since Dana Helene Sapol owns everything already. Also, this isn’t a birthday, it’s just a teens-getting-wasted party

Be prepared for something momentous to happen

• • •

I stood at my locker feeling so excited that I couldn’t even speak. I just closed the shaky metal door quietly and gave the dial a spin, so no one could break in and steal—what? My clarinet? My rain poncho? Nothing in that locker would interest anyone, least of all me. All I could think about was being with Reeve at that party, and what would happen there. Something
momentous.

I turned down the usual offer to hang out with Hannah and Jenna on Saturday night. No doubt all we would’ve done was click on a bunch of different websites, some where you had to press a button certifying you were at least eighteen. And then we’d go on Facebook and laugh at people’s dumb posts. And we’d watch TV and order stuffed crust pizza and individual molten lava cakes, and finally fall asleep at 1:00 a.m. in sleeping bags on the rug in the Petroskis’ den, beneath the framed poster of the sad-looking diner by the artist Edward Hopper, where we’d slept a thousand times.

“What are you doing instead?” asked Jenna when I told her and Hannah that I wasn’t free. “Something with your family?”

“I’m going to Dana Sapol’s party.”

They were shocked. “No offense, but you couldn’t have been invited to that,” Jenna said. “Dana Sapol has never hidden her feelings about you, even if they are twisted.”

“Well, I
was
invited,” I said.

“But anyway, why would you go?” asked Hannah, to which I could only look at her in amazement.

Why would I go? Didn’t she know
anything
?

“Oh,” said Jenna coldly. “Because of your crush.”

“He’s not a crush,” I said, equally coldly.

“Get over it already, Jam,” said Hannah. “And I say this as your best friend who cares about you.”

I looked at these two girls I’d been through everything with since the beginning of time. We’d had so many sleepovers, so many hours of flat-ironing our hair and doing dance moves, and so many sleepy Saturday afternoons at the mall, waiting for someone’s mom or dad to come pick us up in the rain. But now it all seemed far behind me. They couldn’t understand where I was in my life. They couldn’t know the connection I had with Reeve, and how I had to see it through.

“See you,” I said, turning away, and I could already hear them start to talk about me.

THE NIGHT OF THE PARTY, MY PARENTS AND LEO
dropped me off and continued on to their lame-ass evening of a movie at the mall, and I slipped into the Sapols’ enormous house. Several kids said hi, a little surprised to see me at Dana’s house. There were lots of people there, and the smell of weed, and the undersmell of puke, and it was only eight thirty. I looked for Reeve but didn’t see him right away, so I acted really casual, even though my heart was beating hard. Without thinking, I wove my way through a cluster of people and headed deeper into the party.

Among the drone of American voices, I easily picked out Reeve’s English voice. His accent was special, like him, and it pierced the air of Dana Sapol’s long, gaudy living room and led me right to him. There he was, standing with some guys, holding a beer in one hand and a brown paper bag in the other. They were all talking and joking, and Alex Mowphry called Reeve a douchebag, and then Danny Geller saw me and said, “There’s the artist who drew your portrait, Maxfield.”

“Screw you,” Reeve said in a friendly way.

“Nice picture, Picasso,” Danny said to me.

I knew that if I acted embarrassed and upset, he’d tease me even more. So I had to act like I was in on the joke. “Thanks,” I said. “The Museum of Modern Art called to see my portfolio.”

Danny turned to Reeve and said, “You better go off with this girl and pose for another one. Full frontal this time, bro. I dare you.”

“Oh, you dare me?” said Reeve. He turned to me. “Want to go somewhere and talk?” he asked.

“
Talk,
” said Danny. “Right.”

I nodded, and Reeve and I walked down the hall together, past the people leaning against walls drinking and smoking and talking. We opened a couple of doors and found people playing strip poker, or in the process of hooking up.

Finally we opened the door to Courtney’s room, with the over-the-top dollhouse inside. No one was there, and Reeve and I went in, and he put down the bag he’d been carrying. English groceries, he explained when I asked. He’d brought them to the party as a kind of joke, because everyone at school had been asking him what he ate back in London. He was planning on taking all the different foods out later, when everyone had the munchies.

I pawed around inside the bag and saw scones, and a can of something called, disgustingly, “spotted dick.” Everyone would have a good laugh over that.

Then I saw the jam, and right away I got the pun.

“Jam!” I said, thrilled. “So can I have it?” I held the jar up and pointed to myself.

“Sure,” he said lightly. “It’s good stuff.”

Then we started ironically playing with the dolls at the dollhouse, and he leaned forward and kissed me. He smelled beery, weedy, kind of fermented, which made me realize,
Oh, he’s not 100 percent lucid
. But then it didn’t matter, because kissing him made me feel sort of high too.

I leaned into the kiss almost too hard, and let the sensations pour over me. We both felt equally excited, and what was happening was so clearly
inevitable
, and had been building up since that very first day in gym class. It had been building and building, and everyone knew it, and now here we were.

By the end of the kiss, I was positive we were falling in love.

But then the door opened with a loud thud. “Reeve,” said Dana Sapol.

He looked up at her, wiping his mouth, which glittered with traces of my lip gloss—frosted plum, with “patented extra stay-long” moisture.

“I’ll be right out,” he said.

“Take your time hooking up with your pathetic groupie girl.”

“Lay off, Dana, okay?”

Dana shot me a death-ray look. “First you crash my party, Jam,” she said. “And then you basically throw yourself at Reeve, not even caring that he’s shit-faced. I actually feel sorry for you. You have no idea of what’s normal behavior.”

“That’s harsh, Dane,” said Reeve, and he looked over at me for half a second, but didn’t say anything. His lips were still glittering.

Wordless, she pulled him from the room.

Instead of going to the front door and standing outside in the cold, crying a little and texting my mom a line like “I know u r at the movie, but can u come get me?” I followed Reeve and Dana in the darkness. They slipped down the hall and went outside to stand by the covered pool. I pushed open the sliding glass doors a crack so I could hear them.

“Oh no? So what were you doing?” Dana asked.

“I was
plastered
. And she’s really into me.”

“God, Reeve, you’re such a man-whore.”

“I guess I am.” And he smiled at her.

I closed my eyes. Reeve had to be intimidated by Dana, like a lot of people in the grade, and was just telling her what she wanted to hear. Yes, he was kind of high and kind of drunk, but our kiss had still had clarity. It was filled with feeling, and we couldn’t turn back from it. We were falling in love. I was confused by what he was saying to Dana, but I reminded myself that it wasn’t the truth. He was lying to throw her off.

I slipped out of the party but I still didn’t text my parents to pick me up. Instead I walked all the way home in the darkness on the shoulder of Route 18. The cars were so close that when they roared past me my hair was lifted in a big wave. It took me an hour to get home, and by the time I let myself into the house, I was even more excited about Reeve than I’d been all week.

• • •

On Monday at school he was a little distant toward me at first, but I knew it was only because Dana was around. She had an unrequited thing for him, I now understood, and he didn’t want to upset her because she could be such a bitch, and she’d never let him hear the end of it. He walked past me without saying anything, but I knew why, and I knew it was temporary. I waited and waited for Reeve to make contact with me when we were alone.

And later in the day, when I saw him at the doors of the school library, he tilted his head at me, and I followed him inside, and then into the stacks. We were in the 920s, and we didn’t turn on the light with its little timer, but instead stood together in the shadowy, unlit space.

“You didn’t even talk to me today,” I whispered.

“What we have is private,” he whispered back. “And it’s fun to sneak around. Me and my little groupie,” he said, knocking his shoulder lightly against mine.

“I get it,” I said. “This is just between us.”

“Right.” He pulled me toward him.

“Here?”
I said.

“No one’s nearby. Christ, no one in this country even reads.”

So we began to kiss in the library stacks, leaning back against the metal shelves and the spines of books. Distantly, timers ticked, but otherwise it was quiet, and the books were the only witnesses to what we were doing. He scooped a hand up under my shirt, and I felt myself shudder. When we heard footsteps he pulled back so suddenly that I gasped, almost as if I were in pain.

“See you” was all he said, and then he backed off, leaving me stunned and dizzy in the dark, with the crumbling forest scent of old books all around me.

• • •

Over the following days we met in the library two more times, and once beneath the exit sign in the hall, and another time behind the school, against the rough brick wall, where he put his tongue in my mouth and made me laugh afterward with a joke about how there’s no sunlight in England, and even the queen is lacking vitamin D.

We goofed around on the soccer field once when it was empty, but only for like a minute, because he reminded me that everything we did had to be private. I was fine with that, though sometimes I felt like I might explode.

At night I lay in bed with my eyes wide open, my thoughts churning at a rapid rate, cycling through images of Reeve seen from different angles.

“You have dark circles under your eyes, babe,” my mom remarked at breakfast one morning. I quickly ran to the bathroom and patted on some liquid foundation. Even if I didn’t sleep much at night, I wanted to look rested and good.

In school I frequently looked over at Reeve and was positive we were sharing a smile, a signal, even though it turned out he was often just smiling generally, in the middle of a group of people. I was always on the edge of the group, following, except when Dana came along, at which point I made myself invisible, like one of those camouflage animals that can freakily blend in with their background.

I was there in the background when Reeve showed the Monty Python dead parrot sketch to everyone on a TV monitor in a classroom during break. I slipped into the room and sat on a chair in the back. No one saw me.

“’Ello, I’d like to register a complaint,” the customer in the pet shop said, and Reeve thought the sketch was hilarious, and he kept rewinding it and showing the whole thing over and over. Other kids laughed, though mostly the boys and me. Dana Sapol looked bored to death.

“I don’t get why this is supposed to be funny,” she kept saying in a whiny voice.

But I loved it. Reeve and I had the same sense of humor. I heard him explain that he wanted to go to “university” at Oxford or Cambridge, like the members of Monty Python, who had met when they were in college. I knew he would have a great life ahead of him, and I imagined myself being part of it. I saw us at a comedy club in England, where he and his troupe were performing. I’d be in school over there too, maybe spending my junior year abroad.

I pictured us having high tea in London, though I don’t even know what high tea really is. I saw myself on the back of a lime-green Vespa as he drove us around lamplit streets. If I thought about it hard enough, I could picture a whole life with him.

We were in love, and finally I had to tell Hannah and Jenna, though I knew Reeve wouldn’t approve. I told them one morning in the parking lot outside school, and they were all, like, “What evidence do you have that he’s in love with you, Jam?”

I told them I didn’t need “evidence,” that this wasn’t a courtroom, but they only shook their heads.

Hannah came up to me in the cafeteria later, when I was standing near Reeve and Danny Geller, and she said in a nervous, quiet voice, “Would you come sit down already?” But I just ignored her and stood listening to Reeve talk about Manchester United’s most recent game being entirely “brill.” As in, brilliant.

During classes, I couldn’t think about much else. My teachers seemed to be saying nonsense words, and everyone obediently wrote them down in their notebooks. Life went on in this way, and it was trippy but exciting. Apparently this was what love felt like. Reeve and I had to lie low, making sure we didn’t piss off Dana Sapol, who still held on to the idea that Reeve was really into her, which he wasn’t.

• • •

But then one morning when I got to school I smiled at him and he didn’t even smile back, but kept walking. The coast was clear, too; he could’ve
easily
smiled at me. It would’ve been safe. No one would have seen.

Later, I loitered outside the library when I thought he might be there, but he never came. Something was wrong; maybe he was having trouble at the Kesmans. Singing rounds could have been driving him crazy. Or maybe something was wrong in his family back in London. His “mum” was sick, maybe. Didn’t he know he could talk to me about it? That’s the kind of thing that people in love do.

When I saw Reeve with Danny, I said to him, “Can I talk to you?”

Danny looked annoyed when Reeve turned to me. “Jam,” Reeve said, “it’s not a good time.”

“Well, when
is
a good time?” I asked.

“I’ll let you know.”

So I waited.

Finally, on a Friday after school let out, forty-one days after we first met, when I hadn’t slept in a while because sleep was boring, and I’d barely eaten anything because food didn’t offer nearly the same nutritional value as love, I found myself walking along the field behind the school, where sometimes Reeve would hang out with his friends. Maybe I would find him there.

I planned to go up to him and quietly say, “Is this a good time?”

And I hoped he’d say yes, and that we would go beneath the bleachers, and we’d kiss, and he’d tell me he was stressed out about his homework, which was why he’d been kind of distant. I’d reassure him and make him feel calm, and our love could resume as planned. And then we’d kiss some more.

But it was that day, that afternoon, when I saw the figure in the distance and walked toward it.

As I got closer, I saw that it was two people, arms around each other, kissing. Reeve and Dana.

My heart was going so hard inside me; it struck me with force, and I put both hands to my chest to calm it down.

Then Dana said that thing “Well, well, look who we have here.”

And they just kept talking at me while I stood in the wind. Tears started to come down my face, and my hair was blowing everywhere, and Dana’s hair was blowing too. Reeve stood there in his brown sweater and skinny jeans, asking me if I could remember what really happened that night at Dana’s house.

Asking me to own up to what was true and what was not. I felt myself shatter inside. He was a boy, he was just a boy. I was in love with him, but here he was with Dana now. “For
realz
,” as Hannah would’ve said.

“You’re with
her
?” I asked, nodding toward Dana.

A long, long pause, and a look between the two of them.

“Yeah,” he finally said.

“You’re not with me?”

“Of course he’s not with
you
,” said Dana, but Reeve stopped her from saying anything more.

“I can handle this myself, Dane,” he said sharply. Then he came over to me and looked me in the eye. His gaze was too much for me, like the brightness after you go to the eye doctor and he gives you drops, and then you have to go outside into the world, and you feel so unprepared for all that light.

But I couldn’t turn away, even though I was crying. “Look,” he said in a quiet voice, “you don’t want to keep doing this. It doesn’t make you look good, all right? I’m not an arsehole, Jam. Don’t make me out to be one. I’m just here for a term, having a few laughs. Yeah, I sort of have a thing going with Dana. It might be getting serious. But you and me, we were just having fun. You know that.”