Belzhar (6 page)

“D
J
,” 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 really 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.

“Go get a little mountain air, all of you,” she says. “Mrs. Q here insists. It’s pointless trying to teach you when your beautiful brains are all somewhere else far, far away. Go see if you can focus on nature.”

But the mountain air can’t help me sort this out. What I really want to do is call my parents and confess what happened to me last night. Before I met Reeve, I used to tell them so much. Something would happen at school when I was a little kid—like, Dana Sapol would “accidentally” bang into me as we walked past each other, or else push me out of the lunch line—and I’d come home and unburden myself to my mom and dad at the dinner table. They’d always be so supportive.

There’s a pay phone on the first floor of the dorm, and I have a calling card. You almost never see pay phones in the world anymore, which is probably a good thing. I read that somebody did a study and found that the receivers are swarming with millions of disgusting bacteria.
Fecal
bacteria, if you must know. But here at The Wooden Barn, which is like living in Amish country, pay phones are the only way to connect to the outside world.

It’s the morning of a school day, a workday for my mom, so I call her office number. She answers, saying, “Karen Gallahue,” in her businessy voice.

Just hearing her makes my throat tighten and my eyes flood. “Oh, Mom,” I say.

“Jam?” she says. “Is that you?”

“Yep, it’s me. Can I come home? There’s a bus. And maybe you and Dad could even get a tuition refund.”

“Now, babe,” she says, “we talked about this. Remember that family meeting with Dr. Margolis? We all agreed you needed to try it for at least one semester. To get away from home, to get out of your bed. To be someplace where they’re good with adolescent—”

“But,
Mom,
” I say. “You don’t understand.”

“I think I do, Jam. You feel homesick—”

“That’s what you think?”

“Well, yes. Because you’re outside your comfort zone. Thrown into a new situation, after being in a cocoon for so long.”

“Listen, Mom, it’s not like that at all.” I gather in a breath and then, in a quiet voice, I say, “I was with
Reeve
last night, okay? We were
together,
and he was right there, and we were holding each other—”

“
Jam,
” my mother interrupts sternly. “You know that isn’t true. If you remember, Dr. Margolis said we were likely to see certain behaviors, but that we shouldn’t validate them.”

“Certain behaviors?” I cry into the receiver, and immediately I feel bad for speaking so sharply to my mom. But I just can’t take it. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about! You’ve got to let me come home. I’m starting to unravel here—”

“
Jam,
” she interrupts again. “You have to give it time. One semester at least.” She is serious. I am really and truly not allowed to come home.

When I hang up, I’m shaking hard. Should I go to the infirmary and try to sleep it off? Or go upstairs to my room and try to get back to Reeve?

I start to head blindly out of the dorm now, and I run into Sierra, who’s just coming in. We’ve been sort of awkward with each other since we had our moment in the trees. When I saw her that day, she’d wanted to know if I’d possibly had an experience like hers. If I’d experienced something “surreal.” I hadn’t known what she was talking about then. But maybe now I do.

I block her way in through the front door, and I say, “I have to ask you something.”

Sierra looks at me without much interest. I’d had my chance, and I blew it. It’s like she can’t imagine that what I’m going to ask her now can be very interesting; she thinks she’s all alone. But maybe I can pull her back from her isolation. Or else maybe I’ll just seem unhinged.

“The thing you were trying to ask me that day when you were throwing rocks,” I say. “Was it about something you saw? But something that you really couldn’t have seen?”

Sierra keeps looking at me. “What do you mean?” she asks.

I look around to make sure we’re alone. “I
saw
things last night,” I say, knowing I’m going really far here. “There’s no good explanation. It didn’t feel like I’d been drugged. It wasn’t like that.”

Sierra quickly pushes me into the front hall, then off into an alcove. “Here’s the thing,” she whispers. “If something like this happened to you too, then maybe . . . I don’t know. But, yeah, it’s exactly what I was trying to ask you over by the trees. And I didn’t have anyone to talk to.”

“You can talk to me.”

“Where were you going just now?” she asks.

“Just for a walk. I had a bad phone call with my mom.”

“I could come with you,” Sierra says.

So we walk, not saying anything more about it. It’s like we both know it would be too intrusive to ask, “So what exactly did you
see
?” Of course I’m dying to know the specifics of Sierra’s hallucination or whatever you call it. Maybe it’s connected to what DJ said happened to Sierra—the “really bad” thing. And maybe she’s dying to know what
I
saw and who
I
am too. And to find out what landed me at The Wooden Barn.

There’s so much to say, but instead we say almost nothing, except to tell each other how relieved we are to have someone who went through a similar, shocking experience. Sierra and I continue to walk, mostly in silence. I’m still buzzing inside about everything, but I’m also relieved. Finally we wind up at the steps of the library, where she needs to pick up a book. Heading into the stacks with her, I look across the main reading area and see everyone with their heads dipped down in concentration or daydream or nap.

One boy sits alone at a study table, his head in his hands. It’s Marc, and even from across the room I can tell that something’s wrong. He glances up and sees Sierra and me. A look passes between us, a silent communication.

Something’s happened to Marc, not only to Sierra and me.

Maybe something’s happened to all of us in Special Topics in English.

Marc stands up, shoves his papers into his backpack—neatly, of course—and heads over to us. “
Hey,
” he whispers.

“Outside,” Sierra says.

On the wide stone steps of the library, we confront him in as vague but direct a way as we can. “You look wrecked,” Sierra says.

“Haven’t slept,” says Marc.

“Too much work?”

“Nah. Workload’s pretty light here.”

“Seeing things?” I ask.

Marc looks from me to Sierra, trying to figure out what’s going on.

“It’s okay,” says Sierra. “You can say it, Marc. We just admitted it to each other.”

“What if someone slipped us drugs?” he says tensely. “Did that ever occur to you?”

“It’s not that, and you know it,” says Sierra. “This is something else. What’s your best guess?” she asks him.

He looks at her helplessly and says, “I just don’t know. And I usually have answers for everything.” Then Marc asks, “So, when did it happen to both of you? Exactly what were you doing? Because I was sitting at my desk writing in my journal.”

I tell him I was writing in my journal too, and Sierra nods. So: the journals.

“Is it the whole class? Casey was upset at breakfast,” I say. “Griffin’s harder to read.”

“We could get everyone together and ask them,” says Sierra.

“And what if the two of them don’t know what we’re talking about?” Marc says. “They could tell the administration what we said.”

“Oh, come on, they’re not going to do that. Anyway, I’m willing to take the risk,” Sierra says. “I don’t know what else to do.”

So we agree to hold an emergency meeting in our classroom that night at ten o’clock, in the brief slice of time between study hours and lights-out. “The classroom buildings are kept unlocked,” Sierra says. “So it shouldn’t be a problem.”

The classroom is a good spot, she explains, because the trees outside the window will protect us from being seen when security makes its nightly rounds.

We decide that Marc will be responsible for getting Griffin there, and Sierra and I will be in charge of Casey. We make our plan, and then we wait.

During the rest of the school day I sit in classrooms and look out over trees and mountains and sky, recalling how it felt to be with Reeve last night. Thinking that, maybe, when I write in the journal next, I’ll be swept up to be with him a second time.

That night, everyone shows up at ten. Marc brings Griffin, who appears to be in a quiet, controlled state of annoyance, his hood up as usual. But Griffin would probably be in that state if you woke him up and told him he’d won Powerball. Casey seems relieved to be here. We can’t turn on the overhead light in the classroom because it might be seen through the trees. Instead, Sierra lights the big, fat, hazelnut-scented candle she’s brought, and Marc unfolds a comforter with a Marc-like geometric pattern, and we all sit on it on the wooden floor of the classroom with the candle casting a dim glow around us.