Belzhar (8 page)

“Remember, nobody tell anyone anything,” Sierra says anxiously. “Not even your roommates. Everybody promise.”

Everybody promises. Then Marc says, “And everybody also has to promise that they won’t write in their journals again until we’ve gone over things carefully, okay?”

“Why?” Griffin asks. “What’s going to happen?”

“No idea,” says Marc. “Which is why I said it. We just don’t know enough yet.”

I can tell that all of us are scared of that other place, yet we also want to go back to it. But who knows if it would even be the same next time? For all we know, when we write in the journal again, something entirely different might happen.

Or nothing might happen at all.

We’re supposed to write in the journals twice a week; we all know that. But despite what Mrs. Quenell asked us, we all decide not to write in them “until further notice,” as Marc puts it. Then we arrange to meet here again tomorrow night at the same time.

Griffin leans forward and blows out the candle with one sharp blast, leaving us in the dark.

BACK
IN MY DORM ROOM AFTER OUR LITTLE
nighttime meeting, DJ says to me, “Where were you?” and all I tell her is “Out.”

“With who?” she asks.

“Whom,” I correct her, which is a stupid thing to do.

“
Ooh,
Miss Special Topics in English,” she says in a sarcastic voice. “Is that what you learn in that class? When to use ‘whom’?”

“Something like that.”

Jane Ann pokes her head in. “Hey, guys, homework done, et cetera? You’re both good to go?”

“We’re fine,” I say, though, no, I’m not at all good to go.

DJ turns off the light and we just lie there. After a long, uncomfortable silence she says, “Jam?”

“Yep.”

“Can I talk to you about something?”

Oh God, now she’s going to confront me. She’s going to say
,
“Something’s going on with you, something totally over the top, and I want to know what it is.”

“Sure,” I say, and then I wait.

There’s another long, stressful silence. We both just keep lying there, and finally DJ says, “Did you happen to notice anything unusual about me at the social?”

“What?” I ask, surprised. The social? I try to remember. “Well, you were
dancing.
I guess that was kind of not what I expected.”

“Oh, you think I don’t dance, I just sulk?” DJ says, and she snorts lightly. Then she continues, “No, I meant who I was dancing
with.
Did you happen to notice that?”

She isn’t asking me anything about myself at all, and I’m so relieved. I vaguely remember that she was dancing with a girl that night, the way that girls do, just for the hell of it, or to show off.

“A blond girl, is that right?” I say. “Her name’s Rebecca?”

“Yeah, Rebecca Fairchild. I think she’s very cute. Hot, I guess I’m saying.”

“Oh!” I say. It’s never occurred to me for one second that DJ might like girls. Or that dancing with Rebecca Fairchild meant anything at all. “It’s fine
,
of course,” I quickly reassure her.

“‘
It’s fine
’? Gee, Jam, thanks for your approval,” she says. “Now I don’t need to feel like such a circus freak anymore, or worry about being
shunned
by you.”

“Oh, shut up, DJ. I just said that because I know I sounded surprised. And, okay, I was.”

“I surprised myself too,” DJ admits. “Calling another girl hot. I’ve never said anything like that in my life. I sort of still can’t believe I said it out loud.” This is the first time DJ has made herself vulnerable in front of me in any way. Usually she hides everything so carefully. The real, true DJ Kawabata is kept buried like the junk food she’s placed out of sight around our room.

We lie in silence for a while, but it feels less tense now. “You’ve liked other girls before?” I ask.

“Oh, sure,” she says.

“Boys too?”

“Not like that.”

“Did you always know?”

DJ rustles around for several seconds and then says, “The first thing I remember is that I loved my third-grade teacher, Miss Clavel. Seriously, that was her name, like in
Madeline.
She wasn’t a nun, though. She was sort of a leftover hippie who put wildflowers in her hair. She quit her job at the end of the year to move to California with her boyfriend, and when I found out, I cried so hard.”

I lie in my bed picturing DJ as a freckled little girl, yearning for her pretty, young teacher. It’s easy to imagine, actually. “That’s sad,” I say.

“And you know what? My food issues began that spring.”

“Really?”

“No! Jesus, I was joking.”

“Oh!”

We laugh together a little. Then she says, “What about you?”

“What?”

“Who was, like, your first big love?”

I get very uncomfortable suddenly. “Oh,” I say, trying to sound vague, “it’s complicated. But anyway, we were talking about you, not me.”

“Actually,” DJ admits, “Rebecca is the first time I’ve ever, you know,
liked
someone and felt she might actually like me back.”

“Well, that’s a big deal.”

“But I honestly have no idea if she feels the way I do. That night at the social, I thought there was something between us. We kept catching each other’s eye. And now she keeps giving me these
looks,
like we have this private joke going. But if I’m wrong, then we’re stuck in this tiny little incestuous community, where everyone eventually knows everyone else’s business, and how would I deal with that?”

My eyes have gotten used to the dark now, and I can see that DJ is facing me on her bed, straining toward me as she tells me things that are important to her.

“I think you should say something,” I say.

“Even if it could screw everything up really bad?”

“Trust me, life is short. Someone gets taken away from you, and then you can never say anything to them again.”

“Wow,” says DJ. “That’s true. I’ll have to think about it. In the meantime, when I see her next I’ll be, like, ‘Hey, Rebecca, what’s going on?’ I’ll just be normal.”

“Normal for you,” I say with a little laugh.

“Yeah, normal for me.”

We yawn, one after the other, because yawning is so contagious. Soon we’re each turning over, facing away from the other person, and then, like two people jumping off a rock into water, I guess we both fall helplessly into sleep. I’m not sure which of us gets there first.

• • •

In the morning, it’s hard to believe that the sunlit classroom is the same place where, the night before, all five members of Special Topics in English sat by candlelight trading stories of trauma and hallucination. Mrs. Quenell greets us as if today is just a regular morning, and she doesn’t seem to notice the few little droplets of candle wax that spatter the floor.

“I hope everyone’s feeling lively and rested today,” she says. “Who’d like to kick off the in-class presentations?” She looks around the room. “Jam,” she says. “Why don’t you begin?”

I am so not up for this.

Everyone looks at me. I could be wrong, but Griffin seems amused
.
I’m going to try not to let him bother me. I’d gone to the library in the past couple of days and read up on Plath’s life, and I’d also read a few of her poems. It’s not like I put a lot of time into the assignment, because I just don’t care enough, but still I understand the main ideas, I think. Now, for some reason, I’m actually nervous. What if everything I’m about to say is wrong?

They keep looking at me, waiting, and I flip through my pages of notes, not really wanting to make eye contact. “Sylvia Plath’s father kept bees as a hobby,” I start. “He was this huge figure in her life, and he died when she was eight. This was really upsetting to Plath, who was left with her mother and her brother, and I guess a feeling of, you know,
sorrow
.

“Look at the poem called ‘Daddy,’ where she curses her father, and the power he has over her, even though he’s been dead for a long time. I mean, she’s
furious
at him in the poem. I don’t know that it’s
him
exactly,” I go on, “or even if it’s her. It’s a lot bigger than that, and it uses images of Nazis, and makes these points about history, and World War Two. It’s really angry, and really complicated. And I think that even though the poem is filled with incredible rage, it’s also got, like, heartbreak in it.”

I shuffle through the papers I’m holding, and I find the poem. “‘Daddy, I have had to kill you / You died before I had time,’” I read aloud. And then I recite another line, from later in the poem: “‘At twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you.’”

I lower the page. “I think that’s what she wanted,” I say. “To get back to him.”

Mrs. Quenell asks, “Do you think Plath’s depression is a kind of unfinished grief?”

“Well,” I say nervously, “I’m not an English teacher
.
Or a psychiatrist.”

“But you’re a thinking person, Jam,” says Mrs. Quenell. “And besides that,” she says, “you’ve had experiences that qualify you to weigh in on these matters. You all have. Don’t be afraid to use them. Use whatever it is you bring to the table.
Literally,
in this case,” she adds, knocking on the oak surface of the oval table where we sit.

“I guess I feel like grief is this huge part of everything,” I say in a burst. “But you’re supposed to act like it’s not. Like, if you lose someone, how are you supposed to go on caring about stupid day-to-day things? Like whether a test will be hard, or whether you have split ends, or had an argument with your friend. How is Sylvia Plath, or Esther Greenwood in
The Bell Jar,
whose father died too, supposed to just
be
in the world?” I ask.

What I really want to know is: How are any of us in this room supposed to care about anything, when we’re constantly being pulled back by unbearable thoughts and feelings?

“Those are good questions,” says Mrs. Quenell. “Anyone want to answer?”

At first no one does. And then Griffin says, “This isn’t an answer. But sometimes maybe it’s not exactly a person you’re missing, you know? It could be anything that meant something to you.”

I wonder what happened to him, what hurt him and shut him down.

When class ends, Griffin walks out ahead of everyone else in his clomping bad-boy biker boots; this time he doesn’t even make a show of trying to help Casey, the way the rest of us do. As we leave the building, he’s already way up ahead on the path alone, his hood back on, his hands jammed into the pockets of his coat.

• • •

That night at ten, when we all meet up again in the darkened classroom, I’m a little surprised that Griffin shows up. I thought maybe he was going to disconnect from us. But he’s there, sitting on Marc’s comforter. We all arrange ourselves, and Sierra lights the candle, and the faux-hazelnut fragrance makes the place smell like a cutesy, overpriced café. Casey says, “If anyone feels like helping me out of this contraption, I might actually be able to sit on the floor with you guys.”

We all sort of stare at her dumbly, as if it hadn’t occurred to us that she could
exist
outside the wheelchair. Marc goes to stand in front of the chair and lifts Casey out, saying, “Is this okay? I’m not gripping you too hard?”

“I’m not going to
break,
Marc,” she says. “I already broke, right?”

“Just checking. I’ve never done this before.”

Sierra has created a little place for Casey to sit where she can be supported, and finally she’s in the circle with the rest of us, though her legs are out in front of her, with her small, delicate feet in stylish ankle boots flopping to either side.

The candle sends its campfire glow around our circle, and this time we’ve come prepared with food that’s been snuck out of the dining hall at dinner, so we don’t have to steal anything from the teachers.

“Who’s going to go first?” Marc says.

Casey, leaning against the wall, raises a hand as if it were morning and she’s in class.

“Raised hands are not necessary in here,” Marc says, imitating Mrs. Quenell’s voice, and there’s a little laughter. “Only raised minds.”

“I’ll go,” Casey says. “Anybody want to hear how I got like this?”

“I GREW UP RICH IN NEW YORK
CITY,” CASEY TELLS US.
“I don’t want to sound obnoxious, but my family’s apartment was featured in
Architectural Digest.
Yeah, one of
those
. It’s a duplex on Park and Seventy-First. We have a housekeeper who keeps everything running smoothly, and cooks amazing food. If we ever got hungry in the middle of the night, we’d just press the button on the intercom marked ‘Daphne,’ and she’d make us a buffalo chicken sandwich on a Kaiser roll. She’d complain about it the next day, but she’d do it. A town car took us to school every morning, and—”

“A town car. Aren’t you fancy,” Griffin murmurs.

“Be quiet, Griffin,” Sierra says lightly.

“It didn’t seem like a big deal,” Casey goes on, “because lots of girls at private schools in the city are brought to school like that. And our dads continue on to the office after dropping us off. They’re all masters of the universe. They run Wall Street. My dad likes to
win,
and for him that means taking over corporations and doing leveraged buyouts. He’s always been happier doing that than anything else. And he always loved the money he made, and loved spending it on us.

“We were mostly happy,” says Casey. “That’s the thing that people find hard to wrap their minds around. Nobody at Sedgefield—my rehabilitation hospital—really understood this. I tried to explain it to them, but they didn’t get it. Even my mom’s little problem didn’t make us
un
happy.”

Casey stops, and we all wait. “She drank,” she says. “Not in the morning—never
in the morning—but other times of day. I noticed it; we all did. It would put me on alert, make me feel kind of tense, like, ‘Okay, there’s Mom again, under the influence.’ She’d go out to lunch with her friends, and she’d come home basically trashed. My sisters and I always felt worried when this happened. We had a code we used. We’d say, ‘Mom took out the trash.’ We’d even say it right in
front
of her, and she’d say, ‘What do you girls mean? I didn’t take out the trash; Daphne did.’

“She wasn’t one of those mean drunks,” Casey continues. “Drinking actually made her sweeter than she was, which was already very sweet. But she would sort of go a little bit
off
; it’s hard to describe. The thing is, she’s very charming. She’s a redhead like me, and freckly. When my dad met her, he called her the Leprechaun. But even though she mostly
stayed
charming, and kept it together, I worried that when she had too much to drink she’d tip over into something kind of . . . embarrassing.

“And it did happen sometimes. Like, once, when Marissa Scherr came over, my mom was laughing too hard at everything we said, and Marissa noticed, and said, ‘Your mom is weird. She laughs too much.’ So l told her the dumbest thing. I said, ‘Oh, she had laughing gas at the dentist today.’ Which didn’t even make any sense.

“But it was pretty rare for my mom to actually embarrass us. I’d think to myself,
Please let this be okay,
when friends came over, or when she showed up for my school play. And usually it
was
okay. She was
appropriate.
I told myself that I could relax, that I didn’t have to do that walking-on-eggshells thing.

“It was mostly in the summer that my sisters and I got worried. Because in the summer we moved out to our house in Southampton. You know, the Hamptons.”

“Oh, give me a break,” says Griffin.

“Our house was right on the ocean,” Casey says, ignoring him, “and it even had a name: Treasure Tide. Every summer we swam all day, and made bonfires on the beach at night. My dad had to work during the week, so he could only come out on weekends. He didn’t even mind. I knew he’d rather be in the office screaming on the phone to Hong Kong than lying on the sand under an umbrella. So in the summer, it was just Mom and me and my sisters, Emma and Rachel. And that was where things got sticky.”

It almost seems as though that’s the end of Casey’s story and she’s not going to tell us anything more than this.

“Explain,” says Griffin.

“Mom did all the driving.”

Now I see where this is heading.

“It was the summer before last, and we’d been at the beach at night,” she says. “It was one of those August nights that are so suffocating the only place you can bear to be is by the water. We went to our friends’, the Brennigans, who live only half a mile away. We’d built this bonfire, and we roasted wieners, and the little kids were going around saying the word
wiener
over and over, like it was hilarious. And afterward, all the parents headed back to the Brennigans’ porch, while the teenagers stayed on the beach.

“Jacob Brennigan, the oldest, had been flirting with me since we were kids. And I always flirted back, but we were never really sure what to do with our relationship. Once, like a year earlier, we’d hooked up at a party. He was a very good kisser, and it was this really nice moment. That night on the beach he was chasing me along the shore, and I was running.”

It’s hard to picture Casey Cramer running, but of course, in this story, there’s no wheelchair. In this story, nothing is wrong with her yet. The night in August that she’s telling us about was the moment right before everything in her life changed. Her freckled legs took her across the sand, running away from Jacob Brennigan. Casey continues to tell her story of how she ran and ran, and how when she looked over her shoulder she saw that he’d given up and stopped chasing her. She was way too fast for him, and she stood down by the water, her hands on her hips, letting her heart slow.

“I remember thinking that I could outrun this boy I’d known forever,” Casey says. “I liked him, but I didn’t want him to catch me. I felt like an Olympic runner. And then my sisters started shouting that it was time to leave. So I jogged back to the Brennigans’ under these amazing stars, and we said good night to everyone, including Jacob, who gave me this meaningful look.

“And then my sisters and my mom and I piled into the car. It was only a half-mile drive. It was nothing! I could feel the sand on my bare feet, and the bottoms of my jeans were all wet, and my mom was saying, ‘Did you girls have a good time tonight? Because
I
did.’

“Emma was being a pain in the ass. She said, ‘Mom, I don’t think you should drive. You had a lot to drink; I can hear it in your voice. You should ask Mr. Brennigan to drive us home in their SUV, and we can come get the car tomorrow.’

“And my mom said, ‘For God’s sake, Emma, I’m
fine.
’ My sister just kept saying it wasn’t a good idea. And I thought she was being ridiculous too. ‘All right, we’ll put it to a vote,’ my mom said.

Rachel said she didn’t think it was a big deal if Mom drove. It was a split vote. So it was up to me to decide. ‘You’re the tiebreaker, Casey,’ my mom said.

“And because my feet were all sandy and I was getting cold, I said, ‘Let Mom drive.’

“And she said, ‘Thank you, Casey girl.’ That’s what she called me a lot. I was sitting up front in the car, next to her. I was nervous, because Mom had that
way
about her. Everything was just a little too much, you know? And she started the engine and turned on the radio, and a Beatles’ song came on. And right away she said, ‘Ooh, I love this song! Just listen to the beautiful French horn solo in the middle.’

“She was too excited by it; I knew that. But I also knew how much she loves the Beatles, and here was this song on the radio, so why shouldn’t she enjoy it? Those are the songs my mom loves the best, because they remind her of when she was young. And she would always tell us how much she loved being young. Staying out late, being kind of wild. She missed all that when she got older and got married and settled down.

“So my mom was singing along. And she was happy, and we were too, all of us except Emma, I guess—and suddenly there was this loud
thump
, and then the feeling of flying, but
bad
flying. And then I felt as if I’d been socked in the head, and I heard glass breaking, and someone shrieking. Someone who turned out to be me. And then I blacked out.”

Casey stops there. None of us speaks or breathes.

“Okay, at ease,” she says. “That’s it. The story of how I became a cripple.”

Sierra, Marc, Griffin, and I are all silent. There’s not a thing we can say. I’ve never had friends with problems like these. The worst friend-problem I’d ever dealt with was a blowup between Hannah and Ryan about whether it was okay for Ryan to carry a condom in his pocket, “for when you change your mind.” Hannah was insulted, and Jenna and I had to stay up all night with her while she cried and texted him every ten seconds. But I could handle that.

I’m in way over my head now.

“My mom had driven us into a stone wall,” Casey goes on. “Everyone else in the car was fine. But I hadn’t been wearing my seat belt—I mean, it was only a five-minute drive—and I’d slammed into the windshield. I severed my spinal cord and experienced trauma to my head.”

There’s that word
trauma
again. It’s everywhere at The Wooden Barn.

“The airbag was faulty; it didn’t go off,” says Casey. “I was airlifted to the city, and I was in a coma for three days. Finally I woke up, and my parents were right over me in the bed, and they were both crying.

“I heard one of the nurses say, ‘Well, at least it won’t be manslaughter,’ but I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“As I recovered, I learned two things: One, I’d never walk again; and two, my mom’s blood alcohol level was way over the legal limit. She hadn’t been ‘tipsy’ when she drove us home. She’d been totally trashed.

“And then I remembered that I’d been the tiebreaker. Mom went to a court-ordered drug and alcohol rehab for a few months, and I went to a very different rehab. Sedgefield. It wasn’t that the doctors and nurses thought I’d walk again. They just wanted to teach me to get back my upper body strength, and use the wheelchair well.

“It was the grimmest place on earth. Pretty much everyone in my unit had had some kind of accident or disease. One lady was there because she’d gone to have the fat sucked out of her stomach so she could look good in a bikini when she went to Bermuda, and she woke up paralyzed. We were all so pathetic, sitting or lying in our bathrobes all day, drinking little containers of warm apple juice, making houses out of playing cards, and watching
Law & Order
. After I got out of Sedgefield, I didn’t stay in touch with any of those people. It was too depressing. They group e-mailed each other a lot, but I never joined in.

“And at home, my mom kept saying, ‘Casey girl, will you ever forgive me?’ She was totally sober now, and she was horrified at what she’d done. In her rehab they’d made her face everything. It was brutal. And here’s the thing: I forgave her right away. She’d just gotten so used to drinking all the time, and to people thinking she was this sweet, tipsy little leprechaun. I couldn’t be mad at her.

“I went back to school, but it was hard to focus. There was a party one night, and some kids from the boys’ school came. That was the first time I’d seen Jacob Brennigan since the accident. There he was, standing with his friends. He looked way uncomfortable seeing me in my wheelchair. One of his friends started whispering, and pushing him toward me. It was so awkward.

“He came over and said, ‘Hey,’ but he could barely look at me.

“I said, ‘Hey, Jacob. What’s up?’

“And he said, ‘Not much. I’m glad you’re out of the hospital. Well, I’d better go.’

“And that was it. The last time Jacob ever spoke to me. I’d been the cute girl he’d flirted with since we were kids, and now I was the crippled girl he couldn’t deal with.

“Everyone felt sorry for me, and no one treated me normally. My friends had to wait for me to take the wheelchair lift to leave school at the end of the day, and sometimes it took forever to find the lady in the front office who had the key. I started doing reckless things, like once I positioned my chair at the top of the hill on Eighty-Ninth Street that was closed to traffic during the school day, and I just let ’er rip.

“That was when my parents decided to send me to The Wooden Barn. And I guess it’s been sort of helpful so far. But then, the other night, I had one of those visions that Sierra described. Except what
I
saw, obviously, was different.”

“Tell us,” says Sierra.

“Okay,” Casey begins. “Here’s the situation. I’m at my desk, and I’m writing in my journal, and as I write, I feel like I might
hurl,
which—fun fact—is the thing that happens to me whenever I try to read or write in a car. And I look up and I see that I’m not at my desk anymore, but I’m actually
in
a car.
”

She pauses, then says, “It’s nighttime, and I’m in the passenger seat. I realize that something’s happening to my brain. But then I know that I’ve been in this exact scene before, this exact moment. And I know when. I make a move to cross my legs, which are cold, my feet all dusted with sand, the bottom of my jeans damp. And my legs are
fine,
they move like normal. My mom and my sisters and I are singing along with the Beatles on the radio, and I think how lucky I am to be who I am. My family is great. Jacob and I are into each other. And the moment lasts. It doesn’t end after half a mile with my drunk mom plowing into a wall.

“I touch my legs and I can
feel
them; there’s total sensation there. They aren’t paralyzed, nothing bad has happened, and we’re just driving down the road. And I say to my mom, ‘Things are going to be okay, right? They’re going to be just the same as always?’

“She turns to me, and she doesn’t have that silly, tipsy expression on her face, but instead she looks calm and serious, and she says, ‘Let’s not worry about the future, Casey girl. Let’s just enjoy this moment.’

“So I don’t say another thing, and we just keep driving, and the wind is in my hair, and the road seems to go on forever, and so does the Beatles song. At one point my mom stops the car and I get out and go running along the side of the road, and she starts the engine again and I keep pace with her. I’m so fast, and my legs are strong. Then I get back in the car and I can still feel my legs kind of pulsing with life, I guess you’d say.