Belzhar

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.”

  “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 l
ook 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.

  CHAPTER

  12

  “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.