Belzhar

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

  CHAPTER

  20

  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.”

  “I can’t believe you’re saying this” was all I could tell him. And then, even more desperately, I asked, “You don’t love me?”

  “What is it you don’t understand about what he’s been saying?” said Dana, practically shrieking. “He’s not in love with you!”

  “You’re not?” I asked him.

  “No,” said Reeve.

  “You’ve never been in love with me? Not even that night at the party?”

  “Christ, it was a hookup. I was tight.” Drunk, that means, in England.

  “But . . . the jar of jam,” I persisted.

  “What jar of jam?”

  “That you brought. The Tiptree Little Scarlet Strawberry.”

  He looked baffled. “What did that have to do with you?” he said. Then, “Wait, because of your name, is that it?”

  I just stared and stared at him. We were out here in the wind and he was saying he didn’t love me and never had. Even the jar of jam wasn’t about me. Nothing was.

  Reeve Maxfield had never loved me. He’d said it, and he couldn’t unsay it, and I could never unhear it either. And now the world turned instantly sharp edged and unlivable.

  So in that swift moment of epiphany, forty-one days after we’d first met, Reeve became dead to me. It was just easier that way.

  If he wasn’t in love with me, then I could make myself certain that he could never be in love with anyone else.

 
He didn’t love me, so I closed my eyes and killed him in my mind. It was as violent as anything, as shocking as a plane exploding midair. It made a boom sound that shuddered inside me and sent my image of Reeve lurching and pinwheeling through empty space.

  Being rejected by him was the worst feeling I’d ever known. But now in my mind he was dead, which was traumatic too. But it was the only way to cope.

  I felt the sensation of his death rip through me, and almost instantly it felt as true as anything. Even though, of course, I knew that it was just a “story” I was telling myself because the truth was unbearable.

  I turned around and walked away in the wind. And as I did I heard Dana say, “Good-bye and good riddance, you psycho loser.”

  At which point I turned back and screamed, “I’m the psycho loser? That’s hilarious coming from you, someone who feels good about herself only when she’s being cruel to other people!”

  I didn’t even stick around to hear what she said in reply. Her words were swallowed up by the wind, and Reeve was already dead and swallowed up by my humiliation and then my grief.

  I went home and lay in bed with the light off and all my clothes on, even my Vans. My parents were still at work in the gloom of this windy fall afternoon. Leo stood next to my bed and said, “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “Lying in bed in a dark room. Can you start dinner? Mom left a note saying you’re supposed to make couscous. And preheat the oven for the chicken. And that you’re supposed to spend time with me.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “You can’t what? Make the couscous or preheat the oven or spend time with me?”

  “Get out of my room, Leo,” I said.

  But my little brother just stood there, and he began to look worried. “Are you sick?” he asked.