Belzhar (16 page)

I tell him I’m so glad he’s decided to do this. That I think it’s a very good idea.

“If it’s so good,” he says, “then you do it too.”

“Not yet” is all I say.

• • •

At night the auditorium is all decorated for the winter concert, with little lights scattered around, and tinsel in the aisles. I wait backstage with the other Barntones during the jazz band’s performance and then the acoustic guitar duet. Everyone in the a cappella group is dressed in a white shirt, black skirt, and heels. Glancing at myself in the mirror before we’re about to go on, I realize I look slightly older than when I came here. My hair is longer than it’s ever been in my life—halfway down my back—and it shines a little, and my face seems more angular.

Sierra comes out onstage in a black leotard and black silk dance skirt. The program lists her as a soloist for
A Dance for André,
which I’ve seen her practice several times. Now, as the music teacher accompanies her on piano, Sierra performs the ballet again, sometimes dragging around like a person who’s half dead from grief, other times propelled by manic hope. She does a few hip-hop moves too, in a nod to her brother’s dance style. At the end, when she takes a bow, the applause goes on for a long time. Sierra hurries into the wings, where I’m standing. We collide and hug, and her body is boiling from exertion.

“You killed!” I say. “You’re such a big talent.” I know that Sierra will go really far in her life.

Finally, it’s the Barntones’ turn to perform, and though I have no illusions about how talented
we
are (average to above-average), we walk single file onto the stage and into the white spotlight. After all my complaints about the Barntones, I’m actually excited, and though I can’t see anything past the stage, I know Griffin’s out there somewhere.

Later, he’ll tell me all about his final visit to Belzhar, and I’ll praise him for what he’s done. But now he’ll have a chance to hear me sing, and maybe he’ll be a little bit impressed. I wish Reeve could hear me too. But he can’t ever hear me, and in fact he’ll never really know all that much about me.

Adelaide leads us in our three songs, ending in the fast-paced, raplike Gregorian chant. In the audience, several of the youngest boys at the school start to make those howling and woofing sounds, and a whole foot-stomping thing gets started. This room contains two hundred of the most extremely fragile, highly intelligent people around, and we’ve all been cooped up away from our normal lives and our families and technology and civilization for so long that we’re starting to burst out of ourselves. The foot stomping gets louder and louder, shuddering the floor of the auditorium, as if trying to send it crashing down around us.

M
UCH LATER, AFTER PUNCH AND COOKIES AT THE
reception, and after Griffin tells me he went to Belzhar for the last time and that it was a hard thing but he thinks he’s all right now, and after he and I stand with our arms wrapped around each other in the cold night until a teacher pries us apart, I’m sleeping a sleep so deep that I’ve left a little circle of spit on the pillow.

Everything has accelerated in speed and intensity, and I need to be unconscious. No Griffin, no Reeve, no Belzhar, no end of journal, no thoughts about reliving the terrible day back in Crampton. Just sleep. Sleep, and a pool of saliva on the pillow, when voices suddenly break through and wake me up.

“Someone call the nurse. I’ll stay with her!” I hear Jane Ann yell, and I spring up from bed and hurry out of my room to see what’s going on.

“It’s Sierra,” says Maddy from across the hall. She’s standing in a pack of worried, excited girls.

“Same as last time?” I ask.

“No, not a nightmare,” she says. “I heard she’s sick. Like a
seizure
or something.”

I take the stairs two at a time. Several girls are milling around outside Sierra’s door, and I push through even as a bossy senior says, “You can’t go in there, Jam—”

But I’m already in. The room is dim, and Jane Ann and Jenny Vaz, Sierra’s roommate, are standing over Sierra’s bed. Sierra is sitting up with her eyes open, staring straight ahead. One hand is in the air, moving jerkily back and forth.

“Sierra!” I say sharply. There’s no reply. “Sierra, it’s
Jam,
” I say right into her face. Again, no reply, so I turn to Jane Ann frantically and say, “What’s wrong with her?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“Sierra!” I try again, but she doesn’t respond at all. “Oh, come on, Sierra,” I say in a softer voice. “Please don’t do this. Whatever’s going on with you, snap out of it, okay?”

Then I think,
What if this somehow has to do with Belzhar?
I pat the bed around her, lift up the blanket, checking for the journal, but it isn’t there. “Sierra, I need you here,” I tell her. “Come
on
.” I realize that I’ve started to cry a little, and then I can’t stop.

Jane Ann has to come over and put an arm around me and pull me away. “Honey, it’s going to be all right,” she tells me.

“But why can’t she hear me?” I ask, as Sierra remains in her twitchy fog, her face blank, her hand restlessly moving.

“I don’t know. I’m sure the doctors will figure it out.”

“But what if they
can’t
?”

Jane Ann says, a little stiffly, “There’s no reason to believe that’s going to happen.”

But we both understand that what’s wrong with Sierra is obviously very serious. My tears go on and on, and I start to talk obsessively. I tell Jane Ann, “I was much closer to her than even to Hannah Petroski.
Much
closer. It was a really deep friendship. We shared things. Our real feelings. I’ve never had that before at this level.”

And Jane Ann says, “I know,” even though she’s obviously never heard of Hannah Petroski and has no idea of what I’m talking about. I let her pat my back and say kind mom-like words to me. Soon the nurse hurries in, and I quickly move out of the way.

I watch as she removes a few items from her black bag, then crouches down beside Sierra. First she shines a little light in her eyes, then she wraps a blood-pressure cuff around Sierra’s arm and squeezes that bulb thing, and then she takes her temperature with an ear thermometer.

“Sierra, have you taken a drug?” the nurse asks in a very loud voice. “And if so, which one? Ecstasy? Ketamine? PCP?”

“She doesn’t take drugs,” I say, cutting her off. “She
hates
drugs.”

When the nurse is done, she shakes her head and frowns, then murmurs something to Jane Ann that I can’t hear, and finally she says, “I’m calling an ambulance.”

Jane Ann lets me stay with Sierra until the ambulance arrives to take her to the local hospital. “I know you really love her,” she says as I stand helplessly patting Sierra’s shoulder, or occasionally taking her hand in mine—the hand that’s not moving.

“I do,” I say, but already I’m thinking,
I did.

I’ve never seen anyone just disappear so deeply into herself the way Sierra has. When the EMTs arrive, they lower her onto a gurney and fasten the straps with authoritative clicks. Sierra doesn’t resist, and barely seems to notice that she’s being taken away. Her arms are strapped to her sides, and from beneath the blanket I see a tiny bit of motion, and realize that it’s Sierra’s hand, still subtly twitching under there.

Jane Ann says I’m not allowed to go in the ambulance, and that I have to go back to bed now. “I promise to let you know as soon as I hear anything,” she tells me.

But she still looks very upset as she heads out to send the other girls off to bed too. Sierra’s roommate is out in the hall, so I stand alone in the room for an extra few seconds, looking around, and then I go to Sierra’s bed and peer down into the space between the mattress and the wall. It’s narrow and dark, and I can’t see a thing. I plunge my arm in; it barely fits, and my fingertips graze the dusty wooden floor. Suddenly I brush against something.

It’s smooth and cold, and even before I pull it up I know it’s the journal.

I still think it’s possible she was writing in it just before the seizure. Did something go badly wrong in Belzhar, and that’s what this is about? I’m dying to look at the journal right now, but I know I should get out of here. I slip it under my arm, then head quickly back downstairs to my own room.

DJ has miraculously slept though the commotion. So in the darkness, leaning against my study buddy and with my book light switched on, I speed-read through the pages of Sierra’s journal. Her handwriting is so different from mine; it seems much more mature, the words leaping across the page.

Forgive me for invading your privacy, Sierra, I think. But this is an emergency.

I read and read until I find the last entry, which of course begins five pages from the end. The entry is dated tonight. Like Casey and Marc and then Griffin, Sierra made the decision to go back to Belzhar for the last time, even without an actual “plan” in place.

And while she was in Belzhar tonight, she wrote and wrote like she always did, and her last entry describes what happened. She had to relive the night that André went missing, which she’d said she couldn’t bear to do. But who could? Did the experience of losing him all over again send her into shock? Into a permanent seizure?

I see that she filled in the journal to the last line at the bottom, and that there’s no room left.

Her journal is done. This is exactly what she said she didn’t want to do, and yet she’s done it. I squint into the darkness, and read the last paragraph:

Suddenly he stands up and tries to get off the bus, just like when it really happened. And this time, instead of saying, okay, get that cookie dough, I say to him, nah, we’ll make chocolate chip cookies another time. And the light gets dim in the way it always does here, but I hold onto his arm and don’t let go. I have to see if this will work; it’s the only thing I can come up with. In dance class we do improvisations, and this is like one of them. I’m still holding on now, and we’ll see what hap

And there it ends, right in the middle of a sentence. Right in the middle of a word.

Is
that
what happened? When her journal ran out, Sierra held on to André, and was able to stay in Belzhar?

Of course. She’s still there now. Her hand isn’t moving because of some seizure. It’s moving because she’s still somehow writing in her journal, or at least writing in the air.

Sierra tried a frantic experiment in Belzhar; when the light dimmed, she refused to let go of André’s hand. She didn’t even let go when she felt that sharp suck of pressure pulling her away from Belzhar and back toward this world. And she managed to keep her grip on André with one hand. The other hand is the one that’s still writing in an imaginary journal, writing and writing long after the real journal got all filled up.

And maybe, as long as she keeps doing this, she can stay there with him and protect him. He never has to get off that bus, and neither does she.

She doesn’t have to go through her own trauma again, the way Casey and Marc and Griffin went through theirs. But she also has to stay there with André forever.

Sierra’s in Belzhar for good, having given up the chance to get older and dance and have experiences and explore all the possibilities of the world. This world, not the other one.

• • •

I’m agitated for the rest of the night, turning in my bed, flipping the pillow, not knowing what to do. At dawn I finally get an idea, and I become so excited that I hurry downstairs to the pay phone, calling the hospital, asking to speak to someone about Sierra Stokes, who was admitted last night.

The nurse who gets on the line is really nice and doesn’t even question whether this is a legitimate call. To my surprise she agrees with my peculiar and very specific request. “Sure, honey,” she says. “It’s worth a try. We really don’t know what’s going on with this gal.”

So she puts down the phone at the nursing station, and a lot of time passes. Finally she gets back on the line and tells me that she did what I asked, but it didn’t work. She had gone to Sierra’s room, stood over her bed, and followed my instructions, shouting, “Sierra, come out of Belzhar!”

I’d had the idea to try this because I remembered that when I got trapped in that horrible
goat
version of Belzhar after writing in Griffin’s journal, he’d shouted something to me like “Come out of Belzhar!” And it
had
worked
.

But the nurse got no response from her. No sudden spike in alertness. Nothing registered on the monitor. “Sorry, sweetheart,” she tells me over the phone. “No luck.”

I’m all out of ideas.

• • •

In the morning the campus is somber, with everyone whispering at breakfast about the terrible thing that happened to Sierra Stokes in the night. There’s a rumor floating around that Sierra OD’d on Xanax, and had to have her stomach pumped.

Then another rumor starts going around that Sierra had a “major seizure” and is permanently brain damaged. On the oatmeal line, people are talking about what a loss it is. Sierra was such a talented, smart girl, they say, using the past tense. Such an amazing dancer. So intelligent. A real winner.

I just want to scream in their faces, “Shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about!”

A few girls are crying and embracing, even though most of them know Sierra only superficially, because she keeps pretty much to herself with everyone but us. In the dining hall I look for Marc and Casey and Griffin, and I go over to each of them individually and whisper exactly what I’ve figured out.

“She stayed there,” I say. “She held on to André. She’s there right now.” I explain the whole thing, and, like me, their first reaction is shock. But they also understand why she did this.

After breakfast Dr. Gant calls a special assembly for the entire student body. He and the nurse and a couple of teachers get up and give us a talk about relying on one another for companionship and strength when something difficult happens. They remind us that they’re here for us too. By the time the fairly useless assembly is over, we’re running so late that Dr. Gant cancels all first-period classes.

Now that there’s no Special Topics today, the rest of the free period gives the four of us who’ve been grounded a chance to huddle outside in a patch of cold sun and talk a little.

“I don’t blame her for doing it,” Marc says right away. “It makes sense.”

“I don’t blame her either,” says Griffin. “Going back that last time is hard for anyone. It was hard for me.”

“Mysterious you,” says Casey. And I’m reminded that Griffin hasn’t told anyone but me what happened to him in the past. No one else knows about the fire, or what his version of Belzhar is like. And they only know slightly more about me and
my
past. Griffin and I have both remained pretty opaque, and the others have allowed it. I’m grateful to them.

But Sierra told us the whole story. “I think she did the right thing,” Griffin says.

“I just can’t imagine her not being here anymore,” I say. My voice starts to crack apart a little. We’re talking about Sierra as if she’s dead, and has taken her own life.

Griffin puts an arm around me, and I think about how, unlike Sierra, he’s here with me, and he’s not going anywhere. I know it, but I can’t quite believe it. Sometimes you think people will be around forever, and then you lose them with no warning at all.

• • •

In the evening, after a day in which none of us is able to concentrate, our class is driven downtown in a van to attend Mrs. Quenell’s retirement party, which is held in the restaurant of a big old hotel called the Green Mountain Arms. Sierra had really been looking forward to the party; she’d said she was glad to have the opportunity to dress up, and to walk around the room like a normal person at a normal party.

I’d been looking forward to the food; I am beyond sick of meals at The Wooden Barn. It’s basically all quinoa, all the time. And I’d liked the idea of celebrating Mrs. Quenell. We’ve all been granted special permission to leave our rooms for the evening, despite being grounded. Now, of course, none of us is in a party mood at all. Yet here we are.

The hotel is stately and grand. Our teacher looks grand too as she receives guests at the entrance of the glittering restaurant. She wears a red silk blouse and an emerald necklace. Christmas colors. “My wonderful students,” she says, lightly hugging each of us. Behind her I can see glittering silver and candles. Waiters circulate with trays of hors d’oeuvres, and though I’m wearing my best clothes—among the only good clothes I have with me—I feel awkward and unhappy to be here at this party, which is basically a roomful of dressed-up teachers.

“Come in, don’t be shy,” Mrs. Quenell says to us. “Stuff yourselves with canapés. Take some back to the dorms for your poor deprived roommates.” But we hesitate at the door, and she quietly says, “
I know.
”