Belzhar (2 page)

“This summer I even wrote a special sucking-up note to her saying how important it was to me to be allowed to take the class this fall. I said that when I got to college I wanted to be an English major, and that ‘if I was lucky enough to be accepted into Special Topics, it would surely send me on my way.’ I actually used those ass-kissing words. But they didn’t work. I got put in regular English, just like almost everybody else. It’s a total joke.”

“Well,” I say, “you’re probably lucky that you didn’t get in.”

“That’s the same thing people always say,” DJ says, irritated. “And it just makes me want to be in it more. By the way, it’s one semester long. It ends right before Christmas break. And you only read one writer.”

“One writer the whole semester?”

“Yeah. It changes each time. Mrs. Quenell is really old,” DJ goes on. “She’s one of the only teachers at The Wooden Barn who’s called ‘Mrs.’ On the first day of class, every other teacher says ‘Call me Heather’ or ‘Call me Ishmael,’ in this we’re-your-best-friends-and-you-can-tell-us-anythingway. But not Mrs. Quenell. And here’s another weird thing: Some people get into her class who didn’t even
apply
. Like, apparently, you. There are usually only five or six people in it. It’s the smallest, most elite class in the entire school.”

“Feel free to take my place,” I say.

“I wish I could. During the semester, everyone in the class acts like it’s no big deal. But then when it’s over, they say things about how it changed their lives. I’m dying to know in what way it changed their lives. But it’s not like you can ask anyone about it now, because no one who was in that class is still at school. It’s mixed grades, but the last of them graduated or left. I swear, it’s like one of those secret societies.” DJ looks me over with an expression that’s partly impressed, and partly hostile, and says, “So. Tell me. What’s so special about you?”

I think about this for a second. “Nothing,” I say. Reeve was the most special thing that ever happened to me. Now I’m just an apathetic, long-haired girl who doesn’t care about anything except my own grief. I have no idea why I was chosen to be in Mrs. Quenell’s Special Topics in English. I don’t even
want
to be in an advanced class where you obviously have to work extra hard to do well. I’d rather be allowed to hang out in the back of a classroom all year and get some sleep while the teacher gets all worked up and about to have a stroke over whether or not
Huckleberry Finn
is racist.

Instead, I’m probably going to have to “participate.” But I don’t want to participate in anything. The world can go on without me and just leave me alone to close my eyes and rest during the school day. Apparently The Wooden Barn didn’t get that message.

But DJ, who doesn’t get the message that I want to be left alone either, makes me get out of bed and get dressed. “Up,” she says, making getting-up motions with her hands. Her nails, I notice, are painted grayish green.

“What are you, my mommy?” I ask.

“No, your roommate.”

“I didn’t know that getting me up was your job,” I say coldly.

“Well, now you know,” says DJ. Despite her appearance and the snaky way she behaved when my parents dropped me off, she seems very involved in being a roommate. She manages to get me out of bed, and even insists that I eat a little something before Special Topics in English begins. “You want your mind to be sharp,” she says.

“Not really.”

“Believe me, you do. Here. Eat.” This, of course, is deeply ironic—the food-issues girl urging her non-food-issues roommate to eat—but DJ doesn’t seem to notice. She’s reached under her mattress and pulled out a flattened s’mores-flavored granola bar.

I take the bar and wolf it down, though it tastes like old compacted dirt shot through with little bits of gravel. I don’t ask her why I ought to listen to her when I don’t know her at all, except to see that she must be a genuinely screwed-up person to have landed at The Wooden Barn. But then again, I must be one too.

“It’s for the best,” my dad had said a few nights earlier, when I was packing the trunk that I used to take to Camp Swaying Spruce every summer.

Then my mom, who always blurts out the truth when she’s under stress, added, “We don’t know what else to do with you, babe!”

So now, having been banished to The Wooden Barn, and having eaten a flattened, tasteless granola bar, my roommate, DJ, hustles me outside. The leaf-bright campus is actually pretty, though I still don’t care. Fine, so instead of living in a pale blue suburban ranch house at 11 Gooseberry Lane in Crampton, New Jersey, my half-dead self now lives on the campus of an abnormal New England boarding school that’s made to look like a normal one. There are plenty of trees, winding paths, and kids with backpacks.

“See this building?” DJ says, pointing to a big red wooden structure. “It used to be a barn—that’s where the school got its name,
duh
—but now it’s where a lot of classes are held. It’s the nicest of all the buildings. Of course, Special Topics is held here.” She leads me inside and takes me down a long hall. The old, polished wooden floors creak and groan under our feet. People are wandering around, killing time before class.

“Yo, DJ, you in Perrino’s section A physics?” a boy calls to her.

“Yeah,” she says suspiciously. “Why?”

“I’m in it too.”

“What a staggering coincidence,” she says.

DJ seems popular here, which would never have been the case in Crampton. Then again, it was pretty surprising that I got to be popular there, having spent so many years as one of those interchangeable, long-haired nice girls. But when I started spending time with Reeve, some people in the group of kids that decided which other kids mattered began to pay more attention to me. Everyone noticed the way Reeve sat with me during art class once, and how I sketched him. We sat very close that day, and word got around that there was something between us.

Which explains why Dana Sapol, the girl who probably mattered most at Crampton, and who was never nice to me, had actually looked up from her locker and said, “My parents and Courtney the brat are going to our grandparents’ this Saturday, so it’s par-tay time. You should come. The hottie exchange student will be there.”

I pretended not to think it was a huge deal that she had said this. But of course it was. Dana had had it out for me since the day in second grade when she forgot to wear underpants to school. I only found this out because she hung upside-down on the jungle gym that day, though luckily I was the only one who saw. “Dana, you forgot your
underpants
,” I hissed, blocking her from everyone else’s view.

You’d think she would have been grateful. I saw it before anyone else could see. But instead it was like I suddenly knew something scandalous about her that I could hold over her forever. Not that I ever would have, of course, but it was what she thought. Years passed and Dana’s underpants incident might’ve become something funny that we could have joked around about, but we never did. She just treated me cruelly or ignored me—until now, when suddenly I was invited to her party.

I’d twirled my combination lock and made an expression of only the vaguest interest. As if I didn’t care that I was invited, or as if I didn’t care that Reeve would be there. As if maybe I had something else to do on Saturday night besides some sleepover at Hannah’s or Jenna’s, or a trip to the mall to look at skinny jeans, or a family game night with my parents and Leo. I hadn’t really minded those nights before—I’d even liked them—but all of a sudden I couldn’t believe I’d spent so much time that way.

I just wanted to be with Reeve now. He was all I thought about. He’d said that the Kesmans, his host family, were concerned about him making the “right” friends. This was sort of understandable. The previous year, the Kesmans had hosted a girl from Denmark who did nothing but wear clogs and smoke weed. So when Reeve came to live with them, they went through his luggage looking for illegal substances.

“Or clogs,” Reeve added.

But he wasn’t into substances, and neither was I. “If I want to get all paranoid and scarf down an entire Cadbury Dairy Milk bar and a bag of crisps, I don’t need something herbal to make me do that,” he once said, which I thought was pretty funny.

“‘Cadbury Dairy Milk bar,’” I said. “‘Crisps.’ And pronouncing the ‘h’ in ‘herbal.’ Those British things you say—I love them.”

“‘In hospital,’” said Reeve, continuing to try to amuse me. “‘Flat.’ ‘Bloody hell.’ ‘That’ll be twelve quid.’ ‘Duke and Duchess of Fill-in-the-Bloody-Blank.’”

Standing in the hallway outside my classroom at The Wooden Barn, I’m swimming in thoughts of Reeve—his voice, his face—but DJ puts an end to this. “
Focus
. Class is about to start. You’d better tell me all about it later,” she says, and then she pushes me inside.

“WELCOME, EVERYONE,” SAYS MRS. QUENELL WHEN
all of us are seated around the table. “All of us” is only four people. The class is even smaller than DJ said it would be. To my surprise, there’s no loud, in-your-face bell here to signal that class has begun. I guess people at The Wooden Barn are so fragile that a ringing bell could send them over the edge. Instead, our teacher glances at the extremely small face of the gold watch on her long wrist, and frowns slightly, the way people do when they look at the time.

Mrs. Quenell is like someone’s elegant, graceful grandmother, with hair the color of faded snow, swept back off her face. She must be in her late seventies. She looks up and around at us and says, “I had hoped that everyone would be here promptly at the start of class, but I guess that’s not the case. We have a lot of work to do, so I’d like to begin, even with one student absent.”

I wonder who that student is. Maybe she’s new like me, and doesn’t have a roommate who will get her out of bed and push her into the classroom. She could still be fast asleep right now, wanting everyone to go away, just like I do.

“As you are all well aware, this class is called Special Topics in English,” Mrs. Quenell says. “And now I’d like to go around the room and have you all say your names and a few things about yourselves. Even if you already know one another, remember that I don’t know any of you. Except on paper.”

The three other kids sitting at the oval oak table in this small, bright room include a neatly-pressed type of boy with freshly cut black hair and a striped button-down shirt; a beautiful African American girl with a head of braids with bright little beads at the ends like optical fibers; and a boy whose face is obstructed by a gray hoodie. Not only is the hood up, but he’s got his head resting on his crossed arms, his face turned away from everyone.

Suddenly, as if he knows I’m looking, hoodie boy turns in my direction. The movement is sharp and surprising, like when one of the giant sea turtles at the zoo suddenly decides to turn its head. Unlike a sea turtle, hoodie boy is good-looking, but in a hostile way. You can tell he’d rather be anywhere but here, which is how I feel too, though I hide my feelings better than he does. Detachment is my style, not hostility.

Then the boy yanks down his hood, letting loose his long blond hair. I can imagine him surfing, snowboarding, doing something daring while his hair blows in the wind. So he’s one of
those
people, I think, the reckless kind I’ve never liked. Reeve never liked that kind either.

“The
dudes
have arrived,” Reeve said one day when a few of those boys hulked into the cafeteria together. “They’re here to get their recommended daily allowance of dude protein.”

“Eight million grams of raw shark flesh,” I said.

Now, as I find myself looking at the boy in the hoodie, he gives me a glance that seems to say, “Move along now.”

Flustered, I look elsewhere, gazing out the window and half expecting to see a lone student hurrying late to our class.

Mrs. Quenell motions to the African American girl, who sits to her left. She’s the kind of girl who, when she walks down the street in a city, people from modeling agencies probably come up to her and hand her their business cards, saying, “Call me anytime.” She sits up straight in her chair with the best posture I’ve ever seen on a creature that isn’t a sea horse.

“Why don’t we begin here,” says our teacher.

“Okay,” says the girl after an uncomfortable pause. “I’m Sierra Stokes.” She stops, as though we have all the information we need.

Mrs. Quenell says, “Can you say a little more?”

“I’m from Washington, DC. I’ve been at The Wooden Barn since last spring. Before that,” Sierra adds in a slightly stiff voice, “I was out of school for a while. That’s all, I guess.”

“Thank you,” says Mrs. Quenell, and then she nods to the serious-looking boy. He has one of those square, masculine heads that have probably been square and masculine since he first emerged from his mom’s birth canal.

“I’m Marc Sonnenfeld,” he says, and I think,
debate team
, possibly captain. “I’m from Newton, Massachusetts,” he continues, “and I live with my sister and my mom. I was president of the student council. Also, captain of the debate team.”

Yes.

“But then everything got kind of horrible, and I don’t really know what I’m into anymore.” He pauses, then says, “I guess that’s all.”

“Thank you, Marc,” says Mrs. Quenell. She turns to the blond boy in the hoodie and says, “All right, why don’t you introduce yourself next?” His silence goes on so long that it seems rude, as if maybe he were pretending he didn’t hear her. Then finally he speaks in a voice so soft and flat that I can’t even hear it across the table.

Mrs. Quenell says, “One voice. That’s all we’re given.” No one has any idea what this means, but she seems content to let us remain confused, and wait.

“Um, what?” says Marc.

“We each have only one voice,” says Mrs. Quenell. “And the world is so loud. Sometimes I think that the quiet ones”—she nods toward the rude boy—“have figured out that the best way to get other people’s attention is not to shout, but to whisper. Which makes everyone listen a little harder.”

“That wasn’t what I was doing,” says the boy in a suddenly louder voice. “I was just talking the way I talk. I used to always get told to use my
inside
voice. So now I did. And, what, instead you want my
outside
voice?”

Mrs. Quenell smiles so slightly that I don’t even know if anyone else sees it. “No, just your real voice,” she says. “Whatever that is. I hope we’ll find out.”

Who
is
this teacher? I can’t tell whether she’s being playful or serious. I feel awkward sitting here, and the class is so small that there’s probably no way to hide my awkwardness. There’s no way to hide anything at all when there are so few of us sitting around a table. A whole semester of this will be excruciating. Looking around, I’m pretty sure everyone else feels the same way.

But our teacher acts as if she doesn’t notice that we’re uncomfortable. She’s still looking at hoodie boy, waiting for him to introduce himself properly. When he finally does, it seems to take all his effort. “I’m Griffin Foley,” he says.

Then he stops. That’s
it
?

“Welcome, Griffin,” Mrs. Quenell says, and she waits.

“I’m from a farm a mile and a half away,” he continues. “I always get bad grades in English. I’m just warning you.” Then he sinks back down.

“Thank you,” says Mrs. Quenell. “I’ll consider myself warned.”

Just then the door bangs open, the knob slamming so hard against the wall that I worry it’ll leave a crater. Startled, we all turn at once to see a girl in a wheelchair trying to push herself into the classroom. “Oh, fuck,” she says as her backpack catches the edge of the doorframe.

Everyone around the table, including Mrs. Quenell, jumps up to help, though right away we’re all clearly a little embarrassed at our own extreme show of helpfulness. Sierra gets there first, and she lifts the backpack off the wheelchair and out of the way, and the girl zips inside. She’s small, red-haired, delicate, but she’s in a real state, and the word that comes to mind now is
blazing
.

“I know there’s no excuse for me being late,” the girl says in a nearly hysterical voice. “I don’t want to play the cripple card—oh, excuse me, I mean the
disabled
card. And I don’t want you to tell me it’s perfectly all right that I’m late,” she goes on.

As I look over at our teacher, though, I can see that it’s not all right. The thing is, this girl doesn’t understand it yet. She’s probably heard that all the teachers at The Wooden Barn are really easygoing and gentle with their students, afraid that a single stern word might make them disintegrate. But Mrs. Quenell says, “I won’t tell you that. I would like for it not to happen again. We have a lot to accomplish. I don’t want to waste a second.”

The girl seems startled. I bet usually no one has wanted to upset her, just the way no one has wanted to upset me either.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I haven’t figured this out yet.”

“I understand. But you’ll have to, somehow,” says Mrs. Quenell, which seems a little harsh. “If you go through life like that, you’ll miss out on too much.”

And then I realize—and maybe all of us realize, because as it turns out this girl is new too, like me—that she wasn’t born disabled, and that her wheelchair must be a pretty recent addition. I suddenly really want to know what happened to her. I don’t see a cast on either of her legs, so it’s not a broken bone. But the legs don’t look shriveled up, either, like the Wicked Witch of the East’s right before they disappear under the house. They look like normal legs packed in blue jeans, except they’re clearly not functional.

“But it’s just so hard,” the girl says in a voice that makes her sound very young.

“I know that,” says Mrs. Quenell, more gently now. “
Hard
. You’ve used the perfect word. And I’m a big believer in finding the perfect words. I’ve been that way as long as I can remember.”

She closes her eyes, and I think that she is literally remembering something, dragging up a specific image in her mind from long ago. I wonder if maybe she’s too old to be teaching. Her personality seems a little unpredictable—shifting between impatient and sympathetic.

Mrs. Quenell opens her eyes and says to the girl, “You’ve already learned two things since you’ve been here. One: Lateness—your teacher doesn’t like it. And two: Perfect words—she likes them very much. And now maybe we can all learn something about
you
.”

The girl looks unhappy with this idea. “Like what?”

“We’ve been going around the table and the students have been saying their names and a little something about themselves. Now it’s your turn.”

“I’m Casey Cramer,” the girl says grudgingly. “Casey Clayton Cramer. All
C
s,” she adds.

“What?” says Marc. “Your grades?”

“No.
Casey
.
Clayton
.
Cramer
. They’re all
C
names.”

“Oh,” he says. “Right.”

We all sit there, each of us feeling awkward and incredibly sorry for Casey Cramer, who can’t walk and has already been scolded by our teacher. But we’re also kind of waiting for Casey to say, “The reason I’m in this wheelchair is . . .” But she says nothing like that. She’s done.

Which means, I realize with a light sensation of nausea, I’m the only one who hasn’t spoken.

I don’t have to tell them anything big, I remind myself. Anything about Reeve, or what happened to me. I just have to say the barest little nothing, like everyone else. I just have to throw them a bone.

Mrs. Quenell looks at me with her clear, interested eyes and says, “All right, it’s your turn now.”

She waits. I have no choice in the matter. I can’t say that I’m not in the mood; I’m sure Mrs. Quenell would never put up with that. I gaze downward at the wood grain of the table, which suddenly seems as interesting as Casey Cramer being in a wheelchair. I just stare and stare at it, and finally I look up and start, “Okay, let me see. My name is Jam Gallahue.” Then I stop, hoping that that’s enough to satisfy Mrs. Quenell.

But of course it’s not.

“Go on,” she says.

“Well,” I say, looking down again, “my name is actually Jamaica, which is where my parents went on their honeymoon. And where I was
conceived.
” Marc laughs in embarrassment. “My brother called me Jam when he was little, and it stuck. Oh, and I’m from New Jersey.”

Then I’m done, and I look around, and other than Mrs. Quenell no one seems all that fascinated by what I had to say. We’re all so pathetically awkward: five mismatched students and the teacher who chose us.

And though this would be a good time for her to tell us why we’ve each been chosen—for her to say something like “You may be wondering why you’re here. Well, on your standardized tests, you each showed a special aptitude for reading comprehension”—she doesn’t even try to explain. Instead, she turns her head slightly to take each of us in; it’s as if she were studying us, trying to memorize our faces.

I have rarely felt anyone pay this much attention to me before, outside of my parents and Dr. Margolis and, of course, Reeve. I wonder what she thinks is so interesting. If I were her and I had to sit here looking at us, I would be bored out of my mind.

But Mrs. Quenell glances at me, and then at the rest of the class, as though we’ve all been riveting, and says, “Thank you, Jam, and thank you, everyone. It’s only fair for me to tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Mrs. Quenell. Veronica Quenell, actually, but I prefer being called
Mrs
. If any of you prefer being called
Mr.
or
Miss
, I am happy to oblige.” There’s silence. No, none of us prefer that. “I’ve been teaching at The Wooden Barn since long before you were born,” she continues. “I have certain demands that I place on my students, and I do ask that you meet them. Punctuality, of course, but not just that. Also, hard work, honesty, and openness. Now, you might well be thinking to yourself,
Yes, yes, Mrs. Quenell, I will meet all your demands.
But sometimes the mind shuts itself off, and no learning takes place. Reading does not get done. Assignments do not get met. And when that happens, well, there is no point to our being here.

“But if you do all that I ask of you, I think you will find it very rewarding. I am passionate about teaching this class, which is the only class I now teach, because I am no longer a spring chicken. By which I mean I am no longer
young
. In case, somehow, you hadn’t noticed.” She pauses and looks around at all of us again. “Oh, so then you
have
noticed,” she says with a very faint smile. “Alas. Age is one of those things that none of us can do anything about.” Another pause, then she finally does say, “Some of you are perhaps wondering why you’ve been invited into Special Topics in English.”

“No shit,” bursts out Griffin Foley, and there’s startled laughter around the table. Marc shakes his head. “You made a big mistake with me,” says Griffin.