Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer Page B

class for the first time.
    The afternoon in art class when I was drawing on the hill, and he came and sat beside me.
    The night we kissed above Courtney Sapol’s dollhouse.
    The time he showed me a DVD of his favorite old Monty Python sketch about the dead parrot.
    And there were other things we did too, but as the thoughts start to bunch up in my brain, my throat feels kind of choked. And if I don’t stop thinking of the forty-one days, then I might start to cry right here in the middle of this stupid-ass social.
    Stop thinking about him,
I tell myself.
Be social.
    But it’s too hard. There’s no point to being here; it’s insane that they force us. Casey Cramer has shown up late again, parking her wheelchair beside the exit. It doesn’t matter that she can’t dance. No one else here is dancing either. The music blares, and there’s even a disco ball spinning pathetically overhead. What, was someone on staff sent out to a place called Vermont Party Supplies to buy one? But the twirling shards of light from the disco ball only call attention to the fact that we’re all standing around like emotionally fragile lumps.
    “Someone could take a photo of this scene,” Casey says, “and call it ‘Tragedy.’”
    Griffin is standing not too far away. In the low light of the gym at night, with his hood off, his face looks even more sullen than usual, and I wonder why he’s this way—whether he was always like this, or whether it’s the result of whatever brought him here.
    “What are you looking at?”
    Griffin’s voice startles me. “Nothing,” I say, but I
was
still looking at him without even realizing it.
    “Yeah, you were,” he says. “You were looking at me.”
    “I wasn’t,” I insist, and I don’t even know why it’s so important to me to deny it. It’s like the way little kids say to each other, “Was not!” “What did you think,” I say to him, “I was desperate to discover the soulful self inside your hoodie?”
    “Well, whatever,” he says, the most meaningless response in the world. Then he turns and lopes out the door of the gym.
    “What was that about?” Casey asks as we watch him go.
    “No idea.”
    Around us, a few kids have started to move onto the dance floor, and to distract myself from the bad moment with Griffin, I try to focus on the scene. Even though the people here are obviously kind of a mess, some of them still want to take part in these basic human activities. I have no idea why.
    The music gets a little louder and the room fills. Kids form couples or clusters and begin to dance. “So you’re just going to leave him out there?” Casey asks.
    “Who?”
    “Griffin. He went outside.”
    “So he went outside. Fine.”
    “I’m just thinking about what Mrs. Quenell said. About how we should look out for one another. And we all said we would.”
    I don’t really want to deal with Griffin any more than I have to. My feelings would have to be pulled apart and examined. Sometimes in the summer my mom or dad would give me and Leo a job in the kitchen shucking corn. We’d have to remove the silk from between the mosaic of kernels. Pull it out, strand by strand, and it always took forever. This would be like doing that, but with my feelings instead of corn silk, and who wants that?
    In the doorway behind Casey, the outer doors to the gym are open onto the night. And under the outdoor phosphorous light, with his hood up again, Griffin stands hugging himself in the cold.
    Casey’s right, I ought to go out there and say something to him.
    But I take too long to decide what to do, and by the time I’m out on the porch, Griffin is gone. We’re not supposed to leave the social until it’s over, but unlike Marc Sonnenfeld, Griffin isn’t big into rules. If I had my way I’d leave the social too,
and
the school. I’d get on a Greyhound bus late tonight, leaving behind all these people and their sad pasts, and I’d head back home to New Jersey and climb into bed for the