The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Page A

let out a couple of yips and ran into the house shouting, “I’m going I’m going I’m going.” After the bright white sun on the porch it looked pitch dark in there, and I couldn’t make out a thing. I found myself hugging the senior on watch. When she heard I was going to the Yale Junior Prom she treated me with amazement and respect.
    Oddly enough, things changed in the house after that. The seniors on my floor started speaking to me and every now and then one of them would answer the phone quite spontaneously and nobody made any more nasty loud remarks outside my door about people wasting their golden college days with their noses stuck in a book.
    Well, all during the Junior Prom Buddy treated me like a friend or a cousin.
    We danced about a mile apart the whole time, until during “Auld Lang Syne” he suddenly rested his chin on the top of my head as if he were very tired. Then in the cold, black, three-o’clock wind we walked very slowly the five miles back to the house where I was sleeping in the living room on a couch that was too short because it only cost fifty cents a night instead of two dollars like most of the other places with proper beds.
    I felt dull and flat and full of shattered visions.
    I had imagined Buddy would fall in love with me that weekend and that I wouldn’t have to worry about what I was doing on any more Saturday nights the rest of the year. Just as we approached the house where I was staying Buddy said, “Let’s go up to the chemistry lab.”
    I was aghast. The chemistry lab?”
    â€œYes.” Buddy reached for my hand. There’s a beautiful view up there behind the chemistry lab.”
    And sure enough, there was a sort of hilly place behind the chemistry lab from which you could see the lights of a couple of the houses in New Haven.
    I stood pretending to admire them while Buddy got a good footing on the rough soil. While he kissed me I kept my eyes open and tried to memorize the spacing of the house lights so I would never forget them.
    Finally Buddy stepped back. “Wow!” he said.
    â€œWow what?” I said, surprised. It had been a dry, uninspiring little kiss, and I remember thinking it was too bad both our mouths were so chapped from walking five miles in that cold wind.
    â€œWow, it makes me feel terrific to kiss you.”
    I modestly didn’t say anything.
    â€œI guess you go out with a lot of boys,” Buddy said then.
    â€œWell, I guess I do.” I thought I must have gone out with a different boy for every week in the year.
    â€œWell, I have to study a lot.”
    â€œSo do I,” I put in hastily. “I have to keep my scholarship after all.”
    â€œStill, I think I could manage to see you every third weekend.”
    â€œThat’s nice.” I was almost fainting and dying to get back to college and tell everybody.
    Buddy kissed me again in front of the house steps, and the next fall, when his scholarship to medical school came through, I went there to see him instead of to Yale and it was there I found out how he had fooled me all those years and what a hypocrite he was.
    I found out on the day we saw the baby born.

6
    I had kept begging Buddy to show me some really interesting hospital sights, so one Friday I cut all my classes and came down for a long weekend and he gave me the works.
    I started out by dressing in a white coat and sitting on a tall stool in a room with four cadavers, while Buddy and his friends cut them up. These cadavers were so unhuman-looking they didn’t bother me a bit. They had stiff, leathery, purple-black skin and they smelt like old pickle jars.
    After that, Buddy took me out into a hall where they had some big glass bottles full of babies that had died before they were born. The baby in the first bottle had a large white head bent over a tiny curled-up body the size of a frog. The baby in the next bottle was bigger and the baby next to that one