When We Were Infinite

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  “I guess so? Or I guess I’ll see if he wanted to go with his friends.”

  “Are we all going with dates?” Brandon said. “Maybe I’ll ask—”

  “I don’t think we should,” I said quickly. “We were going together, right? I got us the limo.”

  “Oh,” Grace said, frowning a little, “you did? I didn’t realize that was something we were definitely doing.”

  “I thought we—”

  “Come on, Nakamura, go big or go home,” Brandon said. “It’s Jason’s big night, after all.”

  Jason rolled his eyes. “Beth, how much do we owe you?”

  “You can pay me after.” I was afraid to tell them how much it cost, but it would be easier, afterward, if the night went well; hopefully either Chase wouldn’t come or somehow wouldn’t ruin everything, and it would be a good memory, and it would be worth it.

  * * *

  Sunny wanted to leave a little early for Crafternoon to make sure we weren’t late and the whole time we were driving Grace messaged us screenshots of her and Chase’s conversation, which was almost exclusively him flirting in a way that felt entirely devoid of substance. I wrote back lol and , but as we walked into the building, I said, “I think I’m a bad friend.”

  “Why?”

  We were in a big room papered brightly with posters and paintings, split into different zones: couches, coffee station, bookshelves, a grouping of tables where the craft was set up. We were a few minutes before it was supposed to start, but it had the feel of a room where people had been hanging out for a while. There were maybe twenty people, a diverse-looking group. As we stood there, unsure where to go, a smiling Black man wearing dangling plasticky rainbow heart earrings came over to welcome us.

  “I’m Robert,” he said. “You folks haven’t been here before, have you? Important question—how do you feel about Perler beads?”

  There were two clusters of people bead-making and talking animatedly with one another, and a few people looked up and smiled at us, but after we finished talking to Robert, Sunny led us past them to an empty table. Tubs of Perler beads were set out along with squares of parchment paper and a mismatched selection of irons, and someone had made a sample set of rainbow earrings like the ones Robert was wearing. Something about the way the papers were cut—clearly by hand, but also carefully—made my eyes well up. I think it was imagining someone taking that care for Sunny.

  “Should we go sit with other people?” I said.

  “Maybe in a little bit.” Sunny pulled out one of the plastic pegboards and ran her finger through the beads. “So how come you’re a bad friend?”

  “You don’t want to talk to anyone?”

  “Yeah, I will. What were you saying earlier, though?”

  I told her how my initial reaction to Chase hadn’t been happiness for Grace, how even now I wished we didn’t have to factor him in. It was funny thinking sometimes how much Sunny used to scare me before we were friends—part of the reason I told her everything was that I always trusted that our friendship would matter more to her than even the worst things I told her. “On a scale of one to ten, how guilty should I feel?”

  “Like a negative four.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t think we’re required to, like, hardcore ship her and Chase just yet. He has to prove himself first. Also—” She made a short line of blue beads. “I feel like at least eighty percent of the guys who think they’re in love with Grace couldn’t tell you the first real thing about her. Like, they’re like, ooh, she’s so cute and bubbly, and they build some whole fantasy around that.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not just that I’m worried he isn’t good enough for her.” Although I was; there was no one like Grace, and she deserved more than grocery-store roses by her locker. “It’s also that—you know how it is when you have some specific hope about how something’s going to go?”

  “Yeah, I don’t think you have to beat yourself up over not actively fantasizing about riding in a limo with Chase Hartley for Homecoming,” she said. “You’re just lowkey type A about some things, which is fine. Like—birthdays and stuff.”

  “I’m type A about birthdays? That makes me sound incredibly fun.”

  Sunny laughed. “Fun is overrated. You just always want to make sure everyone’s happy. Seriously, Beth, don’t worry so much. In fact, if anything, you should be pettier. Like, in life.”

  I didn’t want to be pettier. I wanted to be open and generous and uncomplicated, welcomed and embraced by the world. I wanted to be, I guessed, more like Grace—as easy as Grace to love.

  “Anyway,” I said, “You didn’t come here to talk about straight drama. You should go meet people.”

  She immediately pretended to focus on her beading. “Everyone’s so much older.”

  People did look older, but not impossibly so. “What about those people over on the couch?”

  “They’re probably in their twenties. And they all know each other already, and also I’m sure they have more important things to talk about than my extremely bland high school life. I don’t even know what I’d say.”

  It was so unlike her to be insecure. “But you were so excited to come. You shouldn’t come all the way here and then not meet—”

  “Actually, I think I’m ready to go,” she said, pouring her beads back into the tub and standing up abruptly. “Ready?”

  “Wait, Sun—”

  “It’s fine. I’ll come another time. Come on.”

  A few people said goodbye as we were leaving, and I saw Robert register us walking out. He rose to catch up, but Sunny ignored him. In the car, I said, “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” She made a face. “Ugh. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

  “Nothing’s wrong with you at all. Was it not what you wanted?”

  “No, it was exactly what I wanted. That’s the thing.”

  “Well, it’s hard to meet new people.”

  She handed me her phone to put on Google Maps—we always teased her for how she always got directions even to places she knew well in case there was traffic—and a message popped up, from her friend Dayna: Hey Sun, I’m thinking of you. You got this. I’ll check in w you after to hear how it went.

  “I had this really stupid argument with my mom last week,” Sunny said, backing out of the parking space. “I’ve told her like three times what pansexuality is and the other day she was like, okay, well, why don’t you just wait to see who you marry, and then it doesn’t matter who else you like?”

  I winced. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “Nothing. I tried explaining why that’s not how anything works and then she was like, well, it doesn’t matter now because you’re not going to date anyone of any gender until you’re thirty. I was like, okay, Ma, fine, my sexuality is I need to get into college. But it’s been messing with me. Like, obviously being in a relationship or not doesn’t change anything, and I know that, but then I also started spiraling over like—does it count if my life is basically indistinguishable from a straight person’s life? I guess I just started worrying I was a fraud, or not queer enough, or something. And I told myself I’d magically fit in in the right queer space that wasn’t our GSA and then everything would make sense, but then today was like, perfect, and I didn’t even know what to say to anyone.”

  “They would’ve loved you,” I said. “You should go back. They’d be lucky to have you. Anyplace would.”

  She made a grumbling noise, but it was tinged with affection. Still, the rest of the drive she was a little sad, so I was too. Every summer we went to Pride in SF with her—this year Brandon had flown home two days early from his family vacation to be there—and it was always electric and beautiful just to be there together, and I didn’t feel useless in the way I did now. I wished I knew all the right things to say.

  Or maybe my wish was bigger than that; maybe it was more about the pressing sense of insufficiency. I wanted her to have everything, and I wanted us to be home for h
er—not her non-queer friends or her in-person friends or her friends from home; her friends, full stop, without qualification. I wanted to always be enough.

  * * *

  For Thanksgiving, as we’d done the past six years, my mother and I went to Boston Market. Before we’d left, I’d spent ten minutes staring at my open closet, trying to decide whether it was worse to look like I’d just rolled out of bed or like I had actually gotten dressed up to go get takeout. Oh, tough call, Sunny said, when I messaged her and Grace about it. I think dressed up. My father usually went to Idaho for Thanksgiving. I’d texted him earlier that day with a picture of my common app, and I’d edited the picture so UC Berkeley was highlighted. He’d written back right away: great news, keep me posted. Then he added, See you for Christmas Eve, if not sooner, and all day I carried that around with me, the or sooner clanging against my heart.

  My mother and I selected two servings of turkey and four side dishes. When we got home, I set the bag down on the table and started to open it, but my mother said, “Oh, Beth—let’s at least put everything on plates.”

  I closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t glare. “Why?”

  “It’ll look nicer. Here, bring the bag back into the kitchen. It’ll feel more like Thanksgiving this way.”

  She plopped all the side dishes onto salad plates and arranged them around a mini pumpkin she’d bought the week before. She’d gotten a bottle of sparkling apple cider, and she poured some in wineglasses as we ate.

  “I thought,” she said, and cleared her throat, “that it would be nice to say what we’re thankful for.”

  I chewed a piece of turkey. It was dry and salty, tough between my teeth.

  “I’m thankful for a stable job and a roof over our heads and food,” she said. “And for Asheville to look forward to. And most of all, I’m thankful for such a wonderful, beautiful daughter.” She smiled at me. “A beautiful daughter almost in college.”

  I swallowed the turkey and reached for my cider. My face was burning. I should have watched more carefully when my father was still here, I told myself. I should have watched exactly what she’d done to drive him out, so that I could make sure I never made the same mistakes.

  “What about you, Beth?” she said softly. “What are you thankful for?”

  I looked at her smooth, pale face and tried to picture my father looking at her the same way, noting her short eyelashes and the way her skin without blush was flat and shadowy, the wrinkles forming under her eyes. I felt something ugly bubbling up. “My friends.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Of course. You’re a very good friend to them too.” She studied a few stray kernels of corn on her plate and pushed at them with her fork, then looked up at me.

  “Your friends…,” she said, and her voice trailed off as though inserting a comma, beginning a list.

  I stood, pushing my chair back so it probably scratched the hardwood floor. “I’m finished,” I announced, though half my plate was still uneaten. “Thank you for dinner.”

  She let me go. Later, I heard her washing the dishes downstairs. Much later, when she was in her room for the night, I was hungry and came downstairs to the kitchen, and when I opened the refrigerator I saw she’d neatly piled all my leftovers in a covered bowl and had affixed a little Post-it note on top that said Beth. I stuck everything in the microwave and burned my tongue on my first bite.

  THE SUNDAY AFTER Thanksgiving was Brandon’s eighteenth birthday, and for the rest of our lives I would think of that day as a curtain, coming down and dividing our lives into two acts.

  It was a beautiful fall day, all the Liquidambar trees lining the streets and the grapevines up in the foothills blazing red against the sharp blue of the sky, and in the morning Grace and I spent two hours drawing and cutting out clothes that looked like Brandon’s for dinosaur figurines to wear. In eighth grade, we’d found The Adventures of King Brandon and Prince T-Rex in Brandon’s room: a comic book he’d made when he was six, in which he was, basically, stronger/more powerful/a better basketball player than anyone else (dinosaur or human) in the land, and we’d been so amused by it that Sunny had made copies for the rest of us. We used to pull them out sometimes at lunch to read aloud while Brandon glowered at us. We’d made little King Brandon and Prince T-Rex figurines by copying the drawings onto Shrinky Dinks, and each year on his birthday we decorated his locker with them. One year, King Brandon and the dinosaurs were eating a box of cookies Grace had baked; another year we did a beach theme, with real sand in a tray. Tomorrow, the dinosaurs would pretend to be Brandon: they would listen to the music he liked, and wear clothes like his, and we were going to get supplies at the restaurant tonight, like chopsticks and napkins with the restaurant’s name, at his birthday dinner.

  This year Brandon wanted to eat Korean barbecue because he was doing some kind of complicated, protein-heavy diet, so we were going to go to Gajung Jip. Brandon was driving Jason and me. He picked me up first, and when I got in he said, “Congrats on being my inaugural I-can-drive-people-around-now ride,” and then we drove the seven minutes to Jason’s. At Jason’s, the door was open a crack. We knocked and no one answered, but Jason was expecting us, so we pushed the door open and went in.

  When we entered I felt my shoulders tightening and my arms pulling in like a shield across my chest. Maybe it was the vibrations in a raised, strained voice, or maybe rage has its own frequency and physical texture. Or maybe I saw Jason and his father faced off the way they were, in the living room, before I even fully registered it.

  Even now, I remember the way it smelled in their home that day, a mix of meat and white pepper and bleach; I remember the pile of newspapers lying by the doorway next to the shoes piled around the shoe rack, the television playing a Mandarin station in the background. I remember that it was cold inside their house and that I wondered distractedly if they, like my mother, refused to turn on the heater, and I remember the jeans and pale yellow sweater Jason was wearing, the sweatpants and faded black long-sleeved shirt his father wore. And I remember how it felt like my organs were being wrung and twisted, a trembling that emerged from somewhere inside and radiated all through me.

  Jason had turned to look when we entered, but Mr. Tsou hadn’t, and for a moment absent of logic, I thought, Maybe they didn’t notice us. His father was breathing heavily, a raspy sound, and when he spoke to Jason again, his voice was careening out of control, almost yelling. He stepped closer to Jason, who took a step back.

  His father broke off. There was a moment of suspension, a moment of waiting, when it seemed as though things might veer off their set trajectory—as though his father might still calm himself, might leave, or might instead erupt. I felt the weight of awful possibility.

  Brandon felt it too. Carefully, he stepped forward and positioned himself so that he was in front of me, and just after he did, Jason said, “Dad—” his voice high and afraid, and then Mr. Tsou struck him, hard, across the face. Jason stumbled backward, his feet making a syncopated, staccato thudding sound on the hardwood floors, before he lost his balance and fell. His father lifted his foot and kicked Jason in the side so that Jason crumpled, the way a sheet of newsprint catching fire seizes and pulls in on itself.

  He stood over Jason for a moment, breathing hard, his hands clenched in fists. And then it was as though he saw Jason for the first time, lying twisted on the floor like that and breathing fast and shallow: Mr. Tsou started, leaning backward, and a look came across his face as though he might be sick. He turned away from his son and left. We listened to the sound of his footsteps falling down the hallway, a door closing somewhere in the back of the house, and then there was a terrible quiet.

  My throat seemed to be catching each breath halfway down so that every attempt at oxygen died somewhere in my throat, and I was growing a little light-headed. The room was wavering around me, arcing and flattening itself out like a cat.

  Brandon composed himself and recovered before I did. He reached down and offered his hand, but Jason p
ushed himself up and stood, unsteadily, on his own. He breathed through his nose, each breath shaky, like his whole chest was trembling. I thought of all those joints and tendons and veins under his skin, how precisely they were arranged and held together.

  “Jason,” Brandon said, “are you okay?”

  “Yep,” Jason said flatly. He coughed twice and then reached up and wiped his forehead; he was sweating, his skin gleaming, and there was a red mark like an ember glowing on his face. “I’m fine.”

  “That was fucked up,” Brandon said desperately. “You aren’t—you’re not hurt? Or—”

  “I’m fine.”

  “No, really, that—” Brandon laughed nervously, a strangled, high-pitched hhhhuhhh sound I’d never heard from him before. “Jason, I had no idea it was that b—”

  “Let’s just go,” Jason said, impatiently. He straightened and strode toward the door. “We’re going to be late.”

  We steadied ourselves, remembered that Sunny and Grace would be waiting at Gajung Jip. And I thought—wildly, graspingly—that maybe he was all right after all. Maybe he was used to this; maybe it was something, like extreme temperatures, to which you could learn to adapt. Because we’d seen Jason slip away before, pull back inside himself, and he wasn’t doing that now. He wanted to go with us, to be around us. Somehow we would make this all right.

  Walking outside, it was like small earthquakes kept erupting underneath us; my legs kept threatening to give out, and my balance was wrecked, like the earth wasn’t holding steady where I needed it. When I glanced backward at the house, I couldn’t focus, and I would have sworn I saw a movement in the curtains.

  In the car, Brandon clutched the steering wheel with both hands until his knuckles went pale and said, “Jason, I should’ve—I don’t know. I should’ve done—”

  “What restaurant are we going to again?” Jason said. “I’m kind of in the mood for Japanese.”