When We Were Infinite

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  “That sounds great,” I said quickly. I was sitting in the back, and I leaned forward toward him, but he didn’t turn around. “I’ll call Sunny and Grace and have them meet us. Where do you—is there anywhere you’d want to go?”

  “I don’t really care.”

  “There’s that sushi place by school,” Brandon said. “Or we could get ramen, maybe, or whatever you want. That izakaya. Anything.”

  “That’s fine,” Jason said. “Anything’s fine.”

  Brandon met my gaze in the rearview mirror. I’d never seen the same fear in his face. “Ebisu?” he said.

  “That’s perfect,” I said, when it was clear Jason wouldn’t answer. Grace and Sunny were probably at Gajung Jip already—it was about ten minutes south—and I texted Grace. Can you meet us at Ebisu instead? I’ll explain later. I knew Grace wouldn’t mind, but Sunny might. It was incomprehensible that their lives, these past moments, had gone on as usual, that they had no idea what had happened. I wondered how many times Jason had thought that about all of us.

  Sunny and Grace were already at Ebisu when we got there. By then the mark on Jason’s face had faded so that he looked more flushed than injured, but Grace peered at him and said, “Jason, what happened to—”

  “Whoa, Grace, new sweater?” Brandon said quickly, loudly, even though she was wearing a wide-striped hoodie that had been one of her staples for years.

  Grace looked at him strangely. “No?”

  Our waitress, a pretty, soft-spoken Japanese girl several years older than us, led us to a table near the front. Jason studied the menu in front of him, quiet, his hands folded in his lap. I watched him breathe, watched the steady, measured rise and fall of his chest. I thought how if he were badly hurt or if he were going to have some sort of breakdown, he wouldn’t be breathing like that; it would be raspy, or erratic. We were good for him, I told myself—he was drawing strength from having us near.

  “So why’d we have to switch restaurants?” Sunny asked after we’d ordered, looking across the table at the three of us. She and Grace were seated on the other side like an interview panel. “Brandon, I thought you wanted barbecue.”

  “Japanese just sounded really good,” Brandon said quickly.

  Sunny raised her eyebrows. “Maybe next time it’ll sound good before we’ve already put our names in at Gajung Jip.”

  “Yeah,” Brandon said, “maybe it will.”

  The waitress returned with steaming bowls of noodles. When she set Jason’s in front of him, he frowned. I saw she’d brought him tempura shrimp udon instead of the vegetarian he’d ordered.

  Jason shoved himself back from the table and slammed his palms against the edge so hard that the teacups rattled and spilled. All around us, heads swiveled to look.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” he snapped.

  We stared. Under the table I felt a knee knock against mine. I knew without looking it was Brandon’s.

  “It’s okay,” I said quickly to the waitress. “He can have mine.” I’d ordered the vegetable udon too, and I slid it across the table to Jason. My hands trembled, and the broth sloshed over the edge. “Jason, here.”

  The waitress looked shaken. She started to say something, but Brandon said, “No, no, it’s fine. It’s fine.” He smiled weakly at her and she hurried off, glancing back over her shoulder once.

  Both Sunny and Grace were still staring at Jason. I should have told them, I thought, somehow, and I tried to catch Sunny’s eye, to signal that she shouldn’t say a word to him. But Jason was staring back at her as though he was daring her to say something.

  She leaned forward toward him, her eyes narrowed. “Jason, what’s wrong with you?”

  Brandon said, quietly, “Sun.” He tried to shake his head at her, but she wasn’t looking at him.

  Jason said, coldly, “What?”

  “What do you mean what?”

  “I mean,” Jason said, “are you saying you take issue with something, Sunny?”

  “What do you—”

  “Really, Sunny?” Jason said. He was smiling, a scary tight smile, his eyes hard. “You of all people are going to try to tell me off right now?”

  “Aaaanyway,” Brandon said. He tried to laugh.

  “No, really,” Jason said. He pushed himself back from the table again and crossed his arms over his chest, and his expression, the clench in his jaw and his narrowed eyes, were so hostile that for a moment he looked just like his father.

  “I want to hear this, Sunny,” he said. “I want to hear how you—you, of all people—can try to take some kind of high road here. Really, tell me.”

  “Jason—”

  “Or maybe you want to talk more about Mike Low’s dead brother making it harder for you to get into college? You know why people always say you’re such a bitch, Sunny?”

  It felt like someone had injected me with ice, or liquid nitrogen; I felt a sharp cold leaking through me. Sunny looked frozen too. “Jason, what’s—”

  “Does anyone else see the irony here?” he demanded. He stretched out his arms like a question mark. I couldn’t look at him. I wanted to find Sunny’s hand under the table. “Does anyone want to tell me I’m wrong? Because I think we all know Sunny—”

  “You guys!” Grace said suddenly. “There’s a Band-Aid in my soup!”

  I wrested my gaze from Jason and Sunny and turned to Grace, blinking. It felt like I imagined it would to manually shift gears, to jerk mechanics into place. Grace held up the Band-Aid with her chopsticks; it was wrapped in a hollow ring, used.

  “Man, disgusting,” Brandon said, and his voice cracked.

  “Wow, Brandon,” I said. I tried to keep my voice light and mocking, though I wasn’t someone who had ever been good at teasing and perhaps now I was coming across badly, not jokingly at all. “How old are you turning—thirteen?”

  I’d startled him; his eyes opened wider, a little. But he forced a smile and a quick, barking laugh. “Beth, I give you a ride, and you break my heart,” he said. He held his fists next to each other in front of his chest and pantomimed snapping something—his heart, I supposed—in two.

  Sunny said nothing. I willed her not to cry.

  The moment was long over, was beginning to fade into another, but I said, “Yeah, you know me.” After that none of us could think of anything to say, and the quiet settled in around us like ash. I looked sideways at Brandon. Beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead, just below his hairline. Across the restaurant, the door opened, and we heard the little bell above the door jingle.

  Jason stood. His chair screeched across the floor as he pushed it back. “Excuse me,” he said, and for a brief, terrible moment I thought he was going to leave, that we’d have to follow him, to force ourselves on him, but we watched him go to the back of the restaurant toward the restrooms instead. When he was out of earshot, Brandon let out a long breath, his shoulders slumping. To Grace, he said, “Thank God you had that Band-Aid in your soup.”

  “It was mine,” she said. “I dropped it in when no one was looking.”

  Brandon laughed, a little hysterically. Sunny didn’t laugh with him.

  “Sun,” I said, “are you okay?”

  She swiveled her head toward me, but her eyes didn’t quite follow. “Is that what you all think of me?”

  “Sunny, no, you know better,” Grace said quickly. She reached up and brushed Sunny’s hair across her forehead, the gesture soothing and motherly. “I don’t know what’s wrong with Jason, but you can’t listen to—”

  “I know people say that about me,” Sunny said, slowly, as though she hadn’t heard Grace. “But you guys know me. I thought Jason—”

  “Sun, when we went over to Jason’s, his dad—things were really bad.” Brandon swallowed, then looked at the table. It was selfish, but I wanted him to keep talking. If he didn’t, then Sunny would turn to me, would expect me to fill in, and I didn’t feel like I was getting enough air to talk. “He didn’t mean it. Don’t take it personally.”<
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  She surprised me; she sat back, and said, quietly, “Okay.” Watching her close her eyes and breathe deeply, her breaths a little jagged, I reminded myself that she and Jason had been friends longer even than I’d known them—that friendships didn’t happen by accident, and that whatever reasons Sunny and Jason were friends already still held true. She wiped her hands on her napkin, then blotted at her eyes. I reached across the table to pat her hand.

  Grace said, “Is he okay, Brandon? Do you want me to call my mom?”

  But then we glanced up and Jason was walking back toward us, and my heart clanged like a bell against my rib cage, and I said, “We’ll tell you later.”

  Things were better when Jason came back; for the rest of our meal, he stirred at his soup and smiled vaguely at things the rest of us said. It was Grace who carried the conversation that day, chattering about how impossible it was to shop for her little brother for Christmas. Sunny was quieter than usual, but I saw how she made an effort, forcing herself to laugh. And I loved her for showing that sort of grace without yet knowing why it was being asked of her.

  We finished eating. Most of us had barely touched our meals, except for Jason, who had eaten the entire contents of his bowl, even the sweet potato, which I knew he hated. After we paid the check, Brandon lingered a moment, and as the rest of us were walking away I saw him slip a few more bills under our receipt.

  In the car, Jason closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the headrest. It was almost suffocating being there, the silence. When we’d pulled out of the parking lot and back onto the road, Jason murmured, his eyes still closed, “I’m sorry.”

  “What? Why?” I said quickly, and at the same time Brandon said frantically, “No, no, nothing to be sorry about.”

  Jason didn’t answer. I hoped that he knew we understood, that this wasn’t something he’d hold against himself.

  “Jay, do you want to crash at my place tonight?” Brandon offered. “If you wanted to—”

  “No, I shouldn’t. But thanks.” It was the last thing he said that night except for Thanks for the ride when Brandon pulled into his driveway.

  “Here,” Brandon said, “we’ll walk you.” Jason paused, but he let us; we got out of the car and walked on either side of him to the front step. We watched him unlock his door and go inside, and we watched the light in the entryway go on and then switch off again.

  Just before getting into the car, I looked back toward the house. I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but for some reason I felt uneasy about it being there behind me, something like how my mother warned me once, when I was younger and we’d gone to Santa Cruz, Never turn your back on the ocean. I twisted my head to look over my shoulder, and for just a moment, I saw Jason’s mother with her face nearly pressed to the window, watching the two of us make our way to the car. She looked small there, swallowed by the window and the fabric of the curtain, and something about the way she’d been watching us made me think she’d been home listening all that time.

  * * *

  After Jason disappeared inside, Brandon backed out of the driveway, drove the length of three houses, and then pulled over and turned off his car. The silence swirled in around us and descended, coming to settle on our shoulders.

  I wasn’t ready to go home yet. There was still so much for the four of us to talk about together. But Grace had curfew, and Sunny’s parents had already called asking where she was before we left the restaurant, and my mother had sent me a message, too (You should get a good night’s sleep before school starts again!—which seemed like a missive from another universe altogether).

  “God,” Brandon said at last. “We shouldn’t have gone in.” He turned his head toward the window, the tendons in his neck jutting out. “Or I should’ve—God, I can’t believe I just stood there.”

  “You couldn’t have done anything, Brandon. If Jason wanted your help, he would’ve said so.” But I heard again how much it had taken for Jason to say Dad, and I knew it wasn’t true; he couldn’t have asked anything of us at all. “Do you think it’s like that all the time?”

  “It didn’t feel like that was the first time, did it?”

  My hands were shaking, and I pressed them together. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, Brandon was still staring out the window.

  “Jason’s dad thinks he’s wasted his shot at college,” Brandon said, mildly, like we were discussing a news article over lunch, and I was jolted—I’d forgotten, in the moment, that of course Brandon understood everything Jason’s father was saying. “He thinks Jason’s been selfish the past four years. He thinks he’s a failure.”

  “He thinks that about Jason? How can he say—”

  “My dad can be like that too,” Brandon said. “I mean, I don’t know, you come here and you’ve made all these sacrifices and you want to prove yourself and you’ve worked hard your whole life, and if your kid doesn’t live up to that, it’s like, what’s your problem?” His voice was very flat. “It fucks you up to hear it, but I get it, you know? But my dad’s—he’s not like that.”

  “Do you think Jason’s mad at us?” I asked.

  Brandon shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I just wish…” He trailed off.

  I asked, “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “It just—God.” Without warning, he balled his hand into a fist and slammed it so hard into his dashboard that it sounded as though something—plastic, bone, I wasn’t sure—had cracked. The sound reverberated off the walls of his car, and I felt it pass through me like a current, like a finger grazing across a power strip’s exposed prong.

  “Brandon,” I said, “you’re bleeding.”

  He looked down at the line of blood trickling from his knuckles. “Fuck,” he said, calmly, as though it were the requisite response. I handed him a tissue from my purse, and he pressed it to his knuckle. I watched the little splotch of blood seep through.

  We stayed in his car like that for a long time, neither of us speaking. Brandon wadded up the tissue and stuffed it in one of the side pockets on the door, and I thought he might say more. But he was quiet, and it occurred to me to wonder if he was waiting for me to talk too. At last, he said, “It’s late.”

  It was. He started the car and pulled back onto the road, the engine detonating the quiet. We drove past all the other long driveways, the lights shining from all the huge, looming homes, and when we passed the strip mall with the tutoring center and real estate office on Via de Valle, there were still cars in the parking lot, and it was inconceivable that in the outside world nothing had changed. When we passed the row of Victorian homes off Willys Drive, I glanced at Brandon’s hands on the wheel; his knuckle was still bleeding. I drew in a deep breath.

  “You know,” I said, “I think for Jason, just knowing that you’re there makes a huge difference, and—”

  “That’s not enough,” Brandon said tiredly. “You know it’s not enough.”

  He made a left turn onto my street. As we passed under a streetlight, the yellow glow flickered in through the window, and in that quick flash of illumination I thought I saw his eyes pooling, small streams reflected beneath them. But it was dark, and I was still reeling, and so I never was quite sure.

  * * *

  The four of us had agreed to talk the next morning, and we met at Brandon’s at six. In my jacket pocket, I had the dinosaurs, although I knew already we wouldn’t use them today, that it wouldn’t feel right. We were all quiet, bleary-eyed from the hour, and Brandon shut his door and motioned for us to keep our voices down so his parents wouldn’t hear. In his room, there were clothes strewn everywhere and notebooks scattered, like always—“Do you just, like, randomly strip wherever you’re standing?” Sunny had said to him once—and today the mess was somehow comforting. Brandon looked awful, though, dark circles ringing his eyes. I knew I did too.

  We’d all been up late messaging. It had started as a group chat minus Jason, so Brandon and I could tell them the whole story,
which we’d done haltingly, clumsily, and then when Sunny and Grace had gone to sleep Brandon had called me.

  “Just checking on you,” he’d said. “You think you’ll sleep at all?”

  “No, probably not.”

  He’d sighed. “Yeah, same. You doing all right, though?”

  I didn’t bother answering; he knew the answer anyway. “We should’ve done a sleepover or something,” I’d said, even though there was zero chance any of our parents would’ve allowed it on a school night. But being alone here in my room in the dark of night was physically painful—my chest hurt. Already I was dreading hanging up.

  “You want me to stay on the line?” he’d offered. “I can just go on speakerphone and be here in the background while you try to sleep. Virtual sleepover. I’ll probably just binge-watch Netflix anyway.”

  I had felt completely alone before in my life and I would never forget what it was like, but my friends were the reason I could sometimes almost forget. It should’ve been Jason he was waiting up for, not me, but the night felt bearable knowing he was there, the murmur of his show coming softly through the phone until the call had dropped around three.

  “So,” Brandon said now, wadding up a shirt next to him on the floor and then sending it flying toward his closet, “what should we do?”

  I had been awake the whole night agonizing over that. Everything you do, and everything you don’t do, is all woven into the narrative of your life; each choice you make sets the future in motion, even (and perhaps especially) if you don’t feel it at the time. Each action or inaction is a thread pulled into the greater whole. Dozens of times all night, I’d started to message Jason, and then stopped myself. If I wrote to him and he didn’t reply—it would kill me. It was better to not try.

  “We’ll just have to really be there for him,” Grace murmured. She yawned hugely, and then rubbed her eyes. “We’ll have to be real friends for him. I’m sure he needs friends right now.”

  Sunny shot her a look that was equal parts impatient and affectionate. Brandon said, “Okay, but aside from that—I mean, should we tell anyone?”