When We Were Infinite

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  But the whole way back and especially at home I was uneasy. I made up an excuse to message Jason and didn’t hear back, which hopefully just meant he was sleeping, but I couldn’t stop all the what-ifs from blooming like algae into an opaque, toxic cloud.

  I would give anything to be with him right now. I felt the few miles between us, all the closed doors and all the hours until Monday, as a lump in my throat. And for a few minutes, I let myself imagine a world where instead of being alone tonight we were together, and I let myself imagine having some solid and undeniable claim on him, one that meant he wanted me there and welcomed me into all those shadowy places he never let anyone follow him into. I let myself imagine us lying together in the dark.

  But I wasn’t with him, and I didn’t have that claim, and he was out there somewhere and I didn’t know whether he was all right and it was unbearable. It wasn’t quite ten—surely not too late to call a college student. I looked up Evelyn’s number.

  She picked up, which surprised me a little. She’d never struck me as the kind of person who’d take calls from random numbers.

  “Evelyn?” My voice came out higher-pitched than I meant, even higher than what Sunny referred to as my customer service voice when I was talking to people I didn’t know as well, and I cleared my throat. “This is Beth Claire. I don’t know if you remember me—I’m one of Jason’s—”

  “I remember you.”

  “Oh—great. Um, I wanted to talk to you because—well, as Jason’s friends, we’ve just been—we’ve been a little worried about him, and we thought—”

  “Why?”

  “There was kind of—” I swallowed. I sat down on my bed. I could hear my pulse thudding in my ears. “After Thanksgiving, we were at your house, and there was kind of an incident with your dad. And then today, he just seemed—”

  “What do you mean an incident?”

  I somehow hadn’t planned to have to say the words aloud. “Your dad hit him,” I said finally. “It was—it was pretty bad.” She didn’t answer, and I felt the words start to choke me. “But then today he seemed maybe kind of like he did that day, a little bit.”

  “Did something happen today?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Then what exactly made you so worried?”

  What was I supposed to say—that he’d made mistakes while playing? All those things that meant something in our world, that I was attuned to because I cared about him, wouldn’t translate into anything I could say to his sister on the phone. “He seemed upset.”

  She was quiet a long time. Finally, she said, “Did Jason ask you to talk to me?”

  “No, but—”

  “Okay, so—I’m not really sure what we’re doing here.”

  “We were just worried about him.”

  Her voice was sharp. “Well, what do you want me to say?”

  What did I want her to say? That she would know some way to fix things, I guess. Or that somehow things weren’t as bad as they seemed, or that there was some reason I hadn’t considered that, actually, Jason would be fine, or that I didn’t need to worry because she was going to do x, y, and z.

  The silence on the phone splayed out, miring us inside it. My face was burning. Maybe I’d said everything wrong. Sunny or Grace or Brandon should’ve called her instead. After a while, when I’d run through all the other impossible options, I said, “I guess I just thought maybe you should know.”

  The panic set in as soon as I hung up. My hands were shaking. It was hard to remember how just a few minutes ago it had felt like a good idea somehow to call her. Was she going to tell Jason I’d called? He would be furious; he would definitely consider it a betrayal. I’d been counting on her knowing that and caring enough about it not to tell him, but maybe that had been foolish.

  Also, I’d counted on the call being worthwhile. I could live with the unpleasantness as a sacrifice I’d make if it did something for Jason somehow. But obviously that had been naive.

  But maybe Brandon had been partly right—maybe it had been for my own sake that I’d called her. Maybe deep down I’d never expected her to fix it; maybe I just wanted to mark us as caring and involved, doing everything we could. Maybe I’d just wanted an outside witness to how deeply we cared for him.

  That was where Brandon had only been half-right, though. Because I think then I still thought that the sheer force of caring could somehow be enough—that it would matter, that it would change things, in the end.

  * * *

  I told my friends about the failed phone call, but I told them not to tell Jason. He never mentioned it, which I hoped meant Evelyn hadn’t told him, but I couldn’t be sure. He also, of course, never brought up any of the rest of it himself, not Brandon’s birthday or the day at rehearsal, but on Monday we were sitting in our usual spot at lunch, and just before the bell rang Jason cleared his throat.

  “Also, uh,” he said, and reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, “this is from my mom.” From inside his wallet he pulled out four sealed red lai see envelopes with gold embossing, and he handed one to each of us.

  “Ooh!” Grace said. “I love Lunar New Year!”

  I was surprised. It was something Grace’s mother might have done—the way she sent cupcakes for Grace to give us on Valentine’s Day and homemade mochi for New Year’s. But we hardly knew Jason’s mother, and unlike Mrs. Nakamura, we almost never saw her, and Lunar New Year was almost two months away.

  I never knew the correct way to open gifts like that, when the gift was clearly money—it felt strange to open it in front of whomever had given it to me, but equally strange to simply pocket it without looking. So I looked around at the others, but they seemed as lost as I was.

  Finally, Grace smiled, a little awkwardly, and slid open the envelope. Then she jerked back, visibly startled.

  “Jason,” she said. She shook her head. “She shouldn’t…” She trailed off, and Jason looked away. The rest of us peeked inside our own envelopes. There were two hundred-dollar bills inside each one.

  Brandon stuffed the money back in his envelope, out of sight, and he held the envelope gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. “Jason, it’s too much,” he said. “We can’t—”

  “It’s fine,” Jason said, a little shortly.

  “But Jay—”

  “Just—she wanted you to have it.” He was sitting cross-legged, and he clapped his hands loudly on his thighs. It made a hollow sound, like punctuation—an ending. “So,” he said, then stopped.

  All I could think was how that was nearly a thousand dollars between the four of us. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Sunny at a loss for words like this. She had her lips pressed together, and she was blinking quickly, her envelope on the ground in front of her.

  Jason cleared his throat and then folded his arms across his chest, not looking at us. Brandon reached up and rubbed his temples with his thumb and forefinger, and then dropped his hand heavily. My fingertips felt icy, tingling and numb.

  Finally, Grace said, “Well, that was nice of your mother.”

  “Mm,” Jason said.

  “Yeah, tell her thanks,” Sunny murmured.

  “Yep.”

  Brandon was still holding the envelope so it dangled from his fingers, wobbling. He looked a little pale.

  “Well!” Grace said brightly. She straightened and slipped the envelope inside her backpack, out of sight. “You know what you can do with two hundred dollars? I heard an ad on the radio last night, and did you know for two hundred dollars you can have someone supposedly name a star after you? My mom and I were laughing so hard. They send you some dumb little certificate, which I don’t know how you could ever prove which star it was because who’s even in charge of naming stars? Would you rather spend two hundred dollars to have a star named after you or—I can’t even think of another option.”

  Jason laughed gratefully. “How do you know they aren’t just renaming the same star every time?” he said, and Grace said, �
��That’s probably exactly what they do,” and Sunny said, “That assumes there’s even one star they’re somehow in charge of,” and Brandon said, laughing, “Man, you guys are all so cynical,” and Grace said, “If you give me two hundred dollars, I’ll print you a certificate right now that says any star you want is now the Brandon Lin,” and it was okay, we were okay—the moment had passed.

  Still, all that day it was as if the envelope throbbed there in my backpack, like surely everyone in class could see. I thought about my credit card bill, but you weren’t supposed to send cash in the mail, and my mother always took my cash to the bank to deposit for me and I could never explain to her where this much had come from. So I gave the money to the NHS food drive, but sometimes even now I remember Jason’s mother’s face in that window, shrouded by the curtains; I remember everything that happened after, and I wish we’d never taken her money.

  I STILL hadn’t told my mother about Juilliard, so when I turned my application in Tuesday after school I put the fee on my credit card, which still had the balance for the limousine rental. For my essay, even though I knew it would upset him if he knew, I’d written about what had happened with Jason on Brandon’s birthday. I couldn’t shake the irrational anxiety that somehow he’d see it.

  I messaged him right after to ask how everything had gone. He didn’t write back all evening, and I spent it in a quiet state of panic, worrying that somehow his parents had found out or that he’d changed his mind altogether. Around midnight, though, he finally wrote back: I guess fine. You?

  It would be weeks before we heard anything, and in less than a week we had finals, and then it would be the holidays and winter break, and so I thought violin would recede into the background for a little while. But the next day, at the end of rehearsal, Mr. Irving did something that stunned us: he announced that the violin solo in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor, the one we’d play in less than two weeks at our winter show, would be up for audition this year.

  Everyone who wanted to audition, he told us, would play it next Monday at rehearsal. There was a silence, and then whispers, and as we put away our instruments Jason’s face was carefully neutral, his movements very precise. Everyone knew that was supposed to be Jason’s solo. We’d been working on the piece for weeks now—Mr. Irving had adapted the arrangement so that only the second movement was written for a solo, so we’d been rehearsing the first and third—and it had been assigned since the beginning of the year. Probably, knowing Jason, he’d been practicing it for months.

  “That’s weird he decided to do it as an audition,” Grace said after practice when we were all walking together to the parking lot. I stiffened; I’d thought that all of us would politely not mention it. Because without any explanation, what else were we supposed to assume except that Mr. Irving was somehow disappointed in Jason? “And it’s so last-minute, too.”

  “Yeah, what the hell?” Brandon said. “Did he ask you about that, Jay?”

  “No, he didn’t say anything.” Jason shifted his violin case to his other hand. “But of course it’s better to hold auditions. That’s more fair.”

  We were at the parking lot, and Brandon offered to take me home. From the window, I watched Jason walk to his car, holding his violin under his arm like a bulky package. I wished I could go with him; I wished he’d go with us. I said, “You think he’s upset?”

  “Probably,” Brandon said. He looked tired, and maybe a little worried, too. “But then knowing Jay I also could see him legitimately thinking it’s fair. You know? If he deserves it he’ll get it, and if not then he shouldn’t have had it to begin with.”

  “I guess maybe. I just—I’m imagining him at home thinking Mr. Irving thinks he’s not good. Or obsessing over the times he made mistakes, or that review.”

  Brandon winced. “Yeah, I could see it going like that, I guess. Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s the opposite and he has bigger things to worry about.”

  “Well, that’s not exactly better.”

  “But then—I mean, you talked to his sister, right? And she thought everything was fine?”

  “She was annoyed I called. I’m not sure those are the same thing.” I watched the band room, the office, the gym go by out the window as we left campus, the view jostling as we went over the speed bumps at the exit. “It’s weird, though—I mean, the violins aren’t bad this year or anything, but I wouldn’t say overall this is the most talent we’ve ever had. It’s not like when we did the auditions for the first chair it was even that close.”

  “You going to audition for it?”

  “Oh, I—what? I don’t know.” I felt myself reddening. I suppose the question shouldn’t have startled me—I was the second chair, after all—but there was something embarrassing about saying I might want it, like putting on makeup in public or admitting you were on a diet or saying you liked someone who probably didn’t like you back.

  But still. Maybe it was because there was nothing more I could do about Juilliard now but wait, or maybe it was because I knew Juilliard wasn’t a possibility anyway, but when I pictured telling people when I was younger I used to play the violin, the future felt like something to suffer through. The truth, which was as difficult to admit as desire always was, was that I would love to play the solo; maybe it would be something I could hold on to when everything was over.

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t think I’d be very good,” I said. “But also—” I hesitated. “Do you think it would bother Jason? If I did?”

  He thought about it for a while. He turned right onto Bubb and slowed to a stop at Columbus, then shrugged. “If anything, I think he’d think it was weird if you didn’t. Don’t you? You know how much he hates when anyone lets other people win.”

  “You don’t think it’s—I don’t know, doubting him somehow? Or pretentious, kind of?”

  “I mean, I don’t know what the hell Mr. Irving is thinking to just throw it out there like that, and if Jason ever needed a good year it’s right now, but if everyone else is auditioning, it just looks weird if you don’t. And anyway, Beth,” he added, “if I’m being honest, Jason has to know you have a shot. It’s your kind of piece, I think. When it comes to, like, musicality and expression and all that, I think you might be the best.”

  I wondered, I had always wondered, exactly what Jason’s talents meant to him. Sometimes it felt like he held those things apart and didn’t let them touch the core of himself, maybe in the same way he held people distant sometimes. Because I’d never seen him seem truly proud of himself, I’d only seen him duly satisfied; if he got back a test with less than an A, he’d leave it on his desk like a self-reproach, but when he did well he barely glanced at the papers before stuffing them in his backpack. And he was so humble, always more excited about someone else’s accomplishments than his own.

  But maybe he needed those things—the first-chair position, his grades, his SAT scores—so much that he kept that need locked away. Maybe it was like how vital and fragile it felt when Brandon used the word best to describe me. I had never been the best at anything. But when he said it, I saw how it could reshape the world around you, place you somewhere different inside it—how everything else could pale next to it until that felt like the most or the only crucial part of you.

  * * *

  That year a cold front blew in in mid-December. In the mornings, lawns glinted with frost, and the sunlight when it came was thin, and every night when I’d message with my friends for a while before going to sleep I’d huddle in bed, my phone glowing in my blanket cave. One evening at dinner, my mother pulled her fleece tighter around herself and said, “It makes you wish you could fast-forward to summer in Asheville, doesn’t it?” That week we turned in the rest of our college apps, and now it was like being on a plane: I’d been strapped in and propelled from the safety of land, and could only wait to ride it out. I was nervous all the time. The three biggest threats that I saw to our promise were these: that I didn’t get into Berkeley,
because it would mean there was nowhere at all in Northern California I could reasonably go (even Davis was nearly two hours away); that Jason or one of the others got into an Ivy League and wouldn’t turn it down; or that Sunny decided to just do what she’d always said she wanted to and go to LA.

  And then, of course, there was Juilliard. But maybe it didn’t make sense to even think about that.

  I asked Sunny, one night when we’d gone to get boba for the caffeine so we could stay up late studying at her house, if she thought it would be hard to turn down LA. Jason had tutoring and Brandon was at the gym and Grace was helping her mom stage a house in Los Gatos, so it was just the two of us.

  “Just because it’s the thing you’ve always wanted,” I said, as we were driving back to her place. “Like, do you think you’ll be a different person without it? Or you’ll look back and think you made a mistake?”

  “I mean—yeah. There’ll always be a part of me that regrets not going, I think. But also—” She hesitated. She circled her straw around the bottom of her cup. “I keep thinking about what Jason said to me that day in the restaurant. Do you remember that?”

  “Oh, Sun, you can’t let that get to you.” I hated the idea of her thinking about that. “It was just an awful night. He didn’t mean it.”

  “It’s just—when it’s like, a random person you don’t care about, it’s whatever, but when it’s one of your best friends who you’ve known basically all your life—I care what Jason thinks about me, you know?”

  “I’m sure if you asked him right now he’d say something totally different. You can’t keep thinking about it like that.”

  We were in front of her house, and she parked and turned off the car but didn’t get out yet. “It’s just been on my mind a lot. Like I think you—you’re naturally a good person, but I always feel like there’s something inside me that doesn’t let me—put other people first in the same way you do. Like I don’t have that nurturing or giving side of me. And I always try to tell myself it’s just that I’m ambitious, but I don’t think that’s all of it. I think you can be ambitious but still a good person, you know?”