* * *
When I was eight, after years of pleading, I’d gotten my ears pierced. I adored my piercings, how grown up they made me look: me, but enhanced. I would admire them in the mirror and carefully sort out my small collection of earrings, and for the first eight weeks, as directed, I’d meticulously turned the earring posts and rinsed my ears with alcohol twice a day. I’d had them in almost half a year when one day I went to remove the backing on my left ear and realized, horrified, that my ear had grown over it entirely. I screamed.
My mother was too afraid to watch and so my father took me to the doctor. He was supposed to be at work, and he was irritated, and I felt the weight of myself pressing against the life he’d wanted. But he held my hand when I cried as the doctor cut into my earlobe, and he patted my hair, and told me I was being brave. He’d never said that to me before. I wanted to keep his praise embedded in my heart. Afterward, the doctor said, sympathetically, to my father, “We see this a lot, you know. Always in young girls—they’re vain, you know, want to look pretty like their friends, but they aren’t responsible enough to take care of themselves yet.” I’d thought my father would defend me—hadn’t he just said I was brave?—but when I looked up at him, I saw in his expression that I’d been wrong: he agreed with the doctor after all.
In that moment I saw myself as he saw me, I understood the shape I took in his life: I was, paradoxically, simultaneously too much and not enough. And all my life since then I had tried to rectify that. I had silently taken instructions on how to be better from everywhere I could glean them: when I was a freshman and my locker was next to where a group of senior guys would laugh and murmur things about girls walking by (too much makeup; too small an ass; not enough makeup; too loud; kind of a bitch because she’d turned one of them down). When I saw movies and all the most desirable women had just a few lines. When Isaac Lin asked Melissa Kim out and she turned him down and everyone was mad at her because she’d embarrassed him, and hurt him, and he was so nice. When someone who’d been in BAYS ten years ago ran for Congress, and I watched both pundits and my father declare her shrill.
Back then I didn’t think he’d ever leave. We were a family; he was my father; I’d thought those things were immutable as eye color or birthplace. And, too, I’d thought I had learned. When I needed something, I went to my mother, and I tried to get better at the games he liked, and I tried not to ask him for things. I tried to erase whatever parts of me were demanding or needy or disagreeable. I tried to take up less space. I’d thought as I got older it would be better, that I would be better, because of how religiously I had devoted myself to not being the wrong kind of girl. But then he’d left, so I understood that I was not in fact better yet. I was, in spite of everything, the same.
And then, miraculously, with my friends I’d been given another chance. I could be someone else with them; I could be the best version of myself. We could build something that mattered, and I could belong with them, and I could shed the ruinous parts of myself that drove people away from me and give all I had.
But now here I was again. And I knew this feeling with Jason: the damning glare of your own inadequacy, how much you hadn’t been enough for someone. You had asked too much and given too little, and you’d nearly lost everything as a result.
* * *
One day that first week back, a few other people from our class came to hang out at lunch. Which happened sometimes, but this time it was because they wanted to talk about Jason. They perched on the edges of the concrete planters and talked about whether there were signs we’d all missed, how awful it could be here, whether it might happen again with anyone else. Vincent Wu, who Jason played tennis with sometimes, said, “I heard he’s not ever coming back to school.”
Sunny frowned. “Where’d you hear that?”
“My mom heard about it.”
“But you’re not talking to Jason, are you?” I said. “It’s just a complete rumor you’re—”
“I’m just saying what I heard.”
“That’s what a rumor is,” I said. My voice came out loud.
“Whoa, whoa,” he said, holding out his hands, “let’s calm down here.”
“Little-known fact!” Grace said cheerfully, ripping open the wrapper of her LÄRABAR. “Girls are allowed to say things, actually,” and because it was Grace, Vincent laughed and tipped an imaginary hat.
“Jason’ll definitely come back, right?” I said when Vincent and the others were gone. Already it seemed an impossible luxury that he used to just be here, with us, all the time.
“Yeah—” Brandon squinted at a big group of sophomores walking by, all with cups of boba from the new place by the freeway. “I do kind of wonder if he just—won’t.”
“Like, ever?” Grace said. “What would he do, just drop out?”
“I don’t know, some kind of independent study or something? I mean, would you want to come back? Everyone here knows too much about everyone else. What if people asked you a bunch of questions or said stupid shit to you, you know?”
“We have to get him to come back,” I said. “Can you imagine if he doesn’t and we never see him, and he’s just at home every day by himself—” I had to stop, the words rising in my throat to choke me. I tried frantically to take deep breaths. I am fine, I told myself, I’m fine, I’m fine, I won’t have a panic attack here. The world was starting to narrow in my vision, but if I closed my eyes they would notice something was wrong. I wondered if they could hear it in my breathing.
“I just remembered I have to go turn something in,” I said, and I got up quickly. My voice came out a little strangled, and Sunny peered at me closely, but she didn’t press it, and I made it to the science wing bathrooms and hid there the rest of lunch in case I threw up, or passed out, slumped against the metal wall of the stall with my fingers pressed to my wrist to track my pulse.
No one said anything, but something else happened with Grace later that day. I was at my locker after school when she appeared behind me and said, “Why didn’t you tell me Chase came to talk to you?”
I closed my locker and turned to her. Chase Hartley felt so thoroughly a part of another, past life that at first I didn’t register her meaning. “What do you mean?”
“Before Homecoming,” she said. “He said he came to talk to you.”
I blinked at her. “Grace, I don’t—what are you getting at?”
“I saw him today and it was really sweet, he said he’d been hearing about Jason and asked if I wanted to talk or anything.”
“Chase asked if you wanted to talk about Jason? To him?”
“And then he asked if that had anything to do with why I couldn’t go to Homecoming.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said yes. And then he said he asked you—”
“Grace, you told him that?”
“He was really sweet about it. He won’t tell anyone.” She tightened her ponytail. “But I can’t believe you never told me how he came to talk to you before Homecoming, Beth! I felt so bad. I didn’t know he was that upset about it. I wish I’d gone with him.”
I was having trouble rooting myself in the conversation we were having. Chase felt entirely inconsequential to me, and I had to struggle through the fog around me to remember even having talked with him. “I don’t really—Grace, we really shouldn’t tell people more about Jason. He’ll be so upset when he comes back and finds out there’re all these rumors flying.”
“Chase won’t tell anyone.”
“How do you know that? And that’s—that’s beside the point. I’m sure he wouldn’t want Chase to know either.”
“I just can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”
“Okay, well, you’d already decided you weren’t going, so it didn’t feel—”
“Yeah, but if I’d known he was going to be that upset, maybe I would have.”
Why were we still talking about him? “Okay, well, I guess I was just more focused on Jason, and considering he almost
died—”
Grace looked stricken. I should’ve been more careful with my tone. I said, tightly, “But since you told Chase everything, he understands now, right? I’m sure it’ll probably be fine.”
On my way back to the parking lot I was afraid to walk by the science wing bathrooms, because I was afraid if I saw them again I’d panic. So I went through the rally court instead, and I saw Chase there loping across the other end with Jacob Rogel. They were laughing about something together, and I felt a surge of fury. If he knew about Jason, because Grace had told him, what was there possibly to find to laugh about right now? I’d been right about Chase, obviously; Grace shouldn’t have told him.
I wanted to be done here. Next year this would all be behind us. We would go somewhere else, away from here, and it would be just the five of us—we could camp out in one of our dorm rooms, and it would be like living together. Maybe some of us could room together—Brandon and Jason could, or maybe Sunny and Grace and I could be in a triple. The only thing that brought me comfort was knowing that we would come out of this stronger. It would bring us together; it would cement things between us permanently. I wouldn’t survive it otherwise—none of us would.
* * *
The first time I heard from Jason was that night. I was in my room after my lesson with Mrs. Nguyen, which had been a disaster. “Your mother pay a lot for these lesson,” she’d told me, not ungently, because it was clear I hadn’t been playing. “Is something wrong?” So now I was supposed to be practicing, as I’d promised her I would. I was holding my violin, but when I looked at the string of notes fanned out across the page, at all the half rests standing out like little gravestones, a whole cemetery contained within the staff, I felt that if I didn’t stop myself I was going to slam my violin to the floor.
Then Jason messaged. When my phone buzzed where it was charging on my desk and I saw his name, it was like a wave crashing over me, a flash of heat that went from my head to my fingertips. My hands were shaking as I entered my password. He’d written, how’s it going?
I put my phone on my bed and burst into sobs. I clutched the phone against my chest and tried to regain control. When I could type again, I wrote, How are you?? How is everything? We miss you so much.
Eh, hanging in. Kind of bored.
Well, boredom wasn’t the worst thing in the world. I don’t know if you got my messages, I wrote.
Sorry, he wrote back. I had to get a new phone.
Of course. I should’ve thought of that—if he’d had it with him, surely it would’ve been ruined. All this time I’d been sending messages to no one, and maybe all this time he’d wondered where we were.
It was only later that I realized he still should’ve gotten all my messages anyway. But I couldn’t let that matter—that was in the past, and at least he was responding now.
The next day, which was early dismissal day, he messaged just before the bell rang to say, what are you guys doing after school?
We had rehearsal, but maybe he’d forgotten. Either way, we’d skip it, obviously.
On the way there, we talked about what we’d say. Grace wanted to just relax, to try to keep things light, but I thought it was critical to know what had happened and why. And I thought we should know now, as soon as possible, especially now that he was back home and out of the hospital’s 24/7 care.
“And he’s, what,” I said, “at home all day, alone? With his parents? Maybe we could set up a rotating schedule so one of is always with him. But also—I really think we have to find out why he did it. That’s the first step.”
“You think he’ll tell us?” Sunny said.
“As opposed to what—just never telling us?”
“I mean, you know how Jason is.”
“He has to tell us. If we don’t know what pushed him over the edge, how do we stop it from happening again? We have to find out.”
Next to me in the back seat, Grace fiddled with the zipper on her backpack. “Maybe we should, like—try to talk to an adult or a counselor or something? Do you think it’s a good idea to try to push him like that?”
You didn’t seem to worry about what was a good idea when you talked to Chase, I thought. “I’m sure it’s not a good idea to just not talk about either.”
“I just feel like I don’t know the right way to handle things.”
There was something clinical in the way she said it. “Well—”
I stopped myself, because I understood something then, all at once, the four of us in the car driving to see him: None of my friends had watched their worlds fall apart before in the same way I had. Because I had spent years of my life dissecting the way things could fall apart, I knew the way a threat could rumble like a fault line when on the surface you could still tell yourself, maybe, that everything was fine. I knew that, I had lived that already, in a way that they hadn’t.
And I could use that now, for Jason, and for all of us. “I just think we need to have a plan,” I said. “Not just for today, but for—well, forever, maybe. We have Berkeley next year, but for the in-between.”
“I guess it’s going to be the elephant in the room anyway,” Brandon said. “We can just see what happens when we see him. Maybe he’ll feel like talking.”
“But I think we should find a way to bring it up, just so we know for next time. So there’s not a next time.”
Brandon hesitated. Finally, he said, “Yeah, maybe, okay.”
“So we’ll just—we’ll wait for the right moment today,” I said. And that would be the beginning; the rest, we’d find our way through.
* * *
When Jason opened the front door, he had on his glasses and sweats, and his hair was longish and his voice was a little scratchy. Seeing him in person felt like a resurrection.
Everyone gave him a hug, and he let us. Brandon was teary. Jason looked, mostly, tired, although less awful than he had at the hospital—his face was normal again, even though his arm was still in a sling. He moved kind of stiffly, like it hurt.
Immediately when we went inside, the smell of the house, astringent like cleaner, tunneled me back to when we’d been here—a lifetime ago—on Brandon’s birthday, and my stomach clenched. Brandon glanced at me, and I knew he, too, was seeing again Mr. Tsou yelling, Jason lying on the ground. We left our shoes by the pile next to the door. It was quiet inside, and as we followed him across the entryway, the marble tiles were cold under my feet. The walls in the entryway were lined with dozens of pictures: Jason and Evelyn as toddlers in a miniature tuxedo and gown at a wedding, Jason and Evelyn in ski gear on top of a mountain, Jason and Evelyn meeting Santa as little kids. Mr. and Mrs. Tsou were in some of the pictures, too.
In the living room, I sat in one of the reclining chairs near the TV, which was as far as possible from where Jason had fallen to the ground. Then I regretted it: Sunny and Brandon and Grace were all on the love seat, and it was small enough that they were pressed together in a way that looked comforting to me. I should’ve tried to sit with them instead.
“Love the picture of you rocking the Pull-Ups there,” Brandon said, smiling a little forcedly, motioning to a framed photo above the fireplace. “Hadn’t mastered potty training yet, huh?”
Jason glanced toward the picture but otherwise didn’t react, and Brandon went quiet. I could see something akin to desperation in his expression.
I didn’t know what to say either. I hadn’t expected it to be this hard.
“Listen, Jay,” he said, quietly, “I don’t really know what to say. Um—but listen, we’re all—”
Jason said, “Can you guys do something for me?”
“Anything,” Brandon said.
“Can we just—pretend it never happened?”
I thought maybe someone would protest, and when no one did, I thought for a moment that I would. Because not only was it ludicrous that Jason would even suggest it, it also seemed counterproductive. How could we be there for him in whatever ways he needed without knowing the full story?
&
nbsp; But maybe Brandon understood something about how much Jason needed that, how much it cost him even to say that much. He said quickly, “Yeah, Jay, of course, of course,” and Grace said cheerfully, “Pretend what never happened?” Sunny said, “Yeah, definitely” too, and Jason looked to me then, like a question, and when he did I could see it took something out of him.
Of course we couldn’t pretend that, not really. The things or the people you try to pretend away are never really gone, just absent—so much glistening negative space, a ghost you’re forever stumbling over in the hall—and of all the things that have ever haunted me, this is perhaps the one that haunts me the most.
And even at the time I knew it would be like that. Making that promise at his house that day, I knew there would be the nightmares of freefall, the nights I jolted awake drenched in sweat, the panic arising at even the shortest of goodbyes. Freshman year in college: I have my fingers pressed to my wrist because I don’t trust my pulse, and a boy who lives across the hall peers at me and says, “Why are you breathing like that?” and my chest squeezes closed like a fist. I am in my TA’s office, still wearing the hospital bracelet they put on me in the emergency room to show her as proof of why I haven’t been to class, and I can’t get a full sentence out without running out of breath but she doesn’t seem to notice, and now whenever I’m with other people all I can think about is whether they’d know how to save me. I am awake the whole night struggling to breathe, each minute a year long. I am in the airport waiting to fly back home after Thanksgiving and I nearly black out at the gate, and then I can’t move, and I miss my flight. Sometimes even now, when I’m crossing a bridge or when I hear the first Christmas song of the year, my heart will start to pound so hard I’m scared it might split my chest wide open, and then I’ll be suffocated with the sense that somewhere, hundreds of miles away, something is terribly wrong.
When We Were Infinite Page 15
