When We Were Infinite

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  But maybe back then some part of us still thought we knew how to bury things. Or maybe not—maybe it was just that he’d asked something of us when he so rarely asked for anything.

  So I said, “Yes.” We would do this for him: We would inter that night forever in our past, that past we shared, because he’d asked. Because we loved him; because it was all we knew to do.

  WE DIDN’T see Jason much while he was at home, and we didn’t hear from him often either. He had appointments, we knew, but aside from that I couldn’t imagine how he was filling his days. I was afraid to ask him things directly, and so I didn’t ask if he was coming back to school, but with every day that passed it seemed like less of a possibility. I could feel myself unraveling. On weekends and Wednesdays, because we still weren’t doing our breakfasts, I could never sleep in. My pants were all loose on me and I always had a headache and I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be relaxed; all our old familiar places, BAYS and the rally court and Sunny’s car at lunch, had lost their sense of safety.

  I was struggling as the temporary first chair—I sounded awful. My friends told me not to worry, that I sounded great, which I knew was a lie. “You’re trying your best,” Brandon said sympathetically. “Go easy on yourself, you know? It’s a lot.”

  I was checking my email constantly these days—we all were—and I still hadn’t heard from Juilliard. Maybe that wasn’t relevant anyway with Jason gone; maybe he wasn’t in the right place to get news either way, and the five of us staying together at Berkeley felt more vital than ever. And besides that, I still couldn’t play at home, and at BAYS it was rote and flat. But I also thought that if we were invited to audition in person, maybe it would give him something—it could be a reason to push forward, remind him who he was.

  We’d still heard nothing about auditions by the time Brandon told us at lunchtime Jason was coming back tomorrow. I tried not to let it bother me that he’d told Brandon first, and groped around for relief. Tomorrow! It would be better with him back. We could keep a closer watch over him, and there wouldn’t be that emptiness everywhere: in his seat in every classroom, in his seat at BAYS.

  “Do you think it’ll be worse here?” Sunny said. “At least at home he doesn’t have to talk to anyone.”

  “People will be nice,” Grace said.

  “Don’t you think that’s almost worse? If he won’t even talk about it with us, how’s he going to react when all day it’s, like, Eric Hsu or whoever coming up to be like oh, Jason, I’m so sorry, are you okay? I think it’s very possible he’s going to have to relive it over and over all day long for as long as people still think about it when they see him.”

  “But we’ll be here,” I said. “We can head it off. We’ll be a shield.” Coming back would be a minefield, yes, but: Jason was coming back. It was something to celebrate; it was a reason for hope. We would make sure everything went the way he needed, and everything would be good. Everything would be fine.

  * * *

  The morning of Jason’s first day back at school, I wore a dress and curled my hair. I was nervous in a physical, all-consuming way. I’d barely slept all night.

  I waited by his locker, but I didn’t see him before the bell rang, and not knowing quite where he was brought all my thoughts to a yearning, desperate pitch. When I went into first-period AP English, he was there already. He was wearing his glasses, and his hair was a little long, but his arm was out of the sling, and when he saw me come in across the room, he lifted his hand off his desk just a few inches in a small wave.

  To anyone else who didn’t know us, it would’ve looked like such a small thing—just a little gesture, daily, banal. But the room that day didn’t feel big enough to contain what that wave meant: all the things it encompassed, all those years it held.

  * * *

  All day my stomach had been in knots imagining Jason besieged by well-wishers, imagining what it might take to make him snap. If he could just hold on until lunchtime, then it would be just us, and we could order the world as we needed.

  We’d decided we’d have a potluck without calling it that, or calling attention to it; we would, as he’d asked, pretend everything was normal. I rounded the corner to our spot, and everyone but Jason was there already, and my mind was so focused on scanning for him that it took me a moment to register that sitting next to Grace, his backpack slung onto the ground like he belonged there, was Chase Hartley.

  When I hurried over, Chase was in the middle of telling a long and detailed story about his dog escaping and ending up at the neighbor’s pool party. I looked to Sunny—of all of us, she was the most likely candidate to get rid of him—but then Chase said, “So then we were—oh hey, Jason, what’s up? Long time.”

  I’d been so flustered I hadn’t even heard him approach. He sat down next to Sunny. I tried to signal her with my eyes, but she was watching Jason. When I looked at Grace—surely she would tell Chase to leave—she was unwrapping her granola bar, and when she looked up she leaned over and said, “Jason! You’re finally back!” and gave him a side-hug.

  We’d agreed not to make it a big deal, make him the center of attention. There was a roiling in my stomach.

  “Hey, man, it’s good to see you,” Chase said, holding out his hand for Jason to slap. “I heard you were having a rough time. You just gotta, like—keep your head up, you know?”

  For a second an expression I couldn’t quite name flickered over Jason’s face. I went tense. But Jason smiled and slapped his hand against Chase’s. “Yeah, right,” he said easily, and then fell quiet again.

  The silence stretched. We’d planned to focus conversation on light things—inside jokes, do-you-remembers that would make him smile. I started to say, “Do you guys remember when—” but before I could get any further, Chase said, soberly, “Yeah, my uncle has like really bad depression too. He had to be hospitalized a bunch of times, actually.”

  “Oh, that’s so sad,” Grace said. I stared at her, willing her to make eye contact with me. She picked out the dried cranberries in her granola bar, setting them neatly on the cement next to her, and then peered back into her backpack.

  “Yeah,” Brandon said, clearing his throat, “yeah, that sucks. Hey, so did you guys do the take-home test yet for AP Lit?”

  “Not yet,” Sunny said. “How was it?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t done it either.”

  “Same,” I said. “The last one was hard.”

  “Yeah, it was pretty bad.”

  We all tried not to look at Jason. He took a long swallow from his water bottle and then put it back down, tapping his fingers against the lid.

  I couldn’t fathom what Grace had been thinking, or what it would be like to be Chase, to so confidently imagine myself fully welcome in any situation, with any group of people.

  “Okay, well!” I said quickly. “I tried this new cookie recipe last night. Anyone want some?”

  “Whoa, kind of buried the lede there,” Brandon said. “You have cookies, and you’ve been holding out on us? Oh, I got some of those shrimp chips too.”

  “Oh right, our potluck,” Grace said. She pulled out a Tupperware with sliced oranges and strawberries, and Sunny had brought little meatballs on toothpicks. We put them in the middle of our circle, and I rearranged everything just to have something to do with my hands. I still couldn’t look at Jason.

  “Aw, is this like a welcome-back party for Jason?” Chase said. He reached for a cookie. “You guys are such good friends.”

  “No, it’s just—”

  Abruptly, Jason stood up.

  “I have to go check on some stuff with Mrs. Kim,” he said. “I’ll catch you guys later.”

  “Did you want to eat first?” I said.

  “Ah—I’m all right, thank you,” Jason said, very politely. “Maybe if I get back before the bell rings.”

  I looked helplessly at Brandon, but what was there for him to do? “All right, see you soon,” Brandon said, and we watched Jason cross t
he courtyard and head up the stairs at the science wing. I felt like I might be ill. I closed my eyes. My pulse was roaring in my ears.

  “Well, that went well,” Brandon said shortly. He clapped his hands over his knees, his jaw set. “Good talk, everyone.”

  “He probably really did have to talk to Mrs. Kim,” Grace said. “When you’re gone for that long, I’m sure there’s a lot to catch up on.”

  “Yeah,” Chase said, “I had the flu in the fall and I missed like four days and coming back was like, brutal. I’m not even in all the AP classes you guys are. These cookies are awesome, Beth. What’s in them?”

  “Sugar,” I said coldly. “Oats. Butter. Normal cookie things.”

  He looked surprised. “Ah. Well, they’re really good,” he said, and there was something in his tone—the same measured way my father used to sound when he thought my mother was being unreasonable, and all at once I was so furious it was hard to sit still.

  “Why don’t you just take them,” I snapped. I shoved the Tupper- ware toward him, the bottom scraping against the concrete.

  “Uh—I don’t think—”

  “No, just take them, Chase. You can have them all.”

  * * *

  After Chase finally left, awkwardly taking the cookies with him, I felt bad about making a scene, but only a little. Grace looked like she might follow him, but instead she gave him a kiss on the cheek. When he was out of earshot, she turned to me.

  “What was that?” she said.

  “What do you mean what was that? Why did you bring him here today?”

  “He just wanted to eat with us.”

  “Okay, well, that was truly the worst possible timing imaginable.”

  “He was trying to be nice,” Grace said. “And I really doubt Jason left because of him.”

  “Really, when Chase wouldn’t shut up about depression and hospitals and basically everything Jason told us he wanted to try to forget about?”

  “I think he really cares about depression and things because of his uncle. I told him it might be awkward, but he said he didn’t mind.”

  “Who cares if it’s awkward for Chase, Grace! What were you even thinking?”

  “Well, you were super rude to him, so maybe he won’t come back. If that’s what you wanted.”

  We stared at each other. I never fought with Grace. Then she said, very quietly, “You should’ve told me he came to talk to you.”

  Why—so he could come here and ruin things like today? I closed my eyes and tried to smooth my expression so I didn’t look as angry as I was. “Okay.”

  “I just think we can’t tiptoe around him forever,” she said. “I think we just have to get back to normal. That’s what he wanted, right? I think that’s what we should do.”

  * * *

  I didn’t see Jason alone again until the next morning. All last night I’d been planning out what I might say to him, but when we fell into step together, before I could say any of it, he said, “So, looks like Grace has been talking a lot to Chase still?”

  “I guess so, kind of.”

  We were in front of the science wing, and I felt my heartbeat start to rise. I was still afraid to go by the science wing bathrooms, and I couldn’t think of a plausible reason to explain why I needed to go around the long way to second period now. When the bathrooms came into view, I stopped walking. Jason glanced at me. “Something wrong?”

  “I’ve just been going around the library instead,” I said. “Just trying to get more daily steps in.”

  I don’t think he believed me, but to my relief he didn’t make a big deal out of it. As we went by the library, he said, “You think she’s happy? Grace, I mean?”

  Alarm bells went off in my head. I tried to keep my tone neutral. “I don’t know. How come?”

  He shrugged. “I think Grace is more complicated than people give her credit for. Like you’d think everything’s on the surface, but I actually don’t think she’s necessarily like that.”

  “Are you remembering this from when you guys went out?”

  I couldn’t parse the look he gave me. “I totally forgot about that.” (Had he, though?) We went by the drama club’s table, where they were selling tickets for Othello. A sophomore whose name I didn’t know was shouting, “Extra credit in any of Mrs. Neumann’s classes if you come!”

  Jason said, “She talk about him much?”

  “Kind of,” I said, then I hesitated. Maybe if the circumstances were different—if it weren’t his second day back—I might have pressed him more about what happened, about why he’d done it. Because of everything there was to talk about that day, why was Grace the thing foremost on his mind? Maybe I had totally misread what had happened at lunch the day before—maybe it wasn’t the particular things Chase was saying at all; maybe it was the fact of him with Grace. Maybe all that time he’d spent alone at home, all that time I’d been holding him so closely in my heart, Grace was the one he’d been holding on to.

  And it was important to know, wasn’t it? It felt that way, at least. There was so much we needed to know.

  But to be without him for so long and then to be there with him—the sheer fact of him there was overwhelming, the familiar angles of his face, the closeness of his skin near mine, the way that every tiny motion between us crackled like an explosion; we were both amplified, the world distilled into just us two. It drowned out all the sentences I’d been practicing, halted all the questions. There was a stillness, maybe, then, and it was only those times that I felt the disarray of all the rest of it: When I was with him, I understood quiet again because the world finally felt at rest.

  And maybe, too, I was just so happy to be with him that I didn’t want to risk it. I understood how fragile happiness could be.

  Or maybe it wasn’t happiness at all, but relief. It’s easy to mistake them when that’s all you have.

  MAYBE IT had been naive to assume that Jason being back meant he’d be back at BAYS, too. But I’d assumed it anyway—I’d thought things would be better then too, that I would be able to play again—and when he didn’t come, I was anxious all through rehearsal and the music sounded tinny and chaotic to my ears.

  We didn’t want to seem pushy, so we didn’t ask him, but we speculated about it. Grace thought maybe it was physical-therapy- related, and Brandon thought maybe Jason was under orders to take things slow. But I was worried it was more complicated than that.

  I didn’t know how to explain it without telling them about Juilliard, though. The four of us were standing in the parking lot after rehearsal; it was winter and dark already, and freezing, and when Serina Kim, a junior from Monta Vista who played flute, stopped on her way out to say hi to Brandon, I wondered if, when she left, I should tell them.

  It had been hard for me lately to be at BAYS in a way it never had before. I could play as directed, the requisite notes at the requisite times, but if I ever tried to take it past that, I went hot and shaky and a hardness crept over me. I had always been able to find a way inside the music, but the few times I tried that now it felt like a physical rejection, like trying to join the opposite ends of a magnet.

  It made me feel like someone else. I didn’t know what was wrong with me.

  “I just don’t know how you all have time to do BAYS senior year with college apps,” Serina was saying. “My parents think I should quit.”

  “You weren’t planning to, like, sleep, were you?” Brandon said, grinning at her. “What do you think this is?”

  If I didn’t know him, I would’ve believed in his smile, I think. Probably to an outsider, to someone like Serina, who didn’t go to our school and maybe hadn’t heard about Jason yet, it didn’t look like anything was wrong. But maybe it was easier for people to hide things than you’d ever expect.

  I shouldn’t tell them about Juilliard yet. Not telling anyone was the one thing Jason had asked of me, and besides that, maybe we wouldn’t be asked back to audition; I was still waiting to hear. And anyway, Jason was here, so I
told myself to be reassured by that.

  Until then he wasn’t. The day we were supposed to all go off campus for lunch together for the first time after break, Jason didn’t show up for school. We all tried messaging and calling him, but he didn’t respond.

  All day, I kept my phone on in class, which you weren’t supposed to do, and by lunchtime I was frantic. Grace and Sunny both thought maybe Jason had appointments and had forgotten to bring his phone, and Brandon was uneasy but certainly nowhere near my level of panic. Somehow that was the opposite of calming, like those dreams where no one believes you that the building’s burning.

  “You think we should just stay here?” I said. “What if—”

  “They wouldn’t just leave him alone if they didn’t think it was okay, right?” Brandon said. “I mean—he’s seeing a psychologist regularly and stuff, right?”

  “But that means you trust his parents?” My voice was shaking. “And we thought he was fine before, too, and—”

  “You know,” Sunny said, “My friend Dayna said people who survive suicide attempts almost never try again. When the impulse passes, everyone wants to live.”

  “But they’ve never even met him,” I said.

  The bell rang. “Let’s see if he’s answered one of us by the time school’s out,” Brandon said. “And then if not, maybe we can go over there. Or I can go over, or something.”

  “I think even that might be overreacting,” Sunny said. “But yes, okay, sure.”

  I walked with them as far as the library, where we always parted ways, and then I found, all at once, that I couldn’t keep propelling myself toward the science wing. The thought of being trapped in the classroom made me want to peel off my own skin. I would be useless in there, I would be basically locked inside, and I couldn’t go.