She came in a few minutes later, wearing leggings and a Berkeley sweatshirt, her hair piled in a messy bun on top of her head. She wasn’t wearing makeup or jewelry, but somehow she looked put together in a way I envied.
“Really, this place?” she said, giving Jason a quick, businesslike hug. “If you wanted Indian food, there’s a ton of good places. This is like, a place for white people.”
“Eh, it looks fine,” he said. “Let’s just stay.”
Something in Jason had relaxed when he saw her—I’d seen it as soon as she walked in, and immediately seen the way I was outside of it, too, how I hadn’t done the same for him this morning or at any point in the day.
We followed a waitress, a white girl with elaborate piercings who looked like she was probably in college, to a table to get plates for the buffet. I was starving—I’d skipped the muffins in the car, although I’d eaten two before Jason came to pick me up—but I didn’t want to pile my plate in front of them, so I took a small amount of each thing. The naan, inexplicably, was bright pink. (A label said it was made with beets.) Also, Evelyn had been right—everyone else in here was white.
“It’s honestly kind of depressing me that this place meets your standards,” Evelyn said to Jason as we sat down. He grinned. She hung her purse strap on the back of her chair and added, “You should’ve told me you were coming. I was supposed to meet up with people.”
“Who?”
“Just some friends.”
“You should’ve brought them. On the plus side,” he said—there was a lightness in his voice; her grouchiness didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest—“you get to eat pink bread.”
“Where do you like to eat around here?” I said to her. I tried to make my tone casual, friendly. She hadn’t acknowledged me since coming in, and I wondered whether Jason had told her we were together.
“There’s a good brunch place down the street,” she said. Then, to Jason: “Remember that french toast we always got when we went on that cruise? It’s kind of like that, where they cover it in cornflakes.”
“Yeah?” He reached out and speared a piece of tofu tikka masala from her plate, then leaned back to balance his chair on its two back legs. “You go there a lot?”
“Jason, it’s literally a buffet. You don’t have to eat my food. No, I don’t go that often.”
“What a waste. Also,” he said, snagging another bite of her tofu and dodging his hand away when she tried to swat it, “this is actually pretty good.”
“Ugh, don’t say that. This place is kind of—” She glanced at me, then said something in Mandarin. “Don’t you think?”
“Beth doesn’t speak.”
Evelyn raised her eyebrows at me in disapproval. “At all?”
I felt my cheeks flush. “Not really.”
“Huh,” she said, sitting back and appraising me for several seconds, long enough for the flush to spread through my face, down my neck and chest. Finally, I said, brightly as I could, “So, um, what are you majoring in at Berkeley?”
“Microbio. And Asian American Studies. Double major.” She turned back to Jason. “This place kind of reminds me of that one place Mom used to always make us go to at the mall—you remember that?”
“Oh, where she thought they had the really nice bathrooms?”
“She was so weird about those bathrooms.”
I smiled tightly, locked outside the conversation. I picked at some rice and tikka masala, and it was hard to swallow. They talked more about the food, and then about other foods it reminded them of (half the time it was Taiwanese dishes I didn’t recognize, at least by name, and every time that happened I felt flooded with shame) or the places it made them think of. The language of siblings—I didn’t speak that, and even if I had, I wouldn’t speak theirs. A couple of times, Jason tried to pull me into the conversation, but that was worse, somehow.
“You guys want more?” Jason said, standing up. “I’m going to get another plate.”
“Yes, sign me up, please,” Evelyn said. “Get me like eighty pieces of their pink tortilla things. See if I can get like a whole plate load to go.”
He laughed. “I’ll get you the recipe so you can make it yourself.”
I went with him, only so I wouldn’t be sitting there alone with her. He didn’t say anything to me as we were going through the line. When we sat back down, Evelyn was typing something on her phone, and Jason reached over to tilt the screen toward himself.
“I knew it,” he said. “You’re heartless, Jie Jie.” To me, he said, “Evelyn takes a sick pleasure in leaving bad Yelp reviews. Every time we go on a trip, she insists on reviewing everything. Even in places where no one’s ever heard of Yelp.”
“Well, people traveling there will use Yelp.”
“They won’t,” Jason said. “Your reviews just languish on the internet, lonely and—”
“Someone has to do it,” Evelyn said. “Like the time we went to Italy and they would only eat the shitty Chinese food? I’m just doing my part to save other people who got trapped on those trips with their parents.”
They meant Mr. and Mrs. Tsou; I understood that much of their shorthand. Jason had told us that story too: how his family had gone with a Taiwanese tour group and he and Evelyn had had to sneak away to get pizza and gelato and pasta. I remembered how he’d been charmed by the fact that dumplings of all kinds were called ravioli in Chinese restaurants all over Italy.
It was disorienting to sit here and hear these glimpses of their family life as if everything between them was ordinary and fine. As if you could be that person who went on tours abroad with your wife and kids, who eschewed the local cuisine in ways that your kids poked fun at later, and all the while be someone who’d done what Jason’s father had. I could understand where Brandon had been coming from when he’d wondered aloud how Jason’s dad had turned into this, whether the same could be true of ourselves someday. I hated Mr. Tsou, and probably I would always hate him, but still there was something a tiny bit wrenching about the image of him trying to have a good time in a foreign country, only wanting to eat the food he knew.
I wondered if he felt that whatever he’d gone through or left behind to be here had been worth it. Maybe he felt that this country had stripped him of the things that made him himself, that it had systematically taken and decimated parts of him he’d always needed.
It was different for me, obviously, but I felt it sometimes too—that lack of concrete belonging, for one thing, like how Brandon had said once he didn’t think he could ever marry a non-Asian and Jason had said casually he couldn’t either, and I wasn’t sure whether or not that would include me. But also I felt it in the things that living here had swallowed away from me, like how I always had to fudge my answers on those You Know You Grew Up In An East Asian Household If listicles so I didn’t score too low, or how I never knew whether to say they or we if I was talking about Asian people.
When I was younger, I’d asked my mother once why she’d never taught me Chinese—so many people I knew went to Saturday Chinese school, and even my father had wanted me to learn Mandarin—and she’d been dismissive. “Oh, Beth,” she’d said, “no one here speaks Cantonese. It’s not going to help you get ahead in life.” Getting ahead in life was never how she framed anything, and so maybe it was more about the way she’d say things like Chinese people as if it both did and didn’t include her, or how sometimes when we saw people flooding out of the Chinese tourist buses, she would step away from them, or murmur things like how loud they were. Or how she’d married someone who wasn’t Chinese—given herself a child who was only halfway what she was.
Maybe there was a way you could lose where you came from, or where you’d never come from, and in that lose part of yourself. It was always a lowkey background hum resonating through my life. I didn’t think it was quite like that for my friends, at least not in the same way, but I wondered that day if Mr. Tsou would say the same.
When we were done eating, the two of them
fought over the bill, and at first I tried too, but Evelyn gave me a withering look, and I backed down, and I was embarrassed but also relieved. Eventually, between the two of them, Evelyn won. When we went back outside, the Berkeley sunlight bright even at that time of year, Evelyn glanced between me and Jason and then said, to him, “So what’s your deal? Are you guys, like, going out?”
He smiled, a little sheepishly and also in a way that felt distinctly little-brotherish to me. Evelyn raised her eyebrows. “Hm,” she said, studying me. I knew already I would replay that look, how it felt to have it trained on me, over and over for weeks. I regretted then not following my instincts and leaving so the two of them could have lunch together. I could see myself, could see the two of us, through Evelyn’s eyes: how superfluous I was, how deeply I was failing to live up to what Jason had offered me.
I had been so happy, but maybe I shouldn’t have trusted my own happiness. Maybe I should’ve known better. There were so many different ways to lose someone, and the deeper you went with them, the more there were.
* * *
I’d imagined us staying until evening—I’d been looking forward to seeing the sun set over the Campanile, maybe finding a romantic place to have dinner—but after we said goodbye to Evelyn and it was just the two of us, Jason said, his voice going flat again, “You ready to go?”
As soon as she’d left, that cloud had seemed to come back over him. In the car, everything I did—breathe, shift in my seat—seemed obscenely loud. I wondered if I should ask if he wanted to break up—if it would be better, somehow, if it seemed like it came from me. But what would happen if we did—would he still want to be friends like we had been? Or had I ruined that somehow too?
I wished I knew what I’d done. But maybe that was just it, maybe I hadn’t done anything—maybe it was just that no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t be enough.
It felt damning being in the car with him, as if being there was methodically dissecting all my failures. My stomach hurt. I was still hungry but also couldn’t quite imagine ever eating again. I pictured him at home that night, alone, replaying the day and trying to superimpose it over the future we were all supposed to share. It had been a mistake to come. I should’ve realized it would be pushing him too far. Now when he thought of Berkeley, and when he thought of me, he would think of today.
I was afraid to imagine my own night at home. There was nothing I could conceivably do, no activity I could engage in and no conversation I could have with anyone else, that would lift this feeling from me.
When we merged onto 880, Jason said, quietly, “I was just—I think I wasn’t in the mood to go out today.”
“No, that’s okay. I shouldn’t have suggested it.”
“It’s not your fault. Just—we’ll hang out another day, okay?”
That didn’t sound like the preamble to a breakup, did it? “Of course.”
I leaned my head against the window and blinked until everything flying past—the Bay, the overpasses—wasn’t blurry anymore.
* * *
That Monday at school Jason brought me a small, delicate bouquet of lavender roses. It was ungrateful, but immediately I found myself wishing it had been a plant or something that would last, that I could hang on to, and I took probably two dozen pictures of the roses at home that night and looked up how to dry them.
Maybe it was just that I’d thought somehow, with this now between us, it would be easier for me to anticipate him and what he needed. Maybe I thought everything would be safer or more secure, or that I would magically become different—that I would be enough for him, or at least a better version of myself. But that didn’t happen, and so often I felt that same chasm between us and didn’t know how to cross it. He had given me this incredible gift, and I was squandering it.
What did happen, though, was that Thursday he didn’t show up for school and didn’t respond to any of my messages, either. All morning, sitting through class, holding my phone on my lap, I was frantic.
“Maybe he just overslept,” Grace offered at brunch. “Or maybe he’s just sick.” She bit into her banana.
“Maybe,” I said. I was trying to peel an orange, and my hands were trembling. “But maybe—”
“You were so worried last time this happened, Beth, but then things were fine.”
Were they, though? Maybe that wasn’t true at all. Maybe by showing up that day I’d averted a possible crisis—it was impossible to know.
“Why don’t you call him?” Brandon said.
“Um—maybe you could?”
He raised his eyebrows. “What, you don’t want to?”
“Well—I’ve just been messaging him a lot already.”
Sunny looked like she might say something, but then she didn’t. “All right, I’ll call,” Brandon said, and glanced around for a teacher before pulling his phone from his pocket. He ducked his head while we waited.
“Oh, hey, Jay. Everything cool? Where are you?” He was quiet a moment. “Oh, good times. All right, see you soon.” When he pocketed his phone again, he said, “He had physical therapy.”
“I thought he had that in the afternoons.”
Brandon shrugged. “I guess it got moved.”
After Berkeley, it didn’t feel that simple for me—that I could just call and demand an answer, and trust that Jason would give one and not retreat into himself like he had that day. Sometimes I thought it would be so much easier to be a boy and be allowed to do things like that. Sunny was like that too, but people thought Sunny was uptight and sometimes kind of a bitch; they thought Brandon was laid-back. I said, “Do you think he was telling the truth?”
Brandon looked surprised. “You think he was lying about it?”
“I don’t know—probably not, but I just worry—”
“I don’t think he would’ve picked up if it was something really bad. Why bother?”
“Unless it was a cry for help.”
Grace folded her banana peel into a neat package. “Honestly, Beth—to me he’s seemed like he’s been fine.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He just seems like he’s fine.”
“Jason is still—I think he really isn’t doing well. Maybe at lunch we can—”
“Oh, at lunch I’m taking Chase to Quickly,” Grace said. “He’s never had boba. Like literally never even tried it. Can you believe that?”
“Nothing surprises me less,” Sunny said, and the way she jumped on the conversation—was she sick of talking about Jason? Did they think that was only my responsibility now? “Chase seems like he’d drink like, those Monster energy drinks.”
Grace laughed. “Okay, but—”
She kept talking, but all at once, out of nowhere I was flushed with a hot, dizzy tingling. My heart wobbled and slowed as though it were caught in a spiderweb. There were widening twin circles of blankness in my peripheral vision, and they ebbed forward, growing, as my mouth went dry and there was an alarming dropping feeling in my chest and a lightness in my head.
I clutched my chest. Everything around me was like the flare in a photograph, little gleaming circles, and nothing held. I’m going to die right here, I thought. Right here at brunch at school.
“Beth, you’re breathing weirdly,” Sunny said. Her voice sounded oddly rounded, elongated, like she was speaking in all vowels. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I managed. My throat was squeezing closed; I could barely get out the words. I tried to swallow, but all the muscles were stuck. When I looked down at my hands, they were shaking. They didn’t even look like mine.
She looked at me more closely. “Are you sure? You’re kind of pale.”
“I think—” I could barely get enough air to talk. I tried to force a smile. “I think I have food poisoning.”
“Oh, Beth,” Grace said sympathetically. “You should go home!”
They were all staring at me. Brandon reached out and gently took my wrist, then pressed two fingers against it to feel for a pulse. �
��Your heart is beating really fast.”
There were so many tests they hadn’t done at the ER, so many deadly things that could be lying in wait inside my own body. My father’s father had died suddenly of an aneurysm, and my mother’s father had had a heart attack in his forties, and maybe whatever it was that had gone wrong in my body, whatever it was that was so obvious right now to my friends, wasn’t survivable.
But I couldn’t bear to have them all see me like this. I had to get out of here.
“I’m fine,” I said quickly. The words felt garbled and breathless. “I’ll just—” I fumbled with my backpack.
“We’ll walk you to the office,” Grace said.
“No, no, I’m—”
But they were already gathering up their things, already in motion, and I felt myself leaving my body, zooming out to look at the four of us gathered there: Grace’s hand on my arm, Brandon slinging my backpack over his shoulder, Sunny clearing a path toward the office. And me with my hands pressed to my chest, hunched over because it felt like it used less oxygen somehow, giving myself away with each step, so exposed to them there with nowhere to hide.
* * *
We went back to the same hospital, although it was a different doctor this time, but he ran the same EKG, the same labs, and this time told my mother to take me to a therapist. By the time we were discharged and back in the parking lot, I didn’t feel like I was going to black out anymore, but I was dizzy and weak and scared, and could no longer trust my body. This wasn’t a one-off, and maybe it would keep happening, and who knew when. I had been in one of the safest places I knew, and that hadn’t protected me at all.
In the car, my mother looked tired and sad. “Did you want to get something to eat, Beth?” she said. “We could go anywhere you like.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine forcing food down my throat.
“Maybe ice cream? Or a drink of some kind?”
When We Were Infinite Page 20
