When We Were Infinite

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  “I’d rather just go home.”

  She put her hand gently against my face, and then removed it, quickly, before I could pull away. When we were on Foothill, she said, “Did you want to see a therapist? I’m sure insurance would cover—”

  “No.”

  “Maybe just to see. We could find someone you like.” She took her eyes off the road to look at me. “I can look for reviews online. Maybe it would be good to have someone you could talk to.”

  I said nothing. We went past school. I wondered what my father would say if he knew about this, or what my friends would think of me if they’d seen me panicked and ridiculous in the hospital, the doctor coming in to inform us it was all in my head. After a while, my mother cleared her throat.

  “Beth, I know how you feel,” she said. “During the divorce, I had the same thing happen to me. The first time I thought I was dying. I missed a meeting with the lawyers.”

  Was that supposed to be comforting somehow? That this had happened to her, too, and she had gone on to survive to do what—settle into a quiet, empty house and life? Finish driving my father away except to demand money each month like I was a bill for him to pay?

  “And my father,” she said, “had a panic attack once when I was in my teens. We rushed to the hospital because he’d already had a heart attack and we thought it was another one, but when they did all the tests—and they did even more tests than on you—they said, no, it was just stress. But they say there’s a genetic component.” She turned onto Stelling, then she added, “My mother blamed him. And for me, too, I felt like it was because I was weak, or there was something wrong, but I just want you to know it’s not anything wrong with you or—”

  “Okay.”

  “If you don’t want to see a therapist and you don’t want to talk to me, maybe you could talk to a priest. Or maybe there’s an adult at school—”

  “Maybe,” I said, so she would stop suggesting it. “I’ll ask someone at school.”

  “I think that would be a good idea, Beth. I think it might help. For me, it helped a great deal to talk to my priest.”

  She always assumed I was so much like her. She felt, it seemed, that I was entirely hers. In the car with her there, so earnest and oblivious, I felt claustrophobic. For a second, I imagined telling her, My friend—my boyfriend now—wanted to die and I need to make sure he never wants to again, just for the satisfaction of the expression on her face when she realized how little she knew about me and my life after all. I wanted to shatter her illusion of sameness.

  Except every time I wanted her to feel the weight of what her choices had done to me, the same thing always stopped me. When you live with someone, you’re the only one who knows so many truths about them, and so you become the keeper of those truths, even if you never asked for that. How they cried in the shower every night for weeks after the divorce when they thought you couldn’t hear, how they thought they had a promotion at work locked in and bought a bottle of sparkling cider to share with you in advance and then the promotion went instead to a younger man who’d just started at the job. How they would display holiday cards from the dentist’s office along with the other cards, how terrified they were of moths and spiders, how much pleasure they took in strawberry ice cream, how they’d once started making online dating profiles and then stopped halfway through. How carefully they tried to hide the Christmas and birthday gifts they bought you months in advance. How, like now, whenever she drove, even on quiet roads, she gripped the steering wheel in both hands and let her eyes flicker constantly to my seat belt, checking, I knew, to make sure I was safe.

  * * *

  In the group chat, Sunny asked for updates on how I was, and I said I was fine, that it had been food poisoning after all, and if they didn’t believe me they didn’t press it. I could get away with it this once, I knew, as long as it never happened in front of them again. And if it did, maybe everything would be like it had been today about Jason: Brandon calling in a perfunctory way, duty done; Sunny skeptical, Grace making behind-the-scenes plans with Chase. They would lose interest or get tired or find me too much of a burden.

  Jason was quiet all night on the group chat, and he didn’t reach out to ask if I was all right. Maybe I expected too much, and I was too demanding, but waiting to see if he would and wondering why he didn’t was unbearable. I was beyond exhausted with myself.

  But I could wait a night. Jason and I were together; that was everything I’d ever wanted. So why did it feel like this?

  I WAS doing a timed practice bio SAT II one evening, a few days after my second trip to the ER, when Jason called. I was in my room, the test spread out on my desk with all the pictures of my friends I kept framed and Brandon’s dinosaurs we’d never put in his locker this year, and I was profoundly unmotivated; every few minutes, I kept getting bored and going back to the daily crossword I had open on my laptop. When he called, I stopped the test timer and answered.

  “Hey,” he said. “Did you get invited back to audition?”

  Immediately, my palms went damp. I’d still been checking my email reflexively—it probably wasn’t an exaggeration to say a hundred times a day—but was it possible I’d missed it? “You mean at Juilliard? Wait—did the email come? Did you get invited back?”

  “I did, yeah.”

  From the way he said it, I couldn’t tell what he thought about it. “Jason, that’s amazing. I mean, I’m not surprised, but still, that’s huge.”

  “When was the last time you looked? I would assume they’d all come out at the same time, right?”

  “It’s been like an hour. I’ll look.” I didn’t want to, in a way, because for as long as I didn’t, anything was still possible. My hands were shaking as I opened my email. And there it was: Dear Beth, we are pleased to inform you…

  I was stunned. I wished there were a way to pin the email to my body like a badge, like a proof of worth. I was still staring at it when Jason said, “Nothing yet?”

  “No, it came. I, um, I got invited back too.”

  He made a sound that was half-laugh, half-whoop. “I knew it!” he crowed. “I knew you would.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “What are you doing right now? I feel like we should, like—celebrate somehow.”

  “Are you going to go audition?” I said. My heart was pounding. What if this was possible after all?

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead. Let’s go do something. Something, like—fun.”

  It was so out of character for him to say something like that. I said, “Like what?”

  “We’ll think of something. You free now? I’ll come get you.”

  * * *

  We drove up into the hills, to a cul-de-sac with four or five enormous estates set out on a plateau. (I don’t know if it’s what he meant by fun, but Congress Springs was quiet, and neither of us could think of anything else.) When he stopped the car, I took a deep breath to fill my lungs with air just to make sure I still could, which I’d been doing lately whenever any kind of tightness started in my chest. Besides still avoiding the science wing bathrooms, I’d been developing other habits to try to ward off another panic attack too—when it had happened at brunch, I’d been in the middle of peeling an orange, so I’d stopped eating oranges; in classrooms or in cars or just in situations when being trapped was more a function of social pressure, I always calculated how quickly I could escape.

  It was quiet up here and more wilderness than not, and if I hadn’t been with him I might’ve been scared, I think. When we closed the car doors behind us, it felt so loud I was worried someone would emerge from the mansions to yell at us. We walked to the edge of the cul-de-sac, and he spread out his jacket for us to sit on, even though I would’ve been fine sitting on the asphalt. There was a sound in the brush below us, and I jumped. Jason smiled and rested his hand on my knee.

  “Just a squirrel or something,” he said. “Don’t stress.”

  “It sounded bigger.”


  “They sound bigger out here because they rustle the leaves, and the leaves are loud.”

  “I guess.” Then I added, “That’s kind of what being in an orchestra always felt like to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like—no one would ever guess from the sound that it’s just you in there.”

  From the way he smiled, I think he understood. I ventured, “You seem really excited.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Sure. I just—I guess I just don’t understand why you aren’t sure if you’ll audition if you’re so excited about it.”

  “Yeah, well—” He pulled his knees in against his chest. “It’s—complicated.”

  “Complicated how?”

  He looked out at the horizon. From where we were parked, we could see the whole South Bay all spread out below us, twinkling in the dark, our homes and our other friends somewhere down there below. For a little while, I thought he wouldn’t answer me, but then he said, “You still didn’t tell anyone, right?”

  “No, I haven’t told anyone.”

  “I guess I just want to keep it that way.”

  I suppose I wanted that too. All the same, though, I wondered: Didn’t he trust our friends? The rest of us hadn’t told him about Berkeley yet, and that was the thing that felt like the strongest proof of devotion—I always wanted us to tell him, but it never seemed quite like the right time—but couldn’t he feel, nevertheless, the constant steady force of care and concern surrounding him?

  Maybe he couldn’t, though. Maybe that was the thing.

  “What if we went?” I blurted out. “What if we went together?”

  He raised his eyebrows, looking, if anything, amused. “To New York?”

  “I know it sounds kind of out there, but—I think we could figure out the logistics. I think we’d regret it if we never went. Just to see what happens.”

  “Sounds like a big trip.”

  “It could be just overnight. Do you think—” I hesitated. “Do you think your parents would let you? Or do you think—I don’t know, do you think there’s a way they wouldn’t have to know? We could say we were pulling an all-nighter at someone’s house to study or something. And if we did a red-eye—I mean, if it’s not on anyone’s radar at all because no one even knows we applied, I doubt it would even occur to anyone enough to be suspicious that we just randomly went to New York.”

  I thought he’d refuse right away—it was absurd, what I was proposing—but he drummed his fingers thoughtfully against the ground, considering. Overhead, something flew by us, an owl maybe. “It just feels—I don’t know. It feels kind of pointless.”

  “Because you still wouldn’t go if you got in?”

  “Among other things.”

  “It might be worth it just to see, though, don’t you think? Then you don’t always have to wonder what if.”

  “You know what?” he said suddenly. “Sure, fuck it, let’s do it.”

  I was more than a little surprised. In fact, I thought at first he was joking. “Really?”

  “Yeah, why not?” He flipped his hand over so he could intertwine his fingers with mine. His hand was warm and soft, and I looked at our embrace there in the near-dark and wished I could take a picture of our hands that way. “We’ll do it together.”

  * * *

  Later that night, though, I worried it was a drastic mistake, especially to go without telling our friends. Getting on a plane and flying across the country by ourselves was a huge and even alarming prospect—if anything happened, no one would know where we were—and it made me wonder at the possibility that my friends were keeping such big secrets from me.

  But the point of us staying together was to be there for Jason, and so even if I didn’t tell them yet, maybe I was honoring our vow in spirit, if not exactly in name. Surely if they knew they’d tell me to do it. If Jason went to New York—we could all go there with him too, as easily as Berkeley. I could find a community college if I didn’t get into Juilliard, which surely I wouldn’t, and then transfer somewhere close by. And my friends had applied all over to appease their parents—Sunny and Grace, I remembered, had applied to NYU, and Sunny and Brandon had both applied to Columbia, and Grace had applied to Barnard, too.

  That week he and I both got our audition confirmations from Juilliard. We’d gotten the date we requested, both of us on the first Wednesday in March, and after messaging back and forth about logistics, and then deleting those messages from our phones just in case, we booked round-trip flights to New York.

  I used my credit card for mine. It still had the balance from the limo plus whatever interest was accruing (I’d deleted another email saying I had a new statement; I knew the interest was probably staggering by now, but I couldn’t bring myself to look). It seemed like so much money—it was so much money—and I’d promised myself I wouldn’t use the card again. But if my balance were really dire, I reasoned, like if it were over my limit, the purchase wouldn’t have gone through. I would get a job over the summer to pay everything off. And the alternative, not going, didn’t seem like a real option.

  I didn’t want to explain the whole thing to my mother because I knew she would say no, or—more likely—she’d insist on coming. At school I nodded along when people complained about the pressure of having Asian parents, but really I knew my mother would probably be thrilled if I wanted to study violin. When the date came near, I would tell her I had to pull an all-nighter at Sunny’s for a video project—I would text her while she was still at work and say I’d already come home to get my toothbrush and pajamas, and she would be upset, probably, especially the next night, when I still wasn’t back, but there would be nothing she could do because I would already be gone.

  I thought that since he would be auditioning, Jason would obviously come back to BAYS now. I was so sure he would, in fact, that I didn’t agonize over whether or not to ask him. When he left after school that Monday I was shocked, but then maybe he’d already had a physical therapy appointment or something he couldn’t reschedule—but then Wednesday he didn’t come back either, or the Friday after, nor did he ever bring it up.

  But—somehow, despite everything—I was playing again. I was hearing the pieces in my mind, and specific sections to work through were rising up with possibility. And that crackling noise that had been blaring through me every time I tried to play—that had quieted, or at least now there was more of everything else I could use to push that to the background.

  It would take a while to find my way back, I knew. I was badly out of practice now, and I would be behind compared to other applicants who’d been working steadily all along. But this was a gift, because it had given me a purpose once more. The music wouldn’t just be indulgent, it wouldn’t just be something for me that I could lose myself in—it would be for Jason, too, to keep him safe.

  * * *

  The week before Valentine’s Day, when I was doing homework at Grace’s house with her and Sunny, Jason forwarded me a confirmation for the hotel room he’d booked us in New York. Sunny happened to glance up at the moment I saw the email, and she said, “Are you okay?”

  “Oh—yeah.” I closed my email quickly. I’d told Jason I’d split it with him, and he’d said not to worry about it, and immediately I’d wondered whether he would want or expect to have sex there.

  I didn’t feel ready. I wished I could talk about it with Sunny and Grace. The act of it felt a little terrifying, and altogether from a separate universe than I could imagine myself inhabiting; I had loved kissing him and holding hands, and possibly I would be content forever with just those things. But I would do whatever he wanted. All the ways you were supposed to guard and fuss over how you looked as a girl, all the things you were supposed to do and be—all of it, I knew, was in service of making sure you were attractive when it mattered, and it wasn’t like the rest of you would somehow be enough to make up for taking sex off the table.

  But then it was hard to say what Jason wanted. Sometime
s I wondered if maybe I was entirely off base to worry about sex at all—it would be horrifying if he actually wasn’t physically attracted to me after all and he thought I was the one oozing with desire. I imagined him repulsed by the things he might think I wanted, or by the fact of my wanting anything. I had googled different primers on what to do, my door locked in case my mother came home and barged in, and mostly, it seemed like it was important to make sure he believed I was enjoying myself whether I actually was or not.

  I was veering between excited and petrified about the trip, and about the audition itself. The average acceptance rate at Juilliard had hovered around five percent the year before, and violin was more competitive than some of its other programs. Even at my sharpest, I doubted I had a chance, but since I’d been given one—since we both had—I wanted to do everything I could to take it.

  But if Jason still thought he wouldn’t go anyway, was he even practicing at home? And if so, why would he do that, cloistered away from us? I wanted him back at BAYS. It was empty without him there.

  At lunch the next day, he met me at my locker as I was trying to squeeze three textbooks in next to my violin. He smiled when he saw me, and I wondered if seeing him light up at the sight of me that way could ever dull its sense of magic.

  It was noisy with the beginning of lunch rush and when I asked him, impulsively, whether he was going to rehearsal today, he put his hand gently on my lower back and ducked his head down to mine to hear. “What’s that?”

  Maybe that was a chance for me to change the subject, and maybe I should’ve taken it. Instead, I said, “Oh—I was just wondering if you were coming to rehearsal today.”

  “Probably not today.”

  “Next week we’re starting rehearsals for the spring show.”

  “Ah,” he said mildly.

  “We’re just doing four pieces this time. There’s this one section of the Haydn, though, that I keep tripping over.”