“Ah,” he said again.
“It’s—it’s really different without you there.”
“Mm,” he said. “Did you bring lunch today? I think I’ll probably buy something. You want anything?”
“I’m good. I’ll go with you, though.”
“You don’t have to.”
“No, it’s okay.” I shut my locker. As we made our way to the line, I said, “I think you could catch up really quickly, if that’s what you’re worried about. But maybe it makes sense to just focus on the Juilliard audition pieces at home for a while, if that’s what you’re doing instead.”
“You like the pieces you guys are doing?”
What I didn’t like was how he said you guys. “I think you would too.”
“Yeah?” We got into line, and he peered at the menu. “Have you ever had the chimichangas here?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You think they’re anything like those taco pockets they used to have in middle school?”
“I bet it would help with the Juilliard audition too,” I said. “So—have you been practicing at home? Or—?”
“Not yet.”
“Do you think you will soon?”
His voice was clipped. “I don’t know.”
The line shuffled forward. I said, “I think it’s made a difference for me. Having the audition, I mean—I don’t dread playing like I used to.”
“Good.”
If he hadn’t started practicing again yet—how long had it been, then, since he’d even picked up his violin? Over a month? Our audition was less than four weeks away, and he’d stopped using his sling, but surely injuring your arm like that would affect your playing. Was he worried that he’d somehow fail? I could see that stopping him, perhaps—that he’d be unable to accept that sort of imperfection in what had always come so easily to him.
We were at the front of the line now, and Jason ordered what he always did when he bought lunch at school, Cup Noodles and a packet of baby carrots. I said, “If you still wanted to practice together, I’m free anytime. I could do today if you wanted, or—”
“Can you just drop it, Beth?”
He was nearly yelling. His voice reverberated off the food service window, closing in on me from all sides. Around us, a few underclassmen turned to stare, and a sphere of quiet enveloped us. I was stunned.
My throat felt like it was going to close. “I didn’t—I didn’t mean—”
He dropped his voice back down to its normal volume and turned back to pay. “I just don’t see why you keep pushing this when it really doesn’t matter. Okay? Just let it go.”
* * *
It was my fault. In all the years I’d known Jason we’d never come anywhere close to a fight, and he’d never remotely raised his voice to me. The only time I’d heard him raise his voice, ever, had been to Sunny on Brandon’s birthday.
All the rest of the day I felt sick. He’d paid for his food and then we’d gone to meet the others at lunch, and he didn’t say anything to them about what had happened. But really, nothing had happened, and in fact he was normal with me after that, and I started to wonder if maybe I was overreacting. He seemed to have moved on, to have forgiven my insensitivity, and so maybe I was the only one who spent the rest of the day and night dissecting the moment again and again. After all, it wasn’t like Jason had said anything insulting, or cruel, or unkind; it had just been his tone, and maybe it was only because I had devoted so many years of my life to the altar of sound—because I wanted to find meaning in every noise—that it had felt so much to me like violence.
* * *
I wouldn’t have brought it up in case it seemed clichéd or needy, but I hoped that Jason would be into Valentine’s Day. He had bigger things to worry about, though, obviously, so I tried not to get my hopes up. I made him oatmeal cookies.
In the morning, he and Brandon were talking near the cafeteria when I got to school, and when I said hi, he didn’t say anything about the holiday. I wondered if the cookies would make him feel guilty—if they’d seem pointed. When the bell rang and we headed toward first period together, he said, “So is it embarrassing to be into Valentine’s Day now? Like super capitalist or basic or something?”
“Oh,” I said. I wouldn’t give him the cookies, then. I tried to keep my voice light. “Is it? Yeah, I guess, maybe so.”
Outside the classroom door he touched my wrist to stop me. “Okay, well, pretend you aren’t judging me.” He slid his backpack around to the front and rummaged through it, then handed me a little muslin pouch. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
Inside was a necklace, a delicate gold chain with a small, gold-wrapped rectangular pendant that I thought at first was some kind of glossy, burnished stone, but when I looked more closely it was something else.
“It’s oak wood,” he said. “I had it made from a branch I got at the park that day we went.”
My cookies suddenly seemed inadequate. When I gave them to him, though, he made a big deal of saying how great they looked.
Sunny noticed the necklace right away when she met me at my locker at brunch. “Is that new?” she said, lifting it up to inspect. “It’s really pretty.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I don’t know why I didn’t tell her it was from Jason. Maybe it felt like bragging, like I’d be tempting fate.
Maybe that was why, around then, I began to worry that a shift was happening with my friends—I was worried, specifically, that Sunny and Brandon and Grace’s concern for Jason was waning or that we were drifting apart.
The times we’d gone to Jason’s house, the time we’d gone to the hospital—that history was going to live with us forever. But Grace was still seeing Chase—a lot, actually—and aside from Brandon teasing her now and then, we mostly weren’t talking about it. Before, whenever Sunny or Grace was into someone, it had felt almost like a group project for the three of us: an endless stream of discussion, an exhaustive dissection of virtually any interaction between them and whoever the other person was. But Grace almost never brought Chase up. And that in itself—that weird shift in dynamics—was something I’d usually talk about with Sunny, but this time I didn’t because I wasn’t sure what she would say. Maybe she and Grace were talking about Chase, and I was being left out. Or maybe none of it bothered Sunny at all, and if that was true, maybe I didn’t want to know that.
So when we were together, there was so much we couldn’t talk about. We couldn’t talk about Chase, and we couldn’t talk about what Jason had been through, and we couldn’t talk about New York or Juilliard or the plan for us to all go to Berkeley. For the first time with them things weren’t as easy as they’d always been.
Grace and I got to school at the same time the Friday after Valentine’s Day, and before the bell I went with her to get hot chocolate from the food cart one of the service clubs had in the mornings to raise money for a climate action fund. Aanika Shah, the junior class president, cheerfully handed us a flyer about the fund and spritzed canned whipped cream into our cups. I burned my tongue a little when I took a sip.
“Chase got me into drinking hot chocolate again,” Grace said as we made our way back to the lockers. “I forgot how good it is.”
“Did he not like the boba?”
“He said the pearls reminded him of boogers.”
I made myself laugh. “So—what’s going on with you two, exactly?”
She flung her head back and squeezed her eyes shut. It was the way she acted in public with guys who were flirting with her—performative, kind of; dramatic—and it bothered me; it was more practiced than we ever were with each other. “Oh my gosh, Beth, that is seriously the question. I have no idea! He’s so sweet, and I have so much fun with him, but I don’t know if anything will ever happen.”
I wanted good things for her, wanted her to be cherished and seen, but I have so much fun with him seemed, to me, resoundingly uncompelling. “Like you mean officially get together or anything? How come?”
“Oh, you know. I think he didn’t want to do any kind of relationship senior year, and I’m still figuring out if that’s what I want. Because probably we’d break up over the summer and that would be really sad. But then every now and then I’m like, wait, what if we didn’t break up over the summer? Every time I bring that up, he kind of freaks out.” She laughed. “I think also because I told him I’m not a low-maintenance girlfriend. Like, I would definitely want the flowers and the good-night phone calls every night.”
If you had to think so hard about whether or not you wanted to be with someone, what was the point? I said, “Oh.”
She finished her hot chocolate and tossed the cup into a trash can we passed by, then linked her arm through mine. “So what’s it like dating Jason? You’re both, like, so private.”
It wasn’t like I’d been refusing to tell her; we just hadn’t talked. “It’s good, mostly.”
“We need to have a girls’ sleepover or something to catch up. Is he really different with you?”
Not in the way she meant, probably. “Sometimes a little.” Talking with her like this—it felt stilted, yes, but also I’d been missing her, and in some ways it would be a relief to tell her what it was really like most of the time with him, how gripped with fear I still was so often, how distant he so frequently seemed, how inadequate I felt. It was different talking about him now—before, he’d belonged to all of us equally, the way we’d all belonged to one another, but now there was more room for me to betray him.
We were in front of my locker, and Grace stopped walking. “You seem—I don’t know. Are you happy?”
“Am I happy?” I repeated. It struck me as a bizarrely incongruous question: Jason had nearly died, and my happiness felt like the least important thing to focus on. And anyway, of all the things a relationship could be, happy felt a little cheap. Once I’d overheard my mother tell someone on the phone that, yes, she was happier after the divorce. “Yes.”
Something in her expression changed. I said, “What?”
“What do you mean what?”
“I mean why do you look like that?”
“Nothing.”
“No, what?”
She dropped her arm and pulled her hair back from her face with her pinkies and sighed a little. “I just think—it seems like you’re kind of stressed out all the time, and sometimes it seems like you’re still really worried about him.”
I blinked at her. “Of… course I am?”
“But do you think that’s—I mean, he seems like he’s doing pretty well.”
“I know, you said that earlier, but I guess I’m not sure why you think that.”
“I hung out with him after school Tuesday,” she said, which I hadn’t known, and which gave me that trapdoor feeling in my stomach like the dip on a roller coaster. I said, “What did you guys do?”
“We just got boba.”
“He invited you, or—?”
“I don’t remember. We were just messaging, and I haven’t seen him just by himself for a while, so I thought it would be a good time for, like, a heart-to-heart. Anyway, honestly, he seemed fine.”
You got boba, I thought, and you had a heart-to-heart. “What did you talk about?”
“I don’t know, a lot of things. Probably nothing you haven’t heard. He was joking about the appointments he has to go to, like he said sometimes it’s tempting to just make up crazy dreams for the therapist to see if he’ll, like, super overanalyze them.” She laughed. “I told him he should. Oh, and then we talked about if he’ll come back to BAYS.”
Felix Ni opened her locker, next to mine, and Grace and I moved over to give her room. I lowered my voice. “What did he say about BAYS?”
“He just said he didn’t know if he wanted to yet. And I asked him about you, but he wouldn’t say that much. It was kind of cute—like, he wanted to be a gentleman about it or something. And we talked some about Chase, because unlike Jason I have no filter. But really, Beth, he sounded good.”
“But that’s—”
“And you’ve been so down ever since it happened. I’ve been kind of worried about you! He’s okay, and the doctors said he’s going to be fine, so…”
“But—” That was how it was supposed to feel; how was I supposed to eat and sleep normally, like everything was fine? I waited until Felix had closed her locker and gone back out toward the rally court. The hallway felt dark and close. “Do you just not think about it because he’s back now? Because that’s—”
“Of course I think about it sometimes, but then what does that actually do? It’s not like I sit there in class and don’t pay attention because I’m just thinking about it. And also, I mean—aren’t you relieved? It could have been so much worse, but it wasn’t. I’m just so glad he’s okay.”
“But he’s not really okay, Grace. It’s not like it just happened and it’s over because he lived.”
“But—it is like that,” she said. “That’s what he wanted us to do. And I just don’t think it’s good for anyone to keep focusing on the past so much. He made a mistake, but now he gets another chance, and I just think we should all look forward. It’s like that quote: ‘Everything will be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.’ ”
I felt a yawning canyon open up between us. “I’m not like that,” I said. “I can’t just let go of things and assume everything’s going to be fine no matter what.”
She smiled, and then she surprised me—she gave me a hug, and held on tightly.
“I know,” she said, finally releasing me when the first bell rang. “I know you aren’t. You should try it sometime, though, Beth. Just trust that everything will be okay.”
* * *
I’d always wished I were more like my friends, and frequently wished I were someone other than myself. Because I was envious, because I was insecure, because there were always so many things that seemed effortless to them that never were to me, because Grace was someone with whom Jason could randomly get boba and talk easily about the things I couldn’t even bring up with him—there were many reasons why.
But that was the first time I was glad I wasn’t Grace, and glad that I wasn’t like her. Because there was something so cavalier in how willing she was to brush off what had happened, something that seemed a stab of disloyalty to me.
I would be better than that. I would carry it all with me, all that fear and pain. I would take it on as my own.
I’D NEVER been on a trip without my mother, and I’d never been to New York, either. We left the first Tuesday in March for our audition the next day. Our flight took off a little past one in the morning, and after a lot of back and forth, I’d decided to just sneak out that night after pretending I’d gone to bed and hope that my mother wouldn’t stay up late or decide to check on me at night. Wednesdays she always went into work early for phone meetings with her East Coast branch, so I could call when we landed and she’d assume I was calling from school.
Sunny and Brandon were both still up and texting when I slipped out the back door at eleven at night, and I tried to carry on a normal conversation with them in the group chat the whole way to the airport, through the security line and finding our gate, my chest tight with guilt. I was a nervous wreck, terrified that my mother would call. She didn’t, but in a way that was almost worse, because I would have to turn my phone off for six hours while we flew and I’d have no way to know if she had realized yet I was gone.
The last time I’d left the state was when we’d gone to Idaho when I was eleven to see my grandmother, which had gone badly. I’d gotten the stomach flu, and the internet speed had been too slow for my father, and my mother always thought white people there were looking at us strangely. My father thought she was imagining it. The whole flight to New York tonight, watching all the patchwork crop circles and snow-dusted peaks pass underneath us, the snaking rivers cupping the earth in their gentle curves, it felt surreal that we were going, and dangerous, too. What if I couldn’t breathe on the plane, or I g
ot a blood clot from flying and it was only Jason there? He fell asleep on the flight fairly early in—I wasn’t sure what he’d told his parents—and it had the effect of making me feel like the only person left in the world. By the time we started to descend, I had grown certain the whole endeavor had been a mistake, and even when Jason woke up as we landed and then turned to smile at me, resting his hand on my thigh just briefly and whispering, “We’re doing this,” the oppressive, nervous haze around me didn’t lift.
I called my mother once we landed, as I’d planned, to tell her I was going to stay at Sunny’s that night to work on a video project, and I got her voice mail, which meant, probably, that she was in a meeting and she hadn’t noticed anything was amiss. She called back almost immediately after, but I ignored it, and then a couple minutes later texted that I was in an AP bio review session before class and I’d call her later that night. Then I called the school and left a message pretending to be my mother, excusing my absence. Jason did the same, but he didn’t call his parents.
It was nearly eleven in the morning, local time, once we’d disembarked and gotten through the airport. We both had afternoon audition slots, and originally we’d planned to fly back out that night, but we hadn’t been able to find a good flight, and so we’d go back in the morning. We got an Uber, weighted down with our bags and our violins, and a pressure started in my chest. What if something happened to me here—a panic attack, something wrong with my heart?
As we were driving, I got a message from Sunny: where are you? Why are you and Jason both gone?? I held out my phone to show him. “Do you think we should just tell them?”
He made a face. “I know it’s paranoid, but if their parents check their phones or something—”
“What should we say, then?”
He shrugged. “Just don’t write back.”
I was a little bit stunned. Was that why so often I didn’t hear back from him—he just ignored the messages on purpose? “Is that what you do?”
When We Were Infinite Page 22
