“Maybe.”
“At Berkeley you just declare the major—there’s no audition. You could even double major.”
“There’s no audition?”
“I looked it up.”
Outside, there was a screech of brakes and then a car horn, but it felt faraway, like it was coming from some other universe. Jason let go of my hands and ran his fingers gently through my hair, and I shivered.
This is it, I thought, and my stomach clenched. I tried to relax. He put both his hands on my shoulders and then skimmed them, very slowly, down the lengths of my arms, touching me so gently that it felt almost like a breeze. He took my hands in his again and shifted a little so we were side by side, pressed against each other, and I waited, tense, because I wasn’t sure what came next exactly or how the mechanics of everything went. Then, kind of abruptly, he propped himself up on his elbow.
“Beth,” he said, “I think—I’ve been thinking a lot, and—”
But he cut himself off. “What?” I said. My heartbeat was percussive in my ears.
For a little while there, the world felt so wide open, and the spaces between us so microscopic, I thought he’d keep going. But he smiled in that way I knew well, the one that meant he was done talking, and then he lay down again and rested his forehead against mine. I could feel his eyelashes brush against me when he blinked. And it was a denouement of sorts—when you play in an orchestra your whole life, you recognize a decrescendo—and so that was it, and we wouldn’t have sex tonight, and I was both sorry and relieved.
I lost track of how long we lay there like that, but after a while his breathing evened out, and when I checked, he was asleep. I lay awake all night just to feel him there next to me and because I was worried that if I went to sleep I would wake up and find myself alone again, him having gone to the other bed, and that would be unbearable. I wished that after the airplane tomorrow we didn’t have to go back to belonging to different spaces, that I wouldn’t go home after this and sleep every night alone while he was alone too.
WE’D GOTTEN home when my mother was still at work, and I’d made sure to change and unpack and rip up any luggage tags and tickets before she came back. But the first night I was back at home, she hovered, repeating several times that it seemed an absurd amount of time to spend on a school project.
“Maybe I’ll email your teacher,” she said as we were eating the tomato egg and steamed bok choy she’d made for dinner. “You already have so much going on, and it just seems insensitive to pile this kind of project on too.”
I almost choked on my food. “No, don’t email her. It’s fine. We got it all done.”
“Well, when students are getting panic attacks because they’re so stressed out, I just don’t understand why—”
“It’s fine,” I said quickly. “Is there more egg?”
“I’ll make you more.”
“No, don’t make more. I’ll eat something else.” I wasn’t even hungry still; I’d just wanted to distract her. Sitting there next to her at the table, I felt like New York was written across my body, like it had to be visible somehow to her. “Actually, I think I’m full. I’m going to go take a shower.”
The next morning, Sunny was waiting for me outside the math portables, and she grabbed my sleeve and said, “So did you and Jason ditch school to hook up?” When I told her that we hadn’t, she said, “You go dark for a full twenty-four hours and I’m supposed to believe that? You definitely owe me details if it’s something more interesting than you were just sick,” and she seemed amused, but when I stammered out a nonanswer, she looked hurt. I was saved from the rest of the conversation only by Brandon showing up. I couldn’t help wondering, though, if I’d been dating someone else, if it hadn’t been Jason, if Sunny would’ve pressed harder. Months ago, it would’ve been unfathomable that I could disappear for the same two days as my boyfriend and she’d just let it go.
I’d wondered whether the way it had felt with Jason would last once we got home, and also whether, deposited back in real life, he would still feel the same way about New York. Maybe it wasn’t that he’d liked Juilliard, or New York itself—maybe it was just the first time he’d been able to conceptualize the future in any real way. Maybe it was the first time he’d remembered what it was to play music.
I imagined telling my father I wasn’t going to Berkeley after all. He would find Juilliard baffling, and probably he’d be so disappointed. Or, worse, if Jason got in and I didn’t, how would I explain to my father why I would have to go to community college in New York? He would see it as a failure. And if all my other friends got into Berkeley, or nearby—would they give that up to switch plans at the last minute to stay close to Jason? Would they be upset we hadn’t told them sooner? I knew he worried about word getting back to his parents somehow, but it was still hard to believe we had actually flown to New York and kept everyone in the dark.
The end of everything had begun to feel so close then. In AP Econ, there was a map on the wall where people could stick pushpins wherever they’d been accepted, and each new pin brought that end closer and closer. I couldn’t look at it in class.
The week after we got back from New York I heard from my first college, UC Santa Cruz, which I hadn’t wanted to apply to but my mother had urged me to, just in case. I’d (unsurprisingly) been accepted, but I never went to Santa Cruz anymore after our day at the Boardwalk just before my father left. It had been a waste to apply.
“I heard last year UCLA was the second UC to come out,” Sunny said at lunch that day. I wanted to say but it doesn’t matter, right? but Jason was there.
Later that week, we all got into UC Santa Barbara, which didn’t help anything, and then UC Davis, which didn’t help either. Grace got into St. Mary’s—I’d expected she would, but it was still a relief—and Loyola Marymount and USD and BU. Sunny, who wasn’t a fan of backup schools, was rejected at Harvard and Stanford. So was Brandon, but he got into Michigan and Caltech. And Jason—Jason didn’t talk about acceptances much unless you pressed him directly, which I made sure not to do. Since coming back, he’d seemed better than before, but also not as good as in New York. He still hadn’t come back to BAYS.
Brandon’s basketball season was in full swing now. The team this year was unusually good, and Brandon was always talking about possible scenarios in which they might make playoffs. They would do things like wear their jerseys to school on game days or have team lunches or group workout sessions in the evenings. We weren’t a very sports-y school—usually when we went to watch him it was like five white moms in team sweatshirts and an aggressively invested dad or two, clusters of people watching their friends play while they studied, and a handful of freshman there for the PE extra credit, probably under thirty people total—but we did have a soft spot for excellence, so people had started going to watch.
The Tuesday of spring break, Sunny and I went to see his game against Los Altos. Jason was at the dentist and Grace was in Kauai with her family, and the gym was almost empty because of spring break. We sat near half-court, our homework for AP Econ spread on the row in front of us, behind three moms who had customized red-and-white stadium seats that said PITCHFORKS!!, where the I and the exclamation marks were upside-down pitchforks and the T was a normal one. When we’d first noticed their seats sometime last year, Sunny had said, “I’m totally getting everyone that for Christmas,” and Jason had told her please do, and that the second exclamation mark really sold it.
“So are you not excited about Chase? What are we calling them now? ChGrace?” Sunny said. On our way over, Grace had FaceTimed us from the beach to say that she and Chase had finally made things official. “You didn’t exactly look thrilled when she told us.”
Did that mean Sunny wasn’t thrilled either? I wanted so badly to be aligned in this, to be able to talk about it. I’d been simmering since we’d heard. One of the Los Altos players overshot the basket, and the ball thudded against the wall, the sound echoing against all the lacquered hard
wood and metal bleachers. Brandon grabbed the ball to throw back in, springing to action when the whistle blew, and I said, “What do you think about it?”
“She seemed really happy.”
My heart sank a little. “Right.” I said, carefully, “I’m just worried, I guess.”
“About her? Chase is pretty harmless.”
“None of us really knows him that well, though.” We didn’t know, for instance, if he cared about our place in Grace’s life, if he understood the importance of it or if he was the kind of person who thought friends should be an interchangeable collection of people you could hang out and laugh with. And you want the people you love to feel more like themselves in a relationship, not less, and it didn’t seem that way.
“I’ve known Chase since we were like five years old. He has a labradoodle. His family makes him go to church. His car smells like a Costco.”
“But you don’t actually know him know him. It just seems—it seems so risky. And if she thinks they’re going to break up anyway, and the timing—the timing is just bad.” What if Grace decided she didn’t want to break up with him after all, and instead wanted to go to college with him?
Brandon had the ball again. I watched him dribble with one hand, shouting directions to the other guys. He was different when he played—more aggressive, more visibly emotional—and I had the strange feeling that I could not imagine that the guy out there drenched with sweat and shouting himself hoarse, his arms muscled and pale in his sleeveless jersey, was someone I’d built my life around and would share a future with.
“Do you think they’re sleeping together?” Sunny said.
I’d wondered. “Maybe. Chase seems like someone who would probably want to.”
“Maybe? I don’t know about Grace, though. She didn’t with Miles.”
“But if he wants to, she probably would, right?”
“Wait, what?”
“I mean, if they’re going out—”
Sunny put down her binder to turn and look at me. “Wait, this isn’t about you and Jason, is it? He’s not, like, pressuring you—”
I felt my face turn red. The metal rim of the bench was pressing uncomfortably into me. “No, no, nothing like that.”
“Wait, is he, though? Because it’s kind of weird you said it like that.”
“It’s kind of weird I said what like that?”
“Like just because Chase wants to, Grace has to go along with whatever? That’s—kind of rapey.”
“I just meant—” I faltered, waiting for her to talk over me, but she didn’t. Brandon rifled off a quick pass to Leo Lim, and Leo shot, the ball swishing cleanly through the net. Brandon screamed something triumphantly at him, slapping his hand. We were ahead. Finally, Sunny said, “You just meant what?”
“I don’t know, I guess if you’re going out with a guy it seems weird to—just not, if he wants to.”
She squinted at me. “Are you reading, like, housewife manuals from the nineteen fifties? What are you talking about? Because, A: Why are you just assuming only the guy wants to, and B: What the hell, Beth? Do I need to talk to Jason?”
“No—Sunny, don’t.” We weren’t sitting particularly close to anyone else on the bleachers, but I looked around anyway to make sure no one could hear. One of the tall white guys on the Los Altos team passed the ball to one of their other tall white guys, but Leo’s arm flickered out and he nabbed the ball, and then everyone stampeded in the opposite direction, a blur of red and blue. “Jason’s never said anything about it. I just—I just assumed that—”
“Okay, but what would you do if he did?”
“I guess I’d say yes?”
“Because you actively want to or you feel like you have to?” I didn’t answer, and she grabbed my arm. “Okay, Beth, seriously, you don’t owe him anything like that, so you shouldn’t feel like—”
“We all owe him, though, kind of.”
“Okay, but not our bodies. Also, what do you mean we all kind of owe him?”
The question surprised me; it felt like it should be self-evident. “Clearly, we failed him.”
“That’s how you see it?”
“How do you see it?”
“Obviously I wish things had been different, but we didn’t know about it. We would have done something if we could’ve.”
There was a twist of pain in my chest when I remembered how he’d tried to sound nonchalant in our hotel in New York when he’d alluded to Christmas. “But that was the problem. We didn’t know. We just assumed everything was fine, and we weren’t—”
“You think it was our fault?”
“Sun—we’re his best friends.”
We watched as Brandon tried to take the ball down the court and lost control when one of the players from Los Altos, a short-ish white guy, boxed him in. Brandon looked enraged in a way he never did in normal life. Everything about him seemed heightened here. One of the moms, an Asian mom I didn’t recognize wearing a red Las Colinas sweatshirt, put her hands to her mouth and called, “That’s all right, Brandon, keep it up!”
“You know,” Sunny said, “Grace said she’s been worried about you.”
“She said that to me, too, but I think it’s because she’s kind of in denial.”
“What do you mean she’s in denial?”
“She thinks no one should be worried about anything.”
“Yeah, I don’t know if that’s exactly what she thinks. It’s more that she thinks you’re like—I don’t know, just not doing well with everything.”
“I think she’s just really wrapped up in Chase.”
Sunny was quiet awhile. I pretended to go back to my lab notes. The tallest Los Altos player shot and missed, and a group of four freshman waved posterboards with pitchforks drawn on them. We scored again—we were up by twelve now—and everyone cheered, a small and hollow sound with so few people in such a big room. After a while, Sunny said, “I think it’s because you’re so like—secretive about Jason. You never talk about things. And the way you guys are together—I don’t know. It feels different now.”
“You mean with the five of us?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t want it to feel different,” I said quickly. “It shouldn’t. It’s not like we’re going off alone together all the time.”
“Grace and I were talking—” She hesitated. “Actually, never mind.”
“No, you can tell me. You and Grace were talking about what?”
She didn’t look at me. “I guess like—trying to picture what it would be like next year. Like if it’s going to feel like this next year.”
It suddenly felt imperative to have Sunny on my side. I wished Brandon were here talking with us instead of running back and forth on the court, shouting instructions. “Feel like what, though, Sun? Things are the same.”
“Maybe it’s not you,” she said. “Maybe it’s more Jason. He’s just kind of—still so withdrawn. I guess I just assumed it’s because he’s more focused on you, but maybe it’s not like that.”
“But that’s exactly why I think Grace is in denial. I think Jason is still really not doing well, and I think he still really needs everybody, but Grace is just too wrapped up in Chase right now to see that. It’s like—it’s like she just wants to forget it all now that it’s not convenient for her anymore.”
“You really think that’s where she’s coming from? Because when you say stuff like you think you have to sleep with him if he wants to—that really doesn’t feel like the healthiest relationship in the world.”
“I’m just—” My voice cracked a little, and then I didn’t know what to say. Sunny softened.
“You know you can talk to us, right?” she said. “It just seems like it’s probably a lot of pressure to be dating someone like Jason ever, but especially, like, right after something so major. It’s just weird to me how it feels like you’re always holding back from telling us stuff.”
“I mean—what do you want to know? It’s not like anyone ever ask
s.”
It was halftime, and on his way to where his team was gathered on the sidelines Brandon veered toward us. He was drenched in sweat, and he looked exuberant—we were up by eighteen now—and he pretended he was going to hug Sunny. “Don’t even think about it,” Sunny snapped, recoiling, and he laughed and kept going to his team, lifting up his jersey to mop his face.
We watched them huddle. The way the lights overhead were flickering, the stuffiness in the gym, the way the bleachers rattled every time someone got up and walked on them—everything was making me feel dizzy. I tried to focus on the door. Then Sunny said, abruptly, “You’ll still tell me things, right? Like if there’s—anything. You won’t keep secrets from me just because you’re with him now.”
The buzzer went off, startling me, and Brandon and his teammates exploded from their huddle.
“Right,” I said, over the noise of so many feet pounding against the floor. “Of course.” It was maybe the first time I’d deliberately lied to her.
AT THE END of spring break, when Grace came back tanned and with Kauai Kookies for us, Jason, Sunny, Brandon, and I all got into UCSD. It was the best school I’d been accepted to so far, and if I got in there, I hoped it meant good things for Berkeley. But that Grace hadn’t gotten in was a little alarming. The first day back at school, all five of us got into Irvine, which didn’t seem like a realistic option, but it was so far the best place we’d all gotten into, and the path was narrowing. At least two-thirds of our class had already chosen where they were going to go next year. The map in AP Econ was teeming with all those small, cold futures.
Meanwhile, improbably, Brandon’s team kept winning. For the game against our rival, Cupertino (rival referring to, basically, test scores, since we were both generally bad at sports), the gym was nearly packed, and a junior named Rajesh 3-D-printed hundreds of six-inch plastic pitchforks and stood outside the gym handing them out. At halftime, Brandon held up his phone and took a panoramic picture, looking emotional. His parents had both taken off work to see him come play, gamely accepting the plastic pitchforks and waving them around whenever we scored.
When We Were Infinite Page 24
