When We Were Infinite

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  That night I found out I didn’t get into UCLA. A few minutes later, Sunny sent a screenshot to our group text. It was her acceptance email and the party horn emoji, a dozen or so of them all in a row. My stomach clenched. Jason and Brandon had gotten in too. Maybe, I told myself, Sunny was holding out for LA being our best option, if, say, Jason didn’t get into Berkeley. Still, though, I couldn’t shake the dread blanketing my shoulders.

  By the time Brandon had his last regular game, Berkeley decisions still hadn’t come out, and the present felt as though it were being cannibalized by the future. The basketball season was supposed to end, which would be a relief because it, too, suctioned up the little time we had left, but then there was the first game of playoffs, and they won, so then there was another game of playoffs, which Brandon skipped rehearsal to go to Watsonville for. They won that, too, and then there was some complicated scenario about certain teams winning or losing certain games that would determine whether or not they would go to the championships—Brandon explained it probably a dozen times, but I could never quite follow—and at lunch the day the results were supposed to be posted, Leo and Bentley came to hold vigil with him while they waited to hear. Chase was there too.

  “We’re not eating until we hear, though,” Bentley said, pointing first at Brandon and then at Leo. “That was our pact.”

  “Brandon,” Grace said, “would you rather somehow curse your chances—”

  “Curse them how?” Chase interrupted. “I feel like that matters to this story.”

  It wasn’t a story, but Grace said, “Hmm, good question. Okay, Brandon, you eat something now and anger the Pitchfork god”—she wiggled her fingers back and forth—“or you make playoffs and the game is tied, right at the end, and you’re shooting and you miss?”

  “What kind of sick question is that?” Bentley said. “You’re a closet sadist, Nakamura.”

  I was sitting across from Jason. Ever since talking with Sunny, I’d been careful not to seem couple-y with him in front of the others—I would make sure I wasn’t sitting next to him, and I didn’t try to hold his hand or in any way reference our status aloud. He’d been quiet most of the day, and today at lunch he seemed distracted.

  “Lose the game, man,” Leo said. “You piss off Lord Pitchfork and you’ll pay for it the rest of your life.”

  “So when would this theoretical game be?” Sunny said.

  “This weekend.”

  “Isn’t that our spring show?” I said.

  “The game would be Saturday,” Brandon said. He was beating out a constant staccato pattern against his knees with both hands. “The show’s Sunday.”

  “The show’s in San Francisco again, right?” Sunny said. “We should go up early and hang out.”

  “Ooh, that could be fun,” Grace said. “I haven’t hung out there in a while.”

  It was supposed to be nice in the city that day, and as Leo kept refreshing the webpage on his phone and Brandon moved on to drumming onto his empty water bottle, Chase sitting with his arm around Grace, we talked about going up first thing in the morning and wandering through some of the neighborhoods. As the plans were taking shape, the day unfurling, I watched Jason, who was meticulously peeling the pith off an orange. I reached out and touched his knee.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come back?” I said. I wondered if San Francisco felt fraught to him still, if it always would. But the spring show was one of the only two big performances we had left. “You could learn the pieces by then. Everyone would be so glad to see you.”

  “I’ll probably skip this one.”

  “Oh, shit,” Leo said, his hand flying out to whap Brandon on his rib cage. “It’s up.”

  Bentley covered his eyes dramatically. “I can’t take it. Don’t tell me. Schrödinger’s results. Right now we both are and aren’t in it, but as soon as we open the box—”

  Brandon whooped. “We’re in?” Bentley said. “For sure?” He made an exuberant stabbing motion. Brandon said, “What’s that?”

  “Pitchforks, obviously.”

  Leo laughed. “All hail.” He peered at his phone. “We play St. Peter’s.”

  “Dude, St. Peter’s,” Bentley said. “That’s totally one of those places for rich white kids whose parents want to make sure their kids only socialize with other rich white kids. We’ll crush them. Go public schools.”

  I thought Chase looked like he wanted to say something, but before he could, Sunny rolled her eyes. “Yes, go public schools, but also, we’re basically a private school.”

  “How are we basically a private school?”

  “Because of everyone’s parents’ absurd property taxes. You’re still paying for your kid to go to a good school. Are they going to do that adversity score thing on college applications? Everyone here will score like, point-five.”

  “Oh right, Sunny has Opinions on college-ready adversity,” Brandon said, grinning. He looked amped. “Ask her what she thinks about writing your essay about your personal traumas. Ask her about Mike—”

  “I don’t think you shouldn’t ever write about traumas,” she protested. “I mean, Beth’s essay about Jason was great, I just think—”

  A fist squeezed around my heart so hard I reeled forward. She stopped herself, stricken, but it was too late.

  Across our little circle, Jason looked at me strangely. “Is that true?”

  I couldn’t breathe. “It wasn’t—I just mentioned you in one of the questions.”

  “You said what, exactly?”

  “Just—” Why hadn’t I prepared for this possibility? I should’ve had some answer ready, something that would make it seem less like a violation, but as it was I was too panicked to even mash together words to form a sentence. Maybe I could’ve salvaged the moment somehow, except that Sunny hadn’t just said it was about him, she’d also said it was about trauma. “It was just about friendship. It was kind of about everyone.”

  I don’t think he believed me. But then he didn’t say anything, and he didn’t ask anything else, so I thought maybe it was all right. I couldn’t look at him. My skin felt hot.

  “So where’s your game?” Grace said brightly, when no one else said anything. “Is it anywhere near SF? We should see if we could make a weekend out of it.”

  “Nah, it’s in Salinas,” Brandon said. He glanced at Jason, and I recognized the way he did it—it was the same way I felt when I was worried about how he might’ve reacted to something. “I wish we were in a league with the North Bay instead, though. We always have to do these games in like, farm towns.”

  “Oh, boo. We should still go early to SF Sunday, though. We could take BART. Jason, you should totally come!”

  “Eh, I probably wouldn’t be performance-ready,” he said. He sounded all right—pleasant, mostly, like we were discussing something neutral like test answers. “I’d drag everyone down. You guys should do it, though. It sounds like fun.”

  “You could just come for the day too, if you wanted,” I said quickly. “You wouldn’t have to play if—”

  His head snapped up to look at me, and he let his orange fall on the ground. “Why do you always keep pushing this so hard?”

  “I wasn’t trying—I just thought you might want—”

  He grabbed his orange and threw it, hard, at the trash can a few feet away, where it splattered. “Just stop, Beth, okay? I said I didn’t fucking want to go.”

  * * *

  I’d gotten around the corner and was breathing into cupped palms, trying to prove to myself that I was pulling oxygen into my lungs, when Brandon caught up to me.

  “Hey,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder, “are you okay?”

  I dropped my hands. “I’m fine.”

  “Does Jason talk to you like that a lot?”

  “No, no,” I said quickly. I wiped my eyes. “It was just—I don’t know why I pushed it. I know he doesn’t like to talk about BAYS stuff.”

  “Okay, because like—that’s not cool for him to
snap like that. You know that, right?”

  “He’s just going through a lot.”

  “I mean, yeah, I want to give him space and stuff, and I want to be understanding, but he doesn’t have to be a dick about things.”

  “You’re his best friend,” I said.

  “The point being what?”

  “The point being that if anyone should understand how hard it’s been for him it should be you. You know he’s not a bad person. Sometimes it just feels—”

  My voice gave out. Brandon said, “Sometimes it just feels like what?”

  “Like everyone’s already stopped caring about him and I’m the only one. It’s just a lot.”

  “Beth—that’s not fair.”

  “I’m not trying to—I know you care about him more than anyone. I didn’t mean you’re not—”

  “I mean it’s not fair to you,” Brandon said. “This is, like—exactly what I was kind of worried about when you said you were getting together. He really doesn’t seem like he’s in a great place to be in a relationship right now.”

  Brandon hadn’t been there for the good parts—the night in the park, New York. “Why should someone have to be in a good place to be in a relationship?”

  “Gee, I don’t know, maybe so they don’t blow up over completely innocuous questions at lunch?”

  “He didn’t blow up. He was just annoyed. And I would never ask him to be happy and perfect all the time. I just want to be there for him even—especially—when things are bad. Isn’t that what you want too?”

  * * *

  Jason called me that night. My voice came out a little strangled when I answered.

  “I called to apologize,” he said. He sounded tired. “I should never have snapped at you like that.”

  “Oh—it’s fine. It was nothing.”

  “I was just—well, whatever, it doesn’t matter. There’s no excuse. I was way out of line.” He added, “Brandon laid into me pretty good.”

  “He shouldn’t—”

  “Nah, I deserved it.”

  We were both quiet a moment. I didn’t know what to say. Finally, I said, “I changed your name.”

  “What?”

  “In the essay.”

  “Oh. That’s—honestly, I’d rather not know.”

  “Right, sure.” That was worse, actually; it made it feel like a more shameful thing I’d done. I felt exposed and ugly, too large and sharp-edged to hide myself.

  “But anyway, I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish—”

  He cut himself off. I said, “You wish what?”

  For a moment, I thought he’d answer me. But had it ever been like that between us—that things were easy and fluid, that we could understand each other without speaking and we would just say whatever came to mind? It felt hard to remember now.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’m just sorry, that’s all. It won’t happen again.”

  * * *

  I believed then that in every relationship, in everything, you made a choice whether or not you were going to hold on. When something was in danger of falling apart, there was always a stopping point—the last time you could halt things before they took on too great a velocity. And I believed that because when my father left, I’d missed that point; it was only in looking back that I recognized the one day, the one moment, that could have reversed the trajectory of our loss.

  That moment, with my father, was this: It was a Saturday in eighth grade, and the three of us had gone to Santa Cruz for the day. We traipsed all over town, my mother armed with sunscreen and my father with his Nikon, which he aimed throughout our visit at the painted wooden spokes of the Giant Dipper, at the reflection of the clouds in the wet sand after the waves had receded. I’d seen it happen, time and again, but I’d never quite understood how from such bright and lovely things—a candy store, a roller coaster where you screamed, happy, and the wind tugged at your hair—he’d extract small, muted black-and-white biopsies of detail and texture so you saw only the splintering wood of the ride’s infrastructure, the way those grains of sand had such sharp, unsparing edges.

  At the candy shop, I chose an ice cream cone with nuts, and my father had a Snickers bar. As my father was handing his card to the cashier, he turned around.

  “You getting anything, Kathy?” he said.

  “Oh—no,” my mother said quickly. Her hands went unconsciously to her stomach, and she smoothed her shirt down over her waist. “The sugar makes my teeth hurt.”

  “We come all the way here and you don’t want anything?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well. Maybe something small. Here.” She quickly picked up a small bag of taffy lying on the counter next to her and handed it to my father.

  “Well, don’t give it to me,” he said.

  “That’s all for you folks?” the cashier said.

  “Yes,” my father said to the boy, a twenty-something with huge wooden ear gauges who looked bored of us, bored of the whole day. “That’s all.”

  Later we walked downtown, and in a used bookstore he bought me Ender’s Game, his favorite book. I read it on the way home. It was dark by then, long dark, but if I held the book up I could read by the headlights coming through the rearview window, the light spilling across the pages and making the words jump and skitter with every bump in the road.

  My mother kept turning around, looking worriedly at me. “Beth, that probably isn’t very good for your eyes,” she murmured, and then, “Beth, aren’t you making yourself carsick?” And then, the last time—“Doug, is she blocking your view?”

  “Just leave her alone,” my father had said—not quite angry, really; more tired, more drained. And that was it, that was the stopping point: the last moment when it was still the three of us cocooned there when we shared a destination and a point of origin and still we called the same place home. When we stepped inside the doorway later that night, my father would clear his throat and say, “Kathy—it’s just not going to work.”

  After he left, I revised that moment over and over, gave it so many alternate endings. In one version, I defend my mother. But I don’t want to be left alone, I say. And he understands what I mean: In the rearview mirror, his eyes meet mine, and he sees, superimposed over that reflection, what it will do to us if he leaves. He sees the father-daughter dance from which I stay home in eighth grade, the couples’ gym membership my mother cancels, Mr. Irving asking me, jovially, “How come I never see your dad anymore at our concerts, Beth?”

  In another version, I take his side. Yes, I say to my mother, Leave me alone. And she’s hurt; she twists back around and looks out the window the rest of the ride. But we go home, my mother still quiet, and when we get back she stops nagging him about the video games, stops radiating her wounded silence around the house, and I learn to be better at the games, and he’s proud and admiring. In another version, I say something funny and he laughs and the tension breaks and scatters. In another, he snaps back at her and they fight until they decide to see a marriage counselor; in another, my mother confronts him, and in another, he laughs everything off. In all my versions, he never leaves, or if he does, he comes back after a few days because he loves us, and he misses us too much.

  Sometimes I still thought about my lonely, devastated eighth-grade self, so desperately clinging to all those alternate endings that would never come true. And I thought now how if I could’ve gone back in time somehow and told that version of me that someday Jason would ask me to belong to him, maybe everything would’ve felt different then. All the ways I felt broken and worthless, all those ways the world felt blown apart and all those ways I felt unwanted—maybe it would’ve soothed them to know that Jason, Jason whom I had always loved, wanted me.

  It was more than I’d ever believed in for myself. So no matter how difficult things were, I wouldn’t waver. I would understand, I would do better. I would hold on.

  I HAD refreshed my email so many times the past weeks—hundreds of thousands, possibly—that it felt almost involuntary, an
extension of my nervous system, and of those countless refreshes there was so infrequently anything new except for credit card emails that when the email appeared the morning of Brandon’s game saying YOUR APPLICATION TO JUILLIARD, at first it didn’t register. And then in a fraction of a second it did, all at once, and my pulse throbbed in my thighs and in the back of my neck, and I opened the email fast, before I could lose the courage.

  Dear Beth, it said. Welcome to Juilliard.

  But surely—surely—I’d misread. I read it four times. It was so unexpected it almost felt more real.

  I did it, I thought. They thought I was good. They want me.

  But still nothing. I was numb. I read it over and over, until the words lost their meaning, and then a message popped up while I was still staring at it.

  I didn’t get in, Jason wrote. You?

  I was so genuinely unprepared for this outcome that it took me several seconds to decipher what he meant. It was impossible that he hadn’t, because I had. He’d been out of practice, yes, but it was Jason.

  I called him. “Are you okay?” I said. “What did they say?”

  “They didn’t say anything.”

  “But was it—did you put in your application about your arm, and—”

  “No.” His voice was flat. “That’s irrelevant.”

  “But maybe if they knew—”

  “It doesn’t work like that, Beth.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Had his audition gone that badly? Surely Jason at his best—even on an average day—was more than good enough to get in. I had spent years of my life listening to him. It wasn’t just that I knew what he was capable of musically—it was also that I knew what it meant to him. Finally, I said, helplessly, “I can’t believe it.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me, what?”

  “Did you hear yet? Did you get in?”

  “Oh—no. I mean, yes, I got the email too. Um—I didn’t get in either.”

  “Well, that’s bullshit.”