I stayed up late that night messaging with Sunny and Grace (Sunny had been arguing with her parents, and Grace was having bad cramps), and they asked what Mr. Irving had wanted to talk to me about. I told them, but then accidentally turned my phone on silent and fell asleep before I saw a response, so in the morning Grace’s message was waiting for me: Oooh, you should go for it!!! You would love that.
I told Jason about it as we were walking to second period, and something changed in his face when I did. “You’re applying?”
“I wouldn’t be able to go,” I said, suddenly embarrassed. “Well, I’ll never get in, either. I just didn’t want to say no to Mr. Irving.”
“He asked you?”
“Did he ask you, too?”
“No.”
“He probably assumed you are since you’re the first chair. I think all the other ones have at least auditioned.”
“Maybe,” Jason said. I couldn’t quite parse the tone of his voice, and I hoped he hadn’t taken it as an accusation.
“Have you ever thought about applying?” I said. “Just—to see?”
He was quiet awhile. “It’s probably not a good idea.”
I imagined him packing away his violin for the last time, shoving it under his bed. “You don’t think you’ll miss it?”
“I’ll probably have to do molecular bio or something for med school.”
That wasn’t actually an answer, but also the expression on his face wasn’t exactly an invitation. “Right.”
“That’s cool you’re doing it, though.” He held open the door for me. “I bet you’d regret it forever if you didn’t.”
* * *
We spent most of Saturday taking and then recovering from taking our SAT IIs, and Sunday we spent five hours studying at Brandon’s house, making a pilgrimage halfway through to load up on snacks. But then on our way to Ranch 99, when we passed Target, there was a sign saying you got a gift card if you got a free flu shot, and Brandon flipped a U-turn, saying, “No, come on, we’re doing it, it’ll be good,” when Sunny told him it was the randomest idea he’d ever had. So we all got our matching flu shots and our five-dollar gift cards, then had a contest to see who could buy the best snack with it in five minutes. Jason won with caffeinated bulgogi-flavored beef jerky, except then it came out that actually it had cost nine dollars and Sunny said, “Jason, we trusted you! Automatic disqualification,” and Jason said, “How much do you think it should cost? You don’t think people should be paid a living wage to make your novelty foods?” and Sunny said, “The rules very clearly—” and Jason said, “Okay, capitalist,” and yanked the bag away, and bits of caffeinated beef flew all over and we had to brush them from our hair. He was laughing, we were all laughing, and I thought how impossible these moments would be to ever explain to someone outside of us, let alone ever replicate.
The next morning before school, Vikram Reddy asked Teri Ma to Homecoming with a flash mob of people from choir. He’d written an original song that name-dropped not only Teri and the different friends they’d be going with but also, somehow, transpiration and factor markets and Bodas de Sangre, which we were reading in AP Spanish. We all circled around to watch, and it was stupid, but when they were finished and Vikram dropped dramatically on one knee and we all applauded, I imagined Jason asking me.
Of course that wouldn’t happen. But the five of us could go, and we could make it something special and memorable we did as a group. I could imagine all of us caught in the rhythms and the shine of the night, the way it felt sometimes at one of our performances except that we wouldn’t all disperse afterward. Maybe the night would make things feel different to Jason—would make me feel different to him somehow.
At home that evening, I looked up limousine rentals. It would be nearly a hundred dollars for each of us, which was a slightly terrifying number. But I thought about how in a limo we’d have our own small world, and I would pay anything in service of that.
For dinner, my mother had made steamed pork cake, and when I came downstairs with my laptop she’d spooned a portion onto a plate for me with broccoli, spinach, and rice. She would have liked for us to regularly sit down and have an uninterrupted meal together, I knew—sometimes, wistfully, she’d mention it—but most nights I was doing homework and she was answering emails or paying bills or cooking for the next day, which she was doing tonight. She pulled a cutting board from under the sink and a knife from the block on the counter, gently nudging jars and bottles out of her way to make room. My father had hated all that clutter. Just throw it away and buy a new one if you need it, he’d snap sometimes when he was clawing his way through the refrigerator looking for jam, or digging through all the pens in the kitchen drawer to find one that still worked.
“Is that homework?” she said, pausing her mincing ginger to take a bite of pork cake, when I set my laptop down on the table. She’d never been a good multitasker, and whenever she tried to eat while she was doing something else, she always timed it wrong and opened her mouth before she’d even picked up her food so that for a few seconds she sat slack-jawed, her mouth gaping. I looked away. I hated thinking how that might have repulsed my father.
“It’s planning for Homecoming.”
“Oh—are you going to Homecoming? I would have thought it had passed by now. What are you planning?”
“I was just looking at different limo companies.”
“Oh, Beth—limos are so expensive. I can drive you there. I don’t think teenagers should be spending all this money on extras for dances like this.” She went back to chopping. “While we’re on the topic of money, though, I’d like to have a discussion about your plans for next year. Is there a good time we can—”
She always tried to schedule things like this. “Why don’t we just talk about it now?”
“Well—all right, there were some things I wanted to prepare first, but I suppose—” She set down her knife and wiped her hands, then came and sat down next to me, too close, and opened her laptop.
I felt myself resisting. So far I’d avoided the topic of next year with my friends, but they were who I wanted to map out the future with, not my mother with her spreadsheets. But also—I felt this was a conversation my father might want to be present for. Berkeley was one of the only things he’d consistently talked to me about when I was growing up.
My mother typed something, her brow furrowed in concentration. Sometimes, when I let myself notice, she seemed so tired and frayed to me, so fragile, and I wondered whether she missed my father still, whether she felt as alone inside the house as I did. When I was a child, we’d been so close—at night she would come crawl into bed with me if I had a bad dream. She’d kept all the drawings I used to proudly give her, framed around the house like a museum of a past life.
“I think we should talk about finances first.” My mother angled her laptop so I could see the file, rows of color-coded numbers that jumbled when I looked at them. On her background, there was a COUNTDOWN TO ASHEVILLE! widget. We were going this summer to celebrate my graduation, my eighteenth birthday, and her forty-fifth birthday. She’d been planning already for over a year. Whenever I opened my email, she’d sent new articles like Ten Vistas You Absolutely Must See on the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway or pictures from restaurants: fried chicken, barbecued ribs.
“As you can see,” she said, “it would be advantageous to go somewhere with lower tuition, so I think staying in-state makes the most sense. But I haven’t spoken with your father yet about his contributions, so—”
“What do you mean his contributions?”
“Well, I expect that he’ll also contribute toward your college fund.”
My skin felt tighter around my rib cage. “I don’t want him to pay for any of it.”
She looked at me, puzzled. “You have to report his income on your FAFSA anyway. Of course I’ve always expected—”
“I don’t want to ask him for anything.”
“You don’t have to ask him, Beth. I’ll speak t
o him about it.”
I felt my voice rising. “I don’t want to use his money.”
She tapped her fingers on her keyboard lightly and blinked at the screen. “Well, I don’t know if—”
“I’ll stay in-state and go to a public school. It’s fine. I wanted to go to a UC anyway.”
“That’s fine if that’s what you want to do, but it limits your options so much to—”
“I’m not going to use his money.”
She started to say something, then stopped. I could tell she wanted to ask me why. Finally, she said, “It’s good to keep your options as open as possible.”
“That isn’t an option for me.”
“Beth, I’ve always worked hard, but my salary isn’t—”
“I’ll just stay in-state. It’s fine.” My heart was starting to race. “Is that all? I have a lot of homework tonight.”
Maybe because she was tired she didn’t press it, or maybe she planned to come back to it later. “Well, I—I suppose that’s all,” she said. “For now.”
* * *
My parents met at UC Berkeley. They were in the dorms together as juniors, and one night my mother was cooking in the communal kitchen, soy sauce chicken in foil and (because she believed in eating at least two different vegetables every night) dau miu and bok choy, and she offered him dinner; three years later they were married. Once upon a time they delighted one another and they were happy.
Before he’d left, when they were fighting all the time, I’d read all the articles I could find on things like How not to drive your boyfriend away and Why he’s thinking of leaving you and What makes marriages fail, because I knew that when I was older I wanted it to be different for me. For a girl, it seemed, the dangers were myriad: you talked too much, or not enough; you let yourself go or your makeup looked too harsh; you didn’t have enough sex; you nagged him or made him feel emasculated or you weren’t fun. How did people ever stay together? And how would I ever learn to be good enough, to somehow avoid whatever it was my mother had done? I’d become so conscious of all the things she was doing that might drive him away—her hovering, the way she would press her lips together and look upset for hours on end when he was trying to play his video games, how she would make demands of him and not stop when it was already clear he was increasingly annoyed. It felt unforgivable that she hadn’t tried harder.
Back upstairs, I closed and locked my door and went back to the limo website. When I was fourteen, my mother had signed me up for a credit card in the name of financial health, and I used it to put down a deposit for the limousine rental for the night of Homecoming. It was so much money it made me feel a little sick, but I’d be paid back for most of it, and it would be a special night, an important one for us. And I knew from watching my mother what could happen when you squandered your chance to hold on to someone.
THE FIRST OF our college apps were due at the beginning of November. Eric Hsu figured out some hack to add most of the senior class to a WhatsApp group he named Rager!!!!, and we used it to complain en masse when for a week straight probably a third of us all set our alarms for two a.m. to wake up and work on our essays—you’d pick up your phone at three in the morning and there’d be fifty new messages, which was gross but also kind of nice. After the five of us turned in our first applications, Mrs. Nakamura sent us cookies via Grace, triangles made to look like college-y pennants with each of our names written in icing, like this was supposed to be a celebration. But each application—BU, Stanford, Princeton, Cornell—represented a different shade of separation: Would you rather lose the people who mean most to you to a redbrick campus with fall foliage and snow, or to a campus studded with palm trees by the ocean? Would you rather their new world be full of thirty thousand potential friends to replace you with, or an intimate four thousand?
Wednesdays were late start days, and for years now we’d had standing plans to meet at Grace’s before school for breakfast. Mrs. Nakamura was a real estate agent, and their house always looked Instagram-ready—Brandon had joked once that cooking in their kitchen made him feel like British bakers were waiting to judge him. That week we made ricotta pancakes, a recipe Sunny wanted to try. She and Brandon mixed the batter, and then Jason meticulously flipped them while I sliced strawberries and Grace whipped cream. Sitting at the Nakamuras’ kitchen island, the light streaming in through their windows and our silverware clinking softly against the plates and my friends all laughing together, I thought how cruel it was that no one in the world could stop this all from ending.
“It’ll be better than you think, Beth,” Grace said. “You’re still thinking about next year, right?” She reached over the bowl of strawberries to pat my hand. “Everyone ends up loving college. You will too.”
“Speaking of,” Sunny said, before I had to answer Grace, “Except not speaking of, I just didn’t have a good segue, who wants to go to something next week with me?”
“I do,” Grace said. “What is it?”
“It’s this thing on Tuesday at the LGBTQ Community Center downtown. Crafternoon.”
“Me,” Jason said. “I love crafts.”
She raised her eyebrows. “You love crafts?”
“Like friendship bracelets and popcorn strings and yarn balls? So meditative. I love that shit.”
“Sun, I didn’t know there was an LGBTQ center in Congress Springs,” I said.
“Yeah, I’ve been wanting to go for a while. I kind of want to meet people.”
“I’ll be your wingman,” Brandon said.
Sunny rolled her eyes. “Who has time for a relationship? No, just meet other queer people.”
“What about the GSA?” Grace said. “Didn’t you used to go?”
“Mrs. Welton asks me that literally once a week.” Mrs. Welton was the vice principal who advised the ASB and also the Gender and Sexuality Alliance. “I went like four times. And every time she’d give me this huge weepy hug and tell me to call her Mama Kat, which, ew. She definitely thinks it’s like, my parents don’t know and are going to disown me. One time she started telling me how she knew honor was an important value to my family.”
“Ooh, like she just watched Mulan?” Grace said, laughing. “Who else was in the GSA?”
“Mm—Liam Chadwick. Missy Straub. Then mostly younger white kids you probably wouldn’t know. Oh, that one junior girl that hangs out with Chase’s group. Emma something. Moffat? They’re all great, but honestly, it’s like eighty percent Mrs. Welton talking about her gay son and then crying and telling us all we’re beautiful the way we are. Which—thank you, I know that. But I want to meet like—other Asian and POC queer people. One of the times I went I said we should talk about intersectionality and race and Mrs. Welton literally was like oh, no, we don’t see color here.”
“Gross,” Brandon said. “Let’s all go with you.”
“Boo, I can’t,” Grace said. “I promised my mom I’d help her stage. The rest of you go.”
Sunny made a face. “I can’t show up with three straight people. I’m picking Beth.”
Brandon pretended to be wounded, but maybe he wasn’t completely pretending, or maybe I was just projecting—I thought it would be better with all of us, because everything was; because we had such limited time left for that.
The day of Crafternoon the next week, when it had started to get cold again and the hills had turned brown as all the grapevines in the vineyards dropped their leaves, I was walking with Grace at the beginning of lunch. In AP Gov, fifth period, Mr. Markham had gone off on a bizarre tangent about Kennedy’s assassination, and as we left class together afterward, Grace had said, “Okay, ooh, this will be fun—which conspiracy theory is everyone in our group?” and now she was trying to convince me that Brandon was The Government Faked the Moon Landing, and we were both laughing, and so I didn’t notice right away that Chase Hartley was waiting in front of her locker with a bouquet of red roses.
My heart sank. I did not want Chase Hartley in our limo, Chase Hartley around for th
e whole night of Homecoming. When Grace saw, she put her hands to her cheeks.
“Chase!” she said, almost scoldingly. “Are these for me?”
He handed them to her, a little sheepishly. “Yeah, I wanted to ask you—you want to go to Homecoming together?”
Grace was so delighted I felt chastened that my initial reaction hadn’t been to share in her happiness. She stood on tiptoes to fling her arms around his neck, and the cellophane around the roses crinkled between them. He patted her on the back a little awkwardly and said, “Okay, awesome, well, uh—I guess we’ll—talk about details and stuff later?”
“I give it a two,” Brandon said, when Grace recounted the story. “Maybe a two-five. Zero points for creativity, but I’ll give him the two for at least buying flowers ahead of time.”
From where we were eating lunch, we could see Chase across the rally court, drinking a bottle of something unnaturally blue. The five of us had been eating in the same place since we were freshmen, a gap between two cement planters at the edge of the rally court across from the gym. The campus had been built to look like someone’s idea of an East Coast school, brick buildings and ivy everywhere, except the hallways were outdoors because it was California, and the murals on the gym walls were all of apricot orchards and a giant pitchfork, which was, inexplicably, our school mascot.
Grace readjusted her flowers. “I thought it was sweet. He looked nervous. He used the word awesome.”
I tried to avoid looking directly at Jason, worried that my longing would be nakedly visible if I did. “So—Chase will come with all of us, then?”
When We Were Infinite Page 3