I said, “Who would we tell?”
“I don’t know. I was thinking about it all night. Some adult?”
I wasn’t the kind of student who was close to any of her teachers. I could’ve told my mother, I suppose, but what could she have done? I imagined her indecision, the hapless, feckless worry that would exude from her, and it felt worse than doing nothing.
“I’ll probably tell my mom,” Grace said.
“Don’t tell your mom yet,” Brandon said. “Just—wait on it, okay? What if she wants to do something about it?”
“Did you tell your parents?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “They kind of know Jason’s parents.”
I said, “Should we call the police?”
“You can’t call the police,” Sunny said immediately. “We’re, like, white-adjacent, maybe, but I still would never call the cops on a POC. You think they’re on your side? How do you picture that going, exactly?”
I hadn’t thought of it like that. My father had called the police to our house once, when a neighbor crashed their car into our mailbox, and they’d been friendly and polite. One had given me a See’s lollipop. “Right,” I said quickly, embarrassed. “True.”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter whose side they’re on,” Brandon said. “There’s no way what happened wouldn’t count as assault, and—”
“Well, my parents go too far sometimes too,” Sunny said. Sunny fought with her parents all the time. When it was really bad, she would storm out and wind up at my house or Grace’s and spend the night because she refused to go back home, and I’d sit up with her when she was too upset to sleep. She had a much older brother who’d bought a multimillion-dollar home in Palo Alto at twenty-five, and she’d told us she thought her parents had always wanted another son just like him. “It’s definitely messed up, but I would never want anyone to call the cops on them. I promise you Jason doesn’t want his dad getting arrested.”
Brandon said, quietly, “You weren’t there, Sun.”
“Okay, well, what do you think your parents would do if someone called nine-one-one on them?” she said. “Can you picture that going even remotely well? Is there any universe where their response is Oh, okay, it’s clear we messed up, and now we’re committed to being better going forward? They’d flip out, right? And who are they going to take it out on?”
“I mean, maybe if they—I don’t know—”
“If they what? Arrest his dad? That sounds like a great solution for someone with an anger problem. What happens when he comes back home?”
“What about, like, firefighters?” Grace said. “You know, the ones where you can drop off a baby at the fire station.”
Sunny snorted. “Okay, and then what—they sic their fire hoses on his dad? What do you think happens when you call someone? Like, what exactly is the endgame here?”
“The endgame is for this not to happen to him again,” I said, and there was a sharpness in my voice. I tried to soften it. “What about Mr. Irving?”
Sunny made a face. “He’s probably some kind of mandated reporter or something. Plus, Jason would still have to face him three times a week afterward. You know he’d hate that.”
“He knows Jason, though. Maybe he could talk—”
“Mr. Irving is great and all, but he’s—” She looked to Brandon for help.
“Right,” Brandon said. “He’s just not—he wouldn’t understand,” and too late I realized what they meant. Inheriting my father’s face, my father’s name, meant I could sometimes forget or fail to notice things they couldn’t, like that overconfident way Mr. Irving would plunge ahead when he couldn’t pronounce someone’s name because he never asked first, and how once when Seoyun Kang corrected him, he’d said jovially, “I might never get that right!” and then never even tried; how sometimes if we weren’t in our assigned seats, holding our instruments, he’d mix us up, or how he’d sometimes slip into those same coded words our white teachers used—the pressures at home, they’d say. The cultural differences.
“Right,” I said quickly, and I was ashamed that I hadn’t seen it that way sooner. It wasn’t the point of the conversation, I knew that, but that circle drawn around them, me outside it with my naive ideas about telling Mr. Irving or calling 911—it stung.
“What about his sister?” Grace said.
Brandon made a face. “Evelyn?”
“They’re close, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. Evelyn was at Berkeley now. She and Jason were just eighteen months apart, and she’d graduated the year before, so we used to see her a lot at school. I found her incredibly intimidating. She was beautiful—she looked a lot like Jason—and aggressively good at things, like school and singing and public speaking. Also, no matter how many times I’d interacted with her, I could never tell whether or not she knew who I was. She was the only person in Jason’s family he ever talked about. “Maybe we could tell her and she could talk to him.”
“Talk to who,” Brandon said, “their dad?”
“To Jason,” Grace said. “Do you think he’d tell her on his own?”
“Yeah, I doubt it. What’s there to say? She probably knows, anyway. It didn’t really feel like that was the first time.”
“Also, Brandon’s scared of Evelyn,” Sunny said. I think it was supposed to be a joke, or at least said jokingly, but she couldn’t quite make the words come out light enough.
“She’s definitely scary,” he said. “But also I just don’t really see it solving anything.”
“So I guess—what do we think’s going to happen?” Grace said. “What are we solving? Like, do we think his dad’s going to really hurt him? In a dangerous way? And we’re trying to stop him? Or—what?”
“That’s not—that’s not really the point,” Brandon said. “It doesn’t have to get worse for it to be awful. It’s already awful.”
“But do you think it’s actively dangerous?”
Brandon looked at me. I knew he was thinking what I was—that of course it was dangerous but also that the word felt all wrong there, that our whole conversation felt so sterile and lifeless held up against last night.
“Honestly—maybe not,” he said. “But it’s hard to say. And anyway, I just don’t think that matters as a standard.”
“Okay, well, then, I think—” Grace started. She cleared her throat. “I just think maybe we’re making too big a deal out of this. I mean—maybe it’s not like it happens all the time or maybe it’s not like this huge thing that always happens. And everyone gets mad sometimes, and—”
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Brandon said. “Maybe we’re making too big a deal of this? Grace, you weren’t there.”
“Well, I was there at dinner when he blew up.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that was really awkward, but now it’s over. So maybe whatever happened—maybe it’s better to just not dwell on it. Was it really that bad?”
Grace always liked easy things, the world scrubbed off and sanitized before it was handed to her. I knew that about her, and it was even comforting sometimes, but it would take me a while before I forgave her saying that.
All the same, though, I didn’t like the expression on Sunny’s face. Brandon said, “It was worse. The hell, Grace, seriously? It was horrible. I can’t believe you’d say that.”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t bad. I’m just saying maybe now it’s over, and we don’t have to sit here talking about whether we’re going to call the police. Maybe we can just try to be there for him and try to be the kind of friends he needs right now. That’s all I’m saying.”
“You don’t think that’s exactly what we’re trying to do?” Sunny said.
Grace put up her hands. “I just think—”
“Okay, well, what you’re thinking—”
Don’t be angry at her, I pleaded silently with Sunny and Brandon, even though I was maybe a little angry myself. We couldn’t afford a fracture between us right now.
“But it’s basically what you’re saying, isn’t it?” Grace said. “That it’s not bad enough to where you’d want to call the police. So I’m saying, if that’s true, let’s just try to be his friends.”
That wasn’t what we were saying, of course. What we were saying was that there weren’t options that felt like they fit into the situation; there weren’t resources or adults who we felt we could trust. Which wasn’t a measure of severity at all; it was just a reflection of the way the rules weren’t built for us, the world not designed for us. It was terrible, and we could do nothing. There was nothing for us to do.
JUST AFTER I’d been accepted to BAYS in eighth grade, my parents’ fighting had started to take on a new tenor. It was different than at Jason’s—no one touched one another; it was like force fields around each of us—and it had its own presence in the house, like a sibling. I would wake up each morning with a stomachache.
My friends had all known one another a long time, but I was still new then; my friendship with them felt tenuous, and it was in the midst of that fighting that I first went to one of their houses. I had a group project with Brandon and Jason, and the three of us went to Brandon’s after school.
His house was on a quiet side street backdropped by the hills, and his room was messy in what felt like a very boyish way to me. When we went in, he swiped at a mass of basketball shorts on his bed and said cheerfully, “Sorry about the mess,” even though I didn’t think he really was. He opened a Spotify playlist on his laptop, and then his mother called him from work, and while he sat there saying uh-huh, yes, no, he opened Faster Than Light and started playing, and my stomach flipped over.
He hung up. Onscreen, a hole was blown into the side of his ship, and his movements got more frantic and exaggerated. “I always die,” he said, ducking and swerving like it would help somehow. “We’re losing oxygen.”
“Sometimes you can seal them off into a different part of the ship,” I said.
Brandon looked up, startled. “You play FTL?”
“I—play it sometimes.”
He died, turned all the way around, and appraised me, a game-day grin spreading across his face. “You been holding out on us, Claire? What are you, some kind of gamer girl?”
“Um—” My stomach twisted like a skein of yarn.
“Because that’s awesome. Just so we’re clear.”
“I’m not very good. I play sometimes with my dad, that’s all.”
“Jump in,” Brandon said.
“I—that’s all right.”
“Come on,” he said, smiling, and I tried frantically to decide whether I’d rather not felt like too assertive a thing to reply. Finally, I repeated, “I’m really not that good.”
“Don’t be so modest,” he said. “Come on. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
“Well—okay,” I said. “I can try. I might die, though.” I’d tried to hold my voice steady, but I’d slipped a little at the end, and Brandon’s smile never wavered, but Jason—something made me think he’d caught it.
“Come save me.” Brandon slid his keyboard over to me. It made a scratching sound across his desk the way it did when my father did the same thing.
Sometimes, growing up, my father had acted like dads did in books or movies—he’d bring home trinkets for me, or he’d come to my shows or back-to-school nights or take us hiking at Sanborn Park. Mostly, though, he played video games.
He could slip so effortlessly in—it took seconds—and then he was gone from us the rest of the night. We could never hold him the way his screen did. He’d play all weekend and all evening, sometimes skipping dinner. Sometimes my mother would ask him to play less and he’d go cold and quiet, but he’d do it for a few days, and they’d argue the whole time. And then he’d go back to playing and my mom would watch, a tightness like a mask over her face, and he’d pretend not to notice her. Or maybe he really didn’t notice; maybe the screen’s pull on him was that strong. When you tried to talk to him while he was playing, his voice was louder and brighter, and his answers to you never quite made sense. Once I was telling him about a coding lesson we’d done at school—I’d thought he’d like it; I’d been excited to tell him—and my mother said quietly, judgment seeping from her tone, “Can you put that down and listen to her?”
He liked obscure, process-oriented games where you built something, a house or a rocket ship or an army. The summer before I started BAYS, he’d played Don’t Starve, and that was the game I always thought of as a turning point. My father despised what he called girl toys—dolls, princess things, anything overtly feminine—and wanted me to be a devoted gamer instead. But I was clumsy and lacked the instincts, and my mind wandered. I couldn’t lose myself in all the false worlds the way he could. He would flinch at each of my mistakes, his voice rising, until he’d commandeered the keyboard again and I stood next to him, inadequate and cast out. But when we’d played Don’t Starve, something had happened. We were trying to defend ourselves against the hounds that appeared periodically when I’d said, “If we led them to the Treeguard, would they attack each other while we escaped?”
My father had stared at me. “Beth,” he said, and the way he’d said my name was like an embrace. “That is a stellar idea.”
Everything changed after that. He bought a small monitor he spent hours setting up in my room, and he made a Twitch channel so we could livestream ourselves: a father-daughter gamer team. When I was good enough, we’d go live. And in the midst of all their fighting, that would be the thing, unlikely as it seemed, that would hold us together. If I could live up to the dreams he had for me, it would keep him rooted here with us.
Faster Than Light was one of the games I had struggled with. There were so many moving parts to keep track of, and the rebel forces were relentless; you had to make decisions and make them quickly, and I kept losing the crew or the ship.
Brandon was still multiple waypoints from the Federation, and he’d lost some crew members in the blast. I tried to get the survivors all to another part of the ship to seal it off so they wouldn’t suffocate; then I could send them out to attack. But I was still frantically trying to find a way to make repairs when there was another weapon strike, and I died.
I sat back heavily. I was sweating. It was just—with Brandon and Jason watching, it was so much pressure. I wasn’t cut out to do this for a live audience. My father wanted this so badly, I knew, but I was going to let him down.
“Sorry,” I said. My voice came out strangled. “I’m not good at—”
“Whoa, whoa,” Brandon said, grinning. “It’s fine, Beth. I would’ve died anyway. Here, try again.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, come on, I’m impressed you even got that far. Let’s try it.”
I felt like I might throw up. “No, really, that’s all right.”
“Just go back to—”
Jason gave him the tiniest shake of his head, almost imperceptible, but Brandon saw it and went quiet right away. He reached out and pulled his keyboard back.
All the muscles in my chest squeezed together. This was just a game to him; I’d made too big a deal out of nothing. “I didn’t mean—”
“Hey,” Jason said abruptly, reaching out and kicking Brandon in the calf, “you got anything to eat?”
“Yeah, probably.”
“Can you go look?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Brandon got up, abandoning the game. A few moments later, we heard the refrigerator door open.
“The thing about Brandon,” Jason said mildly, reaching for Brandon’s mouse and closing the game, “is you can always just tell him to shut up if you don’t want to talk about something.” He didn’t look at me, and when I replayed that moment later it was that part that struck me. Because if he had, it would’ve felt accusatory, or at the very least searching. I recognized that he was being careful with me. And I thought two things then: that Jason had understood that there were things I couldn’t talk about, and that it was because there were thin
gs he didn’t talk about either.
We were young, we didn’t know each other all the way yet, and it was a small moment, and maybe one Jason didn’t think of again. But if I had to pick a single moment when I first knew I loved him, it was that day.
* * *
Before Brandon’s birthday, I would’ve said that rage in a person has to go somewhere—that it’s not an element you can keep dormant inside you, shielded from the greater world. Because we were all enraged, at Jason’s father and at a world that wasn’t designed to protect us or give us options or a way out.
But at lunch that first day back, I looked down at the sandwich I was eating and thought how it would become the glucose flowing through my bloodstream, the amino acids that would form my cells, and what had happened with Jason felt that way too, as though it had become a physical part of me: tangible and permanent, a sharp cold feeling in the abdomen and a wavering of the heart, an extra weight to carry around like so many new cells. Some things don’t spill over; instead you absorb them, and there’s nowhere for them to go.
I would’ve done anything for him; any of us would have. But we found ourselves doing very little. He didn’t want to talk about it, that was obvious, but he also didn’t want to, say, borrow notes or copy homework or go out at night or even snap at us, take his anger out on us, as he had with Sunny in the restaurant.
That evening, my phone on loud in case he called, I finally thought of something I could do for him. It was small, and it was frivolous. But I remembered how when we were freshmen we’d gone to watch the choir performance, because Evelyn was in it, and they’d done a truly haunting version of “Hallelujah” that Jason, who normally didn’t love the song, had really liked. He’d mentioned a few times over the years that he’d always tried to find a violin version of the arrangement, but he never could. I knew he was still probably thinking about it because he’d mentioned it again just a month or so ago, when we’d heard the Jeff Buckley version playing at Squishy when we’d gone to get boba, and so that day I thought—what if I wrote it for violin and recorded it for him?
When We Were Infinite Page 6