When We Were Infinite

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  I found a video of the performance on YouTube, and all week I worked on it, first transcribing the arrangement as best I could for violin and then making a recording of it. At various points during the arrangement, there were as many as five different parts at the same time, and I played all of them, recording and then playing with my recording so I could eventually cover all five. Three nights in a row, I only got a few hours of sleep, and I almost didn’t wake up in time for Wednesday breakfast at Grace’s.

  I finished the recording late that night, technically Thursday morning, the day before Homecoming. I wanted to give it to him in person—I wished I had some kind of tangible, physical version of it—and I wanted us to be alone, or at least as alone as you can ever be on a campus with two thousand people. The closest I could come was between first and second periods, when we always walked together. He was wearing his glasses instead of contacts that day, which usually meant he was tired, and it made his jaw and cheekbones look more angular. Sometimes being close to him made me feel a kind of physical unraveling, like parts of me came loose and I felt fluid, like magma. It felt then like if he brushed against me, or leaned into me, I would ignite, but he never did. I was always nervous he would notice. But also, I guess, I was nervous that he never would, that it would be a secret I’d have to keep forever.

  We were already past the library when I finally worked up the courage to say, “I have something for you.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”

  “I, um, made something.”

  He gave me a little smile, one that might’ve been amused. “You made something?”

  “Yeah. I’ll send it to you.” I took out my phone and forwarded him the email I’d sent myself with the file attached. It was always loud in these passing periods, all two thousand of us charging around the campus at once and that crush of overstuffed backpacks, but still I could hear my heartbeat in my ears. “It’s—well, you can listen to it.”

  “Should I listen to it now?”

  “If you want.”

  He pulled his phone from his pocket. Listening to it—it was too loud for me to hear his phone—his expression changed. “You made this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How did you even find it? I’ve been looking for this forever.”

  “I wrote the parts.”

  “You wrote it?” He listened a few more seconds, then he slipped his phone back into his pocket without finishing, and I knew he recognized it for the gesture it was. “It must have taken you forever.”

  “I wanted—”

  There was something in his face that could have been wariness, or could have been a warning; I couldn’t tell. My voice caught. I wanted things to be better for him. I wanted him to tell us when they weren’t, and I wanted him to let us in; I wanted to do something, anything, for him. But I saw the way he went tense—if I said those things, they’d glance off him, come skittering back to me scraped and raw.

  “I wanted you to have it,” I said finally. “I thought you might like it.”

  “You really didn’t have to do anything like that,” he said. “This is—probably one of the nicest things anyone’s ever done for me. So it figures it’d come from you.” I forced a smile, and blinked a few times until I trusted myself not to cry.

  I told myself maybe tomorrow night would mark a turning point—we could ride around all night in the limo together, and maybe, in our own private world that way, it would be different. He would feel all the ways we cared about him and, for the first time, open up.

  All the things Jason kept from us—if it were me, I was certain I’d have to tell them to someone or they’d corrode me from the inside out. He never seemed to need people the way I always did, that bottomless gaping hole of need inside me. But I wanted him to need me, because the people who need you don’t throw you out or leave you, because they can’t.

  I thought that, anyway. Maybe it was even partly true.

  * * *

  Jason was gone at lunch that day to finish a lab report. When the rest of us had gathered, squinting against the November sun, I said, “So what’s our plan for tomorrow night?”

  “Yeah, I don’t think Jay wants to go to Homecoming,” Brandon said.

  Something twisted in my chest. “That’s what he said?”

  “What do you mean, he doesn’t want to go?” Grace said. “People will be expecting him.”

  “I mean, they’ll be expecting him to, what, smile for a couple pictures?” Brandon said. “You know he doesn’t give a shit about that. I think the odds he wants to, like, get dressed up and pretend he’s into it, plus ask his parents if he can go, are basically nil.”

  “We can just all not go, then,” Sunny said. “If he doesn’t want to, we can stay home and hang out together instead.”

  “Don’t you have to go?” Grace said.

  “I mean, they’ll be kind of pissed if I don’t, but what are they going to do? I hate Homecoming anyway.”

  I felt knots tie in my stomach, felt the night I’d been clinging to start to disintegrate. “It’s just—I did get the limo already.”

  “You can cancel it, though, right?” Sunny said.

  “Maybe—”

  “Let’s cancel it, then, yeah?” Brandon said.

  I looked at Grace. “Do you think Chase—”

  She made a face. “I guess I could tell Chase I can’t go.”

  “You don’t think he’ll be upset?”

  “I mean, probably he will be, but I’m sure if I explain—”

  “No, you can’t explain,” Brandon said. “Just tell Chase you have a migraine or something.”

  “A migraine definitely makes it sound like I’m ghosting him.”

  “Make up something else, then.”

  “I’ll feel so terrible.”

  “Yeah, but how much fun are you going to have anyway?” Sunny said. “If the rest of us don’t go, and then what if something happens with Jason? I’m going to get a lot of shit from ASB for not going either, but, I mean, it is what it is.”

  “You don’t think we should just go and then, I don’t know, keep our phones on in case he calls? I mean, if something else happens, I don’t know how much we could do anyway.”

  “That’s not really the point,” Brandon said. “I just don’t think we should all go without him. And I think we should make it clear we’re there if he needs us.”

  “Yeah—” Grace sighed. “Yeah, I guess I’ll tell Chase I can’t go. I just feel bad.”

  I called the limo company as soon as I got home that afternoon to cancel, but the man I spoke to said it wasn’t possible—that because it was less than forty-eight hours’ notice, I would be charged in full.

  My heart flipped over inside my chest. “That’s five hundred dollars,” I said. “But the deposit is only—”

  “Sweetie, if you read the contract, you agreed to pay in full with less than forty-eight hours’ cancellation. You still want to cancel? You’re paying either way.”

  My hands were shaking when I hung up. Maybe Brandon was wrong and Jason was still planning on going after all, so I wouldn’t cancel just yet. And if we didn’t go—what would I do with a five-hundred-dollar credit card bill? I wouldn’t tell my friends about it, I decided, and I would count it as a small sacrifice I could make for Jason. I’d find a way to pay; I was pretty sure you had twelve months, it was just that the interest ballooned while you waited and then you owed more. But Jason would insist on paying me back if he knew, and certainly I couldn’t take his money for my mistake.

  * * *

  I was stopping by my locker after fourth period the next day when I heard someone calling my name. When I turned to look, Chase Hartley was loping after me.

  “Hey,” he said, when he caught up. “I wanted to talk to you. You have a second?”

  “Um, sure.”

  Chase reached up and pushed his cap back. He’d been moving quickly, but he didn’t seem at all winded. “So—did I do something to piss Grace off?”
<
br />   Maybe the question shouldn’t have caught me off guard, but it did. “Oh,” I said, stupidly, “what do you mean?”

  “You heard she’s ditching me tonight, right? You’re her friend, so I figured you’d tell me why so I can make it up to her.”

  “Um—” I looked helplessly toward where the junior class officers had set up the Stress-Free Zone cart, with its free stress balls and Ziplocs of homemade glitter slime, in the quad. “I don’t think it was you. It’s just—something happened, kind of not to do with Grace, but we all have to—it’s just something that came up.”

  “But like what came up?”

  “I can’t really say.”

  “What, Grace told you not to?”

  “Um—did you try talking to her?”

  “No, because I didn’t want to sound like a jackass if I did something hella obvious to piss her off and had no idea. That’s worse, right? When you’re like, all good here, all cool, and someone has to spell it out for you.”

  I felt a stab of guilt. It would be one thing if he were rude or demanding or hostile, but he wasn’t—he seemed sheepish, maybe, but also sweet, in a way that surprised me.

  “I really don’t think it was you,” I said. “I mean—I know it wasn’t. She was excited to go, and she thought your flowers were really sweet. It’s just that—she was needed elsewhere.”

  He didn’t bother to hide his skepticism. “She was needed elsewhere specifically tonight from seven to ten p.m.?”

  “Not just tonight. A lot of times, but—including tonight. Are you still going to go, do you think? With your friends or anything?”

  “Ah—nah, probably not. All right, well, I’ll see you.” Then he added, not quite matter-of-factly, as he was already turning to go, “I already got her a corsage.”

  I couldn’t think of what to say in time, but maybe still he saw me look panicked. It seemed so much worse when boys or men were sad, people who, like Chase, probably didn’t spend much time that way. So I almost told him how much Grace liked him, and I also almost told Grace he’d come to talk to me. But I worried maybe that would just push her closer to him, maybe it would make her change her mind about going that night, so I didn’t, in the end.

  * * *

  All day I held out hope that maybe Jason did still want to go, but then all day he didn’t mention it, and I was afraid to push him by bringing it up, especially since no one else was. After school, Sunny, Grace, and I went to Brandon’s. We’d stay there all night, we decided (I told my mom I was at Sunny’s), and we’d check in with Jason to see if he wanted to come too. Or if he was still planning on going to Homecoming, we’d all go. I kept watching the clock—if I didn’t call by six, the limo would show up. I felt awful about the money going to nothing. Every winter, I gave as much as I could to the National Honor Society’s canned food drive, and I felt sick thinking about how many cans the five hundred dollars could’ve bought.

  Brandon had grabbed a bag of shrimp chips from the kitchen and one of the washed takeout-container-turned-Tupperwares of cut fruit that their cook had prepared and set them on the floor along with some juice boxes of chrysanthemum tea. I sat on the floor, leaning against his bed. His comforter was a generic dark plaid, probably something his mom had gotten at Costco, and it was soft against my cheek. Sunny sat across from me, our legs touching, occasionally making a show of sweeping articles of clothing out of the way. I pictured Jason alone in his house.

  “You think we’ll ever turn out like that?” Brandon looked up at the ceiling, stretched out on his bed. On the wall above him, there was a poster of Yao Ming and Jeremy Lin he’d put up in elementary school and never taken down. “Like his dad, I mean. It really gets me when I think about our parents having friends. Because then it’s like, you know, that’s going to be us someday.”

  “I don’t think our parents have friends like we’re friends, though,” Sunny said. “Their friends are kind of interchangeable. Someone to get dinner with, someone to have over for parties, all that.”

  “Do you think any of his dad’s friends would say something to him?” I asked.

  Brandon snorted. “Have you ever… met an adult?”

  “If it were one of you guys—”

  “It will never be one of us,” Sunny said. “We won’t turn out like that.”

  “Do you think his dad expected to turn out like that, though?” Brandon said. He was still staring up at the ceiling. “No one has kids thinking, okay, great, someone I can treat like shit. And it’s not like it’s always awful with them, you know? Sometimes his dad takes him to concerts or ball games or things. And if you ever talk to him, he comes off as a nice guy. His friends probably think he’s pretty great.”

  “So, what, that excuses it?” Sunny said. “It’s fine to commit a little domestic assault if every now and then—”

  “Lay off, Sunny, come on,” Brandon said sharply, sitting up so swiftly it made me jump. “You think that’s what I think? You really think that?”

  “Well, you just said—”

  “I said what? I said it was fine to watch my best friend get roughed up while I just stood there like an asshole? You think I liked that?”

  She looked away and didn’t answer him. She hadn’t expected that vehemence, I don’t think, although to be honest I hadn’t either. But I understood where she was coming from—that need to be the one most bothered by something, to prove yourself.

  After a while, Brandon said, “Obviously, it doesn’t excuse it. If anything, it makes it worse. But my point, if you’d just listen for like eight seconds, is that you never know what’s going to make you snap and maybe we actually could turn out like that, who knows. I don’t think anyone can say they’re like some inherently good person and there’s things they would just never do, so they never have to worry about it. It’s like that whole moral luck thing Jay was talking about.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Sunny said. “I think you can decide there are things you’ll never do, and then you just… don’t do them.”

  “Yeah, okay, sure, but say something happens? You get mugged or something or your kid gets sick or—I don’t know, you lose your job and your house. Then what?”

  “Then I’ll still somehow manage to cope with it by not assaulting someone? Those all still sound like excuses to me, Brandon.”

  He made a frustrated noise and looked to me for help. A sharp ache flickered through me at losing this forever after graduation—my role as the mediator between them. Having people who I knew well enough to mediate.

  “It’s not an excuse,” I said quietly.

  “I know it’s not an excuse.”

  Grace was always better at defusing these small tensions. Sometimes I wondered if it came so naturally to her because she never quite felt them the way I did, not as deeply, and they didn’t have the same hold on her; they were easier to break. But Grace had gone to the bathroom and so she’d missed this turn in conversation, and in a way I was glad; the talks you have depend so much on who you’re with at any given time, and maybe if she were here we’d be talking about something that mattered less.

  Brandon said, “My dad—after he first came here, he did his residency in this small town in Michigan and people were really horrible to him and he got really jaded. My mom talks about it sometimes, but he never does. She said she’s never seen him the way he was when they lived there. And sometimes I think about—did Jay ever tell you his dad was supposed to be a doctor too? He did med school and everything. That’s why he came here. But now he does insurance or whatever, which feels like, I don’t know, an f-you to what he actually wanted. And I always wonder if it was really bad for him and that scarred him somehow.”

  “Does it matter, though?” Sunny said. “Everyone has bad things happen to them, so—”

  “You haven’t. You said so yourself when you were complaining about not having anything to write in a college essay. When you think about how easy your life is compared to your parents’, don’t you feel kind of
guilty about it sometimes?”

  She sighed. “What’s your point?”

  “I just—I’m worried we’re not that different. Everyone likes to think they’re a good person, but maybe it’s just that some people’s circumstances never make them prove it. And with Jason, I mean—I just stood there.”

  “You’re not a bad person, Brandon,” I said. “You’re completely different.”

  “Hey, I’ll take it,” he said, and he grinned. It almost tricked me into thinking it wasn’t forced.

  It was nearly five thirty. Brandon picked up his phone and glanced at it, and Grace came back into his room then.

  “Did we hear from Jason yet?” she said, settling down cross-legged onto Brandon’s bed.

  “Nah, that was just Leo.”

  “What’d he want?” I said. Leo was Leo Lim, who Brandon played basketball with. He’d always been fairly close to Leo and a few other guys, Tim Parrish and Bentley Look. The season was about to start, and I’d never liked basketball season because Brandon would get absorbed into Leo and the others for nebulous basketball- related reasons. Would it be like that this year too?

  Brandon put his phone away. “Ah, he just wanted to see about working out tomorrow.”

  “Text Jason again,” Grace said. “Or maybe I will. If we’re all here together, he should at least come hang out. We could watch a movie or something.”

  She messaged, and we waited a few minutes again. And it was fine, probably—he’d mentioned earlier in the day he’d been up late cramming for the AP Econ test (we all had) and it wasn’t unlike him to go home and crash before dinner. It was unlikely that he was in any kind of peril.

  I told myself that, anyway.

  “It’ll be awful next year,” I said. “It’s hard like this, when he’s close by and we’re all together. But if we’re all in different places, and there’s no one near him—”

  “Ugh, don’t say that,” Sunny said. “I already feel guilty we’re just, like, hanging out while he’s doing who knows what.”