“Maybe next year,” Brandon said, “we can like—have some schedule to make sure he pings us regularly or—”
“Or what if we all tried to stay together next year?”
They all turned to look at me, startled. My voice had come out in a flood, surprising even me. I hadn’t planned to say this now.
I had said it, though, and so I kept going. “Because if it’s just Jason alone—what if something happens, and we’re all hundreds of miles away? I think we have to all stick together.”
“How would that work, though?” Grace said.
“Well—he wants to go to Berkeley, right? So we can all apply there, and then maybe also we can apply nearby just in case—like weren’t you going to apply to St. Mary’s, Grace?” It was surreal to be actually saying this aloud. “Or we could do community college a year and then transfer. It’s much easier to get in as a transfer.” Jason and Sunny and Brandon were practically guaranteed admission. I was a maybe, but hadn’t I been working hard all my life?
“That’s—an interesting idea,” Brandon said, slowly.
We all looked at one another. I couldn’t feel my hands.
“I think we should do it,” Grace said, impulsively, surprising me. “I think you’re right, Beth. And we’re lucky we’re in California and there are so many good options here. There’s USF right across the Bay too. I was thinking of applying there anyway.”
I could hardly speak. “Really?”
Brandon said, “Sun?”
She was methodically picking lint off his comforter, not looking up. “You really think it will make a difference?”
“I mean, that’s hard to say, but what I do think is probably what he’s been going through has fucked him up more than any of us have ever realized. So.”
“Well,” she said, “if that’s true, I mean—okay, sure, if it works out that we all get in there, or close to there, okay.”
“Even if it’s not LA?”
Sunny shrugged. “Yeah, I mean, then it’s not LA.”
“Should we ask him first?” Grace said. “Are we even telling him about this?”
“No, no, we definitely can’t tell him,” Brandon said. “He’d for sure tell us not to. I wouldn’t put it past him to like end up going somewhere really random just to make sure we didn’t feel obligated to go there too.”
“Yeah, he would totally do something like that,” Sunny said. “Okay, so, what, then—we just pretend like we’re applying normally to throw him off?”
“I mean, my parents are going to make me apply normally anyway,” Brandon said. “My dad is all in on the college tour trip. But we’ll just—we’ll go through the motions and all, but—here we are. Yeah?”
“Here we are,” Sunny said.
In the kitchen, we could hear one of Brandon’s parents opening the fridge. I felt like if I moved I would break the spell.
“Okay,” I said. “Well—okay.”
“Then we’re all in,” Brandon said, and thumped me on the back in a way that felt distinctly basketball-y. “I feel like we should like commemorate it somehow.”
I could hardly breathe. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. The thing that I had been most dreading—it no longer existed. It was worth the canceled limo, worth whatever it would take for me to pay the fee.
We took a selfie. I imagined showing it to Jason later, revealing how all along we’d known we’d do this for him. Then Brandon wanted to post it, and he and Sunny argued over whether or not it was a good idea (“It’s definitely like look at us all hanging out without you!” Sunny said, “Which is like the opposite of our point, isn’t it?”), and I needed to find a way to sneak into a room where they couldn’t hear me and call the limo company, but still I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. It was the first time maybe all year that the future felt like a beam of light instead of a black hole.
* * *
I had been so happy—I was still so happy—but all that weekend when I practiced there was a physical, heavy grief that crept down my arms to my fingertips. Because it was official now: I wouldn’t keep playing after this in any real capacity, and a life without violin, when I thought too hard about it, felt colorless and bleak. But I told myself this was a small trade-off; the best part of music had always been that we did it together. And I’d never truly expected to play past high school anyway. The things you dream about aren’t the things you expect to actually have.
Maybe it wasn’t just that, though, my sadness; maybe it was also that it wasn’t right to feel happy about promising to stay together when the reason we were doing it was what it was. Would you rather all of you split up forever, or Jason suffer? They were inseparable now, what we were promising and what he was facing, and to view the future together as an uncomplicated gift would be to answer that one wrong.
AT REHEARSAL on Monday, Jason heard me warming up with the Zwilich Mr. Irving had given me, and when I put my bow down, he said, “So is that one of your audition pieces for next year?”
“Oh—no, I just liked the piece. I’m not auditioning anymore.”
“Oh, what?” He frowned. “Not at all?”
“I didn’t think it made sense.”
“Ah.” He leaned closer. It was noisy in the room, everyone playing all at once, and he had to duck his head and speak almost directly into my ear for me to hear him. “I’ve been thinking of it. Auditioning, I mean.”
“Really?” I was more than a little startled, for many reasons, not least of which that it was nearly too late. The due date for audition recordings was less than two weeks away. “Like, to a lot of places?”
“Nah, more like—going for broke. I was thinking I’d just do Juilliard. I doubt I’d get in, and it’s not like I’d go even if I did, but, I don’t know, I guess I just want to see how it goes.”
Immediately, before I could stop it, my mind flooded with images. I saw the two of us rehearsing together late at night in the practice rooms, all the noise of the city stilled around us; I saw us in the dorms I’d been looking up online, tucked away on the tenth or eleventh floor with the cityscape framed outside the windows, reams’ worth of new sheet music filling the bookshelves. I saw us standing onstage in recital halls.
“Do you think there’s time?” I said. “To get the recordings together?”
“Sure, I mean, there’s over a hundred hours in a week if you don’t sleep. And I was looking at the requirements and it wouldn’t mean learning more than one new piece.”
“Well—maybe I’ll do it with you,” I said. “If you wanted, that is.”
“Yeah?” He pulled back a little and studied me. “The thing is—it has to stay quiet. I wasn’t even going to tell Grace or Brandon or Sun.”
“Oh,” I said. “You don’t think they’d want to apply too?”
I knew as soon as I said it there was no chance. And Jason, of course, was too polite to say they’d never get in.
“It’s just if they happened to say something and their parents overheard, and then somehow word got back to my parents—”
It was true that my mother rarely talked to other parents, had never been a part of the unofficial Asian Parents’ Network that traded gossip and recommendations for restaurants or tutors or summer camps. Mrs. Nakamura wasn’t really either, though, and I doubted Sunny or Brandon would say anything, especially if he told them not to. But I didn’t want to question him or start some other conversation that might somehow change the course of this one, so I said, “Right, definitely.”
There was almost nothing I didn’t tell them, especially Sunny. And it was outside of what we’d promised one another. But if there was a minuscule chance—
I was good at hiding things. Maybe that was something Jason and I had always shared.
MY MOTHER came into my room the next evening as I was practicing the Paganini for Juilliard. It was storming outside, the rain coming in sheets against the windows and filling the creeks that veined through our neighborhoods, and I craved being at Grace’s ho
use in front of a fire.
My mother sat on my bed and waited for me to pause, and I felt myself going tense with her there. Lately she was hovering more than usual. Sometimes in the evenings I’d see her looking through all the college brochures that came in the mail, and when I could sense she wanted to talk about them, I would go upstairs.
I was frantically trying to get all the pieces ready in time to make my prescreening recording—Jason was right that we could meet the requirements mostly with pieces we already knew, and I could carve time from all the nighttime hours I’d usually be sleeping—but I was keeping the application a secret from everyone, my mother especially. She would ask too many questions, and she would want to talk about money again, and she wouldn’t understand why I was doing it and also why I wasn’t trying to audition anywhere else. She would like it, I knew, if I applied to music programs, and she wouldn’t understand that it was more important to stay with my friends. When I put my violin down, my mother said, “That was so lovely, Beth.”
“It was just warming up.”
“Well, it sounded beautiful. You’ve been working so hard lately on your violin. What’s it for?”
“Just some difficult pieces.”
“For your next concert?”
I nodded.
“Well, I hope you get more sleep, because it already sounds lovely,” my mother said, then splayed her fingers out on her kneecaps and took a deep breath. I simmered with impatience. Each minute I wasn’t playing felt irretrievable and precious.
“Your Gong Gong and Po Po,” she said, “have told me that they would like to contribute to your college education.”
“Really?”
“It wouldn’t change the situation too drastically, but I think it could be a good opportunity for you. And also for them, I suppose. It would make them feel involved, and it’s something good they could do.”
I wasn’t close to any of my grandparents. My father’s father had died when I was three, and his mother hated phones, so I’d only ever talked to her when I went to Idaho. Before my parents divorced, the three of us used go up to the city some weekends to eat dim sum with my mother’s parents, because my father loved dim sum, and for a while after the divorce my mother still used to take me with her to see them. Mostly they’d talk about adult things, or sometimes they would rehash or pointedly not rehash the same fights they’d probably had all through my mother’s life, but my grandfather would play tic-tac-toe with me or do math tricks on the paper placemats and my grandmother would grab my hand and press gifts inside, lai see or sometimes gold jewelry in zippered fabric envelopes from the jeweler’s, and then fold my fingers closed over them. My mother didn’t talk about her parents’ pasts often, but I knew they’d been hard—as a child my grandmother had lived in another family’s kitchen as domestic help, and my grandfather had been born to a sixteen-year-old who eked out a living picking fruit. They were financially comfortable now, but my mother had once told me that had come too late; they’d been marked by the difficulty of their earlier years in a way money couldn’t assuage now.
For the past few years my mother had been going less often and without me, saying she knew I needed to study or practice violin. I could’ve gone anyway, but I never had, and when she came home and seemed sad or agitated I never asked her about it. I always hoped someday to forge some kind of real relationship with them, though. Asian grandparents were everywhere in Congress Springs, clustered together on playgrounds and pushing strollers in the store, speaking in Tagalog or Korean or Urdu even when their grandchildren were clearly only half Asian. I’d always wished I had that kind of grandparents, the ones who taught you to slip into other tongues and other worlds as your birthright.
“All right,” I said.
“They’d like you to come and have dim sum with them so you can tell them about your plans.”
“Okay.”
“I thought maybe we could go on Christmas morning.” My mother hesitated, then added, “I know it’s Christmas, but it’s just dim sum.”
She was making such a big deal of things. I was supposed to see my father for Christmas Eve, which was our tradition, but my mother and I never did anything on Christmas morning that I’d be especially sad to miss. “I already said okay.”
“Good. It’s settled, then.” She stood up. Just before she reached the door, she turned back and added, “It’s just one meal.”
* * *
“She always overreacts,” I told my friends as we were walking into Sandwich Station at lunch the next day. I’d been up all night working through the Paganini and then the Zwilich, and I was so tired the bright yellow walls with their menu photos throbbed in my peripheral vision. We’d gone off campus because Brandon wanted their meatball sub, and the sidewalks were littered with acorns and fallen branches from the storm. “Shouldn’t she be trying to get me to have more of a relationship with them? My grandparents are the only family we have, and I haven’t seen them in literally years.”
The bell above the door dinged. It was a cramped place with a counter and just two small tables, and we’d barely beaten the lunch rush. “Beth, you order,” Sunny said. We’d always suspected the man who usually worked at lunchtime didn’t like Asians. (Grace thought we should boycott, the same way we did the chicken place a few doors down ever since Sunny told us what the National Organization for Marriage sticker on their cash register meant, but Sunny, uncharacteristically, overruled a boycott of Sandwich Station; she loved their eggplant wrap.) I put in their order, and then we waited by the door. Lunch was short; we’d eat in the car going back.
“Your grandparents are the ones who gave you all your jewelry, right?” Sunny said. “Like that jade bracelet you have and the gold necklaces? And that diamond pendant?”
“Yeah, most of it. So with things like that—I think in their way they probably care about me.”
The place was filling up; we were pressed more tightly against one another to make room. Jason unwrapped one of the cinnamon mints in a bowl by the door and popped it into his mouth. Grace said, “Do you and your mom talk about them a lot? Like, does she tell you why she doesn’t want you to see them?”
“No. Sometimes I think the only way she knows how to respond to conflict is to cut people off. Or cut them off from me. She never tries to work things out or like—change herself, she’s just done.”
“I don’t know,” Sunny said, thoughtfully, “I don’t really get that vibe from her. The fights you guys have are the opposite. Like her wanting to go over the same thing a million times. And then how you said when you were younger she used to make you practice asking for things at restaurants or whatever because she thought you should be more assertive—I bet that’s because she always worried she wasn’t assertive enough herself or something.”
“And look at you now,” Brandon said, nudging me. “Ordering all our sandwiches like a goddamn boss.”
I rolled my eyes. “Maybe that’s it, though. She has some weird view of standing up for yourself where it just means you leave.”
I heard myself say it and wished immediately I’d phased it differently. I didn’t mean you, Jason, I wanted to say. You should leave; you should do whatever it takes. He was leaning against the wall and watching the man behind the counter, fiddling with the mint wrapper in his fingers. Was it my imagination that he was trying to stay on the outskirts of the conversation? I shouldn’t have brought up fighting with parents.
“It’s always so surprising when adults are dysfunctional about things,” Grace said. “It’s like, you’ve had almost fifty years to figure this out!”
“Really, that surprises you?” Brandon said. “I mean—adults are generally not great.”
That seemed safer, talking about adults in general and not parents in particular. “Well,” I said, “they did give us income inequality and a bunch of wars, so there’s that.”
“Don’t forget gun violence,” Sunny said. “Their gift to our generation.”
“And a planet that’s
going up in flames!” Grace said cheerfully, popping open her Sanpellegrino. “Would you rather die of a preventable illness because not enough people gave to your GoFundMe, or bake to death?”
“Bake,” Jason said. “Then at least other people don’t have to sit there refreshing your page and feeling shitty when the numbers aren’t high enough.” He hoisted himself off the wall. “I think that’s our order.”
It was louder and more crowded inside now. Jason went to the far end of the counter and came back with just four bags. “I think he forgot yours, Beth,” he said. “I’ll tell him. What’d you get?”
“Oh, I didn’t order anything.”
“You didn’t get anything?” Grace said. “You love their caprese sandwich.”
“I’m not that hungry.”
“What do you mean you aren’t hungry? This isn’t some weird weight-loss thing, is it?” Sunny said. “Friends don’t let friends diet.”
“No, I just don’t really feel like eating.” I was trying not to spend more money. I’d gotten an email last night about my credit card statement, which I’d deleted in a kind of panic. I was pretty sure I had already missed the payment, but I was too scared to log in and check.
“Maybe you’re getting sick,” Grace said. “You’ve been staying up so late all week.”
When we went back outside, someone called, “Jason!” and we turned and saw Whitney Lim and Tara Tu from school coming across the parking lot. Tara was tall and willowy and a little exhausting—someone who would sidle up to you and ask how you were doing so that when you reciprocated she could launch into an extensive detailing of her latest drama. In middle school we’d briefly had one of those friendships where we wrote each other notes on elaborate Asian stationery before she’d moved on to someone else. When they came onto the sidewalk, Tara said, “So why weren’t you at Homecoming?”
Brandon visibly flinched. I remembered too late Tara had been paired up with Jason that night for the Homecoming court—they were supposed to be announced and walk onto the dance floor together.
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