“Oh,” Jason said. He rubbed his hand over his jaw. “Yeah.”
We’d studiously not mentioned Homecoming around him since it happened; we’d pretended it had never existed. But we’d heard how they’d announced his name and then there was a long silence, and then all the other ASB officers were mad at Sunny for not having warned them he wasn’t going. I’d overheard speculations about his absence (he’d gone on a bender, he thought Homecoming was lowkey homophobic and wanted to support Sunny), but things moved so quickly in high school I’d hoped people would move on without anyone ever saying anything about it to him.
He hadn’t asked if the rest of us had gone. But it would be like him to feel guilty for not honoring a commitment.
“I had to walk all alone,” Tara said. “Everyone was talking about it. Where were you?”
“You guys better hurry and order,” Brandon said. “It’s hella crowded inside.”
“So crowded,” Grace agreed brightly. “Their fries are so good. I should have gotten some. Have you had them, Tara? They have some spice on them that—”
“Is everything okay, though?” Tara said, coming a little closer to Jason. She was wearing Birkenstocks that dragged loudly against the concrete. “I was just telling Whitney you wouldn’t stand us up without a good reason.”
“Yeah—” Jason said. “I fell asleep, actually.”
Tara laughed, a surprised bark “No one called you or anything?”
“My phone died.”
“But how—”
“Okay, well, it was great talking to you guys!” Grace said, and reached out her arms to herd us toward Sunny’s car. “I have to go see Mrs. Chang before the bell rings.”
In the car, Jason said nothing. All our attempts at starting some other conversation died out, and even with my arm and leg pressed against his, he felt unreachable. When I was small, my father had liked building elaborate sandcastles with me, and I thought back to how carefully you had to watch yourself around them, how if you touched them even gently they would crumble, because it felt like that now with Jason. He didn’t take out his sandwich. We went over the freeway overpass, past the turnoff for his house, and still the silence carved itself between us like a canyon.
When we pulled into the student parking lot, Brandon cleared his throat.
“Jay, you didn’t win, by the way,” he said. “I know you were probably wondering.”
Jason looked at him like he’d forgotten he was there. “I didn’t win what?”
“Homecoming king.” He reached across me to clap his hand on Jason’s knee. “Sorry, man. I know how much it meant to you.”
Jason stared back, blankly. My heart pumped a surge of electricity, a flash all the way to my feet.
“But you’re Homecoming king in our hearts,” Grace said. “In my heart every day is a Homecoming parade just for you. Also in my heart you’re definitely wearing this super-elaborate, really regal crown.”
“Is there a scepter?” Sunny said. “It feels like there should be.”
“Anyway, it was probably rigged, so you shouldn’t feel too bad about it,” Brandon said. “But we’re all here for you in, you know, your time of loss.”
Jason’s rib cage pressed against mine each time he drew a breath, each time he shifted in his seat. Brandon’s grin wavered. I couldn’t bring myself to join in the joke. Because if it was the wrong move, if it upset him, then I would be implicated in it too.
Be all right, I said to Jason silently. I would give anything for you to be all right. And maybe it was just that I wanted to believe it, but when his eyes met mine it seemed he knew what I was thinking.
Then he laughed. It was his real laugh, all the lines in his face softening, and the relief was like a downpour. I held that close all afternoon, dizzy with hunger from skipping lunch.
* * *
On Thursday, when we didn’t have rehearsal, Jason came over after my lessons with Mrs. Nguyen so we could listen to each other’s repertoires.
For the Paganini, he’d chosen No. 5, perhaps the most technically difficult, and I watched his fingers fly so fast they blurred, his veins tracing rivers across the backs of his forearms. The way he looked playing made me ache, and I always wondered if he glanced up and met my eyes if he’d be able to tell how I felt. It was, I realized, the first time we’d been truly alone together since the day at his house.
When he put his violin down, it took me a little while to find words. He was sitting next to me on our couch, and if I shifted just a few inches over, I would be touching him. Finally, I said, “I’ve always liked that one. It’s so—so dramatic.”
“I can’t get the ending right.” He half smiled. “Can’t stick the landing.”
“What was wrong with it?”
“I don’t know. I keep rushing, for one thing, and then I get all caught up in the tempo and it goes kind of flat.”
“I don’t think it goes flat.” I reached up to push my hair behind my ears. Did he feel anything too, being alone here with me like this? Maybe I was imagining that things felt different. “If you got in—do you think there’s any chance you’d go?”
He stacked his sheet music neatly on the stand. “Probably not.”
I’d known that already, but still something flattened in my heart. “You don’t think you’d like New York?”
“No, I’ve been there. I like it a lot. When you walk down the street and no one knows you—you’re so anonymous. No one’s paying attention to you at all.”
Was that what he wanted? It was the opposite of what safety felt like to me, which was being known, surrounded by those you knew. “That part feels a little overwhelming.”
He smiled in a different way—sort of, I thought, affectionately. “It doesn’t seem like your type of place, no. I always pictured you somewhere—smaller. Somewhere where you have to notice more.”
“What do you mean notice more?”
“I mean—I just think you have to be a certain kind of person to appreciate somewhere like Congress Springs the way you do.” He considered it for a moment. “And I don’t mean someone like Grace—Grace is going to be happy wherever she goes for the exact opposite reason. I mean I think you notice more deeply.”
A warmth spread through my chest, that sunburst of recognition when someone you care about shows you some way they’ve held a space for you in their heart. Without warning, I felt my eyes well up.
He deserved all the best things. He deserved all the best from us.
“I keep thinking—” He tapped his fingers against my music stand. “I keep thinking about that review.”
“The one from our fall show? Jason—it’s not even worth thinking about. Seriously, you should just forget it.”
“It isn’t like he was wrong.”
“He was wrong. He—”
“It’s fine. It’s pointless to try to just forget what your flaws are. You’ll never change if you just brush it off any time someone criticizes you.”
“I mean, okay, that’s fair, but I don’t think he was ever right to begin with, so—”
“If someone says something negative about you and it bothers you, it’s because they’re right. Like if he’d said, welp, you missed all the notes and you couldn’t handle the tempo, I would’ve shrugged it off because it’s wrong on its face.”
“That isn’t how criticism works.”
“No?”
“It’s not like the worse it feels, the truer it is. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Maybe it’s not quite that simple. But when it stings in a specific way, it’s because it’s real.”
I knew I wouldn’t convince him. But I understood in that moment what this audition was to him—why he was going through all the effort when he knew it wouldn’t matter in the end. It was another chance to measure himself and, hopefully, not come up wanting. He had something to prove; he had a wrong to right.
I wanted to find something to say to that, something that would be soothing and would also tell him,
maybe, how I saw him, but before I could think of what, he leaned back and rested his hands on his knees. “All right, Claire, you’re up.”
In a way, Jason was always the audience I imagined playing for, so I was nervous, but it went away as I played. Every piece was like that—each one offered you a purpose. But also, today I wanted somehow for him to hear what I felt for him, to hear all those things I’d never been able to tell him.
“You’re doing something really interesting with that one,” he said after I ran through the Paganini. It was the one I felt least confident in. “It sounds—it sounds kind of angry.”
“Really, it does? Angry how?”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“Say it like what?”
“Like it’s this horrifying possibility.”
“I don’t mean to sound angry.” Mrs. Nguyen would always frown when she thought I was making a facial expression that might distract an audience, when I looked unhappy or too intense. Audience don’t want to see you angry, she’d say, tapping my forehead. Very distracting! Not like a lady. Everyone want you look pleasant. You try smile more. Relax your face.
“You think there’s something wrong with being angry?” he said.
“I’m really not, though. I’m just playing.”
Jason picked up the sheet music and ran his finger across, then stopped when he came to the third variation. “These bars here,” he said. “If it were me, I think I would’ve toned them down, but—”
“I’ll try that next time,” I said quickly.
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying I would’ve been more—I don’t know, restrained, and I think that’s less interesting than what you’re doing with it. It kind of elevates the whole section.”
I felt myself blushing. “That’s nice of you.”
“It isn’t. I’m just being honest.” He started to say something, then stopped. Finally, he said, “Sometimes I think you don’t—I don’t know. I think you don’t say everything you’re thinking. You do this thing sometimes where, like—I don’t know, you say the right thing, but then I get the feeling it’s not actually you.”
“What do you mean it’s not actually me?”
“I don’t know, exactly. But then sometimes when I listen to you play, it’s like—oh, okay, there’s a lot more going on than what you ever say.”
He dropped his hand from the music stand, and when he did, his arm brushed against mine, and instead of moving it away he left it there.
For one moment, we both paused. He felt warm and solid against me. In AP Bio, we’d just done a study on plankton whose phosphorescence made trails across the sea, glowing in the darkness of the depths like the northern lights, and Jason touching me, his arm bare and against mine; it felt like that. I felt the heat of that movement in streaks across my skin.
And then, so quickly, he yanked himself back. I couldn’t read the look on his face.
“Sorry,” I said, and my voice came out high-pitched, and he said, also quickly, “No, no, it’s fine,” and then he picked up his violin case again, not for any discernible purpose, but maybe—I thought—just to have something to do with his hands. “You want to run through it again?”
And there was something about the way he jerked back that stunned me. Because of all the times he’d ever touched me, it had always felt so deliberate; he had been so measured and in control. This was different. This time it felt like he’d been startled, like he’d caught himself—like if he hadn’t been careful, something else would’ve happened, like this would have gone further.
I REPLAYED that moment between us a thousand times afterward. Had I just imagined it? Because the next day he was so blandly ordinary toward me; all day I felt certain that if I’d said, Jason, did something happen between us yesterday at my house? he would have stared back blankly, or perhaps even with pity. I felt, all day, an enormous amount of doubt—how was it that in the moment I’d so misjudged what had happened, or what hadn’t? How had I felt something that might not ever have been there?
At rehearsal that afternoon, we worked through the andante in Mahler’s 6th. We’d all kind of hated Mahler ever since learning how he’d forbidden his wife, Alma, from composing and had instead made her go on long, silent walks with him so he could daydream about his own compositions, which is to say that it wasn’t anyone’s favorite piece. But it also wasn’t especially complicated to play, at least not the first violin part, so it was more than a little surprising—shocking, actually—when on our first full run-through Jason stumbled over a few notes and then lost his place entirely.
I didn’t want to turn and look at him in some kind of obvious way, but when I watched him out of the corner of my eye, he was gripping his bow so hard his veins were jutting out of the back of his hand and his forearm, and for just a moment, before he wrestled it back under control, his expression was furious. Something vital in my chest, some organs and viscera, squeezed into a tight fist.
“I’ve been having a hard time with that one,” I said to him when rehearsal was over and we were packing up. It wasn’t true, but I wanted to hear what he’d say to that.
Jason smiled, a polite smile that was the opposite of an invitation. “You sounded good.”
Obviously I couldn’t say Well, you didn’t. “Do you like that piece?”
“It’s all right. What about you?” He reached out to take my bag of sheet music—our bags were all heavy, especially mine because I always took too long to weed out the pieces we were finished with—and hoisted it onto his shoulder, and I don’t think he noticed that he hadn’t waited for my answer before he said, “Ready to go?”
I could feel him close off as soon as we got outside to where Sunny and Brandon and Grace were waiting for us, and I recognized the way he did it: like it was a relief to him, and he’d waited this long only out of courtesy when it was just the two of us. As we all walked to the parking lot together, I watched him closely. What if something had happened—what if his parents had found out about Juilliard somehow? Or what if he’d changed his mind?
“Everything Mahler wrote is always like, ooh, I’m going to compose, the world is my symphony, I’m a man and an artist. It’s gross we’ve probably played more things in BAYS by him than we have by women,” Grace said. “Like, really gross.”
“So we still hate Mahler, huh?” Brandon said.
“What do you mean still?” Sunny said. “Team Alma all the way.”
“Alma was also not the greatest person in the world,” Brandon said. “Not that she deserved that or anything, just I don’t think there are exactly heroes in that story.”
“Uh, what do you mean there are no heroes? Alma trashed her shitty husband for fifty years after he died and couldn’t defend himself and it took historians years to realize she was making stuff up.”
Brandon laughed. “Well, when you put it like that.”
Jason had stayed quiet the whole time. We passed the portables and the tennis courts, and when I saw his car right at the edge of the parking lot, my heart sank. I felt desperate to keep him here longer, for him to talk to us.
“What’s everyone doing tonight?” I said. I looked at Jason when I said it, but I don’t know if he even heard.
“Oh, it’s going to be a wild Friday night,” Brandon said. “You guys start reviewing for the Bio final yet? I think I’m going to go pound some caffeine and hole up in the library. Anyone want to come?”
“I will,” I said. I always wished we’d do that kind of thing every night—it always felt like a waste whenever we were all doing the same thing, like studying or eating, at the same time but separately.
“You got any new crossword puzzles?” Brandon said. “Hook us up. We’ll make it a real party.”
Grace said she’d come after dinner, and Sunny said she’d get more done if she stayed home, and Grace said, “Oh, come on, it’ll be fun,” and Brandon badgered her until she finally said, “Okay, fine, but I hate the library,” and Grace said, “You g
uys can come to my house. We can bake something. Or my mom will bake us something,” and through that whole exchange too, Jason said nothing.
When I said, “What about you, Jason?” he startled. From the blank, distant expression on his face, he could’ve been somewhere else altogether.
“Grace’s tonight?” Brandon said. “Studying? Baking? You in?”
“Ah—” He forced a smile. “You guys have fun.”
I watched him as he walked to his car. When he got in—I don’t think he knew I was watching—he slid into his seat and then closed his eyes, and he sat there like that, alone, for a long time. When I drove away with Sunny, he was still there.
* * *
That night at Grace’s, I told them how off Jason had seemed at rehearsal, and I asked if they thought we should try to call Jason’s sister. We were in Grace’s family room, Sunny and me curled up on the soft gray couch with our laptops, Brandon with all his notes spread out across one of the ottomans, Grace attacking her history book with a highlighter. Mrs. Nakamura had started decorating for the holidays already; three wreaths hung on the wall by the door, and on the mantle there were tall glass apothecary jars all filled with different gold baubles: gleaming Christmas ornaments, tiny wrapped gifts, glittery fake pinecones.
“Do we even have her number?” Sunny said. “It’s not like we can get it from Jason.”
“It’s in last year’s BAYS directory.”
“Oh, right.” She smiled a little. “Of course you still have that.”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” Brandon said. “Like, is calling her actually going to help in some concrete way, or are we just trying to prove something to ourselves, you know? Because—”
He paused, because Mrs. Nakamura had come in with a plate of cookies that she set down with a flourish on the coffee table.
“This is an experiment,” she said. “The other day I made dough and froze it, because is there anything worse than when you don’t have time to bake but you just really need a cookie? So you have to tell me how these are.” Then while we ate them (they were excellent), she sat next to me on the couch and stayed to talk, and then Grace was yawning and Mrs. Nakamura said she thought it was obscene for high school students to do schoolwork after nine p.m., so we all packed up to go.
When We Were Infinite Page 9