Was that what he was worried about? I was—maybe oddly—touched. “Well, you definitely don’t need to worry about me. I’m not expecting Jason to be perfect or anything.”
“Right, yeah.” He reached out quickly and squeezed my shoulder. “Just take it slow, okay? You know. Be careful.”
* * *
In those early days I was viscerally nervous before each time I saw him. I was so stratospherically happy it seemed entirely possible I’d somehow hallucinated the whole thing, and even assuming it was real, I wasn’t sure about the new rules. Because they’d changed between us, hadn’t they? Would we hug when we saw each other now, or would he hold my hand, or would we kiss or try to have sex? And also—what if I did something to make him change his mind? Surely it was dangerous to be this happy about anything; surely to hoard that kind of pure pleasure for yourself was to court disaster.
I’d worried a little about what it would be like with the five of us. But it was fine, at least so far. It was the five of us absorbing this new layer of history, not just me and Jason off alone.
On day three of our relationship, he called me at six forty-five in the morning. When I saw his name on the display, my heart slammed against my rib cage. He never called early like this. My hands were shaking as I fumbled to unlock my phone, and when I said, “Jason?” my voice came out panicked.
But he was, it turned out, calling to ask if I wanted a ride to school. When he arrived, he was smiling in a way that suffused the morning with warmth, that plunged away at least most of the lingering terror I’d felt from his call. In the car, all the air between us felt almost nonexistent, both in that I could almost feel every inch he moved and also in that it was a little hard to catch my breath. I wished we were going somewhere else besides school.
My mom came rushing out of the house just as Jason turned the engine back on. She was wearing slippers and no makeup, and her hair was wet. She motioned for me to roll down my window.
I closed my eyes briefly in irritation, but I did it. “What?”
“Hi, Jason,” she said. “How are you?”
“Hi, Mrs. Claire. I’m doing okay. How about you?”
“Oh, you know—” I was terrified she was going to start a whole conversation, but she said, “Beth, there’s a notebook on the kitchen table—did you need that for school? It has a black cover and—”
“I don’t need it.”
“It’s not part of your homework? Or something you need for a test?”
“No.”
“Oh, okay. I just didn’t want you to get to school and realize you were missing it. You’ve all been under so much stress lately,” she said to Jason. “I don’t think for students there should be—”
“Is that all?” I said quickly. She still didn’t know anything that had happened. Which seemed impossible, but really my mother worked a lot and so probably she made assumptions about my days when she was gone, things she had to tell herself to believe I was all right, and none of them involved me going to the hospital to visit someone I loved who had tried to die. She’d been forwarding me articles about panic attacks, though, all of which I’d ignored.
I had the window halfway rolled up by the time she finally said goodbye. Backing out of our driveway, Jason looked amused. “You seemed embarrassed.”
“She’s just so—I don’t know. Things have been kind of bad at home.” He looked at me sharply when I said that, and I said, quickly, “I mean—things are fine. It’s nothing serious.”
“Ah.” He shifted into drive. “I always liked your mom.”
“Really?” I wasn’t sure why that surprised me. “That’s sort of random.”
“She’s always struck me as a genuinely kind person.”
“I guess she’s kind, sure.”
“You don’t think that’s pretty great? You can find some good in most people, but I wouldn’t say most people are kind, per se.”
“No, you’re right.”
He turned to smile at me. “You don’t sound convinced.”
“Well—” I hesitated. I hadn’t planned to tell anyone—it felt so shameful—but then I’d always imagined the two of us sharing things with each other that we’d never told anyone else. And also I wanted to give him every part of me, the same way I wanted every part of him. I wanted there not to be any kind of distance or partition between us. “We’ve just been kind of fighting. I found out she’s been taking child support from my dad ever since my parents divorced.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. And I kind of wonder—I don’t know, I wonder if that’s part of why I don’t see him.”
“Why?”
“If he resents it. Like it makes me feel like just some fallout from their divorce. Or just another bill for him to pay.”
Jason winced. “Beth—that’s so messed up to look at it like that.”
“What other way is there to look at it?”
“Well, maybe he does it because he wants to?”
“She said they had a legal agreement. So I really doubt they’d bother going to court if it was something he’d do voluntarily anyway.”
Someone else—Grace, for instance—would’ve tried to convince me I was wrong, that it was some kind of act of fatherly love and proof of devotion. In Grace’s world, maybe, that would’ve been true. But Jason was just quiet for a long time, through a block of stop-and-go traffic on Creek, and then he said, finally, “Yeah, well.” Then he reached out and put his hand gently on my knee. “People are shitty sometimes.”
I held myself as still as I could so he wouldn’t move his hand. I watched out the window as we passed by throngs of underclassmen streaming across the footbridge over the creek, and he put his hand back on the wheel when we turned onto Walnut. I missed the warmth of it.
“She thinks I’m overreacting,” I said. “She was trying to make it seem like because they had some legal agreement, that’s just the way it is. But I was always supposed to go see him every other weekend and she would always make up excuses for why I couldn’t go, and I’m sure that was a legal agreement too.”
“What kind of excuses?”
“Like I had to practice or she had to reschedule my lessons or the car was in the shop or whatever. I think she’s just always been angry at him and she’s never gotten over that.” She’d gotten rid of all our family pictures when he moved out, and sometimes even now she still shook her head whenever we drove by and saw adults going into GameStop, sometimes looking at me like she expected me to agree. “I just don’t know how she lives with it. Not just the money, but—all of it. How everything turned out.”
He considered that. “I think people make bargains with themselves.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I think you do things—I don’t know, you do things you thought you wouldn’t, maybe, or you put up with things you thought you’d never put up with and you look the other way.”
“You think so?”
He shrugged. “I think that’s just life.”
I wished the drive were longer. We were at school now, but I could’ve stayed in the car with him forever. We went over the enormous speed bumps at the entrance to the parking lot, jostled in unison, and then when we went past the oversize cement planters at the edge of the tennis courts, he said, quietly, “I remember when you told me about your parents splitting up. You remember that? We were—” He nodded toward the planters. “It was right here.”
Of course I remembered. It had been a few months after I’d met them, right before he and I went into rehearsal one day, and I hadn’t exactly planned to tell him, or anyone. But then Jason had asked if my parents were going to the new families orientation dinner, and I’d hesitated and then said it would just be my mother. Something about the way I’d said it had tipped him off, because he’d tilted his head and said, “Oh—are they—?”
So I’d told him how my father had left us. I remembered how nervous I’d been saying it aloud, how I wasn’t sure what to make of Jason’s reaction.
He’d just nodded, and maybe I should’ve thought more about that at the time—maybe it was a signal of how wrong things were in his world, that he could so easily accept my own small tragedy. But then it was rehearsal and he didn’t bring it up again and so I’d assumed that was the end of it, and what could I ask for, really? Even though there was so much more I needed.
But he’d told the others—the next day Grace had brought donuts for us to eat and she passed them out at brunch, with napkins, and Sunny had gotten me a small, pretty embossed-leather journal, and Brandon was tardy in two classes because he’d come to walk with me between periods. And I remembered realizing then how Jason had understood something in me, how he saw me more clearly than I’d known. Because if it had been him sharing bad news with one other person he would’ve wanted privacy, and he wouldn’t have liked for anyone to spread it around. But I was the opposite. I’d wanted my friends to know because I needed not to be alone with it, I just hadn’t known how to tell them—and he’d intuited that, somehow, and so he’d done it for me.
So I understood that this morning, the two of us in the parking lot, when he brought up that conversation from years ago he was making a declaration of what I somehow meant to him still. It was a quiet promise that what I was saying meant enough to him that he’d remember these details—where we were, when it was—years later. He would make room for thoughts of me just as he’d done, in his way, for as long as we’d known each other; he would hold on to these moments and memories and take these smaller pains of mine to heart.
* * *
On our way to second period, when Jason and I had been together for a week, I finally asked him when he was planning to come back to BAYS.
“We’re doing a Haydn,” I said, because he’d always liked Haydn. It was noisy, conversation and footsteps and locker doors slamming reverberating off the brick walls and metal locker banks, but the ordinariness of the hallways felt transformed because Jason was holding my hand. I kept seeing people glance down to look.
“Which Haydn?” he said.
“One-oh-four.”
“Ah. Kind of the obvious choice, I guess.”
“It’s kind of an interesting arrangement, though. I think you’d like it.”
He smiled politely in a way that probably meant he was done with the conversation. But I said, “We sound worse without you there.”
“Nah, I’m sure it doesn’t make a difference.”
“It does, though.”
I recognized the way he dodged the subject, so I didn’t push it, and I didn’t bring up Juilliard, either. But then he called that afternoon when I was home from rehearsal.
“I was thinking about what you said about BAYS,” he said. “What are you doing now? You want to practice together? I could come get you.”
“And practice at your house?”
“Yeah, does that work for you?”
He came by ten minutes later. I’d tried practicing on my own a little—I didn’t want him to hear how bad things had been—but had given up, and by the time he came I was mostly just scrolling frenetically on my phone. He’d said we were going to his house, but then a few streets before his, he turned.
“So, ah—I lied.”
A cavern opened in my chest. He had lied about what—about me? Maybe I should’ve realized it was too good to be true, that if he sat down and thought about it, outside the moment, what did I have to offer him, really? “Oh—well, that’s fine, if—”
“I didn’t actually want to rehearse.”
I tried to breathe again. “Oh. Then—”
We were at Linda Vista Park, and he pulled into the parking lot. “I just thought maybe we should try this again. By this I mean—” He motioned between us. “I feel like I kind of bombed the first time.”
“You didn’t bomb anything.”
“Yeah, well—” He smiled in a self-deprecating way. “I know you think I’m always too down on my failures. So.”
He opened his door, and when I got out after him he held out his hand. I took it, and we walked together across the parking lot.
When we got there, there was a blanket spread out on the grass, and it took me a second to realize this was his doing. He’d brought a small picnic: a thermos and two paper cups, a plastic clamshell of strawberries, a bag of Japanese rice crackers. I said, inanely, “This is for us?”
“It’s a little better, right?” He extended a hand to the blanket, motioning for me to sit. When I did he sat down next to me and carefully opened the thermos, and the scent of jasmine came steaming out. He poured the tea into the two cups and handed me one.
“Jason—” I was not the kind of person people did this sort of thing for. Like elaborate promposals, or surprise birthday parties—I was not first in anyone’s life except for my mother’s. I was not someone about whom people spent time cataloguing my favorite tea or fruit or crackers, thinking about what sort of gesture might mean something to me. “I can’t believe this.”
He pried open the package of strawberries and held it out to me. They were white at the tops, and sour, but I ate three. I wished I could save them forever somehow, press them like flowers. Jason picked up a fallen oak branch that was lying on the grass, studying it, and then laid it carefully on the corner of the blanket like he meant to keep it, although I didn’t ask.
Night fell early those days, the sun going down by six, and we lay back on the blanket and watched the sky darken over the hills. I was cold, and still a little hungry, but so happy I felt like I might break. He was lying close enough to me that our shoulders were pressed together, and my heart was beating so hard I wondered if he could feel it through my skin. All I could think was that if we turned our heads at the same time our cheeks would be touching, our lips. The silence between us felt bright and close and threaded through with all the ways we meant something to each other, all the ways we had over the years, and it glinted with possibility. He traced his thumb lightly across my palm, and a shiver went through my whole body.
I’d always wondered about people my age having sex—how it started, how you negotiated it. Did it start in moments like this? I couldn’t fathom who said what or how you knew what to do and what not to, or how in the midst of remembering to register for all your SATs and struggling through enzyme catalysis and taking your PE uniform home to wash, you somehow also learned how to sleep with someone.
“We could still practice together if you want,” I said, abruptly, mostly because I wondered if he’d felt my shiver, if it was more of a physical response than he’d been going for. “Like—another time. Or whenever.”
He said, “Yeah, maybe, sure,” but the way he said it made me think he wouldn’t take me up on it.
The sky had started to darken, and in the parking lot and on the walkways, the streetlamps glowed on. I said, “I haven’t been playing well lately at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just haven’t been.”
He turned his head toward me. “No, what do you mean?”
“Well—I don’t know what it is, but lately when I play it feels—like I lost control of it. Like before I always felt like no matter how rough something was or how bad I was at playing it I could always kind of hear past that and know what I wanted it to sound like, or even if I couldn’t quite get there at first, there was always this—this sense of it unfolding if I was patient, but lately that’s just gone. It just all feels like—noise.”
Jason’s listening had always felt different from the way most people’s did: Heavier, somehow, as though it had its own presence, and it made me feel larger and exposed, suddenly aware of how much space I seemed to occupy. But lying next to him like this, both of us staring at the sky—I felt a profound safety, that there was space enough to hold all these things I was saying to him.
“You think you’re burned out?” he said.
“I don’t think it’s that.” We’d all been burned out before; you can’t play as long as we had without everything coming in cycles. But t
here was an almost flu-like quality in a burnout, a general malaise, nothing this sudden or acute. “Because then it’s just like you’re bored. And this is—sharper and more I guess visceral, if that makes any sense. Like when I do play, sometimes it feels like all I actually want to do is just—saw my bow across the strings until they snap.”
“What would happen if you did?”
“What do you mean what would happen if I did?”
“I don’t know, if you just—let it all out.”
“Like played through it? I am, it just isn’t—”
“No, that isn’t quite what I mean. I guess I mean what if you didn’t try to fix it or beat yourself up over it and just—let it be.”
I couldn’t imagine what that would even look like, exactly. I said so. In my peripheral vision, I saw him smile.
“Yeah,” he said, “I guess that doesn’t surprise me.”
And then he surprised me—he propped himself up on his elbow so that all at once we were very close; his face was next to mine. I could see the flecks of color in his eyes.
It was like standing on the edge of a very tall cliff. My heart was beating so fast I was a little light-headed, but not in an unpleasant way, and around me the park went hazy and wavered. I had never kissed anyone. I had imagined this a thousand times.
But then he stopped. My stomach clenched. Had I done something wrong? Or maybe I had just interpreted the moment wrong; I had assumed he’d want to kiss me at all when maybe that was ludicrous.
He didn’t move away, though, and it struck me then that he was waiting for permission. I was nervous—what if I was reading him wrong, somehow?—but I touched my forehead against his, and then he smiled, and he kissed me.
When our lips touched, I felt like a different person. He cupped his hand gently against my head to bring me closer. I wanted to obliterate any space between us. I wanted to melt into him and somehow blur out all the sharp edges where I ended, where he started.
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