But I didn’t feel that. This is it, I thought. In less than sixty minutes now it will all be over. I could feel myself trying to speed up, and I struggled to hold the tempo. I was out of breath. I let my fingers slip into the patterns I knew, that I’d rehearsed, and waited for the discipline of muscle memory to guide me.
But maybe that was the problem. Maybe it would always be like this now whenever I picked up my violin or whenever I tried to perform, because music was the biggest lie I had ever believed. All my life, it had taught me that you could come together. It had taught me that you could, if you worked and you sacrificed, earn your belonging—you could erase the differences among yourselves and work toward oneness, toward something bigger than you, and most of all it had taught me that it could be something lasting. I guess I’d believed that if it was beautiful and true enough it would be its own end; it would sustain itself.
We were into the third movement of the Haydn, and I was sweating now, when I heard a second violin play the wrong notes behind me. It could’ve been anyone. It might not have been Grace. But I knew somehow that it was her, and I wondered then: Why had no one else ever had to try so hard as I did? Because wasn’t that always the promise? That if I could disappear myself into those around me—if I made myself accommodating and easy, if I made myself not a burden and I smoothed over the jagged or prickly parts of myself and I didn’t make too much noise or take up too much space, if I could be all the things I was as a violinist, as a member of an orchestra—if I could do that, it would save me. It would make me worth loving. I’d always thought that was the thing that made me and Jason the same, that he understood that part of me, but I’d been wrong. I’d given everything I had, and he’d dropped BAYS like it was nothing, and here was Grace casually ruining the piece everyone was trying to play together because she never could be bothered to practice more at home, and here were Sunny and Brandon, who had hurt me more deeply than I would’ve thought them capable of, still playing alongside me, all of us caught up in this lie where we formed one sound.
“Beth,” Linde Erickson, the second chair, whispered, “what are you doing?”
Without fully realizing what I was doing, I’d stood up. I was standing now, unsteadily, not playing, in the middle of the piece. Linde whispered, “Are you okay?
I was not okay. I could only breathe in as deeply as my throat, and oxygen wasn’t getting past it into my lungs. I was growing light-headed. Around me, heads swiveled to see what was going on. I clutched my bow and violin and hurried out of the row while everyone stared at me. My footsteps were heavy and loud on the stage. When I got backstage, pushing my way past the curtains, I let my bow and my violin clatter to the floor.
I made it back to the greenroom, gasping for breath, my chest squeezed tight. I sank to a crouch and tried to breathe into my palms. I tried to inhale for five full seconds. From the stage, I heard the song come to an end, and then there was a long pause.
Then I heard my name. I didn’t need to look up to know who it was. Sunny and Brandon and Grace had come after me; all of them had left their instruments behind.
“Are you okay?” Sunny said. “You look like you’re going to pass out.”
“Does your chest hurt?” Brandon said. “Should I get my dad?”
“Maybe you should,” Grace told him. “Find Beth’s mom, too.”
“Can you breathe okay?” Sunny crouched down next to me. “Or do you think you’re going to throw up?”
Their faces, blurred a little, were alarmed. I said, “It’s a panic attack. I keep getting them.”
Brandon frowned. “You get panic attacks?”
“Ever since Jason was in the hospital.”
“Oh, Beth,” Sunny said. “You should’ve told us. My cousin gets panic attacks. Okay, try to breathe slower. Sit down on the ground all the way. Maybe even lie down.”
“Are you hyperventilating?” Brandon said. “Do you want, like, a paper bag?”
“You’ll be okay,” Grace said. “Should I go get your mom? Or do you want us to just stay with you?”
They hovered there, watching me, waiting. I knew that I could give them what they wanted from me and maybe we could salvage things; we could pretend away the worst parts and tell ourselves things were the same. All I would have to do was sit up and pretend that I was feeling better, that I was all right, that I forgave them their betrayal. And then we could go back out onstage and continue where we’d left off. We could pretend to be who we’d always been.
I couldn’t, though.
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I know you don’t care anyway.”
Sunny’s expression changed. Brandon saw, and shook his head a little at her. “Sun—”
She started to go quiet, and then she changed her mind. “Beth, that’s so unfair. I don’t know how you can even say that.”
“You don’t know how I can even say that?” I kept seeing again in my mind their expressions when I’d pulled out my chart, how the future we’d planned together, once I had it written out on paper, felt to them like some kind of trap. Even now, even with the room sucked dry of oxygen and my heart struggling to pump, it hurt so much that I couldn’t look right at it, like staring into the sun. “We all agreed—”
“Okay, yes, we did agree, but I just don’t think it’s fair to act like you never want to see us again when it was a promise you never took seriously anyway.”
All those nights I lay awake worrying it wouldn’t happen, all those nightmares about things ending exactly like this. How happy I was when I believed we’d stay together. “How can you say I never took it seriously?”
“I don’t know, maybe because you were going behind our backs to go to New York with Jason because you were going to back out and go to Juilliard with him anyway?”
“Because I was worried about him,” I managed. I was fighting for oxygen, the room speckled with flashes of light. “Even if no one else cared, I did.”
“That’s also completely unfair and you know it.”
I couldn’t answer. The pressure on my chest was so intense I couldn’t believe there was nothing wrong with my heart.
“Okay, fine, so we’re bad friends,” Sunny snapped finally, when I didn’t answer. “Not that you’ve been perfect either, but whatever, that’s what you’re saying? And that’s it? You can’t get past it? You’re done?”
Then there were three heartbeats in a row that felt hollow, like some kind of malfunction, and I felt myself pitching forward, cupping a hand to my chest to try to still the awful beats.
I struggled to stand. Grace reached out to try to steady me, but I yanked my arm away, and I pushed past them and went out the door. My violin was still lying on the ground back where I dropped it.
I realized too late I’d gone through the wrong door, the emergency exit, and tripped the alarm. It blared so loudly I knew the audience would hear it back in the theater, but maybe music wasn’t something sacred to protect anyway. The door creaked closed behind me, a weak stutter like a broken wing.
* * *
My mother decided that this time we didn’t need to go back to the ER. They would run the same tests; they would find the same results. Instead, we would just go home and I could rest. In the car, she turned on the radio and drove in silence, and I wrapped myself in my sweater and tried to breathe and tried not to cry. When we got off the freeway, she turned to look at me, and she started to say something, and I was flooded with hope that she’d forgiven me and that everything between us would be fine. Then she changed her mind, and turned back to the road.
It wasn’t fair, and I knew that, but I didn’t want her silence anymore and I didn’t want to know that I’d hurt her. What I wanted was for someone to hold me and make me believe that this would pass, all of it, that there would be something better around the bend.
ON MONDAY, I feigned illness. I had a story prepared, but my mother didn’t ask about my symptoms or whether I was all right or needed anything, just called the school and then wen
t to work. I turned off my phone, but then later I turned it back on and there weren’t any new messages and I felt stupid for having thought I needed to turn it off. I felt like I was floating above my own aloneness, and it was something I could almost marvel at: This had always been my greatest fear, and here I was inside it. I couldn’t stand the thought of myself.
In the afternoon, I reread my acceptance email from Juilliard to try to feel again like I had when I’d first received it: like I was someone worthy and desirable. But it made me think about having to respond one way or another to the acceptance, and then all I felt was dread.
I went downstairs to eat dinner when my mother came back that evening, but she ignored me, sitting down at the kitchen table with her laptop and immediately absorbing herself in her email. She hadn’t been cooking dinner lately, and each night would pour herself a bowl of cereal.
I thought of all the things I could say to her—that I was sorry, that even though I’d meant to hurt her I also had never wanted that, that I desperately wanted to make it up to her and wanted it to stop being like this—but I couldn’t put words to any of them. “Do we have anything to eat?”
She didn’t look up from her computer. “There are dumplings in the freezer.”
“Okay, I’ll heat some up. Do you want any?”
“No.”
I took longer than I needed to microwaving them, hesitating at the table. Finally, I sat down next to her. “I think I might need to stay home tomorrow, too.”
“All right.” She typed something. “Don’t leave your plate on the table.”
I went back upstairs. Eventually, I heard the clinking sounds of a spoon against a bowl, probably another meal of cereal. I lay awake all night, the pressure in my head mounting and the sick feeling around my organs expanding as the hours went by. The throbbing spread from my forehead into my jaw and neck and shoulders, and eventually my whole abdomen felt hollow, like hunger. I listened to my mother switching off all the lights and making her way up the stairs, finding her way to her bedroom in the dark, and I imagined her lying in her bed, all alone like I was, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, and I waited—and maybe she waited with me—for morning.
* * *
I made dinner the next night, salmon I’d found in the freezer and defrosted and I steamed with oil and salt and green onions, the way my mother made it, and rice. I finished an hour before she got home, so I cleaned the kitchen too. When she came in the door, she looked surprised.
“I made dinner,” I said. “Um—if you’re hungry.”
“Well,” she said, a little warily. She set her bag on the floor next to the table. “All right.”
I put a piece of salmon in a bowl over rice and brought it to her carefully. I’d made tea, too, but it was cold, so when she made herself another cup I didn’t say anything. I picked at my salmon for a few minutes.
“I’ll get a job this summer,” I said. “To pay you back. I never meant for you to have to worry about it. And I never meant—I know how excited you were about Asheville.” My throat hurt. “I’m so sorry, Mom. I thought it just meant I’d have to pay more interest later. Also, I didn’t—” I felt my eyes fill, and I looked away. “I know sometimes people leave even when you try to stop them. I shouldn’t have said what I did.”
My mother nudged at grains of rice with her chopsticks, separating them out one by one and then lining them up neatly at the bottom of her bowl. “I tried to honor the terms of the legal agreement I have with your father,” she said. “But it was—it was difficult to leave you there. Maybe you’ve always given him too much credit, you know. But of course I never wanted you to think he hates you.”
I didn’t answer that. She said, quietly, “You’re very angry. You’ve been angry a long time.”
I thought about telling her everything then—about Jason almost dying, about us going out and then breaking up. But when I tried to arrange the words in my mind I knew I couldn’t say them aloud yet. I would fall apart. “I guess so.”
She sighed. “Well—it’s understandable. I was angry for a long time too. It wasn’t what I ever asked for.”
“Did you feel like you tried?”
“Yes.”
And then I was crying. I hadn’t meant to, and I turned away, trying to get myself under control. My mother put her chopsticks down and reached for me, cupping my chin in her hands to turn my face toward hers.
“I tried too,” I said. “With my friends. I wanted—I wanted it to be different, but I did everything I could, and it was the same. That was why I went to New York and got the limo and—”
My voice gave out. I tried to gulp down air.
My mother’s expression softened. “Oh, Beth,” she said. “You can’t stop someone from making their own choices, you know. It doesn’t work that way. And even if it did, it damages you. You can’t let yourself keep giving and giving and giving to someone who stopped caring. I’ve always worried about you making that mistake, but I thought—well, I thought I’d set an example for you. Because if I wanted one thing for you it was that you’d always know how much you’re worth. The world will tell you otherwise because you’re a girl and you’re not white and you’re softhearted, but you’re allowed to keep things for yourself, and—and to say something isn’t good enough for you. You’re allowed to want more. You’re allowed to be angry.”
She dropped her hand. She looked exhausted and sad. She was wearing one of the skirt suits that she always wore to work, and the jacket was loose on her in a way that made her look younger than she was, almost childlike. I remembered how she’d told me once that when she was a small child the one thing she’d always wanted was to be a mother.
She got up and took her plate and chopsticks to the sink, and then she stood there a moment, gripping the countertop with her hands. The refrigerator hummed and made a clattering sound. With her back to me, my mother said, “I tried to show you that, anyway. I thought I had.”
* * *
By Wednesday, it felt untenable to stay home again. My mother dropped me off at school, and Sunny and Brandon and Grace were by my locker, waiting for me. I wondered if they’d waited the last two mornings too. Brandon was holding my violin.
“You left this,” he said.
I said, “Oh.”
“On Sunday.”
“Yes, I know when.” I took it from him because I couldn’t not, but even just touching it I could feel my chest seizing up again, everything from Sunday night rushing back at me. I put it in my locker, out of sight. I said, shortly, “Thanks.”
I should’ve stayed home. It hurt to look at them.
“So,” Brandon said. From the way they all looked at one another, I could tell they’d rehearsed or at least heavily discussed this. I felt a hand grip around my throat. All the things I’d said about Chase, how I’d made Brandon feel for not missing his game, not telling them about Juilliard and New York—all those things I’d done for Jason that he’d never asked for, that maybe he’d never wanted from me. What could I say to the three of them now? I had tried my hardest, and so many times I’d chosen wrongly, and now it was done.
It was Grace who spoke. “First of all, are you all right? We were all so worried about you after the show. Did you go to the doctor or anything?”
“No. It’s happened enough times by now that they probably wouldn’t bother rerunning the same tests.”
“My dad said it can straight up feel like a heart attack,” Brandon said. “Sounds pretty awful.”
“It is.”
Then they were all silent for a little while. I could feel whatever unspoken negotiation was happening between them, and the way I was outside of it. Finally, Sunny said, “Mr. Irving said you quit BAYS.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I just—I’m done with music.” I hadn’t had the courage to call him, so I’d emailed instead. I was ashamed of that. I’d also logged into my Juilliard account—I had done it three times, in fact—so I could decline and get
it over with, so I could bury it. But each time I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“Is it because of the panic attacks?” Grace said. “Like, is performing really stressful?”
“It’s not the performances.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell us it was happening? I tell you when I have, like, a headache!”
“A headache is so different.” I was, suddenly, exhausted. I wished I’d walked away after they gave me back my violin. “Everyone was sick of dealing with Jason. And nothing happening to me was anywhere near as important as anything happening to him.”
“No one’s sick of dealing with Jason,” Brandon said. “It’s just that Jason honestly I think wants some distance.”
I hadn’t meant in the present tense, but the way he said it—I recognized that, the relief of someone finally bringing up the thing that’s been right under the surface for you, taking up all the space inside your heart. I said, “What’s been going on with him, anyway?”
“He’s been—kind of off doing his own thing,” Brandon said. He was trying not to look pained, I think, but he wasn’t pulling it off. And his palpable sadness—in the face of it, something shifted in me. “I think he just needs some space right now. I think he—I don’t know. We’ll see. I tried to talk to him. My dad thinks—he said maybe being around us just reminds Jason of too much, or something.” He forced a smile, then said, again, “We’ll see.”
“But we don’t have to talk about him right now,” Grace said. “So, okay, anyway, the three of us were talking about how you told us to leave you alone, but then we were like, wait, actually, what you said was that we didn’t care. Which doesn’t mean the same thing, right? So we decided what you meant was try harder.”
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