When We Were Infinite

by Kelly Loy Gilbert

  Unexpectedly, my eyes flooded. It was true that I wanted that—you always do, I think, even when you tell yourself otherwise to try to make it hurt less.

  “So,” Sunny said, “will we see you at lunch?”

  Grace looked uncharacteristically nervous. “Okay, well,” she said, when I didn’t answer right away, “here’s a would you rather: we keep avoiding each other forever all of us feel like garbage all the time, like we do now, and probably regret it the rest of our lives, or we forget all this and move on?”

  I think I would’ve let it go forever. Maybe I never would’ve approached them; I never would’ve found my way back. I was hurt and angry and also, I think, I felt guilty—but mostly it was because, before them, all I knew was that when people left they stayed gone.

  “Yes,” I said, and Brandon, relieved, said, “That wasn’t a yes-or-no question, Beth, come on,” and Grace hugged me.

  I thought Grace was wrong, though—maybe the point was to not forget any of it. Because maybe in a long friendship everyone is an infinite number of different versions of themselves, and all those selves of you that you shed or grow out of, the ones you’re glad you’ve evolved from and the ones you miss—in a long friendship there’s someone who was witness to all of them, and so all those different people you were along the way, no matter what else you may have been, you were never alone.

  * * *

  At my mother’s insistence, the last weekend before decisions were due on May 1, we took a last-minute weekend trip to UC San Diego, which was the highest-ranked school I’d gotten into, so I could see it. I felt horrible she was spending money on it, but flights had been cheap and we stayed at a Motel 6. Despite the things my mother kept trying to point out that she thought I’d like, I hated it there—I hated the vastness of it and all the cement and glass surfaces everywhere, the way sounds bounced harshly off all the walls of the buildings. I couldn’t imagine people making real music there. I could see only a grim, miserable life for myself. Did you go to the beach? Sunny asked. You like beaches. But even the beach had felt all wrong, the neighborhood right behind you and a parking lot pressed up against the sand. I thought about telling my mother I’d gotten into Juilliard after all, but then she would be thrilled, and it would be such a mismatch of what it meant for me that I knew I couldn’t go through with it.

  I missed my violin. Sometimes when my friends mentioned BAYS or on the days they had rehearsal, it was a sharp ache of grief, but how could it ever not feel fraught, how could I ever play in front of an audience again without feeling all it was I’d lost? I had tried once since the Senior Showcase to play, but as soon as I held my violin in my hands I felt my throat start to close, and then even after I’d shoved it back under my bed it was hard to breathe and I could only sit on my bed unmoving, terrified, obsessively tracking my pulse. I had to talk myself out of calling an ambulance, and it was only because I’d messaged Sunny and Grace and Brandon, and they’d googled symptoms and promised mine seemed normal, that I didn’t. It was the worst panic attack I’d had yet.

  I wondered—I couldn’t help wondering—if Jason would’ve gone if he’d gotten in. We were still using our same group chat, and every time I said something I imagined him reading it. I wished I could stop thinking about him. I wished it didn’t matter to me what he did or where he was or who he was with, that I wasn’t always hyperaware of his presence across campus or across a room, that it didn’t feel like a punctured lung when I saw him walking to the parking lot with Annique Chang or when I heard, secondhand, that he was going to go to UPenn. I hadn’t even known he’d applied there.

  In our motel room in San Diego the night before we flew back out, my mother and I stayed up late watching a cooking show on TV. We were flying into SFO so my mother could stop and see my grandparents on the way. I wasn’t going to go; I’d go find a coffee shop or something, or just wait in the car.

  My mother missed the end of the competition—it was a sandwich with char siu and seared blood orange that won, the one she was rooting for—because she was on the phone with my grandmother trying patiently to arrange the visit. When she hung up, she leaned back against the headboard of the bed and closed her eyes a long time, and I said, “Why do you still go see them so much when they’re so awful to you?”

  “They gave me the best life they knew how to, Beth. And when people are that age, they don’t change.”

  “Does it make you angry, the way they treat you?”

  I thought she’d made excuses for them, but she said, “I suppose it always has, yes.”

  I thought of her sitting through dim sum again with them tomorrow, trying to deflect whatever they said to her. “I think you should stop seeing them,” I said impulsively. “I think it’s too hard on you, and you—” I felt my face go hot. “You deserve better than that.”

  “Beth, that’s not—I—they’re my parents,” she said, and then she went into the bathroom to shower, and I remembered too late that anyway they were still paying for part of my tuition. They’d insisted, saying they couldn’t take money with them when they died. But the way my mother had been sort of flustered—I think she was touched, and that it meant something to her that I’d said that.

  Later, we’d turned out the lights and we were each in our beds. I’d been lying there awake for a while—I never slept well anymore—but I’d thought maybe she was asleep already when she said, quietly, “The thing is, Beth, I think you can—you can learn to hold on to that anger. I used to try to pray about it going away or try to push it aside. But then when I keep it—I find that it reminds me what’s true and it helps me—dismiss all the other voices, I suppose. I think you can keep it as a sort of compass. The world will always try to tell you things about yourself, and when some of them give rise to that anger inside you, you know it’s those ones that aren’t the truth.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, and then I waited too long to say anything at all. Maybe she thought I was asleep. At the airport before our flight back home the next day, I bought her a box of Milk Duds, her favorite candy, an infinitesimally small gesture compared to what I meant. For so long I’d thought of her as the one who’d been left, but I’d always failed to see the most important part, which was that she was also the one who’d stayed.

  “SO IS IT like super hard when you see Jason in class?” Grace said after school when we were hanging out at Brandon’s. There were just two days left before college decisions were due, and despite that, time had been unspooling slowly the past week after my mother and I had gotten back from San Diego. Grades barely mattered now, and I wasn’t going to BAYS, which meant a lot of hours each day to sit at home and put off committing to UCSD, to tell myself to just officially decline Juilliard’s offer so I could forget about it.

  It seemed impossible that somehow, after everything, Jason and I were nothing to each other now. But I knew what it was like when people left you, how they multiplied in their absence because now you saw and felt them in all those places they weren’t. I knew what it was to cycle back and forth between anger and grief and pain and shame, or to feel all of those at the same time. I knew too how you always felt like the version of yourself they’d chosen to leave, or the version you’d become because of their leaving: disposable, pathetic. Jason had tried once to talk to me in between classes, but what he’d said when he broke up with me kept echoing in my mind. The same way it echoed every time he walked into first period, every time I saw him across the halls, every time that, in spite of everything, I missed him.

  “Do you ever talk to him?” Grace said. “Or do you think you will?”

  “I haven’t. I don’t think I want to. But—” I hesitated. Grace said, “But what?”

  “But it’s hard to picture just never talking to him again. I don’t know.”

  Brandon was lying on his bed, trying to spin a basketball on his finger. He said, “Is it more like you’re sad or more like you hate him?”

  I could hear how he was trying to sound casual—
like he was interested but not overly invested in my answer. “Have you still not talked to him?” I asked.

  “Nah, not yet.” He dropped the ball, almost nailing Sunny in the head with it, and scooped it up quickly. “I kind of tried, but I don’t know.”

  “What happened when you tried?” Sunny said.

  Brandon glanced at me. “Is it shitty to talk about this with you? We can change the subject if you want.”

  The truth was that now Jason was always the vise around my lungs; at least when we were talking openly about him, I didn’t have to pretend I wasn’t still trying to breathe past all those bruises. “It’s fine.”

  “You sure?” When I nodded, he said, “I just don’t really know what to say. You know how he is. You can’t make him do what you wish he would. So.”

  “What do you wish he would do?” Grace asked.

  Brandon let the ball bounce onto the ground and then roll under his desk. “I guess it doesn’t matter.”

  “No, what?”

  “I mean—I wish everything were different,” he said finally. “I wish we could just redo the whole year. But sometimes I think probably Jay wishes that too, but since he can’t, he’s just kind of giving up. And I wish he wouldn’t do that. I think he’s better than that.”

  * * *

  That night after dinner, Sunny asked if she could come over to talk to me about something. By now we were back to talking constantly, and I’d told her everything about going to see my father and Jason breaking up with me. And I could mostly talk about next year, like how I’d despised San Diego or still hadn’t officially decided anything, without it feeling as fraught and pointed. But I couldn’t guess what she wanted to formally discuss.

  When she came in, she was holding her laptop, which she set on the kitchen table and opened. I said, “What did you want to talk about?”

  “I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I wanted to tell you that I’ll go to UCSD with you.”

  I stared at her. “You’ll what?”

  “That was the best place you got in, right? It could be fun.”

  “Yes, but—Sunny, are you serious? I thought you hated San Diego.”

  “Well, I mean, you know. It’s not like I love Congress Springs, either.” She shrugged. “But people manage. Anyway, it’s not that far from LA. I could go sometimes on weekends.”

  The whole world changed around me, spun differently, like I was suddenly right side up. “I can’t believe you’d do that.”

  She logged into UCSD’s applicant portal. “We can do it right now if you want. It’s due the day after tomorrow anyway.”

  “Sun, I—I don’t even know what to say.” I imagined us sharing a dorm room, having a regular spot in the dining hall, going to the beach. I imagined the others coming to visit us. All the things I’d hated about it—those were things I’d hated only when I pictured being there alone. None of it would matter with her there.

  And it would be all right for her, too, wouldn’t it? It wasn’t that far from LA, like she’d said, and it was a good school. And maybe everything she needed from LA she could find in San Diego too––maybe she’d feel whole there; she’d be happy.

  “Should I click it?” she said, hovering her mouse.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “Why not? I mean, it could be kind of fun.”

  “Could it, though? I don’t think I’ve ever once heard you say anything positive about San Diego.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well, I’m a negative person.”

  “Sun, why are you doing this really?”

  She looked at me strangely. “Um, for you? I thought that was obvious.”

  “But I mean—why?”

  I saw in her face she understood the question I was really asking, which maybe wasn’t why? so much as it was why me? “I just think we’ll have fun.”

  “You’ve said fun like six times.”

  “Well, it will be.”

  “I bet fun wouldn’t even break your top ten things you care about in your future.”

  “I’ll reinvent myself. I’ll be super fun.” She sighed. “But also—I still keep thinking about you saying the rest of us would go on with our lives but that you have nothing else because no one cares about you. And—”

  Without warning, tears welled up in her eyes. “It’s been such a hard year and I love you so much and I just hate the thought of you feeling like no one cares about you as much as you care about them, because it’s not true.” She wiped her eyes roughly. “Ugh, I’m being so melodramatic. But you can’t ask people why like that about yourself. Of course people love you. You should take it more for granted.”

  I reached out and nudged her hand off the mouse pad, then closed the window.

  “You have to go to LA,” I said.

  She looked surprised. “But—”

  “You’ve wanted that almost as long as I’ve known you. You’re going to be so happy there.”

  “This isn’t, like, an empty offer. I’ll do it right now and click the—”

  “I know,” I said, and then, impulsively, I hugged her, even though Sunny was never the hugging type. “Also, Sun, I love you too.”

  Before that year, before all this, I would’ve said that what I knew about life was that there are so many different ways to lose what matters most to you. But what I hadn’t known then—and maybe this has been the most important lesson of my life—was that there are also so many different ways to hold people close.

  * * *

  In the morning, before the bell rang, Jason was waiting for me by my locker. I tried not to look surprised.

  “Hey,” he said, “you feel like getting boba or something?”

  I thought about saying no. It was painful to look right at him, to stand in front of him after how easily he’d discarded me. But then a part of me had been waiting for this; I was still rehearsing conversations with him in my head every night. Maybe you always stupidly fantasize that someone will say the exact right thing to make you whole again, or that you’ll say the exact right thing to make them realize they need you after all. Maybe part of me would never learn to stop waiting. So I went with him.

  In the car he didn’t say anything except, “QQ okay?” I was nervous and self-conscious, and exhausted in a way I’d never been in my life, and I felt so badly exposed. When we passed De Anza, I said, “Brandon misses you. You should talk to him.”

  He winced. “I know.”

  QQ was mostly empty inside. The boy who took our orders got mine wrong, but I didn’t say anything. After we sat down outside with our drinks, Jason checked his watch. “I don’t really have to be back until fourth period. What about you?”

  If I called in pretending to be my mother and excused my absence, I could be gone all day, and I said so. Then I was annoyed at myself; I didn’t want to want to be here with him.

  Jason fiddled with his straw. “You want to play poker or something?”

  “Poker?” Of all the things I’d expected him to say, that wasn’t one of them. “You play poker?”

  “Online,” Jason said. “At night, sometimes. When I can’t sleep.”

  I thought of all those times I’d been up late at night waiting, just in case he messaged me. “I didn’t know that.”

  He looked like maybe he was going to say more, and then he just shrugged. “Yeah.”

  In the drugstore next door, there were playing cards tucked behind the romance novels. They didn’t carry poker chips, and after some consideration Jason bought a bag of Skittles to fill in. I pretended it was all right that I’d left school and left my heart unguarded once again just so I could stand in the aisles this way, buying playing cards. I’d thought, I realized now, that maybe he would apologize. Did he realize how badly he’d hurt me? Because I wanted him to know it. But maybe that was ludicrous; maybe he had nothing to apologize for. You couldn’t fault someone for realizing you would never be enough. Maybe he just hadn’t wanted to go to class.

  “So,” he sai
d when we’d settled back in at QQ, the cards making a sound like pages turning as he shuffled. “Tomorrow’s the day, right?”

  “I hear you’re going to UPenn.”

  “Yeah.”

  I thought of us both at Juilliard, both at Berkeley, how different our lives could have been. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. You, uh, you think you’ll go to Juilliard?”

  The wrought-iron chairs were pressing their pattern into my shoulders, the backs of my legs. “No.”

  “Not even a chance?”

  “I can’t pick up my violin without getting a panic attack, so no.”

  “You’re getting panic attacks?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s rough.” He dealt two cards to each of us and lifted the corners of his, not looking at me. “My sister gets those too. So you’re not playing at all?”

  “I can’t.”

  We played through the end of first period and into second, the sticky candies staining our palms and fingertips and my pile dwindling. You could, it turned out, have imaginary conversations with someone who you were with; I started so many sentences in my head. I was agitated in some unrecognizably hot, unruly way.

  Jason looked half-focused at first, but as we continued he seemed distracted. He folded his hand once, giving me a small mound of candies, and said, “Nice one.” Then, as he watched me sweep them into my pile, he said, “Did you tell your mom you got in?”

  “No.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “Oh, totally,” I said, sharply, before I could stop myself. “We talk all the time. You of all people know how close we are.”

  He looked up at that; that one landed, I think. I could feel something ratcheting up between us. Jason leaned forward.

  “Beth,” he said, “maybe it’s not my right, but I have to say this. I think you’re making a huge mistake.”