I sat back in my chair and crossed my arms over my chest. I was exhausted. What else did we have to say to each other; why had I even come?
“And why’s that, Jason?”
He shrugged and opened his eyes wider momentarily, a show of exasperation, and when he did, something unleashed in me. It took a few seconds before I recognized the feeling, but then I did: It was rage. How could he look at me that way? I was the one who should feel that way; I was the one who’d been betrayed. There were whole oceans of anger inside me that I’d always tried to map for myself instead as hurt or fear or shame.
“I think it’s a mistake,” he said, “because you’ve put so much into your violin all these years, Beth. You really have.”
“What does that even matter?”
My voice was shaking with an anger that was totally disproportionate to what we were talking about, and he must have heard it; it was a conscious choice he’d made to pretend otherwise. He said, “Well, listening to you play…” He paused, searching for words. In the sunlight, I could see the tiny shadows his eyelashes cast, the downy hairs on his forehead. I was out of breath. My skin felt too weak to hold my hammering heart safely inside my chest.
“It makes me feel like I know you better,” he said. “I know that’s not true for my playing. And I’ve never heard that in anyone else we’ve played with either.”
How could he sit here and say these things to me? I decided then, abruptly, that I wouldn’t leave without making sure he understood what he’d done to me. I wanted it to haunt and accuse him every time he tried to look away.
“And, you know, after—” He looked down again, and he swallowed. Then he started to say something and stopped himself, and he exhaled and drummed his fingers against his knees. “Um, after I—when I was in the hospital, one of the things I missed most when I was in there—this is going to sound stupid, but I missed sitting next to you and hearing you play. There’s always been something about that that’s felt so—well—centering to me. Like being with you in a way that just lets me be.”
That antiseptic smell of the hospital and our feet squeaking on the tile and Jason lying there so wholly past our reach—all at once when he said that I was funneled back there. And I felt myself deflate, my anger furling in on itself like a sea anemone.
I knew then I wouldn’t say anything. Because it would haunt him, I knew that, and I didn’t wish to destroy him. I could shield him from my anger; I was strong enough to bear it on my own.
He picked up the deck of cards, leafing through their edges roughly with his thumb. “I don’t think it’s possible to play like that unless it’s something you really care about. You care more about music than anyone I know, Beth.”
“Obviously I care about it. Do you think the only thing that matters is how much someone cares?”
I regretted saying that immediately. It felt cruel in a way I hadn’t intended—of course he knew what it was to care about music, for that to not be enough. He let it go, though. Instead of whatever he could’ve said, he looked down again and then swept the cards into a single stack and shuffled them.
When he laid the first three cards down, I bet high. I had a queen and a king, and I doubted he had the two and six he’d need for a straight. After he turned over the last card, he pushed a handful of candies into the middle of the table and flipped over his hand.
“I don’t have the straight,” he said, “but I have two eights and I know you’re bluffing.”
I slipped my cards back into the deck without showing him; he was right. “I think you’re cheating,” I said, and he smiled, in a way that made me think if the mood between us were different he might have laughed.
“No,” he said, “it’s just that you’re a bad liar, Beth.”
He looked down at the table and gathered the cards into a neat stack. And then—I almost missed it—his expression changed. It was the only time I ever saw him look that way: defiant and tender and sorry and wistful and maybe a little afraid, too, all at once, and I wondered in that moment if some truth or core of us, underneath all those ways we were damaged and all those reasons we both had to be angry, was good. Or it could’ve been; it almost was.
“Jason,” I said, before I could stop myself, “even if deep down I thought everyone else would leave, I thought it would be different with you.” I swallowed; there was a lump like a tumor in my throat. “I thought—”
For a long time I thought he wouldn’t answer me. He was slumped down in his seat, and it made him look wearier, and older somehow.
“Me too,” he said finally, quietly. “I thought it would be different too. But—I couldn’t. I can’t.”
I had the strange feeling that we’d never move past this moment, that I would sit here like this with him forever, everything he said buzzing and humming always in my ears. It was well into third period now, and the shopping center was beginning to fill for lunch, dozens of engineers with their jeans and North Face, their clip-on employee badges.
“You know,” Jason said finally, “I was really shocked when you said you got into Juilliard. Not that I’m surprised you were accepted,” he added quickly, carefully. “That part doesn’t surprise me at all.”
“Mm,” I said tightly. Of course, I thought, of course this was when Jason would watch himself—mind his tone, carefully select his words. But that wasn’t what I wanted from him.
“But also—you do this all the time, Beth. You talk yourself into selling yourself short. And you give people more of yourself than they ever ask from you, and I know I didn’t handle that well and I think you deserve better than that, and I think if you turn down Juilliard you’re going to regret it for the rest of your life.”
It turned out I had to speak carefully too; if I didn’t, I was afraid I might yell. “Why does it even matter to you?”
“Oh, come on, Beth,” he snapped, his patience finally dissolving. “Because I know you.”
I looked at him sitting across from me, the candies scattered across the table in little pops of color like a still life, and I felt then how much I was going to miss this. Because he did know me; he knew me better than most, maybe sometimes better than I knew myself. And maybe that was everything.
He was wrong about one thing, though: I always was an excellent liar.
Or maybe even that’s untrue; maybe it’s just that it’s taken me so long to learn to be more honest with myself.
MY FATHER came to my high school graduation. I hadn’t expected him—I hadn’t invited him, even though my mother had asked if I wanted to—and it was so jarring at first I had to look again to make sure it was him. We’d all poured from the bleachers onto the lawn when the ceremony was over, and he’d waved me over to where he was deep in conversation with Sophia Grace Parada’s father, who, he told me excitedly, was his coworker.
“We were just saying it’s lucky the launch finished right in time for summer,” Mr. Parada said to me, smiling. The way he said it, as a father who made certain assumptions about the other father he was talking to, filled me with a cold anger. “I was so worried we were going to have to cancel our vacation. What about you guys—you have any summer plans?”
“I wouldn’t know if he does, actually,” I said, aloud, to both of them. “This is the first time I’ve seen him in a year and a half.” Then I left without saying anything else to him, without taking the grocery-store bouquet of carnations he was holding.
I saw him once again after that, off to the side, scrolling through his phone the way you do at a party where you don’t know anyone and occasionally glancing up, holding the carnations still, and in that moment all I could feel toward him was a flicker of pity. Because there was such a high energy right then, all the emotion swirling around and bouncing like sound waves among everyone we knew, all of us laughing or crying or cheering or hugging or some combination, that this was the center of the universe, and all I could think toward him was—You could have had all this. You could have been a part of it.
And then it was all over; it ceased to exist.
At the last minute, Jason got off the wait list at Dartmouth, and he decided to take it. I heard it from Brandon—since we’d cut class together, Jason and I hadn’t spoken. Sunny was going to UCLA, and Grace to BU, and Brandon, ironically, to Berkeley. I’d committed to San Diego, and even after I had, I still couldn’t bring myself to decline Juilliard’s offer even though, as a courtesy, you were supposed to as soon as you knew. Instead, I just never logged back in, and I ran out the clock. My mother bought me an embroidered sweatshirt from UCSD.
I stopped listening to any kind of instrumental music, and then for a while I stopped listening to music at all. I missed it. It wasn’t just missing—it was a form of grief. It was easier to not think about it.
That summer, though, I had to pay my mother back. I applied for close to a dozen different jobs—at QQ, at a summer camp—but I never heard back from any of them. The second week of summer break, Mr. Irving called me to say a private teacher he knew was going on maternity leave, and he thought I would be perfect to recommend to parents as a summertime substitute for their younger children. If he held my quitting BAYS against me, he didn’t say it. It was an absurd amount of money—one that made my stomach squeeze with guilt at my mother having paid these rates (more, surely) for all my own lessons—and I didn’t have other options, so I agreed.
I had six students. Near the middle of August, around the time Grace broke up with Chase and left for Boston, one of the girls, Luna, brought Shostakovich’s String Quartet 8 in C Minor, a song Mrs. Nguyen had given me to learn near the end of eighth grade. To me it had always been a difficult, anxious, angry piece, at parts nearly incandescent in its fury, but also somehow one that had made me feel less alone. When I’d played it for her, though, Mrs. Nguyen had frowned at my interpretation, urging me to play more gently, more softly, and then I’d been ashamed.
Luna, who was eleven, told me she despised the piece. (I liked her prickliness; it made me think she’d be all right in the world.) But her playing, annoyed and uncertain as it was, sparked something in me. I wanted, suddenly, fiercely, to bring back to life for myself those familiar measures she was fumbling through. I wanted to resurrect their anger, hold it close.
But I imagined picking up my violin again and my skin went clammy. There were a lot of things I still avoided—oranges, taking Uber—but those meant less to me. How was I going to do this for the rest of my life? All at once, I was ravenously, furiously jealous of Luna, that music meant none of this to her, that she had it all ahead of her still.
* * *
I knew from Brandon exactly when Jason was leaving for New Hampshire. It was mid-September, two weeks before I’d leave for San Diego, and even though we hadn’t spoken I was dreading his departure for reasons I couldn’t quite name.
That morning around eight, a little after my mother had left for work, there was a sharp rapping on my door. Luna was coming but not for another hour and so I thought maybe she’d gotten the time wrong, but when I opened the door it was Jason. He was holding his violin case.
“Hey,” he said. He was a little out of breath.
“What are you doing here?” I thought about pretending I hadn’t been keeping track, but he’d probably know better. “Aren’t you supposed to be on a plane soon?”
“Technically I’m on my way to the airport. But, uh—” He lifted his violin. “I thought maybe you’d play something with me.”
“You thought maybe I’d play something with you,” I repeated. I don’t know why I thought fleetingly that he’d back down, that he’d realize how absurd this was, but he didn’t. He stood there, waiting. Finally, I said, “I told you I can’t.”
“I heard you say that, yeah.”
“Okay, so—”
“I think you can, though,” he said. “If you don’t want to, that’s a different story. But I just thought—”
The sun was shining behind him, so I had to squint. I sighed. “Do you want to come in?”
* * *
There were still so many things we could’ve said to each other, but there wasn’t time, and once he was inside Jason took out his violin and went right away into the living room, where I sometimes kept my music stand. It was in there now, the last piece I’d practiced at home lying open on it, Reger’s Serenade in G. He motioned toward it with his bow. “You like this one?”
I did, actually. When I looked out the window, his mother’s car was idling in our driveway, and Evelyn was sitting in the driver’s seat, waiting. I said, “Is your sister—”
He waved it off. “She’s fine. She’s covering for me. So if you—” Then he lifted his eyebrows just slightly, a question.
I could have said no. I almost did. But maybe I answered with the version of myself that no matter what, would always feel something for him, that wanted to play with him one more time.
It hit me as soon as I lifted my violin, that crushing pressure in my chest like my heart was giving out, and immediately I thought I should’ve said no. He raised and then dipped his shoulders and chin, which had always been his signal to start, and my hands were shaking so hard I kept missing notes. I hunched over because sometimes that made me breathe better, like I could hoard oxygen that way, but it didn’t help. I was scared—I was so scared—that this time it wasn’t actually a panic attack at all but some dire medical emergency and all these symptoms were warning signs.
I struggled to focus on the music, and then wondered if, later, I would wish I had listened to my body and gone to get help instead. I felt like I might suffocate.
Jason lowered his bow and stopped playing and watched me.
“I’m not—”
“No, keep going,” he said, and I did.
I played the next two pages while Jason watched. I was damp with sweat and out of breath, and through it all the awful clutching in my chest never went away or got better.
I did it, though. And I could feel how maybe the next time would be easier. Or maybe not, maybe that wasn’t true, but I could feel at least that there would be a next time.
When I put my bow down, my face flushed, Jason clapped. I tried to catch my breath as he put his violin away and stood up, and I stood—shakily—too.
I wasn’t sure what to say. There was so much, but I knew he had to go. For a second, it seemed like maybe we’d hug, and then Jason held out his hand instead.
“Well,” he said. His eyes were clear and watchful and guarded and maybe, if I was reading him right, a little sad. He smiled, his real smile. “It was a pleasure.”
I watched him walk down the driveway, and I watched his car until it turned a corner and I lost sight of it, and then I went back inside.
I had learned in all my years performing that afterward you remember the music, not the audience. That day, though, I’d remember both.
* * *
I hated San Diego: the hordes of strangers, the spindly, acrid-smelling eucalyptus trees and the pale brownness of all the shrubs clinging to canyon walls, the relentless sun. There were probably thirty or forty people from my class at Las Colinas who’d gone there with me, but it wasn’t anyone I was close to and that made it worse somehow, seeing them around campus, an uncanny valley of my life.
The new symptoms started in my first week there. I would awaken feeling like something important inside me had shifted out of gear, and everything would look blurry. And then my vision would clear and simultaneously my skull would explode in a throbbing, crushing pain that left me weak. Each beam of sunlight was like an ice pick, burrowing itself deep inside my skull and wriggling around in the soft matter of my brain and down my spine and into my stomach until I was violently ill. It felt like I was dying every time. When I could see again, my hands would shake violently as I’d google things like how to know if you’re having a stroke or brain aneurysm symptoms or bus routes to the nearest emergency room. There were a lot of days I couldn’t make it to class. I missed all my midterms except for Victorian Lit, which was a pa
per, and in the two classes where my professors were understanding and let me reschedule, I missed the makeups, too. My roommate, Maria, was a pleasant girl who joined a sorority early on and then was almost never there, and one night when I was curled in a fetal position in bed, trying to make it to morning, she sat up and peered at me.
“Are you okay?” she said. “Why are you breathing like that?”
“I’m just not feeling well,” I managed, “but I’m fine,” and she rolled over in bed and murmured, “That sucks. Maybe it was something you ate.”
I talked to Brandon and Grace and Sunny, but they were all doing well and there were only so many times I could tell them that I wasn’t. I barely talked to Jason, although I wished often—and maybe perversely—that he’d call me. When I thought of him I was still sad and still hurt, but not angry, and I wondered if he thought about me. I wondered if he’d felt like this. I was so nonfunctional that it was astonishing to me, in retrospect, how much he’d managed to hold himself together; I could barely leave my room. Sometimes Sunny would come see me, a process that necessitated a train, a shuttle, and Ubers on both ends and one I tried to do myself so many weekends, but every time I was too scared I’d have a panic attack on the train. She’d tell me about everything happening in the Queer Asian American Alliance she’d joined and try to fill me in on her new social constellation, the roommates and parties and classes. And she’d talk about Dayna, who’d ended up at UCLA too, and how she felt most like herself around them, like so many silent parts of her were all in concert now, and how she was starting to hope in the possibility of being together. I think sometimes she tried to hide it around me, but Sunny was so happy, and so I’d try to be happy for her too and to hoard all those details of her days the way I used to. I’d try to tell her she was being ridiculous whenever she worried she wasn’t caring or brave or brilliant enough for Dayna, but my mind felt like a sieve. Sometimes we’d go to the beach or take the shuttle to the mall or eat at one of the places near campus, but a lot of times I couldn’t make it out of my room and she’d lie in my bed next to me while I tried desperately to breathe normally, to hold on. Once, when it was close to midnight and I’d spent the past few hours yo-yoing between whether or not to go to the ER and could finally trust that I’d survive the night, she said, “Why don’t you leave?”
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