THE SUNDAY AFTER Thanksgiving was Brandon’s eighteenth birthday, and for the rest of our lives I would think of that day as a curtain, coming down and dividing our lives into two acts.
It was a beautiful fall day, all the Liquidambar trees lining the streets and the grapevines up in the foothills blazing red against the sharp blue of the sky, and in the morning Grace and I spent two hours drawing and cutting out clothes that looked like Brandon’s for dinosaur figurines to wear. In eighth grade, we’d found The Adventures of King Brandon and Prince T-Rex in Brandon’s room: a comic book he’d made when he was six, in which he was, basically, stronger/more powerful/a better basketball player than anyone else (dinosaur or human) in the land, and we’d been so amused by it that Sunny had made copies for the rest of us. We used to pull them out sometimes at lunch to read aloud while Brandon glowered at us. We’d made little King Brandon and Prince T-Rex figurines by copying the drawings onto Shrinky Dinks, and each year on his birthday we decorated his locker with them. One year, King Brandon and the dinosaurs were eating a box of cookies Grace had baked; another year we did a beach theme, with real sand in a tray. Tomorrow, the dinosaurs would pretend to be Brandon: they would listen to the music he liked, and wear clothes like his, and we were going to get supplies at the restaurant tonight, like chopsticks and napkins with the restaurant’s name, at his birthday dinner.
This year Brandon wanted to eat Korean barbecue because he was doing some kind of complicated, protein-heavy diet, so we were going to go to Gajung Jip. Brandon was driving Jason and me. He picked me up first, and when I got in he said, “Congrats on being my inaugural I-can-drive-people-around-now ride,” and then we drove the seven minutes to Jason’s. At Jason’s, the door was open a crack. We knocked and no one answered, but Jason was expecting us, so we pushed the door open and went in.
When we entered I felt my shoulders tightening and my arms pulling in like a shield across my chest. Maybe it was the vibrations in a raised, strained voice, or maybe rage has its own frequency and physical texture. Or maybe I saw Jason and his father faced off the way they were, in the living room, before I even fully registered it.
Even now, I remember the way it smelled in their home that day, a mix of meat and white pepper and bleach; I remember the pile of newspapers lying by the doorway next to the shoes piled around the shoe rack, the television playing a Mandarin station in the background. I remember that it was cold inside their house and that I wondered distractedly if they, like my mother, refused to turn on the heater, and I remember the jeans and pale yellow sweater Jason was wearing, the sweatpants and faded black long-sleeved shirt his father wore. And I remember how it felt like my organs were being wrung and twisted, a trembling that emerged from somewhere inside and radiated all through me.
Jason had turned to look when we entered, but Mr. Tsou hadn’t, and for a moment absent of logic, I thought, Maybe they didn’t notice us. His father was breathing heavily, a raspy sound, and when he spoke to Jason again, his voice was careening out of control, almost yelling. He stepped closer to Jason, who took a step back.
His father broke off. There was a moment of suspension, a moment of waiting, when it seemed as though things might veer off their set trajectory—as though his father might still calm himself, might leave, or might instead erupt. I felt the weight of awful possibility.
Brandon felt it too. Carefully, he stepped forward and positioned himself so that he was in front of me, and just after he did, Jason said, “Dad—” his voice high and afraid, and then Mr. Tsou struck him, hard, across the face. Jason stumbled backward, his feet making a syncopated, staccato thudding sound on the hardwood floors, before he lost his balance and fell. His father lifted his foot and kicked Jason in the side so that Jason crumpled, the way a sheet of newsprint catching fire seizes and pulls in on itself.
He stood over Jason for a moment, breathing hard, his hands clenched in fists. And then it was as though he saw Jason for the first time, lying twisted on the floor like that and breathing fast and shallow: Mr. Tsou started, leaning backward, and a look came across his face as though he might be sick. He turned away from his son and left. We listened to the sound of his footsteps falling down the hallway, a door closing somewhere in the back of the house, and then there was a terrible quiet.
My throat seemed to be catching each breath halfway down so that every attempt at oxygen died somewhere in my throat, and I was growing a little light-headed. The room was wavering around me, arcing and flattening itself out like a cat.
Brandon composed himself and recovered before I did. He reached down and offered his hand, but Jason pushed himself up and stood, unsteadily, on his own. He breathed through his nose, each breath shaky, like his whole chest was trembling. I thought of all those joints and tendons and veins under his skin, how precisely they were arranged and held together.
“Jason,” Brandon said, “are you okay?”
“Yep,” Jason said flatly. He coughed twice and then reached up and wiped his forehead; he was sweating, his skin gleaming, and there was a red mark like an ember glowing on his face. “I’m fine.”
“That was fucked up,” Brandon said desperately. “You aren’t—you’re not hurt? Or—”
“I’m fine.”
“No, really, that—” Brandon laughed nervously, a strangled, high-pitched hhhhuhhh sound I’d never heard from him before. “Jason, I had no idea it was that b—”
“Let’s just go,” Jason said, impatiently. He straightened and strode toward the door. “We’re going to be late.”
We steadied ourselves, remembered that Sunny and Grace would be waiting at Gajung Jip. And I thought—wildly, graspingly—that maybe he was all right after all. Maybe he was used to this; maybe it was something, like extreme temperatures, to which you could learn to adapt. Because we’d seen Jason slip away before, pull back inside himself, and he wasn’t doing that now. He wanted to go with us, to be around us. Somehow we would make this all right.
Walking outside, it was like small earthquakes kept erupting underneath us; my legs kept threatening to give out, and my balance was wrecked, like the earth wasn’t holding steady where I needed it. When I glanced backward at the house, I couldn’t focus, and I would have sworn I saw a movement in the curtains.
In the car, Brandon clutched the steering wheel with both hands until his knuckles went pale and said, “Jason, I should’ve—I don’t know. I should’ve done—”
“What restaurant are we going to again?” Jason said. “I’m kind of in the mood for Japanese.”
“That sounds great,” I said quickly. I was sitting in the back, and I leaned forward toward him, but he didn’t turn around. “I’ll call Sunny and Grace and have them meet us. Where do you—is there anywhere you’d want to go?”
“I don’t really care.”
“There’s that sushi place by school,” Brandon said. “Or we could get ramen, maybe, or whatever you want. That izakaya. Anything.”
“That’s fine,” Jason said. “Anything’s fine.”
Brandon met my gaze in the rearview mirror. I’d never seen the same fear in his face. “Ebisu?” he said.
“That’s perfect,” I said, when it was clear Jason wouldn’t answer. Grace and Sunny were probably at Gajung Jip already—it was about ten minutes south—and I texted Grace. Can you meet us at Ebisu instead? I’ll explain later. I knew Grace wouldn’t mind, but Sunny might. It was incomprehensible that their lives, these past moments, had gone on as usual, that they had no idea what had happened. I wondered how many times Jason had thought that about all of us.
Sunny and Grace were already at Ebisu when we got there. By then the mark on Jason’s face had faded so that he looked more flushed than injured, but Grace peered at him and said, “Jason, what happened to—”
“Whoa, Grace, new sweater?” Brandon said quickly, loudly, even though she was wearing a wide-striped hoodie that had been one of her staples for years.
Grace looked at him strangely. “No?”
Our waitress, a pretty, soft-spoken Japanese girl several years older than us, led us to a table near the front. Jason studied the menu in front of him, quiet, his hands folded in his lap. I watched him breathe, watched the steady, measured rise and fall of his chest. I thought how if he were badly hurt or if he were going to have some sort of breakdown, he wouldn’t be breathing like that; it would be raspy, or erratic. We were good for him, I told myself—he was drawing strength from having us near.
“So why’d we have to switch restaurants?” Sunny asked after we’d ordered, looking across the table at the three of us. She and Grace were seated on the other side like an interview panel. “Brandon, I thought you wanted barbecue.”
“Japanese just sounded really good,” Brandon said quickly.
Sunny raised her eyebrows. “Maybe next time it’ll sound good before we’ve already put our names in at Gajung Jip.”
“Yeah,” Brandon said, “maybe it will.”
The waitress returned with steaming bowls of noodles. When she set Jason’s in front of him, he frowned. I saw she’d brought him tempura shrimp udon instead of the vegetarian he’d ordered.
Jason shoved himself back from the table and slammed his palms against the edge so hard that the teacups rattled and spilled. All around us, heads swiveled to look.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he snapped.
We stared. Under the table I felt a knee knock against mine. I knew without looking it was Brandon’s.
“It’s okay,” I said quickly to the waitress. “He can have mine.” I’d ordered the vegetable udon too, and I slid it across the table to Jason. My hands trembled, and the broth sloshed over the edge. “Jason, here.”
The waitress looked shaken. She started to say something, but Brandon said, “No, no, it’s fine. It’s fine.” He smiled weakly at her and she hurried off, glancing back over her shoulder once.
Both Sunny and Grace were still staring at Jason. I should have told them, I thought, somehow, and I tried to catch Sunny’s eye, to signal that she shouldn’t say a word to him. But Jason was staring back at her as though he was daring her to say something.
She leaned forward toward him, her eyes narrowed. “Jason, what’s wrong with you?”
Brandon said, quietly, “Sun.” He tried to shake his head at her, but she wasn’t looking at him.
Jason said, coldly, “What?”
“What do you mean what?”
“I mean,” Jason said, “are you saying you take issue with something, Sunny?”
“What do you—”
“Really, Sunny?” Jason said. He was smiling, a scary tight smile, his eyes hard. “You of all people are going to try to tell me off right now?”
“Aaaanyway,” Brandon said. He tried to laugh.
“No, really,” Jason said. He pushed himself back from the table again and crossed his arms over his chest, and his expression, the clench in his jaw and his narrowed eyes, were so hostile that for a moment he looked just like his father.
“I want to hear this, Sunny,” he said. “I want to hear how you—you, of all people—can try to take some kind of high road here. Really, tell me.”
“Jason—”
“Or maybe you want to talk more about Mike Low’s dead brother making it harder for you to get into college? You know why people always say you’re such a bitch, Sunny?”
It felt like someone had injected me with ice, or liquid nitrogen; I felt a sharp cold leaking through me. Sunny looked frozen too. “Jason, what’s—”
“Does anyone else see the irony here?” he demanded. He stretched out his arms like a question mark. I couldn’t look at him. I wanted to find Sunny’s hand under the table. “Does anyone want to tell me I’m wrong? Because I think we all know Sunny—”
“You guys!” Grace said suddenly. “There’s a Band-Aid in my soup!”
I wrested my gaze from Jason and Sunny and turned to Grace, blinking. It felt like I imagined it would to manually shift gears, to jerk mechanics into place. Grace held up the Band-Aid with her chopsticks; it was wrapped in a hollow ring, used.
“Man, disgusting,” Brandon said, and his voice cracked.
“Wow, Brandon,” I said. I tried to keep my voice light and mocking, though I wasn’t someone who had ever been good at teasing and perhaps now I was coming across badly, not jokingly at all. “How old are you turning—thirteen?”
I’d startled him; his eyes opened wider, a little. But he forced a smile and a quick, barking laugh. “Beth, I give you a ride, and you break my heart,” he said. He held his fists next to each other in front of his chest and pantomimed snapping something—his heart, I supposed—in two.
Sunny said nothing. I willed her not to cry.
The moment was long over, was beginning to fade into another, but I said, “Yeah, you know me.” After that none of us could think of anything to say, and the quiet settled in around us like ash. I looked sideways at Brandon. Beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead, just below his hairline. Across the restaurant, the door opened, and we heard the little bell above the door jingle.
Jason stood. His chair screeched across the floor as he pushed it back. “Excuse me,” he said, and for a brief, terrible moment I thought he was going to leave, that we’d have to follow him, to force ourselves on him, but we watched him go to the back of the restaurant toward the restrooms instead. When he was out of earshot, Brandon let out a long breath, his shoulders slumping. To Grace, he said, “Thank God you had that Band-Aid in your soup.”
“It was mine,” she said. “I dropped it in when no one was looking.”
Brandon laughed, a little hysterically. Sunny didn’t laugh with him.
“Sun,” I said, “are you okay?”
She swiveled her head toward me, but her eyes didn’t quite follow. “Is that what you all think of me?”
“Sunny, no, you know better,” Grace said quickly. She reached up and brushed Sunny’s hair across her forehead, the gesture soothing and motherly. “I don’t know what’s wrong with Jason, but you can’t listen to—”
“I know people say that about me,” Sunny said, slowly, as though she hadn’t heard Grace. “But you guys know me. I thought Jason—”
“Sun, when we went over to Jason’s, his dad—things were really bad.” Brandon swallowed, then looked at the table. It was selfish, but I wanted him to keep talking. If he didn’t, then Sunny would turn to me, would expect me to fill in, and I didn’t feel like I was getting enough air to talk. “He didn’t mean it. Don’t take it personally.”
She surprised me; she sat back, and said, quietly, “Okay.” Watching her close her eyes and breathe deeply, her breaths a little jagged, I reminded myself that she and Jason had been friends longer even than I’d known them—that friendships didn’t happen by accident, and that whatever reasons Sunny and Jason were friends already still held true. She wiped her hands on her napkin, then blotted at her eyes. I reached across the table to pat her hand.
Grace said, “Is he okay, Brandon? Do you want me to call my mom?”
But then we glanced up and Jason was walking back toward us, and my heart clanged like a bell against my rib cage, and I said, “We’ll tell you later.”
Things were better when Jason came back; for the rest of our meal, he stirred at his soup and smiled vaguely at things the rest of us said. It was Grace who carried the conversation that day, chattering about how impossible it was to shop for her little brother for Christmas. Sunny was quieter than usual, but I saw how she made an effort, forcing herself to laugh. And I loved her for showing that sort of grace without yet knowing why it was being asked of her.
We finished eating. Most of us had barely touched our meals, except for Jason, who had eaten the entire contents of his bowl, even the sweet potato, which I knew he hated. After we paid the check, Brandon lingered a moment, and as the rest of us were walking away I saw him slip a few more bills under our receipt.
In the car, Jason closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the headrest. It was almost suffocating being there, the silence. When we’d pulled out of the parking lot and back onto the road, Jason murmured, his eyes still closed, “I’m sorry.”
“What? Why?” I said quickly, and at the same time Brandon said frantically, “No, no, nothing to be sorry about.”
Jason didn’t answer. I hoped that he knew we understood, that this wasn’t something he’d hold against himself.
“Jay, do you want to crash at my place tonight?” Brandon offered. “If you wanted to—”
“No, I shouldn’t. But thanks.” It was the last thing he said that night except for Thanks for the ride when Brandon pulled into his driveway.
“Here,” Brandon said, “we’ll walk you.” Jason paused, but he let us; we got out of the car and walked on either side of him to the front step. We watched him unlock his door and go inside, and we watched the light in the entryway go on and then switch off again.
Just before getting into the car, I looked back toward the house. I don’t know what I was expecting to see, but for some reason I felt uneasy about it being there behind me, something like how my mother warned me once, when I was younger and we’d gone to Santa Cruz, Never turn your back on the ocean. I twisted my head to look over my shoulder, and for just a moment, I saw Jason’s mother with her face nearly pressed to the window, watching the two of us make our way to the car. She looked small there, swallowed by the window and the fabric of the curtain, and something about the way she’d been watching us made me think she’d been home listening all that time.
After Jason disappeared inside, Brandon backed out of the driveway, drove the length of three houses, and then pulled over and turned off his car. The silence swirled in around us and descended, coming to settle on our shoulders.
I wasn’t ready to go home yet. There was still so much for the four of us to talk about together. But Grace had curfew, and Sunny’s parents had already called asking where she was before we left the restaurant, and my mother had sent me a message, too (You should get a good night’s sleep before school starts again!—which seemed like a missive from another universe altogether).
“God,” Brandon said at last. “We shouldn’t have gone in.” He turned his head toward the window, the tendons in his neck jutting out. “Or I should’ve—God, I can’t believe I just stood there.”
“You couldn’t have done anything, Brandon. If Jason wanted your help, he would’ve said so.” But I heard again how much it had taken for Jason to say Dad, and I knew it wasn’t true; he couldn’t have asked anything of us at all. “Do you think it’s like that all the time?”
“It didn’t feel like that was the first time, did it?”
My hands were shaking, and I pressed them together. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, Brandon was still staring out the window.
“Jason’s dad thinks he’s wasted his shot at college,” Brandon said, mildly, like we were discussing a news article over lunch, and I was jolted—I’d forgotten, in the moment, that of course Brandon understood everything Jason’s father was saying. “He thinks Jason’s been selfish the past four years. He thinks he’s a failure.”
“He thinks that about Jason? How can he say—”
“My dad can be like that too,” Brandon said. “I mean, I don’t know, you come here and you’ve made all these sacrifices and you want to prove yourself and you’ve worked hard your whole life, and if your kid doesn’t live up to that, it’s like, what’s your problem?” His voice was very flat. “It fucks you up to hear it, but I get it, you know? But my dad’s—he’s not like that.”
“Do you think Jason’s mad at us?” I asked.
Brandon shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I just wish…” He trailed off.
I asked, “What?”
“Nothing,” he said. “It just—God.” Without warning, he balled his hand into a fist and slammed it so hard into his dashboard that it sounded as though something—plastic, bone, I wasn’t sure—had cracked. The sound reverberated off the walls of his car, and I felt it pass through me like a current, like a finger grazing across a power strip’s exposed prong.
“Brandon,” I said, “you’re bleeding.”
He looked down at the line of blood trickling from his knuckles. “Fuck,” he said, calmly, as though it were the requisite response. I handed him a tissue from my purse, and he pressed it to his knuckle. I watched the little splotch of blood seep through.
We stayed in his car like that for a long time, neither of us speaking. Brandon wadded up the tissue and stuffed it in one of the side pockets on the door, and I thought he might say more. But he was quiet, and it occurred to me to wonder if he was waiting for me to talk too. At last, he said, “It’s late.”
It was. He started the car and pulled back onto the road, the engine detonating the quiet. We drove past all the other long driveways, the lights shining from all the huge, looming homes, and when we passed the strip mall with the tutoring center and real estate office on Via de Valle, there were still cars in the parking lot, and it was inconceivable that in the outside world nothing had changed. When we passed the row of Victorian homes off Willys Drive, I glanced at Brandon’s hands on the wheel; his knuckle was still bleeding. I drew in a deep breath.
“You know,” I said, “I think for Jason, just knowing that you’re there makes a huge difference, and—”
“That’s not enough,” Brandon said tiredly. “You know it’s not enough.”
He made a left turn onto my street. As we passed under a streetlight, the yellow glow flickered in through the window, and in that quick flash of illumination I thought I saw his eyes pooling, small streams reflected beneath them. But it was dark, and I was still reeling, and so I never was quite sure.
The four of us had agreed to talk the next morning, and we met at Brandon’s at six. In my jacket pocket, I had the dinosaurs, although I knew already we wouldn’t use them today, that it wouldn’t feel right. We were all quiet, bleary-eyed from the hour, and Brandon shut his door and motioned for us to keep our voices down so his parents wouldn’t hear. In his room, there were clothes strewn everywhere and notebooks scattered, like always—“Do you just, like, randomly strip wherever you’re standing?” Sunny had said to him once—and today the mess was somehow comforting. Brandon looked awful, though, dark circles ringing his eyes. I knew I did too.
We’d all been up late messaging. It had started as a group chat minus Jason, so Brandon and I could tell them the whole story, which we’d done haltingly, clumsily, and then when Sunny and Grace had gone to sleep Brandon had called me.
“Just checking on you,” he’d said. “You think you’ll sleep at all?”
“No, probably not.”
He’d sighed. “Yeah, same. You doing all right, though?”
I didn’t bother answering; he knew the answer anyway. “We should’ve done a sleepover or something,” I’d said, even though there was zero chance any of our parents would’ve allowed it on a school night. But being alone here in my room in the dark of night was physically painful—my chest hurt. Already I was dreading hanging up.
“You want me to stay on the line?” he’d offered. “I can just go on speakerphone and be here in the background while you try to sleep. Virtual sleepover. I’ll probably just binge-watch Netflix anyway.”
I had felt completely alone before in my life and I would never forget what it was like, but my friends were the reason I could sometimes almost forget. It should’ve been Jason he was waiting up for, not me, but the night felt bearable knowing he was there, the murmur of his show coming softly through the phone until the call had dropped around three.
“So,” Brandon said now, wadding up a shirt next to him on the floor and then sending it flying toward his closet, “what should we do?”
I had been awake the whole night agonizing over that. Everything you do, and everything you don’t do, is all woven into the narrative of your life; each choice you make sets the future in motion, even (and perhaps especially) if you don’t feel it at the time. Each action or inaction is a thread pulled into the greater whole. Dozens of times all night, I’d started to message Jason, and then stopped myself. If I wrote to him and he didn’t reply—it would kill me. It was better to not try.
“We’ll just have to really be there for him,” Grace murmured. She yawned hugely, and then rubbed her eyes. “We’ll have to be real friends for him. I’m sure he needs friends right now.”
Sunny shot her a look that was equal parts impatient and affectionate. Brandon said, “Okay, but aside from that—I mean, should we tell anyone?”
I said, “Who would we tell?”
“I don’t know. I was thinking about it all night. Some adult?”
I wasn’t the kind of student who was close to any of her teachers. I could’ve told my mother, I suppose, but what could she have done? I imagined her indecision, the hapless, feckless worry that would exude from her, and it felt worse than doing nothing.
“I’ll probably tell my mom,” Grace said.
“Don’t tell your mom yet,” Brandon said. “Just—wait on it, okay? What if she wants to do something about it?”
“Did you tell your parents?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “They kind of know Jason’s parents.”
I said, “Should we call the police?”
“You can’t call the police,” Sunny said immediately. “We’re, like, white-adjacent, maybe, but I still would never call the cops on a POC. You think they’re on your side? How do you picture that going, exactly?”
I hadn’t thought of it like that. My father had called the police to our house once, when a neighbor crashed their car into our mailbox, and they’d been friendly and polite. One had given me a See’s lollipop. “Right,” I said quickly, embarrassed. “True.”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter whose side they’re on,” Brandon said. “There’s no way what happened wouldn’t count as assault, and—”
“Well, my parents go too far sometimes too,” Sunny said. Sunny fought with her parents all the time. When it was really bad, she would storm out and wind up at my house or Grace’s and spend the night because she refused to go back home, and I’d sit up with her when she was too upset to sleep. She had a much older brother who’d bought a multimillion-dollar home in Palo Alto at twenty-five, and she’d told us she thought her parents had always wanted another son just like him. “It’s definitely messed up, but I would never want anyone to call the cops on them. I promise you Jason doesn’t want his dad getting arrested.”
Brandon said, quietly, “You weren’t there, Sun.”
“Okay, well, what do you think your parents would do if someone called nine-one-one on them?” she said. “Can you picture that going even remotely well? Is there any universe where their response is Oh, okay, it’s clear we messed up, and now we’re committed to being better going forward? They’d flip out, right? And who are they going to take it out on?”
“I mean, maybe if they—I don’t know—”
“If they what? Arrest his dad? That sounds like a great solution for someone with an anger problem. What happens when he comes back home?”
“What about, like, firefighters?” Grace said. “You know, the ones where you can drop off a baby at the fire station.”
Sunny snorted. “Okay, and then what—they sic their fire hoses on his dad? What do you think happens when you call someone? Like, what exactly is the endgame here?”
“The endgame is for this not to happen to him again,” I said, and there was a sharpness in my voice. I tried to soften it. “What about Mr. Irving?”
Sunny made a face. “He’s probably some kind of mandated reporter or something. Plus, Jason would still have to face him three times a week afterward. You know he’d hate that.”
“He knows Jason, though. Maybe he could talk—”
“Mr. Irving is great and all, but he’s—” She looked to Brandon for help.
“Right,” Brandon said. “He’s just not—he wouldn’t understand,” and too late I realized what they meant. Inheriting my father’s face, my father’s name, meant I could sometimes forget or fail to notice things they couldn’t, like that overconfident way Mr. Irving would plunge ahead when he couldn’t pronounce someone’s name because he never asked first, and how once when Seoyun Kang corrected him, he’d said jovially, “I might never get that right!” and then never even tried; how sometimes if we weren’t in our assigned seats, holding our instruments, he’d mix us up, or how he’d sometimes slip into those same coded words our white teachers used—the pressures at home, they’d say. The cultural differences.
“Right,” I said quickly, and I was ashamed that I hadn’t seen it that way sooner. It wasn’t the point of the conversation, I knew that, but that circle drawn around them, me outside it with my naive ideas about telling Mr. Irving or calling 911—it stung.
“What about his sister?” Grace said.
Brandon made a face. “Evelyn?”
“They’re close, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. Evelyn was at Berkeley now. She and Jason were just eighteen months apart, and she’d graduated the year before, so we used to see her a lot at school. I found her incredibly intimidating. She was beautiful—she looked a lot like Jason—and aggressively good at things, like school and singing and public speaking. Also, no matter how many times I’d interacted with her, I could never tell whether or not she knew who I was. She was the only person in Jason’s family he ever talked about. “Maybe we could tell her and she could talk to him.”
“Talk to who,” Brandon said, “their dad?”
“To Jason,” Grace said. “Do you think he’d tell her on his own?”
“Yeah, I doubt it. What’s there to say? She probably knows, anyway. It didn’t really feel like that was the first time.”
“Also, Brandon’s scared of Evelyn,” Sunny said. I think it was supposed to be a joke, or at least said jokingly, but she couldn’t quite make the words come out light enough.
“She’s definitely scary,” he said. “But also I just don’t really see it solving anything.”
“So I guess—what do we think’s going to happen?” Grace said. “What are we solving? Like, do we think his dad’s going to really hurt him? In a dangerous way? And we’re trying to stop him? Or—what?”
“That’s not—that’s not really the point,” Brandon said. “It doesn’t have to get worse for it to be awful. It’s already awful.”
“But do you think it’s actively dangerous?”
Brandon looked at me. I knew he was thinking what I was—that of course it was dangerous but also that the word felt all wrong there, that our whole conversation felt so sterile and lifeless held up against last night.
“Honestly—maybe not,” he said. “But it’s hard to say. And anyway, I just don’t think that matters as a standard.”
“Okay, well, then, I think—” Grace started. She cleared her throat. “I just think maybe we’re making too big a deal out of this. I mean—maybe it’s not like it happens all the time or maybe it’s not like this huge thing that always happens. And everyone gets mad sometimes, and—”
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Brandon said. “Maybe we’re making too big a deal of this? Grace, you weren’t there.”
“Well, I was there at dinner when he blew up.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that was really awkward, but now it’s over. So maybe whatever happened—maybe it’s better to just not dwell on it. Was it really that bad?”
Grace always liked easy things, the world scrubbed off and sanitized before it was handed to her. I knew that about her, and it was even comforting sometimes, but it would take me a while before I forgave her saying that.
All the same, though, I didn’t like the expression on Sunny’s face. Brandon said, “It was worse. The hell, Grace, seriously? It was horrible. I can’t believe you’d say that.”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t bad. I’m just saying maybe now it’s over, and we don’t have to sit here talking about whether we’re going to call the police. Maybe we can just try to be there for him and try to be the kind of friends he needs right now. That’s all I’m saying.”
“You don’t think that’s exactly what we’re trying to do?” Sunny said.
Grace put up her hands. “I just think—”
“Okay, well, what you’re thinking—”
Don’t be angry at her, I pleaded silently with Sunny and Brandon, even though I was maybe a little angry myself. We couldn’t afford a fracture between us right now.
“But it’s basically what you’re saying, isn’t it?” Grace said. “That it’s not bad enough to where you’d want to call the police. So I’m saying, if that’s true, let’s just try to be his friends.”
That wasn’t what we were saying, of course. What we were saying was that there weren’t options that felt like they fit into the situation; there weren’t resources or adults who we felt we could trust. Which wasn’t a measure of severity at all; it was just a reflection of the way the rules weren’t built for us, the world not designed for us. It was terrible, and we could do nothing. There was nothing for us to do.