MY MOTHER came into my room the next evening as I was practicing the Paganini for Juilliard. It was storming outside, the rain coming in sheets against the windows and filling the creeks that veined through our neighborhoods, and I craved being at Grace’s house in front of a fire.
My mother sat on my bed and waited for me to pause, and I felt myself going tense with her there. Lately she was hovering more than usual. Sometimes in the evenings I’d see her looking through all the college brochures that came in the mail, and when I could sense she wanted to talk about them, I would go upstairs.
I was frantically trying to get all the pieces ready in time to make my prescreening recording—Jason was right that we could meet the requirements mostly with pieces we already knew, and I could carve time from all the nighttime hours I’d usually be sleeping—but I was keeping the application a secret from everyone, my mother especially. She would ask too many questions, and she would want to talk about money again, and she wouldn’t understand why I was doing it and also why I wasn’t trying to audition anywhere else. She would like it, I knew, if I applied to music programs, and she wouldn’t understand that it was more important to stay with my friends. When I put my violin down, my mother said, “That was so lovely, Beth.”
“It was just warming up.”
“Well, it sounded beautiful. You’ve been working so hard lately on your violin. What’s it for?”
“Just some difficult pieces.”
“For your next concert?”
I nodded.
“Well, I hope you get more sleep, because it already sounds lovely,” my mother said, then splayed her fingers out on her kneecaps and took a deep breath. I simmered with impatience. Each minute I wasn’t playing felt irretrievable and precious.
“Your Gong Gong and Po Po,” she said, “have told me that they would like to contribute to your college education.”
“Really?”
“It wouldn’t change the situation too drastically, but I think it could be a good opportunity for you. And also for them, I suppose. It would make them feel involved, and it’s something good they could do.”
I wasn’t close to any of my grandparents. My father’s father had died when I was three, and his mother hated phones, so I’d only ever talked to her when I went to Idaho. Before my parents divorced, the three of us used go up to the city some weekends to eat dim sum with my mother’s parents, because my father loved dim sum, and for a while after the divorce my mother still used to take me with her to see them. Mostly they’d talk about adult things, or sometimes they would rehash or pointedly not rehash the same fights they’d probably had all through my mother’s life, but my grandfather would play tic-tac-toe with me or do math tricks on the paper placemats and my grandmother would grab my hand and press gifts inside, lai see or sometimes gold jewelry in zippered fabric envelopes from the jeweler’s, and then fold my fingers closed over them. My mother didn’t talk about her parents’ pasts often, but I knew they’d been hard—as a child my grandmother had lived in another family’s kitchen as domestic help, and my grandfather had been born to a sixteen-year-old who eked out a living picking fruit. They were financially comfortable now, but my mother had once told me that had come too late; they’d been marked by the difficulty of their earlier years in a way money couldn’t assuage now.
For the past few years my mother had been going less often and without me, saying she knew I needed to study or practice violin. I could’ve gone anyway, but I never had, and when she came home and seemed sad or agitated I never asked her about it. I always hoped someday to forge some kind of real relationship with them, though. Asian grandparents were everywhere in Congress Springs, clustered together on playgrounds and pushing strollers in the store, speaking in Tagalog or Korean or Urdu even when their grandchildren were clearly only half Asian. I’d always wished I had that kind of grandparents, the ones who taught you to slip into other tongues and other worlds as your birthright.
“All right,” I said.
“They’d like you to come and have dim sum with them so you can tell them about your plans.”
“Okay.”
“I thought maybe we could go on Christmas morning.” My mother hesitated, then added, “I know it’s Christmas, but it’s just dim sum.”
She was making such a big deal of things. I was supposed to see my father for Christmas Eve, which was our tradition, but my mother and I never did anything on Christmas morning that I’d be especially sad to miss. “I already said okay.”
“Good. It’s settled, then.” She stood up. Just before she reached the door, she turned back and added, “It’s just one meal.”
“She always overreacts,” I told my friends as we were walking into Sandwich Station at lunch the next day. I’d been up all night working through the Paganini and then the Zwilich, and I was so tired the bright yellow walls with their menu photos throbbed in my peripheral vision. We’d gone off campus because Brandon wanted their meatball sub, and the sidewalks were littered with acorns and fallen branches from the storm. “Shouldn’t she be trying to get me to have more of a relationship with them? My grandparents are the only family we have, and I haven’t seen them in literally years.”
The bell above the door dinged. It was a cramped place with a counter and just two small tables, and we’d barely beaten the lunch rush. “Beth, you order,” Sunny said. We’d always suspected the man who usually worked at lunchtime didn’t like Asians. (Grace thought we should boycott, the same way we did the chicken place a few doors down ever since Sunny told us what the National Organization for Marriage sticker on their cash register meant, but Sunny, uncharacteristically, overruled a boycott of Sandwich Station; she loved their eggplant wrap.) I put in their order, and then we waited by the door. Lunch was short; we’d eat in the car going back.
“Your grandparents are the ones who gave you all your jewelry, right?” Sunny said. “Like that jade bracelet you have and the gold necklaces? And that diamond pendant?”
“Yeah, most of it. So with things like that—I think in their way they probably care about me.”
The place was filling up; we were pressed more tightly against one another to make room. Jason unwrapped one of the cinnamon mints in a bowl by the door and popped it into his mouth. Grace said, “Do you and your mom talk about them a lot? Like, does she tell you why she doesn’t want you to see them?”
“No. Sometimes I think the only way she knows how to respond to conflict is to cut people off. Or cut them off from me. She never tries to work things out or like—change herself, she’s just done.”
“I don’t know,” Sunny said, thoughtfully, “I don’t really get that vibe from her. The fights you guys have are the opposite. Like her wanting to go over the same thing a million times. And then how you said when you were younger she used to make you practice asking for things at restaurants or whatever because she thought you should be more assertive—I bet that’s because she always worried she wasn’t assertive enough herself or something.”
“And look at you now,” Brandon said, nudging me. “Ordering all our sandwiches like a goddamn boss.”
I rolled my eyes. “Maybe that’s it, though. She has some weird view of standing up for yourself where it just means you leave.”
I heard myself say it and wished immediately I’d phased it differently. I didn’t mean you, Jason, I wanted to say. You should leave; you should do whatever it takes. He was leaning against the wall and watching the man behind the counter, fiddling with the mint wrapper in his fingers. Was it my imagination that he was trying to stay on the outskirts of the conversation? I shouldn’t have brought up fighting with parents.
“It’s always so surprising when adults are dysfunctional about things,” Grace said. “It’s like, you’ve had almost fifty years to figure this out!”
“Really, that surprises you?” Brandon said. “I mean—adults are generally not great.”
That seemed safer, talking about adults in general and not parents in particular. “Well,” I said, “they did give us income inequality and a bunch of wars, so there’s that.”
“Don’t forget gun violence,” Sunny said. “Their gift to our generation.”
“And a planet that’s going up in flames!” Grace said cheerfully, popping open her Sanpellegrino. “Would you rather die of a preventable illness because not enough people gave to your GoFundMe, or bake to death?”
“Bake,” Jason said. “Then at least other people don’t have to sit there refreshing your page and feeling shitty when the numbers aren’t high enough.” He hoisted himself off the wall. “I think that’s our order.”
It was louder and more crowded inside now. Jason went to the far end of the counter and came back with just four bags. “I think he forgot yours, Beth,” he said. “I’ll tell him. What’d you get?”
“Oh, I didn’t order anything.”
“You didn’t get anything?” Grace said. “You love their caprese sandwich.”
“I’m not that hungry.”
“What do you mean you aren’t hungry? This isn’t some weird weight-loss thing, is it?” Sunny said. “Friends don’t let friends diet.”
“No, I just don’t really feel like eating.” I was trying not to spend more money. I’d gotten an email last night about my credit card statement, which I’d deleted in a kind of panic. I was pretty sure I had already missed the payment, but I was too scared to log in and check.
“Maybe you’re getting sick,” Grace said. “You’ve been staying up so late all week.”
When we went back outside, someone called, “Jason!” and we turned and saw Whitney Lim and Tara Tu from school coming across the parking lot. Tara was tall and willowy and a little exhausting—someone who would sidle up to you and ask how you were doing so that when you reciprocated she could launch into an extensive detailing of her latest drama. In middle school we’d briefly had one of those friendships where we wrote each other notes on elaborate Asian stationery before she’d moved on to someone else. When they came onto the sidewalk, Tara said, “So why weren’t you at Homecoming?”
Brandon visibly flinched. I remembered too late Tara had been paired up with Jason that night for the Homecoming court—they were supposed to be announced and walk onto the dance floor together.
“Oh,” Jason said. He rubbed his hand over his jaw. “Yeah.”
We’d studiously not mentioned Homecoming around him since it happened; we’d pretended it had never existed. But we’d heard how they’d announced his name and then there was a long silence, and then all the other ASB officers were mad at Sunny for not having warned them he wasn’t going. I’d overheard speculations about his absence (he’d gone on a bender, he thought Homecoming was lowkey homophobic and wanted to support Sunny), but things moved so quickly in high school I’d hoped people would move on without anyone ever saying anything about it to him.
He hadn’t asked if the rest of us had gone. But it would be like him to feel guilty for not honoring a commitment.
“I had to walk all alone,” Tara said. “Everyone was talking about it. Where were you?”
“You guys better hurry and order,” Brandon said. “It’s hella crowded inside.”
“So crowded,” Grace agreed brightly. “Their fries are so good. I should have gotten some. Have you had them, Tara? They have some spice on them that—”
“Is everything okay, though?” Tara said, coming a little closer to Jason. She was wearing Birkenstocks that dragged loudly against the concrete. “I was just telling Whitney you wouldn’t stand us up without a good reason.”
“Yeah—” Jason said. “I fell asleep, actually.”
Tara laughed, a surprised bark “No one called you or anything?”
“My phone died.”
“But how—”
“Okay, well, it was great talking to you guys!” Grace said, and reached out her arms to herd us toward Sunny’s car. “I have to go see Mrs. Chang before the bell rings.”
In the car, Jason said nothing. All our attempts at starting some other conversation died out, and even with my arm and leg pressed against his, he felt unreachable. When I was small, my father had liked building elaborate sandcastles with me, and I thought back to how carefully you had to watch yourself around them, how if you touched them even gently they would crumble, because it felt like that now with Jason. He didn’t take out his sandwich. We went over the freeway overpass, past the turnoff for his house, and still the silence carved itself between us like a canyon.
When we pulled into the student parking lot, Brandon cleared his throat.
“Jay, you didn’t win, by the way,” he said. “I know you were probably wondering.”
Jason looked at him like he’d forgotten he was there. “I didn’t win what?”
“Homecoming king.” He reached across me to clap his hand on Jason’s knee. “Sorry, man. I know how much it meant to you.”
Jason stared back, blankly. My heart pumped a surge of electricity, a flash all the way to my feet.
“But you’re Homecoming king in our hearts,” Grace said. “In my heart every day is a Homecoming parade just for you. Also in my heart you’re definitely wearing this super-elaborate, really regal crown.”
“Is there a scepter?” Sunny said. “It feels like there should be.”
“Anyway, it was probably rigged, so you shouldn’t feel too bad about it,” Brandon said. “But we’re all here for you in, you know, your time of loss.”
Jason’s rib cage pressed against mine each time he drew a breath, each time he shifted in his seat. Brandon’s grin wavered. I couldn’t bring myself to join in the joke. Because if it was the wrong move, if it upset him, then I would be implicated in it too.
Be all right, I said to Jason silently. I would give anything for you to be all right. And maybe it was just that I wanted to believe it, but when his eyes met mine it seemed he knew what I was thinking.
Then he laughed. It was his real laugh, all the lines in his face softening, and the relief was like a downpour. I held that close all afternoon, dizzy with hunger from skipping lunch.
On Thursday, when we didn’t have rehearsal, Jason came over after my lessons with Mrs. Nguyen so we could listen to each other’s repertoires.
For the Paganini, he’d chosen No. 5, perhaps the most technically difficult, and I watched his fingers fly so fast they blurred, his veins tracing rivers across the backs of his forearms. The way he looked playing made me ache, and I always wondered if he glanced up and met my eyes if he’d be able to tell how I felt. It was, I realized, the first time we’d been truly alone together since the day at his house.
When he put his violin down, it took me a little while to find words. He was sitting next to me on our couch, and if I shifted just a few inches over, I would be touching him. Finally, I said, “I’ve always liked that one. It’s so—so dramatic.”
“I can’t get the ending right.” He half smiled. “Can’t stick the landing.”
“What was wrong with it?”
“I don’t know. I keep rushing, for one thing, and then I get all caught up in the tempo and it goes kind of flat.”
“I don’t think it goes flat.” I reached up to push my hair behind my ears. Did he feel anything too, being alone here with me like this? Maybe I was imagining that things felt different. “If you got in—do you think there’s any chance you’d go?”
He stacked his sheet music neatly on the stand. “Probably not.”
I’d known that already, but still something flattened in my heart. “You don’t think you’d like New York?”
“No, I’ve been there. I like it a lot. When you walk down the street and no one knows you—you’re so anonymous. No one’s paying attention to you at all.”
Was that what he wanted? It was the opposite of what safety felt like to me, which was being known, surrounded by those you knew. “That part feels a little overwhelming.”
He smiled in a different way—sort of, I thought, affectionately. “It doesn’t seem like your type of place, no. I always pictured you somewhere—smaller. Somewhere where you have to notice more.”
“What do you mean notice more?”
“I mean—I just think you have to be a certain kind of person to appreciate somewhere like Congress Springs the way you do.” He considered it for a moment. “And I don’t mean someone like Grace—Grace is going to be happy wherever she goes for the exact opposite reason. I mean I think you notice more deeply.”
A warmth spread through my chest, that sunburst of recognition when someone you care about shows you some way they’ve held a space for you in their heart. Without warning, I felt my eyes well up.
He deserved all the best things. He deserved all the best from us.
“I keep thinking—” He tapped his fingers against my music stand. “I keep thinking about that review.”
“The one from our fall show? Jason—it’s not even worth thinking about. Seriously, you should just forget it.”
“It isn’t like he was wrong.”
“He was wrong. He—”
“It’s fine. It’s pointless to try to just forget what your flaws are. You’ll never change if you just brush it off any time someone criticizes you.”
“I mean, okay, that’s fair, but I don’t think he was ever right to begin with, so—”
“If someone says something negative about you and it bothers you, it’s because they’re right. Like if he’d said, welp, you missed all the notes and you couldn’t handle the tempo, I would’ve shrugged it off because it’s wrong on its face.”
“That isn’t how criticism works.”
“No?”
“It’s not like the worse it feels, the truer it is. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Maybe it’s not quite that simple. But when it stings in a specific way, it’s because it’s real.”
I knew I wouldn’t convince him. But I understood in that moment what this audition was to him—why he was going through all the effort when he knew it wouldn’t matter in the end. It was another chance to measure himself and, hopefully, not come up wanting. He had something to prove; he had a wrong to right.
I wanted to find something to say to that, something that would be soothing and would also tell him, maybe, how I saw him, but before I could think of what, he leaned back and rested his hands on his knees. “All right, Claire, you’re up.”
In a way, Jason was always the audience I imagined playing for, so I was nervous, but it went away as I played. Every piece was like that—each one offered you a purpose. But also, today I wanted somehow for him to hear what I felt for him, to hear all those things I’d never been able to tell him.
“You’re doing something really interesting with that one,” he said after I ran through the Paganini. It was the one I felt least confident in. “It sounds—it sounds kind of angry.”
“Really, it does? Angry how?”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“Say it like what?”
“Like it’s this horrifying possibility.”
“I don’t mean to sound angry.” Mrs. Nguyen would always frown when she thought I was making a facial expression that might distract an audience, when I looked unhappy or too intense. Audience don’t want to see you angry, she’d say, tapping my forehead. Very distracting! Not like a lady. Everyone want you look pleasant. You try smile more. Relax your face.
“You think there’s something wrong with being angry?” he said.
“I’m really not, though. I’m just playing.”
Jason picked up the sheet music and ran his finger across, then stopped when he came to the third variation. “These bars here,” he said. “If it were me, I think I would’ve toned them down, but—”
“I’ll try that next time,” I said quickly.
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying I would’ve been more—I don’t know, restrained, and I think that’s less interesting than what you’re doing with it. It kind of elevates the whole section.”
I felt myself blushing. “That’s nice of you.”
“It isn’t. I’m just being honest.” He started to say something, then stopped. Finally, he said, “Sometimes I think you don’t—I don’t know. I think you don’t say everything you’re thinking. You do this thing sometimes where, like—I don’t know, you say the right thing, but then I get the feeling it’s not actually you.”
“What do you mean it’s not actually me?”
“I don’t know, exactly. But then sometimes when I listen to you play, it’s like—oh, okay, there’s a lot more going on than what you ever say.”
He dropped his hand from the music stand, and when he did, his arm brushed against mine, and instead of moving it away he left it there.
For one moment, we both paused. He felt warm and solid against me. In AP Bio, we’d just done a study on plankton whose phosphorescence made trails across the sea, glowing in the darkness of the depths like the northern lights, and Jason touching me, his arm bare and against mine; it felt like that. I felt the heat of that movement in streaks across my skin.
And then, so quickly, he yanked himself back. I couldn’t read the look on his face.
“Sorry,” I said, and my voice came out high-pitched, and he said, also quickly, “No, no, it’s fine,” and then he picked up his violin case again, not for any discernible purpose, but maybe—I thought—just to have something to do with his hands. “You want to run through it again?”
And there was something about the way he jerked back that stunned me. Because of all the times he’d ever touched me, it had always felt so deliberate; he had been so measured and in control. This was different. This time it felt like he’d been startled, like he’d caught himself—like if he hadn’t been careful, something else would’ve happened, like this would have gone further.