I REPLAYED that moment between us a thousand times afterward. Had I just imagined it? Because the next day he was so blandly ordinary toward me; all day I felt certain that if I’d said, Jason, did something happen between us yesterday at my house? he would have stared back blankly, or perhaps even with pity. I felt, all day, an enormous amount of doubt—how was it that in the moment I’d so misjudged what had happened, or what hadn’t? How had I felt something that might not ever have been there?
At rehearsal that afternoon, we worked through the andante in Mahler’s 6th. We’d all kind of hated Mahler ever since learning how he’d forbidden his wife, Alma, from composing and had instead made her go on long, silent walks with him so he could daydream about his own compositions, which is to say that it wasn’t anyone’s favorite piece. But it also wasn’t especially complicated to play, at least not the first violin part, so it was more than a little surprising—shocking, actually—when on our first full run-through Jason stumbled over a few notes and then lost his place entirely.
I didn’t want to turn and look at him in some kind of obvious way, but when I watched him out of the corner of my eye, he was gripping his bow so hard his veins were jutting out of the back of his hand and his forearm, and for just a moment, before he wrestled it back under control, his expression was furious. Something vital in my chest, some organs and viscera, squeezed into a tight fist.
“I’ve been having a hard time with that one,” I said to him when rehearsal was over and we were packing up. It wasn’t true, but I wanted to hear what he’d say to that.
Jason smiled, a polite smile that was the opposite of an invitation. “You sounded good.”
Obviously I couldn’t say Well, you didn’t. “Do you like that piece?”
“It’s all right. What about you?” He reached out to take my bag of sheet music—our bags were all heavy, especially mine because I always took too long to weed out the pieces we were finished with—and hoisted it onto his shoulder, and I don’t think he noticed that he hadn’t waited for my answer before he said, “Ready to go?”
I could feel him close off as soon as we got outside to where Sunny and Brandon and Grace were waiting for us, and I recognized the way he did it: like it was a relief to him, and he’d waited this long only out of courtesy when it was just the two of us. As we all walked to the parking lot together, I watched him closely. What if something had happened—what if his parents had found out about Juilliard somehow? Or what if he’d changed his mind?
“Everything Mahler wrote is always like, ooh, I’m going to compose, the world is my symphony, I’m a man and an artist. It’s gross we’ve probably played more things in BAYS by him than we have by women,” Grace said. “Like, really gross.”
“So we still hate Mahler, huh?” Brandon said.
“What do you mean still?” Sunny said. “Team Alma all the way.”
“Alma was also not the greatest person in the world,” Brandon said. “Not that she deserved that or anything, just I don’t think there are exactly heroes in that story.”
“Uh, what do you mean there are no heroes? Alma trashed her shitty husband for fifty years after he died and couldn’t defend himself and it took historians years to realize she was making stuff up.”
Brandon laughed. “Well, when you put it like that.”
Jason had stayed quiet the whole time. We passed the portables and the tennis courts, and when I saw his car right at the edge of the parking lot, my heart sank. I felt desperate to keep him here longer, for him to talk to us.
“What’s everyone doing tonight?” I said. I looked at Jason when I said it, but I don’t know if he even heard.
“Oh, it’s going to be a wild Friday night,” Brandon said. “You guys start reviewing for the Bio final yet? I think I’m going to go pound some caffeine and hole up in the library. Anyone want to come?”
“I will,” I said. I always wished we’d do that kind of thing every night—it always felt like a waste whenever we were all doing the same thing, like studying or eating, at the same time but separately.
“You got any new crossword puzzles?” Brandon said. “Hook us up. We’ll make it a real party.”
Grace said she’d come after dinner, and Sunny said she’d get more done if she stayed home, and Grace said, “Oh, come on, it’ll be fun,” and Brandon badgered her until she finally said, “Okay, fine, but I hate the library,” and Grace said, “You guys can come to my house. We can bake something. Or my mom will bake us something,” and through that whole exchange too, Jason said nothing.
When I said, “What about you, Jason?” he startled. From the blank, distant expression on his face, he could’ve been somewhere else altogether.
“Grace’s tonight?” Brandon said. “Studying? Baking? You in?”
“Ah—” He forced a smile. “You guys have fun.”
I watched him as he walked to his car. When he got in—I don’t think he knew I was watching—he slid into his seat and then closed his eyes, and he sat there like that, alone, for a long time. When I drove away with Sunny, he was still there.
That night at Grace’s, I told them how off Jason had seemed at rehearsal, and I asked if they thought we should try to call Jason’s sister. We were in Grace’s family room, Sunny and me curled up on the soft gray couch with our laptops, Brandon with all his notes spread out across one of the ottomans, Grace attacking her history book with a highlighter. Mrs. Nakamura had started decorating for the holidays already; three wreaths hung on the wall by the door, and on the mantle there were tall glass apothecary jars all filled with different gold baubles: gleaming Christmas ornaments, tiny wrapped gifts, glittery fake pinecones.
“Do we even have her number?” Sunny said. “It’s not like we can get it from Jason.”
“It’s in last year’s BAYS directory.”
“Oh, right.” She smiled a little. “Of course you still have that.”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” Brandon said. “Like, is calling her actually going to help in some concrete way, or are we just trying to prove something to ourselves, you know? Because—”
He paused, because Mrs. Nakamura had come in with a plate of cookies that she set down with a flourish on the coffee table.
“This is an experiment,” she said. “The other day I made dough and froze it, because is there anything worse than when you don’t have time to bake but you just really need a cookie? So you have to tell me how these are.” Then while we ate them (they were excellent), she sat next to me on the couch and stayed to talk, and then Grace was yawning and Mrs. Nakamura said she thought it was obscene for high school students to do schoolwork after nine p.m., so we all packed up to go.
But the whole way back and especially at home I was uneasy. I made up an excuse to message Jason and didn’t hear back, which hopefully just meant he was sleeping, but I couldn’t stop all the what-ifs from blooming like algae into an opaque, toxic cloud.
I would give anything to be with him right now. I felt the few miles between us, all the closed doors and all the hours until Monday, as a lump in my throat. And for a few minutes, I let myself imagine a world where instead of being alone tonight we were together, and I let myself imagine having some solid and undeniable claim on him, one that meant he wanted me there and welcomed me into all those shadowy places he never let anyone follow him into. I let myself imagine us lying together in the dark.
But I wasn’t with him, and I didn’t have that claim, and he was out there somewhere and I didn’t know whether he was all right and it was unbearable. It wasn’t quite ten—surely not too late to call a college student. I looked up Evelyn’s number.
She picked up, which surprised me a little. She’d never struck me as the kind of person who’d take calls from random numbers.
“Evelyn?” My voice came out higher-pitched than I meant, even higher than what Sunny referred to as my customer service voice when I was talking to people I didn’t know as well, and I cleared my throat. “This is Beth Claire. I don’t know if you remember me—I’m one of Jason’s—”
“I remember you.”
“Oh—great. Um, I wanted to talk to you because—well, as Jason’s friends, we’ve just been—we’ve been a little worried about him, and we thought—”
“Why?”
“There was kind of—” I swallowed. I sat down on my bed. I could hear my pulse thudding in my ears. “After Thanksgiving, we were at your house, and there was kind of an incident with your dad. And then today, he just seemed—”
“What do you mean an incident?”
I somehow hadn’t planned to have to say the words aloud. “Your dad hit him,” I said finally. “It was—it was pretty bad.” She didn’t answer, and I felt the words start to choke me. “But then today he seemed maybe kind of like he did that day, a little bit.”
“Did something happen today?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Then what exactly made you so worried?”
What was I supposed to say—that he’d made mistakes while playing? All those things that meant something in our world, that I was attuned to because I cared about him, wouldn’t translate into anything I could say to his sister on the phone. “He seemed upset.”
She was quiet a long time. Finally, she said, “Did Jason ask you to talk to me?”
“No, but—”
“Okay, so—I’m not really sure what we’re doing here.”
“We were just worried about him.”
Her voice was sharp. “Well, what do you want me to say?”
What did I want her to say? That she would know some way to fix things, I guess. Or that somehow things weren’t as bad as they seemed, or that there was some reason I hadn’t considered that, actually, Jason would be fine, or that I didn’t need to worry because she was going to do x, y, and z.
The silence on the phone splayed out, miring us inside it. My face was burning. Maybe I’d said everything wrong. Sunny or Grace or Brandon should’ve called her instead. After a while, when I’d run through all the other impossible options, I said, “I guess I just thought maybe you should know.”
The panic set in as soon as I hung up. My hands were shaking. It was hard to remember how just a few minutes ago it had felt like a good idea somehow to call her. Was she going to tell Jason I’d called? He would be furious; he would definitely consider it a betrayal. I’d been counting on her knowing that and caring enough about it not to tell him, but maybe that had been foolish.
Also, I’d counted on the call being worthwhile. I could live with the unpleasantness as a sacrifice I’d make if it did something for Jason somehow. But obviously that had been naive.
But maybe Brandon had been partly right—maybe it had been for my own sake that I’d called her. Maybe deep down I’d never expected her to fix it; maybe I just wanted to mark us as caring and involved, doing everything we could. Maybe I’d just wanted an outside witness to how deeply we cared for him.
That was where Brandon had only been half-right, though. Because I think then I still thought that the sheer force of caring could somehow be enough—that it would matter, that it would change things, in the end.
I told my friends about the failed phone call, but I told them not to tell Jason. He never mentioned it, which I hoped meant Evelyn hadn’t told him, but I couldn’t be sure. He also, of course, never brought up any of the rest of it himself, not Brandon’s birthday or the day at rehearsal, but on Monday we were sitting in our usual spot at lunch, and just before the bell rang Jason cleared his throat.
“Also, uh,” he said, and reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, “this is from my mom.” From inside his wallet he pulled out four sealed red lai see envelopes with gold embossing, and he handed one to each of us.
“Ooh!” Grace said. “I love Lunar New Year!”
I was surprised. It was something Grace’s mother might have done—the way she sent cupcakes for Grace to give us on Valentine’s Day and homemade mochi for New Year’s. But we hardly knew Jason’s mother, and unlike Mrs. Nakamura, we almost never saw her, and Lunar New Year was almost two months away.
I never knew the correct way to open gifts like that, when the gift was clearly money—it felt strange to open it in front of whomever had given it to me, but equally strange to simply pocket it without looking. So I looked around at the others, but they seemed as lost as I was.
Finally, Grace smiled, a little awkwardly, and slid open the envelope. Then she jerked back, visibly startled.
“Jason,” she said. She shook her head. “She shouldn’t…” She trailed off, and Jason looked away. The rest of us peeked inside our own envelopes. There were two hundred-dollar bills inside each one.
Brandon stuffed the money back in his envelope, out of sight, and he held the envelope gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. “Jason, it’s too much,” he said. “We can’t—”
“It’s fine,” Jason said, a little shortly.
“But Jay—”
“Just—she wanted you to have it.” He was sitting cross-legged, and he clapped his hands loudly on his thighs. It made a hollow sound, like punctuation—an ending. “So,” he said, then stopped.
All I could think was how that was nearly a thousand dollars between the four of us. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Sunny at a loss for words like this. She had her lips pressed together, and she was blinking quickly, her envelope on the ground in front of her.
Jason cleared his throat and then folded his arms across his chest, not looking at us. Brandon reached up and rubbed his temples with his thumb and forefinger, and then dropped his hand heavily. My fingertips felt icy, tingling and numb.
Finally, Grace said, “Well, that was nice of your mother.”
“Mm,” Jason said.
“Yeah, tell her thanks,” Sunny murmured.
“Yep.”
Brandon was still holding the envelope so it dangled from his fingers, wobbling. He looked a little pale.
“Well!” Grace said brightly. She straightened and slipped the envelope inside her backpack, out of sight. “You know what you can do with two hundred dollars? I heard an ad on the radio last night, and did you know for two hundred dollars you can have someone supposedly name a star after you? My mom and I were laughing so hard. They send you some dumb little certificate, which I don’t know how you could ever prove which star it was because who’s even in charge of naming stars? Would you rather spend two hundred dollars to have a star named after you or—I can’t even think of another option.”
Jason laughed gratefully. “How do you know they aren’t just renaming the same star every time?” he said, and Grace said, “That’s probably exactly what they do,” and Sunny said, “That assumes there’s even one star they’re somehow in charge of,” and Brandon said, laughing, “Man, you guys are all so cynical,” and Grace said, “If you give me two hundred dollars, I’ll print you a certificate right now that says any star you want is now the Brandon Lin,” and it was okay, we were okay—the moment had passed.
Still, all that day it was as if the envelope throbbed there in my backpack, like surely everyone in class could see. I thought about my credit card bill, but you weren’t supposed to send cash in the mail, and my mother always took my cash to the bank to deposit for me and I could never explain to her where this much had come from. So I gave the money to the NHS food drive, but sometimes even now I remember Jason’s mother’s face in that window, shrouded by the curtains; I remember everything that happened after, and I wish we’d never taken her money.