BEFORE SCHOOL Friday morning, my father messaged me out of the blue to ask when I’d find out about Berkeley. It was the first time I’d heard from him since Christmas Eve. Usually, I would’ve messaged him before that, but the shame of knowing he’d been paying child support all this time had stopped me. I wanted to tell him it hadn’t been my idea and I hadn’t known, but maybe that didn’t make a difference, and also I was too afraid to bring it up.
But I could imagine telling him I was going to Berkeley—that would be (I hoped, at least) enough to supersede whatever else had happened. He would be thrilled. Maybe sometimes on weekends he’d come up and we’d meet for lunch, or we’d walk around the campus and compare notes, or maybe go to the football games together. I’d already looked up the dates of Berkeley’s Homecoming. Maybe I’d bring up the child support sometime then to apologize, or maybe by that point it wouldn’t matter as much.
That weekend, Grace was going to be gone both days to watch her brother perform at a taiko festival in Stockton, Sunny had family in town, and it was Brandon’s dad’s birthday. I didn’t want to seem greedy after the evening in the park—and really, I could probably live for years off the happiness of that—but I took a chance as we were walking to second period and asked Jason if he wanted to do something over the weekend.
“Like what?” he said.
“I don’t know, like anything. I’m free all weekend. We could go for a walk or something. Or—what if we went to Berkeley?” As soon as I said it, the day began to take shape in my mind. “We could go spend the day there and visit the campus.”
“And do what?”
“I don’t know, just explore? We could get something to eat and just try to get a sense of what it’s like for next year.”
Berkeley was a lovely campus—romantic, even, beautiful old stone buildings flanked with trees, pockets of forest you could get lost in. It was what I’d always pictured a college should look like. It was right in the heart of the city, and you could spend hours wandering in and out of shops and coffeehouses and cafes, up and down side streets with clusters of cottage-like homes blooming with gardens, and there was an energy there that made the world feel safe and contained, like it had all been brought to you on a grid there on campus. I remembered walking through it with my father, how it felt like a new possibility unfolded with each walkway.
“Sure, if you want,” he said. “I’m not doing anything else. I’ll come get you tomorrow morning?”
Brandon called that night. I’d just showered and was getting into bed, and when I picked up, he said, “What are you doing tomorrow? You want to go get breakfast?”
“Oh—tomorrow? I thought you had your dad’s birthday.”
“Just for dinner,” he said. “Why, are you doing something?”
“I was going to go to Berkeley with Jason. We were going to be there all day.” I hesitated just a second. “Did you want to come?”
“Is this like a date?”
“It’s—” I didn’t know how to answer that. “I’m not sure.”
He laughed. “Well, I’ll pass, thanks. I don’t need to be a third wheel.”
“No, I didn’t mean—it’s probably not a date. You definitely wouldn’t be a third wheel anyway.”
“Nah, it’s fine. I’ll go bug Sunny and her cousins, maybe.”
I felt a twinge as I hung up. It felt bizarre that Brandon wouldn’t consider himself invited by default. This wasn’t how it would always be, would it? I wished I could do both—be alone with Jason, and also be with the five of us together—at once.
I was still having trouble sleeping at night, which seemed disloyal somehow, like it ignored the current reality and left me stuck in the past Jason wanted to move beyond, and also ungrateful after he’d gone to all the trouble to surprise me with the picnic. But that night I lay awake imagining the next day. I pictured us sprawled next to each other on the grass, our hands laced together. I imagined kissing him between buildings or walking through the wooded paths. And also I imagined him falling in love with the campus in some new way—I wanted him to have something shining in his future that he could look toward, something that would lift and sustain him if he started to feel the world pressing in on him again.
In the morning, even though it was the weekend, I got up at six to make muffins. When my mother came downstairs, she looked startled, and then, watching me, she smiled.
“You look happy this morning, Beth,” she said. “And the muffins look beautiful.”
I was drying the dishes I’d used, and she was right: I was happy. “Do you want one? They’re probably ready.”
“What are they for?”
I’d told her I was going to work on a group project with Jason, which was easier than explaining Berkeley. “They’re for the project.”
“What a nice idea. I think it’s wonderful for you to have fun hobbies. It’s so good for stress.” She picked one from the baking rack, blowing on it gently to cool it. “Will you be gone all day? I’ll probably be home from Gong Gong and Po Po’s a little after lunch.”
“You’re going to see them?” I didn’t know why it bothered me. What had I expected—that she’d cut them off? Maybe it seemed unjust that of any relationships she could’ve salvaged, this was the one she’d chosen.
“For the morning,” she said, and started to say something else, I think, but didn’t. “Delicious muffins, Beth.”
Jason was supposed to come pick me up at nine. By nine ten, he still wasn’t there, and because it was unlike him to be late, I’d started to worry. Maybe he wasn’t coming after all—something had happened with his parents, or he wasn’t feeling well, or he’d changed his mind about Berkeley or about wanting a future in general or about me. I held my phone tightly, debating whether it was too early to message him to ask where he was. Maybe he’d just hit traffic, or forgotten his wallet and had to turn around. Or maybe I’d imagined the whole thing; maybe this was all some kind of elaborate joke.
At nine fourteen, he pulled into our driveway. I took a deep breath to try to loosen the tightness in my chest. It was fine, I told myself; everything was fine.
Jason came to knock on the door, and I checked my reflection in the hall mirror. Maybe I should’ve worn more makeup or done something else with my hair.
As soon as I opened the door, the evening at the park felt like a distant memory. When he said hi it was flat, and there was a feeling like a wall around him. He opened the passenger door for me, and I tried to tuck myself in quickly. When he got in, he didn’t say anything, and his silence ballooned in the car between us.
“I made some muffins,” I said brightly, holding up the bag. “Do you still like blueberry?”
“Sounds great,” he said, but he didn’t reach for one. I kept the bag aloft, awkwardly.
“Did you want one, or—?”
“Ah—maybe in a little bit.”
“Sure.” I put the bag on my lap. “Jason, are you—are you feeling okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” He backed out of the driveway. “You?”
“Of course.” I sat straight and still, trying to smooth my expression. When we got to the freeway, I said, “Did you want to listen to something?”
“Ah—sure.”
“Any preference?”
“I don’t care.”
I fiddled with his radio. My heart was thudding. What had happened? Had I done something wrong? After we’d kissed in the park, was I supposed to act differently the rest of the week, or had I done something wrong and not realized it then? Or maybe I shouldn’t have told him about the child support; maybe it made me seem pathetic and burdensome, and anyway surely what he wanted from me wasn’t a litany of my own relatively minor problems. Then I worried that maybe he was spiraling again; maybe these were warning signs. Maybe he’d given me a chance to find a way to him and maybe I hadn’t done that, and he still felt like he couldn’t tell me anything, and maybe he was descending again. My breathing seemed too loud in the car, and I tried to quiet it, to pull oxygen all the way into my lungs.
I’d wondered which way he would take us. None of the routes that made the most sense would involve the Golden Gate Bridge, but I wondered if bridges in general did anything to him now. They did to me—the thought of being on one made me feel sick. But he got onto 237, which meant we’d go around under the Bay, instead.
We hit traffic on 880 going there, and by the time we got onto 880 we’d been driving nearly twenty minutes in silence. I couldn’t think of the right thing to say. It had been a long time since I’d been to the East Bay, and I hadn’t realized how stressful the freeway would be—narrow lanes, cars flying past what felt like inches from you. I tightened my grip on the armrest. I tried to think of something interesting to talk about, something that would engage him—or should I press for more details? Should I say it was clear he was unhappy and demand the reasons why?—but anything I rehearsed in my mind sounded trivial and forced. Passing through Oakland, he finally said, “I’ll take a muffin now.” I handed him one.
“I got batter all over the kitchen this morning,” I said, trying to sound light, and he said, “Ah.”
“Do you want another one? There’s plenty.”
“I’m good.”
“Do you want some water or anything?”
“I’m fine.”
It was close to eleven by the time we arrived. I was worried it would be difficult to find parking, but the lot we pulled into was mostly empty. Jason spent a long time examining the signs.
“I think it’s okay,” I said gently. “It’s a Saturday.”
“You don’t think the permit matters?”
“I think it’s only on weekdays.”
He locked the car, but I could tell he didn’t quite believe me. But that was good, right? If he was worried about getting a ticket later, it meant he was planning to be around for it. I said, impulsively, “I’ll pay the fine if you get one.”
He waved it off. He glanced around the parking lot. It was nestled in a cluster of buildings I didn’t recognize, probably lecture halls. “So what’d you want to do here?”
“Just walk around, I guess.”
“Like, all day?”
“I just thought it would be nice to see it.” I had imagined us strolling through campus hand in hand, making a shared map for what our future together would look like. We could go by the music library, maybe, or the music hall, or depending on how far we were willing to walk there was the Greek Theatre and the botanical garden where my parents had had their wedding reception. But maybe I should’ve booked a tour, or consulted a map and made a plan. “Is there anything you wanted to see?”
“Not really.”
I swallowed. I tried to keep my expression pleasant. “We could go see the Campanile.”
“All right.” He stood there and didn’t make a move in any direction.
“Or maybe we could get something to eat first.”
“Your call.”
“Um—” I should’ve planned this better. “Maybe we can walk and see the Campanile on the way and then see if there’s coffee, or maybe if you wanted brunch or something—”
“All right.”
The campus wasn’t familiar to me in its particulars—I didn’t know where I was going. I’d thought it would be easy enough to find the Campanile, but I couldn’t see it from where we were. I started walking, hoping fervently it would be the right way.
“It’ll be so different next year,” I said. “I think it’ll be good, though, don’t you? I can see us being really happy here.”
“You said your parents went here?”
I nodded. “Maybe it was different back then, though.”
“Sometimes I wonder if it’ll be like a mini Congress Springs,” he said. “How many people from school went here last year—like, thirty?”
Was that supposed to be a good or bad thing? “Well, they’d get diluted. You probably wouldn’t notice as much since there are thousands of other people here.”
“Maybe.”
“Is that—I mean, you still want to go here, right? It’s what you want?”
“Probably it’s the same as any other place.” He wasn’t really looking around as he walked, not taking everything in. “I guess I don’t really care where I end up that much.”
“Um—” I heard my voice rise in pitch. “You’re not—you don’t mean you really don’t care, right? Like you’re still—”
I could tell from his expression he understood what I was asking.
“Beth, you don’t need to panic about every small thing,” he said, a little irritably.
“I’m not panicking, I’m just—”
“I just mean I’ll get used to wherever I end up. People always do.” Then he added, “You know what I hate? Everyone is so nervous around me all the time.”
I didn’t know how to defend myself against that. I felt my face going hot. “Everyone cares about you, Jason, that’s why.”
“Right, I get that, it’s just—”
“It’s just what?”
“Nothing.”
“No, what?”
He sighed. “Forget it.”
“You can tell me if—”
“I just want everyone to go back to normal.”
I had to stop my voice from shaking. Did he not see how hard everyone was trying to give him that? And things had been normal, hadn’t they? Sometimes, like at the park, they’d even been better than normal. “That’s what we’re trying to do.”
“Okay, great. Let’s do that, then. Just—back to normal.”
We walked in a brittle silence. Would it be different at Juilliard instead? I pictured us shielded by all the skyscrapers instead of Berkeley’s loose, open sky, a crush of people and motion and color and noise. Maybe it would be better; maybe it would shift whatever being here with me was doing to him. When finally I stopped to ask someone for directions to the Campanile esplanade and we found it, the stately clock tower rising above us, Jason barely glanced at it.
“My dad used to always take me to see this,” I said.
He forced a smile. “Ah.”
“When I was little, I thought it would be terrifying to go inside it because it was so tall.”
“Heh.”
“Um—do you want coffee or lunch or something? We could do a late brunch.”
“Whatever you want.”
It wasn’t fair to feel frustrated or resentful or angry. I took a deep breath. “Let’s eat something, then. I’ll look on Yelp.”
My palms were sweating when I took my phone from my bag. I wished I knew what to do or say to break the mood, but any possible words were forming a frantic jumble inside my mind. It was because I wanted so badly to reach for the right ones, for there to be some magic combination that would smooth things over, and it made me flail around, made everything slippery. It was like the recurring nightmare where I was onstage and had no sheet music and didn’t know the piece the orchestra around me was playing.
Maybe I shouldn’t have suggested coming. How much time, really, did he need to spend alone with me? It would’ve been better with the rest of our friends here.
“This cafe is supposed to have really good pastries,” I said, holding out my phone to show him. “And they have brunch things too.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll call my sister and see if she wants to eat with us.” He glanced at me. “That all right?”
His sister. Why hadn’t this occurred to me? Of course if he was here, where Evelyn was living, it would make sense for him to try to see her.
“Great!” I said, as brightly as I could manage, although as soon as he’d said it my stomach had plummeted. “Does she know you’re coming?”
He shook his head as he held his phone to his ear. It was so last-minute, I told myself, and maybe she’d be busy. Maybe she wouldn’t pick up the call.
After the hospital, I wondered if she felt differently about me now—after all, I’d tried to warn her about Jason—but it was possible that the opposite was true, that she blamed me for not doing more. I still didn’t know whether she’d said anything to Jason about the time I’d called her. If she had, I thought Jason would’ve somehow let me know he knew, but it also seemed unlikely she wouldn’t tell him; her loyalty in the situation, obviously, wasn’t to me.
“Hey, Jie Jie. I’m in Berkeley. What are you doing?” There was a pause. “No, I’m with Beth. No, we just came for the day. You want to go eat something?” Another pause. “I don’t know, now? I’ll text you the place Beth picked.”
He slid his phone back into his pocket. “She said she’ll meet us.”
“Great,” I lied. “We can go somewhere else if she wants, too. It doesn’t have to be that place.”
“I’m sure it’s fine.”
The cafe was six or seven blocks away, which stretched long in the glare of the sunlight and in the silence, and when we got there the door was locked and the chairs stacked on the tables. All the lights were off.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I felt sick. “I didn’t realize it wasn’t open on Saturdays. I thought—”
Jason said, a little impatiently, “It’s fine, Beth. We’ll just go somewhere else.”
“I’ll try to find—”
“That place right next door is open. I’ll text Evelyn. Let’s just eat there.”
It was some kind of ostensibly Indian fusion buffet, decorated with the brightly colored tapestries half the stores here seemed to be selling when we’d walked by. We stood silently in the entrance while we waited for Evelyn, and as we stood there I wondered if I should offer to leave. Maybe she’d rather just see Jason alone.
She came in a few minutes later, wearing leggings and a Berkeley sweatshirt, her hair piled in a messy bun on top of her head. She wasn’t wearing makeup or jewelry, but somehow she looked put together in a way I envied.
“Really, this place?” she said, giving Jason a quick, businesslike hug. “If you wanted Indian food, there’s a ton of good places. This is like, a place for white people.”
“Eh, it looks fine,” he said. “Let’s just stay.”
Something in Jason had relaxed when he saw her—I’d seen it as soon as she walked in, and immediately seen the way I was outside of it, too, how I hadn’t done the same for him this morning or at any point in the day.
We followed a waitress, a white girl with elaborate piercings who looked like she was probably in college, to a table to get plates for the buffet. I was starving—I’d skipped the muffins in the car, although I’d eaten two before Jason came to pick me up—but I didn’t want to pile my plate in front of them, so I took a small amount of each thing. The naan, inexplicably, was bright pink. (A label said it was made with beets.) Also, Evelyn had been right—everyone else in here was white.
“It’s honestly kind of depressing me that this place meets your standards,” Evelyn said to Jason as we sat down. He grinned. She hung her purse strap on the back of her chair and added, “You should’ve told me you were coming. I was supposed to meet up with people.”
“Who?”
“Just some friends.”
“You should’ve brought them. On the plus side,” he said—there was a lightness in his voice; her grouchiness didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest—“you get to eat pink bread.”
“Where do you like to eat around here?” I said to her. I tried to make my tone casual, friendly. She hadn’t acknowledged me since coming in, and I wondered whether Jason had told her we were together.
“There’s a good brunch place down the street,” she said. Then, to Jason: “Remember that french toast we always got when we went on that cruise? It’s kind of like that, where they cover it in cornflakes.”
“Yeah?” He reached out and speared a piece of tofu tikka masala from her plate, then leaned back to balance his chair on its two back legs. “You go there a lot?”
“Jason, it’s literally a buffet. You don’t have to eat my food. No, I don’t go that often.”
“What a waste. Also,” he said, snagging another bite of her tofu and dodging his hand away when she tried to swat it, “this is actually pretty good.”
“Ugh, don’t say that. This place is kind of—” She glanced at me, then said something in Mandarin. “Don’t you think?”
“Beth doesn’t speak.”
Evelyn raised her eyebrows at me in disapproval. “At all?”
I felt my cheeks flush. “Not really.”
“Huh,” she said, sitting back and appraising me for several seconds, long enough for the flush to spread through my face, down my neck and chest. Finally, I said, brightly as I could, “So, um, what are you majoring in at Berkeley?”
“Microbio. And Asian American Studies. Double major.” She turned back to Jason. “This place kind of reminds me of that one place Mom used to always make us go to at the mall—you remember that?”
“Oh, where she thought they had the really nice bathrooms?”
“She was so weird about those bathrooms.”
I smiled tightly, locked outside the conversation. I picked at some rice and tikka masala, and it was hard to swallow. They talked more about the food, and then about other foods it reminded them of (half the time it was Taiwanese dishes I didn’t recognize, at least by name, and every time that happened I felt flooded with shame) or the places it made them think of. The language of siblings—I didn’t speak that, and even if I had, I wouldn’t speak theirs. A couple of times, Jason tried to pull me into the conversation, but that was worse, somehow.
“You guys want more?” Jason said, standing up. “I’m going to get another plate.”
“Yes, sign me up, please,” Evelyn said. “Get me like eighty pieces of their pink tortilla things. See if I can get like a whole plate load to go.”
He laughed. “I’ll get you the recipe so you can make it yourself.”
I went with him, only so I wouldn’t be sitting there alone with her. He didn’t say anything to me as we were going through the line. When we sat back down, Evelyn was typing something on her phone, and Jason reached over to tilt the screen toward himself.
“I knew it,” he said. “You’re heartless, Jie Jie.” To me, he said, “Evelyn takes a sick pleasure in leaving bad Yelp reviews. Every time we go on a trip, she insists on reviewing everything. Even in places where no one’s ever heard of Yelp.”
“Well, people traveling there will use Yelp.”
“They won’t,” Jason said. “Your reviews just languish on the internet, lonely and—”
“Someone has to do it,” Evelyn said. “Like the time we went to Italy and they would only eat the shitty Chinese food? I’m just doing my part to save other people who got trapped on those trips with their parents.”
They meant Mr. and Mrs. Tsou; I understood that much of their shorthand. Jason had told us that story too: how his family had gone with a Taiwanese tour group and he and Evelyn had had to sneak away to get pizza and gelato and pasta. I remembered how he’d been charmed by the fact that dumplings of all kinds were called ravioli in Chinese restaurants all over Italy.
It was disorienting to sit here and hear these glimpses of their family life as if everything between them was ordinary and fine. As if you could be that person who went on tours abroad with your wife and kids, who eschewed the local cuisine in ways that your kids poked fun at later, and all the while be someone who’d done what Jason’s father had. I could understand where Brandon had been coming from when he’d wondered aloud how Jason’s dad had turned into this, whether the same could be true of ourselves someday. I hated Mr. Tsou, and probably I would always hate him, but still there was something a tiny bit wrenching about the image of him trying to have a good time in a foreign country, only wanting to eat the food he knew.
I wondered if he felt that whatever he’d gone through or left behind to be here had been worth it. Maybe he felt that this country had stripped him of the things that made him himself, that it had systematically taken and decimated parts of him he’d always needed.
It was different for me, obviously, but I felt it sometimes too—that lack of concrete belonging, for one thing, like how Brandon had said once he didn’t think he could ever marry a non-Asian and Jason had said casually he couldn’t either, and I wasn’t sure whether or not that would include me. But also I felt it in the things that living here had swallowed away from me, like how I always had to fudge my answers on those You Know You Grew Up In An East Asian Household If listicles so I didn’t score too low, or how I never knew whether to say they or we if I was talking about Asian people.
When I was younger, I’d asked my mother once why she’d never taught me Chinese—so many people I knew went to Saturday Chinese school, and even my father had wanted me to learn Mandarin—and she’d been dismissive. “Oh, Beth,” she’d said, “no one here speaks Cantonese. It’s not going to help you get ahead in life.” Getting ahead in life was never how she framed anything, and so maybe it was more about the way she’d say things like Chinese people as if it both did and didn’t include her, or how sometimes when we saw people flooding out of the Chinese tourist buses, she would step away from them, or murmur things like how loud they were. Or how she’d married someone who wasn’t Chinese—given herself a child who was only halfway what she was.
Maybe there was a way you could lose where you came from, or where you’d never come from, and in that lose part of yourself. It was always a lowkey background hum resonating through my life. I didn’t think it was quite like that for my friends, at least not in the same way, but I wondered that day if Mr. Tsou would say the same.
When we were done eating, the two of them fought over the bill, and at first I tried too, but Evelyn gave me a withering look, and I backed down, and I was embarrassed but also relieved. Eventually, between the two of them, Evelyn won. When we went back outside, the Berkeley sunlight bright even at that time of year, Evelyn glanced between me and Jason and then said, to him, “So what’s your deal? Are you guys, like, going out?”
He smiled, a little sheepishly and also in a way that felt distinctly little-brotherish to me. Evelyn raised her eyebrows. “Hm,” she said, studying me. I knew already I would replay that look, how it felt to have it trained on me, over and over for weeks. I regretted then not following my instincts and leaving so the two of them could have lunch together. I could see myself, could see the two of us, through Evelyn’s eyes: how superfluous I was, how deeply I was failing to live up to what Jason had offered me.
I had been so happy, but maybe I shouldn’t have trusted my own happiness. Maybe I should’ve known better. There were so many different ways to lose someone, and the deeper you went with them, the more there were.
I’d imagined us staying until evening—I’d been looking forward to seeing the sun set over the Campanile, maybe finding a romantic place to have dinner—but after we said goodbye to Evelyn and it was just the two of us, Jason said, his voice going flat again, “You ready to go?”
As soon as she’d left, that cloud had seemed to come back over him. In the car, everything I did—breathe, shift in my seat—seemed obscenely loud. I wondered if I should ask if he wanted to break up—if it would be better, somehow, if it seemed like it came from me. But what would happen if we did—would he still want to be friends like we had been? Or had I ruined that somehow too?
I wished I knew what I’d done. But maybe that was just it, maybe I hadn’t done anything—maybe it was just that no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t be enough.
It felt damning being in the car with him, as if being there was methodically dissecting all my failures. My stomach hurt. I was still hungry but also couldn’t quite imagine ever eating again. I pictured him at home that night, alone, replaying the day and trying to superimpose it over the future we were all supposed to share. It had been a mistake to come. I should’ve realized it would be pushing him too far. Now when he thought of Berkeley, and when he thought of me, he would think of today.
I was afraid to imagine my own night at home. There was nothing I could conceivably do, no activity I could engage in and no conversation I could have with anyone else, that would lift this feeling from me.
When we merged onto 880, Jason said, quietly, “I was just—I think I wasn’t in the mood to go out today.”
“No, that’s okay. I shouldn’t have suggested it.”
“It’s not your fault. Just—we’ll hang out another day, okay?”
That didn’t sound like the preamble to a breakup, did it? “Of course.”
I leaned my head against the window and blinked until everything flying past—the Bay, the overpasses—wasn’t blurry anymore.
That Monday at school Jason brought me a small, delicate bouquet of lavender roses. It was ungrateful, but immediately I found myself wishing it had been a plant or something that would last, that I could hang on to, and I took probably two dozen pictures of the roses at home that night and looked up how to dry them.
Maybe it was just that I’d thought somehow, with this now between us, it would be easier for me to anticipate him and what he needed. Maybe I thought everything would be safer or more secure, or that I would magically become different—that I would be enough for him, or at least a better version of myself. But that didn’t happen, and so often I felt that same chasm between us and didn’t know how to cross it. He had given me this incredible gift, and I was squandering it.
What did happen, though, was that Thursday he didn’t show up for school and didn’t respond to any of my messages, either. All morning, sitting through class, holding my phone on my lap, I was frantic.
“Maybe he just overslept,” Grace offered at brunch. “Or maybe he’s just sick.” She bit into her banana.
“Maybe,” I said. I was trying to peel an orange, and my hands were trembling. “But maybe—”
“You were so worried last time this happened, Beth, but then things were fine.”
Were they, though? Maybe that wasn’t true at all. Maybe by showing up that day I’d averted a possible crisis—it was impossible to know.
“Why don’t you call him?” Brandon said.
“Um—maybe you could?”
He raised his eyebrows. “What, you don’t want to?”
“Well—I’ve just been messaging him a lot already.”
Sunny looked like she might say something, but then she didn’t. “All right, I’ll call,” Brandon said, and glanced around for a teacher before pulling his phone from his pocket. He ducked his head while we waited.
“Oh, hey, Jay. Everything cool? Where are you?” He was quiet a moment. “Oh, good times. All right, see you soon.” When he pocketed his phone again, he said, “He had physical therapy.”
“I thought he had that in the afternoons.”
Brandon shrugged. “I guess it got moved.”
After Berkeley, it didn’t feel that simple for me—that I could just call and demand an answer, and trust that Jason would give one and not retreat into himself like he had that day. Sometimes I thought it would be so much easier to be a boy and be allowed to do things like that. Sunny was like that too, but people thought Sunny was uptight and sometimes kind of a bitch; they thought Brandon was laid-back. I said, “Do you think he was telling the truth?”
Brandon looked surprised. “You think he was lying about it?”
“I don’t know—probably not, but I just worry—”
“I don’t think he would’ve picked up if it was something really bad. Why bother?”
“Unless it was a cry for help.”
Grace folded her banana peel into a neat package. “Honestly, Beth—to me he’s seemed like he’s been fine.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He just seems like he’s fine.”
“Jason is still—I think he really isn’t doing well. Maybe at lunch we can—”
“Oh, at lunch I’m taking Chase to Quickly,” Grace said. “He’s never had boba. Like literally never even tried it. Can you believe that?”
“Nothing surprises me less,” Sunny said, and the way she jumped on the conversation—was she sick of talking about Jason? Did they think that was only my responsibility now? “Chase seems like he’d drink like, those Monster energy drinks.”
Grace laughed. “Okay, but—”
She kept talking, but all at once, out of nowhere I was flushed with a hot, dizzy tingling. My heart wobbled and slowed as though it were caught in a spiderweb. There were widening twin circles of blankness in my peripheral vision, and they ebbed forward, growing, as my mouth went dry and there was an alarming dropping feeling in my chest and a lightness in my head.
I clutched my chest. Everything around me was like the flare in a photograph, little gleaming circles, and nothing held. I’m going to die right here, I thought. Right here at brunch at school.
“Beth, you’re breathing weirdly,” Sunny said. Her voice sounded oddly rounded, elongated, like she was speaking in all vowels. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I managed. My throat was squeezing closed; I could barely get out the words. I tried to swallow, but all the muscles were stuck. When I looked down at my hands, they were shaking. They didn’t even look like mine.
She looked at me more closely. “Are you sure? You’re kind of pale.”
“I think—” I could barely get enough air to talk. I tried to force a smile. “I think I have food poisoning.”
“Oh, Beth,” Grace said sympathetically. “You should go home!”
They were all staring at me. Brandon reached out and gently took my wrist, then pressed two fingers against it to feel for a pulse. “Your heart is beating really fast.”
There were so many tests they hadn’t done at the ER, so many deadly things that could be lying in wait inside my own body. My father’s father had died suddenly of an aneurysm, and my mother’s father had had a heart attack in his forties, and maybe whatever it was that had gone wrong in my body, whatever it was that was so obvious right now to my friends, wasn’t survivable.
But I couldn’t bear to have them all see me like this. I had to get out of here.
“I’m fine,” I said quickly. The words felt garbled and breathless. “I’ll just—” I fumbled with my backpack.
“We’ll walk you to the office,” Grace said.
“No, no, I’m—”
But they were already gathering up their things, already in motion, and I felt myself leaving my body, zooming out to look at the four of us gathered there: Grace’s hand on my arm, Brandon slinging my backpack over his shoulder, Sunny clearing a path toward the office. And me with my hands pressed to my chest, hunched over because it felt like it used less oxygen somehow, giving myself away with each step, so exposed to them there with nowhere to hide.
We went back to the same hospital, although it was a different doctor this time, but he ran the same EKG, the same labs, and this time told my mother to take me to a therapist. By the time we were discharged and back in the parking lot, I didn’t feel like I was going to black out anymore, but I was dizzy and weak and scared, and could no longer trust my body. This wasn’t a one-off, and maybe it would keep happening, and who knew when. I had been in one of the safest places I knew, and that hadn’t protected me at all.
In the car, my mother looked tired and sad. “Did you want to get something to eat, Beth?” she said. “We could go anywhere you like.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine forcing food down my throat.
“Maybe ice cream? Or a drink of some kind?”
“I’d rather just go home.”
She put her hand gently against my face, and then removed it, quickly, before I could pull away. When we were on Foothill, she said, “Did you want to see a therapist? I’m sure insurance would cover—”
“No.”
“Maybe just to see. We could find someone you like.” She took her eyes off the road to look at me. “I can look for reviews online. Maybe it would be good to have someone you could talk to.”
I said nothing. We went past school. I wondered what my father would say if he knew about this, or what my friends would think of me if they’d seen me panicked and ridiculous in the hospital, the doctor coming in to inform us it was all in my head. After a while, my mother cleared her throat.
“Beth, I know how you feel,” she said. “During the divorce, I had the same thing happen to me. The first time I thought I was dying. I missed a meeting with the lawyers.”
Was that supposed to be comforting somehow? That this had happened to her, too, and she had gone on to survive to do what—settle into a quiet, empty house and life? Finish driving my father away except to demand money each month like I was a bill for him to pay?
“And my father,” she said, “had a panic attack once when I was in my teens. We rushed to the hospital because he’d already had a heart attack and we thought it was another one, but when they did all the tests—and they did even more tests than on you—they said, no, it was just stress. But they say there’s a genetic component.” She turned onto Stelling, then she added, “My mother blamed him. And for me, too, I felt like it was because I was weak, or there was something wrong, but I just want you to know it’s not anything wrong with you or—”
“Okay.”
“If you don’t want to see a therapist and you don’t want to talk to me, maybe you could talk to a priest. Or maybe there’s an adult at school—”
“Maybe,” I said, so she would stop suggesting it. “I’ll ask someone at school.”
“I think that would be a good idea, Beth. I think it might help. For me, it helped a great deal to talk to my priest.”
She always assumed I was so much like her. She felt, it seemed, that I was entirely hers. In the car with her there, so earnest and oblivious, I felt claustrophobic. For a second, I imagined telling her, My friend—my boyfriend now—wanted to die and I need to make sure he never wants to again, just for the satisfaction of the expression on her face when she realized how little she knew about me and my life after all. I wanted to shatter her illusion of sameness.
Except every time I wanted her to feel the weight of what her choices had done to me, the same thing always stopped me. When you live with someone, you’re the only one who knows so many truths about them, and so you become the keeper of those truths, even if you never asked for that. How they cried in the shower every night for weeks after the divorce when they thought you couldn’t hear, how they thought they had a promotion at work locked in and bought a bottle of sparkling cider to share with you in advance and then the promotion went instead to a younger man who’d just started at the job. How they would display holiday cards from the dentist’s office along with the other cards, how terrified they were of moths and spiders, how much pleasure they took in strawberry ice cream, how they’d once started making online dating profiles and then stopped halfway through. How carefully they tried to hide the Christmas and birthday gifts they bought you months in advance. How, like now, whenever she drove, even on quiet roads, she gripped the steering wheel in both hands and let her eyes flicker constantly to my seat belt, checking, I knew, to make sure I was safe.
In the group chat, Sunny asked for updates on how I was, and I said I was fine, that it had been food poisoning after all, and if they didn’t believe me they didn’t press it. I could get away with it this once, I knew, as long as it never happened in front of them again. And if it did, maybe everything would be like it had been today about Jason: Brandon calling in a perfunctory way, duty done; Sunny skeptical, Grace making behind-the-scenes plans with Chase. They would lose interest or get tired or find me too much of a burden.
Jason was quiet all night on the group chat, and he didn’t reach out to ask if I was all right. Maybe I expected too much, and I was too demanding, but waiting to see if he would and wondering why he didn’t was unbearable. I was beyond exhausted with myself.
But I could wait a night. Jason and I were together; that was everything I’d ever wanted. So why did it feel like this?