I WAS doing a timed practice bio SAT II one evening, a few days after my second trip to the ER, when Jason called. I was in my room, the test spread out on my desk with all the pictures of my friends I kept framed and Brandon’s dinosaurs we’d never put in his locker this year, and I was profoundly unmotivated; every few minutes, I kept getting bored and going back to the daily crossword I had open on my laptop. When he called, I stopped the test timer and answered.
“Hey,” he said. “Did you get invited back to audition?”
Immediately, my palms went damp. I’d still been checking my email reflexively—it probably wasn’t an exaggeration to say a hundred times a day—but was it possible I’d missed it? “You mean at Juilliard? Wait—did the email come? Did you get invited back?”
“I did, yeah.”
From the way he said it, I couldn’t tell what he thought about it. “Jason, that’s amazing. I mean, I’m not surprised, but still, that’s huge.”
“When was the last time you looked? I would assume they’d all come out at the same time, right?”
“It’s been like an hour. I’ll look.” I didn’t want to, in a way, because for as long as I didn’t, anything was still possible. My hands were shaking as I opened my email. And there it was: Dear Beth, we are pleased to inform you…
I was stunned. I wished there were a way to pin the email to my body like a badge, like a proof of worth. I was still staring at it when Jason said, “Nothing yet?”
“No, it came. I, um, I got invited back too.”
He made a sound that was half-laugh, half-whoop. “I knew it!” he crowed. “I knew you would.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“What are you doing right now? I feel like we should, like—celebrate somehow.”
“Are you going to go audition?” I said. My heart was pounding. What if this was possible after all?
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead. Let’s go do something. Something, like—fun.”
It was so out of character for him to say something like that. I said, “Like what?”
“We’ll think of something. You free now? I’ll come get you.”
We drove up into the hills, to a cul-de-sac with four or five enormous estates set out on a plateau. (I don’t know if it’s what he meant by fun, but Congress Springs was quiet, and neither of us could think of anything else.) When he stopped the car, I took a deep breath to fill my lungs with air just to make sure I still could, which I’d been doing lately whenever any kind of tightness started in my chest. Besides still avoiding the science wing bathrooms, I’d been developing other habits to try to ward off another panic attack too—when it had happened at brunch, I’d been in the middle of peeling an orange, so I’d stopped eating oranges; in classrooms or in cars or just in situations when being trapped was more a function of social pressure, I always calculated how quickly I could escape.
It was quiet up here and more wilderness than not, and if I hadn’t been with him I might’ve been scared, I think. When we closed the car doors behind us, it felt so loud I was worried someone would emerge from the mansions to yell at us. We walked to the edge of the cul-de-sac, and he spread out his jacket for us to sit on, even though I would’ve been fine sitting on the asphalt. There was a sound in the brush below us, and I jumped. Jason smiled and rested his hand on my knee.
“Just a squirrel or something,” he said. “Don’t stress.”
“It sounded bigger.”
“They sound bigger out here because they rustle the leaves, and the leaves are loud.”
“I guess.” Then I added, “That’s kind of what being in an orchestra always felt like to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like—no one would ever guess from the sound that it’s just you in there.”
From the way he smiled, I think he understood. I ventured, “You seem really excited.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Sure. I just—I guess I just don’t understand why you aren’t sure if you’ll audition if you’re so excited about it.”
“Yeah, well—” He pulled his knees in against his chest. “It’s—complicated.”
“Complicated how?”
He looked out at the horizon. From where we were parked, we could see the whole South Bay all spread out below us, twinkling in the dark, our homes and our other friends somewhere down there below. For a little while, I thought he wouldn’t answer me, but then he said, “You still didn’t tell anyone, right?”
“No, I haven’t told anyone.”
“I guess I just want to keep it that way.”
I suppose I wanted that too. All the same, though, I wondered: Didn’t he trust our friends? The rest of us hadn’t told him about Berkeley yet, and that was the thing that felt like the strongest proof of devotion—I always wanted us to tell him, but it never seemed quite like the right time—but couldn’t he feel, nevertheless, the constant steady force of care and concern surrounding him?
Maybe he couldn’t, though. Maybe that was the thing.
“What if we went?” I blurted out. “What if we went together?”
He raised his eyebrows, looking, if anything, amused. “To New York?”
“I know it sounds kind of out there, but—I think we could figure out the logistics. I think we’d regret it if we never went. Just to see what happens.”
“Sounds like a big trip.”
“It could be just overnight. Do you think—” I hesitated. “Do you think your parents would let you? Or do you think—I don’t know, do you think there’s a way they wouldn’t have to know? We could say we were pulling an all-nighter at someone’s house to study or something. And if we did a red-eye—I mean, if it’s not on anyone’s radar at all because no one even knows we applied, I doubt it would even occur to anyone enough to be suspicious that we just randomly went to New York.”
I thought he’d refuse right away—it was absurd, what I was proposing—but he drummed his fingers thoughtfully against the ground, considering. Overhead, something flew by us, an owl maybe. “It just feels—I don’t know. It feels kind of pointless.”
“Because you still wouldn’t go if you got in?”
“Among other things.”
“It might be worth it just to see, though, don’t you think? Then you don’t always have to wonder what if.”
“You know what?” he said suddenly. “Sure, fuck it, let’s do it.”
I was more than a little surprised. In fact, I thought at first he was joking. “Really?”
“Yeah, why not?” He flipped his hand over so he could intertwine his fingers with mine. His hand was warm and soft, and I looked at our embrace there in the near-dark and wished I could take a picture of our hands that way. “We’ll do it together.”
Later that night, though, I worried it was a drastic mistake, especially to go without telling our friends. Getting on a plane and flying across the country by ourselves was a huge and even alarming prospect—if anything happened, no one would know where we were—and it made me wonder at the possibility that my friends were keeping such big secrets from me.
But the point of us staying together was to be there for Jason, and so even if I didn’t tell them yet, maybe I was honoring our vow in spirit, if not exactly in name. Surely if they knew they’d tell me to do it. If Jason went to New York—we could all go there with him too, as easily as Berkeley. I could find a community college if I didn’t get into Juilliard, which surely I wouldn’t, and then transfer somewhere close by. And my friends had applied all over to appease their parents—Sunny and Grace, I remembered, had applied to NYU, and Sunny and Brandon had both applied to Columbia, and Grace had applied to Barnard, too.
That week he and I both got our audition confirmations from Juilliard. We’d gotten the date we requested, both of us on the first Wednesday in March, and after messaging back and forth about logistics, and then deleting those messages from our phones just in case, we booked round-trip flights to New York.
I used my credit card for mine. It still had the balance from the limo plus whatever interest was accruing (I’d deleted another email saying I had a new statement; I knew the interest was probably staggering by now, but I couldn’t bring myself to look). It seemed like so much money—it was so much money—and I’d promised myself I wouldn’t use the card again. But if my balance were really dire, I reasoned, like if it were over my limit, the purchase wouldn’t have gone through. I would get a job over the summer to pay everything off. And the alternative, not going, didn’t seem like a real option.
I didn’t want to explain the whole thing to my mother because I knew she would say no, or—more likely—she’d insist on coming. At school I nodded along when people complained about the pressure of having Asian parents, but really I knew my mother would probably be thrilled if I wanted to study violin. When the date came near, I would tell her I had to pull an all-nighter at Sunny’s for a video project—I would text her while she was still at work and say I’d already come home to get my toothbrush and pajamas, and she would be upset, probably, especially the next night, when I still wasn’t back, but there would be nothing she could do because I would already be gone.
I thought that since he would be auditioning, Jason would obviously come back to BAYS now. I was so sure he would, in fact, that I didn’t agonize over whether or not to ask him. When he left after school that Monday I was shocked, but then maybe he’d already had a physical therapy appointment or something he couldn’t reschedule—but then Wednesday he didn’t come back either, or the Friday after, nor did he ever bring it up.
But—somehow, despite everything—I was playing again. I was hearing the pieces in my mind, and specific sections to work through were rising up with possibility. And that crackling noise that had been blaring through me every time I tried to play—that had quieted, or at least now there was more of everything else I could use to push that to the background.
It would take a while to find my way back, I knew. I was badly out of practice now, and I would be behind compared to other applicants who’d been working steadily all along. But this was a gift, because it had given me a purpose once more. The music wouldn’t just be indulgent, it wouldn’t just be something for me that I could lose myself in—it would be for Jason, too, to keep him safe.
The week before Valentine’s Day, when I was doing homework at Grace’s house with her and Sunny, Jason forwarded me a confirmation for the hotel room he’d booked us in New York. Sunny happened to glance up at the moment I saw the email, and she said, “Are you okay?”
“Oh—yeah.” I closed my email quickly. I’d told Jason I’d split it with him, and he’d said not to worry about it, and immediately I’d wondered whether he would want or expect to have sex there.
I didn’t feel ready. I wished I could talk about it with Sunny and Grace. The act of it felt a little terrifying, and altogether from a separate universe than I could imagine myself inhabiting; I had loved kissing him and holding hands, and possibly I would be content forever with just those things. But I would do whatever he wanted. All the ways you were supposed to guard and fuss over how you looked as a girl, all the things you were supposed to do and be—all of it, I knew, was in service of making sure you were attractive when it mattered, and it wasn’t like the rest of you would somehow be enough to make up for taking sex off the table.
But then it was hard to say what Jason wanted. Sometimes I wondered if maybe I was entirely off base to worry about sex at all—it would be horrifying if he actually wasn’t physically attracted to me after all and he thought I was the one oozing with desire. I imagined him repulsed by the things he might think I wanted, or by the fact of my wanting anything. I had googled different primers on what to do, my door locked in case my mother came home and barged in, and mostly, it seemed like it was important to make sure he believed I was enjoying myself whether I actually was or not.
I was veering between excited and petrified about the trip, and about the audition itself. The average acceptance rate at Juilliard had hovered around five percent the year before, and violin was more competitive than some of its other programs. Even at my sharpest, I doubted I had a chance, but since I’d been given one—since we both had—I wanted to do everything I could to take it.
But if Jason still thought he wouldn’t go anyway, was he even practicing at home? And if so, why would he do that, cloistered away from us? I wanted him back at BAYS. It was empty without him there.
At lunch the next day, he met me at my locker as I was trying to squeeze three textbooks in next to my violin. He smiled when he saw me, and I wondered if seeing him light up at the sight of me that way could ever dull its sense of magic.
It was noisy with the beginning of lunch rush and when I asked him, impulsively, whether he was going to rehearsal today, he put his hand gently on my lower back and ducked his head down to mine to hear. “What’s that?”
Maybe that was a chance for me to change the subject, and maybe I should’ve taken it. Instead, I said, “Oh—I was just wondering if you were coming to rehearsal today.”
“Probably not today.”
“Next week we’re starting rehearsals for the spring show.”
“Ah,” he said mildly.
“We’re just doing four pieces this time. There’s this one section of the Haydn, though, that I keep tripping over.”
“Ah,” he said again.
“It’s—it’s really different without you there.”
“Mm,” he said. “Did you bring lunch today? I think I’ll probably buy something. You want anything?”
“I’m good. I’ll go with you, though.”
“You don’t have to.”
“No, it’s okay.” I shut my locker. As we made our way to the line, I said, “I think you could catch up really quickly, if that’s what you’re worried about. But maybe it makes sense to just focus on the Juilliard audition pieces at home for a while, if that’s what you’re doing instead.”
“You like the pieces you guys are doing?”
What I didn’t like was how he said you guys. “I think you would too.”
“Yeah?” We got into line, and he peered at the menu. “Have you ever had the chimichangas here?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You think they’re anything like those taco pockets they used to have in middle school?”
“I bet it would help with the Juilliard audition too,” I said. “So—have you been practicing at home? Or—?”
“Not yet.”
“Do you think you will soon?”
His voice was clipped. “I don’t know.”
The line shuffled forward. I said, “I think it’s made a difference for me. Having the audition, I mean—I don’t dread playing like I used to.”
“Good.”
If he hadn’t started practicing again yet—how long had it been, then, since he’d even picked up his violin? Over a month? Our audition was less than four weeks away, and he’d stopped using his sling, but surely injuring your arm like that would affect your playing. Was he worried that he’d somehow fail? I could see that stopping him, perhaps—that he’d be unable to accept that sort of imperfection in what had always come so easily to him.
We were at the front of the line now, and Jason ordered what he always did when he bought lunch at school, Cup Noodles and a packet of baby carrots. I said, “If you still wanted to practice together, I’m free anytime. I could do today if you wanted, or—”
“Can you just drop it, Beth?”
He was nearly yelling. His voice reverberated off the food service window, closing in on me from all sides. Around us, a few underclassmen turned to stare, and a sphere of quiet enveloped us. I was stunned.
My throat felt like it was going to close. “I didn’t—I didn’t mean—”
He dropped his voice back down to its normal volume and turned back to pay. “I just don’t see why you keep pushing this when it really doesn’t matter. Okay? Just let it go.”
It was my fault. In all the years I’d known Jason we’d never come anywhere close to a fight, and he’d never remotely raised his voice to me. The only time I’d heard him raise his voice, ever, had been to Sunny on Brandon’s birthday.
All the rest of the day I felt sick. He’d paid for his food and then we’d gone to meet the others at lunch, and he didn’t say anything to them about what had happened. But really, nothing had happened, and in fact he was normal with me after that, and I started to wonder if maybe I was overreacting. He seemed to have moved on, to have forgiven my insensitivity, and so maybe I was the only one who spent the rest of the day and night dissecting the moment again and again. After all, it wasn’t like Jason had said anything insulting, or cruel, or unkind; it had just been his tone, and maybe it was only because I had devoted so many years of my life to the altar of sound—because I wanted to find meaning in every noise—that it had felt so much to me like violence.
I wouldn’t have brought it up in case it seemed clichéd or needy, but I hoped that Jason would be into Valentine’s Day. He had bigger things to worry about, though, obviously, so I tried not to get my hopes up. I made him oatmeal cookies.
In the morning, he and Brandon were talking near the cafeteria when I got to school, and when I said hi, he didn’t say anything about the holiday. I wondered if the cookies would make him feel guilty—if they’d seem pointed. When the bell rang and we headed toward first period together, he said, “So is it embarrassing to be into Valentine’s Day now? Like super capitalist or basic or something?”
“Oh,” I said. I wouldn’t give him the cookies, then. I tried to keep my voice light. “Is it? Yeah, I guess, maybe so.”
Outside the classroom door he touched my wrist to stop me. “Okay, well, pretend you aren’t judging me.” He slid his backpack around to the front and rummaged through it, then handed me a little muslin pouch. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
Inside was a necklace, a delicate gold chain with a small, gold-wrapped rectangular pendant that I thought at first was some kind of glossy, burnished stone, but when I looked more closely it was something else.
“It’s oak wood,” he said. “I had it made from a branch I got at the park that day we went.”
My cookies suddenly seemed inadequate. When I gave them to him, though, he made a big deal of saying how great they looked.
Sunny noticed the necklace right away when she met me at my locker at brunch. “Is that new?” she said, lifting it up to inspect. “It’s really pretty.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I don’t know why I didn’t tell her it was from Jason. Maybe it felt like bragging, like I’d be tempting fate.
Maybe that was why, around then, I began to worry that a shift was happening with my friends—I was worried, specifically, that Sunny and Brandon and Grace’s concern for Jason was waning or that we were drifting apart.
The times we’d gone to Jason’s house, the time we’d gone to the hospital—that history was going to live with us forever. But Grace was still seeing Chase—a lot, actually—and aside from Brandon teasing her now and then, we mostly weren’t talking about it. Before, whenever Sunny or Grace was into someone, it had felt almost like a group project for the three of us: an endless stream of discussion, an exhaustive dissection of virtually any interaction between them and whoever the other person was. But Grace almost never brought Chase up. And that in itself—that weird shift in dynamics—was something I’d usually talk about with Sunny, but this time I didn’t because I wasn’t sure what she would say. Maybe she and Grace were talking about Chase, and I was being left out. Or maybe none of it bothered Sunny at all, and if that was true, maybe I didn’t want to know that.
So when we were together, there was so much we couldn’t talk about. We couldn’t talk about Chase, and we couldn’t talk about what Jason had been through, and we couldn’t talk about New York or Juilliard or the plan for us to all go to Berkeley. For the first time with them things weren’t as easy as they’d always been.
Grace and I got to school at the same time the Friday after Valentine’s Day, and before the bell I went with her to get hot chocolate from the food cart one of the service clubs had in the mornings to raise money for a climate action fund. Aanika Shah, the junior class president, cheerfully handed us a flyer about the fund and spritzed canned whipped cream into our cups. I burned my tongue a little when I took a sip.
“Chase got me into drinking hot chocolate again,” Grace said as we made our way back to the lockers. “I forgot how good it is.”
“Did he not like the boba?”
“He said the pearls reminded him of boogers.”
I made myself laugh. “So—what’s going on with you two, exactly?”
She flung her head back and squeezed her eyes shut. It was the way she acted in public with guys who were flirting with her—performative, kind of; dramatic—and it bothered me; it was more practiced than we ever were with each other. “Oh my gosh, Beth, that is seriously the question. I have no idea! He’s so sweet, and I have so much fun with him, but I don’t know if anything will ever happen.”
I wanted good things for her, wanted her to be cherished and seen, but I have so much fun with him seemed, to me, resoundingly uncompelling. “Like you mean officially get together or anything? How come?”
“Oh, you know. I think he didn’t want to do any kind of relationship senior year, and I’m still figuring out if that’s what I want. Because probably we’d break up over the summer and that would be really sad. But then every now and then I’m like, wait, what if we didn’t break up over the summer? Every time I bring that up, he kind of freaks out.” She laughed. “I think also because I told him I’m not a low-maintenance girlfriend. Like, I would definitely want the flowers and the good-night phone calls every night.”
If you had to think so hard about whether or not you wanted to be with someone, what was the point? I said, “Oh.”
She finished her hot chocolate and tossed the cup into a trash can we passed by, then linked her arm through mine. “So what’s it like dating Jason? You’re both, like, so private.”
It wasn’t like I’d been refusing to tell her; we just hadn’t talked. “It’s good, mostly.”
“We need to have a girls’ sleepover or something to catch up. Is he really different with you?”
Not in the way she meant, probably. “Sometimes a little.” Talking with her like this—it felt stilted, yes, but also I’d been missing her, and in some ways it would be a relief to tell her what it was really like most of the time with him, how gripped with fear I still was so often, how distant he so frequently seemed, how inadequate I felt. It was different talking about him now—before, he’d belonged to all of us equally, the way we’d all belonged to one another, but now there was more room for me to betray him.
We were in front of my locker, and Grace stopped walking. “You seem—I don’t know. Are you happy?”
“Am I happy?” I repeated. It struck me as a bizarrely incongruous question: Jason had nearly died, and my happiness felt like the least important thing to focus on. And anyway, of all the things a relationship could be, happy felt a little cheap. Once I’d overheard my mother tell someone on the phone that, yes, she was happier after the divorce. “Yes.”
Something in her expression changed. I said, “What?”
“What do you mean what?”
“I mean why do you look like that?”
“Nothing.”
“No, what?”
She dropped her arm and pulled her hair back from her face with her pinkies and sighed a little. “I just think—it seems like you’re kind of stressed out all the time, and sometimes it seems like you’re still really worried about him.”
I blinked at her. “Of… course I am?”
“But do you think that’s—I mean, he seems like he’s doing pretty well.”
“I know, you said that earlier, but I guess I’m not sure why you think that.”
“I hung out with him after school Tuesday,” she said, which I hadn’t known, and which gave me that trapdoor feeling in my stomach like the dip on a roller coaster. I said, “What did you guys do?”
“We just got boba.”
“He invited you, or—?”
“I don’t remember. We were just messaging, and I haven’t seen him just by himself for a while, so I thought it would be a good time for, like, a heart-to-heart. Anyway, honestly, he seemed fine.”
You got boba, I thought, and you had a heart-to-heart. “What did you talk about?”
“I don’t know, a lot of things. Probably nothing you haven’t heard. He was joking about the appointments he has to go to, like he said sometimes it’s tempting to just make up crazy dreams for the therapist to see if he’ll, like, super overanalyze them.” She laughed. “I told him he should. Oh, and then we talked about if he’ll come back to BAYS.”
Felix Ni opened her locker, next to mine, and Grace and I moved over to give her room. I lowered my voice. “What did he say about BAYS?”
“He just said he didn’t know if he wanted to yet. And I asked him about you, but he wouldn’t say that much. It was kind of cute—like, he wanted to be a gentleman about it or something. And we talked some about Chase, because unlike Jason I have no filter. But really, Beth, he sounded good.”
“But that’s—”
“And you’ve been so down ever since it happened. I’ve been kind of worried about you! He’s okay, and the doctors said he’s going to be fine, so…”
“But—” That was how it was supposed to feel; how was I supposed to eat and sleep normally, like everything was fine? I waited until Felix had closed her locker and gone back out toward the rally court. The hallway felt dark and close. “Do you just not think about it because he’s back now? Because that’s—”
“Of course I think about it sometimes, but then what does that actually do? It’s not like I sit there in class and don’t pay attention because I’m just thinking about it. And also, I mean—aren’t you relieved? It could have been so much worse, but it wasn’t. I’m just so glad he’s okay.”
“But he’s not really okay, Grace. It’s not like it just happened and it’s over because he lived.”
“But—it is like that,” she said. “That’s what he wanted us to do. And I just don’t think it’s good for anyone to keep focusing on the past so much. He made a mistake, but now he gets another chance, and I just think we should all look forward. It’s like that quote: ‘Everything will be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.’ ”
I felt a yawning canyon open up between us. “I’m not like that,” I said. “I can’t just let go of things and assume everything’s going to be fine no matter what.”
She smiled, and then she surprised me—she gave me a hug, and held on tightly.
“I know,” she said, finally releasing me when the first bell rang. “I know you aren’t. You should try it sometime, though, Beth. Just trust that everything will be okay.”
I’d always wished I were more like my friends, and frequently wished I were someone other than myself. Because I was envious, because I was insecure, because there were always so many things that seemed effortless to them that never were to me, because Grace was someone with whom Jason could randomly get boba and talk easily about the things I couldn’t even bring up with him—there were many reasons why.
But that was the first time I was glad I wasn’t Grace, and glad that I wasn’t like her. Because there was something so cavalier in how willing she was to brush off what had happened, something that seemed a stab of disloyalty to me.
I would be better than that. I would carry it all with me, all that fear and pain. I would take it on as my own.