TO GET TO the Golden Gate Bridge from Congress Springs if you don’t have a car takes nearly four hours if you’re relying on public transit, and when I looked up the route on Google Maps it was so convoluted, with so many stops, I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it. Surely I would have a panic attack somewhere along the way and I would be alone and there would be no one I could call.
If I didn’t have the credit card, that probably would have been enough to stop me, but as it was I just got my own Uber account and walked to a corner a few blocks away from our home to be picked up. It was a Tuesday morning, and I was supposed to be in school, but in a few hours maybe that wouldn’t matter.
The driver, whose name according to the app was Paul, was a white tech-looking guy (North Face fleece, fitted jeans) who was probably in his twenties. I got in, and the articles my mom always forwarded me or that you’d see girls sharing online flashed through my mind—confirm the license plate, check for child locks, trust your instincts. But what good were my instincts? The people I loved more than anything, the people I had built my life around, had been the ones to ruin me.
“So what are you doing at the Golden Gate Bridge?” he said, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Just visiting.”
“There’s not a race or something today?”
I shook my head. I wondered whether if I told him I had a boyfriend, he would leave me alone.
“So you want to know something interesting?” he said. “Everyone thinks the bridge is like, the Golden Gate Bridge, like the bridge itself is supposed to be golden. The Gate Bridge, only gold. But then it’s orange, so everyone’s like, what the hell, right, that’s not gold. But actually the Golden Gate is the land strait where the Bay hits the Pacific. So it’s like, the bridge over the Golden Gate. That’s why it’s called that. Not many people know that.”
What was he even talking about? People always said you made new friends after high school, that you met new people, but then you met new people and they blathered on about inane trivia about bridges while you were trapped in their car. I could feel the bleakness of my future trying desperately to winnow some kind of sustaining purpose and intimacy from a hundred stupid interactions like this one. The gap between starting over and the world I’d shared with my friends was insurmountable.
Anyway, I’d known that about the bridge. We’d learned it in California history in fourth grade.
He talked for a while about how he’d moved here from Florida to work in tech but then worried he wasn’t finding himself, and he kept going as we got onto the freeway. I was trying not to listen, because this wasn’t the last conversation I wanted to hold in my mind. Already it was making me feel cluttered, and further and further away from the hour last night when, sleepless, I’d thought: What if I was just like Jason?
I wanted everyone to know what they had done to me. I knew what they thought: that it was all forgivable, that they were making reasonable choices, that I would get over it and accept it and move on. They were taking me for granted in that. On the way there, I imagined what they would say when they heard the news.
I felt flushed all over, and my heart wouldn’t slow down. I was starting to get dizzy.
“So what kind of music do you like?” Paul said as we slowed to a crawl in Palo Alto.
“I don’t like music.”
“What! That’s impossible. How is that possible?”
“I just don’t.”
“You’ve never heard good music, then,” he said. “You know why? I bet you listen to all the top-forty crap on the radio. All just mass-produced, commercial bullshit. I’ve been getting more into music theory lately—all just self-taught—and it’s pretty interesting. You should look into it sometime.”
“Maybe.”
“If you ever learn anything about classical music, you’ll gain this huge appreciation for everything else you hear. I have this really good Spotify station.” He turned it on—I didn’t have the energy to stop him—and we listened to the second half of a mediocre rendition of a Delibes operetta. There wasn’t enough brass; it sounded a little thin.
“It’s an acquired taste,” he said. “Like good wine. How old are you?”
I said I was twenty. I couldn’t tell if he believed me or not. He looked at me more closely in the rearview mirror, taking his eyes from the road. I wasn’t quite distracted enough that it didn’t make me uncomfortable. I wished I’d gotten into someone else’s car. I was starting to feel sick.
Except there was nowhere better I could be. I couldn’t be at home, I couldn’t be at school, I couldn’t be at BAYS—none of those places would ever be the same anymore. I had given all of myself, and to have that thrown back at me was so exquisitely painful I didn’t know how to live with it. That was the point; that was why I was here, why I would go and stand where Jason had stood, and see if, maybe, it was easier to just not go on. It would be terrifying, and it would hurt, but then it would be over. It would be a way out.
And then the next song on Paul’s playlist (Beethoven’s Fifth, which if I were in another mood might have amused me) ended and the next one that came on—it took me a little while to recognize it as a take on the end of Bach’s The Art of Fugue. When I realized what it was my throat went tight. I knew this song.
The Art of Fugue was Bach’s last, incomplete work, and though I knew the story of the last part, the Unfinished Fugue, I’d never heard it played until a few years before at the symphony with my mother. The composition ends sharply in the middle of a measure, either because Bach died before he could finish or because—what I believed—he’d hoped others might continue it after he was gone. That day at the symphony, they’d simply stopped playing where the music stopped, and it had been stunning. You felt the loss in that abrupt silence, and even though I’d just seen them that morning and would see them the next day too, it had made me ache for my friends. And what had crystallized for me then was a specific dream: that we would write our own ending for this together. I remembered how I had messaged them at intermission to say so, and how with anyone else maybe I would’ve felt stupid but with them it was just another one of those promises we made: not just a promise about the future but a promise about the present, too, of the space we held in one another’s lives.
I was crying in the back seat of the car. Paul studiously pretended not to notice.
It would never be the same with anyone else. I knew that; maybe it was because I would never again be able to love so fiercely and unguardedly, or maybe it’s that everyone gets one great friendship in their lives, if they’re lucky, and that was mine.
I didn’t want it to end like this. Maybe it was too late; maybe this was already the end for the five of us, or me and Jason, but I didn’t want to die sad and angry and desperately lonely. Really, I didn’t want to die at all. I wanted things to be better. I just didn’t know how.
“Actually,” I said, and I had to say it twice to get his attention, “actually, I don’t think I want to go to San Francisco anymore. If you could just drive back to Congress Springs instead.”
A school and an orchestra are both places where it’s difficult to avoid people you don’t wish to see, not because they might try to talk to you—because mine didn’t—but because they’re so woven into the fabric of your day that even if seeing them is like a stab wound it will happen to you, over and over, relentlessly. You see when they’re all together for lunch looking as self-contained as you used to think they were with you; you notice when one of them (in this case, Jason) seems to stop hanging out with them and sometimes you see him in other parts of campus alone.
Later that week, Sunny and Grace were walking together in the halls before the first bell rang and we all saw each other, and it was too late to pretend otherwise. Your body is slow to catch on to things, and before I could stop it, I felt that little leap of joy I always did when I saw them, the way the people you love always look so beautiful to you, and that time—it was such a chemical response—I let myself hope. Maybe they would call me over; maybe things were fixable. But Sunny said something to Grace, and they walked away.
It was, it turned out, eminently possible to feel alone on a campus of two thousand after all.
My mother came into my room Friday when I was getting ready for bed.
“I finally worked things out with your credit card company,” she said. Her face was like stone. “And I paid your bill. They were going to send it to a collections agency. What on earth did you think was going to happen, Beth?”
“I was going to pay it over the summer. I thought it just meant you had to pay more interest.”
“I can’t believe you were so careless. We’re very lucky they were willing to work with me. Your credit score is going to be ruined for years.”
“I’ll pay you back,” I mumbled. I occupied myself buttoning my pajama top so I didn’t have to look at her.
“And I had to cancel Asheville, so you can take that off your calendar.”
I jerked my head up, stunned. “What do you mean you had to—”
“Beth, I don’t have an extra fifteen hundred dollars lying around.”
I thought the guilt would stop my heart. “Mom, wait, I can get a job—maybe we can still—”
“It’s too late for that.” She leaned over to lift the half-full plastic bag from my wastebasket and tied the top into a quick, angry knot. “Everyone’s born with a different number of chances in the world, you know. You’ll get more than I did. Don’t waste yours on stupid things like this.”
The BAYS Senior Showcase, the last major performance of the year, was that weekend in San Francisco, three weeks before college decisions were due. I was glad, for the first time, that Jason wouldn’t be there, that Grace was several rows back. It would be easy enough to slip in right at the end of warm-ups and leave right afterward, and not have to see them. It would be worse to spend the time with my mother in the car, but I put headphones in, and she drove the whole way with her lips pressed tightly together, and she didn’t say anything to me either, even when halfway through I took my headphones and made a show of wrapping them up to put away. Maybe on some level she knew there was a part of me that had never felt alone like this before and that hoped beyond hope she would talk to me.
I still had barely been able to play. I had been going to rehearsals because it was easier than not going, I’d cast my ballot with the other seniors for which pieces we’d perform, though since hearing from Juilliard, going to BAYS had been physically painful. Each note throbbed in my chest. But I’d told myself that if that night there was even just a little of the old joy in it again—that would be enough. I wouldn’t consign myself to San Diego or Irvine and I would find some way to make Juilliard work, and that would be how I would start over, who I would be. I would fight for it.
When we filed onto the stage that night, I tried to take everything in, to hold it close—the scuffed wooden floor, the neat rows of us. The murmur of the audience before we started, the way even after all this time my heart wobbled like a rocking chair when the house lights dimmed. The show was in a converted old stone church we’d played in almost every year, and it should’ve been easy; I should’ve been able to go on autopilot. But as soon as Mr. Irving lifted his arms to usher us into the first song, everything felt wrong.
We played Bach’s Partita first. As we began the piece that night, I tried to imagine all the hundreds of thousands of people who had played this piece before me. I tried to imagine the former members of BAYS and what they might be doing now, how they’d have spouses and children maybe, houses and jobs, and I tried to imagine a younger Mr. Irving conducting it all those years before. This song could hold all those things, and tonight, I told myself, it could hold me, too.
But I didn’t feel that. This is it, I thought. In less than sixty minutes now it will all be over. I could feel myself trying to speed up, and I struggled to hold the tempo. I was out of breath. I let my fingers slip into the patterns I knew, that I’d rehearsed, and waited for the discipline of muscle memory to guide me.
But maybe that was the problem. Maybe it would always be like this now whenever I picked up my violin or whenever I tried to perform, because music was the biggest lie I had ever believed. All my life, it had taught me that you could come together. It had taught me that you could, if you worked and you sacrificed, earn your belonging—you could erase the differences among yourselves and work toward oneness, toward something bigger than you, and most of all it had taught me that it could be something lasting. I guess I’d believed that if it was beautiful and true enough it would be its own end; it would sustain itself.
We were into the third movement of the Haydn, and I was sweating now, when I heard a second violin play the wrong notes behind me. It could’ve been anyone. It might not have been Grace. But I knew somehow that it was her, and I wondered then: Why had no one else ever had to try so hard as I did? Because wasn’t that always the promise? That if I could disappear myself into those around me—if I made myself accommodating and easy, if I made myself not a burden and I smoothed over the jagged or prickly parts of myself and I didn’t make too much noise or take up too much space, if I could be all the things I was as a violinist, as a member of an orchestra—if I could do that, it would save me. It would make me worth loving. I’d always thought that was the thing that made me and Jason the same, that he understood that part of me, but I’d been wrong. I’d given everything I had, and he’d dropped BAYS like it was nothing, and here was Grace casually ruining the piece everyone was trying to play together because she never could be bothered to practice more at home, and here were Sunny and Brandon, who had hurt me more deeply than I would’ve thought them capable of, still playing alongside me, all of us caught up in this lie where we formed one sound.
“Beth,” Linde Erickson, the second chair, whispered, “what are you doing?”
Without fully realizing what I was doing, I’d stood up. I was standing now, unsteadily, not playing, in the middle of the piece. Linde whispered, “Are you okay?
I was not okay. I could only breathe in as deeply as my throat, and oxygen wasn’t getting past it into my lungs. I was growing light-headed. Around me, heads swiveled to see what was going on. I clutched my bow and violin and hurried out of the row while everyone stared at me. My footsteps were heavy and loud on the stage. When I got backstage, pushing my way past the curtains, I let my bow and my violin clatter to the floor.
I made it back to the greenroom, gasping for breath, my chest squeezed tight. I sank to a crouch and tried to breathe into my palms. I tried to inhale for five full seconds. From the stage, I heard the song come to an end, and then there was a long pause.
Then I heard my name. I didn’t need to look up to know who it was. Sunny and Brandon and Grace had come after me; all of them had left their instruments behind.
“Are you okay?” Sunny said. “You look like you’re going to pass out.”
“Does your chest hurt?” Brandon said. “Should I get my dad?”
“Maybe you should,” Grace told him. “Find Beth’s mom, too.”
“Can you breathe okay?” Sunny crouched down next to me. “Or do you think you’re going to throw up?”
Their faces, blurred a little, were alarmed. I said, “It’s a panic attack. I keep getting them.”
Brandon frowned. “You get panic attacks?”
“Ever since Jason was in the hospital.”
“Oh, Beth,” Sunny said. “You should’ve told us. My cousin gets panic attacks. Okay, try to breathe slower. Sit down on the ground all the way. Maybe even lie down.”
“Are you hyperventilating?” Brandon said. “Do you want, like, a paper bag?”
“You’ll be okay,” Grace said. “Should I go get your mom? Or do you want us to just stay with you?”
They hovered there, watching me, waiting. I knew that I could give them what they wanted from me and maybe we could salvage things; we could pretend away the worst parts and tell ourselves things were the same. All I would have to do was sit up and pretend that I was feeling better, that I was all right, that I forgave them their betrayal. And then we could go back out onstage and continue where we’d left off. We could pretend to be who we’d always been.
I couldn’t, though.
“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I know you don’t care anyway.”
Sunny’s expression changed. Brandon saw, and shook his head a little at her. “Sun—”
She started to go quiet, and then she changed her mind. “Beth, that’s so unfair. I don’t know how you can even say that.”
“You don’t know how I can even say that?” I kept seeing again in my mind their expressions when I’d pulled out my chart, how the future we’d planned together, once I had it written out on paper, felt to them like some kind of trap. Even now, even with the room sucked dry of oxygen and my heart struggling to pump, it hurt so much that I couldn’t look right at it, like staring into the sun. “We all agreed—”
“Okay, yes, we did agree, but I just don’t think it’s fair to act like you never want to see us again when it was a promise you never took seriously anyway.”
All those nights I lay awake worrying it wouldn’t happen, all those nightmares about things ending exactly like this. How happy I was when I believed we’d stay together. “How can you say I never took it seriously?”
“I don’t know, maybe because you were going behind our backs to go to New York with Jason because you were going to back out and go to Juilliard with him anyway?”
“Because I was worried about him,” I managed. I was fighting for oxygen, the room speckled with flashes of light. “Even if no one else cared, I did.”
“That’s also completely unfair and you know it.”
I couldn’t answer. The pressure on my chest was so intense I couldn’t believe there was nothing wrong with my heart.
“Okay, fine, so we’re bad friends,” Sunny snapped finally, when I didn’t answer. “Not that you’ve been perfect either, but whatever, that’s what you’re saying? And that’s it? You can’t get past it? You’re done?”
Then there were three heartbeats in a row that felt hollow, like some kind of malfunction, and I felt myself pitching forward, cupping a hand to my chest to try to still the awful beats.
I struggled to stand. Grace reached out to try to steady me, but I yanked my arm away, and I pushed past them and went out the door. My violin was still lying on the ground back where I dropped it.
I realized too late I’d gone through the wrong door, the emergency exit, and tripped the alarm. It blared so loudly I knew the audience would hear it back in the theater, but maybe music wasn’t something sacred to protect anyway. The door creaked closed behind me, a weak stutter like a broken wing.
My mother decided that this time we didn’t need to go back to the ER. They would run the same tests; they would find the same results. Instead, we would just go home and I could rest. In the car, she turned on the radio and drove in silence, and I wrapped myself in my sweater and tried to breathe and tried not to cry. When we got off the freeway, she turned to look at me, and she started to say something, and I was flooded with hope that she’d forgiven me and that everything between us would be fine. Then she changed her mind, and turned back to the road.
It wasn’t fair, and I knew that, but I didn’t want her silence anymore and I didn’t want to know that I’d hurt her. What I wanted was for someone to hold me and make me believe that this would pass, all of it, that there would be something better around the bend.