ON MONDAY, I feigned illness. I had a story prepared, but my mother didn’t ask about my symptoms or whether I was all right or needed anything, just called the school and then went to work. I turned off my phone, but then later I turned it back on and there weren’t any new messages and I felt stupid for having thought I needed to turn it off. I felt like I was floating above my own aloneness, and it was something I could almost marvel at: This had always been my greatest fear, and here I was inside it. I couldn’t stand the thought of myself.
In the afternoon, I reread my acceptance email from Juilliard to try to feel again like I had when I’d first received it: like I was someone worthy and desirable. But it made me think about having to respond one way or another to the acceptance, and then all I felt was dread.
I went downstairs to eat dinner when my mother came back that evening, but she ignored me, sitting down at the kitchen table with her laptop and immediately absorbing herself in her email. She hadn’t been cooking dinner lately, and each night would pour herself a bowl of cereal.
I thought of all the things I could say to her—that I was sorry, that even though I’d meant to hurt her I also had never wanted that, that I desperately wanted to make it up to her and wanted it to stop being like this—but I couldn’t put words to any of them. “Do we have anything to eat?”
She didn’t look up from her computer. “There are dumplings in the freezer.”
“Okay, I’ll heat some up. Do you want any?”
“No.”
I took longer than I needed to microwaving them, hesitating at the table. Finally, I sat down next to her. “I think I might need to stay home tomorrow, too.”
“All right.” She typed something. “Don’t leave your plate on the table.”
I went back upstairs. Eventually, I heard the clinking sounds of a spoon against a bowl, probably another meal of cereal. I lay awake all night, the pressure in my head mounting and the sick feeling around my organs expanding as the hours went by. The throbbing spread from my forehead into my jaw and neck and shoulders, and eventually my whole abdomen felt hollow, like hunger. I listened to my mother switching off all the lights and making her way up the stairs, finding her way to her bedroom in the dark, and I imagined her lying in her bed, all alone like I was, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, and I waited—and maybe she waited with me—for morning.
I made dinner the next night, salmon I’d found in the freezer and defrosted and I steamed with oil and salt and green onions, the way my mother made it, and rice. I finished an hour before she got home, so I cleaned the kitchen too. When she came in the door, she looked surprised.
“I made dinner,” I said. “Um—if you’re hungry.”
“Well,” she said, a little warily. She set her bag on the floor next to the table. “All right.”
I put a piece of salmon in a bowl over rice and brought it to her carefully. I’d made tea, too, but it was cold, so when she made herself another cup I didn’t say anything. I picked at my salmon for a few minutes.
“I’ll get a job this summer,” I said. “To pay you back. I never meant for you to have to worry about it. And I never meant—I know how excited you were about Asheville.” My throat hurt. “I’m so sorry, Mom. I thought it just meant I’d have to pay more interest later. Also, I didn’t—” I felt my eyes fill, and I looked away. “I know sometimes people leave even when you try to stop them. I shouldn’t have said what I did.”
My mother nudged at grains of rice with her chopsticks, separating them out one by one and then lining them up neatly at the bottom of her bowl. “I tried to honor the terms of the legal agreement I have with your father,” she said. “But it was—it was difficult to leave you there. Maybe you’ve always given him too much credit, you know. But of course I never wanted you to think he hates you.”
I didn’t answer that. She said, quietly, “You’re very angry. You’ve been angry a long time.”
I thought about telling her everything then—about Jason almost dying, about us going out and then breaking up. But when I tried to arrange the words in my mind I knew I couldn’t say them aloud yet. I would fall apart. “I guess so.”
She sighed. “Well—it’s understandable. I was angry for a long time too. It wasn’t what I ever asked for.”
“Did you feel like you tried?”
“Yes.”
And then I was crying. I hadn’t meant to, and I turned away, trying to get myself under control. My mother put her chopsticks down and reached for me, cupping my chin in her hands to turn my face toward hers.
“I tried too,” I said. “With my friends. I wanted—I wanted it to be different, but I did everything I could, and it was the same. That was why I went to New York and got the limo and—”
My voice gave out. I tried to gulp down air.
My mother’s expression softened. “Oh, Beth,” she said. “You can’t stop someone from making their own choices, you know. It doesn’t work that way. And even if it did, it damages you. You can’t let yourself keep giving and giving and giving to someone who stopped caring. I’ve always worried about you making that mistake, but I thought—well, I thought I’d set an example for you. Because if I wanted one thing for you it was that you’d always know how much you’re worth. The world will tell you otherwise because you’re a girl and you’re not white and you’re softhearted, but you’re allowed to keep things for yourself, and—and to say something isn’t good enough for you. You’re allowed to want more. You’re allowed to be angry.”
She dropped her hand. She looked exhausted and sad. She was wearing one of the skirt suits that she always wore to work, and the jacket was loose on her in a way that made her look younger than she was, almost childlike. I remembered how she’d told me once that when she was a small child the one thing she’d always wanted was to be a mother.
She got up and took her plate and chopsticks to the sink, and then she stood there a moment, gripping the countertop with her hands. The refrigerator hummed and made a clattering sound. With her back to me, my mother said, “I tried to show you that, anyway. I thought I had.”
By Wednesday, it felt untenable to stay home again. My mother dropped me off at school, and Sunny and Brandon and Grace were by my locker, waiting for me. I wondered if they’d waited the last two mornings too. Brandon was holding my violin.
“You left this,” he said.
I said, “Oh.”
“On Sunday.”
“Yes, I know when.” I took it from him because I couldn’t not, but even just touching it I could feel my chest seizing up again, everything from Sunday night rushing back at me. I put it in my locker, out of sight. I said, shortly, “Thanks.”
I should’ve stayed home. It hurt to look at them.
“So,” Brandon said. From the way they all looked at one another, I could tell they’d rehearsed or at least heavily discussed this. I felt a hand grip around my throat. All the things I’d said about Chase, how I’d made Brandon feel for not missing his game, not telling them about Juilliard and New York—all those things I’d done for Jason that he’d never asked for, that maybe he’d never wanted from me. What could I say to the three of them now? I had tried my hardest, and so many times I’d chosen wrongly, and now it was done.
It was Grace who spoke. “First of all, are you all right? We were all so worried about you after the show. Did you go to the doctor or anything?”
“No. It’s happened enough times by now that they probably wouldn’t bother rerunning the same tests.”
“My dad said it can straight up feel like a heart attack,” Brandon said. “Sounds pretty awful.”
“It is.”
Then they were all silent for a little while. I could feel whatever unspoken negotiation was happening between them, and the way I was outside of it. Finally, Sunny said, “Mr. Irving said you quit BAYS.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I just—I’m done with music.” I hadn’t had the courage to call him, so I’d emailed instead. I was ashamed of that. I’d also logged into my Juilliard account—I had done it three times, in fact—so I could decline and get it over with, so I could bury it. But each time I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“Is it because of the panic attacks?” Grace said. “Like, is performing really stressful?”
“It’s not the performances.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell us it was happening? I tell you when I have, like, a headache!”
“A headache is so different.” I was, suddenly, exhausted. I wished I’d walked away after they gave me back my violin. “Everyone was sick of dealing with Jason. And nothing happening to me was anywhere near as important as anything happening to him.”
“No one’s sick of dealing with Jason,” Brandon said. “It’s just that Jason honestly I think wants some distance.”
I hadn’t meant in the present tense, but the way he said it—I recognized that, the relief of someone finally bringing up the thing that’s been right under the surface for you, taking up all the space inside your heart. I said, “What’s been going on with him, anyway?”
“He’s been—kind of off doing his own thing,” Brandon said. He was trying not to look pained, I think, but he wasn’t pulling it off. And his palpable sadness—in the face of it, something shifted in me. “I think he just needs some space right now. I think he—I don’t know. We’ll see. I tried to talk to him. My dad thinks—he said maybe being around us just reminds Jason of too much, or something.” He forced a smile, then said, again, “We’ll see.”
“But we don’t have to talk about him right now,” Grace said. “So, okay, anyway, the three of us were talking about how you told us to leave you alone, but then we were like, wait, actually, what you said was that we didn’t care. Which doesn’t mean the same thing, right? So we decided what you meant was try harder.”
Unexpectedly, my eyes flooded. It was true that I wanted that—you always do, I think, even when you tell yourself otherwise to try to make it hurt less.
“So,” Sunny said, “will we see you at lunch?”
Grace looked uncharacteristically nervous. “Okay, well,” she said, when I didn’t answer right away, “here’s a would you rather: we keep avoiding each other forever all of us feel like garbage all the time, like we do now, and probably regret it the rest of our lives, or we forget all this and move on?”
I think I would’ve let it go forever. Maybe I never would’ve approached them; I never would’ve found my way back. I was hurt and angry and also, I think, I felt guilty—but mostly it was because, before them, all I knew was that when people left they stayed gone.
“Yes,” I said, and Brandon, relieved, said, “That wasn’t a yes-or-no question, Beth, come on,” and Grace hugged me.
I thought Grace was wrong, though—maybe the point was to not forget any of it. Because maybe in a long friendship everyone is an infinite number of different versions of themselves, and all those selves of you that you shed or grow out of, the ones you’re glad you’ve evolved from and the ones you miss—in a long friendship there’s someone who was witness to all of them, and so all those different people you were along the way, no matter what else you may have been, you were never alone.
At my mother’s insistence, the last weekend before decisions were due on May 1, we took a last-minute weekend trip to UC San Diego, which was the highest-ranked school I’d gotten into, so I could see it. I felt horrible she was spending money on it, but flights had been cheap and we stayed at a Motel 6. Despite the things my mother kept trying to point out that she thought I’d like, I hated it there—I hated the vastness of it and all the cement and glass surfaces everywhere, the way sounds bounced harshly off all the walls of the buildings. I couldn’t imagine people making real music there. I could see only a grim, miserable life for myself. Did you go to the beach? Sunny asked. You like beaches. But even the beach had felt all wrong, the neighborhood right behind you and a parking lot pressed up against the sand. I thought about telling my mother I’d gotten into Juilliard after all, but then she would be thrilled, and it would be such a mismatch of what it meant for me that I knew I couldn’t go through with it.
I missed my violin. Sometimes when my friends mentioned BAYS or on the days they had rehearsal, it was a sharp ache of grief, but how could it ever not feel fraught, how could I ever play in front of an audience again without feeling all it was I’d lost? I had tried once since the Senior Showcase to play, but as soon as I held my violin in my hands I felt my throat start to close, and then even after I’d shoved it back under my bed it was hard to breathe and I could only sit on my bed unmoving, terrified, obsessively tracking my pulse. I had to talk myself out of calling an ambulance, and it was only because I’d messaged Sunny and Grace and Brandon, and they’d googled symptoms and promised mine seemed normal, that I didn’t. It was the worst panic attack I’d had yet.
I wondered—I couldn’t help wondering—if Jason would’ve gone if he’d gotten in. We were still using our same group chat, and every time I said something I imagined him reading it. I wished I could stop thinking about him. I wished it didn’t matter to me what he did or where he was or who he was with, that I wasn’t always hyperaware of his presence across campus or across a room, that it didn’t feel like a punctured lung when I saw him walking to the parking lot with Annique Chang or when I heard, secondhand, that he was going to go to UPenn. I hadn’t even known he’d applied there.
In our motel room in San Diego the night before we flew back out, my mother and I stayed up late watching a cooking show on TV. We were flying into SFO so my mother could stop and see my grandparents on the way. I wasn’t going to go; I’d go find a coffee shop or something, or just wait in the car.
My mother missed the end of the competition—it was a sandwich with char siu and seared blood orange that won, the one she was rooting for—because she was on the phone with my grandmother trying patiently to arrange the visit. When she hung up, she leaned back against the headboard of the bed and closed her eyes a long time, and I said, “Why do you still go see them so much when they’re so awful to you?”
“They gave me the best life they knew how to, Beth. And when people are that age, they don’t change.”
“Does it make you angry, the way they treat you?”
I thought she’d made excuses for them, but she said, “I suppose it always has, yes.”
I thought of her sitting through dim sum again with them tomorrow, trying to deflect whatever they said to her. “I think you should stop seeing them,” I said impulsively. “I think it’s too hard on you, and you—” I felt my face go hot. “You deserve better than that.”
“Beth, that’s not—I—they’re my parents,” she said, and then she went into the bathroom to shower, and I remembered too late that anyway they were still paying for part of my tuition. They’d insisted, saying they couldn’t take money with them when they died. But the way my mother had been sort of flustered—I think she was touched, and that it meant something to her that I’d said that.
Later, we’d turned out the lights and we were each in our beds. I’d been lying there awake for a while—I never slept well anymore—but I’d thought maybe she was asleep already when she said, quietly, “The thing is, Beth, I think you can—you can learn to hold on to that anger. I used to try to pray about it going away or try to push it aside. But then when I keep it—I find that it reminds me what’s true and it helps me—dismiss all the other voices, I suppose. I think you can keep it as a sort of compass. The world will always try to tell you things about yourself, and when some of them give rise to that anger inside you, you know it’s those ones that aren’t the truth.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, and then I waited too long to say anything at all. Maybe she thought I was asleep. At the airport before our flight back home the next day, I bought her a box of Milk Duds, her favorite candy, an infinitesimally small gesture compared to what I meant. For so long I’d thought of her as the one who’d been left, but I’d always failed to see the most important part, which was that she was also the one who’d stayed.