“SO IS IT like super hard when you see Jason in class?” Grace said after school when we were hanging out at Brandon’s. There were just two days left before college decisions were due, and despite that, time had been unspooling slowly the past week after my mother and I had gotten back from San Diego. Grades barely mattered now, and I wasn’t going to BAYS, which meant a lot of hours each day to sit at home and put off committing to UCSD, to tell myself to just officially decline Juilliard’s offer so I could forget about it.
It seemed impossible that somehow, after everything, Jason and I were nothing to each other now. But I knew what it was like when people left you, how they multiplied in their absence because now you saw and felt them in all those places they weren’t. I knew what it was to cycle back and forth between anger and grief and pain and shame, or to feel all of those at the same time. I knew too how you always felt like the version of yourself they’d chosen to leave, or the version you’d become because of their leaving: disposable, pathetic. Jason had tried once to talk to me in between classes, but what he’d said when he broke up with me kept echoing in my mind. The same way it echoed every time he walked into first period, every time I saw him across the halls, every time that, in spite of everything, I missed him.
“Do you ever talk to him?” Grace said. “Or do you think you will?”
“I haven’t. I don’t think I want to. But—” I hesitated. Grace said, “But what?”
“But it’s hard to picture just never talking to him again. I don’t know.”
Brandon was lying on his bed, trying to spin a basketball on his finger. He said, “Is it more like you’re sad or more like you hate him?”
I could hear how he was trying to sound casual—like he was interested but not overly invested in my answer. “Have you still not talked to him?” I asked.
“Nah, not yet.” He dropped the ball, almost nailing Sunny in the head with it, and scooped it up quickly. “I kind of tried, but I don’t know.”
“What happened when you tried?” Sunny said.
Brandon glanced at me. “Is it shitty to talk about this with you? We can change the subject if you want.”
The truth was that now Jason was always the vise around my lungs; at least when we were talking openly about him, I didn’t have to pretend I wasn’t still trying to breathe past all those bruises. “It’s fine.”
“You sure?” When I nodded, he said, “I just don’t really know what to say. You know how he is. You can’t make him do what you wish he would. So.”
“What do you wish he would do?” Grace asked.
Brandon let the ball bounce onto the ground and then roll under his desk. “I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“No, what?”
“I mean—I wish everything were different,” he said finally. “I wish we could just redo the whole year. But sometimes I think probably Jay wishes that too, but since he can’t, he’s just kind of giving up. And I wish he wouldn’t do that. I think he’s better than that.”
That night after dinner, Sunny asked if she could come over to talk to me about something. By now we were back to talking constantly, and I’d told her everything about going to see my father and Jason breaking up with me. And I could mostly talk about next year, like how I’d despised San Diego or still hadn’t officially decided anything, without it feeling as fraught and pointed. But I couldn’t guess what she wanted to formally discuss.
When she came in, she was holding her laptop, which she set on the kitchen table and opened. I said, “What did you want to talk about?”
“I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I wanted to tell you that I’ll go to UCSD with you.”
I stared at her. “You’ll what?”
“That was the best place you got in, right? It could be fun.”
“Yes, but—Sunny, are you serious? I thought you hated San Diego.”
“Well, I mean, you know. It’s not like I love Congress Springs, either.” She shrugged. “But people manage. Anyway, it’s not that far from LA. I could go sometimes on weekends.”
The whole world changed around me, spun differently, like I was suddenly right side up. “I can’t believe you’d do that.”
She logged into UCSD’s applicant portal. “We can do it right now if you want. It’s due the day after tomorrow anyway.”
“Sun, I—I don’t even know what to say.” I imagined us sharing a dorm room, having a regular spot in the dining hall, going to the beach. I imagined the others coming to visit us. All the things I’d hated about it—those were things I’d hated only when I pictured being there alone. None of it would matter with her there.
And it would be all right for her, too, wouldn’t it? It wasn’t that far from LA, like she’d said, and it was a good school. And maybe everything she needed from LA she could find in San Diego too––maybe she’d feel whole there; she’d be happy.
“Should I click it?” she said, hovering her mouse.
“Are you sure about this?”
“Why not? I mean, it could be kind of fun.”
“Could it, though? I don’t think I’ve ever once heard you say anything positive about San Diego.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well, I’m a negative person.”
“Sun, why are you doing this really?”
She looked at me strangely. “Um, for you? I thought that was obvious.”
“But I mean—why?”
I saw in her face she understood the question I was really asking, which maybe wasn’t why? so much as it was why me? “I just think we’ll have fun.”
“You’ve said fun like six times.”
“Well, it will be.”
“I bet fun wouldn’t even break your top ten things you care about in your future.”
“I’ll reinvent myself. I’ll be super fun.” She sighed. “But also—I still keep thinking about you saying the rest of us would go on with our lives but that you have nothing else because no one cares about you. And—”
Without warning, tears welled up in her eyes. “It’s been such a hard year and I love you so much and I just hate the thought of you feeling like no one cares about you as much as you care about them, because it’s not true.” She wiped her eyes roughly. “Ugh, I’m being so melodramatic. But you can’t ask people why like that about yourself. Of course people love you. You should take it more for granted.”
I reached out and nudged her hand off the mouse pad, then closed the window.
“You have to go to LA,” I said.
She looked surprised. “But—”
“You’ve wanted that almost as long as I’ve known you. You’re going to be so happy there.”
“This isn’t, like, an empty offer. I’ll do it right now and click the—”
“I know,” I said, and then, impulsively, I hugged her, even though Sunny was never the hugging type. “Also, Sun, I love you too.”
Before that year, before all this, I would’ve said that what I knew about life was that there are so many different ways to lose what matters most to you. But what I hadn’t known then—and maybe this has been the most important lesson of my life—was that there are also so many different ways to hold people close.
In the morning, before the bell rang, Jason was waiting for me by my locker. I tried not to look surprised.
“Hey,” he said, “you feel like getting boba or something?”
I thought about saying no. It was painful to look right at him, to stand in front of him after how easily he’d discarded me. But then a part of me had been waiting for this; I was still rehearsing conversations with him in my head every night. Maybe you always stupidly fantasize that someone will say the exact right thing to make you whole again, or that you’ll say the exact right thing to make them realize they need you after all. Maybe part of me would never learn to stop waiting. So I went with him.
In the car he didn’t say anything except, “QQ okay?” I was nervous and self-conscious, and exhausted in a way I’d never been in my life, and I felt so badly exposed. When we passed De Anza, I said, “Brandon misses you. You should talk to him.”
He winced. “I know.”
QQ was mostly empty inside. The boy who took our orders got mine wrong, but I didn’t say anything. After we sat down outside with our drinks, Jason checked his watch. “I don’t really have to be back until fourth period. What about you?”
If I called in pretending to be my mother and excused my absence, I could be gone all day, and I said so. Then I was annoyed at myself; I didn’t want to want to be here with him.
Jason fiddled with his straw. “You want to play poker or something?”
“Poker?” Of all the things I’d expected him to say, that wasn’t one of them. “You play poker?”
“Online,” Jason said. “At night, sometimes. When I can’t sleep.”
I thought of all those times I’d been up late at night waiting, just in case he messaged me. “I didn’t know that.”
He looked like maybe he was going to say more, and then he just shrugged. “Yeah.”
In the drugstore next door, there were playing cards tucked behind the romance novels. They didn’t carry poker chips, and after some consideration Jason bought a bag of Skittles to fill in. I pretended it was all right that I’d left school and left my heart unguarded once again just so I could stand in the aisles this way, buying playing cards. I’d thought, I realized now, that maybe he would apologize. Did he realize how badly he’d hurt me? Because I wanted him to know it. But maybe that was ludicrous; maybe he had nothing to apologize for. You couldn’t fault someone for realizing you would never be enough. Maybe he just hadn’t wanted to go to class.
“So,” he said when we’d settled back in at QQ, the cards making a sound like pages turning as he shuffled. “Tomorrow’s the day, right?”
“I hear you’re going to UPenn.”
“Yeah.”
I thought of us both at Juilliard, both at Berkeley, how different our lives could have been. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks. You, uh, you think you’ll go to Juilliard?”
The wrought-iron chairs were pressing their pattern into my shoulders, the backs of my legs. “No.”
“Not even a chance?”
“I can’t pick up my violin without getting a panic attack, so no.”
“You’re getting panic attacks?”
“Yes.”
“That’s rough.” He dealt two cards to each of us and lifted the corners of his, not looking at me. “My sister gets those too. So you’re not playing at all?”
“I can’t.”
We played through the end of first period and into second, the sticky candies staining our palms and fingertips and my pile dwindling. You could, it turned out, have imaginary conversations with someone who you were with; I started so many sentences in my head. I was agitated in some unrecognizably hot, unruly way.
Jason looked half-focused at first, but as we continued he seemed distracted. He folded his hand once, giving me a small mound of candies, and said, “Nice one.” Then, as he watched me sweep them into my pile, he said, “Did you tell your mom you got in?”
“No.”
“What about your dad?”
“Oh, totally,” I said, sharply, before I could stop myself. “We talk all the time. You of all people know how close we are.”
He looked up at that; that one landed, I think. I could feel something ratcheting up between us. Jason leaned forward.
“Beth,” he said, “maybe it’s not my right, but I have to say this. I think you’re making a huge mistake.”
I sat back in my chair and crossed my arms over my chest. I was exhausted. What else did we have to say to each other; why had I even come?
“And why’s that, Jason?”
He shrugged and opened his eyes wider momentarily, a show of exasperation, and when he did, something unleashed in me. It took a few seconds before I recognized the feeling, but then I did: It was rage. How could he look at me that way? I was the one who should feel that way; I was the one who’d been betrayed. There were whole oceans of anger inside me that I’d always tried to map for myself instead as hurt or fear or shame.
“I think it’s a mistake,” he said, “because you’ve put so much into your violin all these years, Beth. You really have.”
“What does that even matter?”
My voice was shaking with an anger that was totally disproportionate to what we were talking about, and he must have heard it; it was a conscious choice he’d made to pretend otherwise. He said, “Well, listening to you play…” He paused, searching for words. In the sunlight, I could see the tiny shadows his eyelashes cast, the downy hairs on his forehead. I was out of breath. My skin felt too weak to hold my hammering heart safely inside my chest.
“It makes me feel like I know you better,” he said. “I know that’s not true for my playing. And I’ve never heard that in anyone else we’ve played with either.”
How could he sit here and say these things to me? I decided then, abruptly, that I wouldn’t leave without making sure he understood what he’d done to me. I wanted it to haunt and accuse him every time he tried to look away.
“And, you know, after—” He looked down again, and he swallowed. Then he started to say something and stopped himself, and he exhaled and drummed his fingers against his knees. “Um, after I—when I was in the hospital, one of the things I missed most when I was in there—this is going to sound stupid, but I missed sitting next to you and hearing you play. There’s always been something about that that’s felt so—well—centering to me. Like being with you in a way that just lets me be.”
That antiseptic smell of the hospital and our feet squeaking on the tile and Jason lying there so wholly past our reach—all at once when he said that I was funneled back there. And I felt myself deflate, my anger furling in on itself like a sea anemone.
I knew then I wouldn’t say anything. Because it would haunt him, I knew that, and I didn’t wish to destroy him. I could shield him from my anger; I was strong enough to bear it on my own.
He picked up the deck of cards, leafing through their edges roughly with his thumb. “I don’t think it’s possible to play like that unless it’s something you really care about. You care more about music than anyone I know, Beth.”
“Obviously I care about it. Do you think the only thing that matters is how much someone cares?”
I regretted saying that immediately. It felt cruel in a way I hadn’t intended—of course he knew what it was to care about music, for that to not be enough. He let it go, though. Instead of whatever he could’ve said, he looked down again and then swept the cards into a single stack and shuffled them.
When he laid the first three cards down, I bet high. I had a queen and a king, and I doubted he had the two and six he’d need for a straight. After he turned over the last card, he pushed a handful of candies into the middle of the table and flipped over his hand.
“I don’t have the straight,” he said, “but I have two eights and I know you’re bluffing.”
I slipped my cards back into the deck without showing him; he was right. “I think you’re cheating,” I said, and he smiled, in a way that made me think if the mood between us were different he might have laughed.
“No,” he said, “it’s just that you’re a bad liar, Beth.”
He looked down at the table and gathered the cards into a neat stack. And then—I almost missed it—his expression changed. It was the only time I ever saw him look that way: defiant and tender and sorry and wistful and maybe a little afraid, too, all at once, and I wondered in that moment if some truth or core of us, underneath all those ways we were damaged and all those reasons we both had to be angry, was good. Or it could’ve been; it almost was.
“Jason,” I said, before I could stop myself, “even if deep down I thought everyone else would leave, I thought it would be different with you.” I swallowed; there was a lump like a tumor in my throat. “I thought—”
For a long time I thought he wouldn’t answer me. He was slumped down in his seat, and it made him look wearier, and older somehow.
“Me too,” he said finally, quietly. “I thought it would be different too. But—I couldn’t. I can’t.”
I had the strange feeling that we’d never move past this moment, that I would sit here like this with him forever, everything he said buzzing and humming always in my ears. It was well into third period now, and the shopping center was beginning to fill for lunch, dozens of engineers with their jeans and North Face, their clip-on employee badges.
“You know,” Jason said finally, “I was really shocked when you said you got into Juilliard. Not that I’m surprised you were accepted,” he added quickly, carefully. “That part doesn’t surprise me at all.”
“Mm,” I said tightly. Of course, I thought, of course this was when Jason would watch himself—mind his tone, carefully select his words. But that wasn’t what I wanted from him.
“But also—you do this all the time, Beth. You talk yourself into selling yourself short. And you give people more of yourself than they ever ask from you, and I know I didn’t handle that well and I think you deserve better than that, and I think if you turn down Juilliard you’re going to regret it for the rest of your life.”
It turned out I had to speak carefully too; if I didn’t, I was afraid I might yell. “Why does it even matter to you?”
“Oh, come on, Beth,” he snapped, his patience finally dissolving. “Because I know you.”
I looked at him sitting across from me, the candies scattered across the table in little pops of color like a still life, and I felt then how much I was going to miss this. Because he did know me; he knew me better than most, maybe sometimes better than I knew myself. And maybe that was everything.
He was wrong about one thing, though: I always was an excellent liar.
Or maybe even that’s untrue; maybe it’s just that it’s taken me so long to learn to be more honest with myself.