When We Were Infinite Read online

  FOR MY PARENTS, AND FOR AUDREY, ZACH, AND DASHIELL—MAY YOU ALWAYS FIND MUSIC IN ALL THE NOISE SURROUNDING YOU, AND MAY WHATEVER SONGS YOU BRING THE WORLD BE STRONG AND KIND AND TRUE.

  Dear Reader,

  Please be aware that When We Were Infinite contains content that may be triggering. For a list, please see the following page.

  When We Were Infinite contains the following content that may be triggering: a suicide attempt, conversations about suicide, instances of suicidal ideation.

  PROLOGUE

  WHEN JASON WAS VOTED onto Homecoming court the fall of our senior year, it both did and didn’t come as a surprise. It didn’t because Jason was attractive and talented and kind (I, of all people, understood his appeal); it did because he generally disliked attention and, for that matter, dances. And because I often thought of the five of us as our own self-contained universe, it was a little jarring to have the outside world lay claim to him like this. Netta Hamer, the ASB president, made the announcement at the beginning of lunch one day, when the five of us were all sitting together in our usual spot. We were, of course, as delighted as Jason was visibly mortified—he tried to pretend he somehow hadn’t heard, which meant that now we weren’t going to shut up about it—but we couldn’t have known then how that night of Homecoming would turn out to be one of the most consequential of our friendship.

  “For the record,” Sunny said, “I do think it’s a tradition that needs to die, like, yesterday.” Sunny was the ASB vice president, which she’d described as the group project from hell. Associated Student Body officers ran all the dances, and Sunny had tried, unsuccessfully, to do away with the dance royalty. She had been on the Winter Ball court her freshman year, the same year as Brandon—in fact, since Grace had been on the junior prom court last, I was the only one of us five who’d never been chosen. “You parade around a bunch of random people and it’s just like, hey, look at these people who haven’t even accomplished anything specific! And it’s so weirdly heteronormative.”

  “Ooh, true, but I can’t wait to see Jason get paraded,” Grace said, clapping her hands. “Jason, do you get to pick out theme music? I hope they make you wear a crown.”

  “Should I buy a new phone?” Brandon said thoughtfully, dangling his old one in front of Jason’s face. Jason kept eating, glancing past it into the rally court. “Will all the many—and I mean many—pictures I’m going to take fit on mine, do you think?”

  Jason balled up his burrito wrapper and arced it into the trash can a few feet away, then pointedly checked his watch. “Oh, don’t be so modest,” Brandon said, grinning hugely, knocking Jason a little roughly with his shoulder the way boys did with one another—some boys, anyway, because I’d noticed Jason never did that sort of thing, even in jest. “You’re going to be so inspiring.”

  “You know, honestly, I think it’s kind of nice,” Grace said. “Everyone here is too obsessed with accomplishment. It’s nice to have one thing that’s just like, You didn’t do anything to earn this! We just like you!”

  “Mm,” Sunny said. “That’s a pretty idealistic way to say a bunch of underclassmen think Jason’s hot.”

  Jason choked slightly on his water, but recovered. Brandon gleefully pounded his back.

  “Little emotional there?” he said. “I get it, I get it. Big moment for you.”

  “Jason,” Grace said, biting the tip off her carrot stick, “would you rather falsely accuse someone of cheating off you and they fail, or have every single Friday night be Homecoming for the rest of your life?”

  “Oh, come on,” Jason protested, finally, “what kind of sadistic choice is that?”

  The rest of us cheered. “Put it up here,” Brandon said to Grace, lifting his hand for her to high-five. “You broke him.”

  Would You Rather was Jason’s game. He used to come up with the questions when we were waiting in the lunch line, or walking to class: Would you rather badly injure a small child with your car, or have a single mother go to jail for hitting you with hers? Once Sunny had told me she imagined Jason played it alone, testing himself with all kinds of ethical dilemmas, which I believed.

  We were all laughing. Jason said, “When I’m king and I’m looking over my list of enemies, I’m definitely remembering how none of you but Beth were on my side.”

  Actually, I hadn’t joined in because I was imagining the night of Homecoming, how inside the music people would twine their bodies together and whisper secrets, how maybe on some certain chord Jason might look my way and want that with me, and I was afraid if I said anything now I might give myself away. I had been in love with Jason nearly as long as I’d known him. It was the only secret I’d ever kept from my friends.

  I was about to chime in, though, when Eric Hsu came over. Later, after all the ways things came apart, I would look back at this moment as a warning, a kind of foreshadowing of what I let happen.

  We mostly knew everyone in our class—we were a school of about two thousand and Las Colinas was always in the lists of top-ranked public high schools, which meant that years into the future we would still have a sleep debt and self-worth issues and nightmares about not having realized there was a back page of a calculus exam. Eric was the kind of person who would definitely pledge some kind of Asian frat in college, and Sunny and I had once clicked through his tagged pictures to confirm that he was in fact flipping off the camera in every one of them. (Also, he had the third-highest GPA in our class.) Eric’s eyes were bloodshot, and when he came close he smelled like pot. Jason cocked his head.

  “You all right there?” he said. Jason had a way of being on the verge of a smile that made everything seem like an inside joke you were in on with him. It made other people think they shared something with him, that they knew him well, although that usually wasn’t true.

  “Yep. Yep,” Eric said. “Doing pretty good.”

  “Yeah? What’s, uh, the occasion?”

  “Just working on my stress levels,” Eric said. “We’re just all so stressed out all the time, you know?” Then, apropos of nothing, he turned and peered at me.

  “Hey,” he said, “I want to ask you. How come you never talk?”

  The five of us looked at each other. “Excuse me?” Sunny said, a little sharply. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Beth never talks to the rest of us. But then I see her sitting in your little huddle here and she’s all—” He mimed what I think was supposed to be mouths opening and closing with his hands. “How come?”

  It was true that outside of our group I was much quieter. I’d overheard various interpretations about what my deal was: that I was boring, or stuck-up, or a bitch. Still, what Eric said wasn’t the kind of thing people said to your face. It was jarring for a lot of reasons, but I remember it for one I wouldn’t have anticipated: how truly, utterly impervious I felt. Eric could say whatever he wanted about me. I was always invincible with my friends.

  “You are high as fuck, buddy,” Brandon said, clapping Eric on the back, and there was an edge to his tone. “Maybe you should go home.”

  “Well!” Grace said, when Eric had wandered off. “That was rude.”

  I smiled. It seemed, at the time, like a small thing that would become one of our remember whens. But later it would feel like a relic from a different life, back when we could just root ourselves in the moment and not have to brace so hard against the future. And I would wonder if there had been signs I should’ve seen, even then, that could’ve changed how everything went after.

  “I’m just not as dazzling as the rest of you,” I said, which felt true, but I didn’t mind. I knew from them how someone could shift through the wreckage of your life and pull you from the rubble as if you were something precious. That w
as worth being the least dazzling one—it was worth everything.

  “Selling yourself a bit short there,” Brandon said. “I bet you could absolutely murder a crossword puzzle if I put one in front of you right now.” Since finding out a few years ago I loved crosswords, he’d always teased me about it. “If anything says dazzling, it’s absolutely crossword puzzles.”

  “Beth, of course you’re dazzling,” Grace said.

  “It’s fine. At least I don’t have to be on Homecoming court.”

  Jason laughed at that. Later that day, though, as we were packing up after rehearsal, he turned to me.

  “You know,” he said, “silence isn’t the worst thing in the world.”

  He meant it kindly, in case I was still worried about what Eric had said, which I wasn’t. We were musicians; we were intimate with silence. Mr. Irving, who conducted the Bay Area Youth Symphony, or BAYS, as we called it, always said silence was sacred: it was in that space that whatever came before or after was made resonant.

  But I had always known silence—as fear, first as that catch in my mother’s voice and my father’s stoniness in return, and later as all those throbbing empty spaces where he used to sit or sleep or keep his computer and his gaming things. I had known it as the possibility of emptiness, as something I was trying to shatter each time I picked up my violin.

  There was so much the five of us had lived through together, so much we’d seen each other through. But in the whole long span of our history together, this was the most important thing my friends had done for me: erased that silence in my life. In the music and outside it, too, we could take all our discordant parts and raise them into a greater whole so that together, and only together, we were transcendent.

  I always believed that, in the end, would save us.

  AROUND DUSK in Congress Springs, when it’s been a clear day, the fog comes creeping over the Santa Cruz Mountains from the coast, shrouding the oaks and the redwoods in a layer of mist. The freeways there tip you north to San Francisco or south to San Jose, hugging those mountains and the foothills going up the coast on one side and the shoreline of the Bay on the other.

  It was still late afternoon the day we were heading up through the Peninsula to SF for our annual Fall Showcase, and sharply clear-skied, which made it feel like the blazing gold of the oak trees and the straw-colored grass of the hills had burned away all the fog. It was October, and we were seven weeks into our school year and ten weeks into our final year in BAYS. Sometimes I wondered about early humans who watched the grasses die and the trees turn fiery and then expire, if they thought it meant their world was ending. That year, because it was our last together, it felt a little like that to me.

  So far just Sunny and Jason were eighteen and could legally drive the rest of us around, so Sunny was driving; I was sitting squeezed in between Jason and Brandon in the back seat, Grace in the front, my whole world contained in that small space. Jason, Grace, and I all had our violins on our laps so Brandon’s bass would fit in the trunk with Sunny’s oboe and her stash of Costco almonds, and I was holding my phone in my hands because I was hoping to hear back from my father.

  “Is that a new dress, Grace?” Sunny said as we passed the Stanford Dish. Sunny wasn’t sentimental, but when she cared about you, she followed the things in your life closely, almost osmotically. “It’s cute.”

  “Thanks!” Grace said. “I thought it might work for Homecoming, too.”

  “Except that Homecoming will never happen,” Brandon said, waggling his eyebrows at Sunny in the rearview mirror. “We’re all waiting for Jay’s big moment, but the end of the world will come, and there we’ll all be staring down the meteor, poor Jason waiting in his crown, and Sunny will be complaining how Homecoming still hasn’t—”

  “Brandon, don’t bait her,” Grace said, at the same time Sunny said, “Okay, but seriously, I don’t understand how everyone here can have a 4.3 GPA but be so massively incompetent in basically every other area of life.” Homecoming had been repeatedly pushed back this year—now it was after Thanksgiving—because the other ASB officers had taken too long to organize everything, which Sunny had complained about both to us and to their faces for weeks, even after Austin Yim, the social manager, told her she was being kind of a bitch.

  “Anyway,” Sunny said, “if Homecoming does miraculously actually happen despite the rampant incompetence, I bet Chase will ask you, Grace.”

  Grace made a face. “I don’t know. He still hasn’t said anything about it.”

  Grace had had a thing lately for Chase Hartley, who hung out with a somewhat porous, mostly white group of people who usually walked to the 7-Eleven at lunch and stood around the little reservoir there. Even though she and Sunny and I would spend hours afterward dissecting their hallway conversations or messages and parsing the things he said to figure out whether he was into her, I was privately hoping that he wasn’t. The last time she’d had a boyfriend—Miles Wu, for a few months when we were sophomores—she would disappear for three or four days in a row at lunch with no comment and then show up the fifth, smiling brightly, as though she hadn’t been gone at all. But then again, Grace and Jason had very briefly gone out in seventh grade before I’d known them, and so it was always a little bit of a relief when she was into someone else.

  “Chase seems exactly like someone who wouldn’t think about it at all until the last possible minute,” Sunny said. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “We were all going together, right?” I said. “We could get a limo or something.”

  “Maybe!” Grace said brightly. “I’ll see what happens with Chase. Or he could come with us. Brandon, you’re going, right?”

  I didn’t want Chase there—I wanted just the five of us, cloistered from the rest of the world. It was only fall, still blazingly hot in the afternoons and still with the red-flag fire warnings and power blackouts in the hills to try to keep the state from incinerating, but already I’d begun to feel the pressure of the lasts—the last Fall Showcase, the last Homecoming—before the universe blew apart and scattered the five of us to who knew where.

  “Are you kidding?” Brandon said. “Like I’d miss Jay’s big coronation?”

  “My what?” I felt Jason turn from the window to look at us. Brandon grinned.

  “Nervous about tonight?” he asked Jason. I was leaning forward to give them more room, and with Jason behind me I couldn’t see his expression, but I could imagine it—mild, guarded, the way he always looked before a performance, or a test at school.

  “No,” Jason said. “You?”

  We were all a little nervous, minus maybe Grace. Brandon laughed, then reached around me to smack Jason’s thigh. “Liar. And no, I’m not nervous, but I’m not the one with a solo.”

  “Eh,” Jason said, “not a big solo. I’m just tired.”

  I wiggled back so I was leaning against the seat too and could see them, and Jason shifted a little to let me in. “You didn’t sleep?” I said.

  “I did from like twelve to two and then like four thirty to six.”

  That was the worst feeling, when you couldn’t keep your eyes open any longer but you had to set your alarm for the middle of the night to wake up and finish schoolwork. I was drowning in homework and would be up late tonight too. I said, “Were you doing the Lit essay?”

  “Nah, I haven’t even started. I had a bunch of SAT homework.”

  “Did you guys hear Mike Low is retaking it?” Grace said, rolling her eyes. “He got a fifteen ninety, and he keeps telling everyone there was a typo.”

  “He asked me to read his essay for Harvard this week,” Sunny said. “Did you guys know his older brother died in a car accident when we were little?”

  “His brother?” Grace repeated. “That’s so horrible.”

  “It is, but also—I don’t know, I thought it was kind of a cop-out. The essay, I mean.”

  “Whoa,” Brandon said. “That’s pretty cold, Sunny. His dead brother? How is that a cop-out?”


  “Not in life, obviously. That’s beyond horrible. But his essay just felt like… playing the dead brother card to get into college? I don’t know, if someone I cared about died I don’t feel like I could turn it into five hundred words for an admissions committee.”

  “Gotta overcome that white legacy kid affirmative action somehow,” Brandon said. “Okay, but also, can we go back to the part where you said writing about his family tragedy is a cop-out, because—”

  “Let’s help me pick a topic first,” Sunny said. “I literally have nothing like that. My essay is just going to be Hi, I love UCLA, I’ll do anything, please let me in.”

  “That’s where some of your friends are, right?” Grace said.

  Sunny had a group of queer friends she knew from the internet. Most of them she’d never met in real life, but one, Dayna, lived in LA and Sunny had met up with them the last time she’d gone to visit her cousins. They’d made her an elaborate, multicourse meal of Malaysian dishes and taken her to an open mic night. Sunny had been enthralled by their friends—Dayna had had to leave home after coming out to their parents, and had built their own kind of family in its place—and also radiant with joy, sending us probably a dozen video clips of the performances and pictures of the food, but when I said it sounded romantic she’d said it wasn’t, that she wasn’t Dayna’s type and they were just generous and open that way. I thought she might like them, but she always brushed it off. I followed some of her friends on social media—most of them didn’t follow me back, which was fine; they were important to me because they were important to her—and I always wondered if she ever told them she felt out of place with us, or she didn’t think we understood her.

  “Just Dayna, but they’ll probably be somewhere else by then for college,” Sunny said. “It was more just—I swear sometimes Congress Springs is like so aggressively straight, or maybe that’s just high school, and I loved the whole scene there.”

  She’d talked about wanting to be in LA for years now. As for me, all I wanted in life was what we had now: our Wednesday breakfasts and study sessions and hours holed up at the library or a coffee shop or each other’s homes, the performances and rehearsals together, how at any given point in the day I knew where they were and probably how they were doing. For years I had harbored a secret, desperate fantasy that we would all go together to the same college. I would give anything, I would do anything, to matter more to them than whatever unknown lives beckoned them from all those distant places.