When We Were Infinite: List 1

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.

Then, apropos of nothing, he turned and peered at me.

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. I was always invincible with my friends.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

But then, right before the coda, I heard him start to falter—just slightly, on that run of grace notes—and I looked, alarmed, at Mr. Irving.

While the music was technically proficient—the young musicians have clearly been hard at work—at times the sound tended toward the deconstructive, occasionally to the music’s detriment.

“What are we talking about?” Grace said, smiling, materializing in front of us as we approached our lockers.

“Your relentless and extremely unfounded optimism,” Sunny said, reaching for a sip of Brandon’s coffee.

Sometimes when I saw him, the angular lines of his face that were always both familiar and elusive to me, something inside me went off like a camera flash.

He was easily the most talented of the five of us, and it felt extravagantly wasteful to abandon that.

When the room had emptied and he was still perched on his stool, he smiled at me and said, “You know, I’ve been thinking it would be well worth your time to apply at places like Curtis or Jacobs. Maybe Berklee or something like the New England Conservatory as backups.”

I could tell him that if I thought too hard about the future I could get lost in the grimness of a world without violin, where my life would just be some exhausting job that made billionaires richer while people starved and the planet spun toward immolation...

“Have you given any thought to a possible audition repertoire? I don’t know if you’ve looked at Juilliard’s requirements yet—for the Paganini, I think you might consider the Twenty-First. And for the concertos—do you know Zwilich?”

You don’t think people should be paid a living wage to make your novelty foods?

She would have liked for us to regularly sit down and have an uninterrupted meal together, I knew—sometimes, wistfully, she’d mention it—but most nights I was doing homework and she was answering emails or paying bills or cooking for the next day, which she was doing tonight.

For a girl, it seemed, the dangers were myriad: you talked too much, or not enough; you let yourself go or your makeup looked too harsh...

And I knew from watching my mother what could happen when you squandered your chance to hold on to someone.

“Speaking of,” Sunny said, before I had to answer Grace, “Except not speaking of, I just didn’t have a good segue, who wants to go to something next week with me?”

Grace was so delighted I felt chastened that my initial reaction hadn’t been to share in her happiness.

Sunny wanted to leave a little early for Crafternoon to make sure we weren’t late and the whole time we were driving Grace messaged us screenshots of her and Chase’s conversation, which was almost exclusively him flirting in a way that felt entirely devoid of substance.

I didn’t want to be pettier. I wanted to be open and generous and uncomplicated, welcomed and embraced by the world.

He picked me up first, and when I got in he said, “Congrats on being my inaugural I-can-drive-people-around-now ride,” and then we drove the seven minutes to Jason’s.

His father was breathing heavily, a raspy sound, and when he spoke to Jason again, his voice was careening out of control, almost yelling.

Jason stumbled backward, his feet making a syncopated, staccato thudding sound on the hardwood floors, before he lost his balance and fell.

I thought how if he were badly hurt or if he were going to have some sort of breakdown, he wouldn’t be breathing like that; it would be raspy, or erratic.

I thought how if he were badly hurt or if he were going to have some sort of breakdown, he wouldn’t be breathing like that; it would be raspy, or erratic.

He held his fists next to each other in front of his chest and pantomimed snapping something—his heart, I supposed—in two.

But Grace had curfew, and Sunny’s parents had already called asking where she was before we left the restaurant, and my mother had sent me a message, too (You should get a good night's sleep before school starts again!—which seemed like a missive from another universe altogether).

The sound reverberated off the walls of his car, and I felt it pass through me like a current, like a finger grazing across a power strip’s exposed prong.

In his room, there were clothes strewn everywhere and notebooks scattered, like always—“Do you just, like, randomly strip wherever you’re standing?”

It had started as a group chat minus Jason, so Brandon and I could tell them the whole story, which we’d done haltingly, clumsily, and then when Sunny and Grace had gone to sleep Brandon had called me.

I imagined her indecision, the hapless, feckless worry that would exude from her, and it felt worse than doing nothing.

I imagined her indecision, the hapless, feckless worry that would exude from her, and it felt worse than doing nothing.

It wasn’t the point of the conversation, I knew that, but that circle drawn around them, me outside it with my naive ideas about telling Mr. Irving or calling 911—it stung.

I knew he was thinking what I was—that of course it was dangerous but also that the word felt all wrong there, that our whole conversation felt so sterile and lifeless held up against last night.