When We Were Infinite: List 4

by Kelly Loy Gilbert
Beth, Sunny, Grace, and Brandon make a vow to protect their friend Jason, but tensions strain their relationships with one another.

This list covers the pages 190–261 in the 2021 Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4, List 5
40 words 6 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. supersede
    take the place or move into the position of
    But I could imagine telling him I was going to Berkeley—that would be (I hoped, at least) enough to supersede whatever else had happened.
  2. litany
    any long and tedious address or recital
    Or maybe I shouldn’t have told him about the child support; maybe it made me seem pathetic and burdensome, and anyway surely what he wanted from me wasn’t a litany of my own relatively minor problems.
  3. fervently
    with strong emotion or zeal
    I started walking, hoping fervently it would be the right way.
  4. esplanade
    a stretch of pavement or grass for walking by the seashore
    When finally I stopped to ask someone for directions to the Campanile esplanade and we found it, the stately clock tower rising above us, Jason barely glanced at it.
  5. ostensibly
    from appearances alone
    It was some kind of ostensibly Indian fusion buffet, decorated with the brightly colored tapestries half the stores here seemed to be selling when we’d walked by.
  6. languish
    fail to progress or succeed
    “Your reviews just languish on the internet, lonely and—”
  7. eschew
    avoid and stay away from deliberately
    As if you could be that person who went on tours abroad with your wife and kids, who eschewed the local cuisine in ways that your kids poked fun at later, and all the while be someone who’d done what Jason’s father had.
  8. superfluous
    more than is needed, desired, or required
    I could see myself, could see the two of us, through Evelyn’s eyes: how superfluous I was, how deeply I was failing to live up to what Jason had offered me.
  9. superimpose
    place on top of
    I pictured him at home that night, alone, replaying the day and trying to superimpose it over the future we were all supposed to share.
  10. chasm
    an unbridgeable gap, break, or disagreement
    Maybe I thought everything would be safer or more secure, or that I would magically become different—that I would be enough for him, or at least a better version of myself. But that didn’t happen, and so often I felt that same chasm between us and didn’t know how to cross it.
  11. aneurysm
    an abnormal bulge caused by weakening of an artery wall
    My father’s father had died suddenly of an aneurysm, and my mother’s father had had a heart attack in his forties, and maybe whatever it was that had gone wrong in my body, whatever it was that was so obvious right now to my friends, wasn’t survivable.
  12. garbled
    lacking orderly continuity
    The words felt garbled and breathless.
  13. earnest
    characterized by a firm, sincere belief in one's opinions
    She always assumed I was so much like her. She felt, it seemed, that I was entirely hers. In the car with her there, so earnest and oblivious, I felt claustrophobic.
  14. perfunctory
    as a formality only
    And if it did, maybe everything would be like it had been today about Jason: Brandon calling in a perfunctory way, duty done; Sunny skeptical, Grace making behind-the-scenes plans with Chase.
  15. reflexive
    without volition or conscious control
    I’d still been checking my email reflexively—it probably wasn’t an exaggeration to say a hundred times a day—but was it possible I’d missed it?
  16. appease
    cause to be more favorably inclined; gain the good will of
    And my friends had applied all over to appease their parents—Sunny and Grace, I remembered, had applied to NYU, and Sunny and Brandon had both applied to Columbia, and Grace had applied to Barnard, too.
  17. accrue
    grow by addition
    It still had the balance from the limo plus whatever interest was accruing (I’d deleted another email saying I had a new statement; I knew the interest was probably staggering by now, but I couldn’t bring myself to look).
  18. staggering
    so surprisingly impressive as to stun or overwhelm
    It still had the balance from the limo plus whatever interest was accruing (I’d deleted another email saying I had a new statement; I knew the interest was probably staggering by now, but I couldn’t bring myself to look).
  19. cliched
    repeated regularly without thought or originality
    I wouldn’t have brought it up in case it seemed clichéd or needy, but I hoped that Jason would be into Valentine’s Day.
  20. burnish
    polish and make shiny
    Inside was a necklace, a delicate gold chain with a small, gold-wrapped rectangular pendant that I thought at first was some kind of glossy, burnished stone, but when I looked more closely it was something else.
  21. wane
    become smaller
    Maybe that was why, around then, I began to worry that a shift was happening with my friends—I was worried, specifically, that Sunny and Brandon and Grace’s concern for Jason was waning or that we were drifting apart.
  22. exhaustive
    performed comprehensively and completely
    Before, whenever Sunny or Grace was into someone, it had felt almost like a group project for the three of us: an endless stream of discussion, an exhaustive dissection of virtually any interaction between them and whoever the other person was.
  23. stilted
    stiff and strained; lacking natural ease
    Talking with her like this—it felt stilted, yes, but also I’d been missing her, and in some ways it would be a relief to tell her what it was really like most of the time with him, how gripped with fear I still was so often, how distant he so frequently seemed, how inadequate I felt.
  24. incongruous
    lacking in harmony or compatibility or appropriateness
    "Am I happy?” I repeated. It struck me as a bizarrely incongruous question: Jason had nearly died, and my happiness felt like the least important thing to focus on.
  25. cavalier
    showing a lack of concern or seriousness
    But that was the first time I was glad I wasn’t Grace, and glad
    that I wasn’t like her. Because there was something so cavalier in how willing she was to brush off what had happened, something that seemed a stab of disloyalty to me.
  26. amiss
    not functioning properly
    I called my mother once we landed, as I’d planned, to tell her I was going to stay at Sunny’s that night to work on a video project, and I got her voice mail, which meant, probably, that she was in a meeting and she hadn’t noticed anything was amiss.
  27. teeming
    abundantly filled with especially living things
    The halls were teeming with parents as we made our way to one of the designated warm-up rooms.
  28. cacophonous
    having an unpleasant sound
    I wished I could listen to him longer, could try to center myself there in his playing until I felt better. But it was cacophonous in the room, and my slot was first, and I needed to prepare.
  29. apathy
    an absence of emotion or enthusiasm
    I felt how little they cared about me, how impenetrable they were, and yet here I was in the face of their apathy, implying, by my presence, that I thought I deserved to be heard and watched and considered.
  30. subsume
    contain or include
    The music had subsumed me, and it was strange to try to describe that as it went well or I did okay.
  31. facade
    the front of a building
    The buildings were shorter here—the sky closer, a blanket swaddling us—and there were more trees, and all the facades were brick and had wrought-iron gates.
  32. denouement
    the outcome of a complex sequence of events
    And it was a denouement of sorts—when you play in an orchestra your whole life, you recognize a decrescendo...
  33. lacquer
    coat with varnish
    One of the Los Altos players overshot the basket, and the ball thudded against the wall, the sound echoing against all the lacquered hardwood and metal bleachers.
  34. exuberant
    joyously unrestrained
    He was drenched in sweat, and he looked exuberant—we were up by eighteen now—and he pretended he was going to hug Sunny.
  35. gamely
    in a plucky or sporting manner
    His parents had both taken off work to see him come play, gamely accepting the plastic pitchforks and waving them around whenever we scored.
  36. pith
    spongelike central cylinder of the stems of flowering plants
    As the plans were taking shape, the day unfurling, I watched Jason, who was meticulously peeling the pith off an orange.
  37. fraught
    marked by distress
    I wondered if San Francisco felt fraught to him still, if it always would.
  38. adversity
    a state of misfortune or affliction
    “Because of everyone’s parents’ absurd property taxes. You’re still paying for your kid to go to a good school. Are they going to do that adversity score thing on college applications? Everyone here will score like, point-five.”
  39. innocuous
    not causing disapproval
    “Why should someone have to be in a good place to be in a relationship?”
    “Gee, I don’t know, maybe so they don’t blow up over completely innocuous questions at lunch?”
  40. traipse
    walk or tramp about
    We traipsed all over town, my mother armed with sunscreen and my father with his Nikon, which he aimed throughout our visit at the painted wooden spokes of the Giant Dipper, at the reflection of the clouds in the wet sand after the waves had receded.
Created on Tue Nov 30 12:39:22 EST 2021 (updated Tue Dec 14 15:08:16 EST 2021)

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