Brilliant (3 page)

T
ODAY WAS THE FIRST DAY
with campers.

I was having trouble concentrating. I don’t think I was a great role model. Jelly glanced over at me, concerned, a couple of times, but mostly she laughed more than usual, cracking up at everything Adriana said. They were having a lot of fun.

The two of them led our campers right into the pool, and together they all splashed around like a bunch of happy ducks. Only one sullen camper refused to go in, and since I was in no mood to be a happy duck myself, I made a big deal of being willing to sit with him. His name was Ramon, and he was one of the littlest of our campers. He sat still and silent on the bench, his bright towel draped over his narrow shoulders, so serious and thoughtful, his tangled black hair obscuring his dark eyes.

My first few attempts at conversation went nowhere. I
didn’t honestly care. I leaned back against the chain-link fence and was trying not to think about my white room or my mother burning papers when Ramon announced, “I have no gills.”

“True,” I said, without opening my eyes.

“So I can’t breathe the oxygen from the water.”

“You don’t have to,” I mumbled. “You can breathe air, because you’ll just float.”

“How do
you
know?” he demanded.

“You’re buoyant,” I mumbled. I was so not up to being a role model right then.

“Not very,” Ramon said sadly, and hunched over more. “I’m bad at throwing and I don’t care about cars and I am not rough-and-tumble at all.”

“So?”

“That’s what boys are supposed to be!”

“Not boyish,” I said quietly. “Buoyant.”

He looked interested, and skeptical. I explained the principles of buoyancy and why he would float, and then that boys can still be boyish even without punching or being rough at all.

He listened intensely to everything I told him, then said, “Okay, I will swim tomorrow. I have to think about this for a while first.”

I felt so tender toward him in that moment, I put my arm around him and he rested, heart pounding, his head against my chest.

I slumped into Jelly’s car when it was time to go home. “You stressed about family stuff or your piano lesson or what?” she asked.

“All of life is stress,” I said.

“You sound like me,” Jelly pointed out.

“Someone has to,” I mumbled, but I wasn’t actually annoyed at her—I wasn’t actually annoyed at anybody; I was just in a funk that needed to be overcome—so I turned on the rap music and pretended to happily seat-dance along. Sometimes faking is the fastest route to becoming.

I was still fake-happy at my piano lesson, trying to be, as Phoebe’s stupid magazines admonish, lighthearted and fun to be with—because that’s what guys like.

My fingers could not get their act together at all. Oliver touched them lightly. “Wait,” he said. “Think first: What is this piece about?”

I hung my head, chastised. “I don’t know.”

“Good,” he said. “Excellent place to begin. Scary, maybe, but if you’re brave enough to admit not knowing, you open yourself up to what might be. Does that make sense to you?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“What do you feel when you hear it in your mind? What do you think?”

My mind was blank, so I just sat there, a tense lump of failure beside him.

“You okay?” Oliver asked me, in that rumbling baritone voice of his.

“Fine!” I smiled, or at least showed my shiny bleached teeth. Urgh, what a dork. “Anyway, though, this is my last lesson.”

“Oh?” he asked.

I shrugged, all casual, as if I wasn’t admitting for the first time, “Money issues, you know.”

He didn’t say anything. I was staring at my fingers, splayed uselessly across the keys.
Make a joke, make light of it, pass it off,
I was commanding myself, but my normally obedient self was stiffly rebelling. I swallowed, or tried. I forced my mouth back into an imitation smile, and my eyes up toward his. He wasn’t making a
whatever, no big deal
face, or turning away politely, embarrassed. He didn’t even look curious, hungry for the gossip, like most of the people who live in this town absolutely would be. He just sat still on the bench beside me, staring into my eyes.

Just what I needed. Full-body sweat. Did he have to have such piercingly intelligent eyes, if he was going to be too old for me and yet sit right beside me all smelling like cilantro, and his black hair standing up so cute in back like that? I mean, really.

“So,” I started, desperate to not cry like the baby I didn’t want him to think I was. “Anyway.”

He lifted his big, graceful hand from his lap and placed it on my shoulder. It took all of my concentration to remain
conscious and still. I had my hair in a ponytail and a tank top on. I felt two of his fingertips on the skin of my neck, down where my neck curved toward my shoulder. His fingers, so warm, melted something inside me. I could feel it radiating moltenly from the points where his fingers touched my skin, down, down.

I didn’t want to budge.

I’m not sure if I initiated the movement or he did with the pressure of those fingers, but I tilted toward him, slowly, until my head was against his shoulder.

His shirt was soft, the kind of cool silkiness a T-shirt acquires when it’s been washed hundreds of times. I could feel his chest rising and falling beneath my cheek.

“You okay?” he asked, his voice just a whisper or less.

I intended to say yes. It came out instead as, “No.”

I felt his arm tighten around me.

My sisters’ voices on the stairs wrenched us apart. I couldn’t look at him. I didn’t want to look into his face and see clearly that he was comforting a little girl the way I had comforted little Ramon a few hours earlier.

The parallels were too hideous.

The idea of Oliver loving me like I had been loving toward Ramon shot me off the bench toward the living room door.

“So, thanks,” I said quickly. “Sorry about the…lack of notice, or whatever. Hope it doesn’t mess you up, or—”

“No worries,” Oliver replied. “I just…Quinn. If you want to talk…”

“I’m not a baby!” I couldn’t look at him. “I’m fine. Okay?”

I left without saying good-bye or walking him to the door. I ran up the stairs. He was the first person other than Jelly—oh, well, and Adriana—I had told we were in financial trouble; Mom had asked us to keep family business in the family, which meant secret.
Don’t tell anybody.
I broke her trust, broke my word, traded my reliability for an embrace. And a lopsided embrace at that.

And also for what, in the case of Adriana? To seem cool and casual, to try out saying it? It was bad enough to have told Jelly. Why tell Adriana, whom I don’t even know, and Oliver, whom I love in an embarrassing little-schoolgirl-crush kind of way, which I am much too old to continue indulging when he is all brilliant and perfect and off at college and having probably dozens of girlfriends, while I sit home in my little-girl world imagining whether I could ever be good enough, brilliant and beautiful and perfect enough, to make him really notice me? Ew!

Could I please finally accept that he is just way, way out of my league, that I will never be worthy of the kind of love I have to stop wanting from him?

I slammed my door and flopped down on my bed, waiting for tears that didn’t come.
Big mouth
, I berated myself. I’d made such a big deal to my sisters about keeping Mom’s privacy and now I’d sold it out for a cheap, one-sided, nonthrilling thrill.

Why?

Just for attention?

To get him, and them, to like me? For pity?

That was just too pathetic to contemplate.

Since I wasn’t crying, I knelt to peek out my window, to watch Oliver leave. He didn’t turn back to look at me.

I took it, as always, as a sign, proof that he felt, could feel, nothing for me.

But that night was the first time he texted me:

I know you’re not a baby.

I
DIDN’T TEXT BACK,
not right away, and I didn’t call him.

The next afternoon, instead of the romantic tryst I was forcing myself not to imagine, I failed my driver’s test.

I had never failed a test before in my life. I’d gotten 100 percent on my permit test seven months earlier; the lady at the DMV couldn’t believe it. She said she’d never seen a perfect score before, in twelve years of working at the Department of Motor Vehicles. She called a colleague over to see it. The guy, who looked like he’d never said no to a Twinkie, asked me, mockingly, if I’d studied for the test.

“Yes,” I admitted, thinking,
Did I study? It was a test
.

I don’t always get a perfect score on every test, obviously, but when I get something wrong it tortures me. Teachers held me up as an example starting in kindergarten, but, really, it isn’t that I’m so brilliant the answers come easily to me or so diligent I would never shirk a responsibility as much as I am neurotic, and the pain of red Xs on my paper
is so much worse than the pleasure (if there is pleasure in it) of not studying, there’s barely a choice. Did I study? It was a test. Of course I studied.

Mom drove me to the driving test.

Dad used to drive us everywhere, do the stuff with us that most people’s mothers did, make the little decisions that had to be handled every day, especially since Mom’s work got so intense a few years ago. Allison was resentful of Mom’s business busyness, but not me—I liked it that she was the money of our family, that the world took her so seriously and rewarded her so richly (literally) for her hard work and brilliance at what she did.

Huh. Maybe it was just the weirdness of having her drive me to my driving test, her awkwardness and deeply unhelpful attempts to bond (probe) when I was trying to focus, her disorienting new need to get in my head that screwed me up at that vital moment.

Or maybe I was feeling slightly, well, disappointed in her, judging her harshly—which was so unfair and just plain incorrect that it completely threw me off my game.

Or maybe I actually suck at driving, despite my sisters’ oft-repeated belief that I am excellent at it in their impatience to have me drive them everywhere. Maybe they are just fooled about that, too.

Whatever the cause of my distraction or lack of talent during the test, though, and whatever the mitigating
circumstances—like the squirrel that truly did, whether Driving Inspector Man saw it or not, run in front of the car as I was attempting the three-point turn—it is not really under dispute whether or not I smashed into that police car.

I mean, the siren went off.

Or, rather, went on.

And on and on and on.

Nobody was injured or anything. It was a small dent. I am not trying to make excuses for myself. I agree that the driving instructor was well within his rights to fail me. Though I will admit the thought crossed my mind that this is some impressive job for an adult to have—did this dude dream when he was seventeen of someday becoming the judge and jury on whether kids who were nervous and doing their best to block out the rest of their stressful lives and focus on making three-point turns (which never in my life have I witnessed a driver actually making) without committing a small mistake like,
Whoops that is actually still in reverse!
, should be given a second chance after their profuse and, I should add, immediately accepted apologies to the cops whose car they smashed?

But what I said aloud was, “Of course, I understand. I hope your neck feels better soon.”

Then I slipped quietly into the passenger seat of my mother’s car and waited for her to drive away.

Instead, she turned to me, her hand loose on the
gearshift of her Porsche. “What happened?” she asked, not unsympathetically.

I shrugged.

“Well, of course you passed.”

“I didn’t,” I told her. “Can we go?”

“You are so hard on yourself,” Mom said. “I’m sure you did much better than you think you did.”

“Uh, no.”

“Tell me what happened,” she cajoled, her voice smooth steel like always, despite her lack of cajoling practice. “It’s probably like that time you thought you’d failed your presentation in seventh grade because you hesitated for a second, and said, horror of horrors, ‘Excuse me,’ before you continued. Do you remember? And you got an A-plus on that, if I remember correctly.”

She did not remember correctly. I got an A. I gritted my teeth. She was always bringing up that story.

“Come on, Quinn, what happ—”

“I smashed into a police car,” I said.

She blinked twice. “By smashed, do you mean—”

“Did you hear the siren?”

She clapped her hand over her mouth. “That was you?”

I tilted my head and half smiled. “Yeah.”

“No!”

I thought:
We can’t all be as perfect as you, Mom.

I said: nothing.

“A cop car?” She was actually starting to laugh. “Seriously, Quinn? You crashed into a cop car on your driving test?”

“Can we go?” I asked again, then added, “Please?”

Mom turned the key in the ignition. “I can’t believe…Was anybody hurt?”

“No,” I said. “Well, Driving Inspector Man was grumbling about his neck, but—”

“Were they in pursuit of criminals, at least? And cut you off? It was probably their fault,” she tried, racing through a yellow light.

“They were drinking sodas, parked,” I admitted.

“No!” Tears were streaming down Mom’s cheeks, she was laughing so hard.

“Air bags pop out at like the least provocation, don’t they?” I asked.

“Oh, Quinn!” She pulled into a gas station and yanked up the emergency brake in front of the pump. “Did they really?”

I shrugged. “Not in Driving Inspector Man’s car. Just the cruiser.”

Mom was laughing so hard she banged her head down on the wheel, which beeped, causing everybody to look at us. Awesome, just what I needed.

“You need help, ma’am?” a guy at the other pump asked, checking my mother out. It would be awkward if I weren’t completely used to such things.

She waved her hand dismissively. “No, no, thanks. We’re fine.”

She flung open her door and grabbed her purse. I sank down in my seat, feeling like the failure I absolutely was at that moment. Her knock on my door startled me.

“See if you can find any change,” she asked me.

“What? Where?” I asked.

“Below the seat,” she said. “Glove compartment?”

I dug down, trying not to think beyond the project at hand. After excavations with both hands, I came up with a pen, two dollar bills, eighty-seven cents, and a corner of a map showing far northeast Maine. And dirt under my short fingernails. I sorted the money out and handed it to Mom. “I have a ten,” I told her, grabbing for my bag.

“No, this’ll do us,” she said, and strode across the gas place toward the convenience store/paying place like a lady in a perfume commercial.

She had never paid cash for gas before, to say nothing about scrounging for change to buy it.

Scrounging for change in her Porsche.

She strode back out and pumped the gas expertly into the car. I had never witnessed either of my parents getting less than a full tank of gas before.

By the time she got back into the driver’s seat, all my annoyance at her for distracting me from my driver’s test with her questions on the way there about whether I had any crushes and how was camp going and was I okay with
taking a breather from piano lessons for the summer—all that had evaporated. Questions tumbled through my mind: What was going to happen to our family? Were we really going to have to move? To where? Could she even get a new mortgage? We weren’t going to be homeless, were we? And if we were, where was she going to park her Porsche? I don’t know if they have secure garages at homeless shelters. Why had she needed to burn her papers? Why had she really gotten fired?

But I didn’t ask anything.

I watched her face.

Her beautiful face, fierce eyes that could turn in a fraction of a second from laughing Caribbean blue to cold hard steel; perfect, pert nose; unlined, unblemished skin…

For the first time I noticed there were lines on her forehead. Two parallel lines shooting up from the sides of her nose, like railroad tracks splitting her forehead. Her lips were chapped; a fleck of skin tipped off the center of the bottom lip, ready to dive toward her chin but teetering on the edge of her smudged gloss. The semicircles under her eyes were slightly poochy, and shadowy, too.

My stomach clenched.

She forced another giggle, but it was not spontaneous anymore. “You have to tell Daddy about that. He will die laughing!”

That didn’t seem like a consummation devoutly to be wished, at least not in the short run, but I forced a smile,
too, and promised to trot out my failure for the amusement (hopefully not terminal) of my father, and then also my sisters. Sure, why not. If I couldn’t bring home the achievement, the certificate, the medal, I may as well perform the story of my failure for them all, I selfishly, self-pityingly thought.

Mom was right. They all loved the story that night at dinner. Nobody actually died, but all of them, at various points, did gasp for air. Especially Daddy. He was banging the table, cracking up. I admit I embellished the story in a few places, like the Coca-Cola stains on the front of the skinnier cop’s pants. It’s hard to sort out what actually happened, because now I remember it as I told it, and more than that, I remember how delighted they seemed with my story.

Even in flunking, I could bring joy to my parents.