Brilliant (4 page)

T
HE NEXT MORNING
A
LLISON
was in the kitchen when I got down. I knew better than to ask what was going on, or why she was awake. I went straight to the fridge to get the milk for cereal. There was barely a drop in the whole container.

Without turning to her, I asked, “Did you drink all the milk?”

“You just assume it was me,” Allison responded.

I put the milk back in. Dad would want the dribble that was left for his tea. I chose a plum from the fruit drawer and shut the fridge.

Allison’s crazy cell phone was freaking out on the counter in front of her. She was staring right down at it, her head tepeed on her hands, not answering it.

A normal phone surrenders after a while and sends the caller to voice mail, but not Allison’s, apparently. It just kept right on going, playing an ABBA tune I knew I’d be
condemned to hum the rest of the day.

“Phone,” I said.

“You think?” Allison said.

“Who are you ignoring?”

“Tyler.”

“Your boyfriend calls you at eight in the morning and you—”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Oh,” I said. News to me. “Okay.”

The phone stopped playing ABBA. The silence was loud.

I wasn’t sure if I should comfort Allison, and if so, how to go about it. I’ve known her since she was born, but still. Allison is a porcupine.

Before I could choose my move, her phone started having a seizure.

“I broke up with him last night,” Allison explained.

“
You
broke up with
him
?”

“Thanks,” she said. “Nice.”

“I didn’t mean…” But of course I did. Busted. Change the subject: “That him again?”

She looked at me like I was an idiot. “No, the mailman.”

Tyler Moss was the widely acknowledged hottest guy in my grade. He went out with a senior at the beginning of tenth grade, and then fooled around with basically every gorgeous girl in the school, and then fell in love with my
sister. I am not particularly looped into the gossip chains, but even I knew everybody was saying Tyler Moss was totally whipped over Allison. They were the IT couple of the end of the school year.

He was the first guy Allison ever went out with.

And she broke up with him? I couldn’t believe it. I am a big believer in female power and the desirability of offbeat, intense, different-drummer girls. I totally thought Tyler was lucky and smart to fall for Allison, but, well, nobody would break up with Tyler Moss.

I am also serious about not prying. It was none of my business what happened between them.

“What happened?” I asked her accidentally.

She rolled her eyes. “Nothing.”

“Did he do something to you?” Allison had never even kissed a boy before, and Tyler Moss was not exactly known for his prudery. “I’ll kill him.”

Allison burst out laughing. “What happened to my sister, Gandhi reincarnated?”

“I’ll chop off his private parts and staple them to his butt,” I vowed, shocking us both.

“Quinn!” Phoebe said from the doorway.

“Who goes from Zen master straight to Mafia enforcer without passing Go?” Allison asked, smiling a bit in spite of herself.

“Seriously,” Phoebe agreed. “Holy Quinn.”

They were both looking at me with renewed respect. I
shook my head. “I didn’t—”

“So who’s getting stapled?” Phoebe asked, helping herself to a smoothie from the fridge.

“Ty,” Allison said. “It just wasn’t working out.”

Phoebe’s face drooped in sympathy. She spread her arms and gathered Allison into them. “Oh, Al,” she murmured.

I stood there like a stranger waiting for a train.

Allison’s phone honked twice. We all looked at it. Allison’s eyebrows crunched in the center of her face. She shrugged and picked up the phone. After she said hello she just sat there on a stool, listening, so Phoebe and I turned away to give her some privacy, and also to look toward where Mom’s high heels were clacking across the foyer toward us.

“The warranty on my vehicle may be expiring,” Allison explained, hanging up as Mom came into the kitchen.

“What vehicle?” Mom asked, pouring herself a cup of coffee from the pot on the counter.

“Exactly,” Allison said.

“Ew.” Mom swallowed hard. “Your father makes the worst coffee. Where is he?”

“Is everybody always up this early?” Allison asked.

“Can I go over to Luke’s?” Phoebe asked. “And can I stay for dinner, because—”

“Daddy and I may be out late; we have…” Mom checked her watch as she poured the mugful of coffee
down the drain. “He didn’t go out for a run, did he?”

“I’m going back to bed,” Allison announced, sliding off the stool, phone in hand. “This whole
morning
thing sucks.”

Jelly beeped in the driveway for me. I said good-bye and stepped forward to kiss Mom on the cheek, but she bent her head at the same instant, checking her watch, so I just kind of jolted past her.

“We have a meeting with the lawyers in forty minutes,” she said. “Where is…”

Dad flumped down the back stairs at that moment. We all stopped short and watched him walk his long-legged, loose-limbed amble into the kitchen, because instead of his usual summer look (raggedy khaki shorts, loose T-shirt, battered old Keds) he had on a dark suit, crisp white shirt, and blue tie. His hair was even gelled back. He looked like the movie star who would play Dad in a big-budget film.

“Who the hell are you?” Allison muttered.

Phoebe was looking back and forth between Mom and Dad, so I turned to see Mom’s expression, too. She was half smirking, but her eyes were soft, and her head was shaking slowly. She lifted her arms as he approached her, and as I left, they were embracing in the kitchen. Allison didn’t realize I could see her spying on them around the corner, partway up the back stairs.

I think it was the romance between them that infected my brain. That’s the excuse I made to myself anyway. I
was slumped in the front seat of Jelly’s car, my stuff in my bag on my lap, my head tapping Morse-code messages of loneliness onto the window, as Jelly alternately rocked out (when she remembered a word or two of the song playing) and talked about Adriana and the parties we’d go to with her.

Without letting myself think it through, I yanked my phone out of my bag and texted Oliver.

It was nothing huge or horribly embarrassing. Just,
Hi.
I hit
SEND
before I could add to it, or subtract.

“Who’d you text?” Jelly asked between songs.

I shrugged. “Oliver.”

“Shut
up
!”

“He texted me the other night, so—”

“He babysat you,” Jelly reminded me for the billionth time.

“He babysat Phoebe,” I argued.

“While you were there,” she pointed out. “And he got paid.”

“A hundred years ago.”

“I just don’t want you to get hurt,” Jelly said tenderly. “You know that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

I held my phone the rest of the way to camp, willing it to beep with a reply message. In fact I held it most of the day, so much so that Adriana asked me if I was waiting for my boyfriend to text me.

“No,” Jelly said. “Her piano teacher.”

“Your piano teacher?” Adriana asked, as if it were my SAT tutor or, ew, my driving test man.

“He’s hot,” Jelly quickly explained. “And in college.”

“Oh,” Adriana said, with renewed interest. “I get it. Practice, practice, practice…”

“It’s not like that,” I said. When she raised one perfectly arched eyebrow, I clarified, “At least, it’s not…for him.”

“I get it,” she said. “He thinks you’re just a high school girl.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Possibly because I am.”

“That whole reality thing,” Jelly agreed.

“Screw reality; I have a better idea,” Adriana said. We were leading the campers down the hill to the arts-and-crafts shack. Jelly and I had to wait to hear the better idea until all the campers had been seated at benches and given lanyard strings. While the arts-and-crafts counselors got them going on that, Jelly, Adriana, and I went out to sit on the steps of the cabin.

“There’s this guy,” Adriana said. “I think you’d really like him, Quinn. His name is Mason. He’s sick hot.”

“How about me?” Jelly asked. “I need somebody sick hot, too.”

“No fears,” Adriana said. “Mason’s best friend is this guy JD. He’s mad wild.”

“Perfect,” Jelly said, convinced. “Mad wild. I like that.”

“I don’t think Mason sounds like my type,” I protested. “And this JD…”

“He’s anybody’s type,” Adriana insisted. “Tell you what: you guys will come over to my house Saturday. I’m having a few people over and you’ll see if you like them. They’re friends of my boyfriend
du semaine
, Giovanni. Who is so hot it’s probably illegal. No more mooning over Piano Man, though, right? Summer is for fun.”

“Exactly,” Jelly said. “Well, fun and padding the résumés.” Jelly tilted her head toward our campers, who were already streaming out the arts-and-crafts door.

“Come on, you rungs on our résumés,” Adriana said. “Who rules?”

“Hawks!” they all shouted, all except Ramon, who slipped his cool little hand into mine as we walked back up the hill.

The Saturday night fix-up plan was revisited a few times over the course of the day. I gave up arguing. I just shrugged and went along with the idea, knowing (well, thinking I knew) that nothing would ever come of it.

It’s not that I think I suck, or am ugly, or that I am socially awkward to the point of should-look-into-a-convent. The opposite, almost. I can pass. I know I can. The pretty girls, the fashionable, socially buzzy girls, are and have always been very nice to me. Like Adriana, they tend to be, in my experience and counter to the stereotype of obnoxious “popular” girls, very inclusive. And I like them; I do—they are generally a lot more fun in some ways than my brainy friends other than (well, sometimes
including) Jelly: the smart, sardonic, depressed and depressing, poetry-quoting, black-wearing, disaffected, self-consciously outsiderish nerd friends. The social girls are generally happier, for one thing, and up for a good time. The problem is, I get a headache when I spend too much time with them. It’s the accents, the whine in their voices, the entitled attitude, the grabbing one another’s arms and whispering in one another’s ears, the in-crowd behavior that makes me feel sleepy first and then itchy.

When I am with the nihilistic geniuses I long for pastels and smiley faces. When I am with the materialistic supersocialites I fall into a pit of self-loathing and minor chords.

Hard to believe I am the easy kid in my family. I am such a pain in the ass. Nobody usually knows that, though. I am the ultimate con girl. In American Culture AP this past year, we learned about the racial issue of “passing”—there was a thing, historically, that if you were an African American who had lighter skin, you could supposedly “pass” for white and therefore were likely to attain a higher rank in society. Pretty awful, when you think about the implications of that. In my school and my life, it isn’t so much a matter of race or ethnic background. There’s a money element, definitely, though how much impact that has I guess I will find out in the coming year, when we have none, or much less, anyway. But even more than money, and way more than skin color, I think, is social grace, or interest,
maybe. Like, if you know how to whisper and laugh and say the right thing to a particular crowd, that’s who you hang with, even if that’s not who you really are.

I could pass for anything.

Well, not a jock. But I could pass for cool and hyper-social, or brainy, or even theater geek and, of course, band freak.

People usually bought what I put on display.

I had always thought of it as a skill, something good—I didn’t confine myself to one group. Also it was like a secret. I was a spy, able to pass undetected in any guise I chose, and nobody would know the real me.

Except Oliver. It has always felt like he could see right through, like he wasn’t fooled, though he was maybe amused. It’s that, I think, that makes him so irresistible to me. Not just how his butt looks in jeans, no matter what my crass sisters say, too loudly, as he leaves our house after lessons. It’s just that it feels like he sees who I really am when he looks in my eyes.

Or maybe that is all just my fantasy. My horribly deluded fantasy, and something I have to move on from.

Because he didn’t respond to my text. My phone stayed limp and lifeless as a sandwich in my hand all the sweaty day.

Nobody even wanted to let me know my nonexistent warranty was about to expire.

“Screw him,” Jelly said when she caught me checking
it on the drive home. “Not literally, of course. Excelsior. Bigger and better and sicker and wilder guys await us. Right?”

“Right,” I agreed.

“There’s wildness in us,” she insisted, making all the windows go down at once. “Before the grind of junior year starts, we have to let our crazy wildness
out
!”

So that, plus the romance of my parents and the twittering of Adriana and Jelly and their escalating plans for fun this summer with the mad-sick-wild, etc., Mason and JD, and the lack of response from Oliver and maybe even the humid heat had sent me into a bit of a crazed and desperate funk even before I got home to find the house echoingly empty until the doorbell rang.

None of that is sufficient excuse, I am aware, for what happened. I’m just saying they are all pieces of the reason.

I
HAD TO INTERRUPT MY PARENTS
at the lawyer’s office. No way was I letting those three bulky men in the door without finding out if I was even supposed to, or allowed to.

Dad answered Mom’s cell.

He answered all my questions, sometimes saying, “Hold on,” to confer with Mom and the lawyer. I had to read him the document handed to me by the short guy with the stubble darkening his cheeks. All three of them stared at me with arms crossed but not objecting as I listened to murmurs of discussion through the phone. The men seemed kind, patient, and way out of proportion for our mudroom, which had until that moment been plenty big.

“Okay,” I told Dad, but then added, “You sure?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Gotta go.”

His voice cracked.

I closed my phone and turned to the men. “Okay.”

“Can you show us where the piano is?”

I led them through the kitchen and around through the foyer to the living room. I pointed at the piano, though at that point it was probably obvious to them where the piano was.

There was some muttering and measuring, and a bit of difficulty with unjamming the second double front door, which I had actually never seen open before. It looked unseemly, embarrassing to have such a gaping opening to our house, like a girl wearing a skirt with her knees spread.

I leaned against the living room wall while they worked, then went and sat at a stool in the kitchen. It occurred to me I should probably be overseeing what they were doing, making sure they weren’t denting the walls or stealing the coasters, but I couldn’t rouse myself to give a crap, and honestly I didn’t really want to watch them removing the piano.

When the piano was out, presumably in the truck, the head guy brought me a paper to sign. “We just need your autograph,” he said jovially, but his squinty eyes showed he knew this was awkward. He shrugged with one shoulder as I placed the crinkled papers on the granite counter to sign on the line.

I closed the double doors behind them.

I tried to get up the courage to go into the living room and see it all empty and stripped, but I just couldn’t. Instead I opened both the double doors again.

I stood there and looked out at the front yard for a while.

Then I turned around and forced myself to go to the living room.

There were deep indents in the carpet where the piano feet had been. Above them was way too much air. And silence.

When it hit me that the music was gone, that we would go to sleep that night without hearing “Summertime,” listening only to the thudding of our own hearts, I sat down in the space where the piano wasn’t and held my head in my hands. I waited for tears that didn’t show and wished simultaneously for somebody to come home so we could deal together, and yet for nobody to come home because it wouldn’t be fully real until somebody did, until I connected with somebody about it.

I heard a creak behind me but didn’t look up, because only Phoebe walks that quietly, and a sudden wave of guilt had knocked me so sideways, I couldn’t face her. Obviously it wasn’t my fault that our piano had been repossessed, but I was the one who let them take it. I didn’t stop them. I was supposed to be the one who made sure nothing bad happened. Three men came and took our piano; I let them—I signed a paper saying yes, take what was ours, our magnificent grand piano that I will never play again in my whole life.

That’s when the tears came, and when the voice that said, “Hey,” behind me was not Phoebe’s.

Startled, I looked up.

It was Tyler Moss.

“Quinn,” he said.

I rubbed at my eyes like a little kid, and sniffled. “Allison’s not here.”

“What happened?” he asked.

What happened.

“You kind of…It’s a bad…”

He knelt in front of me. “Hey.”

“They took our piano.”

“Were you robbed? The big doors were wide-open….”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Worse.”

“You okay?” he asked.

I swallowed and tried to smile. “Yeah.”

He was staring into my eyes, so tender, his eyes the most intense blue I had ever seen. He mumbled some words of comfort that didn’t comfort me at all.

And then, I don’t know, I started crying again. He hugged me; I hugged him. He was comforting me, like a friend, like an old friend, even though in truth he was not my friend, not an old friend despite the fact that he was in my grade and until a few hours before that had been going out with my sister. But I was kneeling then, too, and he was holding me, right there on the rug where the piano wasn’t, and then, though I had never kissed a boy before, I kissed him.