Brilliant (12 page)

“Good thinking,” I told him, and watched while he zoomed around in circles with his buddies, playing a more creative variation of the freeze-tag game Jelly and Adriana and I had taught them earlier in the summer.

I watched, smiling.

As we were getting into her car, Jelly got a text from JD. He wanted to meet her and hang out. She took a deep breath. “I should, right?” she asked me. “He’s really cute, and he thinks I’m cute. So that’s good. Right?”

“Sure,” I said.

She texted back,
Yes
, with an enthusiastic emoticon, then threw her cell into the backseat. “Do you mind if we listen to classical?”

“Not at all,” I said.

We drove home without talking, just listening to the music. When we got to the top of my driveway, Oliver was sitting on my front step.

“Uh-oh,” Jelly said. “What does this mean?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered.

“You want me to stay or go?”

I swallowed hard and looked at my best friend. “Go, I think. Is that okay? You have a date with JD anyway.”

“I’d cancel if you need me to. No problem.”

“I know.”

She nodded. “Mason totally asked where you were at the party we went to Saturday.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Keep that in your head, okay?”

I unbuckled my seat belt. “I will. Thanks.” I opened the car door. Oliver was staring at us still, his expression serious and sorrowful.

“And,” Jelly said, grabbing me back, “more important: I know you better than any guy does. And I know you
are
better—better than any of them.”

I shook my head. “Oh, Jelly. I’m so not.” I closed the door and headed toward Oliver.

He kept his head down and waited until I sat down next to him before he started talking.

“I owe you an apology, Quinn.”

I started to interrupt, but he held up his hand, so I shut up. “I do. I just…it’s been a weird year all the way around. I’ve changed, but people…my parents, my friends—it’s invisible and of course self-centered to think the universe shifts just because something in me changed. But that’s neither…Saturday was…I was an idiot.”

“Why?” I asked. “What did you do?”

“Well, for one thing, I never should have involved you. I mean, you said it was fine, a group of us, you didn’t mind, but still.”

I did?

“The thing is, I met Cassandra a few weeks ago, and she’s…well, obviously she’s very beautiful, and we hit it off, and I was thinking this concert, here’s a chance to, you
know, raise my middle finger to the wisdom that said you couldn’t go out one night and drink, listen to the Grateful Dead, and make out with a pretty girl and then turn around the next night and impress her with your love of Beethoven—the ‘real’ you. The real me.”

The ground was spinning under me. “Ah,” I managed, or possibly,
Ahhh…

“Tickets for the Emerson String Quartet in the Spanish Courtyard,” he continued, looking off into the middle distance. “It could hardly be better designed. One of the premier quartets in the world, performing outdoors on a perfect summer night, surrounded by maybe a hundred and fifty people, including the smartest, most amazing girl in the world—that’s you, by the way. Damn it, screw me, I was using you, too—going to impress Cassandra by how cool our friendship is, yours and mine. How unlikely, sort of, and different, deep, and…”

He shook his head at his own perfidy. I was motionless.

“I guess I was sort of thinking about how you look at me, and
get
me…you know, maybe she would…I don’t know. And the program—Shostakovich and Beethoven. How better to say to her that I am brilliant, among the elite, I grasp the highest things that man has endeavored to attain, or express. Oh, my God, could I be more of a self-aggrandizing jerk?”

“Hardly,” I said.

A small chuckle escaped his mouth. “Right. Yeah, so there we were at the concert, and I was all, ‘Yes!’ The atmosphere, for starters; has there ever been such a perfect night? These incredibly gifted, insightful, devoted musicians, giving their all to one of the greatest works ever written, and afterward, with poor Cassandra…when she said, on the way back to the car, ‘That was really nice.’”

“Nice?”

“I know. That’s what sent me into that funk on the way home. But so unfair, really. It wasn’t her fault. What did I want from her, from anybody?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What did you want?”

He shrugged. “I guess to be admired, the way…well, the way you seem to admire me, maybe. To have her think highly of me because I had access to these things. I guess I wanted the reflected glory of it.”

“Mmm,” I managed, jaw clenched.

He dropped his head into his hands. “I am just too shallow for words. To trade on one’s deepest calling so that a girl could be impressed and made more, whatever, willing…Urgh!”

“Oliver?”

“Yeah?”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“What?”

“I think you should be apologizing to Cassandra, not me.”

“Well,” he said. “Of course, but I thought I owed—”

“I wasn’t your date; she was,” I said slowly. “I was just there to hold your mirror, Oliver. I’m the acolyte. You’re right. I thought you were amazing. I always have. But you don’t have to try so hard to impress me. I don’t care that your professor thought you were brilliant. I like how you get my jokes, and how lightly your fingers hover above the piano keys before you start to play, the way you lean forward when you’re listening. I have had a crush on you for as long as I can remember, which you have probably always known. Obviously you’ve enjoyed my worshiping you from afar. Well, that’s good, because you know what? I’m done. I’m totally done. You’re even hugely impressed with how petty you are. Could you stop evaluating yourself for one frigging second and just…be?”

“Quinn…”

“Welcome to the human race, Oliver Andreas,” I continued, surprising myself at how fast the words were tumbling out, like they’d been packed under pressure until now, now that the lid was off. “We’re petty and selfish. We are all unlovable, because we are all so messed up. I thought you were different.”

“I’m not,” he said.

“Okay. I was wrong. So thanks, Oliver, for setting me straight—and for setting me free from you.”

I took a breath, finally, and looked at him. He was holding his head in his hands, just taking it. Good.

Softer, I said, “But you came to the wrong place, pal. I wasn’t the one you were hoping to get into your bed; she was. So what the hell are you doing on
my
front steps?”

I stood up and went into the house, leaving him alone there. Even though all his self-loathing could have been plucked right from my own thoughts, my own heart, there is only so much intimacy belonging to somebody else that a girl can steal and imagine her own.

T
WO HOURS LATER, HE
texted me asking if we could talk.

I deleted it without answering.

An hour later Jelly texted me, asking what had happened. I texted her: ( and asked how her date went with JD. She texted back the same: (.

I’m kind of done being fab,
she texted.

Me too.

Kind of ready for a
West Wing
marathon instead of a mad sick party this wknd…

I smiled at my phone, so squat and solid in my hand, and typed,
Me too.

I reread the good parts of
Pride and Prejudice
and was asleep before ten, then woke up early. I watched the dawn whiten the sky and took stock in the shower. Everything was kind of back to normal, really, except actually better. My silly crush was finished. I was a good girl, a nerd. So be it. I was moving out of this house into another, and then
probably another. Okay, so there it was. Just bricks and wood, plaster and granite and stainless steel, too much anyway. I had a few good friends and good PSAT scores and my parents’ approval. Not so bad, really. Overreaching just makes you fall on your butt. Time to play some Pictionary and stop both cursing and editing my vocabulary. Maybe being a good girl is a tight box to squeeze myself into, but I fit into it a lot better than into the wild-child box.

Everybody probably gets cramped, no matter which box they end up in, right? I combed my hair and slicked it back into a ponytail, resolving not to be manically cheerful, but just a somewhat nerdy, good role model for my sweet campers, who deserved more of my attention than they’d been getting.

I double-bowed my sneakers and headed down to the kitchen.

Mom was already at the door, thumb-wrestling her BlackBerry, her wheelie suitcase standing at attention by her side.

“What’s going on?” I asked her.

“What?” She didn’t look up. “Hold on. Yes, what?”

“Where are you going?”

“Chicago,” she told her BlackBerry.

“Did the settlement happen?” I asked her.

She smiled tightly without looking up from the tiny screen. “It’s in the works. Looks good.”

“So why are you going to Chicago?” I asked, aiming for a neutral delivery.
Everything is fine,
I reminded myself. “For the settlement?”

“New project.”

“Are you, like, unfired? Rehired?”

“No,” she said. “Urgh. Hold on. What? No. This is something else.”

“Oh,” I said. I waited for more, but she wasn’t saying anything else. No
Can you keep a secret?
no
I can only tell you this, Quinn, because you are my number one, my favorite, my confidante.

In the driveway, a car crunched over the gravel. “There’s my ride,” she said. “Hold down…”

“…the fort,” I finished for her, as she smoothly maneuvered her suitcase out the door. “I know. Mom? I really don’t want to move. Is there any way…”

“Oh, Quinn,” she said, once the phone was slipped into its holster and she freshly saw me there. “Shake it off. It’s just a lot easier to sell a house that’s more cleared out. Of all the stuff, the clutter.” She shrugged her bony shoulder. “That’s what the real estate agent says. So that’s what we’ll do. We’ll just take what we need to your grandparents’, put some stuff in storage. There’s a stager coming….”

“A what?”

“Daddy will explain. I have to run. You’re the best! Love you!”

“Yeah?” I asked, but she was gone.

When I turned around, my father was there, behind me.

He smiled sadly. “A stager. See, we’re learning a whole new vocabulary. She comes in and makes the house look great. Rearranges the furniture, takes some away, brings in stuff to make it look good, flowers, statues, mirrors. I don’t know.”

“A stager.”

“Yeah. This is the way it’s done. So. She’s coming to take a look today. I’m going to have to rely on you a lot….”

He said a bunch of other words: about how to decide which things would go into storage, color-coded labels for boxes, “think three months,” “support your sisters, what with Phoebe being in a cast and Allison being Allison.” I heard a few phrases through the buzz in my ears that was assaulting me at the same time:
It’s really happening; we are losing our home we are kicked out we are homeless we are lost lost lost.

“Are you okay?” Dad was asking. “Quinn? You feeling sick again?”

I managed to nod.

“Maybe it’s the paint fumes,” he suggested. “Or the lilacs.”

“Yes,” I said. “Does she ever…”

“What?”

“Listen?”

“Who?” Dad asked. “The stager? It’s not…She’s not decorating it for us; it has nothing to do with us, really. She just has a job to do; you can’t—”

“Not her,” I yelled. “Mom.”

“Mom? Quinn, are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” I said, heading for the door, because Jelly’s car was screeching up the driveway. On the way, I leaned my forehead against the cool of the stainless-steel refrigerator for a few seconds and then turned to look back at my father, his teakettle dripping in his hand as he regarded me with some level of concern.

“What’s wrong, Zen?” he asked. “You look stressed. Is camp okay?”

“Camp is fine,” I said. “I saw you. And her. Burning the papers that night. I saw. I know what she did.”

“Quinn…”

“Don’t,” I said. “I know what I saw.”

“She burned her notes, Quinn,” Dad said. “She burned her own private notes—notes that could be taken out of context if this thing ever went to trial. Everybody has doubts, Quinn, everybody. But when they’re written down and taken out of context, what is just thinking something through on paper, with all the pros and cons and worst-case scenarios—all that can sound like foreknowledge, and then decisions made can seem malicious instead of what they really are: a gamble that could have gone well but instead went the other way.”

“I saw her,” I repeated. “And I saw you. You were uncomfortable about it. Admit it, Dad. You make excuses for her after the fact, to me; you say you’re not mad, you’re proud and grateful and so supportive, the perfect husband, but you know she was wrong to do it. Bad. Criminal, maybe even.”

“No, Quinn.”

“Yes, Quinn,” I yelled. “She walks around—and we all treat her—like she’s some sort of god, but she’s so not!”

“That’s true, baby,” he said, setting the teapot down, finally. “She’s not a god.”

“But you never get mad at her. You just appreciate her. Well, maybe you’re the god around here.”

He sighed. “I get mad, Quinn. I do. You’re right. I try not to, but I get impatient, and it’s true I would handle some things differently. I don’t have all the answers, and neither does she. We’re just muddling through, same as you, same as everybody. We’re no different—”

“Exactly,” I said. “But I thought we were. She said…”

“What?”

“The Avery Women,” I said, swallowing back a ball of tears. “She’s all like, ‘We are the Avery Women. Nothing brings us down. We are special. We are never intimidated. We are so awesome.’ But we’re not; we’re not different. We’re just like anybody else. Nothing special. A bunch of petty, ordinary nobodies.”

“I never said she was ordinary,” Dad objected, coming toward me with his arms raised, like he could cuddle this rage out of me. “None of you—”

“No!” I banged the refrigerator with my fist. “I just…I don’t get it.”

“Get what?” Dad asked, stopping, leaning against the counter.

“How you can love someone so f…so flawed,” I said.

“Flawed?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to stay calm but not fully succeeding. “Flawed. Because if you just love, no matter what, like it’s not a choice, it’s just…you get what you get—then so what, you know? You may as well love a stuffed animal, or a rock, or the person behind her in the supermarket line. But if you love somebody because she’s great, because she’s extraordinary and wonderful and irreplaceable—brilliant—and then it turns out she’s not all that, in fact she’s kind of ordinary and selfish and sometimes a jerk; then what? How do you keep loving her?”

“I don’t know,” Dad said. “You just do.”

“Or,” I said, “you just don’t.”

I let the door slam behind me as I left.