Brilliant (7 page)

T
HE FIRST SHOCK WAS
J
ELLY.
I got into the car and did a triple take. It wasn’t just her new glasses, with their thick rectangular frames, or the washed-out blue of her T-shirt dress. She looked different. She looked kind of cool. In a nerdy, funky way—really cool.

She had Adriana’s address plugged into her GPS already, so we let Annoying Lady direct us there. When we turned in past the gates at the bottom of her driveway, we were both wide-eyed. The tires crunched delicately over the stones on her long driveway as we made our way toward the huge house looming in front of us, with the sun painting the sky perfectly in stripes of pink and orange behind it.

Adriana’s housekeeper escorted us through the house that looked like a hotel in Miami, all modern art and white draped fabric and cool-shaped stuff that might have been tables or stools or possibly sculptures, to the backyard,
where Adriana was hanging with a small crowd of people who were themselves draped languorously over big, square, bed-looking things arranged beside her beautiful stone pool, which was lit by floating multicolored lily pads.

“Wow,” Jelly said.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“Quinn!” Adriana yelled, unfolding herself from a group of people on the blue cushion thing. “Jelly!”

She came over and gave us each a hug like we were her long-lost aunties. We awkwardly hugged her back.

“Hey, Mason!” she hollered. “Come take some drink orders.”

“I thought we’re not drinking tonight,” answered a six-foot-tall, gelled-hair Adonis, smiling a professionally handsome smile as he approached us.

“You know the rules,” Adriana said flirtatiously to him.

“Rules are there for the fun of breaking them,” he answered.

“Quinn, Jelly, this is Mason, who is definitely not drinking tonight.”

“Hi, Mason,” Jelly said, grinning her thousand-watt, inimitable Jelly grin at him.

“Hi,” he said to Jelly, as he slipped his arm around Adriana’s narrow waist. She whispered something to him and then he turned to me, looking amused, but didn’t say anything, and then I couldn’t, either. And then, even
worse, I jumped and might have made a small squeaking noise, because another guy, right behind me, said in a deep baritone, “You must be Adriana’s new friends.”

This one had blond wavy hair down to his shoulders and bright, smiling pale eyes.

“Oh, my goodness, it’s a swarm,” Jelly said, and I had to laugh. Adriana made more introductions (the blond was JD, and he couldn’t take his eyes off Jelly) and slipped away casually herself to get us sodas at the bar on the other side of the pool.

“How have I not met you before?” Mason whispered to me, his mouth close to my ear, strangely and suddenly in my space.

“Um,” I brilliantly answered. “Well, where do you go to school?”

“Nowhere,” he whispered, and I could smell cinnamon on his breath as it touched my hair.

I backed up two steps. “Nowhere?”

“It’s July.”

“Before this. After this,” I said. “I mean, maybe we go to different—”

“I just graduated,” he said. “And you haven’t even given me a graduation present yet, Quinn.”

Adriana showed up with sodas just then. I plopped down next to Jelly, who was cracking up over some story JD was telling her, on the nearest seating thing. There was a couple making out on the other side of Mason. I
focused on the can in my hand.

“You seem tense,” Mason whispered near my head. “Am I making you feel uncomfortable?”

“No,” I said. “Yes. A little.”

“Mmmm,” he said. “That’s good.”

As I popped open my can, I inched away from him. He was too close, too good-looking, too insistent. I tried to tell myself this was just what I needed, the perfect antidote to unavailable, off-limits, not-my-type Tyler and unavailable, off-limits, love-of-my-pathetic-life Oliver. Mason. The perfect summer fling, and he seemed more than willing. He seemed interested in me for sure—in fact, he hadn’t taken his bluest-blue eyes off me. If I leaned forward two inches we’d be kissing already. I should totally go for it, I told myself, as Jelly’s laughter trilled beside me and the can sweated in my hand.

I realized I was slanting away from him, in search of my own bit of oxygen. “Um,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry, I’m not…”

But before I could explain that I was not actually interested in having this admittedly beautiful guy in my airspace, I was distracted by a clattering across the pool and gratefully turned to see what it was.

It was Oliver.

Laughing.

Walking, with his arm draped gently around a curvier version of Adriana, right toward me.

“What are you not?” Mason was asking beside me, but I couldn’t stop myself from staring at Oliver. He looked so happy, so relaxed and at ease with this girl who was clearly Adriana’s older sister. I felt my insides caving in, crushing my pitifully enduring hopes that I’d pushed down, away, for so many years, those well-tended fantasies that maybe someday I’d look at Oliver and he’d be looking just like that, but at me.

How long had I been foolishly, subconsciously making excuses to myself?
Maybe he’s shy, maybe he’s just really focused on his music, maybe he’s just different from other guys
—to comfort myself into the continuing illusion that maybe, maybe it’s not that he’s just not into me, doesn’t just think of me as the sweet girl he’s known forever who’s always had a little bit of a crush on him that she will hopefully soon outgrow. Maybe he secretly likes me but doesn’t know quite how to show it yet.

But there he was, circumnavigating the pool, proving he absolutely knew how to show it—when he felt it. His soft laughter was like being stabbed by icicles.

“What’s wrong, Quinn?” the boy beside me, Mason, was asking.

“Nothing,” I grunted.

Jelly looked away from JD at me, and then followed my eyes to Oliver. Just as she groaned, “Uh-oh,” Oliver finally noticed me.

I willed myself to look away from him and smile up at
Mason, whom I totally had no interest in right then but realized a sudden need for. His eyes truly were a magnificent color. I couldn’t help noticing Oliver’s arm dropping away from Adriana’s sister’s waist.

That helped generate my smile. “Nothing’s wrong,” I whispered up at Mason. “What could be wrong in this best of all possible worlds?”

He tilted his head, looking down into my eyes. “You have an interesting way of talking,” Mason said. “Slow and a little…off.”

I was concentrating on maintaining eye contact with Mason despite the sight of Oliver approaching in my peripheral vision. “Off?” I asked softly, not moving.

“Quinn!” Oliver said, looming above me.

I slowly lifted my eyes to him.

He smiled his gradual crooked smile at me, the worst possible thing, because I am so damn allergic to that smile of his.

“Can I talk to you for a sec?” Oliver asked me, and then thrust his hand out. “Hey, Mason.”

“Oliver,” Mason said, gripping Oliver’s hand with his own meatier hand. “How goes it?”

“Fine, thanks. I just need to ask Quinn a quick…Quinn?” He held out his hand to me, and without thinking, I took it, like I was going to shake hands with him. He pulled me up instead.

Adriana’s sister called to him from the bar, asking what
he wanted to drink. He said he’d be right there. I felt my face heating up again. When would I ever get to the point of not imagining him declaring his true and undying love for me every time he said my name?

Now,
I told myself.
That point is now, this second. I am officially over you, Oliver Andreas. Done.

It actually almost worked. I was able to look at him more objectively, like the houselights had just come on in the theater and there before me stood not some larger-than-life matinee idol but just a guy—just a guy with a spray of freckles over his slightly too-large nose, dark brown eyes, black hair in soft waves curling around his pinned-back ears, not so much taller than I am, looking with fierce intelligence into my eyes.

Oh, crap. Oliver.

I gave him a polite face like I’d give a subordinate of my mother’s. “What’s up?”

“Quinn,” he breathed, but that was not about to change my adamantly steely heart, especially not with Adriana’s sister calling his name from across the pool again, and him smiling broadly back at her, promising he’d be right there, before deigning to look at me, his little buddy from back in the day. “What are you doing with Mason Foley?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably the same thing you’re doing with Adriana’s sister.”

He clenched his jaw. “I doubt that.”

“Well, good to see you. Have fun,” I said, and started
to turn away. Adriana’s sister was on her way toward us with drinks in hand, and I really didn’t need to be there for their reunion. There was a very hot guy waiting for me.
Yes, me, Oliver, little Quinn Avery, who has—surprise!—grown up.

He caught my shoulder with his hand and pulled me toward him. “Don’t,” he whispered. “I know Mason Foley, okay? I just…don’t be yet another of his harem, Quinn. You’re better than that, okay? I don’t want you to get—”

“Hurt?” I finished for him, and the surprise on his face actually made me laugh a little. “Thanks, Dad. Glad you’re looking out for me, but guess what, Dad?”

He looked pale and defeated. Good.

“I can take care of myself. So…”

“Quinn,” he was saying as I walked away.

Forcing myself not to look back, I headed straight for Mason, and within a minute was kissing my second boy ever, and saying the name Mason over and over in my mind as I kissed him, kissed Mason, thinking
Mason
to crowd out the other name that was trying to push its way into my thoughts instead.

I
WOKE UP WITH SORE LIPS
the next morning. I’d been dreaming not about having made out with Mason Foley but about being little again, little and pretty and beloved, with black shoes that clicked when I ran across wood floors in them while wearing a party dress. In the dream, my mother was telling me we were going to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, but as in real life, in history, back then she didn’t say,
We’re visiting my parents
. She called it going home.

I hated that.

I had hated it hugely, ragefully, irrationally when I was little, though of course I never said anything aloud. I’d just leave the room when she said it.
We’ll only be home for a few days,
I remember she said to her friend on the phone as I read on the floor beside her in our apartment in London that year we lived there, and I remember thinking,
But we are already home, aren’t we?
Allison played with blocks and Phoebe sucked her thumb in her bouncy seat and Mom
talked on the phone and I pretended to read, only four but precocious, and already aware of it, proud of the reactions people subtly (they thought) bestowed upon my parents—
She’s reading? That tiny little girl?
But when my mother talked on the phone the letters hovered, slurred. I was an eavesdropper before I was a reader.

Home.

She meant it as a general description, of course. We were foreigners living in England for that one year; it wasn’t home. Home was the USA, where the people talked the way my parents did.

But she didn’t only mean it that way.

Home was
her
home, the home where she grew up with her parents and her older brother. The places where we lived, first in an apartment in New York City and then for those months in London, nine months really, not the year or years I sometimes let people think it was, my childhood in London that I barely remembered beyond my stories of it and those snapshot moments like reading/eavesdropping at my mother’s feet—where we lived even when we moved back to the States, back to New York but not the city, to the town where Mom grew up, just beyond walking distance to her parents’ house—none of those places were home to her.

That’s what made me mad.

Her home wasn’t our home, where she was right then with us, with her husband and children. Her home was a
memory. It didn’t belong to me.

Hearing her say
home
and mean not our home but her old home made me feel profoundly not sturdy.

I never admitted this to anybody.

But waking up that Sunday morning I admitted it to myself, after the dream. Her home, but not my home, and I didn’t like when she called that home
home
. It was a betrayal, being mad at my mother for that, being mad at my mother at all, after everything she did, does for us, but there it was. I was mad at her. This
is our home, you jerk,
I thought in the room I woke up in, the stark white room that screamed its betrayal at me all night as I slept and wrecked my dreams.
This is
my
home, and you are taking it away from me.

I got up and hauled myself into the bathroom to stare at my still slightly swollen lips for a minute or two. Jelly had been so happy about hooking up with JD, who actually did seem like a sweet guy, though not nearly smart enough for Jelly. She pointed out that she wasn’t planning to be SAT study partners with him, just to have fun this summer, and why not?

She was absolutely right. I was determined to want the same with Mason. I could still feel the imprint from his strong hands on my back and sides.

Enough thinking about that, I told myself, and took a long, hot shower.

I went with my father to pick up bagels and pastries
to bring to the house my mother grew up in, the house it seemed pretty clear we were going to move to. We listened to music in the car and he sang along in his happy off-key way, and then focused on choosing food in the store. He offered to let me drive on the way home, so I got in on what felt like the wrong side of the car and buckled up. He told me to check my mirrors. “You always want to know where you are compared to what’s around you,” he pointed out.

“Yeah,” I said. “That would be good.”

I backed out of the spot. We didn’t talk; we focused on my driving. At a light, though, he said, “So it looks like we’ll be moving in with your grandparents for a while.”

“Yeah.”

“You okay with that?”

The light turned green. “I guess.” I eased out. “Are you?”

“It’s going to be hard for all of us,” he said. “Especially Mom. But like everything in life, I guess, it’s just temporary. So we all have to…”

“I know,” I assured him.

“I’m so proud of you, Quinn,” he said. “You amaze me, how maturely and lovingly you are dealing with all this. Mom and I really appreciate you.”

I fake-smiled and kept my eyes on the road. I ventured a question at the next stop sign. “Are you mad? At all? At her?”

“At Mom?” he asked.

I shrugged and accelerated. “She’s the one who—”

“No, Quinn. I’m not mad. She’s the one who what? Supported us all these years? Worked in a high-risk industry and didn’t succeed a hundred percent of the time? Why would I be angry at that? Why would you be?”

“I’m not.” I retreated. “Sorry I asked.”

“You’ll learn, Quinn, as you grow up, that everything doesn’t always go perfectly. And when—not if, when—it doesn’t, that’s when your humanity is tested.”

“Fine, okay, I was just asking. I didn’t say I was mad.” I kept my eyes on the road and didn’t ask my other questions, like,
What if I want to invite friends over after school, when we’re living at Grandma’s?
Would I be allowed? And how awkward, inviting them to my grandparents’ house! Not that I ever really invited people over, but what if I wanted to? What if things went well with Mason, I was thinking (ha, ha, ha, ha, weird thought even to imagine a future with Mason) and we wanted to hang out or, like, mess around after school? Grandma’s living room? With the doilies? Yeah, right. Or the room Uncle David’s old trophies still decorated, that I’d be sharing with both my sisters? Oh, now that’s romantic.

And what about family time, just our little family? We were just not going to have that anymore?

But I didn’t say those things. I was mature and loving; I was Zen; I was just what they wanted and expected me to be. My humanity was being tested, and I did not enjoy
the implication that I was doing poorly even for a moment on that fricking test.

I did my best to ignore the dagger I could feel stabbing me through the right eye, after I checked my rearview mirror and saw it wasn’t there.

By the time we got home, Allison and Mom were screaming at each other. I rolled my eyes at Allison and mumbled that she should just wear something else. “Who cares? Why does it have to be the shredded miniskirt when it’s going to annoy the hell out of Grandma?”

Why did she always have to antagonize people?

She flopped into my room, onto my bed, to complain, and I could have killed her. “Allison!” I yelled. “Get out! Okay? I told you to get out and leave me alone! Why do you have to…”

“To what?”

“You know exactly.”

“What? Wear clothes I like? Is that such a horrible crime, Quinn? Just because I don’t dress like a middle-aged housewife?”

“I don’t think wearing khaki shorts and a white T-shirt and flats is necessarily housewifey!”

“Well, then you’re an idiot!” she yelled. “You are the most annoying person ever.”

“Then get out!” I yelled back. “And leave my Sharpie!”

“It’s mine!” She stomped out of my room with my
Sharpie in her hand and slammed my door shut on her way out.

Whatever,
I told myself. I had no right to yell at her for stealing a Sharpie after what I did. I would have to spend my whole life making it up to her.

I considered, for the thousandth time, coming clean and admitting to her what had happened. It was just wrong to carry around a lie as I was doing. On the other hand, telling her would only hurt her. She was finally feeling good about herself, after years of definitely not. She had tried to do a modeling thing, which didn’t work out. She did get a callback, but since she refuses to talk about what happened when she went for her appointment, it’s obvious she was rejected pretty terribly. That kind of thing would have sent her into a pit of despair not long ago, but she has sort of come into herself lately, or anyway, that’s what I heard Dad saying to Mom the other night, proudly. So the last thing I needed to do was smash her bud of self-esteem. I have been her protector since she was born. Even if it is me I am protecting her from, I would never want to hurt her.

First choice would be to erase what happened with Tyler, of course.

Since that wasn’t an option, I’d just have to not unburden myself at her expense. I was in control of that, at least, and it was the least I could do for her.

I just wished she’d make it easier to be nice to her. And
stop saying the word
Tyler
to me. It’s going to be such fun sharing a room with her, I thought, and with Phoebe, too, who, okay, is sweet, but right then I hated her anyway.

I hated everybody right then. Including me.

I flopped down on my bed and checked my phone.

Nothing, no messages at all, including nothing from Oliver. Still. Which, fine.

I opened my computer.

No emails from him or from Mason, either, which was also fine. Didn’t expect any, since I hadn’t even given them my email address.

None from Tyler, either. Thank goodness. The internet is such a time sink anyway. I shut my computer and vowed again not to think about that. I changed into some jean shorts, a black T-shirt, and my old high-top Chuck Taylors. And some lip gloss and black eyeliner.
Who’s a housewife? Not me. I spent all last night making out with Mason Foley, thank you very much.

In the car on the way across town, Allison insisted on having her earbuds in and the volume up, which was so annoying. And Phoebe texted her billion friends, giggling softly when they made whatever witty comments. Texting is so ridiculous. I watched the trees fly backward into the past and dreaded the day, dreaded the future of sharing a room with these two girls I would never befriend if they were in my grade, dreaded the polite smiles I would be forced to force for the next few hours.

And I eavesdropped on my parents as they discussed how right they were to reject the one offensively low offer that was made on our house.

“There will be other offers,” Dad said quietly. “We’ll do the rest of the work she recommended, we’ll hire the whatever, we’ll have another open house. It’ll work out. And if we have to move out to sell it properly, okay.”

“I swear I’d rather burn that house to the ground than sell it for that chump change.” Mom shook her head. “Lisa Lenox. That entitled little—”

“Claire,” Dad said, and glanced in the rearview at us. I pretended to be lost in thought, staring out the window.
What a fun day this is going to be,
I thought.

It was even worse than I anticipated.

Grandpa was all bellowy annoying humor, slapping willowy Dad on the back, calling each of us his special nicknames and holding our faces as he kissed us to ensure we couldn’t escape. Grandma, on the other hand, smiled her tight smile and checked us each out, including Allison’s slashed little miniskirt. Mom said, “Don’t even start with her; do me a favor, Mom.”

Grandma said, “Did I say one word?”

And then we went inside to have lunch.

Grandpa started off by offering Dad a Scotch, which he said no, thanks to, but that didn’t bother Grandpa a bit. Dad took his glass of Scotch and followed Grandpa reluctantly into the living room.

Mom stayed behind to help Grandma unload what we’d brought and add it to what she had prepared. There was a plate out on the counter, “For the girls to snack on,” Grandma said. There were two slices of cheese and three crackers on the plate, and about six or seven potato chips. There was also a strawberry, sliced in half. My sisters and I stared at the plate, doing the math in our heads.

“If you finish that, there’s more,” Grandma said, generously.

Allison took all the chips.

“What?” she said when I glared at her. “We need more chips, Grandma.”

“All out already?” Grandma asked.

“Imagine that,” Allison mumbled, and stuck her earbuds back in as she slumped down at the kitchen table to munch her chips.

Phoebe took one slice of cheese and balanced it on a cracker. I did the same. Grandma, bag of chips in hand, remarked, “Hungry girls.” And placed five more potato chips on the plate.

I caught Mom rolling her eyes as she peeled a carrot at the sink, the shreds of carrot skin falling gracefully, like spent confetti onto a paper towel.

Grandma said we could help ourselves to juice if we liked. I poured myself and Phoebe each half a glass of orange juice from the cracked ceramic pitcher she’d put out. The juice was warm. I was just going to cope, but
Phoebe asked sweetly, cloyingly, “Okay if we take ice, Grandma?”

Grandma nodded. “Of course.”

I was next to the freezer, so I got us each a cube. They were a little brownish. I tried not to notice. Grandma and Grandpa are not poor; they are very comfortable, in fact. They owned their own contracting business. They just didn’t like to be showy. They’d both grown up working-class and talked often about “showy” people, people who bought multiple pairs of shoes at a time, people who thought the opposite of
new
was
bad
.

People like—it was hard to avoid the obvious—us.

As much as I might agree about the grossness of our materialistic culture, dingy ice cubes? Seriously?

Over lunch Grandpa jovially regaled us with many stories of businesspeople he knew who had screwed up even worse than Mom had. Mort Cohen had apparently embezzled funds from his hit-man brother-in-law and hadn’t been seen in months. This one fellow who used to own the shop over in Pelham with the die-cut somethings had invested all his money in Betamax technology back in the 1980s, so he and his wife and four fat kids ended up living in a trailer someplace in Florida, and not the nice area of Florida—and this other fellow had shoveled all his money into a retirement fund that turned out to be a big nothing, and that guy, in his shame, tried to kill himself by jumping out the window of his office and only managed to break his
nose. Not even a concussion.