Brilliant (2 page)

“Fine, forget it,” she said. “Sorry if we can’t all be as Zen-perfect as you. Because I swear, if they painted my room? I mean, did she even ask you first?”

“No,” I said.

“And it’s just…you’re fine with that?”

“No,” I admitted. Behind me I heard Mom open her shoe closet.

“But you just deal. I know, I know,” Allison rambled on, volume increasing. “The Situation. Right, but you know what? If it were my room? I would not be all blissed out like you.”

“Hey, girls?” Mom called from her room.

I had to get out of there. Her shoes were dangling from my fingertips. What if these were the ones she was looking for?

“I’m not blissed,” I whispered to Allison, nudging her toward our rooms, away from Mom.

“Girls?” Mom repeated.

“I can’t believe you painted Quinn’s room!” Allison yelled toward Mom. “That is the crappiest—”

“Allison, don’t start, please,” Mom yelled.

“Let’s go,” I growled at Allison, hinting urgently.

But Allison yanked her arm away from my grasp. “If you are too la-la-la to speak up for yourself, somebody has to,” she said, and stormed into Mom’s room. “If you ever did that to me, I swear I’d tear the house down by hand! How could you?”

“Allison Avery,” Mom barked at her. “I did not ask your opinion. Now you march your obnoxious self out of my room and quit trying to butt in where you don’t belong. It’s Quinn’s room, and she, thank goodness, is mature and reasonable, so…”

I didn’t hear the rest. I closed the door of the room that had been mine but was now a weird avant-garde-movie-set shiny white, and leaned against the still-sticky door until my heart returned to a life-compatible rhythm.

Then I yanked out my underwear drawer. I quickly tucked Mom’s loud, sexy, out-of-place shoes in there, way in the back, beneath some old bras, and closed the drawer.

I figured I’d just return the shoes when Mom was out sometime, and the whole shoe-stealing incident would be past, just a weird little blip in my excellent, smooth, admirable life.

I
SLEPT IN THE GUEST ROOM
because of the fumes, and when I woke up the next morning for camp, I had no idea where I was. By the time I figured it out, I had only ten minutes to get ready before my best friend, Jelly, was due to pick me up. I dashed through my room, pausing only microscopically at the blinding whiteness on my way to my bathroom, where I brushed my teeth and flipped my hair into a ponytail, clonking my head on the corner of the sink in the process, which caused me to choke violently on the toothpaste. I was on my way down the stairs when I heard Jelly’s distinctively tooting beep.

My parents and Allison weren’t around. Phoebe was trying to convince Gosia that Allison’s flip-flops belonged to her, and also to please get the dirt stains off them somehow before Allison woke up and saw. While Gosia was explaining in her patient, lightly accented voice that dirt stains are almost impossible to remove, I said good-bye to
them and stopped the door from slamming behind me.

Jelly had rap music on loud. I turned it down. “You can’t actually like that stuff,” I said as she backed her huge car expertly down my driveway.

“I don’t,” she admitted. “But how cliché would it be if I only listened to classical, right?”

“If the shoe fits…” I started, but that reminded me about the stolen shoes that were hiding in my underwear drawer. Would they fit me? Probably not, and it wouldn’t matter. I wasn’t ever actually going to wear them anyway! So I shrugged and leaned back in my seat.

“Even if the shoe fits, you don’t have to wear it,” Jelly argued, bopping unconvincingly to the beat. “There are other shoes that’ll fit, too.”

Jelly (whose birth-cert name is Jill, but nobody ever uses anything but the name her older brother, Erik, gave her at birth: Jelly) is what she calls Jew-panese (her mom is Jewish, her dad Japanese), and so, according to her, has a double dose of You Are Such a Grind, genetically. The fact that she is also an actual grind made shirking the label that much harder.

“Maybe we should just embrace the fact that we are nerds,” I suggested, as she flew down the entrance ramp onto the highway, while surreptitiously checking her mirrors.

“No, Quinn,” she insisted, opening all the windows simultaneously with the long fingers of her left hand, while
maintaining a cool eight miles over the speed limit (she had read on a website that police radar is set to nine miles above the speed limit). “Don’t embrace nerd status. Just because we study hard for every test and floss our teeth doesn’t mean we can’t also have a hidden wild side. We actually might! Do not go gentle into that nerd night. Rage, rage, against the dying of the possibility we might seem cool to somebody someday.”

“Okay, okay.” I smiled and leaned my head on the shoulder strap of my seat belt. “That’s really likely, by the way.”

She smiled her lopsided smile. “Maybe to somebody extremely minimally observant.”

I considered telling her about my room, but I honestly just didn’t want to deal with thinking about it. Eight hours of being away from home felt, for the first time ever, like a gift, or a vacation.

The underprivileged campers weren’t coming until the next day, so we overprivileged staff were doing team-building kinds of stuff, which I was dreading, but which ended up being less stupid than I’d feared. Luckily Jelly and I were placed together, counselors of the Hawks, along with a girl named Adriana Dominguez.

Jelly and I shot a look at each other when we met her. She was stunning even before she smiled, but when she turned that wide grin on us, it was hard not to be dazzled. She’s the kind of person you really don’t want to like:
too beautiful, fashionable, confident. But she was, to add insult to injury, really friendly and nice, too.

She was going into senior year at the private school named Chadwick, up-county from us. When we went to get water during a break, Jelly said, “I think I may be allergic to Adriana. She is too flawless; it hurts my eyes.”

“Maybe she’ll turn out to be minimally observant,” I suggested.

At least that made Jelly laugh.

Later in the day, when we were slumped on the hill listening to the music counselors do their end-of-camp-day songs, I blurted out that my parents are selling our house so they painted my room white.

Jelly’s jaw dropped. “Wait, what?”

“That sucks,” Adriana said, holding out a pack of gum. I took a piece. Jelly didn’t even seem to notice; she was staring so hard at me.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Sucks.” I folded the gum into my mouth. I almost never chew gum.

“You’re moving?” Jelly asked. “Quinn, what?”

“Just downsizing,” I said, trying to sound casual and not choke on the gum while talking. “You know, the economy.”

“Yeah,” Adriana said. “Your dad lose his job?”

“Mom,” I said.

Jelly sucked in her perfect rosebud lips. I hadn’t said anything to her about Mom, but I figured she knew
anyway. The fact that she didn’t ask anything confirmed that. For all I knew, there was stuff about it in the papers. Jelly read them; I didn’t. Especially now.

“What does your father do?” Adriana asked.

“He’s a kindergarten teacher.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“So your mom is the money?”

I shrugged. “Well, was.”

Adriana nodded. “Huh.”

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said, and flashed that smile again. “Just…different. Must be hard on your dad, you know, emasculating, all that. You know how guys are.”

“No,” I protested. “It’s not—”

“Well,” Adriana interrupted, throwing one arm over my shoulder and the other over Jelly’s, like we were her longtime best buds. “If the home front sucks, we’ll have to make sure the rest of your summer doesn’t, right, Jelly?”

“Absolutely,” Jelly agreed quietly. “You’re not moving away, though, right?”

I shook my head and spit my gum into my hand. My jaw was already exhausted.

“I’ll find us some fun, for sure,” Adriana was saying, meanwhile standing up and brushing the grass off the back of her short cutoffs. Her gauzy shirt came down almost to the bottoms of them, and her thin multicolored bangles
clanked cheerfully as she whipped her long billowy curls over her right shoulder. Her nail polish was complicated. I was trying to figure out what was drawn on her nails when I realized she was squinting down at us. “You guys aren’t going out with anybody already, are you?”

Jelly and I both shook our nerdy heads.

“Excellent,” Adriana said. “Blank slates.”

T
HAT NIGHT, WHILE
I
WAS
fast asleep in my/not-my room, Allison was suddenly there, too, in my bed, whispering furiously to me. I was nodding at her before my eyes were open,
shhh
ing her, trying to hold on to the remnants of my dream.

Oliver was in it. Something nice was happening, maybe a boat? A canoe. We were together in a green canoe with wooden oars in our hands and no lifejackets on. Were we on the lake in camp? But wait, there’s a strict lifejackets rule at camp. And there was a fire, maybe a campfire but maybe it was a forest fire, but we weren’t in the forest; we were in a canoe, on a lake; maybe we were escaping from the forest fire, escaping by canoe. But no, that didn’t make any sense; Oliver wasn’t even working at my camp, so where were we…?

As soon as you try to apply logic to a dream it gets annoyed and pops like the soap bubble it is. I opened my
eyes and tried to focus on my gorgeous, stressed-out sister’s furious face, still wishing I could get back into that canoe.

“They’re fighting,” she was whispering. “Well, not fighting exactly, but, like, whispering and then getting louder and then nothing at all and then whispering again, you know? Like fighting but not fighting really, just kind of discussing while stressed out and thinking but not positive that we’re asleep?”

“Who?” I managed, my eyes drifting closed again. I could smell the forest fire or campfire again; I was near it. If I could go right back to sleep, the dream might still be lingering, with Oliver behind me in the canoe….

“Quinn, what, are you kidding or are you the stupidest frigging genius ever? Them! Mom and Dad. And what you said totally isn’t true, Quinn; I’m serious.”

This is the way Allison always talks, and even when I am fully conscious it is sometimes hard to keep afloat on the whitewater churning of her emotional tirades, canoe or no canoe.

“Okay,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Okay.”

“Okay, you agree you were lying, or okay, you are finally conscious?”

“Um,” I answered.

“Because she totally did it.”

“Who? Mom? Did what?” I almost asked,
Started the forest fire?
But I had crossed just far enough into
consciousness that I realized the forest fire was in my dream, was probably something Freudian about my apparently undying crush on Oliver. Monday nights were always rough that way, because my piano lesson was on Tuesdays. I yawned to block questions about my dreamworld out of the conversation, then asked, more annoyed than I meant to sound, “What are you talking about, Al? It’s one in the morning.”

Allison rolled her eyes at me. They still had remnants of smudgy black eyeliner on them. Allison had in the past couple of months emerged from her long, petulant, frown-filled hibernation in awkward adolescence as a head-turningly gorgeous girl. People literally turned their heads and stared at her now, and not (anymore) because she was throwing a tantrum. Well, not always, anymore. She wasn’t pretty, really. I was, if anything, more of a pretty girl, or I always had been when we were little. I’m not saying I was any great beauty even back then. I mean pretty like fine, okay, pleasing. That was me. Allison was stunning suddenly. That’s the word adults whispered about her. The boys throughout the high school used the excellent SAT vocab word
hot
instead, including the absolute hottest guy in
my
grade, who dogged Allison for a month before she deigned to start going out with him.

“What happened?” I asked her slowly, hoping to erase some of the nastiness that had menaced my last attempt, and also to hand off some bit of calm, which she desperately needed, as always.

She rolled her gray eyes again. “I just told you,” she whispered. “Were you even listening?”

I knew that if I just sat still and silent, Allison would repeat whatever crisis she thought was brewing and had apparently told me in detail while I was fast asleep, escaping fires in a canoe with Oliver. As it was occurring to me that Dr. Freud would not need to be woken from the dead to interpret that most obvious cliché of a dream, it turned out I was right. Allison launched back into her crisis.

Allison was once again convinced—and trying to convince me—that despite all the evidence I’d marshaled, Mom had
not
been scapegoated by the jerk men on her team. Despite the fact that they are a
team
, and make decisions as a team, despite the fact that no trades or decisions can be made except with at least three of them signing off on the decision, Allison was convinced that Mom somehow managed to get around all the safeguards and invest millions (literally many millions—we had heard a bunch of different figures, but the one that kept recurring was $214 million) in a company, Galen, that, rather than curing cancer, like Mom thought it was about to do, was actually skidding down a steep hill toward bankruptcy.

As usual, I tried to calm Allison down. I tried to explain the structure of the hedge fund (as if I understood it myself) and why it was impossible, implausible, ridiculous to imagine Mom could have made $214 million disappear all by herself.

“She was a woman in the boys’ locker room,” I
explained. “You remember I did that report on women last year, on what happened when they first let women into the military, the firefighters’ union, and even men’s colleges? The first women were subjected to all kinds of brutality, scapegoating, and worse….”

“Yeah,” Allison grunted. “Except I am not talking about your damn homework, Quinn. I am talking about Mom. And maybe she did deal with a lot of that, whatever, misery…”

“Misogyny,” I corrected, in spite of myself, not wanting to be a prig, but it was the middle of the night, so my social defenses were weak. “Irrational hatred of women.”

“Whatever!” Allison sprang off my bed to pace around my cluttered room. “What I am saying,” she whispered, “is that Mom is the one on the line here, not because the other guys are jerks, which they probably are. But because she did something way bad.”

I flopped back down on my pillow. “You just hate her.”

“Fine.” Allison stalked toward my door.

I propped myself up on my elbow. “You just automatically assume that if something bad happened, it must be Mom’s fault.”

“No,” Allison snapped back. “You just automatically assume Mom is as perfect as you are, so
nothing
could ever be her fault.”

I pulled my pillow over my face and breathed in the
slightly sweaty smell of it. There was no reason to have this argument for the billionth time in the middle of the night. I heard my door swish open. I figured Allison was heading back to her room, or maybe to go wake up poor Phoebe and fill her with the worry Allison was clearly incapable of keeping to herself. Just as I lifted the pillow off my head to warn her to leave Phoebe alone, Allison’s face loomed beside mine again.

“Yikes.” I gasped.

“But think about this,” Allison whispered. “If she’s so innocent, why is Mom burning her papers in the fireplace at one in the morning?”

I sat up. Allison’s face was all blotchy. I asked if she was sure and, her eyes open wide and scared, Allison slowly nodded.

My mouth was suddenly dry. I licked my parched lips with my sandpaper tongue. Trying to calm my pounding pulse, I breathed in through my nose and smelled it: the unmistakable nondream smell of a fire.

“She’s burning papers?” I whispered.

“Yeah.”

“You’re sure? Because if there’s just a fire we should—”

“I’m sure,” Allison whispered. “I was watching. She’s pulling them out of a binder and crumpling them and putting them in the fire.”

I threw my covers off and followed my sister out of my
room. We tiptoed down the front stairs, skipping the fifth and seventh steps (the squeakers) and pressing close to the banister so we wouldn’t bump the pictures on the wall. We could hear the crackling of the fire and my father’s worried whispers.

“Claire, please,” he was whispering.

We missed her next words because papers were being crumpled, but then heard her whisper fiercely, “my own private notes, my own private thoughts”—
crumple crumple
—“no right to”—
crumple crumple burn burn burn.

“Indictable,” he whispered back.

I wanted to get a look. If my mother was burning her papers, papers that were important in a legal case, and she wasn’t supposed to, she could end up in jail. Her lawyer was a business lawyer; she had told me that—she had explained it to me very clearly, privately, not to my sisters but to me, because I am the oldest, the one she can count on, the one she knows would worry and project forward with
what if
,
what if
,
what if
. So she was very clear to me that this sphere of a man was a business lawyer; she was retaining him (
retaining
, that was the word she used, as if he was something she was keeping around like on a leash, just in case without really wanting to, almost accidentally, retaining him like retaining water) to handle issues of her severance pay, the terms of her leaving the company, how they’d word her letters of recommendation and something about a noncompete clause. I didn’t follow all of what she
was saying but I pretended to, because I wanted her to be able to talk to me in her fast-word shorthand, to trust me—and the important thing was that this Weeble of a lawyer was there to negotiate contracts for her, not to protect her from jail. She hadn’t done anything wrong.

She was blameless.

Allison was blaming her but Allison was always blaming her. If Allison didn’t get her homework done it was Mom’s fault; if Allison overslept or got a zit it was Mom’s fault.

But of course, in fact, it was not Mom’s fault—neither Allison’s zit nor the need for a lawyer. Obviously.

I moved down another step. It was June, late June, a heat wave, and after one in the morning. If there was a good reason for my parents to be making a fire in the family room, I was having trouble coming up with it. I turned to look at Allison, to signal her to be very quiet, and, slightly off balance, knocked with my left shoulder into an etching they’d recently bought by some old Dutch artist who wasn’t Rembrandt, but almost.

Allison and I both froze.

Mom and Dad stopped moving behind the wall. “What was that?” my mother whispered, and her normally absolute voice sounded trembly.

Allison tugged my T-shirt at the shoulder, pulling me urgently upstairs.

“I’ll see,” Dad said. His footsteps started toward us.

I couldn’t move.

Allison tugged again. Her face was intense and urging:
Come! Hurry! Now!
I couldn’t remember how to make my muscles obey my brain.

If I stayed they’d find me there; they’d know I knew. It would all be out in the open. How awful. But…honesty, I thought. The best policy. Oh, great. Clichés, just the weapon I needed.

Something clicked in my nervous system. I dashed up behind Allison and didn’t look back. At the top of the stairs we split—she went left, to her room; I went right to mine. I dove feet-first into my bed and slid quickly down under the blankets, between the cool three-hundred-thread-count organic white cotton sheets. I snuggled my head down into the well of my still-dented pillow and pretended to sleep, sure my telltale heart would give me away if my father had followed us up the stairs.

The next thing I knew, the sun was coming through my window.

I brushed my teeth carefully, concentrating on my morning routine, washing, moisturizing, smoothing my ponytail, choosing soft white socks and my camp shirt.

In the kitchen, watching our moody toaster work on a whole-wheat English muffin for us to share, Mom teased me about having passed out so early because I was worn out from anticipation of being responsible for so many kids.

I fake-smiled, like a twitch, and agreed, “Yes, it is definitely exhausting.”

Not wanting to meet her eyes, I watched the toaster, too. Mom sighed. Together we saw our English-muffin-to-share suddenly ignite inside our crazy toaster. As Mom tried to douse the flames, I tried not to breathe in the scent of burning.