Brilliant (5 page)

I
STOPPED AS SOON AS
I realized what I was doing.

Of course.

I really did.

Well, almost as soon.

What does that even mean,
as soon as I realized
? It’s not like I completely didn’t realize what I was doing. I wasn’t a cabbage at the moment our lips met, obviously. My brain was functioning, though clearly not fully, and my body was following my brain’s commands.

And then some.

But I was also thinking.

I was thinking many, many things all at once. One of which was,
Oh, my God
. Another of which was,
I am finally kissing somebody—hallelujah, I will not graduate from high school unkissed, and by the way, this boy I am kissing happens to be the hottest boy in my grade, hooray for me, and his lips are both soft and hard.
Another thought dashing
across my brain was,
Mmmm.

I may also have been thinking, on another track,
Kissing actually is a very lovely and enjoyable activity; now I see why so many songs are written about this wonderful thing; I must figure out how to do it again often.

I just wasn’t thinking,
Absolutely not. I cannot kiss my sister’s boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, if he really is ex.

The main thing I was thinking about in those few seconds (honestly it was no more than four or possibly five seconds) while I was kissing Tyler Moss and forcing myself not to be thinking,
No!
, was what he had said, trying to comfort me, right before somehow our bodies were mashed up against each other down to the knees (we were kneeling) and up to the lips:

“It’s just things.”

Which, okay, obviously. On one level. And for goodness’ sake, my nickname (not that I completely have a nickname, like at school, to put on my jacket if I were on a team, but from my dad) is Zen. It’s not like I am all about things.

“It’s just things”?

That’s what he came up with to comfort me, when three burly men had just removed our grand piano from the living room and left me home to be the one who already knew, when everybody else came home to find the living room excavated?

I know it’s just things
, I was thinking.

I know we are so blessed that our family is alive and intact and able to weather whatever hits us. I know what the important stuff is and isn’t, you dumb, stupid, condescending jock, with, okay, an amazingly hard body and the staring eyes. But still, you honestly don’t have to give me a greeting-card rally lesson on values. I get it. I got it.

On the other hand (and yes, I had time to think all this as I was making out with him, and no, that doesn’t mean it was an hour-long session or anything; I just think very fast), it is actually not just things that got taken away.

That piano was a gift from my mother to my father, for one thing. It has symbolic value—as a huge, shiny testament to their success and her love for him and his for her—how she gave it to him because he loves to play the piano and had dreams, unfulfilled and even unspoken beneath all his protestations of always wanting to be a kindergarten teacher, of being a concert pianist but realizing early on that he had neither the drive nor the talent to be that—my mom told me all that when she was looking secretly at the Steinway brochure for the perfect grand piano to buy for him, and maybe she thought I forgot or wasn’t paying attention, but I was; I always am. She believed in him, was what it said, sitting there all large in the living room. And he adored her, it sang, every night when he played—he played for us, of course, and for himself—but mostly he played for her, love song after love song; even a silly song like “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on
the Bedpost Overnight?” was a love song, really, because we all knew (or at least I knew) he was singing on some level to get that smile out of her.

And not to be selfish, but hello, I have been taking piano lessons on that piano for four years. I play that thing every single day. They may as well have taken away my fingers.

Or my voice.

Just things?

They even took the bench where Mom sometimes sat next to Dad, or one of us did (usually Phoebe), and also where, for the past year, I sat every week for half an hour beside Oliver.

They took the damn bench.

Seriously, how much does a damn bench cost?

Just things. Right.

But sometimes things are more than just things.

So I pulled my mouth off Tyler Moss’s mouth and opened my eyes.

We stared at each other for a second, maybe three. “Quinn…” he said.

I stood up. “You’d better get out of here,” I told him, with my hand over my mouth.

“I didn’t…” he said. “I’m sorry.”

I shook my head.

Behind me, I heard him standing up.

“Quinn…”

“Don’t tell Allison,” I said, my back still to him. “Please.”

“I won’t,” he said. “I came here to…”

“Just go,” I said, and dashed up the stairs.

No doors closed behind him. I guess he went out the splayed double doors and left them like that.

I threw open my window, too, despite the blasting air-conditioning, and lay flat on my bed for, I don’t know, hours. Forever. Trying not to think, not checking my phone or email because I certainly had forfeited any right to even hope for my own romantic anything. I pushed thoughts of Oliver and even (how did these sneak in there?) weird romantic images of this Mason person, whom I’d never met and would almost surely dislike, out of my festering head. I knew I deserved to be punished for what I had done, and that somehow, cosmically, I would get what I deserved. And I’d have no right to complain.

I always had this somewhat (okay, hugely) arrogant belief that, sure, I was extremely fortunate—materially, of course, but also in the family I got and the brains, the talents, even the actual unmagnified, perhaps puny talents I could honestly claim—blessed, really, any way you look at it. But that (here’s the arrogant part, which I never fully articulated to myself until this second) I kind of in a way deserved all that. I was a good girl. I worked hard. I was responsible. I didn’t smoke or drink or take drugs or curse
or even stay up very late. I was honest with my parents and revised my work. I didn’t gossip or wear tons of eyeliner. So why shouldn’t I have good stuff? Why shouldn’t I get the position at the camp I applied for, or straight As, win the piano competition, be selected “Best Girl” in my camp bunk? I earned it.

I had heard the phrase
the best and the brightest
lots of times in my life, and who wouldn’t want to be that? I was willing to work for it, and when I was considered that, one of the best and the brightest, well, it wasn’t unearned, right?

But someone who is “the best” or “the brightest” doesn’t kiss her sister’s boyfriend. Even if he is recently demoted to ex-boyfriend.

Even if it “just happened.” An accident, a mistake. Everybody makes a mistake sometimes, right?

Do things really just happen, though? Or was there a little part of me that, seeing Tyler Moss there in front of me with those sizzling eyes and that intense body, the hottest boy in
my
grade, not my sister’s grade, thought,
Well, why not
me? Forbidden, naughty—absolutely—but maybe for one freaking second of my life I could be naughty, grab the forbidden thing? Why does Allison always get to be the wild child? Maybe just this once it could be me?

And then, to feel him respond…Because, okay, fine, I started it, I initiated it, I admit that I caused the kiss, true—but he responded. He did. He was kissing
me back. He didn’t pull away, not instantly, anyway. He kissed me, too.

Oh, my God.

I did
not
just do that!

A girl who would do a thing like that was nobody I’d want to associate with.

Which caused a couple of problems. Like, logistically, for starters.

I heard my parents as they were coming up the walk toward home after their appointment with the lawyer. I rolled off my bed and looked at my unrecognizable self, in my unrecognizable room. My heart skittered inside my chest. I had to do something. What? I looked like Psycho Girl, the whites visible all around the irises in my eyes.

Mom’s heels were clicking just as confidently as ever on the path. I dashed to my bed and peeked over the edge of my windowsill and heard her saying to Dad, loud and clear because she was confident nobody was listening (memo to parents: We are always listening), “No, I didn’t burn my journal, because that would be spoliation of evidence.”

To which he very ethically responded, “Oh, Claire.”

“I’m just not the kind of person who’d do such a thing,” she said.

And something in me snapped. I slammed my window closed, and too bad if it startled them or they realized they were not in a cone of silence to discuss their transgressions like they were junk mail.

Apparently they noticed the open double doors. I heard them down there, but when they called to me I just said, “I’m in my room.”

I tried not to listen to them after that. I tried not to hear them discussing what was going to happen next, what was next to go, “mortgage…impossible…your mother…You spoke with her?…temporary…What can we do?…We’ll be okay….”

I put my iPod earbuds in and wrecked my hearing for a while by blasting Rachmaninoff’s entire second piano concerto.

When my sisters came home, they discovered the lack of piano, too.

“On credit,” I heard Mom explaining. “Loan…finance…terms…belt-tightening.”

“But it’s ours,” I heard Allison protest.

“Does Quinn know?” Phoebe asked.

Murmur murmur
, came the response. My excellent hearing apparently had been successfully dulled. I was glad.

I was called down for dinner. Dad had whipped up a pasta dish with cauliflower and smoked Gouda, which we all ate with fake smiles and polite conversation.

I could not look at Allison at all.

Afterward, when all the plates were cleared, while he was washing the dishes, Dad joked, “Well, I guess I could ask a couple guys to come over and help me haul the
upright up from the basement.”

“I doubt it would be worth it,” Mom muttered, then turned to us. “Girls, this is not going to be easy. The piano is only the first thing to go. You need to prepare yourselves—we all need to prepare….”

By instinct I reassured her: “Don’t worry about us, Mom. We’re fine. We’ll be fine.” But I couldn’t, this time, look her in the eyes, either.

“I’m just saying,” she continued, shutting me down without a thought, not noticing how pissed I was despite my reassurances to her. “It’s not going to be easy….”

“We’re the Avery Women,” Phoebe chimed in. “Nothing can intimidate us.”

Dad splashed her with his soapy hands. “Not even dish soap?”

“Well, maybe dish soap,” Phoebe responded.

Dad dried his hands on the dish towel and said, “Okay, then, let’s face our demons, shall we?”

We followed him into the cavernous living room. We stood there silently for a little while, not knowing what to do or where to go. After a minute or so, Dad wrapped his arms around Mom and said, “While it lasted, it sure was grand.”

She buried her head in his chest. He looked up at the ceiling, which is my trick, too, for not letting tears fall out.

This time, though, the trick didn’t work for me.

Suddenly I was on the floor, gasping for air through my sobs. My sisters hugged me, or tried, both at the same time, but I shrugged them off. I didn’t mean to be making a scene, and the last thing I could handle was their comfort.

Allison looked at me with sad eyes, and Phoebe whispered, “You loved that piano, huh, Quinn?”

Mom and Dad turned to stare at me, too, as I cracked apart all over the empty living room. They looked shocked. I’d never lost it like that before. “Quinn…” Mom and Dad both started at the same time.

I shook my head, held up my hand to stop anyone from coming to hug me. I’d had enough of that earlier in the day and didn’t deserve—couldn’t take—any more.

The caring in their faces literally made me gag, and then I had to struggle to catch my breath again. It hit me hard how much I hated that they all had this image of me: the gifted one, the pianist who voluntarily—no, let’s face it, compulsively—practiced, who gave concerts and won awards, the one who actually could, with luck and work and dedication, become a professional piano player, an artist, a master.

Not true, probably, but still, it was what they thought. And I’d let them. I’d liked their thinking it, despite knowing I wasn’t that good at all.

They were staring at me, my whole family, the people closest in the world to me, but what they were seeing was
the Photoshop version of me, retouched and improved, untrue. They had no idea it wasn’t real.

They all thought I was shattered by the loss of the piano, that my dashed dreams of myself and our family had to do with competing, winning, music, beauty, success.

They were wrong. That wasn’t what I was mourning.

Not even close.

“It’s just things,” I told them, and ran upstairs alone.

T
HE NEXT NIGHT WE WENT
to the fireworks at the high school. Adriana invited Jelly and me to go to a party with her, but I explained we had a family tradition, and Jelly said she had the same. Adriana rolled her eyes and empathized and we said good-bye with promises about Saturday at Adriana’s house and meeting JD and Mason, either one or both of whom had previously made out with Adriana. Jelly talked the whole way home from camp about how cool it would be to feel so casual about having made out with this guy and that and then, “No big deal, we can just stay friends.” Wouldn’t that be awesome? “We should totally cultivate that,” she suggested. I had to open my window for some air.

“Maybe if you made out with Mason, you’d stop obsessing about what’s-his-name,” she said.

I jolted toward her. “Who? Why do you think I am obsessed with somebody?”

“Oliver,” she said meekly. “Who you have been obsessed with since, I don’t know, ever. Jeez, Quinn. What?”

“Nothing. I’m just…in a weird mood,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Perpetual bad mood, Q. Seriously, lately. It’s July, dude. We are going to get kissed this summer, and get wild, shed our outer dorkiness. But you have to chill.”

“I will.”

“Okay,” she said. “Could you hurry, though? Because Saturday is coming up.”

“I know. But, Jelly, honestly, I am not obsessed with Oliver.”

“Yeah, right. Uh-huh. And did you know ‘gullible’ is written on the ceiling of my car?”

“Ha, ha, ha.”

“No,” she said. “Actually, it is.” She was bursting with laughter. “It is, Quinn.”

“Jelly, that’s like a fourth-grade joke. Shedding our outer dorkiness?”

“Is it?” She looked deflated. “I still think it’s funny.” She pointed up.

I rolled my eyes and looked. There, in black Sharpie, in Jelly’s beautifully perfect, neat handwriting, was the word
gullible
written small and dark against the tan felt.

I had to laugh. “Okay, I think that’s funny, too. I can’t believe you did that!”

“It’s the worst thing I ever did. How sad is that? I’m in,
like, living torment that my dad will see it and freak out. He will so take the car away. And yet, can I say I am loving the buzz of having done it?”

I laughed again. “Wish I didn’t get exactly what you mean.”

She shrugged, pulling into my driveway. “My worst rebellion is nerdy, though.”

“Totally nerdy.” I grabbed my bag and got out. “But so darn funny.”

“Let’s talk tonight about what to wear to Adriana’s tomorrow,” she yelled on her way down my driveway.

I waved and nodded, though I fully intended to find an excuse not to go when the time came. I’d been to that kind of party before, without Jelly, who’d never been invited until now. I’d explained to her, after each, that they were boring: The people who got drunk made fools of themselves and the rest of us pretended to look for somebody so we wouldn’t seem as bored as we actually were, and then eleven o’clock finally arrived and a person could leave with only shrugs and groans about unfair, though completely made-up, curfews (because my parents had never given me one, but nobody needed to know that) and not be thought a loser. Jelly was too psyched, though. She was out from behind the stacks in the library and determined to find all the glamour she imagined at Adriana’s house, with a bunch of horny, drunk boys casting their eyes quickly over and past us, for sure.

Inside, Gosia was standing beside all her stuff, hugging each of us good-bye. Phoebe had made her a card, and Allison gave her a string bracelet she’d made. They were both crying, and Gosia was trying not to. She’d never be in our house again. She promised to call and check on us, and made us promise to email her all the time. “You’re my girls; you always will be,” she said, starting another round of hugs.

I just kept looking at the ceiling, and after she walked out the door, I went upstairs.

After a few hours of hiding in my white room, I piled into the car with my family and headed for the summer-deserted high school. The five of us sat on a big sheet like we used to when we were little, but none of us could get too excited about the fireworks. Dad said “ooh” and “ahh,” especially at the grand finale, but to me it just seemed like a loud, profligate waste of money and time. The economy is in the toilet but we can blow up minibombs in the sky: Your tax dollars at work! When meanwhile some of my campers sometimes had nothing but ketchup and crackers for dinner. That’s what skinny little Ramon had told me he’d had for dinner the night before, anyway, and it made my stomach clench. It was hard to get enthusiastic about the pops and whirs with that in mind, you know? Or maybe I was just feeling sour and self-righteous.

Maybe I was sad about Gosia leaving, and about not crying when she pulled away, as Allison and Phoebe had.

Maybe I just didn’t feel like sitting on a blanket with my family.

Independence Day
, I kept thinking.
So let’s blow some stuff up. Woo-hoo. Then get some ice cream and straggle home.

Because what says independence more than pointless destruction?

I smiled; I said, “Yeah, that grand finale was amazing.” I said, “No, thank you,” to the extra fifty-cent sprinkles. Jelly was there with her family, so we all said hello to them. Her brother, Erik, talked with Mom about how much he was loving quantitative analysis at college while Jelly and I chatted with Ziva Marks, a friend of ours from school. She was having a few people over in two weeks, before she left for a summer program at Johns Hopkins, where she’d be studying journalism. We talked about SAT prep and how many APs we were going to take in the coming year, and the AP Latin teacher’s reputation as a space cadet.

There was no reason I should feel claustrophobic, chatting with friends under a clear summer sky with ice-cream cones in our hands. Okay, Ziva Marks is a total, unabashed nerd, with her terribly cut hair and schlumpy clothes, all giggly about weird stuff like memorizing the periodic table and the names of every Webkinz stuffed animal ever made, but really she is a sweet and generous friend, with a hilarious sense of humor if you catch her references. And Jelly Chen is a smart, witty, lovely girl, and my best friend. Jelly Chen is just like me—polite, focused, responsible.

Ah. No wonder I was light-headed and sweating. I wasn’t a big fan of myself at that moment, either. Anyway, I was tired and sticky and just really ready to go home. But my family was lagging as my two closest friends discussed whether it would be more fun at Ziva’s party to play Pictionary or watch a
West Wing
marathon. Maybe instead we should just watch
1776
again?

“Whatever,” I said. “Any of those.”

“They’re all fun!” Ziva squealed. “Maybe we’ll do a little of each? And eat those little pretzels shaped like portcullises?”

“I love those!” Jelly shouted. “Wowzers!”

“I gotta go,” I said. It was not just seeing Allison and Tyler talking up the hill, or him chasing after her when she stepped away from him. What was he telling her?
God, no
.

Phoebe and Dad were talking to Phoebe’s boyfriend, Luke, and his dad in front of the hardware store. Dad’s laugh ricocheted off the store windows and joined the echoes of the fireworks. Mom and I leaned against Dad’s car and waited for the rest of them.

“So Jelly’s having a party?” Mom said. “That should be fun.”

“No,” I said. “Ziva Marks. Not Jelly. Allison!”

I told myself not to think about it, not to wonder why I was so annoyed at Mom for getting it wrong or about why I was dreading this nerd-fest of Ziva’s, despite the fact that
I actually fully love
The West Wing
and Pictionary and
1776
and little pretzels shaped like portcullises.

“But you’ll go with Jelly? Is that what you said?”

I just said, “I guess. Sure. Are we ready to go? Allison! Come on! Let’s go!”

“It’s nice that she’s around this summer,” Mom said. “You always liked Jelly; you should hang out with her.”

“I do hang out with her, Mom!”

“And isn’t Ziva the one who won the spelling bee?”

“That was Jelly,” I said. “Ziva won the geography bee.”

“I thought you won that,” Mom argued.

“We tied,” I said. Tyler was holding Allison by the arms and whispering to her. I thought my head might spontaneously combust, so I shouted,
“Allison! Come on!”

“Shut up, Quinn!” Allison yelled back. But she did yank herself away from Tyler and stomp to the car.

“What did he say?” I asked Allison, dreading the answer.

“Nothing,” Allison said.

“I don’t trust him,” I whispered preemptively.

“Because he’s a boy?” she asked. “Or because he says he loves me?”

“He said that?” I asked, feeling my fingers go numb.

Allison shrugged, but the smile she was trying to force into a frown was having none of it.

When we finally got home Phoebe chased Allison up
to Allison’s room and they closed the door quickly behind them. I could hear Phoebe’s voice, all happy and excited, behind the door as I passed it going to my room.
Still my room,
I thought now, each time I entered it.
Still my room.
I didn’t even take a shower.

He told her he loves her
, I thought.

Well, better than telling her I kissed him.

Ugh.

I was unbearably exhausted and wanted nothing more than to crawl under my covers. I conked out before my head hit the pillow.

I woke up at dawn and watched the sky brighten. Dawn is always my favorite time of day.

When the transition from night was done, I opened my computer and checked my email—nothing, a few status updates from people whose status I didn’t really feel like thinking about, an email from Ziva with the subject line
PARTY
. I didn’t open it. Instead I stared out my window for a while. I just felt so vaguely sad; even the clouds tracing their slow route across the sky seemed to mock me, by having somewhere to go.

After an hour of that, I opened my computer again and made a journal file. I decided to write about what was going on, how I felt about it, maybe figure out why I was feeling so prickly lately, plus work on why I had done what I had done (I still couldn’t bring myself to name it even in my head), but there was a knock on my door just after I
typed the date, so I shut the computer. “What?”

It was Phoebe. In her boxers and rumpled sleep T-shirt, she lingered in my doorway and asked, “Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you hate Tyler Moss so much?”

I sat up and shoved my computer behind me. It was closed and I hadn’t even had a chance to write one word about what had happened yet, but I felt totally caught anyway. It took a lot of effort to sound innocent and I was not sure I succeeded. “Who says I hate him?”

“It’s pretty obvious, Quinn.” She smiled. God, she has the happiest, most winning smile. It was impossible not to smile back a little, even then.

“I think it really matters to Allison that you see he’s actually a great guy,” Phoebe insisted.

“Okay,” I answered. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“It’s…I don’t know. That’s…You’re right. I’ll try, okay?”

“Great,” Phoebe said. “I’m starving. Should we make some eggs?”

“Eggs? So early? What are you even doing awake?”

She checked my clock. “It’s nine thirty. Come on, cheese omelette? With fried onions?”

“I…Sorry,” I said. “I am, um, meeting a friend…going for a walk now.”

“Oh?” Phoebe half said, half asked. I flipped my hair over my head to gather it in a ponytail, to avoid looking at her.

“Good thing you came in,” I added. “I’m running late.”

“I miss Gosia already,” Phoebe said, and sniffled. “I can’t believe—”

“I know,” I told her. “Me too. Just don’t say anything to Mom and Dad, okay? They’re already—”

“Mad stressed, I know,” Phoebe said. “I’m not a baby.”

“I didn’t say you were,” I assured her.

“I was just telling
you
,” she added. “Not them.”

“Okay.” She was leaving my room as I opened my underwear drawer. The heel of one of Mom’s shoes poked out.

“How is nobody else hungry in the morning but me?” Phoebe was mumbling.

I shoved a bunch of socks on top of the shoe. “I don’t know, Phoebe, okay? I’m sorry, I just…I can’t answer all your questions right now.”

“It wasn’t that kind of question. You don’t have to answer.”

“Rhetorical,” I said.

“Talk about mad stressed…jeez, Quinn. You don’t have to bite me, you know?”

“Sorry.” I yanked on a tank top and shorts and left the
house with no plan of where to go. I am not a jogger, so that was out. There was no actual friend for me to meet. I did need some air, though, so I decided to take a walk. Then I wouldn’t have totally lied to Phoebe, I tried justifying to myself on my way down the driveway.

That was my plan, and I was kind of happy with it. Despite my usual lack of interest in anything that might cause me to sweat, I was weirdly pleased with this early-morning jaunt. I thought maybe I would do this every morning from now on, take a quick two-mile, three-mile walk to wake me up, to hear some birds chirping and smell the honeysuckle and the lilacs. Honestly. I had myself half convinced that this was what I had been needing, that everything—all the stress and inner turmoil and impulsiveness I’d discovered in myself in the past couple of days—would be resolved with a habit of early-morning walks. All resolved.

Solved again.

Do you have to solve something first, though, before you can re-solve it?

But no, no mind games, I told myself. No thinking. I was just walking, just a girl, the only girl in my family with no boyfriend, no boy who ever thought she was worth asking out or even hooking up with except for Mr. Rebound in Love with My Sister, who therefore does not count at all, especially because I kissed him and he just didn’t instantly pull away because of maybe, like, misplaced
gentlemanliness or even just shock. Anyway. Not thinking about that. Thinking about walking. Thinking about just being nobody, an isolated random girl out for a walk. Randomly. No destination.