Brilliant (8 page)

“So you think you did bad, honey?” he said to Mom. “You’re small potatoes.”

“Thanks, Dad,” Mom said, cutting her quiche into molecule-sized pieces.

Meanwhile I was trying not to gag from the disgusting juice it was getting harder and harder to swallow.

“Enough,” Grandma said to Grandpa.

Grandpa refilled his and my father’s Scotches and we cleared the table.

I didn’t hear what Grandma muttered about Allison and her hair or her clothes or her attitude or her cell phone that did doorbell chimes and then “Yankee Doodle” in an endless loop throughout the lovely lunch, but I gathered that it was not complimentary. Allison managed to hear her, though, despite the blasting music that was bleeding out of her ears loudly enough for the rest of us to sing along to. She yanked the earbuds out and said, “You know what, Grandma? I know you think I am impossible and ugly, but honestly? You have no idea, and you’re old and nasty, and I don’t care.”

And then she stormed to the front door, flung it open, and galumphed down the steps and across the flower bed, the yard, the other row of flowers, and out to the sidewalk.

“That’s how you allow her to talk?” Grandma asked Mom.

“Mom, please,” Mom said. “Could you not—”

“Do you want me to go after her?” I asked, my jaw gripped tight. I wanted to smash Allison in the teeth, but to be honest I could also happily have taken a swing at my grandmother, to knock her muttering smugness right across the foyer.

“No,” Mom said. “Thanks, Quinn. You’re so good.”

“I’ll clear the glasses,” Phoebe said quietly, disappearing quickly, the weasel. One small machine gun in my hand at that moment and the whole family’d be full of holes. Especially when the men emerged, looking slightly off balance and clueless.

“Did Back Alley go out for a walk?” Grandpa asked. “Should we all go?”

“Dad,” Mom seethed, checking her buzzing BlackBerry. “Could you please stop trying to be helpful? It is backfiring.”

“You’re setting quite an example there, Claire,” he said. “You’re like one of the kids, your face always lit by a screen.”

“Dad, I…” she said without lifting her eyes from whatever urgent message she was reading.

What?
I was thinking.
The cops are on their way to handcuff you? Maybe they could bring some reporters and photographers. Because my life is not deep enough in the toilet after all you’ve done, Mom.
The thoughts startled me. Was I mad at Mom?
No,
I corrected myself silently.
It’s Allison’s fault.
And maybe Grandma’s. Not Mom’s.

“Maybe we should talk about where the girls are going to sleep,” Dad said, his words slightly slurred. Dad was not a drinker, and his half a glass of Scotch had clearly gone right to his head.

“Jed,” Mom said, and passed him her BlackBerry.

“What?” he asked, not noticing. “I was just, woo…”

Mom took his Scotch and downed the rest of his drink in a gulp. I stared at her. I didn’t know if I was more surprised by her ease with the Scotch or the continuing vehemence of my anger at her.
You gonna get drunk now, Mom?
I heard myself think.
On top of everything you are now going to start drinking, too?

“Did somebody take my soup cubes?” Grandma called from the kitchen.

“Mom, for goodness’ sake, nobody stole your damn soup, okay?” Mom yelled. “How hard do you want to make this on us?”

“She’ll meet us at home?” Dad asked Mom. “Is she nuts? It’s about nine miles.”

Mom shrugged and shook her head. “I can’t…What do you suggest, Jed? How many things can I…At least she texted me, right? I am trying to focus on…What?” she demanded of Grandma, who was standing in front of us, her lips pursed, holding out the ice cube tray I had taken four ice cubes out of earlier.

“What?” Mom asked her again. “The kids used ice?
Mom, what? They can’t have ice? Fine. No ice, kids. Damn it, Mom. Don’t torture me. Don’t…don’t be all passive-aggressive; I can’t stand it! We’ll find another plan. If you don’t want us to move in with you, I don’t know why you offered.”

“It’s not ice,” Grandma said. “It’s soup. It’s frozen chicken soup.”

I had just taken my final gulp of orange juice in an attempt to keep from blurting out what a jerk I thought everybody was. As a result, I had a mouthful of orange juice/thawed soup. With my tongue I felt a chunk, which, I realized, was not superthick pulp but rather a stewed onion or maybe a piece of celery or turnip or chicken thigh. The explosion of juice/soup out of my mouth all over Grandma’s foyer carpet was a shock to us all, though, in my opinion, completely justified.

Grandpa, for one, thought it was hilarious.

We left a bit earlier than planned, Mom clenching her teeth, me and Phoebe and Dad all a bit green, and Allison on a long, pissy hike across town, during which she texted me and confided that she was actually going to Tyler Moss’s house, and if I wanted I could meet her there; she’d really appreciate that.

Sure. As if that were even a possibility. What fun. I turned off my phone.

I
WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING
absolutely, resolutely cheerful.

Adamantly cheerful.

I was so damned cheerful, any negativity that dared encroach on my space would get punched in the nose. That’s how fricking cheerful I felt.

I didn’t know if I’d had a dream or what, but my eyes popped wide open at five fifty-five, which I took as a good omen because five is my lucky number, and I knew what I had to do:

I had to be my very best self. It was so obvious I spared three seconds wondering why I hadn’t seen it before. But then I moved on. Because I was cheerful!

I just needed to be my best self. Isn’t that what everybody always advises? I think it was Gandhi who said we are more afraid of our power than of our powerlessness, or something like that. And Gandhi is my freaking hero! Here I’d been sinking into gritted-teeth annoyance and
petty resentments, fearing—no, dreading—my powerlessness: losing my home, losing my image of Mom, losing my grip on myself as a good and moral and gifted person. But I was just looking at everything the wrong way, which was why I had been acting so badly, doing such flesh-crawling stuff as kissing two boys. Obviously!

I smiled and got up, brushed my teeth a double round, and then got into the shower, where I lathered, rinsed, and repeated. Vigorously. All while thinking,
Life will throw at me what it will. But meanwhile I will hold my head up. I will remember who I am, who we are. We are the Avery family. I am Quinn Avery. I have a piano recital to practice for, and tests to ace, and disadvantaged children to influence positively. I have my eyes set on the horizon of the Ivy League, possibly Harvard, but Yale or Brown would also be good choices for me, and all it will take is hard work, nailing the SATs and ACTs and SAT IIs, which is just a matter of working on it, no problem, and then I just have to manage an excellent audition tape to submit along with my applications, which I am already working on.

Good, water off. And about paying for college? That should not be a problem, really, I realized as I towel-dried my hair. Dad worked his way through college. Mom was proud of never having asked for spending money from her parents. I didn’t need them to provide everything for me on a silver platter. I didn’t even want them to. And I had an easy way to make some cash—trumpeters and cellists
and even, yes, oboists like Jelly always have to pay pianists to practice with them and accompany them to auditions, even for stuff like when they try out, in September, for all-state and all-county band and orchestra. So that would be quick and easy money. And fun, too! I was getting more cheerful by the moment!

So there were no problems ahead, with the possible exception that I was starting to levitate, I was so heliumified. But I wasn’t even worried about that. The day, the sky, my future—all were bright and clear. Things were better than ever, actually.

I even made out with Mason Foley,
I thought as I whipped my hair back into a tight ponytail.
He’ll be in college next year. Maybe we’ll hook up again soon and we’ll end up falling in love and I will visit him wherever it is he’s going to college, and maybe I’ll apply there, too; no need to be a snob—the Ivy League is not the only game in town. There are tons of good schools, and getting a good education is mostly about attitude and your own aptitude anyway. Maybe Mason is actually very artistic and intelligent, not just deadly hot, and all the people who misjudge him will realize he wasn’t a male slut or whatever Oliver was warning me against; he was just searching for me all this time, and his untapped inner depths will come out to join his outer stunningness, and we will live happily and brilliantly ever after.

I was, perhaps, looking a bit too far ahead. I get slightly manic when my head clears after a funk.

Luckily nobody was in the kitchen when I got downstairs, so I escaped with my buzz intact.

Jelly talked the whole way to camp about JD and how they’d texted all Sunday. She needed some reassurance that bad spelling meant nothing. So I reminded her of the fact that Ziva, one of the smartest people in our grade, was a terrible speller. JD’s overuse of emoticons was a little disturbing, but we decided he was just being flirtatious, which is a good thing. He was cute, and it was a summer fling, right? Mason was really awesome, too, we agreed. We were so lucky! There was not a lot more to say, because I didn’t want to go into Mason’s creeping, insistent fingers on my waist. So I told her my family was planning to move in with my grandparents, who needed some help and company. Jelly is really close with her grandparents, who live with them, so she totally understood that. I discussed my ideas about how to redecorate Grandma’s house to make it completely comfortable and cool for all of us, with drop-down desks in the living room and one of those beds that turns into a bookcase in the daytime for Mom and Dad in the dining room so we could spread out more.

“That sounds perfect,” Jelly agreed, making the big turn into the camp entrance. “Because nobody has a dinner party while everybody’s sleeping!”

“Exactly,” I said. “Plus, that way we can fit the upright piano in there, too, no problem.”

“Sounds great, Quinn,” she said, quieter. “Are you really okay, though?”

“Of course!”

“And your mom?”

“You know her,” I said. “She’s amazing. Nothing fazes her. She’s already making deals, totally psyched. She’s actually relieved, I think. Plus, we’re all getting more time together, which is really nice.”

I was a little out of breath.

“Well,” Jelly said, “that’s all good. You’re pretty amazingly resilient, too, my friend. But if you need some time to, like, get away for a night…?”

“Thanks!” I said. “But I am really great!”

Ramon surprised me, not by slipping his hand into mine as we walked toward the volleyball court, because he always liked to hold my hand as we walked; what surprised me was when he said, “You okay, Quinn? You seem sad today.”

“Me?” I said. “No, Ramon. I am actually happy today. Really happy. How are you?”

“
¿Qué sé yo?
” he muttered. “You seem sad to me.” And he pulled his hand away.

What did he know? Nothing. Just a five-year-old kid with wise, old-soul eyes. I smiled at the other campers and organized a game of tag while we waited our turn at the volleyball net. I would not be brought down by a melancholy five-year-old.

While the kids played tag, Adriana and Jelly and I talked about what a great party it had been. I could tell Adriana felt really good about her fixing-up skills, or
maybe she was just happy for us—or at least Jelly, that it was really clicking between her and JD. She told me not to worry about Mason not contacting me afterward, because he was notorious for that—but she assured me he seemed very into me and would definitely want to hook up with me again, maybe at the party we should all go to the next Friday night. Everybody would be there.

A headache was starting over my right eye. I pretended I was just squinting in the sun and answered sure, she could text Mason and confirm that he was going to that party, and mention she was talking me into going. Why not? Yeah, I was for sure interested in hooking up again.

Adriana texted him something. She wouldn’t show me what, but showed me his response, which I noticed came back immediately: He texted back a winking face.

Later in the day, when Adriana and Jelly were going on, again, about how JD was so fun, even if all he was really into was rowing crew, and about Adriana’s boyfriend, Giovanni, whom she spent not just her own party making out with, but the whole next day with at the beach, my weekend was starting to feel in retrospect a bit lame, and maybe with the muggy heat and the energy all my bright, determined optimism was taking, I was wilting a bit. Jelly whispered to me, “You sure you’re okay, Quinn? You seem really…I don’t know…stressed.”

“Yeah,” said Adriana. “What’s up? You can tell us.”

“No, nothing,” I said. “I just…I’m getting a little
headache. The sun is so…”

“Yeah, true,” Jelly said. “You want to come over after camp and just maybe hang out or something? My parents will be at work, so they won’t be bugging us to do vocab flash cards or anything….”

“I don’t know.” I separated two kids who were fighting and then plopped down next to Adriana and Jelly again.

“No,” Jelly was saying. “I don’t think so.”

“Don’t think what?” I asked.

“You look like a girl with a guilty conscience,” Adriana said. “Did you and Mason go further than you’re telling?”

“No!” I said.

“Told you,” Jelly said. “Just…I think Quinn’s going through…I just mean maybe she might need a little space, so maybe we should…”

“I still think she did something she’s not telling us,” Adriana guessed. “Am I right? What’d you do, Q? You can tell us.”

What can I say? I liked the idea that she called me Q, as only Jelly had before, and how she was whispering with me, and didn’t think maybe I was stressed about boring, tight, nerdy stuff or huge, humiliating, life-shaking things.

“Something pretty awful,” I admitted.

They both leaned forward with wide, excited eyes.

“Tell us,” Adriana urged.

“What happened?” Jelly asked.

So I told them about Tyler Moss. I left out the part about the piano getting repossessed and about me crying. I just said that my sister, my younger sister, was going out with the hottest guy in my grade and had dumped him, and he came over to our house the other day, after she’d dumped him, and one thing led to another and I had totally made out with him.

Adriana opened her mouth wider than a hippo’s and screamed and pushed me in the shoulders and whispered, “No way,” all the stuff I always see those kinds of girls doing. She wanted to know what was I going to do and warned, “You can never tell your sister; that would just be hurtful to stop yourself from feeling guilty but wouldn’t help—it would be a disaster!”

“I know it,” I said.
My thoughts exactly.

“Well, but the important question,” Adriana said. “Was he a good kisser?”

I opened my own mouth wide at the horrible unseemliness of that question and then had to nod. Yeah, he was. Not that I had all that much to compare him to, but, holy crap, yeah, he was a pretty darn good kisser.

“He looks like he’d be a good kisser,” Jelly said, her voice quiet and tight. “But Quinn…”

“You know him?” Adriana asked, her voice tinged with jealousy.

“Of course,” Jelly said. “He’s been in my class since
kindergarten, and he was hot even when the rest of the boys were all about Hot Wheels and Pokémon and worms.”

“As hot as Mason?” Adriana asked.

Jelly shrugged. “Jeez, Q,” she said. “I don’t want to be judgmental or anything, and you know I think you are the most moral person ever, but, I mean, poor Allison!”

“No, it’s not like that,” I assured her. “It was just a mistake between us. He loves her. I really think he does. We just, you know, accidentally kissed.”

Adriana shrieked. “That is just…Accidentally kissed! So excellent!”

“How do you accidentally—” Jelly started.

“God, it’s epically hot. Accidentally kissed your sister’s boyfriend.”

“Yeah,” I interrupted, facing only Adriana. “So, but anyway, we were at my grandparents’ yesterday and Allison bugged out and left, and she went to Ty’s house and texted me to please come meet her there, but of course I couldn’t—the last thing I want to do is be anywhere near him—so I was all like—”

“Wait,” Adriana said. “Ty? Tyler Moss?”

“Yeah,” I said, going cold. “You know him?”

“Yes! Tyler Moss? Holy crap. This just gets better!”

“Shhh,” I said. “Listen, you can’t tell anybody. Okay? Please promise me you’ll never—”

“Quinn! Tyler Moss? He is so friggin’ hot it’s sick!”

“I know,” I said. “Hence the problem.”

“Did she just say
hence
?” Adriana asked Jelly.

“She says stuff like
hence
,” Jelly mumbled. I realized she was refusing to look at me.

“That’s awesome,” Adriana said. “My IQ is skyrocketing just hanging with you smarties this summer. But I had no idea you were so…Ty Moss!”

“Shhh,” I begged. Volleyball was ending and we had to head to snack, but en route Adriana was telling me that Tyler Moss’s cousin went to her school or something. He’d been at the party she’d gone to July fourth.

“Hold on, hold on,” she said as we passed out ice-cream cups. “Does your sister have short, spiky hair and amazing gray eyes?”

“Yes,” Jelly said, her face a mask of serious blankness. “Allison. She’s great, really intense and really vulnerable.”

“Wow,” Adriana said, not noticing the condemnation pouring from Jelly’s every pore. “That’s your sister?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Hence,” Adriana said. “As of Fourth of July, anyway, I don’t think she and Tyler Moss are still broken up.”

“I know,” I said, sinking again. “They got back together. Wait, she wasn’t at a party Fourth of July. She was with us.”

“She was there,” Adriana said. “She was definitely there. Late night.”

“She must have snuck out,” I said. “I can’t believe her.”

“Pot?” Jelly muttered. “Meet kettle.”

Luckily, right then my cell buzzed. I checked it, secretly thankful for the escape valve, while Adriana was saying, “Hence you’re screwed.” And when I saw it was Oliver, I almost had a coronary right there on the deck.

“Is it Tyler?” Adriana asked, standing on tiptoe, craning over my shoulder to see my phone.

“No,” I said. “The plot thickens.”

“The what?”

“There’s this other guy,” I started, and they grabbed me and dragged me to the other side of the picnic area, despite the disapproving stare of Syd, the head counselor.

“He’s older; he’s in college,” I said.

“Oh,” Jelly said. “Him.”

But Adriana’s eyes were wide and expectant. “Who? Wait, the piano teacher?”

“Yeah. Exactly. I’ve had a crush on him basically my whole life, which I have only recently gotten over, because he’s totally out of my league. And I think,” I said to Adriana, “I think he may be going out with your sister.”

“I doubt that,” Adriana said, her huge smile glittering. “She’s gay.”