Brilliant (13 page)

I
WAS A SUBPAR ROLE MODEL
yet again. I had so planned on being excellent at this job, but life had just sucked the spirit out of me.

Jelly told Adriana we couldn’t come to the sick party with her, because we were going over to a friend’s instead. Adriana just shrugged and said, “Whatever,” and that we should text her if we changed our minds. She spent much of the day flirting with Rick, the swim god; Jelly and I kind of moped around together in her shadow.

That afternoon I came home to our partially staged, even less recognizable house, and instead of making myself head upstairs to pack up my room, I sat out back, my feet in the pool, spacing out.

Mom came home about an hour later, when my toes were pickled and my butt had fallen asleep. The meeting hadn’t gone as well as she had expected, apparently; it was obvious from her slumping shoulders and the way
she was barking orders at us to get going on straightening and purging the crap from our rooms if we didn’t want her coming through the next day and throwing all our stuff out, but first could somebody help wrap the dishes and mugs? Allison stood on the counter and handed me dusty champagne glasses while Dad cooked up some rice and beans for dinner. By the time we sat down to eat Dad’s old special comfort-food treat of Buried Treasure (beans, then rice, then melted cheese, fit to soothe the wild beast), Mom was muttering at everybody that we had a lot to pack, a lot to get done, and to stop asking her, “Where is the tape?” or “What should I do with this?”

“Can somebody else please be in charge of one damn thing, ever?” she demanded.

We brought our plates to the sink and then all steered clear of one another as we marched single file up the back stairway, clutching packing tape and color-coded tags. Allison slammed her door behind her. Phoebe’s music went on as soon as she got into her room. I stood on the threshold of the white room formerly known as mine but now “staged” with a fresh white duvet with a pale pink double stripe marking the edge and a single pale pink rose in a bud vase on my dresser, where Vesuvian piles of papers and books had been when I left in the morning. I had no idea where all my stuff was and could not force my muscles to start looking.

So I did not do as I was told. I found my computer and
tiptoed to the guest room, and watched movies I downloaded pretty much at random.

That should have been my first hint I was en route to disaster.

Or maybe the hint was that I didn’t get caught, didn’t get yelled at; nobody lunged through the guest room door shouting,
Caught ya red-handed.
And that it felt kind of excellent, kind of like flying, to be doing something so wrong as sitting on the far side of the guest room bed, hiding, watching one movie after another while everybody else in my family worked. I felt wicked and free.

Once a girl has crawled out of her usual box, it is so hard for her to fit herself back into it. But a girl not in a box of any kind, it’s sort of like being a turtle who shrugs free of her shell, right? How bad a plan is that? Where the heck do I find a new exoskeleton if I’m shedding the old one?

I watched some more movies to shut down weird questions and images like that. Then, after my eyes were dried out from staring without blinking at my computer screen, I did what I realized I’d been forcing myself not to do all these weeks:

I Googled my mother.

I closed my eyes for the fraction of a second it took for the page to fill with results, and then for a few seconds more. As long as my eyes were closed, I could still not know.

The first eleven results were all recent. Seven of them
were from the financial press, or blogs, and basically went over the same facts: She had invested more than she was allowed to of her clients’ money in this stupid company she was sure had a huge new cancer-fighting drug in the pipeline. As the company’s stock plummeted, she invested more and more—borrowed money, not her own, money she had no right to be plunging into the stock; she just kept shoveling it in. There were questions about how she did it. The SEC and the U.S. Attorney’s Office and even, holy crap, the FBI weren’t commenting.

I turned off the computer.

The FBI? Whoa.

That was in the
New York Times
.

So everybody knew. Everybody but me. No doubt my sisters had each already Googled her. What an idiot they must all think I was, what a self-deluding, naive fool.

I rested my head against the guest bed behind me and whispered the words I’d been holding back:

“I hate her.”

She basically stole people’s money, or at least mishandled it.

Okay, so she was either a crook or an incompetent.

Shit.

But it wasn’t just what she did.

I was so sure she was innocent. So damn sure. It was so important to me that she was right, righteous. And she was just not.

My lower jaw was jutting out but I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t sad. I was pissed off. How could she do this to us? How could she fail this publicly, this big? I believed in her. I held her up to my friends, my sisters, and mostly to myself as this paragon of all that is good and admirable in a person. And she let me the hell down. How could she do this to me?

How could she even face herself? She walked around for so long all proud and confident, like she was all that, so wrapped in the stunningness of her success, it was almost blinding, when really she was just an ordinary failure.

At ten o’clock, I took a long shower in the guest bathroom. I blew-dry my hair, then lay down on the guest room bed and waited. Nobody came to say good night or check on me. At two a.m., I tiptoed around the house. Everybody was sleeping, looking so innocent. I stole a short skirt from Allison’s closet and a red tank top from Phoebe’s, then tiptoed into my parents’ room.

They were jackknifed against each other, his arm seat-belting her, her hair wafting over his shoulder. I paused and watched for a moment, not sure if I was taking a mental image to save for some future I couldn’t yet fathom or making sure they weren’t about to jump up and catch me—or trying to imagine whether someday I would be sleeping in a big bed with somebody’s arm seat-belting me.

When an eternity seemed to have passed, I tiptoed into
Mom’s bathroom and surveyed her stuff. A tube of mascara and a red lipstick, palmed, came back out with me.

The next day at camp passed in kind of a blur. I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do. After Ramon took the deep-water test and passed, he sat shivering next to me on the bench and asked what I was thinking about.

“About a guy named Schrödinger, who I read about.”

“The guy from Peanuts? Charlie Brown’s friend who likes Beethoven?”

I had to laugh. Maybe that was part of what had made me think of him, subconsciously. “No,” I said. “A real guy. A scientist.”

“What about him?”

“Well,” I said, rubbing his arms to warm his skinny body up. “This guy Schrödinger said if he put a cat in a box with a poison thing that might or might not kill the cat, the cat is both alive and dead until you open the box and see how the cat’s doing.”

“No, it’s not,” Ramon said.

“The story is just to show that until you see what happens, every possible thing exists.”

Ramon considered the theory all morning but by lunch had decided he still didn’t buy it—Schrödinger’s cat, in that box, was either dead or not dead, regardless of what Schrödinger thought or even hoped. “That’s life, man,” he said. “Your friend Schrödinger is not too smart. Plus, he has to face reality. Also, he should not be allowed to put
cats in boxes, especially with poison. That’s just whack.”

“Can’t argue with you there,” I said, wiping the ketchup off his face.

“But,” he added reassuringly, “I still think
you’re
brilliant, Quinn.”

“Thanks,” I said, and went to get more bug juice for the thirsty campers.

Meanwhile, Adriana was laughing with other counselors. Jelly and I tried to smile at each other a few times before we gave up. She said she’d pick up a gift to bring to Ziva tomorrow from both of us, something good to bring to a journalism program, maybe pens or gummy erasers or gummy bears.

I said, “That sounds great—any of that, thanks.”

My house, or the house I had been living in, looked quite lovely when I got home. It was clean and bright, with interesting art on the walls and no clutter anywhere, just botanical-garden-depleting masses of flowers in stunning crystal vases everywhere.

“No shoes!” a strange, tiny woman with huge lips and long highlighted hair barked at me.

I had the momentary thought that maybe I had accidentally wandered into the wrong house, or that this woman was a witch who knew telepathically that I had stolen and ruined my mother’s shoes.

But no.

The shoes and the rest of the stuff I had stolen were
still hidden in an old duffel bag at the back of the top shelf of my mostly emptied vast closet.

Friday at camp, I barely said a word. Adriana was busy texting her real friends, and Jelly kept telling me about inside stuff, school and orchestra and people Adriana didn’t know. Ramon was chosen second for T-ball and spent the day laughing with three other boys who had finally warmed up to him. I was mortified that in addition to being happy for him, I was a tiny bit jealous. On our drive home, Jelly said, “Adriana’s not really as great as I thought—we thought—you know what I mean?”

“Nobody is,” I said.

She nodded and we just let the Brahms on her stereo fill in the silence.

“See you tonight,” she said as I got out of her car.

I watched her pull away and stood there alone, feeling the heavy humidity settle around me, thinking,
I am so stuck.

A sudden breeze fluttered the leaves on the hedges and trees across our property. I watched their weird ballet.
Beautiful,
I thought.
I love it here. Loved it.

“Home,” I whispered, and like an answer the breeze doubled back and lifted my hair gently from my sweaty neck, a hint, a temptation of lightness. I closed my eyes and felt the cool relief.
Go,
the breeze was answering.

And for the first time all day, I smiled.

I didn’t head downstairs until seven, makeup done and
bag in hand. I buttoned up my saggy white cardigan and asked Dad if he was ready to drive me over to Ziva’s. He looked over at Mom.

I didn’t.

“You’re going out?” she asked me.

“You said I could,” I heard my voice say, calm and steely, just like hers.

“Fine,” she said. “We got an offer.”

“On the house?”

She nodded. “Tentative. Pretty good. They’re coming back tomorrow, measuring tapes and cameras. Are you almost finished with your room?”

“Yes,” I said. “Almost.”

“You didn’t mess it up?”

“No.”

“Great. You’re the best.”

“So I hear,” I said.

“Could you buy more packing tape on your way back, Jed?” Mom asked him, turning back to the plates in a pile in front of her. I stood there and forced myself to look at her, kneeling in the midst of the small, contained mess within the vast polish of the kitchen we hadn’t smudged by having dinner in. Nobody had even mentioned dinner, in fact, which was fine with me.

Her hair was tousled and limp, her forehead creased. She looked stressed, and small, and maybe even foolish, with a piece of packing tape stuck on the side of her
T-shirt, and sweat stains under her arms.

How had I never realized this was who she really was?

I didn’t pity her. I just wanted to get out of there. I wanted to get away from her. I was almost finished with my room, yes, Mom. Almost.

I said no, thanks, to driving and slumped down in the passenger seat. I turned on alarmingly bad pop music and didn’t chat with Dad on the way over to Ziva’s, to avoid conversation.

“Packing sure is fun, huh?” he tried.

I shrugged.

“It’s going to be hard to say good-bye to the house.”

“It’s just bricks and wood,” I said.

“True,” he remarked, easing away from a stop sign. “You are so wise, Quinn. What’s important comes with us, right?”

“Sure. Whatever we can salvage of it.” We pulled up in front of Ziva’s house. It was small and cute, all one level, with a hanging plant blooming beside the front door.

“Have a good time, sweetheart.”

“I will,” I said, getting out.

He opened the passenger-side window and called, “Mom will pick you up at eleven?”

I nodded and walked up the crumbling slate steps toward Ziva’s green-shuttered white wood house.

I stopped halfway up and waved good-bye to my father. When he was out of sight, I opened my bag and pulled out
my cell phone and Mom’s heels. Like Pandora, like Eve, I felt myself at the precipice, not deciding whether to make the move but holding my breath in anticipation of it.

Come get me,
I texted to Adriana, and typed in Ziva’s address. After I hit
SEND
, I went back down the stairs and walked to the curb, where I stowed my shoes and cardigan in Ziva’s bushes. I slipped into my mother’s fabulous shoes and waited.

T
HE PARTY WAS LOUD, HOT,
and sticky. It smelled like beer and baby powder. The thumping music was more rhythm than melody, and none of the bodies crushed up against one another had been on the planet a full two decades. I chugged the first beer I was handed to dull my rising sense of panic at being there, then sipped the second one down to a level that stopped it from spilling out over my fingers as I maneuvered to keep up with Adriana. In my mother’s shoes I was able to see above most of the girls’ heads and many of the boys’, too.

“Over here,” Adriana said, her hand on my arm.

My beer was spilling but my head was pleasantly bubbly. I eased through the crowd in Adriana’s slipstream until I found myself staring into a familiar face.

“Quinn.”

“Hello, Ty.”

“Is Allison here?”

“She’s grounded,” I said, eye-to-eye with him. “Because of you.”

“Yeah, that sucked. You okay? You seem a little…”

“I am excellent,” I told him. “No thanks to you.”

He lowered his head and looked at me past his eyebrows. “Sorry. I thought you were going to tell her, and I…”

“Water under the tunnel,” I said. I took another sip of my beer and laughed. “No, that’s not it. Water under the…What is the water under?”

“Water?”

“Bridge,” I said. “Or dam? Damn. No apologies. I am great. Tonight, I am excellent, in a whole different…Oh, but speaking of apologies, I’ve been meaning to…Sorry I kissed you that day.”

“It’s okay,” he said.

“It must have been somewhat awkward for you.”

“Yeah, somewhat,” he said. “Not that…no offense. But I really like Allison, a lot, and…”

“I know,” I said. “I do, too. It was just a weird day. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“I’m normally very shy.”

“You definitely didn’t seem shy,” Ty said.

I laughed. The one guy ever who thought I was a hellion and he was in love with my sister. Figured. “I’m actually a pathologically good girl. Except that day. And tonight.”

“Uh-oh,” he said. “Tonight?”

“Quinn,” Adriana called. “Come on!”

I gave a half shrug to Tyler and angled my shoulder to get past him. I watched his eyes look down my body all the way to the floor and then back up to meet my eyes. It was like we were dancing, slowly, as he backed up half a step to allow me to squeeze past.

“I’m…” I said, tottering a little.

He caught me by the elbow and said, “Excellent. Yeah, you said. Also, tall.”

I laughed as I walked away from him. Yeah, dude, tall and excellent and fun. I could feel people’s eyes on me, and I was in such a weirdly hot
screw you
happy mood, I liked it. I finished my beer just as I was catching up to Adriana, who had made it to the corner of the kitchen.

“Here she is,” Adriana said. “I told you.”

Mason turned around and looked at me. I met his blue eyes with my own. He was sexy; there was no denying that, and he knew it, too—you could see it in the way his broad shoulders rested easily across his spine, the way the edges of his mouth tipped slightly up as an indulged child’s will at the sight of a new toy.

He handed me a red plastic cup full of cold beer. I took it and my fingers touched his.

Nobody said to me,
This isn’t like you, Quinn.

Nobody who knew me well enough to know that was there; nobody who knew me well enough to know that
even knew where I was. I was a girl untethered. I was loose in the world, free. The people at the party thought this
was
me.

“Good to see you,” Mason whispered into my hair, as his fingers touched my waist lightly enough to give me a shiver. “You look really hot.”

I took a sip of the beer. The bitterness was gone; only the bubbly cold was left. It went down easily.

“Hello, Mason,” I said.

I heard Adriana laugh a little, but I didn’t flinch, didn’t blush. I was feeling powerful and happy. Mason clinked his plastic cup against mine and mumbled, “To tonight.”

“Tonight,” I echoed, thinking,
This is actually more delicious than portcullis pretzels
, and took another sip of cold beer. Okay, maybe not better than. But I could still manage it. I could swallow it; I could.

“Quinn?”

I swallowed hard before I spun around, a calm smile on my wet lips.

“What are you doing here?” Allison demanded.

“I’m not grounded,” I told her, my tongue a little lazy inside my mouth. “What are
you
doing here?”

“You’re drunk!” Allison said.

I turned to Mason while throwing my arm around Allison’s shoulders. “This is my little sister,” I told him. “Allison. She’s only fifteen. But she thinks…It’s like I have three parents.” I held up three fingers to illustrate my
point. “She wants to kick me out of this party. What do you think?”

“I think you’re both hot,” Mason said slowly.

“Ew,” said Allison. “Quinn, seriously. What’s up? Dad said you were at the nerd-fest at Ziva’s.”

“And he said you were in the Tower of London,” I told her, trying to make a joke, a historical reference, not sound like a priggish housewife or wannabe parent repeating that she was grounded. People didn’t laugh along, though. Maybe British historical references were not the surest route to cool, after all. I laughed a tiny bit at my excellent sense of self-mocking humor.

“You are wasted,” Allison said, and grabbed my arm. “Let’s find Tyler and we’ll get out of here.”

Mason put his arm around me. “Not so fast, little sister,” he said in his laconic drawl. “We’re just getting reacquainted here.”

He chugged his beer and pulled me close against his muscular chest.

“Hands off,” Allison said to him, tugging at me.

“Allison!” I shook my arm out of her grip. “Lighten up, huh? It’s a party.”

“You’ve had enough,” my crazy, wild sister told me.

“Not nearly,” I answered, and started drinking my beer. I heard somebody whoop, so I kept going.
Oh, yeah,
I thought.
You thought…you all think that I am so good, so tame, so Quinn Avery predictable and good? You have no idea.
I have no idea! I could be anything. I could be anybody.

I downed the last swallow and dropped my empty cup triumphantly on the floor, grinning at my sister, feeling Mason’s fingers touch my hair. I was strong, powerful, sexy, wild. The faces around me were smiling, impressed, approving. The librarian takes down her bun, removes her glasses, reveals herself to be the sexiest woman in town. As I wiped my wet mouth with the back of my hand, I snarled at Allison, “I got some good advice recently, to stop pretending I was such a good girl. Excellent, excellent advice.”

“You seem pretty good to me,” Mason said, and after I kissed him, he added, “You taste good, too.”

“Okay, that’s it,” Allison said. “Time to go, Quinn.”

I yanked my rubbery arm out of her tight grasp. “Don’t tell me what to do,” I complained. “You’re not my mother.”

“Thank goodness,” Allison said. “Because Mom would drag you out of here by the ear. Come on, boozer. Let’s go home.”

“Home?” I said. My voice was a little overloud, and I could sense people looking sideways at me, nervous, maybe not completely on my side anymore, but I didn’t really care. “Home! Please. As if we had one. You mean that big, hulking shell of a place where our stuff currently is, half boxed up, crowded by bouquets of overpriced dalliances?” That made me laugh, it was so funny. “Not dalliances.
That would be…What would that look like? Bouquets of dalliances. I like that. What did I mean? Oh. Dahlias. Or lilies. In hopes that somebody would please buy our house already.”

“Shut up, Quinn,” Allison warned. “Come on.”

“Oh, right, the defender of our family’s honor and privacy,” I said mockingly. “As if you have ever once done anything for our family.”

“You have no idea what I’ve done,” Allison hissed.

I smiled at Allison. “Right back at you, Al. You have no idea what I’ve done, either.”

Ty was there, suddenly, beside her, his hands on her shoulders. “What’s up? Everything okay?”

I got the giggles then. “Oh, wait,” I said, as my ankle buckled. I clutched Mason to keep my balance. “That’s right. Oops, you do know. Thanks a lot, Ty.”

“She’s wasted,” Allison told Ty.

“I’m fine,” I said, and spun around. “I’m excellent.”

Partway around my spin, or it may have been at the one-and-a-half-spin mark, my face bumped into Mason’s and then we were kissing. His face pressed hard against mine, and his arms wrapped around me. I was thankful for that, because the spinning had been a bad choice; I was feeling dizzy and unsure gyroscopically.

I pulled my mouth away and smiled at Mason. He smiled back, his eyes heavy lidded. “I’m like a sky-ro-jope,” I said. “No, not that. I mean a gyroscope. Wow, I
am having some serious word-retrieval issues tonight.”

“Okay,” Mason said, his face approaching mine again.

“Let’s go,” Adriana whispered into my ear.

“No,” I said, without opening my eyes. “Why is everybody such a party pooper?”

“Now, Quinn,” Adriana insisted.

“Why?” I asked, my mouth on Mason’s. “Just go with Allison. She’s more your type anyway, and she wants to go.”

“Come on,” I heard Adriana insisting, pulling me back. “The cops are here. We gotta go!”

“The what?” I had to close my right eye to see clearly. Mason kept his arm around my waist. “Let’s go,” he whispered. “It’ll be okay. Come on.”

Everybody was scrambling. I heard Allison calling my name, but I went the way I was being pulled. My heels (well, Mom’s) were sinking into grass as my feet struggled to keep up with the top half of me. Then I was in a car, in the backseat, squished in the middle of a bunch of people, and everybody was laughing, including me, and then we were moving.

Fast.

The windows were open and the air felt good. Music was playing and wind was blowing and my friends and I were laughing. Adriana’s head was on my shoulder, and she was singing way out of tune.

We were young and powerful and free; we’d gotten away, and through the open sunroof above my head the night sky was deep blue, moonless, full of stars.

I closed my eyes.

Mason’s hands were all over me. I tried to swat them away but they were multiplying. “Come on,” he was whispering in my ear. “Nobody can see.”

I wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything.

I tried to shift so my back would be toward him, but his hands snaked around front and his fingers were pressing, grabbing.

“I gotta get my…my phone,” I said.

“Shh,” Mason breathed, pulling me into him.

“I have to…have to call Jelly,” I said, suddenly clutched by the powerful need to let her know where I was, so she wouldn’t worry. A fast turn slammed me into Adriana.

“Don’t call Peanut Butter,” Adriana said.

“My bag is under your, urgh, foot,” I said.

“She’s…No offense,” Adriana said, stretching her long neck so her head lay against the backseat but also on my shoulder. “Your friend Jelly is a bit of a tool.”

“A bit?” somebody else said from the front seat, and I realized it was JD, driving. “She’s a complete boring geek,” he said, and sped up even more.

“No, she’s not,” I said.

“Oh, please,” Adriana said.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be driving,” I whispered to JD. “Just take a break….”

“Come on, bitty,” said the guy in the other front seat. “Save the sermons, huh? Who is this girl, anyway?”

Mason got my button undone. I grabbed his hand and said, “Stop it.” I shifted again so Adriana’s head rolled off my shoulder, and when she lifted it to look at me through her thick, perfectly curled eyelashes, I said, “Listen, seriously. Jelly is the least boring…She plays all-county oboe and speaks three languages and went to the National Spelling Bee and raised over two thousand dollars for leukemia research and spends her Thursdays visiting her great-grandmother in a nursing home.”

JD screeched to a stop at a red light. “Oh, man,” he said. “She’s more of a grind than I even thought!”

The light turned green and he peeled out.

“Fine,” Adriana said. “She’s great. Excellent résumé. I’d vote for her for president. But you were right about your sister. She’s a real bitch.”

“Don’t talk about my sister.”

“Mmm,” Mason said. “Everybody stop talking.” He yanked my head around and punched his mouth into mine.

“Get off me,” I yelled, pushing his face away. My eyes were open and I sat up straight. I leaned forward between the front seats. I could see the headlights on the dark road ahead of us. We were not heading in a straight
line, and we were going fast.

“JD, we need to pull over. Now.”

“Whoa,” Adriana said, with a cruel laugh. “You’re actually kind of harsh, too, Q. What’s the third one like? Scary crew. Wouldn’t want to have dinner at your house, three bitchy daughters with your indicted-criminal mom and your sad little mousy dad.”

It was like a door had closed.
Click.
Done. She had insulted my entire family in one sentence; it was almost impressive. I was speechless.

“Don’t get mad,” she purred. “I’m just saying, avoid dinnertime at the Avery house, or do you not have one anymore?”

“Shut up, Adriana,” I seethed. “No worries. You’re not invited.”

“Oooh,” she said. “I’m crushed. Serves me right, trying to do a good deed this summer, get a couple of desperate, résumé-pimping nerds laid.”

“Screw you,” I said, and leaned forward again, trying to speak calmly, reasonably. “I want to get out of this car now. JD, please stop the car and let me out.”

“Relax,” Adriana slurred. “Don’t get your panties in a knot.”

“Now!” I shouted.
“Now!”

JD slammed on the brakes and swerved to the side of the road. Hands were on me, pushing me out. My shoe got caught on something and my bag wasn’t budging but I
was tumbling, pebbles scraping my knees and palms like a little kid falling off her scooter, and then I could taste dirt as pebbles hit me in the back, and the car I had been in screeched away with the door still open. I heard the laughter follow the car like a wake, until the door slammed. When the taillights disappeared around the corner, I was alone.