Brilliant

by Rachel Vail

  To my surprise, they fit. When my sisters and I had tried on Mom’s shoes before, they were huge. Our feet slid forward and our toes were crushed in the pointy front while acres of space followed behind our feet as we tried to maintain our precarious balance. Not now. Those shoes felt made for my feet.

  I had taken two tentative steps, standing straight and imagining myself really wearing them out somewhere, walking into a party or Oliver’s house with Mom’s long saunter and my own hair shiny and straight down my back.

  That’s when Allison slammed my door open and glared at me with fire and tears in her eyes.

  “Allison,” I think I said, but maybe I just gasped.

  “How could you?” she snarled.

  My mouth opened to ask what she was talking about, to stall, but there was no point. I just stood there in front of my younger sister in my pink tank, short skirt, and Mom’s high heels, feeling worse than every word she was calling me in her furious mind.

  “I actually want to know,” she whispered, not blinking, not budging from my doorway, blocking it as if I might try to escape, or like she needed the doorjamb’s support to stand, after the stabbing I’d done to her. “How could you make out with my boyfriend? Why? Why would you do that?”

  I considered pointing out that she had broken up with him, that she herself had insisted the very morning I kissed him that he was no longer her boyfriend, but of course that was beside the point.

  “It wasn’t…” I started, without a plan. “I didn’t…” I tried again, revising fast in my mind, but not fast enough. “What did he say?”

  Her mouth opened wide and her eyes blazed even fiercer. “You want to make sure your stories match up?”

  “No,” I said quickly, relieved to tell the truth about something, if only because I hadn’t thought of that. “Not at all, Allison. Please just calm down and I will—”

  “Don’t you dare!” She punched my door. “Don’t you dare talk to me in your morally superior, condescending, slow Zen way. Don’t you dare!”

  “I never said I was—” I started.

  “Bullshit!” she yelled back. “You say so with every breath you take! Every look you give me and Phoebe, every oh-so-patient sigh and correction and ‘Actually that was in Richard the Third, not Henry the Fifth, Allison.’ Are you kidding me? You are so superior there’s no you underneath it! Give me a frigging break.”

  I backed away, right into my bed, where I plopped down. We stared at each other across the abyss of my room.

  “He told me everything, Quinn,” she whispered at me, stepping closer, into my room, stepping right on my discarded camp shirt and shorts as she approached. “He told me how you were crying the day I had dumped him and he was coming here to talk to me, to assure me about his feelings, to tell me he loves me, Quinn. That’s what he came over for. But you, the center of the universe, took his kindness as a come-on, and you kissed my boyfriend. He pulled away from you, Quinn; is that right or was he lying? Do you have a different side of the story to tell me? Because I want to hear it. I don’t know who to believe. My head is spinning.”

  Her voice cracked. She clamped her jaw shut and took a sharp breath in through her nose.

  She stood right in front of me.

  I couldn’t talk.

  “If Tyler is lying you have to tell me, Quinn.”

  I swallowed. “He’s not lying.”

  She unclenched her jaw. A tear dropped out of her eye. She wiped it away with the palm of her hand, leaving a dark smudge across her cheekbone.

  “Thanks for that,” she whispered. “Okay.”

  I nodded once.

  She stared at me for another moment as tears brewed in her eyes but didn’t spill over.

  I opened my mouth to apologize, but before the feeble words could form, she blinked.

  Then she said, as calm as I’d ever heard her, “I hate you, Quinn. I will hate you forever for this. You can keep pretending to everybody else that you are good and perfect and brilliant and superior, but you and I will know the truth now. We will know that you are small and jealous and mean. I don’t think you loved Tyler, or even wanted him, particularly. I think it just bugged you that somebody chose me instead of you, for once, and you couldn’t stand that. You had to have a piece of it, muck it up and smudge it with your fingerprints so it would all be about you.”

  “Allison…” I stopped myself from objecting that no, she was the attention hog; everything always had to be about her, not me. I stopped not just because I really didn’t feel in any position to criticize her right then, but also because I was busy trying to wrap my head around a torqued view of the world that might actually be true. Was that true? Did I make everything all about me? Was she right? Was she seeing the real me for the first time?

  “You know what’s funny?” Allison was asking me meanwhile.

  I shook my head, because honestly I had no idea what was funny.

  “He was scared you would tell me what happened, and that he’d come off bad in the telling. Ha! But he doesn’t know you like I do, Quinn. I know why you didn’t tell me, and even why you didn’t blame him. Because you knew I’d see through it, and because you wanted to keep it for yourself, yet another thing that belonged to you and not me.”

  I shrugged. Maybe she was right; I really didn’t know, and worried she was both right and only scratching the rotten surface.

  “I can’t believe I’ve spent my whole life looking up to you,” she continued. “Well, not anymore. Every single time I see you, for the rest of my life, I will think of this, of what you did and that you didn’t tell me and why. I’ll think of how you made me feel right now.”

  Then she walked slowly across my room, through the doorway, and slammed my door shut behind her.

  17

  WHEN I GOT MY STUMBLING self to Oliver’s, he wasn’t there. His mom, my original piano teacher, let me in, with a quizzical look on her kind face. When I explained that Oliver had said I could practice there, she quickly ushered me into their cozy family room, saying, “Of course, of course,” but then asking what had happened to our piano.

  “We lost it,” I said, my voice sounding like it was coming from somewhere else.

  She tilted her head, just the way Oliver tilted his, quizzical but quiet.

  “Oliver didn’t mention you were coming over,” she said.

  “Is it a bad time?” I stood up, resigned. Yes, of course it was a bad time. It was so thoroughly a bad time.

  “No, no, not at all,” she said. “Please go ahead. You were always one of my most diligent students. Oliver has said you’ve made great progress. But don’t worry—I won’t be eavesdropping. I’ll be out back in the garden. You do your work for yourself, now. Don’t worry about an audience.”

  “Thanks,” I mumbled. I waited until she had left the room to start. I really wasn’t in the mood to practice piano, of all things, but it would’ve been horribly embarrassing to be like, “Well, actually, I changed my mind,” or, worse, “I didn’t really want to practice; I just came over to flirt with Oliver. Because I am a shallow, horrible person. Seriously. People are starting to realize the truth.”

  One of her most diligent students?

  I turned the phrase over in my mind. Not one of her most brilliant, not one of her most gifted. Diligent. Ew. A workhorse. How embarrassing. She knew. Maybe everybody knew, Dad, Mom, Oliver—I practiced enough to be decent, even to fool people like my grandfather into thinking I was something special. But I wasn’t. I was just hardworking. Diligent.

  Maybe I had only been fooling myself that anybody was fooled, and all this time they’d been humoring me. Like when I was little and painted a picture for Mom and she was like, “Oh, Quinn, what a beautiful boat,” but it wasn’t a boat; it was a man walking his pet cat. “Oh,” she exclaimed. “Of course it is! Silly me. What a fantastic picture of a man walking his cat!” But she was holding it upside down. I didn’t explain that part; I smiled and let her tell me what an artist I was; because I so wa
nted it, I was willing to sacrifice the truth for it.

  My fingers could barely find the notes of my warm-up scales.

  Fake, I was calling myself. Petty, small, envious, mean. Diligent.

  And where the hell was Oliver?

  Wherever he wanted to be, really; he hadn’t asked me out on a date or anything; he’d offered his diligent grind of a student a practice space. That was all. It was hard to even remember why I’d fantasized it was anything more.

  I considered again just leaving, but it felt rude. I’d have to say good-bye and thank you to Oliver’s mother first, and she’d be all like, “That’s it? You’re practicing for under five minutes?” So I sat my sorry ass on the bench and dutifully played through my scales and then my pieces.

  Half an hour later I just couldn’t do any more. Diligent? Maybe not even that. I wandered through the kitchen with its blue and white tiles, full fruit bowl, and plate of fresh minimuffins, to the back door. Oliver’s mom was kneeling in the midst of a flower bed, cursing in Greek. Not that I know any Greek, but trust me, it was clear.

  “Um,” I said.

  She turned around, startled. “Oh, Quinn,” she said. She had a dirt smudge up her right cheek. She explained she had whatever is the opposite of a green thumb and might have overwatered her dahlias to the point of drowning them. She asked if I knew anything about flowers or gardening. I said no and that I had to leave.

  She said she’d tell Oliver I’d been by.

  I tried to think of a nice way to ask her not to, but she’d already turned back to the patch of mud she’d made. I was halfway through the door when she called to me, asking me to send her best to my mother.

  What did she know? Did everybody know what had happened? Did everybody know more than I did about my own family and our Situation? Was there stuff about Mom in the Wall Street Journal, even?

  I managed a polite smile and said I sure would, thanks so much.

  On my way out I impulsively grabbed a minimuffin.

  I didn’t even want a minimuffin. I don’t know what possessed me. I had never stolen anything in my life before that dumb minimuffin. Well, other than Mom’s shoes, but they didn’t count, because I was completely planning to return them. But the minimuffin? I just…I don’t know. I wanted to take something, to grab it and wreck the perfect symmetry of the minimuffin pyramid, to steal something that would otherwise belong to Oliver. Or maybe just to steal. Just for perversity. I don’t know. I just took it.

  Which was why I had a stolen minimuffin in my hand as I was walking out of Oliver’s front door and he was walking in.

  We both stopped short. We both looked confused, I think. Though only one of us had a stolen blueberry minimuffin in hand. (As far as I know.)

  He remembered, suddenly, that he’d invited me to come over to practice. “Oh! Quinn. Sorry,” he said. “I…This…I got—”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Did you already practice?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh.”

  “I should…” I attempted to angle past him, but as I did, I smooshed the muffin in my hand.

  “Wait,” he said.

  For a horrible moment I thought he was going to demand to see my hands, and when the disintegrating evidence of crushed muffin could no longer be concealed, he’d say, Caught you red-handed, the way I used to have a nightmare my father would say, my tender, soft-spoken father-turned-Javert, if I ever got caught sneak-reading under the covers with my flashlight: Caught you red-handed!

  “You want to go to a concert Saturday?” Oliver asked instead.

  “What?” I was off balance and dribbling crumbs onto his porch.

  “Beethoven’s Quartet in F major, Opus 135,” he answered, with such a sweet, excited smile I didn’t have the heart to say no; I wasn’t asking what they were playing; I was just stalling.

  “You know the joke in that, right?”

  “There’s a joke in it?” I asked.

  “True,” he agreed. “It becomes very much not a joke. You’re right.”

  I actually was not making an erudite point. I was just like, A joke? Huh? I thought I ought to clarify, come clean, be honest for once in the month. But I didn’t. I said, “Yeah, sounds familiar.”

  He grinned at me. “It’s at five o’clock, so we could…I’ll pick you up. About like two? So we can get a good spot. I like to be up pretty close.”

  “Me too.” Wait, is he actually asking me out? I tried with all my facial muscles to not smile. “That sounds…that sounds perfect.”

  He smiled at me. The earth stopped in its orbit for a second, then another.

  “So,” he said.

  “So,” I repeated. “Yeah. See you then.”

  “Quinn?”

  I turned back to him, ready for anything—a kiss, a question, a declaration of love.

  “Stuff is falling from your fist.”

  We both looked at my hand, and at the crumbs raining from between my fingers.

  “Sometimes that happens,” I said.

  He smiled. “Oh,” he said. “That’s true, I guess. Sometimes that happens.”

  “Yeah.” I could feel my face heating up, so I turned away and jumped down his steps. As the screen door slammed shut behind him, I could hear his laugh echoing inside. It didn’t sound like a mocking laugh, though, so even as I rubbed the minimuffin crumbs off my palm onto the sidewalk out front, I wasn’t, for once, cringing and criticizing myself.

  “Sometimes that happens?” I whispered to myself as I walked toward home. But I was smiling. I was going out on a date with Oliver Andreas. No thoughts of Allison or Tyler or any of my many other complications clouded that thought the whole way home. It was really actually nice.

  18

  “SATURDAY?” MOM ASKED AGAIN.

  I shrugged one shoulder, not even a shrug, really—a twitch. If she said no, that was it. Even if she said, Is it really important to you?, I’d end up not going. I could only go if she said, Sure, of course, no problem.

  She took a deep breath and let it out, then managed a small smile. “I guess that would be fine.”

  “If you don’t want me to…” I started. “If you need me to—”

  “No,” Mom said. “It’ll work out. I just…Quinn, you really have to clean up your whole room ahead of time. Everything has to be gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “You know what I mean. I can’t—”

  “I’ll make it look like Allison’s,” I promised.

  “Well, you don’t have to get carried away.” Mom kissed me on my forehead. “You’re the best.”

  I ran up the back stairs and started right in on cleaning.

  I actually did load up a big bag to give to charity and another for garbage before I got distracted by The Remains of the Day, a book I love and hadn’t reread recently.

  I looked up, startled out of the old English manor I was in, in my imagination, and back to the bright white room that looked vaguely familiar, to see four bare legs in front of my slowly adjusting eyes.

  “Quinn!” Phoebe said.

  “Yeah,” I answered, blinking. Allison was grimacing beside Phoebe, looking longingly back out my door. “Hey,” I said as nicely as I could, folding down my page, forcing a small smile. “What’s up?”

  “I think we need a conference,” Phoebe said, and pointed at my closet.

  I stood up fast. As much as I deserved whatever Allison wanted to dish out, and as much as, to be fair, she is such a drama queen and makes Armageddon out of one poorly placed, never-should’ve-happened kiss, I still was beyond shocked that she was bringing in Phoebe—Phoebe!—to continue harassing me over it. Fight your own battles, you know?

  That’s what I was thinking as I held open my closet door and let my sisters precede me into my huge closet. Allison refused to look at me as she passed me. Following them in, I told myself to just sit there and take it, not defend myself. Whatever Phoebe had to add to what Allison had said to me and about me earlier couldn’t re
ally hurt that much more, and was nothing in comparison to what I thought of myself, anyway.

  I sat down on a pile of my old crap and waited for the onslaught to begin.

  “Here’s what I think,” Phoebe said.

  Allison and I glowered, our jaws clenched as tight as our fists.

  “They’re really sad, and we need to do something to cheer them up.”

  “Who?” Allison asked.

  “Mom and Dad,” Phoebe said. “Duh. Who did you think?”

  Allison shrugged.

  “So I had an idea,” Phoebe continued, leaning forward and whispering. “I’m not sure if we can manage, but maybe if we work together we could get it up before they get home.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Allison asked.

  “The piano,” Phoebe said, exasperated, rolling her eyes at me like, Isn’t Allison so thick? But I think I looked just as confused as Allison did.

  I slowly explained to her, “Phoebe, they took the piano away. It’s gone. They bought it on credit, and when Mom—”

  “I’m not a mental defective, Quinn,” Phoebe said. “The other piano. The little one. The…uptight one.”

  “Upright,” I corrected, before I could stop myself.

  “Exactly,” Phoebe said.

  “Wait.” Allison yanked Phoebe by the knee. “Quinn didn’t get you to call this meeting?”

  “No!” I yelled. “I thought you told her—”

  “I didn’t tell her anything!” Allison yelled back. “You think I’m such a—”

  “But then why did she—”

  “Hello!” Phoebe held up her hands in front of our faces. “I am still here; remember me? Nobody told me to call this meeting. I am a person here, not a puppet, not a toddler. It was my idea, and if you two can’t stop bickering over whatever petty nonsense for long enough to do a nice thing for our parents, who are, hello, going through the worst time of their life right now, well, fine. I’ll get some friends to come over and help me instead.”

  “No,” Allison and I said at the same time.

  Our eyes met.