Brilliant

by Rachel Vail

“I wasn’t your date; she was,” I said slowly. “I was just there to hold your mirror, Oliver. I’m the acolyte. You’re right. I thought you were amazing. I always have. But you don’t have to try so hard to impress me. I don’t care that your professor thought you were brilliant. I like how you get my jokes, and how lightly your fingers hover above the piano keys before you start to play, the way you lean forward when you’re listening. I have had a crush on you for as long as I can remember, which you have probably always known. Obviously you’ve enjoyed my worshiping you from afar. Well, that’s good, because you know what? I’m done. I’m totally done. You’re even hugely impressed with how petty you are. Could you stop evaluating yourself for one frigging second and just…be?”

  “Quinn…”

  “Welcome to the human race, Oliver Andreas,” I continued, surprising myself at how fast the words were tumbling out, like they’d been packed under pressure until now, now that the lid was off. “We’re petty and selfish. We are all unlovable, because we are all so messed up. I thought you were different.”

  “I’m not,” he said.

  “Okay. I was wrong. So thanks, Oliver, for setting me straight—and for setting me free from you.”

  I took a breath, finally, and looked at him. He was holding his head in his hands, just taking it. Good.

  Softer, I said, “But you came to the wrong place, pal. I wasn’t the one you were hoping to get into your bed; she was. So what the hell are you doing on my front steps?”

  I stood up and went into the house, leaving him alone there. Even though all his self-loathing could have been plucked right from my own thoughts, my own heart, there is only so much intimacy belonging to somebody else that a girl can steal and imagine her own.

  21

  TWO HOURS LATER, HE texted me asking if we could talk.

  I deleted it without answering.

  An hour later Jelly texted me, asking what had happened. I texted her: ( and asked how her date went with JD. She texted back the same: (.

  I’m kind of done being fab, she texted.

  Me too.

  Kind of ready for a West Wing marathon instead of a mad sick party this wknd…

  I smiled at my phone, so squat and solid in my hand, and typed, Me too.

  I reread the good parts of Pride and Prejudice and was asleep before ten, then woke up early. I watched the dawn whiten the sky and took stock in the shower. Everything was kind of back to normal, really, except actually better. My silly crush was finished. I was a good girl, a nerd. So be it. I was moving out of this house into another, and then probably another. Okay, so there it was. Just bricks and wood, plaster and granite and stainless steel, too much anyway. I had a few good friends and good PSAT scores and my parents’ approval. Not so bad, really. Overreaching just makes you fall on your butt. Time to play some Pictionary and stop both cursing and editing my vocabulary. Maybe being a good girl is a tight box to squeeze myself into, but I fit into it a lot better than into the wild-child box.

  Everybody probably gets cramped, no matter which box they end up in, right? I combed my hair and slicked it back into a ponytail, resolving not to be manically cheerful, but just a somewhat nerdy, good role model for my sweet campers, who deserved more of my attention than they’d been getting.

  I double-bowed my sneakers and headed down to the kitchen.

  Mom was already at the door, thumb-wrestling her BlackBerry, her wheelie suitcase standing at attention by her side.

  “What’s going on?” I asked her.

  “What?” She didn’t look up. “Hold on. Yes, what?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Chicago,” she told her BlackBerry.

  “Did the settlement happen?” I asked her.

  She smiled tightly without looking up from the tiny screen. “It’s in the works. Looks good.”

  “So why are you going to Chicago?” I asked, aiming for a neutral delivery. Everything is fine, I reminded myself. “For the settlement?”

  “New project.”

  “Are you, like, unfired? Rehired?”

  “No,” she said. “Urgh. Hold on. What? No. This is something else.”

  “Oh,” I said. I waited for more, but she wasn’t saying anything else. No Can you keep a secret? no I can only tell you this, Quinn, because you are my number one, my favorite, my confidante.

  In the driveway, a car crunched over the gravel. “There’s my ride,” she said. “Hold down…”

  “…the fort,” I finished for her, as she smoothly maneuvered her suitcase out the door. “I know. Mom? I really don’t want to move. Is there any way…”

  “Oh, Quinn,” she said, once the phone was slipped into its holster and she freshly saw me there. “Shake it off. It’s just a lot easier to sell a house that’s more cleared out. Of all the stuff, the clutter.” She shrugged her bony shoulder. “That’s what the real estate agent says. So that’s what we’ll do. We’ll just take what we need to your grandparents’, put some stuff in storage. There’s a stager coming….”

  “A what?”

  “Daddy will explain. I have to run. You’re the best! Love you!”

  “Yeah?” I asked, but she was gone.

  When I turned around, my father was there, behind me.

  He smiled sadly. “A stager. See, we’re learning a whole new vocabulary. She comes in and makes the house look great. Rearranges the furniture, takes some away, brings in stuff to make it look good, flowers, statues, mirrors. I don’t know.”

  “A stager.”

  “Yeah. This is the way it’s done. So. She’s coming to take a look today. I’m going to have to rely on you a lot….”

  He said a bunch of other words: about how to decide which things would go into storage, color-coded labels for boxes, “think three months,” “support your sisters, what with Phoebe being in a cast and Allison being Allison.” I heard a few phrases through the buzz in my ears that was assaulting me at the same time: It’s really happening; we are losing our home we are kicked out we are homeless we are lost lost lost.

  “Are you okay?” Dad was asking. “Quinn? You feeling sick again?”

  I managed to nod.

  “Maybe it’s the paint fumes,” he suggested. “Or the lilacs.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Does she ever…”

  “What?”

  “Listen?”

  “Who?” Dad asked. “The stager? It’s not…She’s not decorating it for us; it has nothing to do with us, really. She just has a job to do; you can’t—”

  “Not her,” I yelled. “Mom.”

  “Mom? Quinn, are you okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, heading for the door, because Jelly’s car was screeching up the driveway. On the way, I leaned my forehead against the cool of the stainless-steel refrigerator for a few seconds and then turned to look back at my father, his teakettle dripping in his hand as he regarded me with some level of concern.

  “What’s wrong, Zen?” he asked. “You look stressed. Is camp okay?”

  “Camp is fine,” I said. “I saw you. And her. Burning the papers that night. I saw. I know what she did.”

  “Quinn…”

  “Don’t,” I said. “I know what I saw.”

  “She burned her notes, Quinn,” Dad said. “She burned her own private notes—notes that could be taken out of context if this thing ever went to trial. Everybody has doubts, Quinn, everybody. But when they’re written down and taken out of context, what is just thinking something through on paper, with all the pros and cons and worst-case scenarios—all that can sound like foreknowledge, and then decisions made can seem malicious instead of what they really are: a gamble that could have gone well but instead went the other way.”

  “I saw her,” I repeated. “And I saw you. You were uncomfortable about it. Admit it, Dad. You make excuses for her after the fact, to me; you say you’re not mad, you’re proud and grateful and so supportive, the perfect husband, but you know she was wrong to do it. Bad. Criminal, maybe even
.”

  “No, Quinn.”

  “Yes, Quinn,” I yelled. “She walks around—and we all treat her—like she’s some sort of god, but she’s so not!”

  “That’s true, baby,” he said, setting the teapot down, finally. “She’s not a god.”

  “But you never get mad at her. You just appreciate her. Well, maybe you’re the god around here.”

  He sighed. “I get mad, Quinn. I do. You’re right. I try not to, but I get impatient, and it’s true I would handle some things differently. I don’t have all the answers, and neither does she. We’re just muddling through, same as you, same as everybody. We’re no different—”

  “Exactly,” I said. “But I thought we were. She said…”

  “What?”

  “The Avery Women,” I said, swallowing back a ball of tears. “She’s all like, ‘We are the Avery Women. Nothing brings us down. We are special. We are never intimidated. We are so awesome.’ But we’re not; we’re not different. We’re just like anybody else. Nothing special. A bunch of petty, ordinary nobodies.”

  “I never said she was ordinary,” Dad objected, coming toward me with his arms raised, like he could cuddle this rage out of me. “None of you—”

  “No!” I banged the refrigerator with my fist. “I just…I don’t get it.”

  “Get what?” Dad asked, stopping, leaning against the counter.

  “How you can love someone so f…so flawed,” I said.

  “Flawed?”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to stay calm but not fully succeeding. “Flawed. Because if you just love, no matter what, like it’s not a choice, it’s just…you get what you get—then so what, you know? You may as well love a stuffed animal, or a rock, or the person behind her in the supermarket line. But if you love somebody because she’s great, because she’s extraordinary and wonderful and irreplaceable—brilliant—and then it turns out she’s not all that, in fact she’s kind of ordinary and selfish and sometimes a jerk; then what? How do you keep loving her?”

  “I don’t know,” Dad said. “You just do.”

  “Or,” I said, “you just don’t.”

  I let the door slam behind me as I left.

  22

  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.