Brilliant

by Rachel Vail

  Okay, maybe good-bye just sucks any way you slice it.

  I’m going to spend this summer very prestigiously working at a camp for underprivileged kids. Like all the other counselors, whom I met today at orientation, I am (or at least have been) overprivileged, and this job, while fulfilling on its own merits, was also designed, not just coincidentally, to help me get into an elite college eventually, so that I could continue on my overprivileged path. The irony was lost on nobody, especially me.

  Yet with all my hyperawareness of both irony and Mom, I am not sure what it was that Mom did this time, either, to cause the Situation. But I could tell by her face even back in May that it was big, and did not work out well at all.

  Instead of a jumbo-size bouquet of stargazer lilies and multiple deliveries from Neiman’s, this time, Mom got a lawyer. And a real estate agent who told her that people will not buy a house, especially in this economy, that has a red room in it.

  I took two more deep breaths, having calmed myself down enough to ensure that I would not race in and burst out crying and cursing nonsensically at my mother, and knocked on her bedroom door.

  No answer.

  I tried the knob. It twisted easily and I opened the door. “Mom?” I heard the water running in her bathroom. I stepped one foot into her room and stopped, one foot on each side—my right foot on the soft white carpeting of my parents’ room, the other on the hardwood floor of the hall.

  “Mom?” I called again. Either of my sisters would have walked right in, no hesitation. Well, Allison would have stalked in, demanding something, ready to argue. Phoebe would have wandered in, innocent and sweet, oblivious, entitled. And me? Well, normally I would have just waited to talk to her later, if she was in the shower.

  Instead I called her name again as I straddled the threshold, thinking about the metaphor I was unwillingly making of myself.

  “What are you doing?” Phoebe asked, suddenly beside me.

  I jumped.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. Why are you standing here rocking back and forth in Mom’s doorway?”

  “Just…just thinking,” I said.

  Phoebe smiled. “Okay, well, cool. Have fun with that, then.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Did you need something?”

  “No, it’s all good,” she said, backing away like I was some kind of lovable but whack-job genius. “You just keep thinking there. Didn’t mean to interrupt your rhythm, or whatever.”

  “No worries,” I said, just as I heard the water shut off. “Mom?”

  “Quinn?” she called from the bathroom.

  “Yes,” I answered, rooted to the spot. “Mom? I was—”

  “Oh, good, Quinn. Could you bring me the dress that’s on the bed there? I meant to bring it in here with me to steam out the wrinkles. Quickly, Quinn?”

  Ah, the one thing sure to uproot me: obedience. I flew to her bed, where a white summer sundress was splayed, unwrinkled, on a hanger. I brought it to her in the bathroom, where she was wrapped in one of her superthick terry bath sheets, her hair dark wet, water drops dripping from her long eyelashes.

  “Thanks, sweetie,” she said. “Just hang it right there on the hook. Great.” She bent over and rubbed her hair with a smaller, matching towel.

  I turned around, dismissed. As I was walking through her bedroom, I saw that her shoe closet doors were splayed open. Her shoes were lined up in neat rows, like spectators at a concert. Her neat gene had skipped me and gone right to Allison. I lingered in front of the shoes and looked at each pair, not touching at first, just looking. The names signed inside them sounded like music, like foreign language lyrics to an aria of longing:

  Valentino Jimmy Choo

  Louboutin Miu Miu

  Manolo Blahnik Ferragamo

  Rangoni Dolce & Gabbana

  I traced my fingers over some of them, but not the black patent-leather ones, because I remembered the fingerprints my sisters and I had desperately rubbed off against the carpet. No evidence, I thought. I reached toward the back. My favorites were there, strange favorites for a girl who only wears silent sneakers and feels ludicrously self-proclaiming in ballet flats or loafers, but they were my secret absolute favorites nevertheless. I pulled them out. They were new, never worn; I hadn’t tottered around with my sisters in these—bold fuchsia stilettos in smooth, cool satin with a little space in front for toes to peek out under a sparkly rhinestone ring—the sexiest shoes I’d ever seen.

  I held the pair of them in my hands, weighing them for the moment, thinking.

  Then I shut her closet and dashed out of her room, the shoes dangling from my guilty fingers, and crashed into Allison in the hall.

  “What the hell?” she demanded.

  “Allison,” I said, trying to hide the shoes casually behind my back.

  “Oh, it’s my fault? You come flying around corners without looking and what—what did I do now?”

  I blinked twice. “I don’t know,” I said slowly, thinking a mile a minute. “What did you do?”

  “Fine, forget it,” she said. “Sorry if we can’t all be as Zen-perfect as you. Because I swear, if they painted my room? I mean, did she even ask you first?”

  “No,” I said.

  “And it’s just…you’re fine with that?”

  “No,” I admitted. Behind me I heard Mom open her shoe closet.

  “But you just deal. I know, I know,” Allison rambled on, volume increasing. “The Situation. Right, but you know what? If it were my room? I would not be all blissed out like you.”

  “Hey, girls?” Mom called from her room.

  I had to get out of there. Her shoes were dangling from my fingertips. What if these were the ones she was looking for?

  “I’m not blissed,” I whispered to Allison, nudging her toward our rooms, away from Mom.

  “Girls?” Mom repeated.

  “I can’t believe you painted Quinn’s room!” Allison yelled toward Mom. “That is the crappiest—”

  “Allison, don’t start, please,” Mom yelled.

  “Let’s go,” I growled at Allison, hinting urgently.

  But Allison yanked her arm away from my grasp. “If you are too la-la-la to speak up for yourself, somebody has to,” she said, and stormed into Mom’s room. “If you ever did that to me, I swear I’d tear the house down by hand! How could you?”

  “Allison Avery,” Mom barked at her. “I did not ask your opinion. Now you march your obnoxious self out of my room and quit trying to butt in where you don’t belong. It’s Quinn’s room, and she, thank goodness, is mature and reasonable, so…”

  I didn’t hear the rest. I closed the door of the room that had been mine but was now a weird avant-garde-movie-set shiny white, and leaned against the still-sticky door until my heart returned to a life-compatible rhythm.

  Then I yanked out my underwear drawer. I quickly tucked Mom’s loud, sexy, out-of-place shoes in there, way in the back, beneath some old bras, and closed the drawer.

  I figured I’d just return the shoes when Mom was out sometime, and the whole shoe-stealing incident would be past, just a weird little blip in my excellent, smooth, admirable life.

  3

  I SLEPT IN THE GUEST ROOM because of the fumes, and when I woke up the next morning for camp, I had no idea where I was. By the time I figured it out, I had only ten minutes to get ready before my best friend, Jelly, was due to pick me up. I dashed through my room, pausing only microscopically at the blinding whiteness on my way to my bathroom, where I brushed my teeth and flipped my hair into a ponytail, clonking my head on the corner of the sink in the process, which caused me to choke violently on the toothpaste. I was on my way down the stairs when I heard Jelly’s distinctively tooting beep.

  My parents and Allison weren’t around. Phoebe was trying to convince Gosia that Allison’s flip-flops belonged to her, and also to please get the dirt stains off them somehow before Allison woke up and saw. While Gosia was explaining in her patient, lightly accen
ted voice that dirt stains are almost impossible to remove, I said good-bye to them and stopped the door from slamming behind me.

  Jelly had rap music on loud. I turned it down. “You can’t actually like that stuff,” I said as she backed her huge car expertly down my driveway.

  “I don’t,” she admitted. “But how cliché would it be if I only listened to classical, right?”

  “If the shoe fits…” I started, but that reminded me about the stolen shoes that were hiding in my underwear drawer. Would they fit me? Probably not, and it wouldn’t matter. I wasn’t ever actually going to wear them anyway! So I shrugged and leaned back in my seat.

  “Even if the shoe fits, you don’t have to wear it,” Jelly argued, bopping unconvincingly to the beat. “There are other shoes that’ll fit, too.”

  Jelly (whose birth-cert name is Jill, but nobody ever uses anything but the name her older brother, Erik, gave her at birth: Jelly) is what she calls Jew-panese (her mom is Jewish, her dad Japanese), and so, according to her, has a double dose of You Are Such a Grind, genetically. The fact that she is also an actual grind made shirking the label that much harder.

  “Maybe we should just embrace the fact that we are nerds,” I suggested, as she flew down the entrance ramp onto the highway, while surreptitiously checking her mirrors.

  “No, Quinn,” she insisted, opening all the windows simultaneously with the long fingers of her left hand, while maintaining a cool eight miles over the speed limit (she had read on a website that police radar is set to nine miles above the speed limit). “Don’t embrace nerd status. Just because we study hard for every test and floss our teeth doesn’t mean we can’t also have a hidden wild side. We actually might! Do not go gentle into that nerd night. Rage, rage, against the dying of the possibility we might seem cool to somebody someday.”

  “Okay, okay.” I smiled and leaned my head on the shoulder strap of my seat belt. “That’s really likely, by the way.”

  She smiled her lopsided smile. “Maybe to somebody extremely minimally observant.”

  I considered telling her about my room, but I honestly just didn’t want to deal with thinking about it. Eight hours of being away from home felt, for the first time ever, like a gift, or a vacation.

  The underprivileged campers weren’t coming until the next day, so we overprivileged staff were doing team-building kinds of stuff, which I was dreading, but which ended up being less stupid than I’d feared. Luckily Jelly and I were placed together, counselors of the Hawks, along with a girl named Adriana Dominguez.

  Jelly and I shot a look at each other when we met her. She was stunning even before she smiled, but when she turned that wide grin on us, it was hard not to be dazzled. She’s the kind of person you really don’t want to like: too beautiful, fashionable, confident. But she was, to add insult to injury, really friendly and nice, too.

  She was going into senior year at the private school named Chadwick, up-county from us. When we went to get water during a break, Jelly said, “I think I may be allergic to Adriana. She is too flawless; it hurts my eyes.”

  “Maybe she’ll turn out to be minimally observant,” I suggested.

  At least that made Jelly laugh.

  Later in the day, when we were slumped on the hill listening to the music counselors do their end-of-camp-day songs, I blurted out that my parents are selling our house so they painted my room white.

  Jelly’s jaw dropped. “Wait, what?”

  “That sucks,” Adriana said, holding out a pack of gum. I took a piece. Jelly didn’t even seem to notice; she was staring so hard at me.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Sucks.” I folded the gum into my mouth. I almost never chew gum.

  “You’re moving?” Jelly asked. “Quinn, what?”

  “Just downsizing,” I said, trying to sound casual and not choke on the gum while talking. “You know, the economy.”

  “Yeah,” Adriana said. “Your dad lose his job?”

  “Mom,” I said.

  Jelly sucked in her perfect rosebud lips. I hadn’t said anything to her about Mom, but I figured she knew anyway. The fact that she didn’t ask anything confirmed that. For all I knew, there was stuff about it in the papers. Jelly read them; I didn’t. Especially now.

  “What does your father do?” Adriana asked.

  “He’s a kindergarten teacher.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

  “So your mom is the money?”

  I shrugged. “Well, was.”

  Adriana nodded. “Huh.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said, and flashed that smile again. “Just…different. Must be hard on your dad, you know, emasculating, all that. You know how guys are.”

  “No,” I protested. “It’s not—”

  “Well,” Adriana interrupted, throwing one arm over my shoulder and the other over Jelly’s, like we were her longtime best buds. “If the home front sucks, we’ll have to make sure the rest of your summer doesn’t, right, Jelly?”

  “Absolutely,” Jelly agreed quietly. “You’re not moving away, though, right?”

  I shook my head and spit my gum into my hand. My jaw was already exhausted.

  “I’ll find us some fun, for sure,” Adriana was saying, meanwhile standing up and brushing the grass off the back of her short cutoffs. Her gauzy shirt came down almost to the bottoms of them, and her thin multicolored bangles clanked cheerfully as she whipped her long billowy curls over her right shoulder. Her nail polish was complicated. I was trying to figure out what was drawn on her nails when I realized she was squinting down at us. “You guys aren’t going out with anybody already, are you?”

  Jelly and I both shook our nerdy heads.

  “Excellent,” Adriana said. “Blank slates.”

  4

  THAT NIGHT, WHILE I WAS fast asleep in my/not-my room, Allison was suddenly there, too, in my bed, whispering furiously to me. I was nodding at her before my eyes were open, shhhing her, trying to hold on to the remnants of my dream.

  Oliver was in it. Something nice was happening, maybe a boat? A canoe. We were together in a green canoe with wooden oars in our hands and no lifejackets on. Were we on the lake in camp? But wait, there’s a strict lifejackets rule at camp. And there was a fire, maybe a campfire but maybe it was a forest fire, but we weren’t in the forest; we were in a canoe, on a lake; maybe we were escaping from the forest fire, escaping by canoe. But no, that didn’t make any sense; Oliver wasn’t even working at my camp, so where were we…?

  As soon as you try to apply logic to a dream it gets annoyed and pops like the soap bubble it is. I opened my eyes and tried to focus on my gorgeous, stressed-out sister’s furious face, still wishing I could get back into that canoe.

  “They’re fighting,” she was whispering. “Well, not fighting exactly, but, like, whispering and then getting louder and then nothing at all and then whispering again, you know? Like fighting but not fighting really, just kind of discussing while stressed out and thinking but not positive that we’re asleep?”

  “Who?” I managed, my eyes drifting closed again. I could smell the forest fire or campfire again; I was near it. If I could go right back to sleep, the dream might still be lingering, with Oliver behind me in the canoe….

  “Quinn, what, are you kidding or are you the stupidest frigging genius ever? Them! Mom and Dad. And what you said totally isn’t true, Quinn; I’m serious.”

  This is the way Allison always talks, and even when I am fully conscious it is sometimes hard to keep afloat on the whitewater churning of her emotional tirades, canoe or no canoe.

  “Okay,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Okay.”

  “Okay, you agree you were lying, or okay, you are finally conscious?”

  “Um,” I answered.

  “Because she totally did it.”

  “Who? Mom? Did what?” I almost asked, Started the forest fire? But I had crossed just far enough into consciousness that I realized the forest
fire was in my dream, was probably something Freudian about my apparently undying crush on Oliver. Monday nights were always rough that way, because my piano lesson was on Tuesdays. I yawned to block questions about my dreamworld out of the conversation, then asked, more annoyed than I meant to sound, “What are you talking about, Al? It’s one in the morning.”

  Allison rolled her eyes at me. They still had remnants of smudgy black eyeliner on them. Allison had in the past couple of months emerged from her long, petulant, frown-filled hibernation in awkward adolescence as a head-turningly gorgeous girl. People literally turned their heads and stared at her now, and not (anymore) because she was throwing a tantrum. Well, not always, anymore. She wasn’t pretty, really. I was, if anything, more of a pretty girl, or I always had been when we were little. I’m not saying I was any great beauty even back then. I mean pretty like fine, okay, pleasing. That was me. Allison was stunning suddenly. That’s the word adults whispered about her. The boys throughout the high school used the excellent SAT vocab word hot instead, including the absolute hottest guy in my grade, who dogged Allison for a month before she deigned to start going out with him.

  “What happened?” I asked her slowly, hoping to erase some of the nastiness that had menaced my last attempt, and also to hand off some bit of calm, which she desperately needed, as always.

  She rolled her gray eyes again. “I just told you,” she whispered. “Were you even listening?”

  I knew that if I just sat still and silent, Allison would repeat whatever crisis she thought was brewing and had apparently told me in detail while I was fast asleep, escaping fires in a canoe with Oliver. As it was occurring to me that Dr. Freud would not need to be woken from the dead to interpret that most obvious cliché of a dream, it turned out I was right. Allison launched back into her crisis.

  Allison was once again convinced—and trying to convince me—that despite all the evidence I’d marshaled, Mom had not been scapegoated by the jerk men on her team. Despite the fact that they are a team, and make decisions as a team, despite the fact that no trades or decisions can be made except with at least three of them signing off on the decision, Allison was convinced that Mom somehow managed to get around all the safeguards and invest millions (literally many millions—we had heard a bunch of different figures, but the one that kept recurring was $214 million) in a company, Galen, that, rather than curing cancer, like Mom thought it was about to do, was actually skidding down a steep hill toward bankruptcy.