Brilliant

by Rachel Vail

  As usual, I tried to calm Allison down. I tried to explain the structure of the hedge fund (as if I understood it myself) and why it was impossible, implausible, ridiculous to imagine Mom could have made $214 million disappear all by herself.

  “She was a woman in the boys’ locker room,” I explained. “You remember I did that report on women last year, on what happened when they first let women into the military, the firefighters’ union, and even men’s colleges? The first women were subjected to all kinds of brutality, scapegoating, and worse….”

  “Yeah,” Allison grunted. “Except I am not talking about your damn homework, Quinn. I am talking about Mom. And maybe she did deal with a lot of that, whatever, misery…”

  “Misogyny,” I corrected, in spite of myself, not wanting to be a prig, but it was the middle of the night, so my social defenses were weak. “Irrational hatred of women.”

  “Whatever!” Allison sprang off my bed to pace around my cluttered room. “What I am saying,” she whispered, “is that Mom is the one on the line here, not because the other guys are jerks, which they probably are. But because she did something way bad.”

  I flopped back down on my pillow. “You just hate her.”

  “Fine.” Allison stalked toward my door.

  I propped myself up on my elbow. “You just automatically assume that if something bad happened, it must be Mom’s fault.”

  “No,” Allison snapped back. “You just automatically assume Mom is as perfect as you are, so nothing could ever be her fault.”

  I pulled my pillow over my face and breathed in the slightly sweaty smell of it. There was no reason to have this argument for the billionth time in the middle of the night. I heard my door swish open. I figured Allison was heading back to her room, or maybe to go wake up poor Phoebe and fill her with the worry Allison was clearly incapable of keeping to herself. Just as I lifted the pillow off my head to warn her to leave Phoebe alone, Allison’s face loomed beside mine again.

  “Yikes.” I gasped.

  “But think about this,” Allison whispered. “If she’s so innocent, why is Mom burning her papers in the fireplace at one in the morning?”

  I sat up. Allison’s face was all blotchy. I asked if she was sure and, her eyes open wide and scared, Allison slowly nodded.

  My mouth was suddenly dry. I licked my parched lips with my sandpaper tongue. Trying to calm my pounding pulse, I breathed in through my nose and smelled it: the unmistakable nondream smell of a fire.

  “She’s burning papers?” I whispered.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re sure? Because if there’s just a fire we should—”

  “I’m sure,” Allison whispered. “I was watching. She’s pulling them out of a binder and crumpling them and putting them in the fire.”

  I threw my covers off and followed my sister out of my room. We tiptoed down the front stairs, skipping the fifth and seventh steps (the squeakers) and pressing close to the banister so we wouldn’t bump the pictures on the wall. We could hear the crackling of the fire and my father’s worried whispers.

  “Claire, please,” he was whispering.

  We missed her next words because papers were being crumpled, but then heard her whisper fiercely, “my own private notes, my own private thoughts”—crumple crumple—“no right to”—crumple crumple burn burn burn.

  “Indictable,” he whispered back.

  I wanted to get a look. If my mother was burning her papers, papers that were important in a legal case, and she wasn’t supposed to, she could end up in jail. Her lawyer was a business lawyer; she had told me that—she had explained it to me very clearly, privately, not to my sisters but to me, because I am the oldest, the one she can count on, the one she knows would worry and project forward with what if, what if, what if. So she was very clear to me that this sphere of a man was a business lawyer; she was retaining him (retaining, that was the word she used, as if he was something she was keeping around like on a leash, just in case without really wanting to, almost accidentally, retaining him like retaining water) to handle issues of her severance pay, the terms of her leaving the company, how they’d word her letters of recommendation and something about a noncompete clause. I didn’t follow all of what she was saying but I pretended to, because I wanted her to be able to talk to me in her fast-word shorthand, to trust me—and the important thing was that this Weeble of a lawyer was there to negotiate contracts for her, not to protect her from jail. She hadn’t done anything wrong.

  She was blameless.

  Allison was blaming her but Allison was always blaming her. If Allison didn’t get her homework done it was Mom’s fault; if Allison overslept or got a zit it was Mom’s fault.

  But of course, in fact, it was not Mom’s fault—neither Allison’s zit nor the need for a lawyer. Obviously.

  I moved down another step. It was June, late June, a heat wave, and after one in the morning. If there was a good reason for my parents to be making a fire in the family room, I was having trouble coming up with it. I turned to look at Allison, to signal her to be very quiet, and, slightly off balance, knocked with my left shoulder into an etching they’d recently bought by some old Dutch artist who wasn’t Rembrandt, but almost.

  Allison and I both froze.

  Mom and Dad stopped moving behind the wall. “What was that?” my mother whispered, and her normally absolute voice sounded trembly.

  Allison tugged my T-shirt at the shoulder, pulling me urgently upstairs.

  “I’ll see,” Dad said. His footsteps started toward us.

  I couldn’t move.

  Allison tugged again. Her face was intense and urging: Come! Hurry! Now! I couldn’t remember how to make my muscles obey my brain.

  If I stayed they’d find me there; they’d know I knew. It would all be out in the open. How awful. But…honesty, I thought. The best policy. Oh, great. Clichés, just the weapon I needed.

  Something clicked in my nervous system. I dashed up behind Allison and didn’t look back. At the top of the stairs we split—she went left, to her room; I went right to mine. I dove feet-first into my bed and slid quickly down under the blankets, between the cool three-hundred-thread-count organic white cotton sheets. I snuggled my head down into the well of my still-dented pillow and pretended to sleep, sure my telltale heart would give me away if my father had followed us up the stairs.

  The next thing I knew, the sun was coming through my window.

  I brushed my teeth carefully, concentrating on my morning routine, washing, moisturizing, smoothing my ponytail, choosing soft white socks and my camp shirt.

  In the kitchen, watching our moody toaster work on a whole-wheat English muffin for us to share, Mom teased me about having passed out so early because I was worn out from anticipation of being responsible for so many kids.

  I fake-smiled, like a twitch, and agreed, “Yes, it is definitely exhausting.”

  Not wanting to meet her eyes, I watched the toaster, too. Mom sighed. Together we saw our English-muffin-to-share suddenly ignite inside our crazy toaster. As Mom tried to douse the flames, I tried not to breathe in the scent of burning.

  5

  TODAY WAS THE FIRST DAY with campers.

  I was having trouble concentrating. I don’t think I was a great role model. Jelly glanced over at me, concerned, a couple of times, but mostly she laughed more than usual, cracking up at everything Adriana said. They were having a lot of fun.

  The two of them led our campers right into the pool, and together they all splashed around like a bunch of happy ducks. Only one sullen camper refused to go in, and since I was in no mood to be a happy duck myself, I made a big deal of being willing to sit with him. His name was Ramon, and he was one of the littlest of our campers. He sat still and silent on the bench, his bright towel draped over his narrow shoulders, so serious and thoughtful, his tangled black hair obscuring his dark eyes.

  My first few attempts at conversation went nowhere. I didn’t honestly care. I leaned back agai
nst the chain-link fence and was trying not to think about my white room or my mother burning papers when Ramon announced, “I have no gills.”

  “True,” I said, without opening my eyes.

  “So I can’t breathe the oxygen from the water.”

  “You don’t have to,” I mumbled. “You can breathe air, because you’ll just float.”

  “How do you know?” he demanded.

  “You’re buoyant,” I mumbled. I was so not up to being a role model right then.

  “Not very,” Ramon said sadly, and hunched over more. “I’m bad at throwing and I don’t care about cars and I am not rough-and-tumble at all.”

  “So?”

  “That’s what boys are supposed to be!”

  “Not boyish,” I said quietly. “Buoyant.”

  He looked interested, and skeptical. I explained the principles of buoyancy and why he would float, and then that boys can still be boyish even without punching or being rough at all.

  He listened intensely to everything I told him, then said, “Okay, I will swim tomorrow. I have to think about this for a while first.”

  I felt so tender toward him in that moment, I put my arm around him and he rested, heart pounding, his head against my chest.

  I slumped into Jelly’s car when it was time to go home. “You stressed about family stuff or your piano lesson or what?” she asked.

  “All of life is stress,” I said.

  “You sound like me,” Jelly pointed out.

  “Someone has to,” I mumbled, but I wasn’t actually annoyed at her—I wasn’t actually annoyed at anybody; I was just in a funk that needed to be overcome—so I turned on the rap music and pretended to happily seat-dance along. Sometimes faking is the fastest route to becoming.

  I was still fake-happy at my piano lesson, trying to be, as Phoebe’s stupid magazines admonish, lighthearted and fun to be with—because that’s what guys like.

  My fingers could not get their act together at all. Oliver touched them lightly. “Wait,” he said. “Think first: What is this piece about?”

  I hung my head, chastised. “I don’t know.”

  “Good,” he said. “Excellent place to begin. Scary, maybe, but if you’re brave enough to admit not knowing, you open yourself up to what might be. Does that make sense to you?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “What do you feel when you hear it in your mind? What do you think?”

  My mind was blank, so I just sat there, a tense lump of failure beside him.

  “You okay?” Oliver asked me, in that rumbling baritone voice of his.

  “Fine!” I smiled, or at least showed my shiny bleached teeth. Urgh, what a dork. “Anyway, though, this is my last lesson.”

  “Oh?” he asked.

  I shrugged, all casual, as if I wasn’t admitting for the first time, “Money issues, you know.”

  He didn’t say anything. I was staring at my fingers, splayed uselessly across the keys. Make a joke, make light of it, pass it off, I was commanding myself, but my normally obedient self was stiffly rebelling. I swallowed, or tried. I forced my mouth back into an imitation smile, and my eyes up toward his. He wasn’t making a whatever, no big deal face, or turning away politely, embarrassed. He didn’t even look curious, hungry for the gossip, like most of the people who live in this town absolutely would be. He just sat still on the bench beside me, staring into my eyes.

  Just what I needed. Full-body sweat. Did he have to have such piercingly intelligent eyes, if he was going to be too old for me and yet sit right beside me all smelling like cilantro, and his black hair standing up so cute in back like that? I mean, really.

  “So,” I started, desperate to not cry like the baby I didn’t want him to think I was. “Anyway.”

  He lifted his big, graceful hand from his lap and placed it on my shoulder. It took all of my concentration to remain conscious and still. I had my hair in a ponytail and a tank top on. I felt two of his fingertips on the skin of my neck, down where my neck curved toward my shoulder. His fingers, so warm, melted something inside me. I could feel it radiating moltenly from the points where his fingers touched my skin, down, down.

  I didn’t want to budge.

  I’m not sure if I initiated the movement or he did with the pressure of those fingers, but I tilted toward him, slowly, until my head was against his shoulder.

  His shirt was soft, the kind of cool silkiness a T-shirt acquires when it’s been washed hundreds of times. I could feel his chest rising and falling beneath my cheek.

  “You okay?” he asked, his voice just a whisper or less.

  I intended to say yes. It came out instead as, “No.”

  I felt his arm tighten around me.

  My sisters’ voices on the stairs wrenched us apart. I couldn’t look at him. I didn’t want to look into his face and see clearly that he was comforting a little girl the way I had comforted little Ramon a few hours earlier.

  The parallels were too hideous.

  The idea of Oliver loving me like I had been loving toward Ramon shot me off the bench toward the living room door.

  “So, thanks,” I said quickly. “Sorry about the…lack of notice, or whatever. Hope it doesn’t mess you up, or—”

  “No worries,” Oliver replied. “I just…Quinn. If you want to talk…”

  “I’m not a baby!” I couldn’t look at him. “I’m fine. Okay?”

  I left without saying good-bye or walking him to the door. I ran up the stairs. He was the first person other than Jelly—oh, well, and Adriana—I had told we were in financial trouble; Mom had asked us to keep family business in the family, which meant secret. Don’t tell anybody. I broke her trust, broke my word, traded my reliability for an embrace. And a lopsided embrace at that.

  And also for what, in the case of Adriana? To seem cool and casual, to try out saying it? It was bad enough to have told Jelly. Why tell Adriana, whom I don’t even know, and Oliver, whom I love in an embarrassing little-schoolgirl-crush kind of way, which I am much too old to continue indulging when he is all brilliant and perfect and off at college and having probably dozens of girlfriends, while I sit home in my little-girl world imagining whether I could ever be good enough, brilliant and beautiful and perfect enough, to make him really notice me? Ew!

  Could I please finally accept that he is just way, way out of my league, that I will never be worthy of the kind of love I have to stop wanting from him?

  I slammed my door and flopped down on my bed, waiting for tears that didn’t come. Big mouth, I berated myself. I’d made such a big deal to my sisters about keeping Mom’s privacy and now I’d sold it out for a cheap, one-sided, nonthrilling thrill.

  Why?

  Just for attention?

  To get him, and them, to like me? For pity?

  That was just too pathetic to contemplate.

  Since I wasn’t crying, I knelt to peek out my window, to watch Oliver leave. He didn’t turn back to look at me.

  I took it, as always, as a sign, proof that he felt, could feel, nothing for me.

  But that night was the first time he texted me:

  I know you’re not a baby.

  6

  I DIDN’T TEXT BACK, not right away, and I didn’t call him.

  The next afternoon, instead of the romantic tryst I was forcing myself not to imagine, I failed my driver’s test.

  I had never failed a test before in my life. I’d gotten 100 percent on my permit test seven months earlier; the lady at the DMV couldn’t believe it. She said she’d never seen a perfect score before, in twelve years of working at the Department of Motor Vehicles. She called a colleague over to see it. The guy, who looked like he’d never said no to a Twinkie, asked me, mockingly, if I’d studied for the test.

  “Yes,” I admitted, thinking, Did I study? It was a test.

  I don’t always get a perfect score on every test, obviously, but when I get something wrong it tortures me. Teachers held me up as an example starting in kindergarten, but,
really, it isn’t that I’m so brilliant the answers come easily to me or so diligent I would never shirk a responsibility as much as I am neurotic, and the pain of red Xs on my paper is so much worse than the pleasure (if there is pleasure in it) of not studying, there’s barely a choice. Did I study? It was a test. Of course I studied.

  Mom drove me to the driving test.

  Dad used to drive us everywhere, do the stuff with us that most people’s mothers did, make the little decisions that had to be handled every day, especially since Mom’s work got so intense a few years ago. Allison was resentful of Mom’s business busyness, but not me—I liked it that she was the money of our family, that the world took her so seriously and rewarded her so richly (literally) for her hard work and brilliance at what she did.

  Huh. Maybe it was just the weirdness of having her drive me to my driving test, her awkwardness and deeply unhelpful attempts to bond (probe) when I was trying to focus, her disorienting new need to get in my head that screwed me up at that vital moment.

  Or maybe I was feeling slightly, well, disappointed in her, judging her harshly—which was so unfair and just plain incorrect that it completely threw me off my game.

  Or maybe I actually suck at driving, despite my sisters’ oft-repeated belief that I am excellent at it in their impatience to have me drive them everywhere. Maybe they are just fooled about that, too.

  Whatever the cause of my distraction or lack of talent during the test, though, and whatever the mitigating circumstances—like the squirrel that truly did, whether Driving Inspector Man saw it or not, run in front of the car as I was attempting the three-point turn—it is not really under dispute whether or not I smashed into that police car.