Brilliant

by Rachel Vail

  Hard to believe I am the easy kid in my family. I am such a pain in the ass. Nobody usually knows that, though. I am the ultimate con girl. In American Culture AP this past year, we learned about the racial issue of “passing”—there was a thing, historically, that if you were an African American who had lighter skin, you could supposedly “pass” for white and therefore were likely to attain a higher rank in society. Pretty awful, when you think about the implications of that. In my school and my life, it isn’t so much a matter of race or ethnic background. There’s a money element, definitely, though how much impact that has I guess I will find out in the coming year, when we have none, or much less, anyway. But even more than money, and way more than skin color, I think, is social grace, or interest, maybe. Like, if you know how to whisper and laugh and say the right thing to a particular crowd, that’s who you hang with, even if that’s not who you really are.

  I could pass for anything.

  Well, not a jock. But I could pass for cool and hyper-social, or brainy, or even theater geek and, of course, band freak.

  People usually bought what I put on display.

  I had always thought of it as a skill, something good—I didn’t confine myself to one group. Also it was like a secret. I was a spy, able to pass undetected in any guise I chose, and nobody would know the real me.

  Except Oliver. It has always felt like he could see right through, like he wasn’t fooled, though he was maybe amused. It’s that, I think, that makes him so irresistible to me. Not just how his butt looks in jeans, no matter what my crass sisters say, too loudly, as he leaves our house after lessons. It’s just that it feels like he sees who I really am when he looks in my eyes.

  Or maybe that is all just my fantasy. My horribly deluded fantasy, and something I have to move on from.

  Because he didn’t respond to my text. My phone stayed limp and lifeless as a sandwich in my hand all the sweaty day.

  Nobody even wanted to let me know my nonexistent warranty was about to expire.

  “Screw him,” Jelly said when she caught me checking it on the drive home. “Not literally, of course. Excelsior. Bigger and better and sicker and wilder guys await us. Right?”

  “Right,” I agreed.

  “There’s wildness in us,” she insisted, making all the windows go down at once. “Before the grind of junior year starts, we have to let our crazy wildness out!”

  So that, plus the romance of my parents and the twittering of Adriana and Jelly and their escalating plans for fun this summer with the mad-sick-wild, etc., Mason and JD, and the lack of response from Oliver and maybe even the humid heat had sent me into a bit of a crazed and desperate funk even before I got home to find the house echoingly empty until the doorbell rang.

  None of that is sufficient excuse, I am aware, for what happened. I’m just saying they are all pieces of the reason.

  8

  I HAD TO INTERRUPT MY PARENTS at the lawyer’s office. No way was I letting those three bulky men in the door without finding out if I was even supposed to, or allowed to.

  Dad answered Mom’s cell.

  He answered all my questions, sometimes saying, “Hold on,” to confer with Mom and the lawyer. I had to read him the document handed to me by the short guy with the stubble darkening his cheeks. All three of them stared at me with arms crossed but not objecting as I listened to murmurs of discussion through the phone. The men seemed kind, patient, and way out of proportion for our mudroom, which had until that moment been plenty big.

  “Okay,” I told Dad, but then added, “You sure?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Gotta go.”

  His voice cracked.

  I closed my phone and turned to the men. “Okay.”

  “Can you show us where the piano is?”

  I led them through the kitchen and around through the foyer to the living room. I pointed at the piano, though at that point it was probably obvious to them where the piano was.

  There was some muttering and measuring, and a bit of difficulty with unjamming the second double front door, which I had actually never seen open before. It looked unseemly, embarrassing to have such a gaping opening to our house, like a girl wearing a skirt with her knees spread.

  I leaned against the living room wall while they worked, then went and sat at a stool in the kitchen. It occurred to me I should probably be overseeing what they were doing, making sure they weren’t denting the walls or stealing the coasters, but I couldn’t rouse myself to give a crap, and honestly I didn’t really want to watch them removing the piano.

  When the piano was out, presumably in the truck, the head guy brought me a paper to sign. “We just need your autograph,” he said jovially, but his squinty eyes showed he knew this was awkward. He shrugged with one shoulder as I placed the crinkled papers on the granite counter to sign on the line.

  I closed the double doors behind them.

  I tried to get up the courage to go into the living room and see it all empty and stripped, but I just couldn’t. Instead I opened both the double doors again.

  I stood there and looked out at the front yard for a while.

  Then I turned around and forced myself to go to the living room.

  There were deep indents in the carpet where the piano feet had been. Above them was way too much air. And silence.

  When it hit me that the music was gone, that we would go to sleep that night without hearing “Summertime,” listening only to the thudding of our own hearts, I sat down in the space where the piano wasn’t and held my head in my hands. I waited for tears that didn’t show and wished simultaneously for somebody to come home so we could deal together, and yet for nobody to come home because it wouldn’t be fully real until somebody did, until I connected with somebody about it.

  I heard a creak behind me but didn’t look up, because only Phoebe walks that quietly, and a sudden wave of guilt had knocked me so sideways, I couldn’t face her. Obviously it wasn’t my fault that our piano had been repossessed, but I was the one who let them take it. I didn’t stop them. I was supposed to be the one who made sure nothing bad happened. Three men came and took our piano; I let them—I signed a paper saying yes, take what was ours, our magnificent grand piano that I will never play again in my whole life.

  That’s when the tears came, and when the voice that said, “Hey,” behind me was not Phoebe’s.

  Startled, I looked up.

  It was Tyler Moss.

  “Quinn,” he said.

  I rubbed at my eyes like a little kid, and sniffled. “Allison’s not here.”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  What happened.

  “You kind of…It’s a bad…”

  He knelt in front of me. “Hey.”

  “They took our piano.”

  “Were you robbed? The big doors were wide-open….”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Worse.”

  “You okay?” he asked.

  I swallowed and tried to smile. “Yeah.”

  He was staring into my eyes, so tender, his eyes the most intense blue I had ever seen. He mumbled some words of comfort that didn’t comfort me at all.

  And then, I don’t know, I started crying again. He hugged me; I hugged him. He was comforting me, like a friend, like an old friend, even though in truth he was not my friend, not an old friend despite the fact that he was in my grade and until a few hours before that had been going out with my sister. But I was kneeling then, too, and he was holding me, right there on the rug where the piano wasn’t, and then, though I had never kissed a boy before, I kissed him.

  9

  I STOPPED AS SOON AS I realized what I was doing.

  Of course.

  I really did.

  Well, almost as soon.

  What does that even mean, as soon as I realized? It’s not like I completely didn’t realize what I was doing. I wasn’t a cabbage at the moment our lips met, obviously. My brain was functioning, though clearly not fully, and my body was following
my brain’s commands.

  And then some.

  But I was also thinking.

  I was thinking many, many things all at once. One of which was, Oh, my God. Another of which was, I am finally kissing somebody—hallelujah, I will not graduate from high school unkissed, and by the way, this boy I am kissing happens to be the hottest boy in my grade, hooray for me, and his lips are both soft and hard. Another thought dashing across my brain was, Mmmm.

  I may also have been thinking, on another track, Kissing actually is a very lovely and enjoyable activity; now I see why so many songs are written about this wonderful thing; I must figure out how to do it again often.

  I just wasn’t thinking, Absolutely not. I cannot kiss my sister’s boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, if he really is ex.

  The main thing I was thinking about in those few seconds (honestly it was no more than four or possibly five seconds) while I was kissing Tyler Moss and forcing myself not to be thinking, No!, was what he had said, trying to comfort me, right before somehow our bodies were mashed up against each other down to the knees (we were kneeling) and up to the lips:

  “It’s just things.”

  Which, okay, obviously. On one level. And for goodness’ sake, my nickname (not that I completely have a nickname, like at school, to put on my jacket if I were on a team, but from my dad) is Zen. It’s not like I am all about things.

  “It’s just things”?

  That’s what he came up with to comfort me, when three burly men had just removed our grand piano from the living room and left me home to be the one who already knew, when everybody else came home to find the living room excavated?

  I know it’s just things, I was thinking.

  I know we are so blessed that our family is alive and intact and able to weather whatever hits us. I know what the important stuff is and isn’t, you dumb, stupid, condescending jock, with, okay, an amazingly hard body and the staring eyes. But still, you honestly don’t have to give me a greeting-card rally lesson on values. I get it. I got it.

  On the other hand (and yes, I had time to think all this as I was making out with him, and no, that doesn’t mean it was an hour-long session or anything; I just think very fast), it is actually not just things that got taken away.

  That piano was a gift from my mother to my father, for one thing. It has symbolic value—as a huge, shiny testament to their success and her love for him and his for her—how she gave it to him because he loves to play the piano and had dreams, unfulfilled and even unspoken beneath all his protestations of always wanting to be a kindergarten teacher, of being a concert pianist but realizing early on that he had neither the drive nor the talent to be that—my mom told me all that when she was looking secretly at the Steinway brochure for the perfect grand piano to buy for him, and maybe she thought I forgot or wasn’t paying attention, but I was; I always am. She believed in him, was what it said, sitting there all large in the living room. And he adored her, it sang, every night when he played—he played for us, of course, and for himself—but mostly he played for her, love song after love song; even a silly song like “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?” was a love song, really, because we all knew (or at least I knew) he was singing on some level to get that smile out of her.

  And not to be selfish, but hello, I have been taking piano lessons on that piano for four years. I play that thing every single day. They may as well have taken away my fingers.

  Or my voice.

  Just things?

  They even took the bench where Mom sometimes sat next to Dad, or one of us did (usually Phoebe), and also where, for the past year, I sat every week for half an hour beside Oliver.

  They took the damn bench.

  Seriously, how much does a damn bench cost?

  Just things. Right.

  But sometimes things are more than just things.

  So I pulled my mouth off Tyler Moss’s mouth and opened my eyes.

  We stared at each other for a second, maybe three. “Quinn…” he said.

  I stood up. “You’d better get out of here,” I told him, with my hand over my mouth.

  “I didn’t…” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  I shook my head.

  Behind me, I heard him standing up.

  “Quinn…”

  “Don’t tell Allison,” I said, my back still to him. “Please.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “I came here to…”

  “Just go,” I said, and dashed up the stairs.

  No doors closed behind him. I guess he went out the splayed double doors and left them like that.

  I threw open my window, too, despite the blasting air-conditioning, and lay flat on my bed for, I don’t know, hours. Forever. Trying not to think, not checking my phone or email because I certainly had forfeited any right to even hope for my own romantic anything. I pushed thoughts of Oliver and even (how did these sneak in there?) weird romantic images of this Mason person, whom I’d never met and would almost surely dislike, out of my festering head. I knew I deserved to be punished for what I had done, and that somehow, cosmically, I would get what I deserved. And I’d have no right to complain.

  I always had this somewhat (okay, hugely) arrogant belief that, sure, I was extremely fortunate—materially, of course, but also in the family I got and the brains, the talents, even the actual unmagnified, perhaps puny talents I could honestly claim—blessed, really, any way you look at it. But that (here’s the arrogant part, which I never fully articulated to myself until this second) I kind of in a way deserved all that. I was a good girl. I worked hard. I was responsible. I didn’t smoke or drink or take drugs or curse or even stay up very late. I was honest with my parents and revised my work. I didn’t gossip or wear tons of eyeliner. So why shouldn’t I have good stuff? Why shouldn’t I get the position at the camp I applied for, or straight As, win the piano competition, be selected “Best Girl” in my camp bunk? I earned it.

  I had heard the phrase the best and the brightest lots of times in my life, and who wouldn’t want to be that? I was willing to work for it, and when I was considered that, one of the best and the brightest, well, it wasn’t unearned, right?

  But someone who is “the best” or “the brightest” doesn’t kiss her sister’s boyfriend. Even if he is recently demoted to ex-boyfriend.

  Even if it “just happened.” An accident, a mistake. Everybody makes a mistake sometimes, right?

  Do things really just happen, though? Or was there a little part of me that, seeing Tyler Moss there in front of me with those sizzling eyes and that intense body, the hottest boy in my grade, not my sister’s grade, thought, Well, why not me? Forbidden, naughty—absolutely—but maybe for one freaking second of my life I could be naughty, grab the forbidden thing? Why does Allison always get to be the wild child? Maybe just this once it could be me?

  And then, to feel him respond…Because, okay, fine, I started it, I initiated it, I admit that I caused the kiss, true—but he responded. He did. He was kissing me back. He didn’t pull away, not instantly, anyway. He kissed me, too.

  Oh, my God.

  I did not just do that!

  A girl who would do a thing like that was nobody I’d want to associate with.

  Which caused a couple of problems. Like, logistically, for starters.

  I heard my parents as they were coming up the walk toward home after their appointment with the lawyer. I rolled off my bed and looked at my unrecognizable self, in my unrecognizable room. My heart skittered inside my chest. I had to do something. What? I looked like Psycho Girl, the whites visible all around the irises in my eyes.

  Mom’s heels were clicking just as confidently as ever on the path. I dashed to my bed and peeked over the edge of my windowsill and heard her saying to Dad, loud and clear because she was confident nobody was listening (memo to parents: We are always listening), “No, I didn’t burn my journal, because that would be spoliation of evidence.”

  To which he very ethically responded
, “Oh, Claire.”

  “I’m just not the kind of person who’d do such a thing,” she said.

  And something in me snapped. I slammed my window closed, and too bad if it startled them or they realized they were not in a cone of silence to discuss their transgressions like they were junk mail.

  Apparently they noticed the open double doors. I heard them down there, but when they called to me I just said, “I’m in my room.”

  I tried not to listen to them after that. I tried not to hear them discussing what was going to happen next, what was next to go, “mortgage…impossible…your mother…You spoke with her?…temporary…What can we do?…We’ll be okay….”

  I put my iPod earbuds in and wrecked my hearing for a while by blasting Rachmaninoff’s entire second piano concerto.

  When my sisters came home, they discovered the lack of piano, too.

  “On credit,” I heard Mom explaining. “Loan…finance…terms…belt-tightening.”

  “But it’s ours,” I heard Allison protest.

  “Does Quinn know?” Phoebe asked.

  Murmur murmur, came the response. My excellent hearing apparently had been successfully dulled. I was glad.

  I was called down for dinner. Dad had whipped up a pasta dish with cauliflower and smoked Gouda, which we all ate with fake smiles and polite conversation.

  I could not look at Allison at all.

  Afterward, when all the plates were cleared, while he was washing the dishes, Dad joked, “Well, I guess I could ask a couple guys to come over and help me haul the upright up from the basement.”

  “I doubt it would be worth it,” Mom muttered, then turned to us. “Girls, this is not going to be easy. The piano is only the first thing to go. You need to prepare yourselves—we all need to prepare….”

  By instinct I reassured her: “Don’t worry about us, Mom. We’re fine. We’ll be fine.” But I couldn’t, this time, look her in the eyes, either.