Brilliant

by Rachel Vail

  “Yeah,” he said, strumming lightly.

  “They repossessed our piano.”

  His fingers froze above the guitar strings. “No way.”

  “Way,” I said. Luckily, no tears threatened. I was all cried out.

  “That sucks,” he said, shaking his head sympathetically.

  I smiled.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” I half giggled. “It’s just, yeah. Exactly.” I stretched my legs out in front of me.

  “So, what happened? This was all pretty sudden.”

  I shrugged, very world-weary and sophisticated, I hoped. “The economy,” I said. “Plus, I can’t really say, but my mom is a very moral…She’s the most…I don’t want to say heroic or…But—let’s just say she took the fall for a lot of jerks.”

  “Really?”

  Oliver was looking with his X-ray-vision eyes at me—not heavy-lidded and intense like Tyler, but sharply focused, reflecting my image back at me from somewhere deep in them. “Yeah.” I sighed.

  “You must be really angry.”

  “About what?”

  “At her,” he said. “Your mom.”

  I shook my head. He had it all mixed up. “No. Not at all.”

  “Not at all?”

  “She didn’t…She’s completely blameless, for one.”

  “And for two?”

  I smiled. “I don’t really get mad.”

  “Ever?”

  I shrugged. “Not really, no.”

  “Wow, that’s a lot of tight control there.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not—it just seems pointless to get mad. You know? You end up losing control, saying stupid things and doing stuff you shouldn’t….”

  “That would be a sight to see,” he said.

  I blinked, turned my own eyes down, studied my sneakers. Give it up, Quinn. You are too old to have little-girl crushes now. Abruptly, to change the subject, I said, “I think we may have to move.”

  “Move? Where?”

  “I heard them discussing moving in temporarily with my grandmother.” I hadn’t mentioned this to either of my sisters yet. I hadn’t even admitted to myself that I’d heard it, and hearing myself say it aloud to Oliver I heard it, really heard it, for the first time. I bit my lip. This was not good. I was all jumbled up and starting to sweat. Profusely.

  Always an attractive flirtation move.

  “No!” Oliver half frowned, half grinned. “The grandmother who hates Allison?”

  “She does not! Allison just hates her. It’s projection.”

  “That’ll be a party.” Oliver put the guitar down and stretched his legs out, too. “I’m sorry I won’t be here to witness that.”

  “Why?” I asked, trying for casual. Failing. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to school.”

  I think I managed to say, “Oh.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah. I gave it a shot.”

  “I didn’t realize you had just taken…”

  “Leave of absence. Junior year not abroad. Yeah. So, I’ll be a junior.”

  “Me too.”

  He smiled. No teeth.

  “I mean, obviously…” Oh can I possibly be this lame? “I’ll be in high school.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know you.”

  “What do you mean, you gave it a shot?” I was talking in a higher key than usual, but it seemed urgent that I get him talking so I could catch up with my racing pulse and not make even more of an ass of myself. Although we’d spent half an hour every week for a year sitting beside each other on a piano bench, his hands sometimes touching mine, his shoulder tantalizingly close to mine, his scent of shampoo and fresh air wafting around us—plus a few minutes afterward chatting in our kitchen, usually—I had never really asked him why he wasn’t at Harvard anymore, what he was doing hanging around our town, taking over some of his mom’s piano students, including Phoebe and me, but basically just, as far as I knew, loafing. I had wondered all year what had happened with school, but I didn’t want to be rude. I didn’t want to pry.

  Well, I did want to pry, but I didn’t want him to think I was prying. But there on his front porch it seemed, finally, like maybe he’d be okay talking about it. And I was determined to stop barfing up embarrassing little pearls about my family and myself. I’ll be in high school. Jesus freaking Christ in a Buick, as my grandmother would say.

  “I mean,” I said, truly unable to shut my mouth, “if you don’t mind saying—what happened?”

  “I had this really great professor. He hated me.”

  “Sounds awesome.” Did he fail out? Oliver Andreas? Not even possible.

  “He was. Brilliant, intense, so hard. I wrote this fugue for his class, and it was kind of a crazy time…you’ll see when you go to college. I was just…I wasn’t sleeping; I was trying to write for the Crimson, and study, and then there was marching band, which is actually way cooler than it sounds, and much more work, plus I was playing guitar a couple nights at this little pub in Harvard Square, and I was dead set on having fun, too, which…Anyway, so, the beginning of the fugue was really good, but I kind of let it get away from me—I guess I got a little overambitious.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Did you try to introduce more than three voices?”

  “Yeah,” he said, his eyes lighting up. “You know Bach’s fugues?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I mean, I like Bach—don’t love him, but he’s kind of growing on me. So, from listening and, well, you mentioned something about Bach’s fugues earlier this year….”

  “I did?” he asked.

  “I like counterpoint,” I admitted. “Well, I haven’t really…It sounded interesting, so I checked out a couple of books and, well, I kind of read them. So, how many voices did you try to shove into your fugue, then?” I asked him.

  “Seven.”

  “Seven?”

  “Yeah. It was my first try at it. But I thought—”

  “Uh-huh,” I interrupted, forgetting to watch what I said, or to try to seem cool and mature to him. “And for your next trick, maybe you should build a skyscraper, starting at the top floor and working down from there.”

  He grabbed a flower off the bush beside him and chucked it at me, laughing. “I know, but I, well, I thought it was pretty good—anarchic, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You do, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I know you.”

  “Jeez, Quinn Avery.”

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “Well, Professor Glover didn’t get it. Or maybe he did get it; he totally got it. He called me to his office and he threw it at me.”

  “Threw what at you?”

  “The score, the music. Literally. He was so steaming mad his face was all red. And then he…Well, anyway.”

  “Tell me!” I demanded.

  Oliver sighed. “It’ll sound like bragging, but it really isn’t, I swear.”

  “Okay. If you get out of hand, I promise to cut you down to size.”

  “Deal.” He sighed and said softly, “He said if he had my talent, he wouldn’t be pissing it away like I was doing. He said if I wanted to be a good-time Charlie, go ahead, but then I shouldn’t do music because it was a travesty for me to do it so half-assed.”

  “So you decided…”

  “To do it full-assed. Yeah. Well, first to drop his class.”

  “Good-time Charlie?”

  “I know. So,” Oliver continued, looking up at the sky, “I gave myself a year. A lot of geniuses, successful geniuses, have dropped out of Harvard: Bill Gates, Stephen Wadsworth…”

  “Who?”

  “Opera director, Juilliard professor, great guy.”

  “Never threw a score at you?”

  Oliver grinned and shook his head. “Couple of puns, maybe a chair.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Juilliard?”

  “Took some classes. Applied. Didn’t get in.”

  “Really? That’s crazy.”<
br />
  “Not really,” he said. “I’m good, I think, but I’m not, you know…”

  “Brilliant?”

  He shrugged. “It confirmed for me that I wasn’t getting what I wanted, anyway. I don’t even know if I want to do classical or rock. I should know, right? Well, neither one has panned out so far for me….”

  “You’re good at both,” I said. “Maybe you’re just too brilliant for people to understand.”

  He looked at his feet, bare in tattered old untied running shoes. “I had this idea about myself,” he said, and hesitated.

  “It doesn’t sound like bragging.” I got up and went to sit beside him. “It sounds like…I mean…”

  “Like what?”

  “Like me, when I’m just thinking. Alone. About myself. Not that I’m at your level of, well, anything, but…” Urgh! Could somebody please come shove a sock in my mouth?

  “I’m not so sure about that,” he said gallantly, as I cringed.

  “Tell me what your idea of yourself was.”

  He sighed. “I…I just…I had this idea I was…that it was all going to just…happen for me. To me.”

  “I am familiar with that idea,” I said slowly.

  He nodded. “I bet you are, Quinn Avery.”

  We sat there for another few minutes, staring straight ahead. Nobody had ever said out loud my own thoughts about myself like he just had. I mean, he was way more talented at piano than I could ever even dream of being, but he just sounded like…me. Inside me. Secret me. But the boy version, I guess, deeper voice, college, music. Same theme, two voices: a fugue.

  I didn’t want to say that out loud, despite knowing on some level he would totally get it and not think I was being a sap. Still, though, I tucked it away, saved it for someday, for maybe.

  “Maybe it still will,” I whispered, still looking straight ahead, afraid to move much. “Happen for you.”

  “I hope so,” he said. “But hoping is not a strategy. I don’t know. I have this friend who says if you never fail, you aren’t trying hard enough.” He turned toward me, so I turned, too, and we were looking into each other’s eyes then. His were dark, and sad around the edges, more closed now, more internal. “Maybe I just finally tried hard enough.”

  “Your friend sounds like a really smart guy.”

  Oliver laughed. “Actually he’s a wastie in the pub I play in sometimes. But maybe he’s wise. I don’t know.” He leaned back again and I realized his arm was around the back of the bench, behind me.

  “A friend of mine…” I started.

  “Yes?”

  “Not really a friend.”

  “Okay.” He looked a bit amused. I ignored that.

  “He was like, ‘No big deal,’ about the piano. ‘It’s just things,’ he said. Which, obviously, but…”

  “Right. And we’re just blood and hormones.”

  I felt my shoulders loosen. “Right.” I leaned back and could feel the heat from his arm, not touching my shoulders, but near. “And music is just noise.”

  “Your boyfriend?”

  “No!” I didn’t mean to shout. “No. Allison’s, actually. I think. They broke up, but I think they got back together. Last night. Not that…Anyway, I don’t like him very much.”

  Oliver’s eyebrows went up. “No?”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  He held up his hands in surrender. I felt my face heating. Don’t take your arm away.

  He let it fall back down again to the back of the bench. His thumb grazed my shoulder, maybe by accident. Or maybe not. “Quinn,” he said quietly.

  I turned again to him, as innocently as I could. “What?”

  He just looked at me for a few seconds, then said, “That sucks about the piano.”

  I nodded.

  “And everything.”

  I nodded again.

  “And…”

  And then I felt my face moving toward his. He wasn’t moving away. Holy crap, I am going to kiss Oliver, I thought, and then immediately, still moving microscopically toward him, I had two more simultaneous thoughts: What the heck has happened to me this week, when I never kissed anybody before and now I am practically attacking unsuspecting boys at every opportunity, and also, What if he pulls away like “Ew, little girl, what the heck are you doing?” How awkward would that be? Can a person actually die of embarrassment? Because if so I would keel over right into his mother’s hydrangeas.

  I stood up. “Gotta go,” I barked out, and, without looking back, trotted stumblingly down his front steps and out to the sidewalk, took a quick right, and zoomed away, not realizing until too late that I had gone the wrong way and would have to loop around the whole block to get home.

  It took a while, which was why I wasn’t there until too late.

  12

  HERE IS THE THING ABOUT a real estate open house. It is kind of like a doctor’s appointment. Instead of your body being checked out, of course, it is your home; instead of a doctor, who presumably went to school for a very long time and studied ridiculously hard and also has professional ethical requirements concerning the patient’s privacy and well-being, you get whoever the hell has nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon than rifle through somebody’s stuff, making faces and comments and judgments.

  Before a doctor’s appointment you (if you are me) take extra care in the shower so your nails are clean and you smell good, even if you have a fever and have to brace yourself on the shower walls because of dizziness. If you have an open house, you basically do the same, but on a housewide level. Whatever is not cleaned up because you were out flirting with a completely unavailable and by all appearances kind but uninterested college guy, so you barely have time to make your bed—whatever is still not neatened to your crazed family’s standards by the time the clock strikes noon has to be shoved somewhere it is hoped (but should not be believed) the rampaging vultures will not open.

  They will open it anyway.

  When the economy is bad, nobody is supposed to have enough money to buy an overly big, overly luxurious house like this. The extras, the marble and the granite and the Bosch, Sub-Zero, warming drawers and media room and mahogany and wet bar, are all très passé, but apparently word of that did not get out, or perhaps word of that was overwhelmed by words like fire sale and must sell NOW or just plain damned curiosity.

  For a while in the spring Allison had this thing where she was convinced she’d sold her cell phone to the devil. Or maybe she was kidding; it is extremely hard to tell with her and her drier-than-Mom’s-martinis sense of humor. But if the devil had come along during the open house and made me an offer to sell my cell phone, or my soul, to clear the people out instantly, I would have done it. I swear I would have. For so many reasons.

  And the “it’s just stuff” argument would not persuade me, either. Somebody went through my medicine cabinet. My tampon box was taken out and left on my counter.

  Ew.

  They opened everything.

  “There are no ethics in an open house,” Mom murmured to Dad. “No levels of discretion.”

  He said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

  After they came back and the last of the vultures were shooed away, the exhausted-looking real estate agent collected her clipboard and her offering sheets and shook my parents’ hands. She smiled and said, “I think it went great!” and retreated in her beige-on-beige Jaguar. “We’ll talk.”

  Dad offered to get a pizza.

  Nobody was hungry.

  I went up to the guest room, not just to check my email or listen in on the baby monitor to spy on my parents. I was tired; I wanted to be alone. Okay, also to spy. And maybe to check my email.

  The only one I got was from Tyler Moss, asking, You okay?

  Fine, I answered immediately, my heart weirdly pounding. I almost added, How about you? to be polite, but I so didn’t want to get into it. I deleted the thread immediately after I hit SEND, and phew on that, because as it was deleting itself, Allison and Phoebe barged in. I s
lammed my computer closed and looked at them as innocently as possible.

  “Did they say anything yet?” Phoebe asked.

  “Not…I wasn’t really…” I turned up the volume on the monitor, but it was only static. We watched it for a minute, which was weird because it’s not like there was video; it was just a white-and-blue plastic baby monitor. We waited for it to morph into something else, I guess, but it didn’t.

  “Are you going to the party tonight?” Allison asked me. “Yes,” I said. “No.”

  “Are you sure?” Phoebe asked, with a smile in her voice.

  “Positive,” I answered. When did she get to be so witty, little Phoebe? “What party?”

  “Max Kaufman’s,” Allison said. “Obviously.”

  “Obviously,” I echoed. “No. I’m just going over to a friend’s house.”

  “Jelly’s?” Phoebe asked. “Oh, I love her. Can I come with you? I could cancel my thing. Are you going to the movies? Because I am so in the movie mood. But if you guys are just going to be, like, doing math or something, forget it, I guess. Is that what you guys are doing?”

  Before I could respond to that, Allison said, “Tyler will be disappointed you won’t be there,” and I swear my heart seized up.

  “Why?” I asked her, or maybe demanded. “Why—why do you say that?”

  “I swear he has a crush on you.”

  “Shut up!” Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.

  “He asked me twice today if you were coming to Max’s party,” Allison said.

  “No way,” Phoebe said. “Twice?”

  “Twice.”

  “Well, they’re in the same grade,” Phoebe said.

  “He doesn’t even…We barely know each other,” I said, willing myself to sound at least a bit less colossally strange.

  I consciously relaxed my face, unclenched my jaw, took a deep breath through my nose. My sisters, meanwhile, watched me as if they were seeing a particularly awful reality show. I willed myself not to check my closed computer just to make sure it really was closed and no new emails were popping up from hot boys in my grade who should not be trusted and who might be thinking about me when he so shouldn’t be.