Brilliant

by Rachel Vail

  I was, perhaps, looking a bit too far ahead. I get slightly manic when my head clears after a funk.

  Luckily nobody was in the kitchen when I got downstairs, so I escaped with my buzz intact.

  Jelly talked the whole way to camp about JD and how they’d texted all Sunday. She needed some reassurance that bad spelling meant nothing. So I reminded her of the fact that Ziva, one of the smartest people in our grade, was a terrible speller. JD’s overuse of emoticons was a little disturbing, but we decided he was just being flirtatious, which is a good thing. He was cute, and it was a summer fling, right? Mason was really awesome, too, we agreed. We were so lucky! There was not a lot more to say, because I didn’t want to go into Mason’s creeping, insistent fingers on my waist. So I told her my family was planning to move in with my grandparents, who needed some help and company. Jelly is really close with her grandparents, who live with them, so she totally understood that. I discussed my ideas about how to redecorate Grandma’s house to make it completely comfortable and cool for all of us, with drop-down desks in the living room and one of those beds that turns into a bookcase in the daytime for Mom and Dad in the dining room so we could spread out more.

  “That sounds perfect,” Jelly agreed, making the big turn into the camp entrance. “Because nobody has a dinner party while everybody’s sleeping!”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Plus, that way we can fit the upright piano in there, too, no problem.”

  “Sounds great, Quinn,” she said, quieter. “Are you really okay, though?”

  “Of course!”

  “And your mom?”

  “You know her,” I said. “She’s amazing. Nothing fazes her. She’s already making deals, totally psyched. She’s actually relieved, I think. Plus, we’re all getting more time together, which is really nice.”

  I was a little out of breath.

  “Well,” Jelly said, “that’s all good. You’re pretty amazingly resilient, too, my friend. But if you need some time to, like, get away for a night…?”

  “Thanks!” I said. “But I am really great!”

  Ramon surprised me, not by slipping his hand into mine as we walked toward the volleyball court, because he always liked to hold my hand as we walked; what surprised me was when he said, “You okay, Quinn? You seem sad today.”

  “Me?” I said. “No, Ramon. I am actually happy today. Really happy. How are you?”

  “¿Qué sé yo?” he muttered. “You seem sad to me.” And he pulled his hand away.

  What did he know? Nothing. Just a five-year-old kid with wise, old-soul eyes. I smiled at the other campers and organized a game of tag while we waited our turn at the volleyball net. I would not be brought down by a melancholy five-year-old.

  While the kids played tag, Adriana and Jelly and I talked about what a great party it had been. I could tell Adriana felt really good about her fixing-up skills, or maybe she was just happy for us—or at least Jelly, that it was really clicking between her and JD. She told me not to worry about Mason not contacting me afterward, because he was notorious for that—but she assured me he seemed very into me and would definitely want to hook up with me again, maybe at the party we should all go to the next Friday night. Everybody would be there.

  A headache was starting over my right eye. I pretended I was just squinting in the sun and answered sure, she could text Mason and confirm that he was going to that party, and mention she was talking me into going. Why not? Yeah, I was for sure interested in hooking up again.

  Adriana texted him something. She wouldn’t show me what, but showed me his response, which I noticed came back immediately: He texted back a winking face.

  Later in the day, when Adriana and Jelly were going on, again, about how JD was so fun, even if all he was really into was rowing crew, and about Adriana’s boyfriend, Giovanni, whom she spent not just her own party making out with, but the whole next day with at the beach, my weekend was starting to feel in retrospect a bit lame, and maybe with the muggy heat and the energy all my bright, determined optimism was taking, I was wilting a bit. Jelly whispered to me, “You sure you’re okay, Quinn? You seem really…I don’t know…stressed.”

  “Yeah,” said Adriana. “What’s up? You can tell us.”

  “No, nothing,” I said. “I just…I’m getting a little headache. The sun is so…”

  “Yeah, true,” Jelly said. “You want to come over after camp and just maybe hang out or something? My parents will be at work, so they won’t be bugging us to do vocab flash cards or anything….”

  “I don’t know.” I separated two kids who were fighting and then plopped down next to Adriana and Jelly again.

  “No,” Jelly was saying. “I don’t think so.”

  “Don’t think what?” I asked.

  “You look like a girl with a guilty conscience,” Adriana said. “Did you and Mason go further than you’re telling?”

  “No!” I said.

  “Told you,” Jelly said. “Just…I think Quinn’s going through…I just mean maybe she might need a little space, so maybe we should…”

  “I still think she did something she’s not telling us,” Adriana guessed. “Am I right? What’d you do, Q? You can tell us.”

  What can I say? I liked the idea that she called me Q, as only Jelly had before, and how she was whispering with me, and didn’t think maybe I was stressed about boring, tight, nerdy stuff or huge, humiliating, life-shaking things.

  “Something pretty awful,” I admitted.

  They both leaned forward with wide, excited eyes.

  “Tell us,” Adriana urged.

  “What happened?” Jelly asked.

  So I told them about Tyler Moss. I left out the part about the piano getting repossessed and about me crying. I just said that my sister, my younger sister, was going out with the hottest guy in my grade and had dumped him, and he came over to our house the other day, after she’d dumped him, and one thing led to another and I had totally made out with him.

  Adriana opened her mouth wider than a hippo’s and screamed and pushed me in the shoulders and whispered, “No way,” all the stuff I always see those kinds of girls doing. She wanted to know what was I going to do and warned, “You can never tell your sister; that would just be hurtful to stop yourself from feeling guilty but wouldn’t help—it would be a disaster!”

  “I know it,” I said. My thoughts exactly.

  “Well, but the important question,” Adriana said. “Was he a good kisser?”

  I opened my own mouth wide at the horrible unseemliness of that question and then had to nod. Yeah, he was. Not that I had all that much to compare him to, but, holy crap, yeah, he was a pretty darn good kisser.

  “He looks like he’d be a good kisser,” Jelly said, her voice quiet and tight. “But Quinn…”

  “You know him?” Adriana asked, her voice tinged with jealousy.

  “Of course,” Jelly said. “He’s been in my class since kindergarten, and he was hot even when the rest of the boys were all about Hot Wheels and Pokémon and worms.”

  “As hot as Mason?” Adriana asked.

  Jelly shrugged. “Jeez, Q,” she said. “I don’t want to be judgmental or anything, and you know I think you are the most moral person ever, but, I mean, poor Allison!”

  “No, it’s not like that,” I assured her. “It was just a mistake between us. He loves her. I really think he does. We just, you know, accidentally kissed.”

  Adriana shrieked. “That is just…Accidentally kissed! So excellent!”

  “How do you accidentally—” Jelly started.

  “God, it’s epically hot. Accidentally kissed your sister’s boyfriend.”

  “Yeah,” I interrupted, facing only Adriana. “So, but anyway, we were at my grandparents’ yesterday and Allison bugged out and left, and she went to Ty’s house and texted me to please come meet her there, but of course I couldn’t—the last thing I want to do is be anywhere near him—so I was all like—”

  “Wait,” Adriana said. �
�Ty? Tyler Moss?”

  “Yeah,” I said, going cold. “You know him?”

  “Yes! Tyler Moss? Holy crap. This just gets better!”

  “Shhh,” I said. “Listen, you can’t tell anybody. Okay? Please promise me you’ll never—”

  “Quinn! Tyler Moss? He is so friggin’ hot it’s sick!”

  “I know,” I said. “Hence the problem.”

  “Did she just say hence?” Adriana asked Jelly.

  “She says stuff like hence,” Jelly mumbled. I realized she was refusing to look at me.

  “That’s awesome,” Adriana said. “My IQ is skyrocketing just hanging with you smarties this summer. But I had no idea you were so…Ty Moss!”

  “Shhh,” I begged. Volleyball was ending and we had to head to snack, but en route Adriana was telling me that Tyler Moss’s cousin went to her school or something. He’d been at the party she’d gone to July fourth.

  “Hold on, hold on,” she said as we passed out ice-cream cups. “Does your sister have short, spiky hair and amazing gray eyes?”

  “Yes,” Jelly said, her face a mask of serious blankness. “Allison. She’s great, really intense and really vulnerable.”

  “Wow,” Adriana said, not noticing the condemnation pouring from Jelly’s every pore. “That’s your sister?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Hence,” Adriana said. “As of Fourth of July, anyway, I don’t think she and Tyler Moss are still broken up.”

  “I know,” I said, sinking again. “They got back together. Wait, she wasn’t at a party Fourth of July. She was with us.”

  “She was there,” Adriana said. “She was definitely there. Late night.”

  “She must have snuck out,” I said. “I can’t believe her.”

  “Pot?” Jelly muttered. “Meet kettle.”

  Luckily, right then my cell buzzed. I checked it, secretly thankful for the escape valve, while Adriana was saying, “Hence you’re screwed.” And when I saw it was Oliver, I almost had a coronary right there on the deck.

  “Is it Tyler?” Adriana asked, standing on tiptoe, craning over my shoulder to see my phone.

  “No,” I said. “The plot thickens.”

  “The what?”

  “There’s this other guy,” I started, and they grabbed me and dragged me to the other side of the picnic area, despite the disapproving stare of Syd, the head counselor.

  “He’s older; he’s in college,” I said.

  “Oh,” Jelly said. “Him.”

  But Adriana’s eyes were wide and expectant. “Who? Wait, the piano teacher?”

  “Yeah. Exactly. I’ve had a crush on him basically my whole life, which I have only recently gotten over, because he’s totally out of my league. And I think,” I said to Adriana, “I think he may be going out with your sister.”

  “I doubt that,” Adriana said, her huge smile glittering. “She’s gay.”

  “She’s gay?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Adriana said, like, how did everybody not know that?

  “But she and Oliver…”

  “Oh, Oliver Andreas?” Adriana asked.

  “Do you know everybody?” Jelly asked incredulously.

  Adriana shrugged and whipped her long hair back into a hair tie. “They’re band-geek buddies. Oliver is your lifelong crush piano teacher? Really? Oliver Andreas?”

  “Yes,” Jelly said. “Is he not epically hot enough?”

  “Hmm,” Adriana said, considering. “I guess I never thought of him like that. But yeah, he is kind of crushable, in a brooding-poet kind of way, actually. If you’re into that. Yeah. You guys might make a cute couple.”

  “In my dreams,” I said.

  “Well?” Adriana grabbed at my phone but I yanked it away from her grasp. “What did he say?”

  “He wants to know if I want to come over after camp today to…”

  “To what?” Adriana shrieked. “What perfume are you wearing, girl?”

  “To practice piano,” I said, trying to sound very no big deal about it.

  “Oh, man, that is a total move,” Adriana said. “You have to go.”

  I texted him back that I’d be there.

  “You are having the best-ever summer, aren’t you?” Adriana asked me.

  Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

  16

  NOBODY WAS HOME WHEN I got there, so I was lulled into thinking it would be a quiet afternoon of resisting the urge to rush straight to Oliver’s house or to build up his invitation into something more exciting than it probably was.

  I should have left right away and maybe everything would have turned out differently, at least for a little while.

  Gosia always used to be around, though, and my sisters, too, and usually Dad, by the time I got home from whatever activities I was doing. It was like the house was losing us already, I thought, but then pushed that aside. No! It was good to have some solitude. I liked solitude, I reminded myself, and though I had sort of lost the momentum of cheerful mania from earlier, I managed to convince myself it was, at least, nice to have the house to myself.

  That’s why I lingered.

  This is nice, I thought.

  Which reminded me of how my fifth-grade English teacher had outlawed the word nice.

  “It means nothing,” she told us. “It’s a nice shirt? A nice girl? A nice day? What the heck do you mean? Is it low-cut, tight-fitting silk shantung in a peach that picked up the color of her blushing cheeks and threatened to reveal sweat moons under her arms? Now we’re talking.”

  The room full of ten-year-olds regarded her blankly, blinking.

  But I loved it. At lunch afterward, I sat among my chattering friends in front of my untouched tuna sandwich on its lily pad of tinfoil, thinking about the blushing girl. I knew that girl was hiding something, whenever I thought or somebody used the word nice. Since that day, I have often wondered nonsensically what secrets she was keeping, despite the fact that this not-nice girl existed only as part of a vocab lesson.

  Wandering slowly up the front stairs, languorous in my solitude in my big house, I continued thinking about being ten and in Mrs. T’s classroom. Mrs. T was the first teacher who’d used the word gifted to my face. I will never forget that last day of fifth grade, I was thinking as I wandered past my room toward my parents’ room. Mrs. T called me aside at recess. There was something she wanted to say to me.

  And she wanted me to listen, and to remember.

  I did, and I did.

  She said I was brilliant. She said she’d been teaching for forty-two years (six times seven years, I remember thinking, fleetingly), and she’d never had a student quite like me. She knew I was brilliant from the first week, and had expected to discover, all year, what type of brilliant I was. “Usually it’s easy,” she told me. She’d had brilliant math kids and brilliant writers and brilliant artists, even brilliant entertainers and diplomats pass through her classroom, and she’d gotten really good at identifying their brilliance. But I had stumped her, apparently. She didn’t know what I would be brilliant at, and, she predicted, I would have moments ahead of me when I felt like a faker, or like a mediocrity. But she wanted me to remember that she told me, on the last day of fifth grade, that I was brilliant, and that she was confident I would someday figure out how to harness my brilliance.

  “That’s all,” she said. “Now go play.”

  Sure.

  I remember being dazed the rest of the day, even that whole summer, maybe. I went off to camp wondering if I was a brilliant swimmer or tennis player, macramé artist or color warrior. I was a good reader, I knew, a bookworm, really, and I was good at music and most school things. But being a good student is not the same as being brilliant. So, was I really? Was she wrong? Or was I just missing something?

  So I started playing violin and switched to piano when it was clear I wasn’t Mozart, didn’t even know how to hold the bow correctly, and couldn’t make a decent sound. At least piano sounded good, if tinkling and small under my rubbery fingers.
But Oliver’s mom was a good and patient teacher, and I practiced so much she thought I had talent. Maybe I did. Hard to say.

  And here I was, almost seventeen, and I still hadn’t figured out what I might be brilliant at. At being a good girl, maybe, though, wait, no, not even that. I stood in the middle of my white room and felt the air all around me as I smelled the whiteness and listened to the silence. Even though I was trying to empty my mind, I realized actually I was imagining how Oliver would react if I showed up in my mother’s stunning fuchsia stilettos and a short skirt, hair down around my shoulders, dangly earrings even—instead of my normal T-shirt, shorts, sneakers with short socks, ponytail.

  I opened my underwear drawer and yanked out my ponytail at the same time. I cleared away all the bras and panties that were hiding them and there they were, glittery and bright, like forbidden candy just within my reach. I touched the cool satin with my hesitant fingertips.

  What the heck, I decided. I’ll just try them on, for fun, and then quickly return them before Mom even notices they were gone. It’s the perfect opportunity.

  I placed them on my rug and stripped off my shorts and T-shirt. A white miniskirt left over from last summer was hanging in the back of my closet. I grabbed that and then a pink tank top from my dresser drawer, and slid my feet into the cool shoes waiting patiently for me.