Brilliant

by Rachel Vail

  I took the opportunity to grab Mom’s shoes from where I’d hidden them under a pile of my junk, to return them. There was caked dirt up the heels and some mystery stains near the toe of the right shoe. I did my best to clean them but Gosia was right. They were the bad kind of cleaned up, the kind like somebody had messed them up and noticed—noticed enough to try to clean them but failed.

  There was nothing more I could do, though. I decided to put them back in Mom’s closet, behind some others, in a box. With any luck, it would be a long time before she noticed them and she might think she had messed them up herself. I was on my way out of my room right when Allison burst out of hers. We stopped and stared at each other. I tried to let the shoes dangle inconspicuously from my fingers while Allison raged about the torment of having our parents as parents. She was well into her fourth paragraph of complaints when she stopped suddenly.

  “What’s with you? You look like puke on toast.”

  “Urgh,” I said. The last thing a person who is trying not to puke needs to hear is the word puke.

  “Are you hungover?” she asked incredulously.

  “No,” I moaned. “Sick.”

  “And what are you doing with Mom’s shoes?”

  I dashed back into my room and ran for the bathroom; I was unable to hold in the puke any longer.

  “Ew,” I heard her say, out in the hallway. “Phoebe? Where’s Phoebe?”

  I couldn’t interrupt my barfing long enough to tell Allison where Phoebe was. I clutched the cold porcelain and waited for my body to finish turning itself inside out. In the five-minute postpuke grace period of feeling able to stand upright, I brushed my teeth, washed my face with a cool, damp-but-not-wet cloth, then went to my room, changed into my coziest pajamas, and got back into bed. When I noticed Mom’s shoes displayed garishly in the middle of my floor, I had to force myself up long enough to toss them into my closet.

  Mom, Dad, and Phoebe got home sometime later in the day. Phoebe had a torn tendon in her left ankle with a pink cast on it, and crutches. After they settled her in on the couch with pillows and a movie to watch and a cool drink to sip with a straw, over her protestations that she was fine, fine, Mom and Dad got back to the business at hand, which was, of course, dealing with Allison.

  Meaning: yelling at her, demanding explanations, voicing their disappointment. I fell asleep listening. It was as much my lullaby as “Summertime,” listening to the same old tune of my parents (mostly, honestly, my mother) yelling at Allison.

  In my dream, I saw Gosia looming above me, holding Mom’s messed-up shoes like a sinister mobile above my face, and saying in a harsher voice than she’d ever used in real life, “Dirt stains are almost impossible to remove. Dirt stains are almost impossible to remove. Dirt stains are almost impossible to remove.”

  The next time I woke up, Mom was in my room asking, “Why are you in bed?”

  “Um, I’m sick,” I said.

  She felt my forehead. “You’re not hot.”

  “I was,” I said.

  “Hmm,” she said. “Well, I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

  I’m not, I thought but didn’t say.

  “I have to run out,” she said. “Can you listen for Phoebe? She isn’t used to the crutches yet, so if she needs anything, will you help her?”

  “Okay,” I said, then, “Mom?” But she was already gone.

  The next morning, Monday, I still felt crappy, and way too weak to handle camp. I wandered down to the kitchen. Mom was there, back from her run, drinking a tall glass of water. “Hiya, sweetie,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “I’m still sick,” I said.

  “Really? Well, can you rally and go to camp?”

  “I don’t think so,” I whispered.

  “Oooh.” She put her glass in the sink. “You’d better call Jelly and let her know not to come get you, then.”

  “I’m on it, Mom,” I snapped at her. As if I suddenly needed her, after she’d been largely absent, working these past few years, to barge back into my life and tell me when I had to call my best friend? Thanks, anyway, Mom. You are too late.

  “You are so good,” she said, oblivious, kissing my forehead. “You don’t have a fever. Sore throat?”

  “No,” I said, my teeth clenched against the stream of bile that might come pouring out at her.

  “Headache? Period?”

  “Just…sick.” Sick of you, sick of myself, sick.

  “Lousy.” She bent down and untied her laces to slip off her running shoes. “Wish I could stay home and play hooky with you, take a girls’ day, mental-health day.”

  I shrugged. She had no job; why couldn’t she?

  “Can you keep a secret?” she asked me, her eyes glinting. If she were my age, she’d totally be in with the social crowd, with every crowd. She’s perfect. Adriana would adore her instantly. Oliver and his funky friends would crowd around her, attracted to her obvious brilliance, if she were eighteen, or even sixteen; beyond her achievements, she’d just know how to be. A torrent of nasty epithets flooded my brain.

  “Yeah, of course,” I assured her instead.

  “I have a meeting today, lunch. I have a really good feeling about it. I think…I really think we’re going to get this all settled, come to terms. Knock wood.” She banged against the pantry cabinet, which she never does; only Grandma knocks wood. Weird. “There’s no reason it shouldn’t work. It benefits everybody.”

  I could smell the fire, but I blinked away the memory of her burning her papers. “You mean they might not sue you? The lawsuit might just get settled?”

  She knocked the cabinet again.

  “So you’ll just get off, just like that?”

  “We shall see,” she said. “It takes a lot of work to get lucky.”

  It wasn’t that I wanted her to get caught, or go to jail, or be punished in any way. I was just struggling to put together what I had seen and the possibility that it might just all turn out fine and life could resume, as if she’d never done anything wrong but remained as flawless as I’d imagined her to be, wished she could be. As if nothing had happened, we could all just blithely move on.

  I met her sparkly eyes. “So we might not have to…”

  “To what?”

  “To move?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, yanking her ponytail holder out. “We have to move. We lost the house, lost the mortgage. But on we go, right? No failures, just temporary setbacks. We’re strong; we’re invincible. We are the Avery Women.”

  “Yeah,” I said, leaning against the counter, because, despite my status as an Avery Woman and therefore strong, invincible, etc., I was actually so far from all that. I was still sick and hadn’t eaten in two days and was therefore a bit wobbly, on top of everything else.

  “So wish me luck,” she said on her way out of the kitchen, her running shoes dangling from her fingers the way her shoes had dangled so recently from mine. “And hold down the fort, will you? Your sisters are falling to pieces. Good thing I can count on you!”

  I think she blew a kiss at me. I couldn’t be sure, because I had sunk down to the floor against the refrigerator by then.

  Mom and Dad went out for a walk together Monday night after dinner, to discuss the Settlement. She was taut again, distracted and shiny, which was reassuring, kind of, though she was also a little more jittery than usual. Phoebe was still on the couch and Allison was texting like mad, when she looked up and asked me how long I realistically thought they’d be gone.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I said.

  “You are such a prig,” Allison snapped. “It’s like I have three parents.”

  “Shut up,” I shouted. She and Phoebe stared at me.

  I went upstairs and took a shower, because I decided I was absolutely going back to camp again Tuesday. I still felt pretty woozy and had developed a really attractive cough (one that sounded weirdly like my great-uncle Alton’s, the guy with the chewed-up
cigar permanently dangling), but the thought of another day fetching Phoebe lemonades and smoothies, and listening to what control freaks our parents were for grounding Allison the lunatic slut attention hog—when next weekend was going to be the best party ever with the best people ever and if they forced her to miss it they may as well drive a stake through her eye because her life was basically ruined—was more than I could handle.

  Adriana and Jelly spent the whole next day, between dealing with relay-race day and the skinned knees it engendered, talking about the amazing party coming up over the weekend. In my weakened state it took me five full minutes to put together that it was the same amazing party my sister had been talking about.

  “You have to come with us,” Adriana said.

  Us, I noted. Adriana and Jelly had become us?

  “It’s gonna be sick!” Jelly said. “Speaking of which, what happened to you? Did you get wrecked with Piano Man Saturday night or what?”

  She was clearly trying again to be light and fizzy Jelly. The strain showed in the corners of her eyes, and I loved her more than ever for it.

  “Wrecked,” I mumbled. I told them what had happened, despite the fact that I am a pretty private person, particularly when it comes to stories that make me seem like a complete and utter dork. I guess I was feeling a little…I don’t know…needy.

  They both hugged me and said mean things about Oliver, and meaner things about his skanky girlfriend and their pretentious loser friends. We walked around with arms linked much of the day. They made me laugh, and they made me feel like a funny, hot girl instead of a loser little kid slinking home with her tail between her legs.

  An hour later, though, I felt this pit of self-loathing start to spread through my belly. It felt like I had sold out my complex, complicated feelings about Oliver for the chump change of their burbling comfort, and for the hedge against being left out of their suddenly chummy companionship. I had made Oliver sound like a typical two-dimensional bad-date jerk, made them hate him so that I could feel like less of a loser, and less alone.

  Nothing is sacred to me, I scolded myself. Allison is right about what a small, envious girl I am.

  And still I couldn’t help enjoying and appreciating the camaraderie Adriana and Jelly were showering on me all day. It wasn’t praise for high achievement or awe at my amazing abilities they wanted to crowd near. It was just fellowship, and it felt really good.

  And at the end of the day, when I was feeling pretty bucked up, I said absolutely I’d go to the “sick” party with them. Jelly reminded me we’d have to get out of Ziva’s farewell bash. “No problem,” I told her. “It’ll be a nerd-fest anyway.”

  “Yeah,” Jelly said. “I guess that’s true.”

  Adriana laughed like I was hilarious and suggested that maybe I could deep-condition my hair tonight. She mentioned “product” that was excellent for straight hair like mine and Jelly’s. Jelly typed it into her BlackBerry and forwarded it to me. So we were all set, I guess.

  Ramon slipped onto my lap during the singalong. We were all arrayed on the hill of the quad, and a breeze was blowing. It was a little less humid than it had been, and the sun had that hazy midsummer blur to it. Realizing I’d missed him the day before, I cuddled Ramon while we sang, “I want to walk”—clap clap—“a mile in your shoes…” (So different from songs we sang at my fancy sleepaway camp, which were all variations of the theme, We are the blue team; let’s kill the red team!)

  “You know what I want to be when I grow up?” Ramon whispered to me, as the singing counselors started the next song, the one about the Hudson River.

  “No,” I whispered back. “What do you want to be?”

  “Guess.”

  “Let’s see. You’re really smart, and sweet, and perceptive. A doctor?”

  “No. Guess again.”

  “A teacher?”

  “Getting warmer.”

  “A scientist? A writer? A lawyer? An astronaut?”

  “No.” His gappy smile stretched across his normally serious face.

  “You can be anything you want to be, Ramon.”

  “I know,” he said. “I want to be a counselor at this camp, and then we can get married.”

  I felt myself start, honestly, to blush. “You’ll be an excellent counselor someday,” I told him. “And an excellent husband, too.”

  He nodded. “I know. I would bring you flowers sometimes because that’s what the ladies like.”

  The song about the Hudson ended and it was time to gather ourselves to go. “Well,” I said to him, “if I don’t get to be your wife, Ramon, some other girl is going to be so lucky.”

  “I already decided on you. But now I have to run around,” he told me, in great seriousness. “It’s a long bus ride home.”

  “Good thinking,” I told him, and watched while he zoomed around in circles with his buddies, playing a more creative variation of the freeze-tag game Jelly and Adriana and I had taught them earlier in the summer.

  I watched, smiling.

  As we were getting into her car, Jelly got a text from JD. He wanted to meet her and hang out. She took a deep breath. “I should, right?” she asked me. “He’s really cute, and he thinks I’m cute. So that’s good. Right?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She texted back, Yes, with an enthusiastic emoticon, then threw her cell into the backseat. “Do you mind if we listen to classical?”

  “Not at all,” I said.

  We drove home without talking, just listening to the music. When we got to the top of my driveway, Oliver was sitting on my front step.

  “Uh-oh,” Jelly said. “What does this mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered.

  “You want me to stay or go?”

  I swallowed hard and looked at my best friend. “Go, I think. Is that okay? You have a date with JD anyway.”

  “I’d cancel if you need me to. No problem.”

  “I know.”

  She nodded. “Mason totally asked where you were at the party we went to Saturday.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Keep that in your head, okay?”

  I unbuckled my seat belt. “I will. Thanks.” I opened the car door. Oliver was staring at us still, his expression serious and sorrowful.

  “And,” Jelly said, grabbing me back, “more important: I know you better than any guy does. And I know you are better—better than any of them.”

  I shook my head. “Oh, Jelly. I’m so not.” I closed the door and headed toward Oliver.

  He kept his head down and waited until I sat down next to him before he started talking.

  “I owe you an apology, Quinn.”

  I started to interrupt, but he held up his hand, so I shut up. “I do. I just…it’s been a weird year all the way around. I’ve changed, but people…my parents, my friends—it’s invisible and of course self-centered to think the universe shifts just because something in me changed. But that’s neither…Saturday was…I was an idiot.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What did you do?”

  “Well, for one thing, I never should have involved you. I mean, you said it was fine, a group of us, you didn’t mind, but still.”

  I did?

  “The thing is, I met Cassandra a few weeks ago, and she’s…well, obviously she’s very beautiful, and we hit it off, and I was thinking this concert, here’s a chance to, you know, raise my middle finger to the wisdom that said you couldn’t go out one night and drink, listen to the Grateful Dead, and make out with a pretty girl and then turn around the next night and impress her with your love of Beethoven—the ‘real’ you. The real me.”

  The ground was spinning under me. “Ah,” I managed, or possibly, Ahhh…

  “Tickets for the Emerson String Quartet in the Spanish Courtyard,” he continued, looking off into the middle distance. “It could hardly be better designed. One of the premier quartets in the world, performing outdoors on a perfect summer night, surrounded by maybe a hundred and fifty peop
le, including the smartest, most amazing girl in the world—that’s you, by the way. Damn it, screw me, I was using you, too—going to impress Cassandra by how cool our friendship is, yours and mine. How unlikely, sort of, and different, deep, and…”

  He shook his head at his own perfidy. I was motionless.

  “I guess I was sort of thinking about how you look at me, and get me…you know, maybe she would…I don’t know. And the program—Shostakovich and Beethoven. How better to say to her that I am brilliant, among the elite, I grasp the highest things that man has endeavored to attain, or express. Oh, my God, could I be more of a self-aggrandizing jerk?”

  “Hardly,” I said.

  A small chuckle escaped his mouth. “Right. Yeah, so there we were at the concert, and I was all, ‘Yes!’ The atmosphere, for starters; has there ever been such a perfect night? These incredibly gifted, insightful, devoted musicians, giving their all to one of the greatest works ever written, and afterward, with poor Cassandra…when she said, on the way back to the car, ‘That was really nice.’”

  “Nice?”

  “I know. That’s what sent me into that funk on the way home. But so unfair, really. It wasn’t her fault. What did I want from her, from anybody?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What did you want?”

  He shrugged. “I guess to be admired, the way…well, the way you seem to admire me, maybe. To have her think highly of me because I had access to these things. I guess I wanted the reflected glory of it.”

  “Mmm,” I managed, jaw clenched.

  He dropped his head into his hands. “I am just too shallow for words. To trade on one’s deepest calling so that a girl could be impressed and made more, whatever, willing…Urgh!”

  “Oliver?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “What?”

  “I think you should be apologizing to Cassandra, not me.”

  “Well,” he said. “Of course, but I thought I owed—”