Brilliant by Rachel Vail

you, Oliver Andreas. Done.
    It actually almost worked. I was able to look at him more objectively, like the houselights had just come on in the theater and there before me stood not some larger-than-life matinee idol but just a guy—just a guy with a spray of freckles over his slightly too-large nose, dark brown eyes, black hair in soft waves curling around his pinned-back ears, not so much taller than I am, looking with fierce intelligence into my eyes.
    Oh, crap. Oliver.
    I gave him a polite face like I’d give a subordinate of my mother’s. “What’s up?”
    “Quinn,” he breathed, but that was not about to change my adamantly steely heart, especially not with Adriana’s sister calling his name from across the pool again, and him smiling broadly back at her, promising he’d be right there, before deigning to look at me, his little buddy from back in the day. “What are you doing with Mason Foley?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably the same thing you’re doing with Adriana’s sister.”
    He clenched his jaw. “I doubt that.”
    “Well, good to see you. Have fun,” I said, and startedto turn away. Adriana’s sister was on her way toward us with drinks in hand, and I really didn’t need to be there for their reunion. There was a very hot guy waiting for me. Yes, me, Oliver, little Quinn Avery, who has—surprise!—grown up.
    He caught my shoulder with his hand and pulled me toward him. “Don’t,” he whispered. “I know Mason Foley, okay? I just…don’t be yet another of his harem, Quinn. You’re better than that, okay? I don’t want you to get—”
    “Hurt?” I finished for him, and the surprise on his face actually made me laugh a little. “Thanks, Dad. Glad you’re looking out for me, but guess what, Dad?”
    He looked pale and defeated. Good.
    “I can take care of myself. So…”
    “Quinn,” he was saying as I walked away.
    Forcing myself not to look back, I headed straight for Mason, and within a minute was kissing my second boy ever, and saying the name Mason over and over in my mind as I kissed him, kissed Mason, thinking Mason to crowd out the other name that was trying to push its way into my thoughts instead.

14
    I WOKE UP WITH SORE LIPS the next morning. I’d been dreaming not about having made out with Mason Foley but about being little again, little and pretty and beloved, with black shoes that clicked when I ran across wood floors in them while wearing a party dress. In the dream, my mother was telling me we were going to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, but as in real life, in history, back then she didn’t say, We’re visiting my parents . She called it going home.
    I hated that.
    I had hated it hugely, ragefully, irrationally when I was little, though of course I never said anything aloud. I’d just leave the room when she said it. We’ll only be home for a few days, I remember she said to her friend on the phone as I read on the floor beside her in our apartment in London that year we lived there, and I remember thinking, But we are already home, aren’t we? Allison played with blocks and Phoebe sucked her thumb in her bouncy seat and Momtalked on the phone and I pretended to read, only four but precocious, and already aware of it, proud of the reactions people subtly (they thought) bestowed upon my parents— She’s reading? That tiny little girl? But when my mother talked on the phone the letters hovered, slurred. I was an eavesdropper before I was a reader.
    Home.
    She meant it as a general description, of course. We were foreigners living in England for that one year; it wasn’t home. Home was the USA, where the people talked the way my parents did.
    But she didn’t only mean it that way.
    Home was her home, the home where she grew up with her parents and her older brother. The places where we lived, first in an apartment in New York City and then for those months in London, nine months really, not the year or years I sometimes let people think it was,