Free Brilliant by Rachel Vail Page A

said.
    “Talk about mad stressed…jeez, Quinn. You don’t have to bite me, you know?”
    “Sorry.” I yanked on a tank top and shorts and left thehouse with no plan of where to go. I am not a jogger, so that was out. There was no actual friend for me to meet. I did need some air, though, so I decided to take a walk. Then I wouldn’t have totally lied to Phoebe, I tried justifying to myself on my way down the driveway.
    That was my plan, and I was kind of happy with it. Despite my usual lack of interest in anything that might cause me to sweat, I was weirdly pleased with this early-morning jaunt. I thought maybe I would do this every morning from now on, take a quick two-mile, three-mile walk to wake me up, to hear some birds chirping and smell the honeysuckle and the lilacs. Honestly. I had myself half convinced that this was what I had been needing, that everything—all the stress and inner turmoil and impulsiveness I’d discovered in myself in the past couple of days—would be resolved with a habit of early-morning walks. All resolved.
    Solved again.
    Do you have to solve something first, though, before you can re-solve it?
    But no, no mind games, I told myself. No thinking. I was just walking, just a girl, the only girl in my family with no boyfriend, no boy who ever thought she was worth asking out or even hooking up with except for Mr. Rebound in Love with My Sister, who therefore does not count at all, especially because I kissed him and he just didn’t instantly pull away because of maybe, like, misplacedgentlemanliness or even just shock. Anyway. Not thinking about that. Thinking about walking. Thinking about just being nobody, an isolated random girl out for a walk. Randomly. No destination.
    Maybe it was in my subconscious, or my unconscious (still can’t quite sort those two guys out), but it was definitely not my plan to walk all the way to Oliver’s.

11
    I TOTALLY WOULD HAVE walked right by, but Oliver was sitting out front on a bench, playing his guitar, and he called to me.
    I was not faking a startled reaction.
    He patted the seat beside him.
    I hesitated.
    He waited.
    I crossed my arms.
    He strummed a chord and sang softly, “Quinn Avery stood on my sidewalk today, trying to decide—walk…or stay….”
    I couldn’t help smiling a little.
    “Stay,” he said softly.
    I felt myself moving toward his front porch. “Hey,” I said, sitting down on the Adirondack chair across from him instead of on the bench next to him. I couldn’t trust myself not to grab and kiss him if I was in close proximity.I was a lot less predictable lately than anybody (including I) had realized.
    “How’s it all?”
    “Okay,” I lied. “Well, I told you, you know…”
    “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.