Brilliant Read Online Free PDF

explained the principles of buoyancy and why he would float, and then that boys can still be boyish even without punching or being rough at all.
    He listened intensely to everything I told him, then said, “Okay, I will swim tomorrow. I have to think about this for a while first.”
    I felt so tender toward him in that moment, I put my arm around him and he rested, heart pounding, his head against my chest.
     
    I slumped into Jelly’s car when it was time to go home. “You stressed about family stuff or your piano lesson or what?” she asked.
    “All of life is stress,” I said.
    “You sound like me,” Jelly pointed out.
    “Someone has to,” I mumbled, but I wasn’t actually annoyed at her—I wasn’t actually annoyed at anybody; I was just in a funk that needed to be overcome—so I turned on the rap music and pretended to happily seat-dance along. Sometimes faking is the fastest route to becoming.
    I was still fake-happy at my piano lesson, trying to be, as Phoebe’s stupid magazines admonish, lighthearted and fun to be with—because that’s what guys like.
    My fingers could not get their act together at all. Oliver touched them lightly. “Wait,” he said. “Think first: What is this piece about?”
    I hung my head, chastised. “I don’t know.”
    “Good,” he said. “Excellent place to begin. Scary, maybe, but if you’re brave enough to admit not knowing, you open yourself up to what might be. Does that make sense to you?”
    “Yes,” I whispered.
    “What do you feel when you hear it in your mind? What do you think?”
    My mind was blank, so I just sat there, a tense lump of failure beside him.
    “You okay?” Oliver asked me, in that rumbling baritone voice of his.
    “Fine!” I smiled, or at least showed my shiny bleached teeth. Urgh, what a dork. “Anyway, though, this is my last lesson.”
    “Oh?” he asked.
    I shrugged, all casual, as if I wasn’t admitting for the first time, “Money issues, you know.”
    He didn’t say anything. I was staring at my fingers, splayed uselessly across the keys. Make a joke, make light of it, pass it off, I was commanding myself, but my normally obedient self was stiffly rebelling. I swallowed, or tried. I forced my mouth back into an imitation smile, and my eyes up toward his. He wasn’t making a whatever, no big deal face, or turning away politely, embarrassed. He didn’t even look curious, hungry for the gossip, like most of the people who live in this town absolutely would be. He just sat still on the bench beside me, staring into my eyes.
    Just what I needed. Full-body sweat. Did he have to have such piercingly intelligent eyes, if he was going to be too old for me and yet sit right beside me all smelling like cilantro, and his black hair standing up so cute in back like that? I mean, really.
    “So,” I started, desperate to not cry like the baby I didn’t want him to think I was. “Anyway.”
    He lifted his big, graceful hand from his lap and placed it on my shoulder. It took all of my concentration to remainconscious and still. I had my hair in a ponytail and a tank top on. I felt two of his fingertips on the skin of my neck, down where my neck curved toward my shoulder. His fingers, so warm, melted something inside me. I could feel it radiating moltenly from the points where his fingers touched my skin, down, down.
    I didn’t want to budge.
    I’m not sure if I initiated the movement or he did with the pressure of those fingers, but I tilted toward him, slowly, until my head was against his shoulder.
    His shirt was soft, the kind of cool silkiness a T-shirt acquires when it’s been washed hundreds of times. I could feel his chest rising and falling beneath my cheek.
    “You okay?” he asked, his voice just a whisper or less.
    I intended to say yes. It came out instead as, “No.”
    I felt his arm tighten around me.
    My sisters’ voices on the stairs wrenched us apart. I couldn’t look at him. I didn’t want to look into his face and