Page 19 of Gifted & Talented

Technically, Eilidh was lugging her suitcase with some effort into Dzhuliya’s trunk right now. Not that Dzhuliya was meant to do any more than she had already done, having chosen to pick Eilidh up from the airport, an act akin to helping someone move or declaring everlasting love, but Eilidh did have a bad back and a tendency to overpack. It seemed a bit rude not to at leastoffer,but Dzhuliya was already settling herself in the driver’s seat of her actually very cute SUV.

Eilidh knew with certainty and a small, ignorable degree of arousal that the last time she’d been in a car with Dzhuliya, it had been in a tiny, aging coupe. They’d been forced to wrestle erotically in the back seat until—well, until it had hurt Eilidh’s back, severing their tryst, and so now she was back where she started.

“Mer, what on earth are you talking about?”

“Oh, Christ,” said Meredith. “No, no. You can’t hear this from me.”

“What?” Suitcase finally settled in the trunk, Eilidh made her way to the passenger side of Dzhuliya’s astonishingly clean vehicle. Was it… new? Was that an appropriate thing to ask? Had there ever been an appropriate version of their relationship? Not that it was ever arelationship—

“Call Arthur,” suggested Meredith. “Or, well, Arthur’s incommunicado at the moment, I assume. Not that I’ve been to an orgy, but I have my guesses.”

“What?” said Eilidh, for what seemed to be the hundredth time. Meredith was chatting away as if this was something they always did rather than something Meredith would only do under extremely limited circumstances, like deciding what to buy Aunt Fern for Christmas or grapevining news of a horrific accident. “Meredith, just tell me why you’re calling. Did someone die?” asked Eilidh, wrenching open the door to the passenger seat of Dzhuliya’s car.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, I’m assuming we’re done now with Jenny—”

“Dzhuliya.” Eilidh glanced askance at Dzhuliya then, who did not meet her eye.

“—but if we’re not, she’s so fired for this. Jamie, you tell her.”

The tinny, masculine voice was back. “What? Meredith—”

“Come on, you’ll be better at it than me, you’ll be doing her a favor—”

“It has to come fromyou,Meredith, not me—”

“Jamie.” Eilidh felt a mix of irritation and dread. She had always had a tendency to remember everything Meredith said to her, in detail, verbatim. Every little nit Meredith had to pick. Every throwaway comment Meredith seemed to sprinkle like pixie dust, sometimes meaningless and sometimes not, but it was impossible to tell in the moment which it was, and so Eilidh would replay the conversation in her head for hours and hours and hours until she felt certain which things Meredith meant and which things Meredith, who was at least forty percent machine, thought were simply facts or quips or even witticisms.Can you believe this motherfucker had the gall to up and die? I’m assuming we’re done with Jenny—If you’re next in line for CEO—What are you going to do yourself now that he’s not there—

“Jamie, I’ve had a very difficult day, and you know what my sister is like. Please tell me,” Eilidh felt herself say in a small voice. “Please just tell me.”

“Oh, Eilidh.” They had only spoken a handful of times over the course of his courtship with Meredith; they’d never actually met. It seemed unfair to put this on him, but such was life. “I’m so sorry,” Jamie sighed, closer now, as if he’d leaned toward the speaker. “It’s your father.”

“I told you, right? The gall,” said Meredith irritably, but Eilidh couldn’t hear her.

She couldn’t hear anything. Everything seemed to be drowned out by a low buzz, the faint sound of her heart beating in her ears, the agonized flutter of a locust wing. She felt as if everything around her had suddenly gone white, and there was a slow, gentle curl around her ribs from the thing in her chest, as if it was now snaking around her comfortingly, holding her like an embrace.

Not now, thought Eilidh impatiently, no disasters now, please, but it did feel nice, and she realized why Dzhuliya was here, and that amicable or not Dzhuliya had not wanted to be the one to have to comfort her, and neither would Meredith, and unless Eilidh wanted to wait for Arthur, nobody would give her a hug.

So Eilidh swallowed hard and sat alone with it, the sadness, the monster inside her chest that seemed to vibrate consolingly, its own bitterness and wrath entwining gently with hers.

“But seriously, if you’re Wrenfare’s next CEO, I’m going to lose my fucking mind,” her sister said.

Eilidh, Five Years Ago

The light flickered directly above Eilidh’s head. A small but unavoidable glitch.

“Sorry,” said the nurse, whose name was Angelica, an ordinary, not uncommon name that Eilidh would come to irrationally despise. “I put in a work request for that last week, but you know how these things go.”

Eilidh said nothing. She was aware, distantly, that her silence was rude and probably abrasive, but she had given herself permission, just for twenty-four hours, to not concern herself with what was or wasn’t rude.

Angelica, a remarkably decent person upon whom Eilidh should really not have wished such ill, didn’t seem to mind her silence. “Weather’s great today,” she said, and seemed to hesitate, unsure whether continuing to chat was better or worse as a tactic. “If you’re feeling up for it, I can take you outside for a bit.”

The good news was that Eilidh was going to be able to walk. She was going to regain mobility very soon—or soon enough, anyway, compared to the course of human existence. The good news was the taxi driver was fine. The good news was the other driver was, also, fine. The good news was her understudy was well prepared, she’d sold nearly as many tickets as the much-hyped Eilidh Wren, and the season was already almost over. The good news was that the understudy had learnedso muchfrom Eilidh—it really was an honor just to dance with her. (Was.) The good news was that Eilidh had lived. The good news was the weather was great today, and if Eilidh was feeling up for it, she could maybe be wheeled outside.

Meredith had done ballet, too, up until her studies got too rigorous for her to keep up with so many extracurriculars. Ballet, tennis, piano, her volunteer work at the summer camp for holy vagrants (that’s what Arthur jokingly called it, more of a reflection on Meredith herself than on the… fuck, suddenly Eilidh couldn’t think of a term that wasn’t “vagrants”), plus a fullload of honors and AP classes. So Meredith bailed out of ballet, crediting her perfect posture and the unmistakable whiff of rigorous discipline you got just from being near her to something that had been formative but fleeting, merely a thing she’d once done. For Meredith, ballet was an aesthetic, a reason to keep her hair neatly tied in a bun at all times from the ages of six to sixteen.

For Eilidh, it was different.

It engulfed her. It made her feel the way love was supposed to make her feel, the way other people talked about sex. She couldn’t talk about ballet without a noticeable degree of horniness, as if desire and dance were inseverable, as if she couldn’t feel passion any other way but on her toes, with the tips of her fingers so far outstretched as if to graze the cheek of God. She only ever slept with other dancers, never understanding how to explain to the normies the way she ate, her early bedtime, her early rising, the way that one mistake over the course of a near-perfect performance would paralyze her for hours afterward, ultimately driving her right back to the barre. How did you tell someone—man, woman, anyone—that you would rather achieve perfection than eat a slice of pizza? And in New York! Not a single person could understand her, not even the lovers she did take, who were all—put frankly—artistically inferior. Even the ones who claimed her same level of devotion still concerned themselves to some degree with rest, with sex, which Eilidh didn’t. She partook in it. She dabbled in it. But even in bed she was dancing. It was all she had ever wanted to do.

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