Page 57 of Gifted & Talented

So Lou looks at her best friend and says Meredith, I thought you were over this? Get over this, Lou says, people die. Lots of people die. Grow up.

She doesn’t know that Meredith knows about the cheating. She doesn’t know that Meredith knows about the football player, that Meredith is sure that Arthur, too, is in love with Lou, that Meredith feels like Lou is evolving and Meredith isn’t, because she’s still chasing something, a different ending than the one her mother got—a better, sweeter fate.

But anyway, this is Meredith’s story, so there’s a lot of more important things to talk about, like what happens when Meredith walks, as prophesied, the hallowed Harvard halls, or what happens when Meredith breaks Jamie’s heart as well as her own, or how Arthur calls Meredith ten times in a row and she doesn’t answer because she knows it’s about Lou, who’s back home now, in El Cerrito, where her mother now lives because Abuela is gone and Lola is sick and Lou is going to have to get a job to help out, and sure, maybe Meredith feels badly about it, but who can really ever tell with Meredith? There’s obviously a story to how Meredith ends up lying about the deal she’s made and releasing a product she already knows is a fake, a fucking forgery, and what is she even supposed to say, that she once had a friend whose grandma was the actual, literal village witch? That it turns out the Garden of Eden isn’t the Ainsworth Academy, and it isn’t Harvard, and it isn’t Silicon Beach or Silicon Valley or the magitech economy or the 30 other assholes Under 30, and what if it isn’t even Wrenfare or her father’s approval, because the truth is you could fall from grace at any time, before or after thirty, which is a completely arbitrary number, and you’re never safe from a fall unlessyou arebecause you werebornsafe, actually, and if you have the wealth of Thayer Wren and Persephone Liang behind you, then all you have to do is be happy with what you have without tearing down theonly person who reallyloves you,but you can’t be happy, not really, because you’re still trying to be in Eden, when the whole time it turns out that Eden is just a fucking lie?

But I don’t really feel like talking about it anymore. So, you know, let’s move on.

Maria Odesa Guadalupe de León

El Cerrito High School

HONORS:Class Valedictorian, Summa Cum Laude, Most Likely to Succeed

“Do your worst, for I will do mine!”

WEDNESDAY.

25

Meredith awoke in a cold sweat, the dream still thundering through her head. It was the usual one, the first day of school and she hadn’t registered for classes, except the school was actually Tyche’s campus and her feet wouldn’t move, they were stuck in place, the halls labyrinthine and unrecognizable. All she had to do was get to the registration office, to tell them what courses she wanted, she’d take anything at this point, whatever they had to give. But instead of a registrar it was Kip Hughes and Merritt Foster and Lou, and they were all saying they needed Meredith’s data right away, right now, it was late and if she didn’t give it to them she was going to be eaten. Unclear if it was jackals or a cannibalistic ritual. She simply understood that the situation was dire, and yet her fucking feet wouldn’t move.

“The industry, it’s very ‘fake it till you make it,’” Cass had said to someone at the cocktail party (as it had inevitably become) last night, someone who had golfed with her father or built model cars with him, who could say. Meredith had been tiptoeing around in the kitchen at the time, trying to get more alcohol without anyone seeing her, wearing their not-so-covert expectation that she fall to her knees and weep. “The whole deal with venture capitalism is that it’s a race to prove that the thing you make is both necessary and worth a lot of money, which isn’t always true. In reality, sometimes things underperform for a while. But it doesn’t mean everything is shit, necessarily.”

“So you think Tyche will survive the risk?” said the old golf dude, who was apparently an old industry dude.

“Oh, Tyche will be fine,” Cass replied. “There’s always a margin for failure built into any product gamble. Not that I’d count Meredith out quite yet.”

Meredith looked over at Cass now, his peacefully sleeping face. The traitor. Sure, he’d been upbeat enough, but he wondered, too. He wondered if she would fail. Every day it was I believe in you Mer, everything will be fineMer, you’ll figure it out. But what he really meant was Mer, if you fail, it makes no difference to anybody. We all cleverly planned for the likelihood that you were never actually going to succeed.

Glass cliff.

Meredith picked up her phone, glancing at the screen. It had an address in the East Bay, where Lou now lived, unless this was outdated. It was someplace to start, at least.

Meredith hadn’t had to look too hard for Lou, because this wasn’t her first rodeo when it came to checking up on her former best friend. Meredith already knew Lou had graduated from public high school the year Meredith had graduated from Ainsworth. She remembered Lou posting her yearbook quote, a line fromThe Count of Monte Cristo,on a now-defunct account, something that Meredith had, at seventeen, been quietly, desperately sure that Lou had only posted for Meredith’s benefit—a message to her, sentimental for its pettiness. Because who else but Meredith would have known what it meant?

From there, the personal updates got fewer, farther between. Lou graduated from UC Berkeley the same year Meredith was supposed to have graduated from Harvard. Lou didn’t have a professional page of any kind—she was too successful for that, and likely didn’t need the many start-up vultures hunting for her private line given that she’d been valued in the hundred millions by the age of twenty-five—but she was still listed on the website of Cal’s technomancy school for the many influential papers she’d published throughout her schooling.

Lou was probably working somewhere else in the magitech economy now, maybe just didn’t care for social media. She didn’t have any personal accounts and Meredith couldn’t find any record of her after she’d sold her first start-up to Tyche (at least two years before Meredith would later do the same, making Meredith’s fingers itch), but maybe she’d gotten married. Maybe her name had changed. Meredith tapped on the Berkeley page again, lingering on the first academic paper that had borne Lou’s name—or, well, technically the name that everyone else had used for Lou. Maria de León.

All the time between them seemed scattered grittily across the floor, like it had spilled out from an hourglass. Meredith looked at the address again, and the phone number.

Then she tapped Jamie’s name in her messages.

“Look, I already know the story about your mom,” Jamie had said toMeredith in the car two days ago, “and I know you already had the idea for Chirp when I met you. You told me about your friend from high school and the things she taught you to do. Which means I already know everything, basically, except for one thing I can’t figure out. Why’d you do it?”

By “it,” he meant turn her subcutaneous magitech-powered mood stabilizer into the profit-deriving go-button of a brainwashed corporate shill.

“As both a theoretical exercise and a refreshing change of pace from you asking me the same question in different formats,” Meredith had replied, “why don’t you tell me why you think I did it? Since you’re probably the only investigative journalist who doesn’t find it plausible that I did it for the sake of pure, unadulterated greed.”

“You’d think you’d be a little more grateful to me for that,” commented Jamie.

“Well, it’s not my fault if you look for zebras,” said Meredith.

“You mean because I hear hoofbeats?” He looked skeptical. “You really think there was any possibility it was a horse?”

“I think any reasonable person would assume it’s a horse.” The horse being the usual reasons anyone did anything.

“So you’re saying that’s it, you did it for the money?”

---