Page 76 of Gifted & Talented

Arthur:Who’s his father?

Me:Some guy, probably

Arthur:Are you fucking with me?

Who can say?I replied from where I was leaning on my kitchen counter. Monster asked me for some juice and I told him no, no more juice, he’d just brushed his teeth.

Arthur, meanwhile, stayed on the floor for a long time before saying what he wanted to say, which wasCan you meet me in the morning?

It’s Thursday and I have to work, I pointed out, a fundamental truth that was easily forgotten by the generationally wealthy.

Take the rest of the week off please. I’ll pay whatever you think is fair, I promise

I just have a lot of problems, Arthur added.This dying thing is really inconvenient

I personally find Eilidh’s apocalypse problem more interesting, I replied, mostly to be curmudgeonly, which unfortunately Arthur intuited, because he’s very intuitive that way. Monster asked me again for more juice and I said no again. Then Monster asked me to read him a book, which really meant four books, so I didn’t see Arthur’s reply until much later, after my son had fallen asleep.

It saiddon’t tell anyone but I wish my dad had liked me

Oh Arthur, I said.Literally everybody knows that.

36

You already know that at that particular moment, Jamie and Meredith were meeting for a drink.

“What would stop you from publishing that article?” she asked him. She was fiddling with her glass, trying not to look at Jamie. Blood in the water. She knew he’d smell it, but she didn’t have to look him in the eye while she drowned. Or whatever.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Seriously, nothing?”

“Seriously, nothing.” She flicked a glance at him to watch him take a long sip of his drink. “I mean, I’d love to make you more sympathetic. Anytime you want to tell the truth, just let me know.”

“The truth?” echoed Meredith.

Jamie nodded once, stoically. “The truth.”

She looked at the liquid in her glass and tried to imagine being someone different. What would a real genius do—one that was not a fraud?

Not this. “It scared me,” she confessed. “When I was with you. The person I was willing to be for you. I didn’t like what it said about me.”

“What did it say about you?” Jamie asked gamely.

She didn’t answer. “I was nineteen and barely treading water in everything but biomancy. I was supposed to be brilliant.” She slid a carefully manicured nail down the sheen of condensation on her glass. “I couldn’t make myself not care.”

“Nobody asked you not to care.”

“I hated it,” she admitted. “Failing.”

“Were you failing?”

“I was to me.”And to my father,she didn’t say.

Jamie shrugged. “Everybody hates failing.”

“But I wasn’t supposed to fail. I was a prodigy.” She paused. “You were distracting me.”

“Was I?”

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