Page 77 of Gifted & Talented

No, he wasn’t. Only in the sense that he existed, and she always wanted him more than she wanted to jump through hoops for Introductory Bullshit 101. She couldn’t fight the sense that her time was being wasted, that her likelihood of singularity was receding—all of which was her fault, not his. She just wasn’tgoodat it, not as good as she should have been. Everything was so much harder than she’d expected. And it hurt, perfection hovering eternally out of reach.

Only Jamie had been easy. Only Jamie had felt right.

So she said, “I loved you too much. I was afraid to miss a single moment of you. I picked you over everything, over and over again, and it was stupid. I got a C on a midterm because I wanted to spend the night with you instead of studying. I thought about you,” Meredith said through partially chattering teeth, “incessantly. The human brain isn’t made for that kind of puppy love, it can’t adequately perform.”

“Puppy love,” Jamie echoed hollowly.

“Yes, puppy love, because if I’d been a grown-up, I would have done things differently. I’m not an idiot, Jamie. I know the choice I made back then was immature and it was childish. I dropped out because I didn’t like that things didn’t come easily, naturally, like they were supposed to. I left you because I knew eventually you’d leave me, and I just couldn’t take the stain of it, I’d already failed so many things.” She took a long pull from her glass of wine. “I thought if I cut you off first, then I could suck the poison out.”

“That’s what you thought I was? Poison?” For the first time, Jamie sounded wounded.

“No, Jamie, but I’m a fucking liar and I lied to myself. And then—” Meredith felt her voice shake. “And then we got older and I was right, it was self-fulfilling, because whenever we fell back into it, you didn’t stay. Whenever I woke up in the mornings you were gone. And I said okay, he doesn’t love me, I knew he would have a life without me and I can’t have one without him and that’s embarrassing, it’s so stupid and fucked up and I’m supposed to be—”

“A genius,” Jamie said in a wry tone of insouciance.

“Someone,” Meredith clarified. “Something. There were all these metrics for it, these things I had to do before I ran out of time—”

“Who said you were running out of time?”

“It’s the thirtyunder thirty,” Meredith scoffed into her glass. “You think it’s my fault I couldn’t envision life on the other side?”

“So you’re blaming society?” Jamie sounded patronizing, unconvinced.

“No. I’m telling you I’m sorry,” she said, watching him pause with his glass partway to his lips. “I’m telling you I’m older now, I’m different. I’m telling you that if you ask me to run away with you now, I’ll do it. If you ask me to marry you, settle down, disappear into obscurity, shop for groceries with all the other moms in yoga pants and graphic tees, I’ll do it for you.” Would it really be so bad, eternal boredom, if success only meant underattended tech talks, colleagues who didn’t trust her, investors who threw her to the wolves? Success was a myth, a sharp cliff—couldn’t she at least be unsatisfied in a way that felt less hollow, more like a life?

THIS MAN WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY IF YOU JUST, LIKE, CHANGE!unfurled like a scroll in Meredith’s mind.

“If I could do it all over, I would choose you, Jamie.” Meredith exhaled, closing her eyes. “If someone gave me another chance, I’d choose you instead.”

She heard Jamie set his glass down on the bar and let her eyes flutter open, waiting. Jamie was quiet for another few minutes, long enough that Meredith finished her drink.

“Nice try,” he said eventually, “but that’s not the truth I was asking for.”

She breathed out a sharp laugh, like someone had punched her.

“Damn,” she said. “I really thought that might work.”

37

“Try it again,” suggested Gillian, and so Yves bent his head and kissed her softly on the side of her knee a second time. She repressed the urge to kick him in the face. “No,” she said with sigh, “never mind, I must have imagined it.”

Yves caressed her calf gently and this time she did kick him away, albeit in the shoulder and not very hard. “I suppose it’s probably just hopeless,” Gillian said.

The day before, when Gillian and Yves had gone to the grocery store, Yves had confessed a number of things to Gillian in the car under the influence of what was essentially an edible. Gillian had been very, very focused on driving the car through the steep, winding roads of Mill Valley and so had listened sort of absentmindedly to Yves’s soliloquy, which did not necessarily rise to the level of diatribe but felt spiritually significant in a similar way.

“The thing is, she didn’t realize at first that it couldn’t be mine,” Yves said, “because I use male birth control.”

“Do you?” asked Gillian, impressed.

“So then the whole thing essentially backfired,” Yves said cheerfully, “or I think it did, although she is not being very forthcoming about the whole thing, which I suppose is understandable because she is not one to give up the game so easily. More chocolate?”

“No thanks,” said Gillian, who was feeling… not a lack of clarity, exactly. She feltexceptionallyclear, which was kind of the problem. Gillian required a certain degree of haze in order to get through all her rituals for the day without the interruption of unruly thoughts, and now she was having all sorts of them. She realized, for example, that Yves had just confessed something quite personal to her, and now she was meant to confess something personal back, which was a condition she would have picked up on under normal circumstances—Gillian had a militaristic awareness of socialcues—but in this case, she felt oddly compelled to rise to the challenge in a way she might not otherwise have done.

“Do you love her?” asked Gillian.

“I love love,” said Yves. “And Mouse is quite a person.”

“I love Arthur,” said Gillian.

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