Page 92 of Gifted & Talented

“See?” I crossed my arms. “Even he gets it.” When Arthur still looked unconvinced, I gestured around at the park guides who were definitely not coming to arrest me. “Do it or I’ll keep yelling. I HAVE CRAMPS,” I yelled. “GOD IS FAKE, BUT HE’S ALSO DEFINITELY A MAN! WHY ELSE WOULD BEING A WOMANSUCK—SO—HARD?”

“AHHHHHH!” said Arthur, which startled me. I had been really focused on shouting my God theories, but it seemed now wasn’t the time.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” Arthur elaborated, and a small group of tourists came toward us as if to shush him, but I glared daggers their way.

“I JUST WANT TO BE LOVED!” screamed Arthur.

“SAME!” I bellowed.

“I JUST WANT TO DO SOME GOOD IN THE WORLD!” Arthur wailed. “AND I HATE THE INFINITE SCROLL!”

“Ooh, good one,” I said.

“Thank you,” Arthur said, exhaling with relief. “Are we done, then?”

“I LOVE MY SON!” I said. “I HOPE HE DOESN’T GET SHOT AT SCHOOL!”

“Whoa, dark,” Arthur gasped.

“The world’s a dark place,” I informed him, adding, “I THINK PEOPLE WHO GET BORED EASILY ARE THE WORST!”

“I WISH I’D MARRIED A WOMAN WHO COULD LOVE ME LIKE I LOVE HER!” said Arthur, which felt like something real.

I wanted to acknowledge it somehow, but I wasn’t sure what to say that wasn’t obnoxious and pitying, so instead I turned to Arthur, looked at him for a long time, and then said, “I HATE THAT MY MOM IS GOING TO DIE SOMEDAY!”

His eyes were wide, tragic, honest. He looked back at me, then screwed up his face like he was about to say something repulsive.

And when he said it, I guess I wasn’t really that surprised.

“I JUST WANTED MY DAD TO LOVE ME, AND NOW HE NEVER WILL,” said Arthur Wren to the grove of heavenly trees. To the indifference of nature and a universe who hadn’t put him into motion in any particular way; hadn’t given him the fate it did for any particular reason.

We studied this in biomancy, the profound accident that was heredity, and life. There is a randomness to the universe; you can find it everywhere, from physics to biology. Oh, there is definitely elegance in this world, mathematics mainly, the things you can do with magic once you understand the nature of communing with something larger than yourself. But there is only so much order. Most of that beauty comes from somewhere broken, from something accidental. In life there is no narrative, no neatness to the ending. Your mom might forget who you are someday, even if you’re the reason she’s done everything since the moment you first drew breath. Your dad might have three children he cannot love equally. He might love you the most unfairly because you’re some weird mirror-sliver of himself. Because someday, he might be gone and you’re what will be left, and perhaps he has always been too selfish to imagine a world without him in it.

Arthur’s voice broke then, after admitting out loud the thing his father had never given him the space or the tools to say, and suddenly he dropped away, and I thought maybe this was an example of him dying. I thought whoa, I know he said this was a thing, but I really thought he was joking.

But it turned out he had just sunken down to sit on the bench, holding his head in his hands.

Monster, who had been really excited while we were all yelling, was alarmed by the sudden change in the game. He reached for me, and I picked him up and kissed the palm of his hand, and he stroked my arm and then kind of smacked my face, and I said no, no hitting, and kissed his hand again. Then I sat down next to Arthur, and Monster wriggled away to go look at a stick on the ground.

Arthur was silent for a really long time, so I figured I’d give it a try. The stakes were low, anyway. Whether he felt better or not we probably weren’t going to have a lot of time together after this. If he never spoke to me again, so be it. I’d already lost him once before.

“I think your dad probably loved you,” I said. “But even if he didn’t, you can’t control how he felt. You can only control howyoufeel, whatyouaccept. So you can accept that he was really inept at his most important job, and you can hate him for that if you want. It doesn’t matter, he’s dead. But you could also just decide you don’t need it—his approval or whatever. And you can keep on living, because you have to do that anyway.” I shrugged. “You’re the only one left, so you get to decide.”

Arthur’s eyes were brimming with tears that he didn’t want me to see. He was thinking about all the things he’d never hear Thayer say, but also the things that Thayer would never see. Because Arthur was grateful to Thayer for the things that had made him, but also, he was grateful to himself for the things that hadn’t unmade him. He might be just some guy, some has-been, some failure of a politician, maybe one who ended up divorced and alone, but even some guy is allowed to live a normal life with normal problems. If it wasn’t this, Arthur reasoned, it would be something else.

Arthur reached out for my hand and I gave it to him. I don’t know, I guess I decided that being together in that moment was more important than staying mad about something that happened half a lifetime ago.

I’m not totally sure what I was mad at him for, anyway. Not the sex, that was consensual, and the feeling of emptiness I carried around with me afterward wasn’t his fault. It was that I had done things for the wrong reasons—things that preceded him. I had given my girlhood away in stages because in my quest for my amorphous future, I thought it was already gone. I had loved the wrong parts of him; I wanted a version of him that I had imagined for myself, a person whose love was more like a metric, because I wasinnocent and heartbroken and young. Meredith I could definitely still hate, she’d had agency all the way down, but Arthur I had closed the door on that day because I thought I was understanding something about, I don’t know, class solidarity—the way the rich always choose themselves. And they do! Don’t get me wrong, we should absolutely eat the rich, and I think what made me so furious with Arthur for so long was the specific way he had wanted to help me; like Meredith’s ability to discard me meant she had the means to ruin me; like because my fancy education had fallen away, then my potential, too, was gone. To Arthur, I was the despoiled one, the one cast cruelly out of Eden, and I believed it then, too—but what was Eden, in the end? The father who didn’t love him? The prison of a life built on external validation? On what photo filter or idea of a person the public could guiltlessly love?

“You know,” I said, “Meredith’s app, that Chirp?”

“Oh, that,” Arthur said with a sigh. “I tried it. I really wanted it to work, and not just for her sake. I just…” He shrugged. “I just wanted it towork.”

“Yeah,” I said, “me, too.”

He looked at me with surprise, so I nudged his shoulder with mine.

“I just want to be happy,” I admitted.

---