Page 100 of Gifted & Talented

But inevitably a calmer, more stable Eilidh came back to her. Her father’s daughter. She couldn’t stand it, actually, even inside her head, the thought that she might let him down. She’d gone too long craving his adoration, finding some contorted relief in knowing that even if her dream was over, even if her body was broken, her father still loved her the most. The most! Hetreasuredher, and maybe that had come with strings, a gilded cage, but she’d worn this mask so long she no longer knew what lived beneath it. The thing in her chest, the stirring of darkness was a bug, that’s all, just a bug—shewas something different, something more alive than a parasite could ever be.

Oh, how they warred inside her, the girl and the god! She, her entire she, it didn’t want to be adored. Adoration had come so cheaply. Eilidh or her monster, no telling which, they both wanted to make something tremble, wanted to unleash a nightmare, to be rendered a nightmare herself because it was what they—she—deserved.

So what if she’d read him wrong the whole time; so what if Thayer wasn’t benevolence incarnate? What was she owed for her diligence, for her loyalty, for the filial duty that only she had fulfilled? Who was to say it wasn’t everything! Maybe the reason the world hadn’t actually fallen off its axis (yet) was that Eilidh didn’t know for certain where Thayer had placed his legacy. She still hadn’t lost everything, not until the curtains closed. The show went on until the final lines of Thayer Wren were read.

“I want it,” she said. The thing in her chest became the thing in her throat, then the thing in her mouth, crawling up like vomit. “Wrenfare. I’m going to fight for it.”

“What?” Dzhuliya was looking at her with something not quite bewildered. Too sharp for that. It was arepeat that so I can hold you to itkind of a request for clarification.

“If he leaves the shares to me, I’m taking it. If he divides them, I’ll make sure Arthur’s on my side. How hard could it be?” Eilidh’s heart thud-thudded in her chest, borne on the wings of a demon, alight on the branch of demand. “Or I’ll convince him to split his shares up, and then the board can decide. The board will choose me over Meredith, I know they will.” Everybody fucking hated Meredith. Eilidh was so light she wanted to fly. It’s called a long game, Meredith! How aboutthemapples, Sister Death! “The point is I’m going to try, I want to try.” Power, that’s what Eilidh deserved, power! Thayer was dead but Eilidh was alive, and by god, she was free! “I don’t care if it costs me everything.” What else was it for if not this, a seat at the table, the inheritance of a throne?

What else was there now but Eilidh and her rage?

“Securing a majority might not be as hard as you think,” said Dzhuliya, who was a little wild-eyed, a reflection of Eilidh’s own festering mania. Or maybe not? Either way, Eilidh’s essentialness, the thing that had so long lain dormant was alive, it was awake, she wanted to run a mile, she wanted to scream as loud as she could, she wanted to fuck Dzhuliya in the car and then tear open her father’s last wishes, casting old dreams unto the pyre. Freedom! Forget the dreamhouse of expectation, she had a monster to feed, hers was a lore built on glory! Father, forgive me. Father, release me. Father, absolve me—oh, and by the way Father, fuck you!

Eilidh rose to her feet from the steps outside the funeral home, pulling Dzhuliya up beside her, and kissed Dzhuliya full on the mouth, exuberant, bereaving. The darkness Eilidh had made was somehow animal, alive. She could feel the quiet breeding, sightless eyes blinking from deep inside the soul of her inky night.

“Grief is a real rollercoaster on you,” whispered Dzhuliya, a hot gasp in Eilidh’s mouth.

“Ride the high, baby,” Eilidh replied, and smacked her lightly on the ass.

54

In case you’re wondering, by then I had finally received Meredith’s text message, the one calling me a traitorous bitch, which did not make any sense to me at the time and which, given the euphoric second-chance fucking that soon preoccupied her mind, Meredith had forgotten about.

I didn’t text her back because by then Arthur had gotten a call from Gillian, and then I had to drive, and anyway, what do you say to that, really? By the time we both remembered she’d said it, we were locking eyes over the Wren family dinner table, one of us receiving some truly catastrophic news.

55

When it was over—when Meredith came loudly, as Meredith always did, and Jamie finished with a little more dignity, a jaw-clenching groan—they both became aware beneath apocalyptic skies that there was no future there, which technically they had both already known.

But Jamie had meant what he said, that he was going to marry her, even though he would hate her a little bit, and more importantly, hate himself. Because the hating her would pass—assuming she did not go the libel route and destroy his career, a merciless, narcissistic form of sabotage that never seemed entirely out of the question with Meredith—but the hating himself would stay forever. Meredith Wren! When Jamie had first found out who she was, back when they were both students and she’d become more than just the girl in his rhetoric course—when he realized that Wren wasthatWren, unlike when he’d played hockey with a kid named Kennedy who wasn’tthatKennedy—he started to think things likeMaybe there are some ethical billionaires?which was counterproductive and absurd. Meredith had started to humanize capitalism for him and it was disgusting, it was the worst.

Jamie hadn’t come from money. His parents had scrimped and saved and starved so he could get the best education in the world, and he had every intention of nobility—pay off his loans, then pay off their mortgage, pad their retirement fund, things for which he would need a starting salary of six figures right off the bat, which was why law school had seemed the natural route, the most patently obvious. Even summer associates made enough to pay off significant portions of their loans! And to think, with every luxury that his parents had forgone, every vacation they hadn’t taken, every moment they’d spent choosing Jamie’s future over their own, here was Meredith, who could wipe out their debt with a swipe of her finger, erase it like it had never existed at all. And for what? So her father was widely considered a genius; so what? Jamie’s mother had managed to feed her family for about sixty dollarsa week, how wasshenot a genius? How was Jamie’s father not a genius for making his way here, for starting over completely? If you’d forced Thayer Wren to give up his livelihood, his life, to start over from scratch in another country, would he still have founded Wrenfare? Could Jamie’s father have been the one to found Wrenfare had he been given Thayer’s partners, Thayer’s same resources in life? Was that fate’s cruelty, its randomness, assigning fortune and comfort to Meredith Wren, who was so fucking miserable she sometimes cried in her sleep, who believed more sincerely in the ambiguous possibility of magic than in her own innate worth as a human, while Jamie had to go to his happy childhood home and be unable to bear it gracefully, to see the shabbiness of his life through new eyes, having now experienced the finery of Meredith’s idea of a Christmas gift between casual lovers: cashmere sweatpants?

“Does she make you happy?” Jamie’s mother had asked, her one question as to whether Meredith was right for her only son. The only thing she had ever cared about: Jamie’s happiness. Such that when Jamie couldn’t do it, couldn’t stomach the thought of law school, of kowtowing to white men in suits who asked if he spoke English or said “But where are you fromoriginally” when he told them he was from Boston, the thought of representing some corporation like Wrenfare, of defending its right to whatever-the-fuck because they had the money to hire some kid who wanted to get paid right away, for reasons that were maybe unselfish but still, in the end, pretty bad. And his mother just saidI want you to be happy. I just want you to be happy.

“No,” was nearly Jamie’s answer, “no, she doesn’t make me happy, when I’m with her I don’t even know what happiness is or what it means, it seems too small and unimaginative an idea, I’m not sure happiness was ever even real, I mean whatisthat? I was happy before her, now I’m something else, something sickly and weak and yet massive and esoteric, I am confounding and arcane, I am consumed by something ancient and universal and yet no one has ever felt the way I feel, I’m sick with it, I’m sick to death with it, I want to hold her forever, I want to crawl inside her heart and wear her skin!”

Obviously he went with a simple yes and that was that. And then Meredith left, and Jamie felt happiness again, even if she had changed him, rewritten him from the top down so that he couldn’t do anything meaninglessly anymore, he couldn’t do anything anymore but write and ask questions and write. She disappeared, she came back without warning, he was sick all over again. She was gone, or he left, either way he was obsessed with her story.He knew something secret about her, something intimate, which was that she got foot cramps right after she came. He also knew that she believed she was a witch. He had humored her belief, thinking it eccentric and charming, until she had showed him.

“I’m serious,” she said, “pick a person and I’ll prove it.”

“What kind of person?”

“I don’t know, someone you want to change.” She had to be able to get physically close to them, she explained. She had to be able to make eye contact directly.

Jamie’s freshman roommate was the worst person Jamie had ever met. They’d parted ways and never spoken again, though he still thought of it, the way that guy had brought back girls who seemed suspiciously docile, the way he called Jamie a terrorist and laughed. Old New Jersey money, some future stockbroker son of a bitch. “Okay, great,” said Meredith, and the next time there was a party, a big one, Meredith sweet-talked the guy into an empty, shabby room in the den of iniquity and pulled Jamie in after her with a laugh.

“Watch,” she said.

He watched. He watchedher. He watched her look of concentration, the sweat on her brow. The way her fingers developed a tremor, a serious tremor, to the point where Jamie nearly interrupted to say she was obviously dehydrated, she needed to stop. Her eyes were unfocused, they were dark with purpose, with a little hint of madness that made Jamie feel he was witnessing something unholy, occult. He only remembered to look at the guy, his old roommate, after Meredith stepped back and swayed, nearly fainted, a thin wisp of a smile on her face.

“There,” she said, “fixed it,” and fell into Jamie’s arms.

When she came to, the guy was gone, Jamie was calling 911. Meredith grabbed the phone from him and said she was fine, hung it up. “Well?” she demanded. “Did you check to see if it worked?”

“Meredith, I thought you weredying—”

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