Page 120 of Gifted & Talented

“Hm? Oh, sorry,” said Arthur, thinking she was looking somewhere else.

“No, that’s—” She reached for the chocolate, holding the chunk that Arthur had broken off for her in the palm of one hand. It was easily several times as much as she had ever seen Yves take, and perhaps quadruple the size Yves had previously given her. “Were you going to eat all of this at once?”

“Oh, I couldn’t figure out the dosage, it’s some indeterminate number of ounces,” said Arthur. “So I just break off a bit and go with that.”

“Arthur.” Gillian flipped the chocolate bar to look at the label, which was in Turkish. “This is very clearly ingrams.”

“Is it?” Arthur reached for it. “Oh,” he said, and frowned. “Isn’t a gram close enough to an ounce?”

“Oh my god. Arthur, how long have you been taking this?”

“Probably once a day since I arrived. Sometimes a bit more, if the internet is being especially hellish.” Arthur frowned. “You’re sure it’s grams?”

“Arthur.” Gillian began to laugh, a laugh she knew would soon become a cry. She threw her arms around his neck and thought my god, I’ll have to love him forever, if I don’t he’ll fucking die.

“Arthur,” she said as she held him, which didn’t seem strange or uncomfortable, at least for now. “Arthur, Arthur—”

An electric charge ran up her spine as she laugh-wept. Love!

“Gillian,” said Arthur, in his softest, mildest, most hope-filled voice. “Imagine we’re old, really old, like near the end, and we’re standing beside a window. What’s outside?”

Gillian, who was not opposed to imaginary exercises or manifestation ceremonies, obligingly closed her eyes.

There it was, coalescing in a fraction of an instant, like finally seeing the forest through the trees or interpreting the random dots of an autostereogram. In her mind’s eye, Arthur’s hair was gray and thin, a little mottled skin of his scalp showing through the crown, lines of laughter webbing his face. The wallpaper was decadent, sublimely maximalist, with Thayer’s antique rifle mounted, unloaded, on the wall. Gillian smelled cookies and looked down at her hands, spotted with discoloration, a little shaky now, arthritis. They were in the living room setting out plates, moving together with the choreography of domesticity, the familiar clockwork of the home that they had made.

There it was, the window, just to her left! It faced the sidewalk, the slight unevenness of their tree-lined urban street. Gillian took a step toward the glass, heart thundering as she realized what she was looking for, what her future self seemed so ready to see. She knew—oh, how she knew.

And there she was now, coming up the front steps! There she was, on her way, coming home!

“Riot,” whispered Gillian with a flutter of recognition.

Arthur held her tightly, so tightly she almost couldn’t breathe.

“We don’t have to… you know. There are other ways,” he said, clearing his throat. “I don’t care about the biology of it all, I just—”

“Me too,” said Gillian firmly.

“I really—”

“I know.”

“I just didn’t think—”

“I didn’t either.”

“Oh, fuck,” said Arthur belatedly. “Wait, are you thinking the deaths might be somehow drug related?”

Gillian pulled away, taking the square that Arthur had handed her and contemplating it for a long while in her hand.

“Only one way to find out,” she said, and popped it in her mouth.

67

I didn’t feel it was appropriate to bring Monster to a funeral, plus it was one of Ben’s days to take him, so I brought Monster home. My mom had agreed to watch him until Ben was done with work, and it made my heart warm a little to know how happy she and Monster were to see each other after their long night away. He immediately ran to the living room and started playing with his toys, running his usual traffic jam of wooden cars along the edge of the sofa.

“So,” Mom said with a knowing tone, “how was it?”

“Well, you were right, I shouldn’t have gotten involved,” I said. “My ego got the better of me.”

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