Page 31 of Gifted & Talented

Cass seemed surprised at first, but then nodded as if tasked with something holy. He strode forward then, looking contemplatively at the canopy of trees that beheld patches of moonlit sky before taking hold of the stairwell banister and beginning to climb.

“That was sweet,” said Eilidh, and Arthur glanced back at her with surprise. “Not really helping your case that you’re not, you know, completely geriatric at the age of twenty-nine,” she said. “Though now that Dad’s gone, I hope you’ll be like that for me if I ever bring someone home.”

She seemed genuinely sad, though Arthur supposed that wasn’t much of a surprise. Their father had always been sweet to Eilidh in a way that didn’t otherwise exist, like he’d made it up specifically for her enjoyment. Thayer had always looked at Meredith with a sense of caution, as if keeping his distance was something he did in the interest of public safety. He looked at Arthur with something closer to effort, like if he simply looked hard enough for long enough then eventually Arthur would transform, miraculously becoming something else.

“The headlights on Cass’s car are sparking,” said Eilidh, the way she might have told him his fly was down. Arthur jumped a little, realizing he’d rounded a fist, and shook out his hands. They were almost arthritically tense, so cramped he struggled to uncurl them.

“Yeah, weird,” he said, pretending to frown bemusedly at the car. “That’s… wow, he really ought to have that looked at—”

But Eilidh was looking unmistakably at his hands.

“Still?” she asked him. Entirely the worst question, because asking if Arthur still suffered from the fiasco they should have long ago forgotten was like asking if he still wet the bed. He had not, after all, caused any damage to himself or others via near-fatal electrical fire for decades, not since Lou. (Unless you counted all the damage he’d caused over the last few months, which was, again, a temporary condition Arthur was hoping to be rid of at the universe’s earliest convenience.)

“It’s nothing,” he assured her. “I’ve got it under control.”

“I’m not judging you,” Eilidh said quickly. “I’m just curious. Because—” She broke off, hesitating. “Well, I hadn’t planned to… to talk about this. But I guess, you know, since you’re here, and honestly, I’d rather talk about this right now than Dad—”

Arthur stopped listening, realizing that dear god, he’d have to talk about his fathera lotover the coming days. It wasn’t just Yves who would wanthim to wrestle with grief, but everyone. The press! Oh god, the press. Imagine what theLos Angeles Timeswould say about him as a man, as a son, if he couldn’t conjure up something more meaningful than “fuck you” to say to an urn. Because surely the man would want a secret extravagance—the quiet luxury of anorganicurn, undecorated but designed by Frank Gehry, a fact known only to thosein the know.

The possibility existed that Thayer Wren had given so little thought to his mortality that he had not specified any funereal eccentricities, but then it would be even worse, because Arthur, Meredith, and Eilidh would be responsible forinventingthe pomp and circumstance that would be suitable to their father, which was unimaginable at this moment in time, an era in which anything Arthur thought was right or even acceptable would surely be met with revilement en masse. And to think he would have to say words, publicly, on the nature of his relationship with his father! Full sentences, even! And what of the circus that was surely coming on social media, assuming it wasn’t already here? The comments, which would no doubt alternate wildly between adulation and vitriol, the unavoidable polarity of in memoriams and memes?

The sudden, world-upending feeling Arthur had given in to when he’d first heard the news was back, and for a moment, he felt as though the ground had slipped out from under him.

Then yet another set of blinding white headlights struck him between the eyes like a godless curse.

“You know what, Jamie? Have the car! Write your little article! Have a fantastic life subsisting on the grief of other people like some kind of scum-sucking bristle worm and see where it gets you!” shouted Arthur’s sister Meredith, slamming the door shut on a still-running car before suddenly materializing by Arthur’s side, so impressively unchanged from when he’d last seen her that he wanted temporarily to drop to the ground and kiss her feet.

“What?” Meredith demanded, apparently of Eilidh, who wasn’t doing anything particularly, aside from being Eilidh, as the car’s headlights receded in reverse.

“Bristle worm?” asked Eilidh.

“They’re scavengers,” snapped Meredith. “They keep aquarium ecosystems clean.”

“No, makes sense,” said Eilidh in the haughty way that Meredith hated,which was really Eilidh mirroring Meredith in a way she subconsciously put on, like a costume.

“Do shut up,” said Meredith in the Meredith way that Eilidh hated, or perhaps “hated” was too strong a word. It was unclear what Eilidh felt, since she was perpetually a child to Arthur despite having very clearly grown up. “Art, you look shit.”

He didn’t feel well, come to think of it. Cass’s headlights were sparking again; the taillights now, too. They’d been going like that for several seconds, he realized, lighting up like the Fourth of July. He saw them streaming with starlight, a haze of bright white rising up like a banner in the sky. He felt… suddenly painless, as if he’d swallowed a ball of light whole.

Oh wow,he thought, which probably should have beenoh no,under the circumstances.

Because although Arthur Wren had started to die some decades ago, depending on how closely one was keeping track—and really, aren’t we all dying from birth, in some sense?—this was actually the first time death had ever happened in a tangible, recognizable way, such that he wouldn’t even feel it by the time he hit the ground.

13

When Meredith was nine years old, her mother died of heart complications from an eating disorder that had been killing her slowly over the course of several decades, having taken root in her teens. Persephone Liang had been deemed anemic and malnourished several times over the course of her youth—and you’ll recall she had the moneynotto starve—before she eventually became Persephone Wren and began committing fashionably to juice cleanses and intermittent fasting and exercising to the point of collapse, usually saying things like “I just feel so muchbetterwhen I’m active and don’t eat carbs” while simultaneously lacking the energy to remain upright for the entire day.

Throughout her childhood, Meredith watched it happen, and although she did not then know how to fix it, she did understand that her mother had a disease, and the disease was hatred. Persephone hated herself, which was absurd to Meredith, who loved her mother more than she had ever loved anybody—more than she thought she would ever love anyone again. She confided all this in Lou, who tried to help in the silly ways that girlhood friends do, by making potions out of twigs and burning sage in small, ineffective piles. But it didn’t work, and eventually Meredith went through school and learned about mental disorders, and specifically about one that caused you to sometimes be extremely active and sometimes very sedentary and depressed, and that sometimes, if the wires got crossed badly enough, you did things like stop taking care of yourself. And occasionally stop eating and go for such a long, dangerous hike on so few nutrients that a heart attack was a woefully inaccurate way to describe the suicide that would ultimately go unwritten across the death certificate bearing your name.

It was in high school, when Meredith was sixteen and finally realizing in retrospect whichspecificdisease her mother had had, that she understood why the girlhood witchcraft hadn’t worked to bring her back. Maybe it wouldhave if Meredith had come into her whole power in time, she thought. Maybe if she’d caught it quickly enough and understood it in a way that a nine-year-old would never have the world-wise maturity to do. Lou was still with her then, having set off for the same illustrious boarding school Meredith attended, and together they spent their summers in Marin obsessing over the possibility that a mind could be changed, that a brain could be fixed.

Unfortunately, Lou had mistakenly considered Meredith to be the normal sort of motivated instead of fucking pathological, and thus, upon realizing what Meredith wanted to be able to do—and the way she wanted to practice it—Lou realized it would necessarily imply small violations here and there to a person’s mental and physical autonomy. Whether for the greater good or not, it still seemed kind of fucked. So Lou said some variation of “Uh, I think you’re going too far,” which put a damper on their collective exploration of witchcraft. (“BIOMANCY,” screamed Meredith at the time, a convenient shorthand forI’m out here doingscience,you fucking cunt!)

Shortly after, for probably unrelated reasons—said the Lord God, sarcastically—Meredith would have Lou expelled by revealing a minor history of plagiarism, which the school did not tolerate. But the point is that Meredith had an obsession, and that obsession was rewriting the past into a version where she had the power to save her dead mother’s life, which would ultimately become a tool that could make you happy—an invention that Meredith called Chirp.

This was not the speech that Meredith had given earlier that day on the Tyche stage. That one was more about having a research idea you then guided in a methodical, meticulous way to fruition, with the assistance of venture capital so phenomenally massive it gave you a near-magical ability to overlook your father’s failure to invest or your own nauseating transgressions. She mostly talked about how difficult it was to be a woman of color in magitech, which was true. Most of Meredith’s poor reputation in the industry came from a place of personal dislike, because in order to become as successful as she was, she had had to tell a lot of men to suck her dick in various ways, largely for the crime of having been smarter than they were to begin with.

The truth, oh, the truth—again from a place of divine narrative impartiality, bordering on indifference—is that Meredith Wren was absolutely, without question smarter than any man she’d ever worked with or for. Meredith Wren was smarter than her peers, smarter than her rivals, smarterthan her siblings, smarter than her father. But this isn’t a world that actuallyembracesgenius, not when it doesn’t come with the right packaging, and anyway she was also an asshole, and actively unethical, and so powerfully single-minded that to call Meredith Wren a danger to herself and others was not only warranted by the metrics of professional psychiatry, but also completely, profoundly true.

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