Page 14 of Gifted & Talented

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“So you’ve kidnapped me, is what you’re saying,” commented Jamie ruefully from the passenger side of Meredith’s rented vehicle. It was a gas model, of all things—urgency had left little room for choosiness, despite the fact that she had the money for a magitech model, or even a normal electric car that was just as good and cheaper to manufacture than the M-batteries her father had developed—though this one had come equipped with external Wrenfare GPS, so if Meredith got lost, she would know precisely which dead man to blame. “You never intended to tell me anything at all, did you?”

It was then hour three of Meredith’s… “abduction” was a strong word. Indeed, it had not felt like abduction at the moment she’d had the idea. (We know; we were all there.) Instead, Meredith had sagely thought, Well, can’t let Jamie run free with his silly little story about my massive corporate fraud —and had not, at the time, considered what preventing him from doing so might mean.

Within the first hour, though, it became very obvious that the lie she’d always intended to tell—something about how Jamie hadn’t understood what he’d seen her do back when he’d seen her do it, or that he was letting his personal feelings get the better of him, or that the problem was in Chirp’s popularity leading to it being distributed so indiscriminately, creating a mythos of negativity and the general sense that it was not, per se, good, as with paranormal romances of the aughts—was actually a very short conversation. She said all three things in the span of about five minutes and then realized there were five hours left of the drive, possibly more with traffic (and there would be traffic, heaven help them, because no amount of magitech could get the political support for an at-grade train line built across a landscape intended in obscure but unignorable ways for military defense).

Which was when Meredith had called her sister, forced Jamie to tell Eilidh the news of their father’s death, and then put on an audiobook that was actually fairly engaging until Jamie abruptly turned it off, having realized the predicament he’d put himself in.

“What am I supposed to do when we get to Marin?” he asked her. “What did you foresee happening from there?”

“I could ask you the same question,” Meredith pointed out. “You’re the one who got in the car with me. By the way, do you need to use the restroom?”

“A bit, yeah, now that you mention it,” said Jamie. “But aren’t you concerned I’ll run?”

“Run where? You live three hours in the opposite direction. Want to switch when we get to the rest stop?”

“Switch? Switch?” Jamie’s voice sounded maniacal with indignation. “You think I’m going to drive?”

“I’m just asking, for heaven’s sake, James—”

“And for the record, I don’t even live in Venice anymore,” Jamie muttered. “I was only in town to cover your tech talk for Magitek .”

“What do you mean you don’t live in Venice anymore ? You were living in Venice ever? At all?” asked Meredith, stunned enough to look at him then. “But I live in Venice.”

“I know.” Jamie was looking resolutely out the window. “I didn’t live there long.”

“How long did you live there?” Her voice sounded very strange to her, with a porous element, like there were holes in it.

Jamie shrugged, or gave the indication of having been trying to shrug. “Just a couple of years.”

“ A couple of —” They missed the exit for the rest stop. “You’ve just been there? Skulking in the shadows? This whole time?”

“I told you, I don’t live there anymore, I’ve been on the road for the past six months. And I was never skulking in the shadows. I was writing out of the coworking place on Rose and shopping at the grocery store and surfing on Thursday mornings. None of those things are considered skulking.”

“What grocery store?” demanded Meredith, and this time it sounded a little like a shriek.

“Not Demeter, if that’s what you’re asking.” Jamie’s tone of judgment was audibly insulting. “I’m a freelance writer, Meredith. I shop at places that don’t slice their own kiwis or get milk from the happiest cows. And anyway, you’re in cahoots with Demeter. And in bed with Tyche.” He gave her a meaningful look then. “What made you agree to it?”

“Agree to what?” Meredith drummed the steering wheel innocently and missed the exit for the next potential place to stop, which meant at least fifty more miles.

“Your product does work,” Jamie pointed out, and Meredith had to physically stop herself from adding “to an extent,” realizing that despite Jamie’s careful return to the subject of his article, this was not a casual chat. She ought to have been counting those words as a win.

“Oh, so now you admit I’m not actually a fraud? Maybe you’re a fraud,” Meredith huffed at him. “You’re the one threatening my livelihood over something you freely admit is a lie.”

“Your product works—as a tool for Tyche,” Jamie corrected, seemingly gleeful over his semantic trap. “It does something very effectively, for sure. But it doesn’t do what you said it would do.” They both heard the words like the unmistakable bleat of a tiny passenger in the back seat: THIS APP WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY! :)

Jamie paused, then added, “Aren’t you going to ask me what I was doing for the last six months?”

“No,” snapped Meredith.

“I was tracking down as many Chirp users as I could find, including the trial patients. Do you remember Colette Bothe?” he asked in a tone that loomed with disaster. “Because she remembers someone who looked an awful lot like you.”

Colette’s dead eyes bore into Meredith’s skull from the inside. Patient 76A. “Everyone looks like me, Jamie. I’m generic.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“I’m biracial Asian, it happens!” she said, overzealously.

“Colette’s doing well,” Jamie commented. “Very well. Much better than anyone else I’ve spoken to who bought Chirp on the market. Far better than any Chirp customer who hasn’t spent time with an abrasive biracial Asian woman who couldn’t possibly be you—”

“Happiness is a high bar, Jamie,” snapped Meredith. “It takes longer than six months.”

To that, Jamie scoffed. “Please. You wouldn’t know happiness if it tapped you on the shoulder and asked you to dance.”

“You didn’t ask me to dance. You asked me to talk.” She could see him there briefly in his crimson prelaw association T-shirt, his hair in long, wild curls as he disrupted her Tuesday and nearly every Tuesday she’d lived through since.

From the corner of her eye, Meredith saw the edges of Jamie’s mouth flicker threateningly with a smile. “I wasn’t talking about me, Meredith.”

“Chirp works.” Meredith realized her knuckles were tight around the steering wheel and made a concerted effort to relax them. “It does exactly what I said it would do. It monitors brain chemistry. It delivers the appropriate SSRI subcutaneously in response to whatever your brain chemistry is doing. It takes the guesswork out of treating mental illness.” If she sounded robotic, that was just a natural byproduct of her voice.

“And what happens when a person wearing a product funded by Tyche walks into a store funded by Tyche?” asked Jamie, with a tone of innocence that did nothing to mask the journalistic expression on his face.

Meredith again became aware of the presence of eggshells. “Advanced third-party research shows that—”

“Oh come on, Meredith, don’t.” Jamie gave her a withering look. “You and I both know what really happens. When someone wearing Chirp walks into Demeter and the GPS location of their device shows them at the register, Chirp pushes serotonin regardless of their actual mood.”

Meredith said nothing.

“Chirp is nothing more than a glorified version of the bell Pavlov rang for his dogs. It’s not solving mental health. It’s just—” Jamie looked disgusted. “It’s just another tool of late-stage capitalism. It’s making people buy things . How long before other companies like Tyche do the same thing? How long before a market disruption becomes just another high-capital valuation with no actual contribution to wellness, or goodness, or anything of meaningful humanitarian change? How long before this thing you made renders every human being incapable of separating real, actual joy from retail therapy, until ‘happiness’ means nothing at all?”

Meredith’s mouth felt dry, her lips chapped. THIS APP , exclaimed their imaginary passenger, WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY! , only this time with the undertone of a threat. :)

“You sold your soul to Tyche,” Jamie concluded, this time sounding sad or angry or—no, just disappointed. “And you’re profiting off that choice. You’re profiting off the vulnerability and desperation of others despite the fact that you are a Wren .” Ah, and there it was, the repulsion was back. “Meredith,” Jamie gritted out, “you couldn’t die in poverty even if you never worked another day in your life, so what is the point of any of this?”

He was silent then, and Meredith realized he was waiting for an answer. She cleared her throat, considering her response.

“Well,” she eventually began. “These allegations are obviously—”

Instantly, Jamie groaned. “Seriously? Forget it.” He practically spat the words at her before letting his head fall back against the seat. He closed his eyes, shaking his head, like she was a bad dream he could wake from if he simply tried hard enough.

She drove in silence, wondering if she could get away with putting the audiobook back on.

Then, some minutes later, Jamie leaned over and hit play, filling the car once again with the soothing sound of performatively British narration.

Meredith shut it off.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were living in Venice?” she asked without looking at him. “You could have called. Or sent me a message.”

“Would you have answered?” asked Jamie in a tired voice.

“Yes.” She did look at him that time, though only briefly. “Yes, Jamie, I have always answered your calls. I will always answer them.” She turned to look at the road again. “I thought you understood that.”

He said nothing.

Then he shook his head.

“There’s an exit,” he said, pointing. “Can you stop?”

“Yes.” She flicked her turn signal.

“I can drive if you’re tired.”

“It’s fine, don’t worry about it. I’m okay.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of relaxing, actually. I don’t mind.”

“Okay.” He fidgeted, picking at his cuticles as she took the curved exit toward the nearest gas station. She pulled into a parking spot and cut the ignition, catching his eye by accident.

“Please,” said Jamie. “Just tell me you didn’t do it for the money.”

Deny it, said the gremlin who lived in Meredith’s brain. Use the word “allegedly” again. Make it conditional. Do not say something quotable. He is not your friend. He is not your lover. He is a journalist. He is a member of the faceless public. He will not hesitate to put you in jail.

But, a smaller voice said, if you lie to him, he won’t get back in this car.

And for probably sane and normal reasons, that was an unacceptable condition.

“I can’t honestly tell you that,” said Meredith. “I wish I could. But it’s…” She looked away, then back at him. “It’s not what I wanted.”

Her hands were still on the wheel. The moment felt heavy and unfinished.

“Can you believe that?” she asked him.

Jamie exhaled swiftly, like he’d just been given bad news. Like the tumor was malignant. Like the symptoms had already suggested the disease.

I probably don’t need to tell you that Jamie Ammar is very firmly not an asshole. He is, however, an idiot, and while there is definitely some truth to what Meredith is currently saying to him, we can’t actually point to it and name it honesty. And because Meredith is spectacularly absent self-reflection, we can only speculate as to whether she was telling Jamie the truth or just telling him the acceptable degree of truth she knew would still allow her to hold him in her web.

We haven’t discussed Meredith’s past with Jamie Ammar, but surely you’ve grasped some idea of it by now. It was powerful and lifelong, and Meredith, like a spider, consumes her mates. Whether by biological, survival-driven instinct or on purpose, just for fun, is really the question, though, isn’t it?

Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe there is no question, and Meredith is just a dick.

“Meredith,” Jamie said, “if I didn’t already believe the woman I loved still existed in there somewhere, I wouldn’t have gotten in the car.”

See? What did I tell you? An idiot. As if Meredith couldn’t be worth loving and a fucking liar at the same time. Even she knows he’s allowing her a small but significant sliver of falsity, a place to exist between guilt and innocence without necessarily confessing to one or the other or both. He is practically handing her the means to get away with it, to change his mind.

And Meredith is a lot of things, including a so-called genius. So she said nothing. She reached out and tapped Jamie’s knuckle with one unpolished but carefully manicured finger. In response, he gave her something of a grimace that was as good as a promise. They split up temporarily to empty their respective bladders and Meredith thought melancholically about the grammatical use of past tense.

Then she got back in the car and so did he. He put a bag of her favorite gummy candy in the cup holder, presumably as some sort of peace offering. She put the car in reverse, then drive.

“What if I tell you part of the story?” she said.

“Okay,” said Jamie with palpable relief, despite the fact that Meredith had rehearsed this line and everything to follow in the mirror of the gas station bathroom. Despite the fact that over the course of their technically very brief courtship, Meredith had lied to him as often as she had told the truth. Despite the fact that he knew this, and had loved her anyway—despite the fact that Meredith Wren had never technically learned that love was a tacit agreement not to grievously injure the other person—despite the many people Meredith Wren had already fucked over and left behind, because her tolerance for pain was high—despite the fact that just because she loved someone did not mean she couldn’t also stand to hurt them—

Despite all of this, Jamie Ammar, who had once been a very promising prelaw student at Harvard until Meredith Wren broke his heart—Jamie Ammar, a very talented investigative journalist who coincidentally did not have health insurance or a life partner or anything really beyond a ratty futon in storage and a set of lifestyle choices that didn’t really fit and whose job was currently being threatened by the use of content-deriving machines that spat out listicles and grammatically accurate drivel that was, to be fair, indistinguishable from what an overworked, underpaid human being could probably write—which happened to be developed by the very same father Meredith was going home to mourn —

Despite all this, Jamie simply said to her okay, I’m listening, go ahead.