Page 24 of Gifted & Talented
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Meredith Wren met Jamie Ammar during the early days of a crisp New England fall. It was doomed, probably, or so she told herself in retrospect. It was impossible not to fall in love in autumn, something about the colors, or the way death and rot were such powerful erotic motivators. The way the desperation to be outside was so sensual, an atavistic longing to be one with the earth, to commune with nature, to fuck and be fucked. She had been without Lou for nearly two years by then or she would have said something like that to her, and Lou would have said my god, you’re so goddamn pretentious, I love it. You don’t need to explain adolescent horniness to me like you’re Robert fucking Frost.
The details about the day were unsavory. Meredith typically forced herself to block out the circumstances, but for purposes of setting the scene, I’ll tell you what had happened: Meredith had done a search for Lou that day, discovering that Lou’s paper on experimental technomancy—authored by Lou as not only an undergraduate, but a mere sophomore —had recently been published. Meanwhile, Meredith had failed to impress a professor for the first time.
It was a class on rhetoric, a general education course in the philosophy department that Meredith considered a profligate waste of time, because Meredith was a biomancy prodigy. She had gone to Harvard because they had the biggest, most lavishly funded lab in the country. She was destined, as her father had been, to be named an industry genius, to earn a place in the magitech revolution, not to perform on command for the whims of general education . (Similarly, although Arthur technically had the greater proficiency for magic, Meredith was more devoted. Meredith focused harder. Meredith cared more.)
But then her philosophy professor told her point-blank that she wasn’t talented. The word he used was, literally, “talentless.”
As in, “For someone so essentially talentless you have an extremely unproductive attitude,” then bestowed upon teenage Meredith verbatim.
As in, “You act as if everything we do in this class is beneath you, Miss Wren, but nothing is beneath you. You are below everything. You are a worm, do you understand this? I don’t mean you exclusively, everyone your age is a worm—you are meant to be learning things, not deciding at first glance what does or does not matter.”
As in, “Okay, so you are very promising at something this university considers valuable, that’s wonderful. So you will go on to make this university lots of money, how wonderful for you. But I am trying to teach you how to matter, which you will never do so long as you continue to believe that you alone are the source of value, that you exist in any heightened significance; that intrinsically you are worth in some way more than anything else that lives on this earth.”
As in, “Either you will learn that lesson from me, Miss Wren, or I will give you the grade you deserve for failing to learn it, and perhaps you will hate me and nothing will change, which is fine by me. Because I already know that you do not matter, and I will forget you the moment you exit this room.”
Jamie was an English major with prelaw aspirations, and taking the class as a junior because he was just a few credits shy of a secondary concentration in philosophy. He was in the room when the professor said all of that to Meredith. It was obvious that Meredith was supposed to respond haughtily, or that the professor had assumed she would, or maybe the professor had only said it because it was a rhetoric class and Meredith was meant to respond, to argue. Instead, Meredith had blinked and then nodded, and then she caught Jamie’s eye just before she walked out of the classroom. As far as Jamie could tell, she’d had no reaction to what was an unquestionably vicious undressing of her entire existence and self. And then Meredith came back on Monday, seemingly unchanged.
Jamie saw Meredith at a party a few weeks later, holding a red cup in one hand and frowning distractedly as a boy rambled drunkenly in her ear. Jamie had a girlfriend at the time, although things were not going especially well between them because he was finding that his girlfriend enjoyed life in a way that seemed somehow insane. Like, she just sort of went about her day, and when good things happened to her she celebrated them and when bad things happened to her she was bummed but then she moved on. Jamie wanted more conflict in his life, presumably, or what else would have led him to Meredith Wren?
“Hi,” he said, walking right up to her. The boy who had been talking to Meredith gave Jamie a possessive look, which Jamie ignored. Jamie was focused on Meredith, who glanced at him with that same furrowed frown, as if he were no different to her than the other boy currently next to her, which was fair. “I’m in your philosophy class,” Jamie explained.
“Oh,” said Meredith.
“I don’t think it’s true,” Jamie added. “The thing that Professor [purposefully redacted from Meredith’s memory] said to you. I think he’s incredibly mean-spirited and probably a little misogynistic.”
Meredith took a sip from her cup and tilted her head at him. She glanced at the boy next to her, then back at Jamie. “Are you single?” she asked Jamie.
“Oh. Um, no,” said Jamie.
“Oh. Okay.” Meredith set her cup down on the bar behind her and left the room. The boy looked at Jamie with something like murder in his eyes, and would later report this incident to his friends as an unsportsmanlike cock block.
Jamie, however, followed Meredith out of the room in service to something that was most closely considered impulse. “Hey, wait—”
“Are you single now?” asked Meredith without turning to look at him.
“You mean between five seconds ago and now?”
“Yes.” She had her arms folded over her chest as she walked and Jamie wanted to give her a jacket, but he wasn’t wearing one. This was momentarily very upsetting to him.
“No,” said Jamie, “I’m still in a relationship.”
“Then stop following me,” Meredith advised.
“I’m not following you,” said Jamie, who then stopped, because he realized that yes, he was absolutely following her. “I mean, okay, sorry. I just wanted to talk to you, that’s all.”
“I can see that,” said Meredith. She walked a few steps, then stopped, turning to face Jamie. They were a few feet apart on the sidewalk, such that a very tall person or a small crime scene could lie between them. “But I don’t really want to talk to you if I can’t have sex with you.”
Jamie was very taken aback by this, probably because the era of sex positivity had not yet dawned. This sort of attitude would later be branded something-something manic pixie when really, as Lou would have pointed out to Meredith, it was merely horny, which was natural, literally. It was fundamentally tied in with nature, and it is very important that you understand that for this moment alone, Meredith is not to be blamed. Parenthetically, everything else is fair game.
“What would happen if I were single?” Jamie said.
“What if, indeed?” said Meredith whimsically, although because it was Meredith, it did not read as whimsy. Then she turned and kept walking.
“Wait,” Jamie called after her. Poor, poor idiot Jamie. “Can I walk you home?”
“No,” said Meredith without turning around.
Eventually she disappeared from sight, and Jamie broke up with his girlfriend, and another week or so went by. They all went home for Thanksgiving and then they came back, and Jamie stopped Meredith outside of their philosophy class.
“Do you want to study for the final together?” he asked.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m not very good at this class,” said Meredith with another of her slight frowns, which was actually just her face. “If you study with me, you’re probably not going to get anything out of it.”
“But I would, though,” said Jamie. “Because you’ll be there, which is kind of my only goal.”
“I like that we’re developing a real rapport,” said Meredith. “But I do actually need to study, and unless you’re single now—”
“I am,” said Jamie, a little breathless. “I mean—not that I’m, like, suggesting anything—”
“I’d actually prefer it if you’d suggest something, and quickly, because I really need to study for this class,” said Meredith, who had been reading about Lou again. Lou had won some kind of award. Lou was very good at college. Lou, as Meredith had always known, wasn’t talentless, not that it matters to the story.
“I do actually think that most of the things I think about are more valuable than this exam,” Meredith qualified, “and I don’t really like to waste my time, but I still don’t want to fail.”
Of course, there wasn’t really a way to avoid failing, because by definition, not caring about the class was defeating the class’s entire purpose. Jamie told Meredith this, and she considered it, and by then things had emptied because most people had gone to their next class or to lunch or wherever they were going, but Meredith stood there contemplating what Jamie had said, and also the possibility that a department-mandated curve meant that someone was going to fail, and dear god, it might be Meredith, who couldn’t actually care about this no matter how hard she studied.
Which was ironically the inverse of a problem Meredith would later have, although right now, what’s important is what Meredith said to Jamie, which was, “I do really want to have sex with you, although I don’t think it should be especially drawn out given the time constraints.”
Jamie felt destabilized by every single word out of Meredith’s mouth. He felt the beginnings of an obsession, the little prescient stirring in his gut that everything in his life was about to revolve around Meredith. He was about to see her constantly in every crowd, he was about to memorize the divot between her brows, he was about to create an invisible, personal mood ring that would only change color depending on what Meredith did, said, or thought. He did not, however, realize that the feeling would follow him well into adulthood, so that later on, when Meredith lied to his fucking face and he knew it, because he had already learned so long ago how to read her, because he had once considered the mere act of knowing her to be a reward in and of itself, he would suffer the simultaneous thrill of hatred that married with the violence of loving her passionately, without respite.
She was so fucking unlikable, that was the thing! She was so fucked up it was addictive, because he could never make it stop, this wanting to understand her that was already impossible. It was exactly the perfect inverse paradox of failing a class because you couldn’t care about it. He loved her because he knew he could never actually know her, and for fuck’s sake it was paralyzing, breathtaking. What calmer love could ever compare?
So they went to Meredith’s room in Adams House and had sex, and then because it hadn’t taken too long, they had sex again, and then Meredith studied and Jamie studied next to her because he didn’t want to leave, and then Meredith had to eat and so Jamie went with her to the dining hall, and then Meredith had to sleep so Jamie slept beside her, and then Jamie had to go home and take a shower but then Meredith called him so Jamie came back, and days just kind of kept going like that for a long, pleasant buzz of time, and then Meredith went home for Christmas break and when she came back Jamie realized it had been like he’d held his breath for four weeks. Like time had stopped and then she was back, and everything was alive again.
And then Meredith went away again, and time stopped again for Jamie Ammar. Though he hadn’t necessarily noticed until he saw her on the Tyche stage, because it was easy to become accustomed to suffocation when it happened glacially over time. After twelve years, you can almost forget what kind of madness lives in your chest until it shows up again to destroy you.