Page 27 of Gifted & Talented

23

By six thirty that evening, Eilidh had done what she customarily did at social functions and disappeared. She sat alone in the chair behind the desk in her father’s home office, ignoring the muffled sound of partygoing mourners outside the door while staring up at the painting on the wall. It was a Degas, one of the paintings of the ballerinas, which Thayer had purchased at great expense in honor of Eilidh, assuming she would love it. She didn’t, and not because it made her nostalgic, or even sad.

Actually, it was one of the rare things in her life that made her feel better about having lost ballet. She had never told her father how sinister that series of paintings felt to her, how insidious they seemed, the way there was a male presence lurking in them, the idle sense of depravity to the girls being placed on display. How young they were, the dancers—how girlish . Pretty things in pretty clothes. Ballet was both delicacy and contortion. Like girlhood, ballet was art meant for consumption; it was virtuous because it was beautiful pain.

Eilidh learned later that her instincts were right—that at the time Degas painted, ballet was actual entrapment in its way, with the girls plucked off the street too young to say no, usually forced to engage in sex work for their patrons. Ballet had always been a little bit cruel, the way that at the highest levels it deformed you, hurt you, broke you. Eilidh had thought that was something she and her father had in common. The brokenness, which made Eilidh harder to love, actually, than Meredith.

Eilidh thought of her affairs, her liaisons with other dancers; the way that they, too, were just bodies to her. Means to an end. Which was not to say it hadn’t been consensual, but Eilidh only knew how to live for an audience. What she did with her lovers was never sacred because there was always the implication of a performance. Her intimacy was a lie that lived in the lurking presence of some higher desire—at the time it was ambition, her craving to shine on the stage. It was a hunger that Eilidh still felt, but no longer knew how to satisfy.

The thing in her chest snapped with an unquenched thirst for vengeance, like biting the inside of its cheek and flooding the Nile red.

“Oh. You’re already in here.”

Eilidh glanced up sharply to find Meredith standing in the doorway of Thayer’s office, looking annoyed. Meredith hesitated, then shrugged and closed the door behind her. “Fine.”

It was Meredith’s usual treatment of her, as if Eilidh were something she wished would disappear, an inconvenience or a blemish. Something that would, eventually, go away if she simply outlasted, which Meredith usually did. But Eilidh didn’t currently feel like giving in.

“I don’t like them either,” Eilidh pointed out, gesturing to the people outside. “Are you drunk?” she asked in matronly disbelief, noting Meredith’s quick stumble over the corner of the office rug. To Meredith’s answering middle finger, Eilidh sighed, shaking her head. “Dad would hate this,” she muttered, now sounding all of six years old.

“Disagree,” Meredith countered, toasting her with a bubbling glass. “Or rather, irrelevant. He’s gone.”

Eilidh said nothing.

“I think he’d find it funny. Champagne for his real friends,” said Meredith in an ironic toast, draining the glass and then moving as if to drop it on the floor.

Eilidh leapt up from her chair. “Don’t—!”

“You’re so easy.” Meredith gave Eilidh a look of actual loathing, something worse than her usual lukewarm irritability. “Such a fucking daddy’s girl.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, is my inconvenient grief obstructing your natural talent for spitefulness?” snapped Eilidh, the thing in her chest rearing up with an apoplectic glee. “There are a million other rooms in this house. Go destroy his things in those.”

The door opened and they both stopped talking. The thing in Eilidh’s chest slithered up in her throat, ready to fling itself out like a toad. Then Arthur slipped inside, so Meredith again gave Eilidh the finger.

“Oh good, something exciting in here,” said Arthur, falling into the chair opposite the desk and propping his feet on top of it. “All’s well, Sister Spiteful?”

“Stop it.” Eilidh nudged his foot away.

“Yes, Brother Negligent,” mocked Meredith, “be very careful with Daddy’s nice things.”

“Shut up. Just shut up.” Eilidh felt she was being unexpectedly commanding, which she must have been, because Meredith feigned indifference and shrugged, turning toward the floor-to-ceiling windows. “Again, I can’t believe I have to say this,” Eilidh snapped, addressing both her siblings, “but it’s not unreasonable for me to feel sad that Dad’s gone. Not that that has anything to do with me not wanting you to wreck his things for no reason.”

“You never know, they could be my things,” said Arthur with a tipsy twinkle in his eye, as Meredith whirled around with a scoff.

“More likely he left all his stuff to some obscure charity,” said Meredith, with a tone of unspeakable annoyance. “Or to Eilidh, which is basically the same thing.”

“We already did this,” said Eilidh, fuming a little. The demonic thing inside her chest began to chirp like a baby bird, begging for the opportunity to spread its wings, to swallow up her anger and then use it to douse the room in flames. “And believe it or not, I don’t really care if you’re mad that he was closer to me. I don’t think it would be very surprising if I got everything, given that you never gave a shit about him.”

“Everything,” Meredith echoed with a sudden darkness. Eilidh felt it, the sudden dampening she’d always known and quietly dreaded. Meredith’s natural state was a simmering impatience, but her real rage was cool, cavernous, and black.

“Hey, hey.” Arthur was on his feet, stepping between them. “Dad had his moments, but he wasn’t actually unfair. You’re getting worked up over nothing.”

“Dad was absolutely unfair,” snapped Meredith. “And he was petty, too.”

“Which must be where you got it from,” muttered Eilidh.

“And,” Meredith added, ignoring her, “let us not forget that he changed his will, apparently so drastically that two lawyers can’t even agree on which one stands.” She turned to Eilidh again. “And if anyone would have any idea why that is, it’s you. But apparently you don’t see fit to share with us your privileged little secrets.”

Meredith was fucking impossible. “Unlike you, ” Eilidh seethed, “I didn’t think of my father as a source of inheritance. I loved him because he was a person, because he was my father, and because he was the only one there for me when my entire life ended in a single day —”

“Oh, grow up,” snapped Meredith. “You got hurt, Eilidh, your life didn’t end. You can move on anytime you like, you know, and try actually doing something with yourself. God,” she snarled, “you’ve always been such a martyr.”

Eilidh had always known that Meredith lacked the emotional competency for sympathy, but hearing herself painted as a failure was like a slap to the face; like learning that the worst thing that could happen to you was real; that all the cautionary tales were actually true. “I’m sorry, did you train for your entire life to do one thing, only to get the thing you love most ripped away from you?”

But Meredith was eternally uncompassionate, unfailingly so. “You’re still one of the richest women in the world, Eilidh, for fuck’s sake, you can still do literally anything you want —”

“Okay, so by that logic, what do you need Wrenfare for?” demanded Eilidh, stung by the reminder of her privilege, her wealth, all of which she’d give away in an instant just to dance again—the money that was also, by the way, something Meredith would have easily inherited if she’d just stayed at Harvard like Thayer asked, instead of throwing it all away to create something nobody needed so that a tech company financed by their father’s number one personal nemesis would give her the funds to fuel a petty grudge. Just so some heartless industry would take her seriously, because Meredith, a productive member of society, could be given vast, universe-altering sums of money to do frivolous, meaningless work that would feed, cure, and house absolutely fucking no one . “ You’re the one who never lets us forget you’ve already got ten billion dollars—”

Meredith threw her hands in the air. “I don’t have ten billion dollars. I have a company valued at ten billion dollars, none of which I actually have—”

“Why?” asked Eilidh. “Because your product doesn’t work?”

The room got cold again, but this time it didn’t scare her. This time, Eilidh wanted her sister to look her in the eye and say, explicitly, that Chirp could not make anyone happy. That Meredith could not make anyone happy, including and most importantly herself. That Meredith was a miserable, miserly person for whom all the money in the world would not recreate her mother’s love or her father’s affection, and that yes, maybe Eilidh was still suffering from something in her body that had gone wrong, but at least she had something that Meredith would never have, which was the knowledge that for at least one person on this earth, she was enough.

And even that wasn’t happiness! Because nothing could invent happiness that didn’t exist intrinsically, in a way that was deserved. Especially not Meredith Wren.

“Death,” warned Arthur thinly.

“Not now,” snapped Meredith, her eyes still locked on Eilidh’s. It was unclear to Eilidh what would happen next, only that whatever it was, she would return it, blow for blow. If her sister actually hated her, if those words would be painful to hear, so be it. The thing in her chest was awake—no, not just awake—acute, alive, thriving. The worst thing Eilidh had ever thought about herself was already true. Nothing Meredith could say to her would cheapen her own carefully cultivated self-loathing. Nobody could hate Eilidh Wren like Eilidh Wren.

“Death,” said Arthur again.

Irritation sparked in Meredith’s eyes, temporarily disrupting her stare-off with Eilidh.

“Arthur, I swear to god, if you don’t stay out of this—”

Then there was a thud, and Eilidh and Meredith both turned to find Arthur lying motionless on the floor.