Page 30 of Gifted & Talented

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Meredith awoke in a cold sweat, the dream still thundering through her head. It was the usual one, the first day of school and she hadn’t registered for classes, except the school was actually Tyche’s campus and her feet wouldn’t move, they were stuck in place, the halls labyrinthine and unrecognizable. All she had to do was get to the registration office, to tell them what courses she wanted, she’d take anything at this point, whatever they had to give. But instead of a registrar it was Kip Hughes and Merritt Foster and Lou, and they were all saying they needed Meredith’s data right away, right now, it was late and if she didn’t give it to them she was going to be eaten. Unclear if it was jackals or a cannibalistic ritual. She simply understood that the situation was dire, and yet her fucking feet wouldn’t move.

“The industry, it’s very ‘fake it till you make it,’” Cass had said to someone at the cocktail party (as it had inevitably become) last night, someone who had golfed with her father or built model cars with him, who could say. Meredith had been tiptoeing around in the kitchen at the time, trying to get more alcohol without anyone seeing her, wearing their not-so-covert expectation that she fall to her knees and weep. “The whole deal with venture capitalism is that it’s a race to prove that the thing you make is both necessary and worth a lot of money, which isn’t always true. In reality, sometimes things underperform for a while. But it doesn’t mean everything is shit, necessarily.”

“So you think Tyche will survive the risk?” said the old golf dude, who was apparently an old industry dude.

“Oh, Tyche will be fine,” Cass replied. “There’s always a margin for failure built into any product gamble. Not that I’d count Meredith out quite yet.”

Meredith looked over at Cass now, his peacefully sleeping face. The traitor. Sure, he’d been upbeat enough, but he wondered, too. He wondered if she would fail. Every day it was I believe in you Mer, everything will be fine Mer, you’ll figure it out. But what he really meant was Mer, if you fail, it makes no difference to anybody. We all cleverly planned for the likelihood that you were never actually going to succeed.

Glass cliff.

Meredith picked up her phone, glancing at the screen. It had an address in the East Bay, where Lou now lived, unless this was outdated. It was someplace to start, at least.

Meredith hadn’t had to look too hard for Lou, because this wasn’t her first rodeo when it came to checking up on her former best friend. Meredith already knew Lou had graduated from public high school the year Meredith had graduated from Ainsworth. She remembered Lou posting her yearbook quote, a line from The Count of Monte Cristo, on a now-defunct account, something that Meredith had, at seventeen, been quietly, desperately sure that Lou had only posted for Meredith’s benefit—a message to her, sentimental for its pettiness. Because who else but Meredith would have known what it meant?

From there, the personal updates got fewer, farther between. Lou graduated from UC Berkeley the same year Meredith was supposed to have graduated from Harvard. Lou didn’t have a professional page of any kind—she was too successful for that, and likely didn’t need the many start-up vultures hunting for her private line given that she’d been valued in the hundred millions by the age of twenty-five—but she was still listed on the website of Cal’s technomancy school for the many influential papers she’d published throughout her schooling.

Lou was probably working somewhere else in the magitech economy now, maybe just didn’t care for social media. She didn’t have any personal accounts and Meredith couldn’t find any record of her after she’d sold her first start-up to Tyche (at least two years before Meredith would later do the same, making Meredith’s fingers itch), but maybe she’d gotten married. Maybe her name had changed. Meredith tapped on the Berkeley page again, lingering on the first academic paper that had borne Lou’s name—or, well, technically the name that everyone else had used for Lou. Maria de León.

All the time between them seemed scattered grittily across the floor, like it had spilled out from an hourglass. Meredith looked at the address again, and the phone number.

Then she tapped Jamie’s name in her messages.

“Look, I already know the story about your mom,” Jamie had said to Meredith in the car two days ago, “and I know you already had the idea for Chirp when I met you. You told me about your friend from high school and the things she taught you to do. Which means I already know everything, basically, except for one thing I can’t figure out. Why’d you do it?”

By “it,” he meant turn her subcutaneous magitech-powered mood stabilizer into the profit-deriving go-button of a brainwashed corporate shill.

“As both a theoretical exercise and a refreshing change of pace from you asking me the same question in different formats,” Meredith had replied, “why don’t you tell me why you think I did it? Since you’re probably the only investigative journalist who doesn’t find it plausible that I did it for the sake of pure, unadulterated greed.”

“You’d think you’d be a little more grateful to me for that,” commented Jamie.

“Well, it’s not my fault if you look for zebras,” said Meredith.

“You mean because I hear hoofbeats?” He looked skeptical. “You really think there was any possibility it was a horse?”

“I think any reasonable person would assume it’s a horse.” The horse being the usual reasons anyone did anything.

“So you’re saying that’s it, you did it for the money?”

Meredith then gave him as long a look as she could manage without driving them off the highway, which she hoped conveyed the extent of her irritation.

“Fine.” Jamie was quiet then, considering it. “I think,” he said slowly, “you did it because you’re ambitious. You’re, you know, hungry. The hungriest person I’ve ever known.” He stopped. “I do think a lot of it was for your mom,” he admitted. “That was my first thought, that you never really got over losing her, and you wanted to fix her even though you couldn’t. This was the closest thing. But the scale of it, the betrayal, the fact that you chose these particular corporate overlords…” He trailed off. “That part doesn’t sound like you.”

Meredith thought about the sweat of it. The heart-crush of it. The way she’d stood in a room full of people she’d hired at twenty-four years old and promised them they could trust her as if she wasn’t just an idiot teenage girl playing dress-up in a fancy suit. All those mothers and fathers with children to feed. The people who needed this job to pay their rent, to keep a roof over their heads. The people who expected her to be a genius because everyone she’d ever met had told her she was a genius even though she was pretty sure she was just an idiot teenage girl. She read eight different books about impostor syndrome. You go, girlboss! You are smart and capable! But surely not everyone who read the books was actually smart and capable. The book was only printed with the assumption that a bunch of stupid, incapable people would buy it. If only the worthy read those words, then publishing as an industry would collapse. Maybe impostor syndrome was real, but not for her, an actual impostor.

“Everyone takes the money,” said Meredith, realizing she was parroting her father’s words back to Jamie. “Couldn’t this whole thing have been a natural consequence of an industry built on pretense? Everyone who takes the money has to show success that doesn’t exist yet—that isn’t technically possible until it is. I’m not the only one who doesn’t want to fail.”

Jamie didn’t say anything.

“Why didn’t you tell me you called off your wedding?” blurted Meredith.

“What would you have done about it?” said Jamie.

Meredith didn’t say anything.

“Yeah,” said Jamie darkly. “That’s what I thought.”

Meredith shook herself of the memory from the car, typing out a message.

U up?

Very funny , said Jamie.

That’s not a no

I’m proofreading the article to send to my editor. Could be free later

After you destroy me, you mean?

Yeah, after that.

Meredith picked at her cuticle and blinked, then blinked again, struggling to clear her vision. The stye was still going strong. She looked over at Cass, then back at her screen.

Do you think we should just have sex and get it out of our systems?

No , said Jamie, but I could do coffee again if you want. Or a drink?

Assuming she found Lou today, she was definitely going to need one.

Okay , said Meredith. See you later for a drink.