Page 41 of Gifted & Talented

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You already know that at that particular moment, Jamie and Meredith were meeting for a drink.

“What would stop you from publishing that article?” she asked him. She was fiddling with her glass, trying not to look at Jamie. Blood in the water. She knew he’d smell it, but she didn’t have to look him in the eye while she drowned. Or whatever.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Seriously, nothing?”

“Seriously, nothing.” She flicked a glance at him to watch him take a long sip of his drink. “I mean, I’d love to make you more sympathetic. Anytime you want to tell the truth, just let me know.”

“The truth?” echoed Meredith.

Jamie nodded once, stoically. “The truth.”

She looked at the liquid in her glass and tried to imagine being someone different. What would a real genius do—one that was not a fraud?

Not this. “It scared me,” she confessed. “When I was with you. The person I was willing to be for you. I didn’t like what it said about me.”

“What did it say about you?” Jamie asked gamely.

She didn’t answer. “I was nineteen and barely treading water in everything but biomancy. I was supposed to be brilliant.” She slid a carefully manicured nail down the sheen of condensation on her glass. “I couldn’t make myself not care.”

“Nobody asked you not to care.”

“I hated it,” she admitted. “Failing.”

“Were you failing?”

“I was to me.” And to my father, she didn’t say.

Jamie shrugged. “Everybody hates failing.”

“But I wasn’t supposed to fail. I was a prodigy.” She paused. “You were distracting me.”

“Was I?”

No, he wasn’t. Only in the sense that he existed, and she always wanted him more than she wanted to jump through hoops for Introductory Bullshit 101. She couldn’t fight the sense that her time was being wasted, that her likelihood of singularity was receding—all of which was her fault, not his. She just wasn’t good at it, not as good as she should have been. Everything was so much harder than she’d expected. And it hurt, perfection hovering eternally out of reach.

Only Jamie had been easy. Only Jamie had felt right.

So she said, “I loved you too much. I was afraid to miss a single moment of you. I picked you over everything, over and over again, and it was stupid. I got a C on a midterm because I wanted to spend the night with you instead of studying. I thought about you,” Meredith said through partially chattering teeth, “incessantly. The human brain isn’t made for that kind of puppy love, it can’t adequately perform.”

“Puppy love,” Jamie echoed hollowly.

“Yes, puppy love, because if I’d been a grown-up, I would have done things differently. I’m not an idiot, Jamie. I know the choice I made back then was immature and it was childish. I dropped out because I didn’t like that things didn’t come easily, naturally, like they were supposed to. I left you because I knew eventually you’d leave me, and I just couldn’t take the stain of it, I’d already failed so many things.” She took a long pull from her glass of wine. “I thought if I cut you off first, then I could suck the poison out.”

“That’s what you thought I was? Poison?” For the first time, Jamie sounded wounded.

“No, Jamie, but I’m a fucking liar and I lied to myself. And then—” Meredith felt her voice shake. “And then we got older and I was right, it was self-fulfilling, because whenever we fell back into it, you didn’t stay. Whenever I woke up in the mornings you were gone. And I said okay, he doesn’t love me, I knew he would have a life without me and I can’t have one without him and that’s embarrassing, it’s so stupid and fucked up and I’m supposed to be—”

“A genius,” Jamie said in a wry tone of insouciance.

“Someone,” Meredith clarified. “Something. There were all these metrics for it, these things I had to do before I ran out of time—”

“Who said you were running out of time?”

“It’s the thirty under thirty, ” Meredith scoffed into her glass. “You think it’s my fault I couldn’t envision life on the other side?”

“So you’re blaming society?” Jamie sounded patronizing, unconvinced.

“No. I’m telling you I’m sorry,” she said, watching him pause with his glass partway to his lips. “I’m telling you I’m older now, I’m different. I’m telling you that if you ask me to run away with you now, I’ll do it. If you ask me to marry you, settle down, disappear into obscurity, shop for groceries with all the other moms in yoga pants and graphic tees, I’ll do it for you.” Would it really be so bad, eternal boredom, if success only meant underattended tech talks, colleagues who didn’t trust her, investors who threw her to the wolves? Success was a myth, a sharp cliff—couldn’t she at least be unsatisfied in a way that felt less hollow, more like a life?

THIS MAN WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY IF YOU JUST, LIKE, CHANGE! unfurled like a scroll in Meredith’s mind.

“If I could do it all over, I would choose you, Jamie.” Meredith exhaled, closing her eyes. “If someone gave me another chance, I’d choose you instead.”

She heard Jamie set his glass down on the bar and let her eyes flutter open, waiting. Jamie was quiet for another few minutes, long enough that Meredith finished her drink.

“Nice try,” he said eventually, “but that’s not the truth I was asking for.”

She breathed out a sharp laugh, like someone had punched her.

“Damn,” she said. “I really thought that might work.”