Page 60 of Gifted & Talented

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When it was over—when Meredith came loudly, as Meredith always did, and Jamie finished with a little more dignity, a jaw-clenching groan—they both became aware beneath apocalyptic skies that there was no future there, which technically they had both already known.

But Jamie had meant what he said, that he was going to marry her, even though he would hate her a little bit, and more importantly, hate himself. Because the hating her would pass—assuming she did not go the libel route and destroy his career, a merciless, narcissistic form of sabotage that never seemed entirely out of the question with Meredith—but the hating himself would stay forever. Meredith Wren! When Jamie had first found out who she was, back when they were both students and she’d become more than just the girl in his rhetoric course—when he realized that Wren was that Wren, unlike when he’d played hockey with a kid named Kennedy who wasn’t that Kennedy—he started to think things like Maybe there are some ethical billionaires? which was counterproductive and absurd. Meredith had started to humanize capitalism for him and it was disgusting, it was the worst.

Jamie hadn’t come from money. His parents had scrimped and saved and starved so he could get the best education in the world, and he had every intention of nobility—pay off his loans, then pay off their mortgage, pad their retirement fund, things for which he would need a starting salary of six figures right off the bat, which was why law school had seemed the natural route, the most patently obvious. Even summer associates made enough to pay off significant portions of their loans! And to think, with every luxury that his parents had forgone, every vacation they hadn’t taken, every moment they’d spent choosing Jamie’s future over their own, here was Meredith, who could wipe out their debt with a swipe of her finger, erase it like it had never existed at all. And for what? So her father was widely considered a genius; so what? Jamie’s mother had managed to feed her family for about sixty dollars a week, how was she not a genius? How was Jamie’s father not a genius for making his way here, for starting over completely? If you’d forced Thayer Wren to give up his livelihood, his life, to start over from scratch in another country, would he still have founded Wrenfare? Could Jamie’s father have been the one to found Wrenfare had he been given Thayer’s partners, Thayer’s same resources in life? Was that fate’s cruelty, its randomness, assigning fortune and comfort to Meredith Wren, who was so fucking miserable she sometimes cried in her sleep, who believed more sincerely in the ambiguous possibility of magic than in her own innate worth as a human, while Jamie had to go to his happy childhood home and be unable to bear it gracefully, to see the shabbiness of his life through new eyes, having now experienced the finery of Meredith’s idea of a Christmas gift between casual lovers: cashmere sweatpants?

“Does she make you happy?” Jamie’s mother had asked, her one question as to whether Meredith was right for her only son. The only thing she had ever cared about: Jamie’s happiness. Such that when Jamie couldn’t do it, couldn’t stomach the thought of law school, of kowtowing to white men in suits who asked if he spoke English or said “But where are you from originally ” when he told them he was from Boston, the thought of representing some corporation like Wrenfare, of defending its right to whatever-the-fuck because they had the money to hire some kid who wanted to get paid right away, for reasons that were maybe unselfish but still, in the end, pretty bad. And his mother just said I want you to be happy. I just want you to be happy.

“No,” was nearly Jamie’s answer, “no, she doesn’t make me happy, when I’m with her I don’t even know what happiness is or what it means, it seems too small and unimaginative an idea, I’m not sure happiness was ever even real, I mean what is that? I was happy before her, now I’m something else, something sickly and weak and yet massive and esoteric, I am confounding and arcane, I am consumed by something ancient and universal and yet no one has ever felt the way I feel, I’m sick with it, I’m sick to death with it, I want to hold her forever, I want to crawl inside her heart and wear her skin!”

Obviously he went with a simple yes and that was that. And then Meredith left, and Jamie felt happiness again, even if she had changed him, rewritten him from the top down so that he couldn’t do anything meaninglessly anymore, he couldn’t do anything anymore but write and ask questions and write. She disappeared, she came back without warning, he was sick all over again. She was gone, or he left, either way he was obsessed with her story. He knew something secret about her, something intimate, which was that she got foot cramps right after she came. He also knew that she believed she was a witch. He had humored her belief, thinking it eccentric and charming, until she had showed him.

“I’m serious,” she said, “pick a person and I’ll prove it.”

“What kind of person?”

“I don’t know, someone you want to change.” She had to be able to get physically close to them, she explained. She had to be able to make eye contact directly.

Jamie’s freshman roommate was the worst person Jamie had ever met. They’d parted ways and never spoken again, though he still thought of it, the way that guy had brought back girls who seemed suspiciously docile, the way he called Jamie a terrorist and laughed. Old New Jersey money, some future stockbroker son of a bitch. “Okay, great,” said Meredith, and the next time there was a party, a big one, Meredith sweet-talked the guy into an empty, shabby room in the den of iniquity and pulled Jamie in after her with a laugh.

“Watch,” she said.

He watched. He watched her . He watched her look of concentration, the sweat on her brow. The way her fingers developed a tremor, a serious tremor, to the point where Jamie nearly interrupted to say she was obviously dehydrated, she needed to stop. Her eyes were unfocused, they were dark with purpose, with a little hint of madness that made Jamie feel he was witnessing something unholy, occult. He only remembered to look at the guy, his old roommate, after Meredith stepped back and swayed, nearly fainted, a thin wisp of a smile on her face.

“There,” she said, “fixed it,” and fell into Jamie’s arms.

When she came to, the guy was gone, Jamie was calling 911. Meredith grabbed the phone from him and said she was fine, hung it up. “Well?” she demanded. “Did you check to see if it worked?”

“Meredith, I thought you were dying —”

“Oh my god, Jamie!” She looked at him with such a flame of hatred that he knew, somewhere deep in his gut he knew, that this was a really bad love, the kind that bites. The kind that would bite him, specifically.

“Why would you do that to yourself?” he felt himself ask her. “Why would you go through that, for what?”

She was embarrassed, he could tell. She was mortified, like she’d shown him an ugly scar and he’d replied that she, as a whole, was ugly. He knew, he could see it on her face, but he didn’t yet know it the way he would eventually know. He’d humiliated her, he’d broken her heart, he’d said no to a part of her that she had only shared with him because she trusted him more than any other person on earth. Poor little rich girl! Except he really did feel pain for her, he honestly fucking ached.

The guy, Jamie’s old roommate, he did a total one-eighty, dropped out of school to go on medical missions in various countries south of the equator. He posted on social media about his numerous hunger strikes; he used his family’s money to fund class action suits over negligence-related deaths and racially driven wrongful termination cases until his father cut him off; eventually he died in poverty, about a year ago, from a severe case of malaria. His social media linked to a variety of socially conscious websites—he rarely appeared in any of the photos, and his last post was “what a beautiful life! I am rich in all the ways that matter” followed by the hashtag #happiness .

And, obviously, #blessed .

So to say Jamie had become obsessed with Chirp was an understatement. He preordered it, wore his the moment it arrived. After weeks and weeks he found that all it did was make him think of her, which was the opposite of happiness, though it fanned an old compulsion, some idiotic need to be part of Meredith’s life. This time he was angry, ultimately she had killed a man; it didn’t matter what sort of platitudes that guy had claimed to his imagined global audience, happiness and self-sacrifice weren’t the same. Happiness! Please! Meredith couldn’t make that shit! She sold her soul when she signed with Tyche, and thank god she did, because Jamie could hate her for that. He couldn’t hate her for anything else, but that was disgusting, it was the epitome of privilege, it proved to him that her goal was never philanthropic. It made her less the girl whose lashes swept across her cheek as she slept and more the thing he wanted her to be, the willing conflagration of callousness and greed. Meredith Wren, finally the paragon of class solidarity that Jamie’s ethical conscience had always needed her to be.

He’d known it from the start, that he was going to expose her, he was going to ruin her, and yes, he would carry that guilt around forever—he’d shove it in the box marked MEREDITH along with the vestiges of pain and love—but who was to say that wasn’t exactly what either of them deserved?

He could only love her complicatedly, maybe even only from a distance. Up close she made him stupid, she overrode his natural functions. He looked at her and saw stars, he saw forever, he saw a lonely girl with more money in her life than love. She was the last person to know what happy looked like, what happy felt like, how incredibly underwhelming happiness actually was to claim. Happiness! Mosquitoes were probably happy, the bloodsuckers. Short and blissful, filled with retribution. How was that for the fulfillment of life.

Meredith’s foot cramped then and Jamie reached for it, massaged it, kissed the arch of it. The darkness was thick, teeming with bugs and bloom. It was all so simple, so pathetic. Don’t marry him, marry me. Be a better person. Want to be better, all on your own—want to right it all, for me. Face it, he thought, but also, how could he ask her that when it meant that he would lose her? Fix it, he thought, keep lying until you’ve gotten away with everything you’ve done, but if she did that, would he still respect her? Could he still look her in the eye and know he’d made a liar of her, even if they both already knew what she was?

Why couldn’t he just love someone middle-class and sane? Why couldn’t he want something smaller than justice? Why couldn’t he buy pre-sliced mango at Demeter without it eating up his checking account—why was it so undignifying to slice the damn mango himself? Why couldn’t he just accept that it was nice to feel better, to feel a moment of [redacted because it isn’t real] from giving himself a little treat, which frankly he deserved? Wasn’t this what life was, hadn’t it always been life, they’d just monetized it so that in exchange for Jamie’s mango-related hedonism the CEO of Tyche could have three thousand exotic camels and ten night-blooming yachts?

“I should probably get back,” said Meredith, “because the lawyers will be here soon.” She took his face in her hands and kissed him quickly, inconclusively. “I’ll call you as soon as I’m done.”

“And then what?” asked Jamie.

“And then we’ll get a drink,” she said.

“And then?”

“And then at some point we’ll eat breakfast.”

“And then?”

“And then I guess we’ll have lunch.”

“And then?”

“Probably dinner, unless we’re still full from the other two meals.”

“And then?”

“Breakfast again.”

“You’re not answering my question,” Jamie said irritably.

“Actually, I am. You’re just not listening.” She tightened her grip on his cheek, then reached over for her yoga pants. “I’m sorry you have to love me,” she said in a moment of worrying telepathy, rising to her feet to pull them on. “I wish I could let you love someone better.”

“At least leave me the decency of my own critical errors,” muttered Jamie, handing Meredith her bralette.

“But can you do me a favor?” Meredith said, pulling it on over her head.

“Absolutely,” he said to his feet. “I’d hoped there was a catch. Make it a good one, like really ethically troubling, something I can feel violently sick about.”

She crouched down to look at him.

“Don’t let me go,” she said.

“Okay,” said Jamie uncertainly. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Meredith confirmed.

Then she got up, turned on the flashlight on her phone, and went the opposite way down the trail.