Page 84 of Gifted & Talented

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I was going to just slip out undetected. That was the goal, anyway. But Meredith caught my arm and asked me to wait, so I did. I could have told her to go fuck herself—I mean, I had a baby at home and honestly, was Meredith entitled to my time? No, she wasn’t.

But let’s be real, if I hadn’t wanted to talk to Meredith, I would have just told Monster we were going another time around the block when I’d first seen her standing outside my house.

I watched her say goodbye to everyone, one by one. Arthur said something like are you ready to go Sister Hostess and she said thanks Brother Chivalrous, I’ll get home by myself. I rolled my eyes into my Diet Coke. Of course she just assumed I’d give her a ride. I mean, I was going to. But she was really taking her sweet time and there were only so many tiny funeral hors d’oeuvres you can eat before it becomes, like, gluttony.

Finally, Meredith materialized at my side just as I’d brought out my phone to play Tetris. “I won’t take long,” she said. “I just wanted to discuss some Wrenfare offers with you.”

“What?” I had some bruschetta in my mouth. (I lied about how many hors d’oeuvres you can eat at a funeral. The limit does not exist.)

“I’ve got about ten offers for Wrenfare in my inbox. I wanted to discuss them with you.”

I managed—barely—to swallow. “Why?”

“They’re astronomical. It’s a lot of money, especially Tyche’s. You’re smart.” She looked at me sideways. “And it’s about to be your decision, so I figure you should have a say.”

That time I choked on nothing. “What?”

“Come on, let’s talk in private.” She gestured to the parking lot with her chin. “Which one is yours?”

“That one,” I said, pointing to my mom’s old hatchback. “Wait, what?”

“I’m about to be investigated for fraud,” Meredith explained, strutting over to the passenger side. “Actually, I’m told that the federal government is already mobilizing a case against me.” She explained later that her business partner Ward could be very motivated when his ass was on the line. Apparently, he was a key witness against her. “I’ve thought about fighting it, but I don’t really see the point. I fucked up, full stop. Anyway, I’m a Wren.” She ducked her head into the car and I scrambled into my seat, looking over at her as she pulled on her seatbelt, then stopped, as if just remembering we weren’t actually going anywhere. “I’ll serve time for what, a year? It’ll be fine.”

“But your career—your company—” I didn’t know where to start, exactly. “Though, you’re probably right about white-collar crimes,” I acknowledged, because that seemed the easiest place. “You’ll be the first person in magitech I can think of to actually go to prison for anything.”

“Yeah, it’s not my favorite outcome, but I can’t say it’s undeserved.” Meredith looked over at me as if to ask why I wasn’t saying anything else. It was unhinged, frankly. I don’t know how she expected me to react, but I was having trouble piecing it together. “The point is,” she continued, “I’m going to use my majority to appoint you CEO of Wrenfare. You can sell the company and cash out. Give some of it to my siblings, but take the money and run. I owe you.” She shrugged again. “Call it reparations.”

“Are you insane?” I said, and turned to look at her.

She turned to me. “What?”

“You think money can fix this?”

“Oh. No.” Her expression turned wry. “I’m not trying to fix it, really. I just thought the money would be a nice plus. And anyway, my dad’s offer for your product was paltry, truly laughable. I don’t think you even want to know.”

Oh, I definitely had some idea. I’d sold out before. “What makes you think I want your money?”

“Do whatever you want with it, Lou, I don’t care.” Meredith shrugged. “Give it to your mom. I owe her, she fed me so many times when we were kids.”

“What’s gotten into you?” I said, aghast.

She frowned. “What, you don’t think that’s fair?”

“You’ve owed her for decades!”

“Yeah, well, I’m a grown-up now, I wasn’t before.”

“You still haven’t apologized,” I muttered.

“Oh, you need that? Sorry,” said Meredith Wren, the asshole. She lowered the passenger bill to look in the mirror, peeling back her eyelid in a totally disgusting way. “Huh, I think the stye is gone. It’s been driving me absolutely insane—I mean, can you believe I got a stye, at my age?”

“Meredith, you’re thirty, not dead, there’s no age limit on bacterial infection,” I muttered. “And do you really think ‘sorry’ cuts it? What are you even sorry for ?”

She paused to consider it.

“I’m sorry we both had to finish high school alone,” she said eventually. “I’m sorry you got married and I wasn’t there. I’m sorry you live in El Cerrito.”

“What’s wrong with El Cerrito?” I demanded. “The weather is extremely temperate!”

“I’m sorry I never got to tell you about Jamie,” she continued as if I’d never spoken. “I’m sorry that I hated you even more after Arthur took your side.”

“Hello? You had me expelled?”

“Oh, come on. You were being stupid.”

“ Meredith! ” I thundered, and she laughed.

“Look, seriously, Lou, if I’m being honest, I’m way sorrier for me. I missed everything. I ran on a hamster wheel to nowhere for ten years trying to prove something.” She shrugged. “And of course I’m sorry—I fucking betrayed you, I know that, but that’s the least of it, really. And you were being really dumb.”

I folded my arms over my chest, collapsing back against the driver’s seat in complete and utter disbelief. Meredith casually dabbed on lip balm.

“You don’t have to say hamster wheel to nowhere,” I groused eventually. “It’s redundant. The ‘to nowhere’ part is implied.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t rehearse this.” She looked at me then, and I was temporarily rocked by the fact that I was sitting in a car with Meredith Wren, a thing we had done so often when we were teenagers, and now all this time had passed and I didn’t even feel it. It was barely in the car with us—it was hardly even real. This was Meredith, my witchy best friend.

“How did you do it?” I asked her.

“Cheat?”

“Yeah.”

“You couldn’t tell?”

“I just want you to tell me.”

“You would.” She rolled her eyes, then pursed her lips. “Fine. I sat down with all the clinical patients. I changed them all individually.”

“Changed them?”

“You know. Fixed them.” She made the universal sign for witchy spell-casting, a little flutter of her fingers. “I made them happy.”

“Did that work ?” I asked, astounded. I had seen Meredith influence people before, but I never thought of it as permanent.

“It seemed to, at least for long enough that they reported feeling happier.” She looked up at the ceiling of my car, seeming to retreat a little into her thoughts. She’d always done that as a kid, too. She used to have a problem with not seeming very present. I noticed in her recent talks and interviews that she had improved that, made herself seem like an active listener. I was pretty sure that Meredith was still busy with the inside of her head, but now she at least made it look like she was making an effort.

“Does it work?” I asked, and she looked over at me with a bemused sort of frown.

“You already know it doesn’t. You told me so yourself.”

“I know, but…”

I trailed off.

Then I reached for the steering wheel.

And paused.

“You really want to appoint me CEO of Wrenfare?” I asked.

“You can’t work for a Wrenfare store, I won’t be able to sleep at night from my cushy little prison cell,” she replied. “It’s too, like, dark. I mean really, Lou, retail ?”

I sidestepped that, because she wasn’t totally wrong. In general, people were… how to put this? Fucking unbearable. “What about Birdsong?”

“Oh, I don’t know. They’ll remove me, maybe put Ward in charge, or maybe declare bankruptcy if everyone jumps ship.” She sighed. “I’m really fucking pissed about that part, actually. All that work.” She made a drizzling motion, then an explosion sound. “Gone.”

“Does it work?” I asked again.

“What?”

“Chirp. I know it doesn’t do what you said it does. But does it work?”

Her face contorted in an indecipherable way. “I mean—”

“ Could it work,” I clarified. “Your research, your product development before Tyche came in. The thing you actually wanted to make.”

“What?” She looked at me like I was speaking another language.

“You wanted something more streamlined,” I reminded her. “Something that responded in real time to brain chemistry. Not just dopamine hits, actual pharmaceutical tweaks. Right?”

“That was the concept,” she said with a shrug.

“Do you know how many people that could help? Even if it only worked on one thing. Bipolar, or clinical depression. Or anxiety. If you just focused on one of those things—”

She turned to me with that same frown, like I was making fun of her and she was waiting for the drop. “What are you doing?”

“We could make it again, from scratch, under Wrenfare,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be a separate product. We’ll build it into the Wrenfare watch.”

“Lou, Wrenfare is going under,” Meredith said. “The company is kaput. There’s no money.”

“There must be some money if people are coming for its parts,” I pointed out. “You just need someone smart to fix it.”

“Oh, come on. That’s a trap, Lou.” Meredith shook her head. “We’re talking decades of shit investments, not to mention all kinds of lawsuits that have been piling up for company misconduct, underpaid labor—”

“Fixable,” I said with a wave of my hand. “You don’t just throw things away, Meredith, don’t you remember what Mr. Grantham taught us in grade school? Reduce, reuse, recycle—”

“He gave it to me so I’d fail,” Meredith said, half shouting, half laughing. “I’m not giving it to you just so you’ll fail. He only wanted someone else to catch the blame instead of him, Lou, you don’t have t—”

“I want to,” I said, and realized then that I did. “I want to scale everything back, cut everything but the basics, the Wrenfare operating system that’s still the best of its kind. And I want to make a version of Chirp that works. I promised,” I said to her. “I promised you I would.”

She tossed me a look of skepticism. “When did you promise me that?”

“The day I met you. I promised I’d help you bring your mom back.”

“You can’t do that. It’s not possible.”

“But for you it is, Meredith, it is. You honestly think I don’t get that?”

Her expression was guarded, dark with fear. “Get what?”

I leaned in like I would take her face between my palms.

“Meredith Wren, you fucking asshole,” I sighed, “you’re just a grown-up little girl who wanted to help a woman who couldn’t be helped. But that doesn’t have to stop you from helping a whole lot of other people.”

I watched her swallow hard. She hates sentiment—will do anything to avoid it.

But she surprised me when she reached out and threw her arms around my neck.

I hugged her back.

“If I burn it to the ground, don’t be mad,” I whispered fiercely in her ear.

She gave a little chuckle-sob. “I won’t.”

“And there’ll be a job waiting for you,” I added. “After prison.”

She pulled back, looking at me with confusion.

“Nobody else will hire someone with a criminal record,” I pointed out. “You’ll be shit out of luck.”

“Well, exactly,” she said, exasperated. “I’ll have a criminal record . You can’t hire me.”

“I fucking can, actually,” I said. “It’s called nepotism.”

At that, Meredith laughed until she howled. Actually howled .

“God, I hope you fix everything,” she said through weird, hysterical laughter-tears. “I don’t actually think you can. But man, I’d fucking love to watch you try.”

“I’m kind of a genius, actually?” I reminded her. “So just wait.”

She squished my face between her hands then. I did the same to her.

“Your son is cute,” she said. She was crying again. What a beautiful, gigantic baby. “Is your life good?”

“Yes,” I said, amazed that I didn’t even have to think about it. I don’t think I would have believed even a few years ago that I could be where I was and still say those words. “Yes, it is, and it was, even before you just handed me a bazillion dollars.”

“I want that,” she said.

“It’s yours,” I said, like a wish-granting genie.

It was over. I loved her again. Maybe I never stopped. God damn it, I’m the problem. Give a mouse a cookie and bam, the mouse just fucking loves cookies.

“Well, I’ve got to go see a man about a rental car,” she said with a long-suffering sigh, releasing me to reach for the door handle. She stepped out of the car, then bent to look at me through the passenger side window. I obligingly rolled it down.

“Want to come over?” Meredith said, referring to her father’s house, presumably, not the dark side, though even that invitation I might have considered, or maybe I already had. “I’m probably turning myself in on Monday, so, you know. Time is of the essence.”

“I’ll have to talk to my mom, but sure,” I said. “Pizza’s on you.”

She looked at me until she glowed with fondness.

“Are you sure?” she said. I don’t know what she meant. Who cares!

“Fuck yeah,” I said, and closed the window on her laugh, and I put the damn car in drive.