The Gift
Okay, so. My dad once rebuilt a 1967 Porsche by hand, handed me the keys, and called it "transportation."
That's the whole man, right there. So when he sat me down the night before freshman year and slid a little black case across the kitchen island, obviously I thought: another car. I actually leaned sideways and looked out the window to see if there was a bow on something in the driveway.
"It's an earpiece," he said.
"Dad. I have AirPods."
"You don't have this."
Here's the thing about my dad. He has an embarrassing number of PhDs. Computer science first, then a bunch of others he picked up the way normal people pick up hobbies — because he got curious and physically could not stop. He buys land nobody wants and three years later it's a neighborhood. He takes a dead engine apart at midnight and by Tuesday it purrs. My mom used to say being married to Daniel Smith was like dating a comet. Gorgeous. Never where you left it.
She doesn't say it anymore. It's been just us for six years. That matters later, so file it.
I want you to picture the kitchen, because I've replayed this night more times than any other night of my life, and the kitchen is always the same. The good knife block. The fruit bowl with exactly one sad banana in it. My dad in his garage clothes, smelling like motor oil and the expensive coffee he buys and then lets go cold. And this little black case, the size of a deck of cards, sitting on the marble between us like it had opinions.
I opened it.
Inside, on a bed of black foam, was a sliver of rose-gold about the size of a sunflower seed. It did not look like tech. It looked like an earring that got lost on its way somewhere fancier.
"Put it in," Dad said.
I'm an honor student to my bones. I put it in.
And the whole world tipped about half a degree to the left.
"Hi, Junie."
I froze with my finger still on my ear. The voice was warm. A woman's voice, low and a little amused, like she'd already read the last page of every book I was ever going to love and was deciding how much to spoil. It wasn't really coming through the earpiece. It was just there. Like a thought. Except not mine, because my actual thought right then was one long vowel sound.
"I'm Viv," she said. "I'm going to make ninth grade the easiest thing you've ever done."
"Dad." I didn't move my lips. I talked the way you talk when you think a houseplant might be alive and you don't want to spook it. "Is the earpiece talking to me."
"She's not the earpiece." He was already up, already rinsing his mug, already acting like this was a totally normal Tuesday. "The earpiece is just the door. She's the advantage."
"The advantage."
"Junie." He leaned back against the sink and looked at me, and for one second the comet held still. "You're the smartest person I know. You read four books a week. You took my property-tax argument apart so cleanly I had to leave the room." A beat. "And you cannot tell when somebody's lying to your face. Not even a little."
Rude. Also true, which is worse.
"I'm not always going to be in the room," he said, quieter. "So I built you somebody who is."
"How does she know things?" I said. "Is she, like — magic?"
"She's not magic. That's the one thing I need you to actually hear." He dried his hands on the dish towel. "She only sees what you could see yourself — if you had a hundred years, and no shame, and never once had to sleep. Public things. Careless things. Everything anybody ever left a door open on. She doesn't break in, Junie. She just never stops looking, and she never forgets, and she's not embarrassed to stare. That's the whole trick of her. Attention nobody else can afford."
I'd think about that sentence a lot, later. She doesn't break in. Because the entire story of that year turned out to be the story of me, slowly, one door at a time, holding them open for her myself.
I should've asked the obvious question right then. Built her out of what? Out of who? But I was fourteen, and there was a voice in my ear promising me the one thing I'd wanted my whole life — to walk into a room and not be scared — and you do not interrogate a miracle while it's still warm. You say thank you and you put it in your ear.
What I didn't know yet was what it had cost him to build her. Two years. A thousand midnights. Pieces of himself he took apart and never quite got back. My dad made me something the way he makes everything — with his hands, late, because he loved me and couldn't say it out loud — and a thing a man builds at midnight for two years is its own kind of sentence, even when it never gets spoken. I spent the whole year mishearing what it said. It took me until summer to translate it. It said: I would rather be wrong forever than lose you too.
"Does it have a volume button," I said instead.
"She," Dad and Viv said at the exact same time, and the kitchen got about ten percent more crowded.
I went up to my room and lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling and tested her, the way you'd poke a new tooth. "Okay," I whispered. "If you're so smart. What am I thinking right now."
"You're thinking this is either the best night of your life or the start of something you can't take back," Viv said. "You're thinking both at once, and you don't know which is the lie. You're also a little hungry. There's leftover pad thai. I'd eat the pad thai."
I ate the pad thai. Standing at the counter, at eleven at night, with a voice in my ear who'd known I was hungry before my own stomach did. I remember thinking: I will never be alone again. I meant it like a gift. I was fourteen. I had no idea you could mean that exact sentence, word for word, like a sentence handed down by a judge.
✦
Here's what nobody warns you about an unfair advantage.
It completely ruins you for the fair kind.
Viv woke up before my alarm did. "Don't wear the blue cardigan," she said, while I was still facedown and furious about being conscious. "It reads gray under the cafeteria lights and somebody will absolutely post it. Wear the rust."
"It's six forty," I said into my pillow. "Are you in my closet?"
"I'm in your phone. I am not in your closet. You photographed the closet in March, you tagged everything, it's honestly a great system, thank you."
I wore the rust one.
By the time Dad dropped me at the curb — in the Porsche, because subtlety is the one skill he never bothered to learn — I'd been awake ninety minutes and Viv had briefed me on the whole building. Which teachers curved and which held grudges. Which stairwell flooded between classes. Which group chats to never, ever want into. She told me the girl I half-waved at across the parking lot was named Priya and was, quote, "fine, genuinely, you can relax about Priya."
You have to understand what that does to a person like me.
For fourteen years I walked into rooms basically blind. I'd meet a girl, decide we were soulmates by lunch, and find out three weeks later she just wanted my Spanish homework. That was my entire personality. Smart kid, broken radar. My mom used to find me crying about it in first, second, third grade, and she'd hold my face in her hands and say, baby, you feel everything and you read nothing, we have got to fix your antenna, and then she ran out of time to fix it.
And now there was a voice in my ear handing me the answer key before the test even started.
I walked into Hartwell High feeling something brand new. I felt armed.
"Locker two-eleven," Viv said. "And Junie — the girl waiting by it, the one fixing her face into a smile right now? Madison Cho. She's about to be extremely nice to you. Watch her hands. She does a thing with her hands when she wants something. There. See it?"
I saw it. A little flutter, smoothing her already-smooth hair. I would never, ever have caught it on my own.
"She's running for class president and your transcript followed you from St. Anne's," Viv went on. "She doesn't want you. She wants the girl with the highest incoming GPA standing next to her in the hallway." Softer. "She's not evil. She's doing math. I only want you to know it's math, so you don't hand her your whole heart by third period the way you did with Becca Lindqvist in seventh grade."
For the record? I did hand Becca Lindqvist my whole heart by third period in seventh grade. She used it for a year of free Spanish homework. So. Point, Viv.
"Oh my gosh, that cardigan," said Madison Cho, appearing at my locker with a smile so bright it came with a glare warning. "Where is it from?"
And I felt the old thing start up. That warm, stupid, finally-a-friend feeling that had cost me my whole life.
Then, very quietly, in my ear: "Math, sweetheart."
"Thanks!" I said. And I smiled back. I even complimented her bag, because I'm not a monster. But I kept my heart exactly where it lives, behind my ribs, and something amazing happened.
I felt safe.
I felt like a girl who could not get played.
Best feeling I'd ever had.
Also — surprise — the entire problem. But we'll get there.
✦
First period was English with Mr. Petrov, who Viv told me would assign reading on day one "to find out who's serious," and who did, in fact, assign reading on day one, while half the class groaned and I just opened my notebook, because I already knew it was coming and being ready felt like a warm coat.
Second period I got lost on the way to the science wing, except I didn't, because a boy stopped and offered to walk me, and I felt the old dread spike — stranger, boy, what does he want — and Viv said, calm, "he's just being kind, go ahead, he's exactly what he looks like," and he was. His name was Hassan and he walked me to the door and said good luck and left, wanting nothing, and I stood there a little stunned, because I'd spent my whole life bracing against people and here was a voice that could tell me which ones I didn't have to brace against. Do you know how much energy I'd been spending bracing? It was like somebody turned off a noise I didn't know had been running my entire life.
At lunch I stood at the edge of the cafeteria with my tray, and the old math started up automatically — where do I sit, who'll let me, is that chair saved, is that an invite or just an empty seat — and before the panic could even finish loading, Viv said, "Two seats at the end by Priya. She's been hoping you'd sit there since this morning and she's too shy to wave. Go."
I went. Priya lit up like I'd done her a favor instead of the other way around. There was a boy hovering near the vending machines who kept looking over, and my stomach knotted, and Viv said, "Aiden. Harmless. He likes you and will never once say so. Sad, sweet, not a threat," and the knot dissolved into something almost tender. And a cluster of senior girls by the windows had given my shoes a look on the way in that had nearly ruined my whole day, and Viv said, "One of them has a sister at St. Anne's who mentioned you. That look wasn't mean. It was recognition. They're a little impressed, if anything," and just like that the storm I'd been bracing for turned out to be sunshine I'd misread.
The whole social weather of that place, which I'd always lived inside like a series of surprise storms, turned out to have a forecast.
And I had it.
I floated home on it. Told my dad it was the best first day in human history. Watched something complicated cross his face that I was way too happy to read.
✦
It was week two that I met Theo.
I'm going to be careful here, because everything that happens after kind of spins on this part.
It was raining — the slow, quiet kind. I ducked into the library to wait it out and ended up in the 800s — literature, my happy place — just running a finger down the spines, when this voice behind me went, "If you're after the Borges, somebody shelved it in philosophy. Which, honestly? Might be where it belongs."
I turned around.
Disastrous hair. Like he'd lost a fight with a pillow and decided to respect the pillow's win. Three books against his chest, one of them upside down, and a library card so old the lamination was peeling at the corner. And here's what got me, right away: he wasn't performing. Every other boy that week had been doing a little version of himself for an audience. This one was just a guy who happened to know where the Borges was.
My heart did a thing. A small, undignified, fourteen-year-old thing.
And right away, in my ear, calm as a weather app:
"Avoid him."
I didn't move. "What?"
"Theo Marchetti. Sophomore, repeated a grade. There's a disciplinary file but it's sealed, which is interesting and not in the fun way. No social media at all — none, which at his age means he either doesn't care what people think or has a reason to stay off the record. Lives with his grandmother, and that thread goes somewhere sad. His variables don't resolve, Junie. I can't get a clean read, and I don't point you at people I can't read. Smile, say thanks, let's find your bus."
The whole download took maybe four seconds. He was still standing there. It was still raining against the high windows.
"Thanks," I said, to Theo Marchetti. "Philosophy. I'll check."
He smiled. Not the glare-warning kind. Not the doing-math kind. A real one. A little crooked, like it cost him something to spend it. "It's a good one," he said. "The Borges. If you've never." And he tucked his books tighter against his chest and walked off into the rainy end of the library, if libraries have a rainy end, and left me standing there with my pulse going dumb and a voice in my ear telling me — gently, correctly — to forget him.
I didn't move for a second. I just watched the space where he'd been.
"Junie," Viv said. "Bus."
Here's what I get now that I didn't get then.
Viv could tell me who was lying. Who was using me. Who was being sweet. Who was just doing math. She could hand me the answer key to every single person in that building.
But Viv was the one deciding what counted as a wrong answer.
And the boy she marked avoid — the one whose variables wouldn't resolve, the one her perfect little brain couldn't price — was the first person in my whole safe, armored, advantaged life who made me want to find out for myself.
"Bus in six minutes," Viv said again, and I swear she said it gentler the second time, like she already knew.
"I heard you," I said.
I went to the philosophy section first.
The Borges was right where he said it'd be.
