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clamped her lips shut.
    Elizabeth sat perfectly still and upright in her chair. The circles under her eyes were as dark as bruises, and Piper had a crazy urge to get her makeup bag out of her purse and cover them up. The dark circles, Elizabeth’s thinness, the way Elizabeth sat, waiting for her to say something, all of it made Piper furious.
    “Oh, so you’re giving up? Is that it?” Mean. Piper felt so mean. She started to walk out of the room.
    “Piper,” said Elizabeth in a voice that was almost a wail. When Piper turned toward her, she saw that Elizabeth’s hand was stretched out, reaching for her.
    “Do I have to remind you that you have two children who need you?” said Piper. She stood in the doorway to the room and pointed a finger at Elizabeth. “You are such a coward, Elizabeth. And you are not giving up.”
    Piper walked as fast as she could to Elizabeth’s front door, and before the door had even slammed shut behind her, she was running.
    T HREE
…[T]he human species is by no means the pinnacle of evolution. Evolution has no pinnacle and there is no such thing as evolutionary progress. Natural selection is simply the process by which life-forms change to suit the myriad opportunities afforded by the physical environment and by other life-forms. —M ATT R IDLEY ,
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters
    D ev Tremain wasn’t Sarah Chang or Gregory R. Smith or Toby “Karl” Rosenberg. He sure as hell wasn’t Pablo Picasso or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Bobby Fischer. And forget about A.E., whose name he couldn’t even bring himself to say because it was one he’d been called way too many times in way too many tones of voice. Privately, Dev felt kind of sorry for A.E. because he’d gone from being the flesh-and-blood guy who pretty much figured out what made the whole physical universe tick to being a metaphor: the generic, universal symbol for genius. Like flesh and blood didn’t matter. Like the theory of relativity wasn’t enough.
    Dev Tremain wasn’t a genius, not a genius-genius, although from the way Lake was acting, you wouldn’t have known that. Lake Tremain was Dev’s mother, and from the way she’d loaded up the car and taken off like a bat out of Hades, you’d think he was Sarah, Gregory R., and Toby “Karl” rolled into one; you’d think he’d gotten into Juilliard at the age of six, graduated from college at the age of thirteen, and learned to write Japanese from a sake bottle before he turned five years old. Those kids were freaks ( Japanese from a sake bottle? A sake bottle? ) and Dev wasn’t a freak, definitely not freak material, not even close.
    When he thought about those kids being freaks, though, he immediately also thought, No offense, because those kids couldn’t help being so freakishly smart or gifted or whatever, the same way Dev couldn’t help being highly, but unfreakishly, smart. He didn’t know how it had happened to them, but he did know that not one of them had asked for it.
    But at the moment, as he sat in the backseat of his mom’s 1988 Honda Civic, thirteen years old, deep into his Discman, Green Day pounding into his head, fingers drumming hard on the book in front of him, more than smart or anything else, Dev was mad. It had been a pretty rotten year for him. A crap year. Seventh grade. Seventh grade was at least partly why he and his mother were wherever they were—Kentucky, maybe?—instead of back in their little apartment in their little nowhere California town.
    Even though Dev had lived most of his life in that town, leaving it was not what made him angry. Dev was glad to leave, more than glad. The truth was that it had taken a full one hundred miles for Dev to finally unknot, a hundred miles for him to breathe like a normal person again. He’d just been sitting there in the car when he’d felt this opening sensation, like there was suddenly more space between each of his ribs, and although he hadn’t changed position, his