Chapter One

Chapter One


That skinny eleven-year-old boy sitting across the table from me with the wispy dishwater-blond hair and glasses, that’s my twin brother, Milo, short for Myles. He’s got his long nose pointed down where his physics books and sheets scribbled with mathematical equations are neatly lined up at 180-degree angles on his end of the table. This is where Milo is likely to stay until bedtime (even though Mom says we have to study only until four o’clock), mumbling to himself and moving his face closer and closer to his work and getting more and more fidgety, until he’s reaching for his inhaler. Then Mom makes him stop for the day and go to bed.

Milo is “profoundly gifted.” One of those scary-smart geniuses who could have started college while still in diapers. Milo is going to be a physicist one day. His dream is to get a paper on string theory published in the globally renowned journals Nature and Physical Review and to prove some startling theory in quantum mechanics so he can earn himself a place among the leading geeks in the physics field.

Mom had me tested when she sent Milo, but I know it was for no other reason than that she didn’t want me to feel left out. Same as she had the eye doctor give me a Sponge- Bob SquarePants sticker when Milo got his last eye exam, even though my eyes are as sharp as a hawk’s, and even though I didn’t know who the little character was. We were six when we took that test. Mom hid the results when they came, but it wasn’t hard to figure out where she’d hidden them, since she puts all of her important papers in one place: her file cabinet, in a folder marked