Be Good Be Real Be Crazy by Chelsey Philpot Page A

and I almost got inducted into a cult.”
    â€œPromise you won’t make fun of me?” Einstein said.
    â€œThis better not be disgusting, because—”
    â€œI was fixing their solar panels. They’d been set up wrong and it took a while to untangle all the stupid cords.”
    Homer swallowed. “Wow.”
    â€œYeah.” Einstein took off his glasses and polished them against his shirt. “I mean, it wasn’t hard. It was a basic circuit. I learned that stuff when I was eight.”
    Homer formulated his response carefully. “Steiner, that was pretty awesome of you.”
    â€œYeah?”
    Homer couldn’t see his little brother’s expression in the dusky light, but he could hear the smile in his voice. “Yeah. Pretty much the opposite of a social fail.”
    Einstein slid down until he was low enough in the passenger seat to push his knees against the dashboard. “Do you think Jenkins and Bob will succeed?”
    Homer stared at the yellow lines, noticing how they almost looked golden when the sun was low, thinking of an answer.
    â€œProbably not,” he said as he flipped on his left blinker for the turn onto the highway. “But they’ll be able to say they tried. Maybe that’ll be enough.”

THE PARABLE OF THE BOY GENIUS
    THE BOY GENIUS UNDERSTOOD STRING theory, quantum mechanics, relativity, and why six of the seven Millennium Prize Problems in mathematics had yet to be solved. He did not, however, always understand other human beings.
    Why did they talk so much, but rarely discuss Things That Matter: rogue artificial intelligence, meteor trajectories, the survival of humanity in an unpredictable future?
    Why did old ladies bristle if he called them “old”?
    Why did adults not appreciate being corrected even when they were stupendously wrong?
    Why did kids his age roll their eyes when he talked and get annoyed that he walked away when they bored him?
    The Boy Genius could no more help the way he was than a massive star could stop itself from exploding into a supernova.
    What a gift , said strangers.
    We expect great things , said his professors.
    How proud you must be , said family friends to the Boy Genius’s dads.
    And though his dads and brother tried their best to make the world let him be a kid first and a prodigy second, they couldn’t protect him from things they weren’t able to see.
    At the university, he tried to make friends by building scientifically sound beer funnels for parties he couldn’t go to and giving sorority girls in glasses and skinny jeans answers to problem sets he could finish in ten minutes. But it wasn’t exactly a social win to be the youngest guy in the classroom—never mind the smartest.
    The Boy Genius often thought that it would be so much easier if people made mathematical sense. If the two sides of the equal sign did in fact equal each other.
    Sometimes, when he was walking alone across campus from one science building to the next, he liked to imagine that he was an undercover anthropologist from a distant universe—a member of an advanced species who had been sent to this blue-and-green planet to observe humanity.
    Being an alien offered a reason for his isolation. It allowed him to objectively observe the strange gestures and poses of Homo sapiens , the odd social rituals and interactions.
    Sometimes, the distraction worked.
    A lot of the time, it didn’t.
    Even extraterrestrials, it turns out, get lonely. Even BoyGeniuses who can easily understand the complex relationships among subatomic particles, stars, space, and the dimensions of time are lost when it comes to making sense of connections here on Earth.

THE REST STOP OF PURGATORY
    â€œWHY DO I FEEL LIKE we’ve stumbled onto a low-budget sci-fi set? This place is creepy.”
    Homer nodded in agreement even though he was standing on the opposite side of the Banana and there was no way Einstein could see