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details seemed so silly, so unreal and artificial. How could anyone actually believe in such stuff?
    “My brother is very troubled.” That was all he ever managed to tell people. “He’s very—ill. Mentally ill.” He didn’t know what else could be said.
    When Hayden first started to exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia, back when they were in middle school, Miles didn’t really believe it. It was a put-on, he thought. A prank. It was like the time when that quack guidance counselor decided Hayden was a “genius.” Hayden had thought this was hilarious.
    “Geeenious,” he said, drawing the word out in a dreamy, mocking way. This was at the beginning of seventh grade, and it was late at night, they were in their bunk beds in their room, and Hayden’s voice wafted down through the darkness from the top bunk. “Hey, Miles,” he said in that flat, amused voice he had. “Miles, how come I’m a genius and you’re not?”
    “I don’t know,” Miles said. He was nonplussed, perhaps a bit hurt by the whole thing, but he just turned his face against his pillow. “It doesn’t matter that much to me,” he said.
    “But we’re identical,” Hayden said. “We have the
exact
same DNA. So how can it even be possible?”
    “It’s not genetic, I guess,” Miles had said, glumly, and Hayden had laughed.
    “Maybe I’m just better at fooling people than you are,” he said. “The whole idea of IQ is a joke. Did you ever think about that?”
    When his mother started bringing in the psychiatrists, Miles thought about that conversation again.
It’s a joke
, he thought. Knowing Hayden, Miles couldn’t help but think that the therapist their mother consulted seemed awfully gullible. He couldn’t help but think that Hayden’s so-called symptoms came across as melodramatic and showy, and, Miles thought, easy to fake. Their mother had remarried by that time, and Hayden hated their new stepfather, their revised family. Miles couldn’t help but think that Hayden was not above using an elaborate ploy—even to the point of imitating a serious illness—just to stir up trouble, just to hurt their mother, just to amuse himself.
    Was he faking it? Miles had never been sure, even as Hayden’s behavior became more erratic and abnormal and secretive. There were times, lots of times, when his “illness” felt more like a performance, an amplified version of the games they had been playing all along. The “symptoms” Hayden was supposedly exhibiting, according to the therapist—“elaborate fantasy worlds,” “feverish obsessions,” “disordered thoughts,” and “hallucinatory perceptual changes”—these were not so much different from the way Hayden usually behaved when they were deeply involved in one of their projects. He was, perhaps, a little more exaggerated and theatrical than usual, Miles thought, a little more
extreme
than Miles felt comfortable with, but then again there were reasons. Their father’s death, for example. Their mother’s remarriage. Their hated stepfather, Mr. Spady.
    When Hayden was institutionalized for the first time, he and Miles were still working on their atlas pretty regularly. It was a particularly complicated section—the great pyramids of North Dakota, and the destruction of the Yanktonai civilization—and Hayden couldn’t stop talking about it. Miles remembered sitting there at dinner one night, his mother and Mr. Spady watching stonily as Hayden pushed the food around on his plate as if arranging armies on a model battlefield. “Alfred Sully,” he was saying, talking in a low,rapid voice as if reciting memorized information before a test. “General Alfred Sully of the United States Army, 1st Minnesota Infantry, 1863. Whitestone Hills, Tah-kah-ha-kuty, and there are the pyramids. Snow is falling on the pyramids and he’s amassing his armies at the foot of the hill. 1863,” he said, and pointed at his boneless chicken breast with his fork. “Khufu,” he said, “the second