The Prodigy's Cousin Read Online Free PDF Page A

Alex’s had been. It was tough to offer incentives because his interests shifted unexpectedly.
    After seven months of therapy, he still didn’t respond to his name; eye contact was still fleeting. During an assessment, he yelled when the examiner tried to join him in completing a puzzle and nearly cried when his alphabet letters were not perfectly arranged. When frustrated, he bit his hand or tapped his head.He echoed the words of the examiner and his mother, a phenomenon known as echolalia, and chanted phrases—“Today is Friday” or “Go press the
O
”—out of context.
    Despite William’s struggles, Lucie began getting—more and more frequently—the distinct, sometimes chilling sense that his intelligence was “out there.”
    The December after William enrolled at Portia, he became engrossed with a set of magnetic letters that Lucie and Mike had bought for Alex. In the midst of the holidays, William took the letters off their magnetic board and placed them on a brown leather ottoman. Luciewent to get her camera to snap a couple of pictures. When she returned, she found William where she had left him, still playing with the letters.
    She took a closer look. At two years and three months, William had spelled out two words across the ottoman, “Mommy” and “Daddy.” He was midway through his third word, “William.”
    Lucie watched, stunned, as William continued to work, his head of tousled brown hair weaving back and forth between the ottoman and a stockpile of letters. He announced each new addition. He drew out its pronunciation for several seconds, as if he didn’t want to let it go, as if merely
saying
the name of the letter was a delight. Eventually, his childish voice lilted upward, warbled, and broke, and William moved on to the next magnet. When he ran out of letters, he flipped a
W
over to use as an
M;
he rotated a 7 to create an
L
.
    Over the next few weeks, William used the letters to spell increasingly difficult words. A few days after watching his aunt write out “algorithm,” William re-created the word with the magnet letters; he spelled the same word out loud at dinner, squirming in his high chair, sporting a bib with a lion on it. Lucie discovered him spelling out the months of the year—correctly and in sequence—with the magnet letters. There was no calendar anywhere in the house. “There was a constant stream of stuff that he would always do that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. It gave me goose bumps,” Lucie said. “It was almost creepy.”
    By two and a half, William could battle his way through early readers, carefully keeping his place with his finger and sounding out each new word. After that, he read all the time. He read books, he read newspaper ads, he read labels; he read at home, and he read on the beach. Whenever he received a gift, he carefully read every word of the card before opening the present.
    About a month before his third birthday, William began writing out words on Alex’s chalkboard. At first, it was an exercise in frustration. When a letter wasn’t perfect, William screamed and franticallyerased it. But when he printed one to his specifications—magic. “I did it!” he would cry out, the curls above his forehead bouncing as he ran to Lucie. Within days, he was spelling out “Mommy” and “Amanda” (the name of one of his behavioral therapists). His writing wasn’t restricted to the chalkboard; he used Lego bricks to craft words, piecing them together to spell out “Nana,” and he wrote out the alphabet on graph paper.
    William discovered the computer before he turned three and became mesmerized by fonts. He spent hours typing words in different fonts and developed opinions about which fonts looked best in which colors. By three and a half, he was using the computer to type out train schedules. Before he turned