The Prodigy's Cousin Read Online Free PDF Page B

his fifth birthday. He was soon inhaling geography. He studied maps—maps of the world, maps of Canada, maps of Ontario. Then he discovered Street View on Google Maps and began spending long periods of time traveling around the world, street by street. When Lucie asked whether he’d like to visit those places in person one day, William told her no, he liked traveling from his living room.
    William wasn’t much of a showman—other people’s approval meant relatively little to him—so he was generally content to sock information away in his brain for his own enjoyment. But every now and then Lucie and Mike caught a glimpse of what was bubbling beneath the surface. It happened one day when Lucie drove the boys out into the countryside to pick out a pumpkin, a month after William got his atlas.
    â€œWhy don’t we just go to the grocery store?” Alex whined. “There’s a box of pumpkins right by the door.” Lucie pressed on. As they drove onto a rural road, far out of their usual circuit and into an unfamiliar part of Canada, Lucie jokingly asked the boys if they knew where they were. “Yes,” William piped up. “We’re on page 34.” Lucie sat for a moment in silence. “Oh, wait, we just drove onto page 35.” Lucie realized that William had done more than just study the atlas—he had
memorized
it. And not just their own neighborhood or their familiar haunts. He had memorized the entire thing.
    Lucie couldn’t probe too deeply; if she tried to pry open the doors to William’s mind, he was quick to change the subject or shift the conversation back to something that interested him. But William’s knowledge wasn’t something he could conceal, either. His command of geography popped up again when Lucie once referred to a street ina place they were visiting. William supplied two cities that had a street of that name (in one of which the street was so short, few cabbies would have known of it) and asked which one she meant.
    William had the same fascination with vocabulary. The fall after he turned five, he saw Lucie pick a dictionary up off the shelf. William asked what it was. Lucie explained that it was a book that listed every word in the English language. “He looked at me like, ‘How could you keep this from me all these years?’” Lucie recalled. When he received a dictionary of his own for Christmas, he abandoned all his other gifts and paged through it, soaking in all of the information. He discovered sections previously unknown to Lucie: lists of the most common words, lists of the most commonly used letters. “I would just go in and look up a word,” Lucie said. “I never read it like a book.”
    It made him an ace at Scrabble—he knew every two-, three-, four-, and five-letter word that contained the letter
q
and delighted in slamming them down on triple-word-score spaces. He enjoyed creating words so much that sometimes he played both players in a two-player Scrabble game.
    When William was five, Mike gave him a printout of the periodic table of elements. By the end of the day, he had memorized it. Lucie tried to coax William into playing outside, and she eventually persuaded him by giving him a piece of chalk he could use to draw on the ground. He took it and re-created the periodic table on their backyard patio. Over the next few months, he taught himself everything he could about each element: its symbol, molecular weight, electron shell structure, diameter in picometers, density, state of matter, year and country of discovery, what it is used in, percent on Earth’s surface, and percent in our bodies.
    His memory—at least for things that interested him—seemed to know no bounds. At five, he discovered pi. Over two days, he memorized it to the seventy-fifth decimal place. He memorized every country in the world, including information about its location, capital, population,