Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos Read Free Book Online

slouch suddenly felt like a slouch, true and easy. So he’d looked up to check how far they’d gone and, weirdly enough, it’d been one hundred miles exactly.
    Dev amused himself with the idea that the town, or more specifically, Dev’s school had a kind of atmosphere of tension and dread around it that stretched out a hundred miles in every direction and that Dev had escaped, punched out of that atmosphere like a rocket into clear, breathable air. This wasn’t true, of course, although Dev didn’t rule out that there might be some real reason for the one hundred miles, and that if Dev had more information about space and time or maybe about physiology, he might be able to figure the reason out.
    Anyway, Dev would love it if he never saw that town again. He wasn’t mad at Lake for taking them out of the town. He wasn’t even mad that she’d given him less than two weeks’ notice that they were leaving, because if she’d tossed his duffel bag to him in the middle of dinner one night, said, “We’re out of here,” and headed for the door, he would’ve gladly gulped down his milk and gone.
    Dev was mad, Dev was fuming because his mother wouldn’t give him a straight and complete answer to his question of why they were leaving, and he was fuming because she wouldn’t give him any answer at all as to why, with the whole country spread out before them, they were making a beeline for some suburb of Philadelphia, as small and random a black dot as there was on the entire map. For Dev, the more mysterious and complex an idea the better; he loved unpacking a difficult theory, working to understand how it all fit together. But Dev wanted two things in the world to be as utterly straightforward and unmysterious as possible: one was music, the other was his mother.
    Dev glanced down at the open book on his lap, at the sentence under his thrumming fingers: “Evolution has no pinnacle and there is no such thing as evolutionary progress.” The music in his head didn’t grow fainter, but it slipped slightly into the background to clear out a space for the sentence. Evolution, now there was an idea you could really sink your teeth into. Dev’s list of heroes was fairly constantly rearranging itself, but Charles Darwin was definitely up there, way up. What thrilled Dev about Darwin was that he hadn’t employed esoteric equations or fancy gadgets to accomplish what he’d accomplished, but had done what all human beings do, more or less. He’d walked around the world looking at the things in it, but because of what he’d chosen to look at and because of the kind of attention he’d paid, he’d come up with an idea so rich and dazzling, it had made everyone see life in a new way.
    But if you tried to trace Dev’s seventh-grade trouble to a single source, that source would be Darwin. To be precise, the source would be the idea that lay strong and still under Dev’s beating fingers, that evolution wasn’t moving toward any pinnacle or toward anything at all. But blaming that idea wasn’t entirely fair because trouble had been waiting for Dev; he’d felt it as soon as he’d walked through the door of his new junior high. Trouble had been like a ten-ton sleeping monster curled up somewhere in the vicinity of Dev’s locker; the theory of evolution had just been the noise that woke it up.

    It had happened at the start of the second week of school, the first week of real school, since the first calendar week had been a combination of getting-to-know-you games, passing out gym uniforms, and seething chaos. On Monday of the second week of school, Mr. Tripp had entered Dev’s biology class, tossed his books dramatically on the desk in front of him, turned his back to the class, and written EVOLUTION on the chalkboard in letters nearly a foot high.
    Then Mr. Tripp had spun around and demanded, “Do you people know why we can sit in this room today and talk about the theory of evolution?”
    Dev considered saying something