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

changes by adapting to them, period. That’s a huge simplification, but if you want to talk about winners and losers in evolution, the winners are the ones who survive change, not the ones who have the most complex brains or who communicate with language. Or whatever.”
    Now, every single person in the room was paying attention, and not the kind of attention people pay to someone who is saying something interesting. The kind of attention people pay to the guy who falls in the shark tank.
    “And you know this because you spent your summer reading The Origin of the Species ?” Mr. Tripp had raised his eyebrow and looked around the room at the other kids, as though they were all sharing a joke. But what Mr. Tripp said hit a nerve for Dev, a big nerve, and suddenly he surged way past caring what they all thought. For the record, he wouldn’t stay past caring; but at that moment, he’d only been able to think about Darwin.
    “No, see, that’s just it. It’s not The Origin of the Species . Not ‘ the species.’ Just species. All species. It’s not about us. We think we’re the center of everything because we’re smarter than other animals, but even that’s not fair because we invented the whole idea of ‘smart’ and we decided smart means the thing that we are. When you think about it, whales are smarter than we are when it comes to surviving in the deep ocean, right?”
    Dev had felt himself getting increasingly worked up, and some small part of him was aware that getting worked up about biology was not a way to make friends, not in the seventh grade anyway. But some things were more important than people liking you. Darwin, humility, and respect. Dev had been thinking about all this stuff a lot, and as corny as it sounded, he felt a kind of team spirit, a connection with all the survivors, with every living thing that had gotten this far. Team spirit mattered, right? Dev believed that it did.
    “Well, I see that at least one of us has decided that smart is the thing that he is,” said Mr. Tripp, which made Dev hate him. Mr. Tripp looked down at his roll book. “Aha. Deveroux Tremain.”
    And then Mr. Tripp had done a shocking thing. In front of the whole class, he’d said, “Oh, I was warned about you, Mr. Tremain. We all had a little sit-down about you before school started.” Mr. Tripp had begun walking around the room, addressing the other students in the class. “Mr. Tremain’s mommy and his elementary school principal decided to come on out and tell us all how special Mr. Tremain is, about how he deserves special treatment.” He’d circled the room and come back to stand in front of Dev again. “Now maybe I’m not as smart as you are, Dev. I didn’t reread the Constitution on my summer vacation, and no doubt you did.” What Dev saw in the teacher’s eyes was pure hatred. “But last time I checked, this was a democracy. Which means no one, not even Mr. Einstein here, I mean Mr. Tremain, deserves special treatment.”

    Naturally, that had been it for Dev, the end. He knew Mr. Tripp had been way out of control, that saying what he’d said in front of everyone was not only evil, but maybe also against the rules, some kind of violation of Dev’s right to academic privacy maybe. Dev knew that if he’d reported Mr. Tripp, the man might have gotten into some kind of hot water. But Dev felt defeated in a way he’d never felt in his life; no matter what they did to Mr. Tripp—and Dev didn’t think they’d actually fire him—the hour in that classroom had doomed Dev.
    So instead of telling on Mr. Tripp, Dev had retreated, folded in on himself every weekday from eight thirty to two thirty. At home, he felt pretty normal, and he’d finish his homework in no time and then would read and talk to Lake about what he’d read. Sometimes, in the evenings or on weekends, he’d go to a playground nearby and play pickup basketball with older guys who didn’t care about anything except that Dev was tall