Entwistle Farm, Walla Walla, Washington, July 1986

William’s whole body shook, causing his teeth to chatter in his head like a jackhammer. He was freezing, even though it was summer. William picked himself up off the hardwood floor and leaned against his upstairs bedroom window sill. Heat shimmered over rows of crops in the fields behind their house.

“Not this again,” he groaned. William had been caught in a stream of energy, trapped in his own memories of the past. Inside the stream he would wish with all his might he was home then an unseen force jerked him back. 

A familiar sound reached his ears. His brother Archie was calling him to come downstairs. Archie and Larry were going out to the barn to test Larry’s new invention, a small remote controlled plane with a camera attached. 

William yelled back to his brothers, “I’m gonna shower.” 

William tried to walk, but his legs were like jelly. He stumbled into the bathroom, gingerly stepped into the shower and turned the nozzle. He rested his head against the tiles and let warm water fall on his body. 

~~~~~

West Seattle, Washington, October 2015

Aeneas Entwistle stretched his legs and glanced down at his feet. Two different socks again. He pulled off each sock, carefully examined the patterns and thought back to the night before. He’d stayed up late finishing his geometry homework, but he was certain when he went to bed that his socks were green, with the Seattle skyline etched in white. Yet attached to his feet were a bright red sock scattered with blue dots and a black sock with a pattern that looked like falling snow. 

The decision before him now was whether he wanted to make a mad dash for the bathroom without changing his socks and risk a sighting by his younger sister or his older brother or stash them at the bottom of his sock drawer. In a house full of geniuses, any unexplained phenomenon like waking up with socks of unknown origin was bound to cause suspicion, invite comment, or draw as it were, too much unwanted attention to oneself. One of the geniuses might even take it upon themselves to hook up a machine to monitor his REM cycle or tag him with a tracking device. Aeneas had to be vigilant to escape their notice.

Having just turned fourteen, Aeneas wanted less, not more attention from his overachieving siblings. With this in mind, the socks were kept secret from everyone except his two best friends, Tabitha and C.J.

Aeneas was not a genius like the rest of his family. He was a bright, funny, athletic teen who loved games of all kinds and played for the sheer fun of it rather than to win. His parents were shocked to find after several different IQ tests were administered that genetic diversity had endowed their middle child with only above average intelligence. 

Miranda confided to Archie, “Surely there must be some mistake. Aeneas can’t just be above average.”  

Archie smiled and replied with a shrug, “What about my younger brother William?” 

Miranda sighed. There was no arguing that. Archie had two brothers, one a genius and the other, not. 

Miranda and Archie were scientists holding Ph.D.’s in both chemistry and chemical engineering. After their wedding they decided to settle in Seattle's Industrial District and hired an architect to help them retrofit an old warehouse into a state of the art laboratory. They were considered innovators by their peers and frequently published scientific articles in prestigious academic journals. Soon after Aeneas’s older brother was born, Archie decided to convert the adjacent warehouse from a spare laboratory into a livable loft, because their family was beginning to grow. For a few years they resided there quite happily.

From the time Aeneas could walk, he loved to play soccer and spent hours a day practicing inside the loft when it was too rainy for his mom or dad to bundle up his baby sister and take them to the park. However, after a series of mishaps involving broken glassware, a small explosion and loss of power for two city blocks, Aeneas at the tender age of four suggested to his father that they buy a house near a park where he could practice soccer without causing a blackout.

Aeneas was beloved by his parents even though he wasn’t brainy like his siblings. He was, in fact, quite astute in ways his parents began to appreciate. One day Aeneas had spotted a house for sale a few blocks from Hiawatha Playfield in West Seattle when he was attending a birthday party of a friend from Montessori school and insisted his father go see it. Archie took one tour of the house and decided that his young son was shrewd about practical matters. They were a family of five now and a home was needed. Archie called the realtor, offered a good cash price and the Entwistle family moved in a week later. 

Archie and Miranda had always had enough money to buy a home, a very nice home, but their priorities were occupied with testing chemical compounds that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions and serve as sustainable fuels, so buying a house simply never crossed their minds. Throughout his life, Aeneas assisted his parents in practical ways, such as buying a house, and even later when the whole family became extremely busy, proposing a housekeeper to prepare regular meals and tackle their mountains of laundry. 

But Aeneas was keenly aware that his interests and the interests of his family were diverging, so he kept a few secrets. Some were small, like his stash of comic books hidden under neatly folded hoodies at the top of his closet and others were big, like waking up with two different socks. And the socks… Well, they didn’t need to be up for scrutiny.