“So it’s you, Mr. Schafer, who’s been stealing the pudding cups out of my sack lunches!”

The line was delivered just like that, dramatically, the way a super hero would address a super villain. The pudgy kid in the wheelchair rolled out of the elevator with a triumphant look on his face.

Adam saw the man selling flowers by the freeway onramp and decided he was going to buy one for Lucy. He’d noticed people selling flowers there before, but never thought he’d actually be a customer.

“Over here!” Adam shouted at the flower salesman. The man walked up to Adam’s window. He was wearing a dirty brown blazer.

Adam studied the flowers clenched in the man’s fist. Most of them were ordinary red roses. The one exception was a purple flower with yellow splotches and wide droopy petals.

“I’ll take that one,” Adam said, pointing.

Excerpt from Prenatal GenReport, Issued to Anne Talarico on 10.3.12:

“Subsequent tests revealed, with a high degree of certainty, the existence of the Hallman Sequence. This sequence manifests itself in a small percentage of tested subjects and has been strongly correlated with aggressive and violent behavior. Seventy-two percent of carriers exhibit signs of violent tendencies by the age of thirteen, and 53.5% go on to obtain criminal records…