She shook her head. “I must have gotten my creative genes from my biological parents. Reality is, I don’t care about the brain. All I care about is how to make the body beautiful.”

“Do you know who they are, your biological parents?” I asked.

“Nope.”

I looked down at the bottle in my hand, and watched the condensation slip down the side and trickle onto my hand.

“Sometimes I think I’m adopted, but no one bothered telling me,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

I paused. I would normally never get this personal with someone so quickly, but Thembi had let me into her world. “You know Barbara Palmer of Palm Luxury Realty.”

She sat up straight and her eyes widened. “You’re shitting me? That’s your mom? The one from all the YouTube videos?” The flatness in her tone was gone now, and I got a feeling I was starting to glimpse the real Thembi.

“The very same.”

“And I thought my mom was weird. You know, she brings Neanderthal skulls to our house. And I once found human brain dissections in our freezer, and my dad once psychoanalyzed me because I told him I had a dream about being a peanut butter sandwich.”

I burst out laughing. “That’s equally weird!”

“And your dad?” she asked.

“My parents are divorced. My dad screwed some twenty-something-year-old in a hot tub.”

“More and more interesting by the minute.” She paused. “I wish my parents would get divorced.” There was now a hint of sadness in her voice.

“You don’t. Trust me.”

“No, I do. They can’t stand each other sometimes.”

“They don’t look like it.”

“Looks can be deceiving. My dad thinks his research and career are more important than my mother’s, and she thinks hers are . . . their jobs are the most important things to them.”

“My brother is autistic,” I blurted out for some strange reason, and immediately regretted it.

“My mother always says that neurodiversity is the next step in the evolution of the human brain. That neurodiverse brains actually have a competitive edge. Some companies are even seeking to employ neurodiverse people.”

“Really?” I went quiet and thoughtful for a moment, while I considered this. Perhaps it was true. The idea that Zac’s autism was some kind of a mistake had never sat right with me. I’d never viewed his brain as defective in any way. If anything, I’d always seen it as superior in the way it functioned, and saw things and drew connections that others couldn’t. There was genius inside Zac, and perhaps the world around us was just defective because it couldn’t understand his rare and special gifts.