The Naturalist (The Naturalist #1)(43)

“Yes,” I reply hesitantly. “That’s what I wanted to talk about yesterday.”

“Yeah, yeah. A mix-up.” He rests his hand on the door frame. “I can’t let you take her up there alone. For all I know, you could be a whack job.”

I take off my sunglasses and point to my bruised cheek. “Do I strike you as the violent type?”

“You might be pissed and all. But that was a mistake. That was Charlie’s fault. He thought you were someone else.”

“Who is that?”

“I don’t know. Some guy that likes hitting girls. Fucking you up was wrong, but we never hit any women. Anyhow, I’m coming with you.” He grabs the handle to the back door.

“The fuck you are,” I shoot back, making sure the doors are locked.

Devon walks back to my window. “Listen, I’m sorry about what happened. Here.” He shoves his hand into his pocket and pulls out a wad of bills. “Take it back. Charlie’s got the rest.” He feeds the bills through the crack in the window like a vending machine.

I watch the money fall into my lap. When I look up, Amber is walking out of the house in a jacket.

“Is he okay with it?” she asks.

Devon looks at me through the window. “Well?”

This keeps getting worse. “Fine. But you’re sitting up front so I can watch you.” I know that’s something you’re supposed to do, but the idea doesn’t make me feel any safer.

“Sure. Cool.” He goes around the car and gets into the passenger side. Amber climbs into the back behind him.

It’s an awkward drive for the next few minutes. I keep a watch on Devon. Each time he moves, I twitch.

In the rearview mirror, I check to make sure Amber isn’t getting ready to strangle me with piano wire.

Finally Amber speaks. “I had to tell Devon where I was going. He pointed out you could be the guy that got Chelsea. Going off with you alone would be kind of stupid.”

These people are afraid of me?

“Amber is a bit too trusting,” Devon says.

“That would explain you in my life,” she replies.

“Woman, I’m the best thing that happened to you.”

“Oh, lord. If this is the best, I don’t want to go on.” Amber shakes her head and stares out the window.

Devon reaches for the radio, and I shove my hand in my pocket. He notices. “You carrying?”

Carrying? He means a gun. It might be better if they think I’m armed. “I’m always careful.” I add, “I told some friends where I was going to be.”

“We did, too,” Devon replies. “Never know.”

“No, you don’t.” I give him an anxious glance, but he’s staring at the houses as they pass by.

After a few minutes he speaks up. “Amber says you’re a scientist? What kind?”

“I studied biology. But I’m in computer science, too.”

“Cool. Cool. I wanted to be an astrophysicist.”

What a loss to the scientific community.

“I had straight As until my senior year,” Devon explains. “That’s when my mom got sick. I graduated, but barely. I guess I should do some online stuff. I watch the Discovery Channel all the time.”

“High,” Amber says from the back seat.

“Carl Sagan got high a lot.”

“He was also Carl Sagan,” I reply, regretting it, but Devon laughs.

“True. True. So, Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould?”

“You’ve read them?”

“Yeah. The Blind Watchmaker is one of my favorite books ever.”

The debate between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould was whether the genes or the whole animal was the principal driving force of evolution. It was actually one of the reasons I got into bioinformatics.

To an amateur scientist, asking where you stood on Dawkins versus Gould was the equivalent of asking who your favorite sports team was.

The debate died down when people began to appreciate the notion that evolution is a very complex process and saying the animal or the gene is the deciding factor is too simple.

“I side with Dawkins,” I reply, so Devon won’t murder me in the woods. “But it’s complicated. One of the things I study is how we define genes. As you know, there’s a biological definition for it as the smallest unit of inheritability. But things are more complex. I tend to think about things in terms of systems or processes. Some systems can be reduced to a few bits of DNA. Others involve entire ecosystems.”

“Where do you draw the line at the organism?”

Apparently, Devon is more intelligent than I realized. Granted, our first meeting wasn’t under the best circumstances.

“I’ve heard it argued that we’re just space suits for mitochondrial DNA,” I reply. “Another thought is that we’re just moving cities of gut bacteria. We carry more bacterial DNA than our own. Not by length, but unit. An alien might not recognize us as what we think we are.”

“I’m not sure I recognize us as us,” says Amber.

“We’re constantly changing.” I point to the darkening sky. “As the seasons change, some of our genes switch on or off. Genetically, we become slightly different organisms. Other things can do that, too.” I don’t think I want to bring up my were-frog research right now. “Nature controls us more than we want to admit.”