The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

“Of course I’ve heard of the Internet. I went through the orientation at the public library in the spring of 2000. Big to-do about nothing. Worse than watching TV.” She looked him over: beneath the misdirection of his genteel conduct and crisp uniform, he was a boy of the twenty-first century after all. Since her birth she’d witnessed the advent of automobiles, airplanes, automatic washing machines, atomic bombs, space shuttles, disposable diapers, and Touch-Tone, had received them all as a matter of course, her capacity for wonder peaking around 1969 with the moon landing; but this old-timey boy who carried a phone the size of a baby’s rattle and plucked information from France out of a machine in his bedroom presented quite the conundrum. She smoothed her hands over her head, as if to tidy up the technology it had already absorbed.