During a thunderstorm when she’s eight, Lucy gets struck by lightning. She survives, but suddenly she’s a math genius. She can multiply large numbers without even trying; she also knows the day of the week for any day you name, be it in 1901 or 2055. Numbers for her have various colors and shapes. Lucy remembers every number she works with, including the first several hundred digits in pi. She also has obsessions with counting, doing things multiple times, and using wet wipes to clean surfaces.

Lucy, now 12, lives with her grandmother, Nana. Sometimes Nana’s son Paul, a Marine, visits. He gives her a lightning-bolt charm on a necklace. She loves it. Lucy is homeschooled, just earned her high school GED, and got a perfect score on the math SAT. Already she’s taking college classes online, but Nana wants her to go to a regular school first.

Lucy says she already has friends, four of them, whom she chats with in online math forums. Paul and Nana believe she should have in-person friends, but Lucy remembers how her do-everything-three-times-only habit always got in the way. She thinks her life is “perfectly balanced. Nana +

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