Theo and Alec

Theo reminded Alec of a dolphin at the Shed Aquarium he had visited in Chicago. Alec thought of Theo as any dolphin, really; the one at the Shed was only the particular dolphin he imagined when the connection snapped into place in his mind. When his family visited the Shed on the day after his seventh birthday, he remembered that the tour guide pointed at a pregnant dolphin, “Dolphins never fall to sleep. Their brains are in two parts like ours, but instead of sleeping all at once a dolphin puts one half its brain to sleep while the other half is working,” she said.
Theo was so dead sometimes that Alec thought half Theo’s brain must be always asleep.