Excerpt from I See You Made an Effort by Annabelle Gurwitch, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

*The Apple Time Capsule, or Time Machine, is the most technically advanced and popular external hard-drive gadget Apple has on the market. I bought it because I liked the name.

† I would try to come up with one memorable code but not: 123456, 12345678, or Password, Pussy, or Baseball. A successful hack of millions of Yahoo accounts on July 12, 2012, revealed that's what the majority of people use as passwords.

Judging from his appearance, it seems a distinct and sobering possibility that AuDum Genius might have been born the same year I was throwing clay.

"So, how old are you?"

"Twenty-six."

He is closer in age to my son than me by a decade. As he checks out my computer, I pepper him with questions. "What qualifies one to be a Genius? Is there much training? An IQ test?"

Just as he's about to answer, another of his tribe, Sean Genius, comes over and deferentially asks what even I know to be a simple question. "What do you do if someone forgets her iTunes password?" AuDum helps him out and I compliment him by noting that some Geniuses seem more gifted than others. He tells me that he was certified at the thirty-two-acre Apple campus, located at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California. The hotels are owned by Apple, the blankets have an Apple stamp, and would-be Geniuses eat on plates stamped with the Apple logo in Apple-owned cafés and are regularly whisked past restricted areas where classified research takes place. In fact, he will return for further training soon.

"Ooh," I tease him excitedly. "You could be a spy, pretending you're there to train, but you're really sneaking in to collect intel for Intel. The James Bond of computer tech."

He looks at me blankly. Clearly the reference to Bond doesn't hold the kind of cachet it did for generations of men before him.

Should have said Jason Bourne. That's when he suggests a radical move.

"Are you up for it?"

"I am."

He wants to strip my computer down completely and then carefully, slowly and deliberately, he will reload my hard drive. In order to make this work, I will have to agree to do everything he says, even if it sounds a bit unusual.

"In order to give something, we have to take something away," he tells me. Is he quoting the Bible or a sacred Steve Jobsian aphorism? I have no idea, but he had me at "reload."

We will need to download any applications I use and the process may take all night. During that time, I shouldn't do anything to harm or disturb the computer, he warns, or we'll have to start all over again and can I manage that kind of painstaking process? I'm forty-nine years old, I have all of my own teeth, most of my wedding china is still intact, and the baby who was cut out of my abdomen while I was awake has made it to puberty under my watch, so yes, I think I can do that. I nod my assent, swallowing hard. He tells me to take everything off.

I remove my data silently and swiftly. He begins his maneuvers, and I want to hear more about his mother.

"Were you always close, or did you find your way back to her as an adult?"< br>
"Oh, we were on the same team until maybe thirteen or fourteen and then it got tough. She was having a hard time, too. She got divorced, changed careers, we moved around, but then things turned around after I went to college. Now we're close."

I take out a pen and paper to write his words down—like I'm an anthropologist taking field notes on the maturation process of young men. His grandmother died last month and his mother is "freaked" about being the oldest person left in her family. He's been calling a lot to help her make peace with that.

His hands are nice, I notice, nails filed, but a quick glance down the counter shows me that all Geniuses have clean hands and filed nails. Maybe it's code, like the way Disney once required employees at the park to be clean-shaven.* I may be looking at the last of the Apple manicures, but I hope not. It's nice to see good grooming on twenty-somethings. It's kind of old-school, or rather, my school.

Excerpted from I See You Made an Effort by Annabelle Gurwitch. Copyright © 2014 by Annabelle Gurwitch. Excerpted by permission of Blue Rider Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.