Where other children drew square houses with yellow-crayon bars of sunshine beaming down upon the triangle-roofs, I would stare blankly at the paper with arid, unblinking eyes. My fingers would rest on either side of the page and the golden pencil with a glinting lead tip would remain still at the midpoint of the sheet, looking as empty as I did. The others would snicker and whisper with cupped palms into their friends' ears, and despite the unintelligibility of their murmurs, the message rang clear: Look at the weird kid. Why doesn't she do what we do? There must be something wrong with her.1

Turned out, there was. And that 'something', that difference that was regarded a fault by so many for so long, is what brought me to Dassett Academy, and what became the most valuable 'something' of my life.2