When my stomach growled from hunger, when the foster parent I was stuck with preferred to snort cocaine rather than feed me, I would retreat into my mind, my nails buried in my teeth as I marked off another tick on the wall of the basement.

No one would ever understand that hollow existence. If I told them, they’d pity me—and I didn’t want their pity.

I didn’t need their sympathy.

I wasn’t some tragic story to be stared at from a distance.

Things only started to change when Arthur Price came into my life, at the moment when I was on the verge of being lost to the darkness of my own mind. He pulled me out of the wreckage and saved me in ways I didn’t know I needed saving. Arthur and Jenna took me and didn’t just give me a place to sleep or meals to eat; they gave me a home. It was as if someone had hit the reset button on my life. For the first time in years, I could breathe without feeling the weight of fear pressing down on me.

For the first time, I didn’t have to hide, didn’t have to pretend everything was fine when it was anything but.

I had to relearn how to feel, how to be human. I spent too much of my childhood locked away inside my own head, cutting myself off from everyone, pushing away the people who tried to get close. I was impenetrable, closed off, because I was scared—scared of being hurt again, scared of letting anyone see the mess I’d become. And when the experts started talking about my potential, when they told Arthur and Jenna that I was wasting it, I could feel myself retreating all over again.

They said I needed to advance, that my brain was a gift I wasn’t nurturing. They wanted me to skip grades and move ahead. They wanted me to leave everything I had just started to rebuild and throw myself into the kind of intellectual treadmill that would keep me trapped, constantly chasing something more.

But I didn’t want to be pushed any harder, to be treated like some kind of lab rat who could never catch a break. I wanted a life. I wanted to be me, not a mind for them to dissect.

To my surprise, Arthur and Jenna understood that.

They wanted me to live, to experience the things I had been denied and robbed of for so long. They didn’t want me to be a genius for the world. They wanted me to be a kid, to live a life that wasn’t defined by expectations.

They always fought for me, even convincing the school that I didn’t need to skip a grade. After plenty of discussions and negotiations, the school administration finally agreed to let me be in Beverly’s class.