Delia couldn’t hold it in anymore and told her what the twins had said, but she didn’t stop there. She told her about the looks the boys gave her when she joined the mathlete team, the ones that turned into glares when they realized she knew more than they did; she told her about the sleepovers Cassie was invited to that only turned into invitations for her when Cassie intervened. She told her that it didn’t really matter—that Cassie and her mom and dad and Smudge were enough.

Her mother listened, dried her own tears, and then pulled her daughter into an embrace. Delia curled into her, breathing in her lilac perfume, shielded by her light blonde hair, desperately trying to fit into the space of her mother’s lap, but she couldn’t. Not anymore. She pushed herself back, so tired of not fitting in.

“I wish I were like you and Dad,” Delia said. “Everyone loves you, the way you sing, how you make them feel. Numbers don’t make anyone feel anything.”

But numbers didn’t care if you “fit in” either, Delia had thought, and she’d begun to reconsider relegating her computer to the stuffed animal graveyard.

Her mom took both of Delia’s hands in hers. “I’m going to tell you something that my mother told me the day I insisted on wearing my Cinderella costume to school and came home in tears, searching for a pair of scissors. She said, ‘Some people are just plain mean, but it’s up to them to change, not you. Never stop being Cinderella, Claire.’”

Delia shrugged an understanding.

“I know.” Her mom gave a soft smile. “I thought it was corny too.”

“But did it help?”

“Some. Especially when I realized that if I were going to be someone for the rest of my life, it was going to be Princess Leia. Wore that costume until it shredded on its own. Hair buns and all.”

Delia laughed. “I hope there are pictures.”

“Sure are, I was a ham from birth.” She squeezed Delia’s hands. “And you, you were exactly this from birth. You started reprogramming the clocks after daylight savings time when you were four. I was so proud. I still am. But you need to be too.”

And that day, with Delia by her side, her mom researched Delia’s version of Princess Leia.

The end result was an expansion of the games on Delia’s Den, ones inspired by real-life women who made breakthroughs in computer science, like Ada Lovelace, whose writings from the 1840s led to her being credited as the first computer programmer.

Delia’s eyes drifted to the Ada quotation taped to the bottom of her bunk—the one that used to live on the corkboard above her desk at home.

Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, preeminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.