Why does no one ever understand that I simply can't help being smart?
Well, with a mother who has biology and maths PhDs and a father who was moved into a GCSE class at the age of eleven, I couldn't not be, could I?
When I was four, I'd started nursery class – which was just learning to make friends and sing cute little songs and maybe learn the alphabet. So my parents started to teach me how to read and write and add at home. It was all easy for me. I was so much further ahead of my classmates.
No one really cared until year 3 because before no one really understood that I was smarter and I didn't realise it either. Year 3 was when my friends stopped liking me. They saw that I was cleverer than them, and it made them hate me. Every time I answered a question, everyone would imitate my "posh" way of speaking (my parents had told me very sternly to speak proper English) or laugh. What made it worse was the fact that I just couldn't do sports, so I was always picked last for any team.
It started to upset me. I became more and more isolated – while everyone else was playing football at break, I'd be sat alone reading an Agatha Christie book. Some girls in my class tried to make friends with me a couple of times, but I'd spent so long without friends that I simply didn't know how to have fun and act my age. They said I was being rude and that if I didn't want any friends, that was fine by them.
But there were other things that made me different. Not my cleverness, but... something else.