My real friends were books and adults. Books didn’t care that I could hold an interesting conversation with adults. They also didn’t care that I wasn’t quick-witted. They did care that I knew the entire anatomy of the pancreas and how to pronounce islets of Langerhans, or that I could quickly find logarithms at the back of my math book (calculators do that now). Books thought I was cool for having read the entirety of the V. C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic series in fifth grade and for having already determined that I was going to be a gastroenterologist. Hence, I hung out with them