There had always been something different about her. She had been a quiet child until her younger siblings came alone. Where with other babies her age would have forgotten items once they were out of sight, she always remembered and wanted them back where she could see them and know for sure they were still there. Her mother could not shower without dragging her highchair into the bathroom to let her sit and play with her toys, peeking out to prove she was still there every few minutes lest she begin to cry.
She would take all of the cans out of the pantry, line and stack them all up so that they faced a certain way and reorganize them to her liking. Her parents would find her doing this, put the cans back, and leave only to return and find her having repeated her actions. She did the same with her diapers and wipes, taking them all out and stacking them to her liking, all facing a particular way and following rules that only she seemed to know.
When she grew older, her physical education teachers were not pleased with her stubbornness and refusal to cooperate. She would refuse to walk anywhere but on the lines and would get upset at anyone who did not do the same. She would refuse to do certain exercises and no form of reprimand could make her budge. With her academic teachers, she cried more often than not until she was moved back a year and gained a friend. She became quiet and studious, thriving with her lessons save for the occasional abnormality. One such case was when she and her classmates were coloring a booklet of pumpkins and she began coloring the last few pages of pumpkins every color other than orange because coloring them orange was making her hand cramp up.
As she grew and developed, she remained studious and was claimed to be a delight by all her teachers. There were only a handful of issues that ever occurred, usually caused by spontaneous actions not thought through. Her mind eventually developed ahead of her peers, and she managed to skip ahead to the grade she would have been had she not been moved back when she was younger. By the time she reached high school, she was completing advanced classes and earning dual credit towards both high school and college.
She graduated cum laude and entered university three months later with a full scholarship and a full academic semester’s worth of college credits completed. As she completed the only freshman semester of her college career, she discovered that her university provided free counseling for all students. Upon her first appointment, years’ worth of anxiety, stress, and mental illness was revealed. She had never realized how broken she felt until these issues were pointed out by the counselor, finding reasons why she acted a certain way with certain assignments and why she viewed herself so poorly. She had been broken for a long time, but at last the broken pieces were being mended.