That fierce fire.

On how a moment in the 3rd grade still lives in me.

Some moments thwack you awake and then lodge in your body.

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In kindergarten, I sat on a tall stool and pointed toward the illustrations in a picture book as I read to my class. My teacher offered me this assignment to give me something to do with the words that lined up in my head, marching in sentences that chanted. Sometimes they grew unruly and turned into a new song.

While other kids curved their crayons around the outline of a C in a contained space, I wrote my own little stories. Sure, I gripped my pencil tightly, trying to maintain that perfect line. But words of 1st-grade wisdom spilled out of me, unbidden. Every time I held a pen, writing and reading pulsed in me, urgent, joyful.

I remember the physical feeling of settling in my hard plastic chair and opening a new little book. A world opened in my mind as well. I hungered for every story, every chance to meet a new person.

Books always felt like magic to me.

The scheduled section of the day when our teacher read to the class? Within a few weeks after starting school, that space became my domain.

No. Wait. It doesn’t live that concrete in my mind.

I remember the stories my parents told me, about how I read to the class every day. How my teacher stood to the side, probably tired and ready for the break. How I sat high above my classmates and held the picture book open wide, reading the words on the page, then turning the book to my classmates, pointing out the pictures. How I would chastise certain kids who didn't seem to be paying attention.

I know their memory of this because it was told to me so many times.

But my memory?

I remember feeling that reading elated me. I remember sitting above my classmates on that stool, all of them assembled on the rug below me.

I remember how weird that felt in my chest. I remember being set apart.

Sometimes I wanted to be on that rug with them instead.

My parents prided themselves that I read so easily by the time I was 5. I think they needed me to be a genius, for a variety of reasons.

But being a super-early reader turns out to have been far less important than I was led to believe back then. Being on the rug might have done me more good.

The way I see it now — from a distance much greater than perching on a stool above the rug — is that words surged in me, early. They filled me, fascinated me, and captured my attention. Words — and the stories they formed — helped me make sense of the world.

It's how I am made.

But that sense of being set apart, high on my stool, teaching the kids my age, also cemented me as different. Right away.

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When I was 5, everything was okay in my house.

By the time I was 7, anger and anxiety spiraled in my parents and through the rooms of our home. Not much made sense to me.

I tried to use my precocious sense of words to make them stop fighting, to talk sense into them. Quickly — the way I had been elevated from student the first day of kindergarten to assistant reading teacher within a few weeks — my ability to talk to my seething-with-anger parents and calm them down with my words became codified.

This was my job.

One day, my mother turned to me after another UN-level negotiation to quell their resentful rage and said, "Thank goodness for you, Shauna. You're the real adult of the family."

I was 8.

This also cemented me as different, right away.