They filled the fake store with real books before the first live taping. I touched their spines, running my fingers down the leather and cardboard and paper, tracing the indented and raised words with reverence. Somehow, even though it was a false front of a store, it even smelled like an old, used bookstore. Books had forever been my escape, my way out of this world and into another.

Books had given me friends. Great friends. I solved so many mysteries with Nancy Drew and Kinsey Millhone and James Qwilleran. I traveled to new realms with Aslan and Artemis Fowl. I learned magic with Hermione and Harry and, no. Let's be honest, Ron never learned anything. I cried with Stu and Frannie, with George and Lennie, with Holden and Phoebe.

My humor. My sarcasm. My wit. Books.

This love of reading made me valuable to the directors. I had a vocabulary beyond most nine-year-olds. I was able to connect to the emotions of characters. The writers loved to get me talking about books. They would scribble my babbled words, trying to make Maddie Turner come to life on the page, on the screen.

I thought I could learn anything I needed to know from reading. I was wrong. I never learned how to hold someone's hand without my palms sweating. I never learned how to leave a room gracefully. I never learned how to tell the people who mattered to me that they mattered to me.

I was so lost in thousands of imagined worlds. I never learned what it was to be loved. To be whole. To be real.