When Tiffany Hammond was growing up in Texas, in the nineteen-nineties, other children teased her for how she spoke: she talked too softly, she talked in a monotone, she paused too long between words, she didn’t talk enough, she talked to herself. “Something’s wrong with her head,” kids would say. She was always fidgeting with pens or Troll dolls. She tried to connect with her peers by taking on their interests as her own—the Goosebumps series of scary novels, the N.B.A.—but the attempts backfired, as when she printed out an N.B.A. schedule, laminated and color-coded it, and brought it to school as a conversation piece. She kept a notebook on “how to be human,” which included tips such as remembering to staple your worksheets at the top-left corner and acquiring a pair of the correct Filas. Nothing worked. “I wondered why I didn’t have friends, or if I even deserved friends,” Hammond said. She dreaded school so much that, on a few mornings, when she was supposed to be walking there, she instead tried to make it to her great-grandparents’ house, some twenty-five miles away.