She will sometimes stay in her bedroom for the whole weekend. She will come down for dinner, but she won't speak unless she has to. The far-away look in her eyes tells you that she is daydreaming.

What she never told you is that she has been having the same daydream throughout the whole weekend. It began Friday afternoon and it's still not over on Sunday afternoon. The daydream has all the characteristics of an addiction. Every time she imagines a new plot twist, she gets intensely pleasurable feelings, and she has been in a mildly euphoric haze for three days. If she forces herself (or somebody forces her) to focus her mind elsewhere, ending the daydream, she goes through a very painful withdrawal. But she never told you that.

She loves colors, music and intricate designs. She will tell you with absolute certainty that the numeral one is white, two is yellow, and three is green. What she never told you is how badly and for how many months she has longed for one particular coloring and tracing book she once saw in the store.

She sees her brother pulling the legs off tiny bugs, and she runs to her room and cries. She vividly pictures what it must be like to have a huge being rip your body apart. That night she has nightmares about it. But she never told you about it.

When she was younger sometimes the nightmares woke her up and she cried. You went to her and she told you that a cat had been clawing at her blankets, trying to get up on the bed. You explained that there were no cats in the house, and she went back to sleep. She never told you that she was still sure that a cat had been clawing at her blankets.

Once there was a very loud, sudden noise outside. Everybody jumped and then started speculating about what caused it. She never told you that the very first possible explanation that popped into her mind was that a foreign country had just dropped a bomb on a nearby city. Only afterward did it occur to her that the noise might have been caused by a car crash or by thunder.

There are many more things she never told you: how passionately she loves tracing intricate patterns and designs, how much it hurts inside when her baby brother cries, that she thinks you are the absolute wisest person on earth, or how incredibly much love is in her heart, just waiting to be expressed.

It's not that she doesn't want to tell you these things. She's afraid to tell you, because she doesn't know how you will react. You might smile with genuine admiration for her incredible imagination and tell her that it will make her great some day. But you might just frown, look away, and say nothing at all.