What Do I Do Now? 60
Someone who Elon hadn’t forgotten was Justine. While
visiting friends back at his old university, he convinced
Justine to go to a dinner date with him. They fit together -
both grew up as social misfits, bullied, and lonely. “I was a
really lonely kid and he [Elon] was a really lonely kid and
that’s one of the things that attracted me to him,” Justine
said. “I thought he had this understanding of loneliness
- of how to create yourself in that. A lot of the things
that come naturally to people he had to think about. It’s
more deliberate with him. The lessons he had to learn were
different from most of us. I don’t think people understand
how tough he had it growing up.”^278
“I see myself in you,” Elon told Justine.^182 When Justine
didn’t watch the television seriesKnight Rider,Fame, or
A-Team, she read a lot of books. At age five, she had
learned how to read, and her first teacher thought she just
stared at the pages to appear bright. “Reading was my first
and earliest drug,” she said. “I’ve been reading since first
grade, when I used my allowance to purchase a book in a
bookstore for the very first time.” Like Elon, she didn’t want
to go out on the playground during recess and lunch hour.
She hid somewhere in the school building and read.^141
After graduation, Justine moved to Japan for a year and
then returned to Canada where she worked as a bartender
while working on a novel as she was an aspiring writer. “If
Elon ever calls me again, I think I’ll go for it. I might have
missed something here,” Justine told her sister. Elon called
her one week later.^182