Connie is quiet and awkward and never knows what to say to other children. She can talk with a teenager or an adult for hours, astounding them with how "adorable" and "precocious" she is. She isn't too bad with toddlers, either. But when the other kids gossip over their desks about what they did over summer vacation, her tongue feels like it's coated with lead.
How should she enter the conversation? What could she say? She has nothing. Nothing interesting or funny, no clever anecdotes. What she has is a head that feels like it's stuffed with cotton and a heart frozen stiff in her chest by deep, primal terror. If she tries to blurt out something, she'll say something weird that no one cares about, and they'll just give her that strange look-like she's wrong in some imperceptible way, physically possessing the same eight-year-old body, but something's just slightly mentally askew and they all can see it-and Connie can't take that look again. She's so tired of it.
At her desk, Connie silently reaches into her backpack and pulls out her reading material, one of the library's newest crop of children's fantasies. Dragons and forests and shapeshifters, oh my. She flips to the page she'd bookmarked less than ten minutes ago, when she stepped off of the bus. Connie spreads the pages under her fingers, and they flutter luxuriously, thick gobs of text scattering around her as her eyes are magnetically drawn to the passage where she'd stopped.
Connie runs her fingers along the smooth paper and relaxes.
Connie immerses herself in her story.
The world fades away.
It's not that Connie can't tell what's reality and what's fantasy.
Connie knows what reality is. She is Connie Maheswaran, skinny, nut-brown skin and long dark hair that gets in the way when she plays tennis (but it's the only pretty thing about her, so she doesn't want to cut it), a bit taller than average, glasses. She plays the violin and practices tennis, and always, always gets As. She has no friends.
That's Connie Maheswaran.
But Connie can't help but feel that reality is a slurred, murky place. It's here and there and everywhere, and yet...her mind doesn't really feel like it's quite in the same place as everyone else's. The moon in the night sky is so dim, the days are blinding bright.
They don't want her, anyway, right? What's the point of hanging around? Connie reads as she waits to go to school, and reads as she walks, and reads in class when she can spare the time, and reads during lunch and on the playground, and reads as she does things around the house, and reads at the beach, and reads in the car and on the bus, and reads everywhere that she possibly can and a number of places she probably shouldn't. It's the easiest thing in the world, as long as she doesn't stop to think.
Connie Maheswaran is a good girl, after all, and good girls read. But do good girls stay up past midnight, quietly reading by the light of a tiny flashlight, fingers tense and ears strained for the creak of their parents' checking to make sure they're actually asleep? That's a little more complicated.
It's worth it, though. If Connie does this, she's not quite Connie. She can spend as little time as physically possible thinking about everything she hates about herself. She can replace herself, piece by piece, with something that isn't her.
Maybe when there's less of her, she won't feel so alone.
Did books spark whatever's wrong with her? Or is it the other way around? Connie can't quite remember.
It was a long time ago, back when she liked reading The Berenstain Bears. She'd check the one about Sister and Brother Bear starting their own feuding secret clubs out of the library time after time, running chubby, dark fingers over illustrations of kids hanging out with each other, making their own secret inventions, all sorts of fun stuff. In the end, Mama and Papa Bear figured things out, and the rift between the siblings was patched.
Connie, coincidentally, is an only child. A very lonely only child.
She'd been a toddler, so she didn't really understand why she'd been so fascinated with the story before. She does now, albeit reluctantly. One of the good things about reading? It gives her a lot less time to spend psycho-analyzing herself. Self-epiphanies are never a good thing, she's realized. There are all sorts of unpleasant things someone can realize about themselves that they'd much rather have never known.
So, Connie feels lost and alone, all of the time. Fine. As long as she reads most of the time, she can't think about that. As long as she stays up until the early hours reading, she's too tired to think as she falls asleep, too tired to dream. As long as she never stops doing things for one second, and plugs the cracks between all of those moments of activity with reading, the thoughts can only get in through the tiniest holes. And she can deal with those occasional surges. She can push them out of her mind, and fantasize about her latest novels instead.
That's what fantasies are for, after all.
By the time she's eleven, Connie is quietly spending the vast majority of her time somewhere far from herself. But she still needs to stay connected to her life, or she'll fail her classes or waste her time at her extracurriculars, which would be awful. So she uses touch to tell her what's real and what's not real. When she needs to be grounded, a spot of touch always works.
Her violin. That's real. She grasps the violin with one hand and her bow with the other, and the wood is sleek and cold and hard in her grasp. After tuning her strings, she runs the tip of a finger over the horsehair set in her bow, just once. It's slippery beneath her fingers. With a smooth motion, string rubs against hair and sound creaks out. She closes her eyes, wraps her thin fingers more tightly around her instrument, and begins to play, the wood reassuringly cold and hard against her neck and hands. She's not lost, she's here, because she's playing the violin.
Her tennis racket. That's real, too. She holds its handle more roughly compared to the delicate touch she tries to use on her violin, then whacks a ball across the net. The racket vibrates satisfyingly in her fingers, the way it only does when she's hit a ball perfectly dead-center. This is reality.
Her pencil. It's real. The slim wood is hard against her thin fingers, and as she presses it into the pape, it rubs against the callus that's developed on her ring finger. She's writing an essay for school, one on the more complex version of the water cycle they'd been learning recently. The pencil makes the shallow scratching sound that she's always loved as she moves it across the page, and through half-lidded eyes, she sees words take form, miraculously-no, that's wrong, not miraculously. Those words appear on purpose, because of something she does. They're real and she makes them.
The pages under her fingers. They're real. Even if she's reading, a million miles away and, thankfully, not Connie Maheswaran at the moment, the pages are smooth and familiar in the way nothing else is, and that's how she knows that no matter where her mind is, she's still there. Adrift, but there, like an astronaut tethered to her ship.
Connie's mom and dad are real, too.
So is her desk.
So are her clothes.
So is her bed.
And that's her trick. If she can touch something, then she's there.
But most of the time, that's a distant reminder. Most of the time, she's reading, lost among stormy seas and sprawling nights, so it doesn't really matter. Connie casts herself out like a fishing line into the ocean's infinity, again and again.
Connie brings books everywhere. She was too young to own a phone for much of her life, but no one would deny a child their books. A minimum of two in her backpack, always. One in her athletic bag. A couple in the car. Stacks and stacks of them scattered around the house, ready for her perusal, and another stack on her bedside table, in case she's ever on the go. Not counting, of course, the one she's reading at the moment that goes everywhere with her, to the dinner table where it sits beside her-pages fanned against the table to hold her place-to class, where she tucks it in her desk with her schoolbooks, to the pool, where she holds it lightly in one hand-fingers fitting so easily and naturally around its edges-as she heaves her pool bag along the hot pavement.
She brings a book when she goes to the beach, too.
When Connie sees magic for the first time, it's not that she's not startled. It's not that she thinks it's fake. It's that she rests her hands on an impossibly slick, diamond-hard bubble…
And months later, she grips two hands around a pink hilt that is barely too large for her-and she'll soon grow into it, anyway...
And because she can do that, she knows it's real.
And that's so very amazing, and so absolutely terrifying.
Steven is solid and soft and definitely real. He's also pretty much the sweetest person anyone could ever meet. He's made of sunshine and Cookie Cats, which just makes everything he has to go through even worse. He doesn't deserve any of this, and she doesn't deserve him. Someone as incredible as Steven should have someone so much...better...than her paltry self as their best friend.
But she's what he has.
She's what he, inexplicably, wants.
In that case, she just has to live up to the infinitely more amazing version of herself that he has, equally inexplicably, decided is the real Connie Maheswaran.
It's amazing what happens when you're not paying attention.
Connie had always kind of hated herself, but changing herself had been impossible. Not when there were books, books everywhere, to soothe the sting, to numb it to a distant echo in the back of her brain.
With Steven, nothing feels quite so impossible. Steven is a magical half-alien half-human hybrid, the fourth member of a team of ancient, intergalactic warriors, and in the face of what he's up against-what they're up against-well, it's fascinating what the subconscious considers a priority.
Connie doesn't realize it until she gets home late from sword practice that night. But as she flops onto her bed, sweaty, tired limbs flying everywhere, she turns her head...and sees her current book on her nightstand.
She hadn't brought it to school, she hadn't even noticed it was missing-she'd texted Steven during lunch, and finished the homework she no longer had time to do at home in the spaces around her classes.
She hadn't brought it to hanging out with Steven-they'd gone for a swim, then sprawled out in the sand, his fingers plucking out a new melody on his ukulele while Connie built a castle fit for even the most regal of sand-royalty.
She hadn't brought it to sword practice-no time, with Pearl's frantic tutelage and Steven's back to watch, same as he watched hers.
She hadn't touched a book the entire day.
Connie rolls over, shocked. When was the last time she'd gone a day without reading! How would she keep up with her quota? She had so many books to read this week, same as always. Would she have to stay up late to finish it? That normally wouldn't be a problem, but training so much made it hard to stay up late-she would find her eyes closing of their own accord as she nestled into her pillows. So would she…
Connie stops. Stares at the book. And with more willpower than she had known she possessed, she takes a shower-hot water against her limbs, she's here, she's not adrift, her muscles ache, her skin burns, her head is full of memories, she's here-changes into her nightgown-cotton on damp skin-and lies down to sleep.
Books had always seemed so large, so absorbing, so infinite. There are whole worlds, whole galaxies hidden in there, she thinks as her eyes are drawn towards the invitingly thick book lying so close to her.
The thing is, there are galaxies out here, too.
When she closes her eyes, she thinks of that day's swim with Steven.
AN: Thanks to lovely45 on ao3 for betaing.
I've never really liked Connie as a character, mostly because she reminds me entirely too much of myself. Sorry for dumping my issues on you, sweetie. You don't deserve it.
Constructive criticism is always welcomed!