Chapter 2

Connie has the foresight to picture her future rather clearly, and all these silly fantasies she has, of soft lips and gentle touches and feminine curves—they’re not a part of it. ‘Stability and security’, as her father says. That’s what she imagines for herself. What she wants right now is a delusion, a distraction. What she wants and what she is meant for are two perpendicular paths that will never meet and, if she’s being honest, that doesn’t faze her as it should. Sacrificing the things she loves is nothing new. She accepts very early on that the cravings of her heart are a vice she’ll never give in to, and while she may not be the best at school or studying Connie is smart enough to know and understand the things that truly matter.

Connie knows she is gay. She has known it right from the start, right from the moment she first learned what gaymeant. But she never thinks it might be something with the power to jolt her entire world and flip her upside down; not until Alex Ryan comes creeping into her life. 1

June 1993

I read the Aeneidwhen I first moved to London. Trying to fight off that unmerciful voice at the back of my head coaxing me into submitting to my loneliness I delved into a pile of second-hand books I picked up from the bookshop around the corner, something I hadn’t done since I was a child. I loathed the Aeneidmore than any other book I had ever read, what with its one-dimensional hero, its flimsy plot, its lack of focus. If not for its portrayal of fate and destiny I imagine I would have long forgotten about it by now. Virgil’s depiction of fate still resounded in my memory for a long time afterward. Throughout those lonely months I spent my days pondering fate, and destiny, and life paths. I wondered if everything is set out before us long before it transpires, everything under the control of fate, each of us victim to a premeditated game of dice, an unknowing victim of some ice blooded god. I wondered if there was no such thing at all—if our existence truly was a mistake, a slip-up in the mechanics of the universe, and if we were all just sauntering around with no upper hand influencing our destinies and so unfathomably insignificant that our selfish, ignorant minds could never comprehend it.

It wasn’t a pleasing topic to ponder over, but I deduced eventually that when the worst things befall us in life it is so much easier to shrug all of the blame off of ourselves and accuse the cards we were dealt, firm in the belief that there was nothing we could have done to escape our personal tragedies. But when luck strikes, we boast that we alone orchestrated our fortune and that our winnings are won by our own hands—no gods, no fate, no predestination.

It would be hard, in years to come, to even remember that there once existed a version of myself before I came to know Connie O’Reilly. I suppose you could quite easily divide my life into two decidedly uneven halves; the Alex before Connie, and Alex after Connie. Two barely reconcilable figures, I suppose, who lived very different lives and embodied very different ideals. A girl who was meek and well-mannered and mundane, compared to she who flirted with trouble and blasted caution and common sense to the wind. The time that came before is hardly memorable to me now. I was plain and unassuming before there was Connie, so much so that I struggle to picture clearly what I must have been like before she catapulted into my world and transformed the very essence of who I was.

Standing on the edges of crowded rooms, blending into the background. Never speaking unless spoken to. Childhood is a time of excitement and freedom, carefree innocence that can never be recaptured. My own childhood was never something I saw as such. I was not an unhappy child; merely forgettable, even to myself. My entire childhood I was holding my breath, awaiting something that would release me from my own prescribed monotony and self-diagnosed gutlessness. That something, as it turned out, just so happened to come in the shape of Connie.

I discovered who she was rather quickly upon starting secondary school in St. Michael’s. Everybody knew her whether they were in our year or not. She usurped her elder sister to become captain of the junior hockey team by Halloween, an impressive feat for a First Year, and the fact that she was both stunningly beautiful and filthy rich ensured that half our classmates were jealous of her, unsure of whether they wanted to beher or befriend her. Sometimes I would find myself staring unabashedly at them when they walked by, invisible on the periphery of the crowd. I couldn’t imagine that they might ever notice me, that they might be aware of anything beyond themselves. That was the aura they gave off, with their boisterous laughter and their elegant gliding, elated above the rest of us.