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She’s smart, and she’s smart enough not to need anyone else to say it. She knows she’s smart. Her intelligence has been a lifetime companion, her longest relationship. She’s smart.
She likes being smart. Her lifelong friend that she takes care of and plays with and makes sure is properly entertained. She gently reads herself books while her teachers are droning on about history she already knows about. She questions unforgivingly, unabashedly, unapologetically, because she wants to know and she wants to know so much. She puts the pieces together until they fit nice and neat into a puzzle, until the thing is something she can grasp in the palm of her hand, turn around that way and this way, inspect and scrutinize, feel its smooth texture with each of her small girlish fingers. Until it turns into rapid-fire sentences coming off of her tongue, giggles mixed in between the ideas, because she’s excited excited excited. She loves knowledge and knowledge loves her and she doesn’t understand why no one else would want that knowledge that she holds so dear, treats so tenderly.
Because she is so smart, and it is that knowledge, her knowledge that soothes her when she feels dumb. When the other kids make jokes she doesn’t understand. When her teachers give her a disapproving tut, an exasperated sigh, and “How many times have I told you, you can’t read in class, Hermione?” It’s the soothing caress of knowledge, that she knows what pi is used for, that she knows all about all those great far-away people like Emily Bronte and Marie Curie and Mary Shelly, that shields her, protects her from what her mind forces her to understand.
She’s so smart, but somehow finds it in herself to ignore what she could so easily observe and piece together.
“Teachers say she’s struggling socially…”
“Not turning in assignments on time…”
“She’s bored, not a problem child…”
“She can’t switch grades! She’s already so alienated from her peers. I won’t have that for my baby!”
“...school psychologist did suggest testing…”
She’s smart. She knows what those words mean. She knows how they connect to the boy who pulled her hair and the girl who called her a freak and the odd older man with thin glasses and a thick nose who wanted to know if she felt lonely.
She’s not lonely. She has her knowledge. All that other stuff, all those childish games and petty gossip and yelling and screaming and fighting and noise wasn’t necessary for her. She doesn’t need it. She likes the way she is. She likes her bushy hair and her too-large books that don’t fit around her too-short fingers and her questions that children her age really shouldn’t be thinking about and her answers that children her age really shouldn’t be able to come up with.
She sees them play. She sees them point and stare. And sometimes when she reads her books, she imagines them, the strong heroes and witty mages and sly villains were her reality. Because this one doesn’t make sense to her. She’s too big. She’s too much. She’s too smart. She’s too quiet. She’s not compassionate enough. She’s not interacting with her peers enough. Those are the words that float around her. She’s achingly, tragically, awfully too much and not enough.
She’s a witch. And she’s the smartest witch of the age, because intelligence follows her. No matter where she goes, no matter who she meets, she is smart. She easily falls into the patterns of studying and revising and writing and editing and pleasing teachers and answering questions and asking questions, but, of course, with a bit of magic in between.
It’s a fresh start. It’s the same as before.
There was that horrifying, tremendously nerve-wracking moment. She remembers it so clearly. That day Flitwik told them “swish and flick!” and for one terrifying heartbeat, she almost felt that magic would betray her. That even with all her diligent study, she would fail where it mattered most.
The feather soared into the air.
“Hermione, dear, you are a miraculous student, simply miraculous, but I haven’t seen you interacting with your dormmates. You seem to be separated from them. Is everything alright?”
She is Hermione Granger and nothing stops her. She is smart and she wears it on her sleeve. It is her protection. It is her shield. It is her and her intelligence against the rest of the world.
It doesn’t matter that she misses her parents. It doesn’t matter that sometimes, sometimes, when the other girls in her dorm are up together, giggling and laughing while they throw pillows at each other and speak too loudly, and Hermione tells them to be quiet so she can sleep, (“Don’t you all know we have a potions test the next day?”) that for one crushing second she wishes they would talk to her like that, look at her with such unfilited affection like that, accept her like that, take her word seriously like that.
(They ignore her. She locks herself in the bathroom and pretends that running the faucet has nothing to do with hiding the sound of her tears.)
She’s not stupid. She’s not stupid. She’s not stupid.
She’s so smart and couldn’t connect the dots together enough to know, to see, that this is the truth. This is her reality. She doesn’t live in a storybook world. She is Hermione, and she is smart.
She is Hermione Granger and the girls in her dorm tease her for not making eye contact when she talks to them. It is something she never noticed before,never had the chance to, but now it haunts her like an ill-forgotten love. A flush rises to her cheeks each time she tries to talk to them, tries to observe how they make eye contact, tries, so desperately, so hopelessly, to copy them.
She is falling, falling, falling.
She’s awkward, but worse than the way all young girls are awkward and gangly. She’s a loudmouth, but not in the way gossip falls from all the ordinary girls' lips. She is shy, but not in the way the normal girls are shy. She is extraordinary. She is not ordinary. She is other. That grotesque distinction that sinks down in her stomach, settling like a ship in the bottom of the ocean. The casualties pile up.
She is smart. She is smart. She is smart.
She’s the first in their year to arrive at the table and gets first pickings at the best sausage. She opens her book as she has always done and vanishes into the depths of its pages. The book is thick and the pages a little worn, but that just means its been well-loved, and that means it must be a good book. She has always loved reading with her breakfast as a way to start her day.
The girls in her dorm sit down a bit away from her and suddenly they burst into laughter like fireworks on a warm summer evening. She’s never liked fireworks. They were too loud, too startling. But sometimes she envied their vivid color, envied how easy it was for them to soar.
In that moment, she would give anything to laugh like that, surrounded by friends. She would give up every book she’s ever read, every interesting fact and consoling character and world not quite her own. It felt like the worst betrayal of her life. She loves her intelligence, but in that moment, she would throw it all away to have friends. Even one would do.
She wonders what it’s like to soar.
-.-
She’s hiding in the bathroom because Ronald Weasley is the meanest boy she has ever met. Worse than Matthew Davy who pulled her hair until she screamed and then told the teacher Hermione pinched his arm, earning her a scolding and her recess privileges revoked and that awful conversation with the man with the thin glasses and thick nose.
The troll bursts into the bathroom. She runs. She hides. She screams. She’s smart, but she can’t think of a way out. She can’t do anything. For one terrifying moment there is nothing in her head. She can’t think. And for the first time in her life she knows what it is like to be truly alone.
Two boys burst through the door, and she is never alone again.
It is hard. It’s an adjustment. She doesn’t understand what it means to have people in her life. Doesn’t know that when she sees them at breakfast she’s meant to say goodmorning and when they retreat to their dorms at the end of the day, she is meant to bid them goodnight. Doesn’t know until Ron nudges her side and whispers in her ear that Harry is upset and needs to be consoled. She doesn’t know how to console. The first time it comes off too harsh, too cold, or so she is told. She doesn’t understand what was wrong with what she said.
And that’s the issue. That’s the issue. She’s so smart but so devastatingly stupid. She tries to study all these things. The small talk, the important talk, the gestures, the facial expressions, the darting eyes, the tone in their voice, but comes up short each and every single time.
It’s awful. She cares so much, all of it stuck inside of her, bursting to be free, but doesn’t know how to show it. How can she call herself a good friend when she is always too late to know that Harry needs a hug? Or that Ron could use a quiet game of wizard’s chess? Or that they don’t actually want the answers to their transfiguration homework?
She’s so smart and sometimes, when she has retreated to her dorm room with the girls who now make fun of her for only hanging out with boys, she wonders if that’s all she ever will be.
There’s a growing tension–both between herself and the boys and within her own chest. It tightens, constricts, pulls against her, makes her ache for a simpler time when her friends were words on a page.
Hermione begins the process of drifting away.
It’s subtle. She manages that for all her lack of subtlety. She excuses herself to the library. She lets them sit together during classes while she sits behind, out of sight, out of mind. She lingers in the back of their conversations. She ignores the desire to speak up. She learns to be quiet. To quiet herself. To find company in her first friend.
She is not subtle enough.
“Did we… did we do something wrong?” Ron says, and she can’t look at him, at least, not in the eye. She sees his robes, the way they are much more worn, the frayed ends, the loose strings, the pulled threads, the overstretched elbow.
She sees the way Harry fidgets, wringing his hands together. The boys followed her into the library, her safe haven, her fortress. Now, she has no escape. She wishes they would leave her alone, make this easy for her.
These things were never easy for her.
“I am really very busy right now with Professor Flitwik’s essay so-”
“Hermione-”
“-if you wouldn’t mind leaving me alone for a few hours I’m sure we-”
“Hermione!”
“-could figure out a different time to sort—well, whatever this is—out. There’s no reason-”
“ Hermione! ” and her head snaps towards Harry because it is Harry who yelled. Harry doesn’t yell. Harry is scared of yelling. That she knows.
“Hermione,” and it is softer this time, and Hermione relaxes, because even with this distance she is fostering, Harry is good. He is a good friend. “Why don’t you want to be friends anymore?”
It is different coming from Harry than Ron. It is easier to speak to Harry than Ron. Ron is also a good friend, but it is with him where the chasm between them stretches on for infinity. Harry speaks a dialect, the words garbled, but often decipherable if she tries really very hard. It is Ron whose language is so foreign to her that no dictionary makes up for what is lost in translation.
She hugs the book, large, old, oversized. She holds it to her chest, letting it become her armor.
Her throat tightens. Her heart aches. She shuts her eyes against everything, against this awful mixed up story her life has turned into. She whispers it, a confession, a dire sin, “Because I’m an awful friend.”
The boys are stunned silent. Harry takes a deep breath in that way that means he’s about to say something, but Hermione rushes in to fill in the empty air. “I-I don’t like the things that you both like to do and I’m boring because I only ever think about books and I’m annoying because I nag you both to do your schoolwork and I stick too much to the rules and I embarrassed you in front of Malfoy the other day and I get too many points taken from the house and no one else in our year will talk to you both when I’m around and- and- and-” but she’s crying now, she’s crying. “-and I’m too emotional. And awkward. And a know-it-all.”
Her face feels hot, blotchy, ugly. The world is ugly, ugly, ugly. They don’t want to be her friends anymore. She should have never come here, should have never believed she could fit in with this world. This crazy and wonderful and awful world that she had thought she had a chance of belonging in .
Harry is sitting next to her, so it must be his hand on her shoulder. She stiffens under it, not knowing what it means, hating the not knowing.
“Hermione, you’re so smart-”
“I know!” She almost yells, but it is a library, and she knows not to yell in the library, not to break the rules. She needs more rules. “I know that! But that’s not good enough. An O in transfiguration doesn’t make me a good friend!”
She rubs her fingers over the cover of the book, the textured pattern of words and designs. She knows that Ron gets up, sits on her other side.
“You’re a good friend,” Ron says, his voice sharper, perhaps more serious. She doesn’t know. “And I know that because you care about us and you forgive us for our mistakes and you let us push you outside your comfort zone and you tell us when you get sick of our shenanigans.”
She shakes her head. “But I do it wrong .”
“No you don’t. I mean, come on ‘Mione, someone as creative as you surely knows there’s more than one way to solve a problem. If we’ve made you feel bad for finding your own solutions… that’s our fault, not yours.”
Hermione shudders. She puts the book back on the desk.
“I-I’m sorry,” she says, and she wants to cry again, “I’m sorry for acting like an idiot. Will you forgive me?”
It’s Harry that rushes forward first. “Of course!” He hugs her, arms tightening impossibly tight around her shoulders, and she forgets to breathe for a minute before Ron wraps his arms around both of them, his larger frame almost able to cover them both.
Ron laughs and there is something wet in it, but affection overwhelms the sound, reverberates through his chest so that even Hermione can feel it. “That’s what friends are for.”
This, she thinks, but she doesn’t know, she may spend the rest of her life not knowing, this is what it feels like to soar.