Chapter 10: Slippers and Slytherins
Phedra’s anger at James and Sirius did not last long. Her upset over the slippers, however, did. Her whole Christmas vacation that year went rather badly, and she was quite sure that it was the slippers’ fault. Well, more like Susan’s fault. The poor slippers couldn’t help that they were big and ugly, but Susan hadn’t needed to buy them and send them off to Hogwarts. Looking at it that way, it was Maeve’s fault too, because it had been her idea in the first place. Either way, the whole Christmas would have been a lot less stressful if Susan hadn’t insisted on helping Phedra unpack and decide clothes needed to be washed. Phedra hadn’t wanted her to; she would much rather unpack the beloved trunk herself and not have her Muggle mother digging through her school possessions. Obviously this didn’t matter to Susan, and Phedra could not pull her mother away from her things no matter what she said.
It was pure frustration. Phedra spent all her time at school being polite and patient. She laughed at people’s jokes, she hung out with her group of Gryffindors constantly, she slunk out of the way of Slytherins, and she put everyone else first. She was tired of being patient and polite. She wanted her way. She wanted Susan to leave her alone. In fact, Phedra was about to throw a hairy screaming fit when Susan pulled something out of the very bottom corner of the huge brown trunk.
“Look, it’s the slippers I sent you!”
“Yes, I see. Put them down,” said Phedra, unable to control herself.
“They look pretty dirty. Did you get a lot of use out of them?”
The slippers were dirty because a bottle of ink had spilled in the trunk and Phedra had not done a proper job of cleaning up the mess (magic always helped, but ink stains were a chore to get out). Not to mention that the slippers had been squished underneath all of her other things for a few months.
“No, I didn’t.” She didn’t see “ or perhaps just refused to see “ the point in lying.
“Why not?” Susan demanded.
“They’re too big.”
“You couldn’t shrink them or something?”
Phedra bristled. “No,” she snapped. “Stop pretending you know about magic!”
“I’m not pretending-”
“Then at least stop going through my trunk, for the thirtieth time already! I don’t want your help getting out my clothes!”
“I heard you the first time,” Susan said as she continued to pull robes and jeans out of the trunk, “I’ll buy you a smaller size, okay?”
“No! Not okay! I really don’t want slippers!” Three months of being constantly agreeable must have gotten to Phedra, but at that moment there was no way she was letting her mother get her more slippers. Slippers were ugly and gross and served to get you laughed at in the middle of the night by errant boys.
“Don’t be silly, you need something for your feet! And stop with the abuse. I’m paying for your private magical education, I never see you except during the holidays, and I’m cleaning out your trunk for you! Stop being so rude, Phedra!”
“I just want to clean out my own trunk! Leave me alone!” Phedra practically wailed.
Then, surprisingly, Susan did. She stood right up and walked out of the room, leaving the laundry in a heap on the floor and calling back that she had to take Maeve to ballet lessons. Phedra flopped onto her bed with a whoosh and a sigh, bouncing a little on the mattress and listening to the garage door go up and the car pulling out of the driveway.
Matters didn’t improve over the course of the next week. Maeve would follow Phedra around like a second shadow, jumping around and running into Phedra’s room at inopportune moments. Phedra tried very hard to be interested in Maeve’s school stories and Susan’s prattling about luncheons. Her family tried very hard to understand Phedra as she burst into laughter in the middle of retelling the tale of Lily and the umbrella. In the end, she would end up falling silent at the dinner table and pushing food around on her plate, or staying home while Susan and Maeve went shopping. Susan never brought home any slippers.
***
Waiting to get on the train at King’s Cross station, Phedra shivered in the January air and scanned the crowd for any familiar faces. There was Sirius, practically skipping away from his older cousin, Narcissa (whom she had made a point of avoiding ever since the Halloween card incident the year before). Narcissa looked like she was about to explode with frustration at Sirius for a moment, but restored a cool look to her face as a tall young man leaned over to kiss her goodbye.
Phedra could hear Sirius laughing loudly behind her and turned to follow him onto the train. She had managed to convince her family that they did not need to come onto the platform with her anymore (“It’s so crowded anyways, Mom”) and was thankful that Mark and Susan had remained on the other side of the barrier where they belonged. Maeve was staying with a friend.
She and her family didn’t have much in common anymore, Phedra thought to herself as she boarded the train and wandered through the compartments. She kept an eye out for Lily’s telltale red hair, but didn’t see her. She shuffled along behind Sirius, who had found Peter and was moving at a leisurely pace, speaking earnestly to his friend.
“…I can’t even say how glad I am to be done with Christmas. My mother’s gone crazy or something. Ever since Andromeda ran off with that Muggle-born, she’s been trying to crack down on me. Thinks I might pull something like that.”
Phedra leaned forward a bit to hear better. Andromeda had married a Muggle-born, had she? No wonder she’d wanted to know all about Muggles! Was that what the whole deal about taking sides was about? Phedra wouldn’t have thought it was such a big deal if she hadn’t known the Blacks. Purity of blood meant nearly everything to them. In her interest, Phedra almost walked straight into Sirius and Peter, who had paused to allow some energetic third-years to race across the aisle. She was pretty sure that the boys hadn’t noticed she was there, and she preferred to keep it that way. Not that they really paid her much notice when they did know she was there, but still.
“Would you?” Peter asked, eyes as wide as if Sirius had told him that he was actually eloping with a Muggle the next day.
“What? Get married? Who cares? I certainly don’t plan on doing anything she wants of me, anyway. Making as much trouble for Slytherins as possible is the first thing on my list for this term.”
“You’ve got a list?”
“It’s an expression. Where’s James?”
“Dunno…oh! Right there!”
James was making a dignified exit from a nearby compartment. His exit was so dignified, in fact, that Phedra was able to safely assume that she had found Lily as well. She did her best to slide quietly past the boys so as not to be noticed (an impressive feat considering that the aisle was extraordinarily narrow and her trunk was very bulky, but somehow they never bothered to look at her as she muttered her pardons and staggered by). In her concern over slipping by, however, Phedra failed to spot the bulky Slytherin sixth-year just ahead of her until she had painfully collided with him.
“Idiot Mudblood,” he snarled, pushing past Phedra and sending her crashing into the nearest compartment. Blood pounding in her face, she scrambled backwards into the compartment, terrified he would jinx her, and several pairs of hands grabbed her and pulled her into a seat. There were Lily, Ailis, and Michelle, all on their feet, and all looking thunderous. Phedra flopped down, completely humiliated.
“Who does he think he is, calling Phedra that? What makes him so special? I swear, I’m going to go out there and…” Lily had jumped towards the compartment door and pulled her wand from the pocket of her Hogwarts robes (she was the only one to have already changed), her temper flaring up. Ailis and Michelle leaped to stop her.
“What are you thinking? What do you want to do, Lily? Duel with a sixth-year? I’d rather not have to carry your remains back in a dustpan, thankyouverymuch!” Ailis sounded slightly hysterical.
“It’s okay. It’s not that big a deal,” said Phedra. “It’s not like he was wrong. I’m not a pure-blood, am I? It must be really obvious.” She was still shaking a little from the encounter, but would rather not see Lily rush off to her doom in a fit of temper.
“Phedra! That kind of attitude is what lets people like that idiot get away with things! I’m not taking it from anybody, and neither should you! We’re better than that jerk…we have manners!”
“Do we?” Ailis said sarcastically, trying to calm down. “Attacking people isn’t usually considered polite.”
Lily rolled her eyes, but Phedra laughed. She was starting to relax a bit after two weeks of tension.
“Still,” Lily insisted, “it isn’t right. I mean, look at what’s been happening in the papers recently!”
They all looked at her blankly.
“D’you think we actually read newspapers over Christmas?” Michelle joked. “Heck, I don’t even read papers when we’re at school, either.”
“Says the girl I rely on for so much information,” sighed Lily, shaking her head. Michelle was the only girl in the group whose parents were both magical. She and Ailis provided Lily and Phedra with quite a bit of practical wizarding knowledge.
“Anyway,” continued Lily, “throughout history there have always been occasional bouts of anti-Muggle violence. Little uprisings by small groups of psychos””
“Slytherins,” interjected Michelle. The train took off with a rattle and a jerk. The girls swayed a bit in their seats but didn’t pay any heed.
“No! Well, yes, but that’s not the point. Every now and then, including over Christmas holidays, a bunch of pure-blooded pigs will get drunk and end up attacking some Muggles. Occasionally they even go after Muggle-borns. They get caught…they go to jail for a little while…but nothing ever changes. We just keep taking it. Muggle-borns like us hardly ever bother to stand up for the rights of their families! It’s despicable!” Lily’s face had flared up to match her hair. Phedra had never seen her friend so upset…with the exception of the usual “I’m going to wallop James Potter” episodes, Lily’s violent emotional outbursts weren’t particularly frequent.
“It sounds like you’ve been doing research or something,” Ailis said.
“As a matter of fact, I have…but just from my schoolbooks, and there’s hardly anything in them. There’ve been two attacks in the past eighteen months! That’s more than one a year!”
“So, you’re going to fight for a cause? Seriously, Lily, you are twelve years old!”
“No! But I don’t think Phedra should let people push her around like that!” She then turned her attention to Phedra, who shrank back a bit in her seat. “Seriously, Phedra, stand up for yourself. People’ll walk all over you, otherwise.”
“Mm-hmm.” Phedra nodded vigorously, which appeared to satisfy Lily. After a few moments, Michelle started gossiping about some gorgeous new third-year Chaser on the Ravenclaw Quidditch team, and Lily’s anger over the sixth-year Slytherin was forgotten by all but Phedra. She sat quietly, half-listening to how the Chaser, Brendan Sullivan, had been taken on at the last minute as a replacement, and how now the Gryffindor team had doubled their number of practices. She didn’t even bother to question how Michelle had found all this out. The girl was a fountain of gossip-related information.
Phedra wondered if she was letting people walk all over her. She didn’t think so, and supposed that even if she was…well, it wasn’t working out badly. Deciding that she shouldn’t bother worrying, she brushed Lily’s words into the back corners of her mind and settled down to hear about Sullivan. After the holidays, it was nice to be involved in conversation with people who actually knew what a Quaffle was, and who didn’t think Hogwarts’ moving staircases were escalators.