Today is Friday, March thirteenth. It is also one of the worst days of my life. I have recently made the discovery that I am an idiot. A big one; a great big idiotic dunce. A pitiful, stupid child. Pathetic ness lies at the core of my very existence. I am a ‘stubborn stuck-up meat head’.
The great culminating epiphany came to me finally. I have seen the inlaid answer to the mysteries of the past few weeks. I’m so pathetic! You, anonymous, hopefully hypothetical, reader must have known of that particular darling quality of mine for a good time now. You probably knew everything; I bet you could just tell. You could just see what I could not. You shook your head and laughed at this journal, thinking how pathetically dramatic and un-amusing I was.
I never thought I would see the words come from a quill of mine, but James Potter was right. I am blind. Not only that, but I knew of my blindness and chose to ignore it. And I don’t know why.
As much as it pains and humiliates me to recount this, I will. After all, it’s better than just sitting here and doing my hardest to avoid James’s sympathetic gaze.
After the little incident in the Hospital Wing James and I pretended as if the other weren’t occupying the neighbouring bed, arms crossed and huffing loudly. Once we were free of Madame Pince’s hawk-like supervision, we had pledged the unspoken ‘War of the Clueless’ upon each other, or so Sirius likes to refer to it now. And I quite agree, for my part at least.
Despite it all, I did achieve a thing thought to be humanly impossible…I improved my pranking skills. (Insert dramatic gasp here).
Monday morning, in Charms class, I tried again the same trick I had tried the last Thursday, with just one tiny little difference: it worked. Do you perhaps recall, dear reader, the odorizing-pellet fiasco? Yes, well, this time around, Potter stank so bad of dung that even his mates couldn’t stand to sit next to him. Professor Flitwick, pinching his nose as he hurried past him, ordered Potter to go to the Hospital Wing and watch out for what he ate next time.
According to Rich and Sophie, I was grinning like a mad-woman all day long. That, plus the fact that I was the only known Potter-hater left in the school, probably contributed to the fact he hadn’t decided to consider me a poor hapless spectator. And the evil way he chuckled when McGonagall handed me back my essay on human transfiguration because it was a ‘lousy mound of disjointed gibberish and vulgar nonsense’ also did not motivate me to put him on my list of ‘innocents’.
Even though I managed to talk McGonagall into letting me redo the essay to hand it in at the end of the week, I was still furious. Choosing to ignore the fact that my problem was a consequence of something I’d done, upon finding him fast asleep in the common room early on Tuesday morning, I decided his hair didn’t look right. If you’re still wondering where the aforementioned haircut came from, you are dense (no offence). (Again with the rhyming!). Potter woke up in the morning looking like a little bespectacled Elvis piglet.
Everyone stared the next day, and, after all, whose to blame them? Sophie, upon seeing him as he made his way up toward the seat his friends had saved for him at Gryffindor table (which, unfortunately, happened to be right next to where we were), sprayed a mouth full of pumpkin juice all over herself and the vicinity (Sirius was very quick at assisting in the wiping of her shirt. Wanker.)
The whole day I went around dreading what he would do in retaliation. But nothing happened to me out of the ordinary for the rest of the day. When I woke up on Wednesday, I was beginning to wonder if anything would. My question was answered not ten minutes later, as I descended the spiral staircases and a little first year started laughing herself silly and pointing at my head.
I raced back up the stairs and discovered that my hair, my beautiful smooth red hair, was hanging down all the way to my hips and it was an eye-achingly, nauseating, shade of neon green.
The girls in my dorm tried to help me once they got over themselves. One of them, Alexandria, lent me her jeans cap to stuff it in. She tried to bargain it with a picture of me. She said she’d use it as a model for a Halloween costume. Well, hoho, aren’t we a riot?
Alas, the hat was of no use. During Potions Class, James Potter pointed out to Professor Slughorn that a student among us was violating the school uniform. Potter’s simply a rule-abiding little angel, haven’t you heard? The entire day, I had to go around assuring people that, no, I had not gotten severely drunk the night before, been dared to dunk my head repeatedly in a vat of toxic waste, and found it amusing.
Although, there was one thing that bothered me more than the rest. After my last class, when I was on my way to the Great Hall, a group of rowdy Slytherin boys followed me. I’m guessing they had the IQ of a rock. Their insults weren’t truly insulting, seeing as how they were so pathetic, but the extent of their vulgarity was embarrassing, really. I’m normally not the target of such innuendos, as everyone in school knows I’m more than capable of holding my own, but I guess they couldn’t resist. And I was doing my best to ignore them, because I make it a point of only resorting to immediate extermination when it comes to Potter, when I heard them shrieking behind me. I turned around to see they had all suddenly grown very large breasts. Laughing hysterically I watched them scamper away toward the nearest boy’s bathroom, until I noticed who was standing at the end of the hall, laughing with me.
I turned immediately and rushed toward the Great Hall. He hadn’t looked at me predatorily that time. He had looked at me the way he always used to.
A James Potter that plots against me, that calls me a meathead, I can deal with. I can even deal with a James Potter that turns my hair to green shit. What I can’t deal with, is a James Potter that sends me enchanted boyfriend-repelling flowers, that lies to professors about my whereabouts to keep me out of trouble and hexes Slytherins for harassing me. That’s what I can’t deal with.
I did a good job of busying myself with other thoughts until the time of my detention. I found Terry rushing away from the Library after dinner, and he served as a lovely distraction. We took a stroll around the grounds, and he just listened as I blathered on stupidly, blurting out anything, as long as it kept my mind busy. He just listened and watched me, with a funny kind of look, that, when I asked, he told me was nothing. Now I look back on that and I think he was observing me, deducing me…comparing me.
I arrived at detention a little late, to the annoyance and disapproval of McGonagall. I didn’t even glance at Potter. Actually, that’s a lie; I made myself pause from my writing, to glance over and laugh at his haircut. The way he looked at me afterward had me thinking he was reconsidering the good of defending me. And for some reason, the knowledge wasn’t satisfactory, as I had hoped.
The minute McGonagall said we were free to go he tore out of there, glaring. I left not a minute later. I could see him walking way ahead of me, at the other end of the hall as we made our way toward the moving staircases. When I arrived he was waiting there. The staircase had arrived, but he wasn’t getting on. That’s about when my heart picked up speed.
“Lily,” he spoke to my feet, as I approached warily, “there’s something I have to show you.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, and tried to look condescending. “What exactly makes you think I’ll trust you? You just want to prank me again; give me a big blistery nose to match with my hair.”
He watched me slowly, calmly, sadly. “This is nothing like that. I should’ve told you about it a long time ago. And now that I have, I won’t take ‘no’ for an answer; you have to come with me.”
I was attempting to look uninterested and composed, but I’m almost certain he could hear my heart hammering away in my chest. “Potter, that’s really low. All you want to do is mess me up some more, and-”
“No, Lily, this time I’m very serious.” As if to prove his point, he took his wand out and waved it once. A sort of prickly sensation coursed down my scalp, and as I turned my head slightly, I could see my hair was no longer green. “Come with me.”
There was no way I could’ve said no. I was so curious. He really did look serious, not that I would ever have admitted any of that to him. “Fine,” I sighed, trying to preserve at least one trademark of our old interactions. “But this had better not be just another scheme, ‘cause or else you don’t even want to know what I’ll do.”
He laughed a little. “I know that.”
I followed him back the way we’d come from, and up a flight of the back stairs. After a while he started speaking.
“You know, I always wanted to catch Terry at something, and then tell you about it, so you’d dump him. Don’t look at me like that, that shouldn’t be a surprise to you. Anyway, he never did anything wrong. He was like a perfect little saint. And believe me, I watched him a great deal. I was almost giving up at the beginning of the year, but then I started noticing something…”
Idiot. Normal people don’t say things like that about one’s boyfriend to them and then don’t finish the sentence. So much for me keeping a semblance of dignity.
“Noticed what?” I demanded, knowing that was exactly what he had wanted.
James took a deep breath and ploughed on, “I didn’t tell you at first, because I knew you wouldn’t believe me. And I’m entirely to blame for that. I decided I needed some sort of proof first, see, so you’d have no way to deny it. It took a really long time, but then, finally, on the week right before Valentine’s Day, something happened.”
Once again he let his sentence linger in the air. I could not remember ever being so impatient and irritated in all of my life. My heart was doing a very fast tango with my stomach. “What bloody happened?”
He’d been slowing down as we neared the library. Once we reached the door, he came to a full stop. He motioned for me to follow. We stood together quietly behind a book shelf near the entrance. He reached out and held my arm. I could feel it shiver.
“You believe me so far, right?” he whispered.
“You haven’t told me anything, so I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to believe!” I whispered frantically. “Just spit it out, will you?”
“Do you know Kathy McKinnon?” he asked me, completely unexpectedly.
Yes, I knew her. She was the shy, quiet Ravenclaw in Rich’s year, known for being abnormally smart, and pretty, even though she was too awkward for much of a reputation. I could see her in my head, smiling at everyone from behind her golden bangs. And I could not have imagined at that moment how in the world she tied into my story.
“Have you ever noticed the way Terry looks at her?” James whispered so softly I had to lean in to hear him.
I stared at him. My system, moments ago impossibly anxious, seemed to have come to a stand-still. A little cold was spreading through me, making it harder to breath.
“Has he ever told you who it is he meets to study with almost every day?” James’s voice was barely at all.
I was forcing myself to take deep breaths. I had received an electric shock, and the aching tingling feeling wasn’t going away as it ought.
James still had a grip on my arm, I noticed, when he started quietly dragging me further into the library, always in the shadow of the book shelves. “It’s usually just the two of them, but not always. At first, in the beginning of the year, I think they were tutoring third years together, and later on they started having study groups. I think it took her a long time to get comfortable with that, but she did in the end. Here is like the only place they meet. Our…sources, told us that they don’t spend much time together in their common room. That’s what they seem like they are; study-buddies. That’s it. But, well, it’s just the way he looks at her…”
We had stopped behind one of the shelves at the end. James was slowly pulling out a book, and looking through the crack. He beckoned me closer, so that I could see too.
They did look like just study-buddies at first. Just a teenage girl, and boy, sitting next to each other, bending over books and scrolls of parchment. Nothing out of the ordinary. But if you just looked a little longer, you could see it starting to show. It was the way he watched her eyes more than he watched what he wrote. It was the way she smiled with her whole body when he whispered something funny. That was anything but ordinary.
I watched them from the other side of the shelf, standing between dusty books and a boy who looked at me with nothing but pity, feeling endlessly stupid and useless.
“That week he almost kissed her. They were just sitting there, just like that, and he leaned forward. She moved her face at the last minute, and he ended up kissing her cheek. For the rest of the week they didn’t meet, and then, on the next Monday, the day of our first detention, she came to meet him after you left. I was watching you.
“He said he’d called her there because he wanted to apologize. He said he hadn’t known what he was doing, or why. He said he still really liked you, but he still wanted to be her friend. Kathy asked him if he’d told you any of this, and he said he didn’t have to because it didn’t mean anything. After that, they went back to the way they were before. The way they are now. No matter how many times he says he still likes you, he doesn’t stop looking at her like that. When I confronted him in the Great Hall, he told me I was overreacting; you were ‘just a girl’.”
It wasn’t the dust that made my eyes sting. I looked over at James, barely seeing him. He looked as if the sight of me caused him physical pain. He made a twitching sort of movement, as if he wanted to put his arms around me and hold me, but thought better of it. His hand slipped down my arm, until he could give mine a very slight squeeze.
“That’s why I sent you that flower. I’m sorry, now I know it was stupid. I’m sorry about everything.”
I gasped for breath. I couldn’t stand to be there another second, on the other side of the shelf. I stumbled out, knocking over about half a dozen books. When I stood up straight in the hall, Terry had stood up and leaned his head to see what had caused the disturbance. When he saw me, for a second he almost smiled. And then he noticed my eyes. I didn’t stay around long enough to witness the guilty look setting in. I ran.
So there it is. I was wrong all along. I was blind. I had never been living a cute little love story, as I so pathetically supposed. I was ‘just a girl’. A silly, stupid and forsaken one. It had never been my story; I never even came into the picture. It was their story. I had no story, and still don’t.
Lily Evans, the stupid little girl.
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Alright, now onto my looooooong author's note.
I would first like to beg you to forgive me...and now that I've politely given you the chance to shout at me (with reason) "NEVER!", I shall procede to attempt to defend myself with some excuses.
My little sister was in the hospital. She had pneumothorox. They had to operate three times before they were sure she wasn't about to lose all of the air in her lung's again. If you have gone through something of the sort, watching a loved one suffer, sleeping in hospitals and living with the people there, some on the brink of death, you'll know it's an extremely sobering experience. Sadly, becaues of that, I lost touch with Lily's humorous character...for a while anyway.
Less than two weeks after that nightmare ended, my family and I moved back to the U.S. and we stayed in upstate New York, as we always do for two months. As that is a very short time for me to see all of my friends and family in, I spend every single second outside with them, and that really kept me from the computer.
And now I'm back to Brazil, behind in all of my classes, because our summer is in December and January and they didn't practically have time off. So that kept me busy. A lot.
So, there you have it. I could have just told you I had troubles with real life, but I thought you all deserved a worthy explanation. Updates with go back to being relatively frequent, and I also have a new James/Lily one-shot coming out, called The Horridly Cheerful Valentine's Day. It's a lot fluffier than this story, and I'll hope you'll all read it (and review )!
Now, about this chapter...Did I surprise you? Do you all hate Terry? Are you wondering what comes next..? Tell me! I adore reviews!
Thanks once more to my beta, cAughtonFire for her wonderful help. And if, at least once throught the past months you took the time to hate me for not updating, this chapter is dedicated to you. *hugs*
Edit: This story was nominated for a Quicksilver Quill for Best Canon Romance! Thank you! *hugs dear readers and nominators to death*
P.S: I have a thread in the Forums (more specifically, at the Duelling Club, part of the Great Hall) with the sole purpose of answering questions. So, if you have questions about this story, anything about it, or my other writings, fire away! That is, if you have an account. And if you don't, you should. The Forums are wonderful!
Finally time to review! *nudgesgently* Lol, kidding....
The Epic Tale of the Hogwarts Food-fight by Gin_Drinka
Chapter Notes: My note is at the end. And anything you recognize doesn't belong to me.