Every person has a point like this in their lives. Where something unbelievable happens, and you know somehow your life is changed forever. It could be anything, good or bad, but whatever it is, you know there will be no going back.
Mine was when I got the letter from Hogwarts.
Wait – I can go further back than that. Back to a hot dusty playground, and me aged 9 showing off on a swing. Because that was the day I met Sev – Severus Snape.
Severus wasn’t like anyone else I had ever met. He was quite strange looking, skinny and pale, with greasy dark hair that seemed to always hang over his face, and his clothes were … well … bizarre. The first time we met him, in fact, Petunia and I thought he was a total freak. But as I got to know him better, I stopped noticing these things. I guess you could say I saw the beauty within. Because when I looked beyond the greasy hair and large nose, I saw someone who was helpful and kind and always supportive of me. And he told me about a world I had never dreamed of, a world where magic wands and flying broomsticks aren’t just confined to books.
Petunia never saw the beauty within Severus, though admittedly he didn’t exactly go to great lengths to show her. They never got on, and it got worse after I started going to Hogwarts. She took it all out on him – all her jealousy, her resentment at being called a ‘Muggle’. Sev was an easy target.
He was an easy target at school, too. Certain people just loved to make fun of him – a group of four boys springs to mind. I’m glad to say I never joined in, and for the first five years at Hogwarts, I hexed anyone who dared try anything into oblivion. It was hard, though. Severus wasn’t at all popular at school, but I … was. Is that boasting? I don’t know. But sometimes I had to sacrifice time with my other friends to protect him from some idiot who decided it would be hilarious to hang Sev upside down by his ankles. I didn’t resent this at first, not at all. But as the years went by, I started to wonder: this was what I gave to the friendship, so what did he give?
Gradually, me and Sev were starting to go our separate ways. The idea of a Gryffindor and a Slytherin being friends was completely unheard of, after all, and as we grew older, the differences between us just seemed to increase. Severus started hanging around with a group of wannabe Death Eaters whose idea of fun was to torture a Muggle-born like me. Rumours spread that some of them had already joined Voldemort. With all this, our friendship was getting pushed to the limit, and it only needed one more problem to send it crashing down around us.
That problem turned out to be a boy with hazel eyes and an annoying habit of messing up his hair. James Potter.
The boy I thought I couldn’t stand.
The boy I fell in love with.
The boy who Severus Snape could never be.
My name is Lily Evans, and this is my story.