Professor Slughorn was pacing round the potions classroom, now thick with the shimmering steam of dozens of bubbling cauldrons. It was the very first day of term, and the seventh year N.E.W.T. students were all ready picking up where they had left off last year “ that is, a rather precarious stage in the making of Felix Felicis. Timing was vital now after the potions had sat for three months. Slughorn opened his mouth to comment on Bridget’s potion, now an unsightly shade of puce, but instead erupted into a violent fit of coughing. The steam was getting increasingly thick.
Lily was in her element. Already far ahead of the class, she was setting about adding some ingredients of her own, variations she had brainstormed over the summer.
“Beautiful, Miss Evans,” boomed Slughorn as he waddled carefully through the tightly spaced tables to where Lily was standing. “Absolutely perfect. I shall have to use this as an example for my fifth years. And ho! What’s this?” He sniffed the air for a moment, leaning so far Lily feared he might tip over and roll away. “Miss Evans, have you put honey in your potion?”
Lily nodded a little smugly.
“Why, that’s brilliant! Honey would not only make the potion rather tasty but, I do believe, prolong its effects by at least fifteen percent! Oh, well done, Miss Evans. Twenty points to Gryffindor!” Beaming, Slughorn clapped Lily on the back and continued on his way, stopping to scold Severus Snape, who had left his potion unattended, and which had now frozen solid. Lily couldn’t help but suspect he had been staring at her.
From across the room, Sirius Black yelled something snide to “Snivellus” and Lily tried to tune it out. She had given up on defending Snape last year when she found out the lot he hung around with were Death Eaters. While she mostly couldn’t stand Sirius’s arrogant, often cruel behaviour, she had to accept that he was actually a better person than Severus.
Lily focused exclusively on the potion in front of her. She put more care than was necessary in stirring it every so often so the honey would set in properly. She stared deeply into her full cauldron, losing herself in its shimmering swirls, letting her mind carry itself to a world where there was no war, no Voldemort, and no annoying James Potter…
When the bell signalled the end of class, Lily gathered her things and left immediately, letting the world come back to her in a rush of colour and noise.
By the end of the day, though, she wished she had stayed in Potions. As Lily stared glumly at the enormous pile of homework in front of her, she wanted desperately to go back to her cauldron. The very first day of term, and I’m already up to my eyeballs in work. Brilliant. She wondered if she glared at the stack of work in front of her long enough, it would get itself done. Her train of thought “ or lack thereof “ was interrupted by a stampede of voices coming from the entrance hole.
First years.
Lily panicked: she didn’t want to deal with the noisy, giggling, mob of short people who would undoubtedly want to tell the Head Girl all about their first day. Without thinking, she threw her books into her bag and bolted out of the common room, taking the stairs to the dormitories three at a time. Before she knew it, she was back in the Heads’ common room for the second time that day.
She now understood what Dumbledore meant when he said past Heads didn’t want to tell anybody about this room. It was the perfect place for her to go when she needed to be away from people “ which she clearly did. It’s just a shame that I have to share with Potter, she thought bitterly.
Pushing this depressing thought out of her head, Lily walked over to the writing desk that had caught her eye the previous night. She slumped into the squishy chair, sighing loudly. Straight ahead of her was an Everest of homework she would rather eat before completing. Turning her head toward the window, her thoughts roamed again to James Potter. How did he manage to never do anything at all, yet seem to do everything? Lily had always been a good student, but she’d had to work hard for every grade she’d got. She rarely ever had time for much else besides schoolwork. James, on the other hand, managed to be entirely lax about school and get good marks and be adored by the entire student body. How does he do it?
She was saved from guessing, however, by sudden, concentrated heat coming from her pocket. She fished around until she pulled out a small, round stone, which was glowing warm and yellow. It was pulling on her hand, as if by a giant invisible magnet, in the direction behind her. The Call Stone was an invention of hers from fourth year. It was part of a set of three, the other two belonging to Bridget and Gwen. When one girl whispered another’s name into her Stone, the latter’s Stone would glow warm and become magnetised to its partner. Lily exhaled in a loud, horse-like raspberry. She’d have to deal with them some time.
“Hey, Evans.” Lily turned around just before she reached the door and found James poking his head out of the tapestry of the gargoyles. “You leaving?”
Lily nodded.
“Could I use the writing desk, then?”
For a second, Lily wondered if she had heard him wrong. Where was the smug flirtation? Where was his thousandth attempt to get her to go out with him? For the past two years, his pursuits of her had been so incessant, she’d not only grown used to them but come to expect them. This didn’t make them any less annoying, but the fact was that they that come to be a part of her life. Now that James had not so much as winked at her, she felt like something was missing. She told herself this was a good thing. Then why are you so frustrated?
“Fine. Whatever,” she answered. “Let me get those out of your way,” she offered, and moved back towards the desk.
Before she could get there, however, James said, “Don’t bother “ let me,” and took his want out and flicked it at the books. They vanished instantly, and Lily knew they were now sitting somewhere in her dormitory.
“Thanks,” she said grudgingly, noting a hint of the familiar smirk returning to his face. She turned around once again towards the entrance hole and paused for a moment, waiting for James’ next inevitable attempt to win her heart, and mentally prepared to find a witty way to shoot him down once again. But it never came. Amazed, Lily continued to follow the pull of her Call Stone, which took her out of the Heads’ common room and away from James Potter, who stood behind her without so much as a loudly-blown kiss in her direction.
Lily found her friends by the portrait of the Fat Lady, where Gwen held her Call Stone to her mouth, whispering to it to bring Lily to them. She ran to hug them both, trying to ignore the pain in her side which had receded to only a dim throbbing since the previous night.
“What’d you Call me for?” she asked them. “I only just saw you two in Defence Against the Dark Arts less than an hour ago.”
“We know,” Gwen said, waving her hand as if it were an irritating detail, “we just wanted to talk to you. You disappeared this morning and then we couldn’t find you anywhere after class.”
“Yeah… er, sorry,” Lily mumbled, looking at her feet, “It’s just… I’ve got a lot to deal with right now. I couldn’t do people just yet.”
“Well thanks for that!” Bridget huffed dramatically. “If we’d known you didn’t want to hang out with us, we wouldn’t have bothered Calling you!” She set her hands on her slender hips and turned round theatrically, making to stomp off.
“No! Wait!” Lily cried, playing along, but when she reached to grab Bridget’s arm, a sudden twinge in her side made her gasp out loud.
“Are you all right?” Gwen asked, her dark brown eyes wide with worry.
“Yeah, I’m fine. The knife hit some major nerves, which apparently takes awhile to heal. And Madam Pomfrey reckons this one may have been cursed. You should’ve been there when I woke up “ that potion was horrid.”
“We’re so sorry we weren’t there, Lily, when you woke up,” Gwen said.
“Yeah,” Bridget explained, “Madam Pomfrey told us we had to leave, because she had to take care of you and undress you and apparently your wound was pretty nasty. But James wouldn’t leave.”
“Refused, point-blank,” Gwen cut in. “Threatened to hex her if she made him go.”
“Gwen reckons it was sweet of him, but I’m pretty sure he just wanted to see you naked.”
Lily laughed softly at her Bridget’s inability to be serious for more than a few moments. She felt a momentary twinge of guilt, though. She had always been so cruel to James, so annoyed by him, that she’d never really taken the time to consider that the reason he was so bothersome was because he actually cared for her. She was interrupted from this disturbing revelation by Gwen’s change of subject.
“They’re having a service for that second-year who died tomorrow morning “ everybody gets off their first class.”
“Do either of you know who he was?” Lily asked. It made her sad to think that this boy had died in such and unfair, sordid way, yet she didn’t even know his name. He was the faceless, nameless unfortunate soul who hadn’t survived the subject of today’s gossip.
“He was Daniel Rittenberg,” Bridget said quietly, “in Hufflepuff. Curtis Abbott told me, but I’ve no idea who he is “ was.”
“Nor me,” Gwen said.
This made Lily even more miserable. Daniel Rittenberg was dead, and here stood three girls who had never even known he existed.
At a loss for what to say, Lily, Gwen and Bridget all looked down at their feet. In their silence, the all shared a sense of loss for the boy they would never know. Unbidden, tears began to fall from Lily’s bright green eyes.
The next morning, Lily felt like she was teetering on the edge of a very high cliff. Having learned the name of the dead boy last night had filled her with a gravity she hadn’t felt before. It made the terror looming over her world seem so much more solid and real.
She was taking an unusually long time to get ready, trying in vain to make her make-up cover up her blotchy eyes, still red and swollen from crying herself to sleep the night before. She had not only felt inexplicable sadness for the boy she never knew, but she had been filled with a terror of what might happen to her friends and family if things kept going the way they were.
Pull yourself together, Evans, she told herself, staring down her heavily made-up reflection. The last thing she wanted was to show the world Voldemort had gotten to her.
When she got to the Gryffindor common room, she found James waiting for her, dressed soberly in black robes and a black tie “ instead of the customary red and gold one he wore loosely around his neck.
“Your friends went ahead,” he answered to the question her eyes asked when they scanned the room. “All right if I walk you down?”
“Fine,” she said. She didn’t have the heart to fight him off today. Plus, they were on the same side of this all, weren’t they?
When they entered the Great Hall, it was barely recognizable. It was dark and gloomy, the mass of floating candles even seeming to give off a dreary, half-hearted glow. The usually red, yellow, green and blue banners hanging on the walls were now all pitch-black. The enchanted ceiling above depicted an appropriately stormy sky, the pregnant clouds hanging low and threatening above the silent students.
There was a giant poster of a young, blonde boy in Hufflepuff robes, who was waving cheerily at the mourning crowd, oblivious to the fact that the real Daniel Rittenberg was dead.
Lily stopped breathing.
Daniel Rittenberg was the same boy she had comforted on the train when they were being attacked.
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know! Stacy Grant’s just told me that we’re being attacked. We’re stuck here! I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die!”
“Shhh, shhh. It’s all right. We’ll keep you safe.”
She had known Daniel Rittenberg, if only for a short while. She had comforted him, told him he would be safe, that everything would be all right. But everything did not turn out all right. Voldemort’s followers had killed him, and he had spent his last moments in fear.
Lily’s words had been powerless to stop this tragedy.
She turned round and fled from the Great Hall, leaping out of sight of James just in time for tears to sting her eyes, hot and angry and afraid.