Myrtle was a girl with bright eyes and shining hair. She was an interesting mixture, a kind girl who hid behind an air of smugness that you had to tap through before you got to the gold. I was one of the few who had known that side of her, the part that was happy and innocent, and laughed with the lightness of the breeze. That was before the madness had taken over. It progressed through her like poison, slowly at first, and then one day it sprang forth like a raging beast, pulling her down into the depths from which she would never rise.
For the longest time, she had been my friend. Though I liked to pretend otherwise, I had not been hers. I was Nella, synonymous with hopeless, the one who hid her face behind books and let the walls of pages shield her from the rest of the world. Next to Myrtle, I was nothing, not worthy of even a passing glance.
Still, she saw me when others didn’t. She took me in when no one else would, helping me when I was down, supporting me when I was up. For the first time, I had someone to lean on, to sit beside when I felt lonely, and confide in with all my anguishes.
Myrtle would always listen. She had problems of her own, though I did not know it, and kept them well hidden from me for a long time. Back then, she had seemed so much stronger than I was, so much braver. She became my lance, that noble, unbreakable weapon I carried into battle every day, hoping to pierce through my shell.
But in the end I had betrayed her. I had abandoned her in her hour of darkness, running off to other things I felt I needed more. It seemed to be the only thing I was ever good at, even after all she had done for me.
Now, in the back of my mind, I wonder what had gone wrong.
I met her on a chilly autumn morning long ago, in the days before everything had changed…
When I looked at her for the first time through the compartment glass, Myrtle was sitting quite alone, her legs folded beneath her, watching the steam from the train condense onto the window. The platform outside was jammed with chatting families who were laughing and sobbing, waving as their children boarded the ride that would take them away from home for a whole year. My mother wasn’t among them. She had chosen to stay on the other side”the ‘regular’ side”and was probably leaning against one of the pillars at this very moment, reapplying her lipstick, pretending that her eleven-year-old daughter hadn’t just vanished on the spot between Platforms Nine and Ten.
The Hogwarts Express was the first train I had ever been on. It had a smooth, polished interior, and its hallway was wide enough for two people in it to stand shoulder-to-shoulder. Children of all ages were brushing past me, their chatter mingling words and phrases I could not immediately process. The compartments in the front were all filled, and when I scanned the back for any available spots, Myrtle’s was the emptiest.
I slid in carefully, settling across from her at a safe distance. She took a peek at me, and I at her, then we both looked our separate ways again.
The train shook as more students boarded, bringing a greater rush of faces, footfall, and fading laughter. Nobody else came to sit in our compartment.
It wasn’t until the train actually came to life, when the white steam thickened to such a degree that the platform outside vanished completely, that the girl turned away from the window and sighed.
“My mum can’t stop waving at me... she’s so embarrassing.” The girl smiled, and after a moment, I returned it. We had scrutinized quietly, and found each other likable.
“At least yours is here,” I said. “Mine’s still at King’s Cross.”
Suddenly her eyes widened. “You too?”
“Me, what?”
The girl twisted her hair. “You know... Muggle-born.”
I relaxed. I knew a bit of Wizarding terminology thanks to my mother, who had given me a short talk so that I wouldn’t appear foreign. I was able to answer her question with no pause at all. “No,” I said. “I’m half-blood. Dad’s side. He was a wizard, but he left when I was really young, so I never got to know about any of this.”
The girl nodded slowly, as if she were contemplating the same thoughts as I was. Here we were, two strangers going off to some school we had never heard of, or even applied to, on the base notion that we could hover pebbles and turn clouds purple.
Life was a winding road indeed.
“I’m Myrtle, by the way,” said the girl, after a hanging pause. “Myrtle Atwood.”
“Nella Puckett.”
And just like that, we began to talk. Like magnets we had snapped together, complete opposites at first, and yet we shared a bond of understanding that drew us closer and closer. For a while, we stayed that way.
But bonds have a funny way of breaking.
The years of our friendship flick past me now in a single reel of film, as they do in a person’s final moments. They are seamless, save for the parts where the pictures have blurred. Those were the times where I hadn’t been myself, when the world had felt so much like a spinning dream that I was afraid it all would evaporate the second I loosened my hold. That was my fault too. I had changed myself, corrupted myself, like a dying vine lured by a mirage of water. By the time I realized how far I had gone, it was too late.
The last time I saw Myrtle alive, she had been trying to talk to me. I, lost in a daze, had pushed her away. Our friendship had torn apart right then like an old piece of paper, the chain breaking at its weakest link. And it was all because of me.
But sometimes two people are joined so closely in life that they end up repeating each other's mistakes, living each other's trials. In this sense, we hadn’t been so different after all. We had both risen and fallen together, swept by the same wave, as if there had been something connecting us the whole time.
It took me a long time to realize it, but Myrtle and I were the same.
Facing death, I see that we were two-of-a-kind.