Chapter 3
chapter three
lily
Last day of secondary school. Lily couldn’t believe it was real.
She takes a bagel with her in the morning, waves goodbye to Petunia (her sister), and walks to school as her hair flutters behind her in the warm morning breeze. Lily stops in front of a small house with yellow shutters and an unkempt garden, and waits for Remus to come out and meet her. She hears a thump and a clink of keys, and Remus steps out, looking annoyed.
“Hey Rem. How are you doing?” she asks, looping her arm in his.
“Hip hurts. Also my knees.” He grumbles, patting his chest pocket. Lily whacks his hand away.
“No smoking around me. It fucking stinks.” she says sternly, and he gives her an exasperated look. She sticks her tongue out at him in return. “Also, I find it hard to feel bad for you when I’ve been telling you to go talk to someone about your hip.”
“It’s not that bad,” Remus protests. Immediately after this statement, he stumbles and hisses in pain, rubbing his hip. “...Okay, maybe it is that bad.” Lily nods with affectionate annoyance.
Remus turned on his phone, awkwardly shifting the arm twined with Lily’s to put in his password. “Who are you texting?” Lily asked, raising an eyebrow. Remus glares at her.
“Nobody.”
“You know, the fact that you turned your phone off so quickly after saying that makes me feel like you’re lying.” They approach the school, and Remus conveniently spots his friends on the other side of the courtyard. He pulls his arm away.
“Look at that! I have to go!” Remus says, waving to Lily as he hurries away as fast as he could with a bad hip and knees. She rolls her eyes at him.
Lily pulls her backpack higher over her shoulders, and winces. She should have taken some of her books out—she won’t need them today, after all. Lily’s shoes click on the floor as she opens the door, and startles when someone walks up beside her. Lily’s heart does a quick swoop and a cartwheel when she sees it’s Mary. “Hey, Lily,” Mary said in her sing-songy voice, Marlene by her side.
“H-hi!” Lily says in reply. Mary looks more tired than she did yesterday, but she still has a smile on her face.
“So excited to not wake up this early again for months,” Mary says, yawning. Maybe that’s why she looks so exhausted. “Man, I love choir but it’s stupid how we have to wake up at the ass crack of dawn every morning.”
Lily giggles. “It’s a zero period, right?” Mary nods, looking exaggeratedly put-upon.
Lily smiles. “Well, I have to go to first period—but I’ll see you at lunch?”
Mary grins at her and waves as they walk different ways when the hallway turns. Lily heard Mary say something to Marlene, who laughed loudly and bumped Mary playfully with her hip. As she steps into her first period classroom, the students around her laughed and chatted, the teacher not even making any attempts to quiet them down. Lily sat down at her desk, wishing she could capture this moment in a photograph.
At the front of the classroom, a girl with purple hair was telling a story to her friends, who were roaring with laughter. Others were scrolling on their phones, heads tilted towards each other. At the back of the room, a few kids in all black with hands that were more rings than fingers were flipping through manga books and giggling. And there was Lily, at the center of it all. Just sitting and taking everything in.
Most of her classes were like that. She doodled or played noughts and crosses with her tablemates while the people around her gossiped about one thing or another. After what felt like only a few minutes, the lunch bell rang and all of the students filed excitedly into the lunchroom.
Lily sat down at her usual table (God, was this the last time she’d sit here?) beside Dorcas Meadows and Pandora Rosier—neither of whom she knew very well, but who were both really nice people. Pandora was in her literacy and math classes, and they usually paired up whenever they could for group projects.
When Lily looked up from her nasty meat mashup she noticed Mary and Marlene walking out of the lunch line. She waved at Mary excitedly, and turned to her tablemates. “Do you mind if they sit with us today?”
“Yeah, sure!” Pandora says in her soft, dreamy voice. Dorcas nods with a smile, and Lily thought Dorcas might be blushing a little.
Mary and Marlene sat down, and Mary instantly started talking to Pandora about something, which isn’t surprising. Mary seemed to know everyone. About halfway through the lunch period, she noticed whenever Marlene and Dorcas accidently bumped elbows or grazed their fingers against each other, both girls turned bright red.
Lily felt a weird swirling in her stomach when she thought about it a little more. Did they like each other? And why did it make her feel so weird? She wasn’t homophobic, was she—she’d never felt so strange when she saw Remus and Sirius together (even if Remus insisted on denying there was something going on between them). Sour self-loathing rose in her throat. This solidified it. Lily was not only a terrible person, but she was a bigoted piece of shit.
Mary lightly put a hand on Lily’s shoulder, bringing her back to reality. “Hey, you still here?”
“Yeah, sorry, just spaced out,” Lily said, laughing awkwardly. “Did someone ask me a question?” She rubbed her shoulder, trying to figure out why the place Mary had touched her felt like it was on fire.
“Oh, I just asked if you have plans for the summer,” Dorcas said, looking at Lily through her long eyelashes. Lily noticed Marlene and Dorcas’s pinky fingers were overlapping on top of the table. She felt sick again.
“Well, my friend Alice is trying to convince me to go on a road trip before college. Y’know, just to destress. She said I could bring some friends, but I’m not really sure about it yet.”
“Oh, that sounds awesome!” Pandora smiled. She brushed a blonde braid out of her eyes. “I’d say I would go with you, but my brother and I are going to visit our parents for a month.”
Dorcas nodded. “Yeah, I’m going to volunteer at a sleepover camp for my siblings. Sorry, Lils.”
“Marls and I could come with you,” Mary suggested, looking unusually nervous. “If you want us to, that is.”
A warm feeling spread through Lily’s whole body. “Oh, seriously? I’d appreciate that so much! I think I’m mainly just nervous about doing all the planning by myself.”
“Of course,” Marlene grinned.
“I’ll probably ask Rem to come with me too,” Lily mused. “And he’ll probably want to bring Sirius…” Mary giggled a bit at this. “But yeah, it’d be awesome if you two came with me. Thanks so much!”
“We’ll talk to the lads after school, yeah?” Mary asked, putting a hand on Lily’s shoulder again.
At that moment, Lily felt like she could fly.
chapter three
mary
Okay, maybe Mary was being a little selfish.
When, though, she thought to herself, wasn’t she being selfish?
Once she heard Lily was going on a trip for the summer, her first thought was that it would be the easiest way to get away from her mom. And that definitely made her a terrible, ungrateful daughter.
At the same time, though, something about spending weeks with Lily and Marlene and the lads and Lily made her feel like her heart was fizzling. So she wasn’t completely terrible, right? And even though Lily still scared her a little—she never really felt like she was saying the right thing around her—she couldn’t help being curious about her. Mary had a strange, burning desire to know everything about Lily. She tried not to think about this too much.
Throughout her last few classes of the day, she couldn’t stop thinking about the trip. She was bubbly and giddy and couldn’t focus on anything her various acquaintances were trying to say to her, and she didn’t even know why. At one point, someone tapped Mary on the shoulder and she impulsively reached into her bag for tampons and pads (Mary was known to be the distributor of hygiene products among the girls) before realizing it was her teacher, telling her that class had just ended. Mary couldn’t remember the last time she had been this scatter-brained.
When the final bell rang, she hurried out of the classroom (and then realized she forgot her backpack—thankfully, Gemma Prewett, who had two twin brothers in their sister school, was nice enough to bring it out for her).
She literally bumped into Marlene in the hallway, who yelped. “Mary! What the hell!”
“Sorry, love—we’ve got to go find Lily!” Mary said hurriedly, grabbing Marlene by the hand and pulling her towards the door.
“Christ, Macdonald—” Marlene gasped. “Slow down! What’s the rush, anyway?” Mary didn’t reply to this. She wasn’t sure she knew the answer herself.
The two girls stepped out into the sunshine, blinking against the brightness. Mary spotted Lily’s bright red hair a few feet from her and called out, “Hey, Li—Evans!” She’d been about to call her Lily, but for some reason that felt too personal.
Lily turned, hair swirling around her like a crimson halo. “Hi!” The bubbly feeling was back. Mary couldn’t help but smile. “Let’s go find Remus.”
She did a little skip-gallop as she turned around, waving Mary and Marlene forward. Mary’s heart skipped a few beats.
They found the guys standing under the same tree they’d been standing by the previous day, laughing loudly and obnoxiously. Lily stepped up next to Remus and chirped, “Hey, lads.”
“Hey, Lily,” they all replied. Mary almost laughed. It was a little funny how much they all visibly loved her. But who wouldn’t, really? Lily was almost radiant. Mary and Marlene dwindled behind Lily as she talked about her trip (Remus and Sirius wanted to go with them, unsurprisingly, but James and Pete were apparently both spending the summer at James's parents’ house—though they were both disappointed about not being able to come).
And so it was decided. Mary was so excited—probably too excited. She waved goodbye to Marlene, who had yet another football practice and nodded to the guys, who were off to their “annual rewatch of every Disney movie possible”, leaving her standing next to Lily.
Lily turned to her and smiled, sharp eyes softening a little. Mary’s heart tha-thumped. Just as Mary was about to say an awkward goodbye, Lily suddenly asked, “So… do you want to go get smoothies?”
Mary’s eyes widened. “Yeah. Yeah, sure!”
The two girls smiled at each other, and Lily led the way. Mary’s bag thumped against her thigh, but she barely felt it. She was too captivated by the way the sun filtered through the leaves and cast streaks of light onto Lily’s hair and spots of glitter in her green eyes.
“So, I feel like I don’t know much about you,” Mary said, looking up at Lily. “What do you do for fun?”
Lily looked surprised at being asked a question about herself. “Oh! I like taking pictures… mostly polaroids. And scrapbooking. My parents got me a camera for my birthday a few years back, and you could say it’s well-used.” She laughed a little.
“That’s so cool!” Mary said, genuinely excited. “You’ll have to show me your pictures sometime. I mean you don’t have to, I was just trying to say—”
“I get it,” Lily giggled. “And I’ll totally show you some. What about you, though? What’s your thing?”
“I’m not a super interesting person,” Mary laughed self-consciously.
Lily stopped in her tracks and gave Mary a look of pure disbelief. “I’m sure that’s not true!”
Mary scratched her neck, looking away. “...Well… I dunno, I don’t really have something I’m good at. I don’t even know what I’m gonna do beyond this summer. I’m just sort of… aimless. Useless. I dunno.”
Lily sputtered, still looking shocked. She flapped her hands, saying, “What—but you have such a beautiful singing voice! I’ve been to some of the concerts. You’re amazing. And whoever told you you’re useless has to be out of their goddamn mind!” Lily looked like steam might come out of her ears at the thought anyone would think anything terrible about Mary.
Mary flushed. “You’ve been to our concerts?”
Lily smiled a little, looking embarrassed. “Yeah, I know a few people in the choir. I didn’t connect who you were before, but I definitely noticed you. You sort of stand out.”
Mary looked away, feeling very warm. Which was probably just because of how hot it was outside, she rationalized to herself. “Thanks, Evans.”
“No problem. And hey, we’re here!”
Mary looked up, and sure enough, they’d walked up to the smoothie truck, which was pastel colored and bright, with a glowing sign and a yellow and pink canopy. There was a bubbly, green-haired employee behind the window, handing brightly colored drinks to tired and over-warm teenagers.
Lily walked up to the truck and greeted the teenager cheerfully, asking for a strawberry banana smoothie. She turned to Mary with a question in her eyes, and Mary looked at the menu with mild panic. After a few awkward seconds, she chose something random that looked like it didn’t have spinach or broccoli or something in it.
The two girls sat down and sipped their drinks, Lily looking at the trees and Mary looking at the way the sun made Lily’s hair look like it was made of gold.
Mary felt more comfortable than she had in a long time.
~~~
9:32
Lily Evans
Thanks for indulging me with the smoothies today!
9:33
You
of course!!
i had a great time :)
9:33
Lily Evans
Me too <3