Johnny’s Girl

Hazel had already unpacked when Tink arrived back from the Christmas holiday, but she stayed in their dormitory to have a chat with her best friend while Tink did her own unpacking. Tink always brought an absolutely ridiculous amount of clothes back and forth with her at holidays. Last Easter she’d had two suitcases along when she returned to school.

Hazel was stretched out on her bed with her pillows propped behind her back, her legs crossed at her ankles. “What did you do over Christmas?” she asked. She hadn’t heard from Tink the entire holiday.

“Oh, we went to Paris. I was incommunicado because I left my owl behind. Sorry about that, I was strictly Muggle over Christmas. It was a lot of fun, though. Wait til you see the new dresses I bought. And-” Tink pulled a small package wrapped in shiny red paper out of her suitcase and tossed it to Hazel.

Hazel unwrapped it with a smile. She knew it was a book even before she opened it, and sure enough, it turned out to be a copy of one of her favorite detective novels in French. “Thanks, Tink.”

“I thought it would help improve your French since you’re already familiar with the book.” Tink was smiling. “Maybe you can find some French films to improve your accent, too.”

She chuckled. “Thanks very much. Johnny says I have a terrible accent too.”

“Did you speak French in front of Johnny?” Tink asked. She’d gone back to unpacking, pulling clothes out of the suitcase and arranging them on her bed in piles.

“Yes, well, his grandmother is French and she said something to him in French so I responded and-”

Tink looked up. “Wait, you met Johnny’s grandmother? When did that happen?”

“I went to his house over Christmas.”

Tink dropped the trousers she’d been holding and came around to sit opposite Hazel, staring at her gobsmacked. “Oh my god!”

“Shut up.”

Tink picked up a bra from the pile of clothes beside her and smacked Hazel with it. “Oh. My. God!”

Hazel rolled her eyes. “It’s not like that. It was his little brother’s birthday party, I just went over to hang out. He told all of his relatives that I’m his life coach. They thought it was hilarious. Remus especially.”

Tink was very clearly unconvinced and hit her again with the bra. “You are Johnny’s girlfriend!”

“I am not!” Hazel snatched the bra away and tossed it behind Tink. “I’m just his friend, that’s all.”

She wasn’t about to tell Tink that all of Johnny’s uncles and aunts thought she was his girlfriend. His mother had seemed unconvinced as well. The last thing she wanted was for Tink to run around thinking the same as the Lupins and Weasleys.

“You fancy him, I know you do,” Tink said, almost accusing now. “And he invited you home at Christmas. Hazel!”

“You are being deliberately obtuse,” Hazel snapped. She could feel her cheeks turning red. “I do not fancy him. He certainly doesn’t fancy me. Don’t make it more than it is. I go to your house all the time and you’re not my girlfriend. I’m just his friend. He really doesn’t have any friends, so he’s still getting used to how to behave to one.”

Tink gave her a look that said she thought Hazel was the one being obtuse. “He has friends all over the school.”

“Does he?”

Tink frowned at her. “Of course he does.”

Hazel sighed. “He has minions, not friends.”

They stared at each other for a moment, then Tink seemed to decide she wasn’t going to argue the point. She sat back and pulled her legs up, cross-legged on her bed.

“Tell me what Johnny’s house was like.”

“It was… well, it was very busy. It was his brother’s sixth birthday party and there were a lot of his cousins and aunts and uncles everywhere. Chaotic, really. The cake was good, though,” she added. She decided on the spot not to tell her best friend about Johnny taking her to see the bowtruckles down at the little pond. Something about that moment had felt very private, and she didn’t want Tink making it into something it wasn’t.

Romantic, for example. It wasn’t. Oh, bugger. It wasn’t.

Tink seemed to have remembered something, and glanced over her shoulder at the poster of Hilarion Winston-Fisher, then turned back to Hazel wide-eyed. “Johnny’s related to him, isn’t he? Did you meet him?” She immediately recognized from Hazel’s expression that she had, and shrieked loudly, “Oh my god!”

“What’s wrong?” asked Bethany Device from the other side of the dormitory, looking alarmed at Tink’s rather piercing voice.

Tink pointed at the poster. “Hazel met him!”

Bethany’s eyes went wide. “No!”

Hazel shrugged. “He was very nice. Very quiet.”

“Did he look just like his photos?” Tink asked eagerly.

“Well, mostly. He’s a bit older now than he was in that one,” Hazel said hesitantly, nodding at the poster.

Bethany had come over to lean against Hazel’s bedpost. She was even quieter than Hazel tended to be, and came from a long line of very talented hedge witches. Hazel had always liked her. “I can’t believe you met him! Was he so gorgeous in person?”

She had to admit that he was a breathtakingly gorgeous man, even if he was a solid twenty years older than the three of them. “He really was, honestly.”

“You have the best life, Hazel,” Bethany said enviously. “Going out with Johnny Lupin, meeting Hilarion Winston-Fisher. All I did at Christmas was eat my weight in chocolate.”

“I’m not going out with Johnny,” Hazel told her, exasperated. “He’s just a friend.”

Bethany shook her head and returned to her own unpacking. Hazel threw a sardonic look at her best friend.

Tink raised an eyebrow. “I told you everyone thinks you’re Johnny’s girl.”

Hazel threw a pillow at her.

*

Johnny was waiting for her after Herbology, standing outside the greenhouse in his Quidditch robes and his cloak, his red and gold Gryffindor scarf wrapped loosely around his neck. Hazel wasn’t surprised to see him, since these days he regularly popped up wherever she was. He straightened up when he saw her, bestowed a cheerful smile on their classmates, and offered an arm to her as they set off for the castle.

She hesitated only for a moment before taking his arm. He’d thrown his cloak back so she could, and it seemed like she’d be the one being a twat if she refused. Besides, it was sort of nice walking along beside him with her hand wrapped around his arm. He was always so warm, too, her fingers didn’t have time to cool off from the warmth of the greenhouse in the winter air. She hadn’t put her mittens in her pocket before she went to class, again.

“How was the rest of your holiday?” Hazel asked him. Since they’d been back from the Christmas break, she hadn’t had a chance to coach him yet, and it felt a little like she’d hardly seen him for the past week since his brother’s birthday party. It was only the second day back to classes, of course.

“Oh, good. Lots of family. Visited my grandparents and various aunties and uncles, lots of presents and food, Uncle Louis nearly got arrested on New Year’s Eve. The usual. What about you? Anything fun happen?”

“Why was your uncle nearly arrested?” she asked, glancing up at him in surprise. She’d heard several stories about Uncle Louis, so she had a fairly good guess it had probably involved one of his many girlfriends.

“It wasn’t one of his better incidents,” Johnny assured her. “Kind of boring. He was in a pub with two women and they fought over him, and one of them Stunned someone with his wand and let him take the blame. The authorities checked round the pub afterward and witnesses came forward and said he was passed out in the loo at the time, so Magical Law Enforcement let Uncle Louis go. Honestly I think it was a repeat, my auntie Dominique swears he did this ten years ago too. My dad called it Louis Being An Embarrassment, the sequel. Did you go see your dad over Christmas?”

“God no,” said Hazel, still chuckling a bit over his comments about his uncle. “I only see him once a year.”

Johnny looked a little shocked by that. They’d reached one of the entrance antechambers to the castle, and he drew her to the side, out of the path the other students were walking. “Really? I didn’t know that. Is he cruel to you?”

“No, it’s not like that.” She waved that off, letting go of his arm, and hurried to explain it to him. “Look, my mum’s a witch, and my dad’s a Muggle. They got divorced when I was a baby. He couldn’t handle her being magic. And by the time I was a toddler, it was obvious I was a witch too, and he didn’t know how to handle me. So I didn’t see him for many years. Then he got remarried, and he didn’t want to explain to his new wife that he didn’t see me because of magic, so he asked my mum if he could have me come to visit just for a week every summer.”

Johnny leaned back against the stone wall with his arms crossed over his chest, looking thoughtful. “When did that happen? Him getting remarried?”

“When I was eleven.”

“Does his new wife know about magic now?”

Hazel shook her head. “No. It would violate the Statute of Secrecy. I’m just very careful to act like a Muggle around them as best I can, although I’m not that great at it, honestly. Mostly I just stay quiet and read. My father’s wife thinks I’m very shy because I don’t talk a lot there.”

Johnny frowned. “Doesn’t it bother you? Having to pretend in front of them?”

“No. It’s only for a week.” She shrugged. It was difficult to explain, but it was such a brief week, visiting her father in London and seeing the Muggle parts of the city with him, she didn’t really concern herself that she was hiding her magic and who she really was. Her father took her and his wife and young daughter to museums and films and bookstores, and to lovely restaurants. And then she went back to her real life with her mother again, and mostly forgot about him until the next summer. It was more like visiting distant cousins, really.

“But he’s your dad. It would bother me,” he said quietly.

“Well, I’m not you.”

Johnny was staring at his feet, and mumbled something Hazel didn’t catch.

“What was that?” she asked suspiciously.

He looked up at her, his blue eyes troubled and his jaw set. “It bothers me for you.”

She stared at him for a long moment, uncertain what she should be feeling, what to say to him for being upset on her behalf. Eventually she settled on a quiet, “Thank you.”

Johnny was still looking at her with that same troubled expression, but he let the subject go, to her relief. “All right.”

“Did you finish the next chapter of your story yet?” Hazel asked, partly to change the subject and partly a genuine desire to know what happened next in his detective story. If it was a novel, she would have already stayed up all night to read the whole thing. Having to wait for the next chapter was difficult.

“Oh, yes. Hang on.” He fished around in his pocket and extracted some tightly folded sheets of parchment. “I’ve got the next two done, actually.”

“How many do you intend to write?”

He handed the story to her. “Seven total. That goes through the end of the year. They don’t normally do a June edition, but Natalie said they’d do one special for my grand finale.”

Hazel rolled her eyes at that, but she was already unfolding the parchment. Johnny leaned closer to read over her shoulder, as if he hadn’t written all this himself. Normally she hated someone reading over her shoulder, but somehow it didn’t bother her, even though everything he did usually irritated her. Maybe she was getting used to him.

His next two chapters were even better than the first. He seemed to be establishing a voice as a writer very quickly, which wasn’t surprising given both his history as a storyteller and his tendency to be irritatingly good at everything he did. His characters were engaging, the dialogue read very naturally, and the plot was developing well. So well, in fact, that when the second of his new chapters ended in a cliffhanger, she drew in her breath sharply and looked over to find his face very close to hers.

He grinned. “It’s good, right?”

Hazel stared at him. His ginger hair was tumbling over his eyebrows, in need of a trim, and those blue eyes sparkled like sapphires. He had a very infectious smile. She was smiling back at him before she’d even realized it.

“You really are good at everything,” she murmured. “It’s very annoying.”

“Remus always says so,” he agreed. “You like the story though, right?”

“Yes.” She handed the pages back to him, a little reluctantly. She sort of wanted to re-read them later. Johnny seemed to notice her reluctance.

“D’you want a copy?” He straightened up, pulling his wand from the pocket of his robes, and duplicated the parchment pages for her. “No spreading spoilers, though. Not even to Tink. Those are top secret.”

“You know I wouldn’t,” she said, stuffing the new chapters of his story into her rucksack.

“I know, I’m just teasing,” he said easily. “I better go. I’m late for Quidditch practice.”

Hazel rolled her eyes. “You should’ve said instead of standing here chatting with me.”

“Not like they can start without me. I’m Quidditch captain. Bye, Hazel.”

She watched him saunter off toward the pitch. People waved and called greetings to him as he passed them.

Those same people, she thought, believed she was his girlfriend, at least enough to gossip about it. And she had no idea what to do to stop them. Possibly walking around with her hand on his elbow wasn’t helping that, not to mention him going out of his way to see her between classes, but on the other hand, she didn’t want to let the opinions of people she didn’t even know stop her from hanging out with Johnny.

Bugger it all. They could say what they liked. Johnny was her friend. Hazel squared her shoulders and went into the castle.

*

The dining hall was nearly empty when Johnny returned from Quidditch practice, but he was pleased to see Hazel was still there. She was sitting at the back of the Ravenclaw table, her nose buried in a novel with a plate of sugared biscuits next to her. There was still plenty of food on the tables, and he slid into the seat next to her. A plate appeared on the table in front of him and he began loading it up before the house elves took the dinner platters away for the evening.

Hazel looked up at him and smiled vaguely. She was probably still mentally absorbed in her book, he thought affectionately. He reached over to tip the book up so he could see the cover, his hand on hers. It was one of those mystery novels about a grandmotherly witch who solved rather tame crimes in her bucolic little town, which he would have thought wasn’t gory enough for Hazel’s taste. She favored horror and crime stories, gruesome murders and alien abductions, much more noir than this series. This book looked too new to have come from the student lending shelves in the library. It must belong to her.

“You like these books?”

“I started reading them when I was ten, and now I always have to read them when a new one comes out. They’re sweet,” said Hazel. She still had the book open, and hadn’t pulled her hand away.

Johnny grinned at her for calling a murder mystery sweet, even if it was a cottage mystery. “How many murders are in that one?”

“Oh, Frances Fernworth rarely solves a double murder,” she told him with a twinkle in her eye. “One at a time is her speed.”

He chuckled and let the book go, turning his attention to his plate. Hazel closed the book, one finger holding her place, and propped her head up on the heel of her hand, watching him as he ate. He flashed a grin at her between bites, and she smiled back, one corner of her mouth quirking up ruefully.

“You are absolutely appalling at the table,” she remarked with a dismayed shake of her head. “I don’t know why I let you sit near me.”

“Cause I’m your friend.”

She looked very amused. “That must be it. Chew with your mouth closed, please.”

He rolled his eyes, exaggerating the gesture. “Yes, Mum.”

Hazel smacked him gently with her book, then huffed in exasperation as she realized she’d changed her grip on the book and forgotten about holding her page. “Oh, now I’ve lost my place.”

She didn’t look serious about that, so he laughed. “Lost your place in a book? What kind of Ravenclaw are you?”

Her mouth dropped in mock outrage. Hazel set the book down and pinched him hard on his bicep. He pretended to be hurt and ducked away from her, trying not to choke on his food through his laughter, and she poked him in the side while he scooted away from her.

“Twat,” she told him as they both settled back into their seats.

“You better keep coaching me, if I’m still a twat.”

She was chuckling at him. “I haven’t given up on you yet. I’ll have you not a twat by Easter.”

He pretended to check an imaginary watch, glancing ostentatiously at his bare wrist. “Is that enough time?”

“It’s an ambitious project,” she told him in an airy voice. “You are an enormous twat, after all.”

He smiled. “Guess you’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

She picked up the book again and gave him another gentle whack with it. “I’m not getting rid of you, you twat, you’re my friend.”

Johnny was still smiling as he went back to eating, watching her pop one of the biscuits into her mouth and brush the sugar off her hands before opening her book again. He watched her reading and thought his favorite thing about being friends with Hazel was that she felt comfortable enough around him to tease and roughhouse a little, and take his arm when he walked beside her around the castle.

He liked that she was comfortable around him now. She wasn’t exactly shy, not really, but she was a little standoffish at first and a loner at heart. A tough nut to crack, was Hazel, but he thought he’d broken through her shell now.

Having her come by over Christmas had been a lot of fun. And his mum had liked her, although she was very suspicious that Hazel was actually his girlfriend and he just wasn’t admitting it to his mother. He’d tried explaining to his mum that there was very little he wouldn’t admit to and, frankly, brag about, but she still looked suspicious about the whole Hazel attending Artie’s party thing.

Hazel looked up at him and smiled warmly before picking up another biscuit. She really was very pretty, her eyes sparkling in the candlelight of the Great Hall. He watched as she took a bite and returned to the twee little cottage mystery, unable to stop smiling back at her.

Maybe his mum had a point.

*

Hazel was hurrying toward the Transfiguration classroom a few weeks after Christmas when she nearly collided with another student emerging from a shortcut at the same speed.

Hazel danced sideways as the girl did the same, both of them wide-eyed and clutching their bookbags, and then the girl said, “Oh, sorry Hazel!”

As she dashed off down the corridor to where a group of third year Slytherins she vaguely recognized were clustered outside the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom, Hazel stared in consternation.

She hadn’t the faintest idea who that girl was, but somehow a Slytherin third year knew her name? Was the gossip around the school about her getting that bad, really?

“Oh, bugger,” she whispered.

“All right, Hazel?” came a familiar voice behind her. Johnny was right behind her, utterly unconcerned that they were both due in class in a few moments. She supposed once she was with him, she needn’t be concerned either, since Johnny frequently strolled in late and most of the teachers didn’t say a word to him about it. A bit of his reputation seemed to be rubbing off on her, because they’d both turned up late to Charms a few days ago and Professor Winpenny hadn’t acknowledged either of their tardiness.

Johnny glanced down toward the Slytherins. “I didn’t realize you knew Bumpy.”

“I don’t, but she seems to know me,” she told him, then paused. “Her name is Bumpy?”

“Oh, that’s just a nickname,” Johnny said breezily. “She’s part of my cousin Tipper’s crew, they’ve all got silly nicknames. That’s him over the end next to Yap.”

Hazel glanced over at his cousin. Johnny’s cousin Tipper had auburn hair that was more brown than ginger, closely resembled Liam Lupin, and was a third year who from Hazel’s recollection primarily spoke with a very affected upper-class drawl that she found very annoying. He lacked that odd star quality that Johnny and Dora had. Frankly, she didn’t usually pay that close attention to him to remember he even existed. “I see.”

“It’s just a nickname for him, too. You know Tipper’s real name, don’t you?”

She searched her memory and came up blank. No doubt she’d heard it when he was Sorted, but that was years ago and she’d only ever heard people call him Tipper (and, of course, ‘Mr. Van Laren’ from the staff). “I suppose I don’t.”

He smirked. “Thornton.”

“And he always goes by Tipper?”

“Wouldn’t you, if you were called Thornton?” Johnny wiggled his eyebrows at her, and she chuckled despite herself.

“Do you know all his friends’ real names too?” she asked, curious despite the need to be at least nearly on time for class. She was well aware of Johnny’s encyclopedic memory for names and faces, so she wasn’t at all surprised when he immediately responded in the affirmative.

“Of course. That’s Lawrence,” and he pointed at Yap. “Beside him is Abigail, who goes by Flopsy for reasons known only to moronic rich aristocrats, and beside her is your new friend Bumpy, whose mother named her Priscilla. I actually think Bumpy is an improvement there.”

“What about Knickknack and Tully?” She felt rather as if she were looking into a secret world she’d never been aware of.

And sure enough, Johnny immediately responded, “Alastair and Louisa. Who are dating right now, by the way. Practically all of them have dated each other this year, and they’re always having dramatic breakups, but they stay friends. Tipper’s group are tight like that. And stupid like that.”

She smiled at the thought of a bunch of thirteen year olds having dramatic breakups, and at Johnny for knowing the gossip about his cousin’s group. He was as bad as Tink about being interested in everyone else’s business. “I wonder if they found each other here or always knew each other.”

Johnny waved a hand airily. “It’s been ages. My auntie Dominique has had her kids in some sort of rich upper crust school virtually since birth. Knickknack has been around for yonks, and so has Yap. I’ve known Flopsy since she was in nappies, she’s related to my auntie Dominique’s husband, he’s got a couple of magical relatives and her dad is one of them. Apparently her dad did something naughty with a gerbil once that got in the papers and Flopsy hates it when you bring it up. Dora tries to mention it to her once a month.”

“Of course she does. You have entirely too many cousins and aunties,” Hazel informed him in amusement.

“Well aware of it.” He held out an arm, offering her his elbow. “Shall we, then?”

This was why there was gossip about them, but at the moment she couldn’t bring herself to care. Hazel tucked her hand into the crook of his arm and they set off for the Transfiguration classroom together.