The Coming Out of Percy Weasley

The Coming Out of Percy Weasley

Chapter Five

Magazines Again

What was the point? What was the point? What was the point?

Percy’s mind kept reeling with the same thought over and over again, his body so heavy with the realisation that everything that he had suffered had been for nothing. There would be people like him in a few years, exchanging vows at the altar and kissing between classes. He thought of all the dead that hadn’t been buried yet and how their families had to hear that the Ministry decided that, oh, I suppose that that homosexuality thing we’ve been terrified of for so long isn’t so bad after all.

It was so ludicrous that Percy didn’t know what to feel. At points, he felt a hollow pain; at times, he felt so angry, and he felt nothing at all because feelings of things after the fact didn’t change what had happened. He was in heart failure. He would need dialysis for the rest of his life because his kidneys could not function on their own and needed a magical machine to do its job for him, and if they didn’t do it, then he would be dead. He was cured. But he’d been cured for something that no longer needed to a cure. He had an attraction to nothing. The thought of being close to anyone repulsed him. He had an involuntary reaction to being touched by a man that he could not control out of his own will that came deep from his gastrointestinal system. His treatment made it so that his body would never function the same way.

Because of everything, he would die before his time. His family was broken forever because of a law that meant nothing.

This wasn’t what laws were supposed to be like. Rules and laws were supposed to bring order and protect people. He thought of his mother telling him to go back upstairs in the middle of the night in their first safe house. Then he thought of the hours he spent in that room being treated as subhuman, being told that if he were not treated, then he would go on to pry on defenceless little boys and how he would want to have violent, abusive sex with his spouses. And if he had the will to care, if he were the kind of person that he was before he had been tortured within an inch of his life, he would decide that this was the time that the whole regime had a change. He would review the decrees and think of campaigns he could launch publicly. If he could get this many signatures and have enough ties with political parties, maybe something could happen that would make a difference. But he was sick of it. He was so sick.

He was too sick to think about changing the world or being a martyr. He was not good like his golden labrador Gryffindor family, and he should’ve listened to the Sorting Hat when it had such a Hat stall because it was between putting him in Ravenclaw or Slytherin. Still, he’d insisted that he wanted to be with his family. But then his father put him in that ward. His father had given up on him when Percy went against his values. Arthur didn’t love him.

This wasn’t love.

“Perce?” Charlie had been hovering over them. All his family members looked at him with this sickening concern. He felt less than he ever was just with how they looked at him. The pitied dog.

Percy closed his eyes, feeling tears burning into his eyes, but what would crying solve? If he shed a single tear, a thousand tears, would that bring back everything he had lost? Would that turn back time to when he was less naïve? Would that remove all the pain he felt from his fingers from how the curses damaged his nerves?

“It’s not fair,” he finally said.

Charlie cleared his throat.

“Yeah, Perce, it’s not fair,” he said after a pause. “It’s the most not fair thing that’s ever happened. And you deserve to be angry. And sad. And you’re going to feel things that I could never imagine feeling. But we’ll be right there with you because we’re family. We’re always going to be on your side no matter what.”

Percy was seething. “Is that a fucking joke?” he didn’t even mean to swear and never had, but it was just so stupid what Charlie had said. How could he say that knowing what he did? 

George just raised an eyebrow. “Well, yeah, he’s got a point. Dad’s put him there so the family line doesn’t work, Charlie. But you’ve got us—even though we’ve mucked up. But we’re really good now.”

He looked at George full on. Insufferable twats. There was nothing that the twins could ever say that would make him angry, and he didn’t know why. They could call him a loser or a prat, but he knew they cared about him. Probably more than anyone else did. He didn’t understand how he knew this information because they picked on him constantly. They were annoying and always knew how to press his buttons. His only reprieve was when they picked on Ron, and he had to punish them for that, so they started picking on him again. It was a constant bloody cycle with those two. 

“Yeah, we’re O-level students,” Fred added, and Percy did not know why, but that made him laugh. 

After the insertion of a dialysis line, two blood transfusions, ten litres of fluid draining out of his stomach, and enough diuretic potions and blood sugar-lowering potions to make an obese dragon dehydrated and malnourished, Percy was semi-normal enough to go home on the seventh day of his hospital admission, surprising the staff that thought that he would die on that very same admission. Due to how bad his heart failure was, he was sent home with a wheelchair because of his inability to walk long distances and a nasal cannula to give him oxygen to breathe in. They shrunk the oxygen tank so he didn’t feel like he was carrying too much. He was sent home at the beginning of August.

A Gringott’s goblin had come and explained that there was compensation from the Ministry because of everything he’d gone through. When Percy had looked at it, he was relieved that he had not yet made a will because the amount of money he had could now house his family in a Manor. Then afterwards, he asked for an attorney and wrote a well-crafted will despite his mother’s protests that it was unnecessary, and he was due to be discharged soon.

His heart also worked only at 20%, and his kidneys needed a machine to filter waste. Percy was sure if he stopped breathing throughout the night, his healers wouldn’t spend too long on his CPR, thinking it wasn’t even worth that much anyway. He wouldn't blame them. 

He had gotten a letter from Hogwarts, explaining that they felt sorry about his condition and had given him his diploma. Another girl on the Daily Prophet who would’ve graduated that year from her wizarding school had also gotten a diploma despite not finishing the school year. They had given his projected grades based on his previous marks. He had gotten his full N.E.W.T’s despite not sitting a single exam, just based on the fact that he had gotten his full O.W.Ls without much difficulty. But that was the Percy that he was before. The Percy  he was now was different. The Percy that he was now knew even if he had five years to practice for his N.E.W.Ts, he would not pass them. He might not even pass his O.W.L’s. He’d scarcely believe that he would pass his first-year exams because he’d forgotten the wrist motions of an Accio and was not sure what the fire-creating charms were. He could not make a first-year-level potion.

Percy’s mind was such cotton. He was still thinking about the DNR he had been staring at for ages because he had forgotten how to write. He understood what he was signing just fine without Charlie being patronising as he tried to explain it to him in case his oxygen-deprived mind didn’t understand. He had just forgotten how to write. Sometimes, he found it hard to read anything. There were things he’d lost, but he was unsure how to explain. He sometimes stared at an object for a long time, wondering what it was, a something or rather that he used daily that he couldn’t remember the name of. Sometimes, he heard names and places that took him weeks to find the context. Percy was an intellect. He spent most of his time studying and accumulating data into tiny little folders that he placed in his brain. That was what made him happy. That was the only thing that made him happy. But it was gone because he couldn’t find any folders he’d colour-coded so meticulously. His mind was gone.

And if he was not his mind, then who was he? He tried to imagine Oliver without Quidditch, Charlie without his dragons, Fred and George without their pranks, and just imagined them as different people, soulless. He was soulless.

He was lost in a deluge. He was not of this world. He was of the world of white walls and a drowning constant silence ringing into his ears that nobody he knew would ever understand. He spent most of his days still there, even at home, sitting on the floor in the living room, unable to hear his mother talking to him to get up and wash his hands so they could eat dinner. He would find himself on the floor or the chair or sitting at the dining room table without any clear memory of how he had gotten there.

Percy knew that his family was concerned about him. He could hear them sometimes, when he was in and out of consciousness, talking about how he was only there some of the time. But he was so dissociated from reality, used to time just passing, not accounting for the time that had passed. That was what happened when you were locked into a white room for ages. That was what your mind turned to at the end.

Then, he was just leisurely browsing through a copy of the Quibbler and saw the paint.

It was THE PAINT.

The one of his nightmares, the very white paint that was forever in his mind. That was when he had discovered that the paint was discontinued and why. That was the only time Percy had had enough energy to do anything. He had gotten into his wheelchair, made his way to Mr Lovegood’s home, and asked him if he knew how to get a can of this paint.

He had never thought that he would ever come to like the Lovegoods. He always thought Luna Lovegood too weird and her fascination with creatures that didn’t exist too outwardly for him, but he was the most normal in that house he had ever been in his life. They talked to him like he had always been a corpse in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank hooked to his nose. The only thing that Luna had asked him was how many litres of oxygen he needed. He told her he needed two. Luna nodded her head as if that piece of information would make a difference in her life.

Mr Lovegood had procured him the paint that he had asked the following day. Then Percy went home, went to his room, and somehow, through all the adrenaline in the world, shrunk down everything into his room. He somehow remembered all the spells he had forgotten, put everything he owned into a tiny box and shoved it into the closet; then he spello-taped the door. He spent the rest of the day painting his room white.

When his mother came in to call him down for dinner, his room and floor were covered in semi-lethal paint. His clothes, his hair, his wheelchair, his hands—everything was covered in a thick smear of paint. His paint job was not the best, and he knew that because he did not ask for help. He was panting, and his chest burned, but he kept staring at the walls around him, and for the first time since he had been back home, he did not feel crazy anymore.

The walls were real; he could touch them, and his mother could see them. They were not just in his mind.

“Godric, Percival, couldn’t you find a darker colour than this?” Molly said, rubbing her eyes as she stared at the walls. She couldn’t. It was too bright to look at. He knew because he felt the same way the first days he sat in that room. But he’d adjusted to that colour. That colour was seared into his memory. The smell of it. The feel of it. The existence of it. It was the same. “Sweetheart, it’s too bright. This isn’t…and it has this awful smell. Where did you get this paint from anyway? We don’t own any paint!”

“This is the colour,” he said, looking at his room with amazement. “The colour in the ward. In the room they kept me in. It was this colour.”

“Why on earth would you want to paint your colour that colour now that…” Molly stammered. “Percival, this isn’t healthy. It’s not like you’ve fond memories of this place. People paint their walls to remind them of calming beaches or happy colours like that yellow I painted in the kitchen last year, but this is…”

“You don’t understand,” Percy said quietly. It wasn’t that she wasn’t trying to. She just simply couldn’t. “I did this so you can understand what it was like. I can hear you sometimes—talking to each other, wondering where I am. I’m here in this room. I’ve always been in this room, so I thought I could…show you. How it was like.”

Molly paused, thinking about this for a while.

“It was like this?” she said.

Percy nodded his head.

“What was…a day for you like?” Molly asked slowly.

Percy stood up from his wheelchair (the first time he had done this in public, he’d received so many stares from people that he’d thought he’d done something wrong. It was as if being able to stand from a wheelchair meant he had no disability) and walked towards the wall. He sank down on the floor, feeling the sensation of the cold wall against his hard spine. He shivered. He’d cast a spell so that the paint had already dried.

He patted down so that she could sit beside him.

“I’m not dressed for that, love,” she said, pointing towards her floral nightgown.

“Neither was I,” Percy said with a smile. It was not a mean smile. It was just a matter-of-fact one.

She did not say anything and sat down beside him. She had tried to talk to him, but he shook his head. He owned a window, but he boarded it up and then painted over the cardboard so that it was white. He knew this room was still better than the one in his head, but it was the closest thing he would ever have again. He painted his door, too.  

After moments of his mother shuffling around and saying things he didn’t respond to, such as how she needed to get the washing done or the cleaning. She continued chattering on, sighing ever so often. 

Percy sometimes wondered why his family wanted him to explain what he had gone through, but when he was trying to, they didn’t understand what he was trying to convey. Maybe it was too abstract what he had done.

“I think this is a bit ridiculous, Percival,” she said. “I don’t know what you were trying to convey by this. I want to know what’s happened… but I don’t understand why painting your room in this colour will do anything for you. I mean, it’s not good, is it? I mean, it’s probably re-traumatising or something of the like. Oh, I’m not sure. I’ve read Martha Johnston made a column about it in the Wellness section of Witch Weekly about how trauma victims might react to surroundings that remind them of their trauma… I think that you shouldn’t have done this by yourself of all accord. You’ve got that diabetes and that heart disease. Have you checked your blood sugar recently?”

He pulled his knees up to his abdomen like how he used to comfort himself when he was back there when he did not have a huge stomach that was pressing against him. His back and whole body ached because he was still too thin. Even sitting in the room with his mother and hearing his mother talk incessantly didn’t make him feel like he was out of the room.

“It was quiet, Mum,” Percy said with a half-smile. “I didn’t have anyone talking nonstop into my ear about my blood sugar readings.”

“Maybe you should’ve. Look at the state of you. It’s like you’ve not seen a homecooked meal not once in your life,” Molly said as if she’d forgotten that he’d been tortured in a ward for the better part of a year and a half. “Oh, I’m sorry, love. I know you’re trying to get me to see something. I understand that, but I… I just don’t see it.”

“I’m just saying that if you’re quiet,” Percy said, stressing that keyword, “and just sit here and imagine that there’s no option to leave the room. That nothing is connecting you to the outside world. Just…try to imagine that. Please, for me. For my sake. Because you said it yourself, you want to understand, and you can’t understand, mum, not if you’re talking all the time about my blood sugar readings and what Martha Johnston wrote about trauma in her Witch Weekly column.”

“Alright then,” he heard her mother take a dramatic intake of her breath. “I’ll do that then.”

He nodded his head. He noticed her open her mouth to speak but said nothing.

 Then, after a while, she spoke, and her voice was very weak, and he could hear tears in her eyes. “Percival, love, why don’t you leave this room then, lock the door behind you and come back in a few hours? Don’t tell me when. Just do that. I think I need some time alone, alright? Just to…well, just to think about everything you’ve said.”

Percy walked to his wheelchair, already out of breath, when he arrived. He would steal a shirt or a pair of pants from Ron or Bill; it didn’t matter which of them. He would take a shower and then maybe try to eat something, ground himself in this world long enough and come to open the door for his mother.

That was initially the plan, but the minute Percy had run himself a warm bath and sat at the tub's edge, he fell asleep. He had somehow gained the magical ability to fall asleep anywhere as long as he sat up. He could be in the bath, on a chair, in the train station, or a hospital bed. He had slept in the most uncomfortable positions; a position that gave him any slight comfort usually made him fall asleep almost instantly. When he woke, he forgot what had happened between him and his mother for the first half hour at least. He had gotten up from the tub, his body in a texture resembling a prune and had put on the Chudley Canons pyjamas that he’d stolen from Ron that were too short on him.

He only thought something was amiss when he wheeled himself out of the bathroom and realised the house was eerily silent. He couldn’t hear anything from the twins’ rooms, Ginny’s room, Bill or Charlie’s room and had remembered conveniently that he had left his mother in his room for ages. He looked at the clock and flushed, realising that he had fallen asleep in the tub for eight hours straight. He was glad that his skin had not separated in the water.

Percy wheeled himself to his room and opened the door but was surprised to see that everyone in his family was sitting on the floor, none speaking to each other, silently staring at the blank walls in front of them. He wondered how they had all gotten into this scenario but felt a tug in his chest because… he finally felt they understood what he was trying to do. He sat by the wheelchair and said nothing for the first ten minutes. He didn’t need the visuals of this room to go back to that room in his mind, the deafening silence, the smell of the chemicals, the lack of stimulation, the lack of everything. He did not know when he’d interact with another human being or eat anything; his mind went to cotton.

He didn’t know why, but he found himself getting up from his wheelchair and sitting next to his mother, holding her hand and pulling himself close to her. In that white room, he sometimes wanted another touch of a human being. He did not realise things about his mother like he did that second, like how she smelled slightly of something citrusy and fruity, like strawberries and lemon, how her hair was softer than it was frizzy, and how her skin was so warm against his. He thought he felt warmth when he returned from that room, but he didn’t. This was what he was missing, this warmth that he so desperately wanted. He grabbed her arm and held it so tightly because he was almost suddenly terrified of losing it, as if it would all go away and all the white walls would collapse on him. There were monsters in the shadows, and they were going to grab his legs and pull him back into the room forever this time, and he would be locked, and nobody would come to rescue him. He closed his eyes, and still, all he could see was the piercing white boring into him.

His mother reached out to hold him back, holding him so tightly that he swore that he could feel his ribs break underneath her touch, even though she couldn’t hurt a fly. She was holding him so tightly, and even though she had told him probably a hundred thousand times since he’d been back, this was the first time he’d heard her, “Don’t worry, love. That’s all back there now. We’re here with you now—in the present.”

Percy felt better after that. Whenever he seemed to be far away enough, his family around him had come up with increasingly more creative ways to bring him back to reality. Once, he was sat down at the breakfast table, his porridge oats getting cold in front of him when George had decided to place a cup of cold orange juice in his hands, and Percy looked down and accidentally spilt three-quarters of it on his lap. George had gotten so red, and Percy couldn’t help but smile because having ice-cold orange juice poured over your lap was one way to be pulled back into reality.

Another time, Charlie pulled him to his feet when he was sitting on the floor and put him in his wheelchair, taking him out into the woods for a walk and chattering off to his ear so much that he had no choice but to listen. One more time, Bill sat down and joined him for three minutes before he’d played his extremely loud metal music, and Percy had spent half an hour trying to get him to stop doing that.

Another time, he was in the living room when Ron hit him in the face with a colouring book and a pack of colouring pencils. His mother had gone white because Ron could be so violent, but that was the best thing that Ron had ever done to him. He didn’t have to think of spells he couldn’t remember or words he could hardly understand. He would just colour in between the lines, something so simple that a three-year-old could do it. He would spend hours filling in the book. By the end of the week, he had finished a forty-page colouring book and had handed it in as if it were an assignment to Ron.

The next day, his mother came in from Diagon Alley with a stack of colouring books and a new packet of colouring pencils. It cost her three Sickles and twelve knuts, and it was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

But better than that, when he was too tired to colour in anything, he’d put everything away and just sat on the kitchen table, wasting his life away until Ron slammed down a chessboard in front of him.

“I don’t remember how to play,” Percy said.

His ears went pink as he said that because he initially taught Ron how to play wizarding chess. He also taught Ron most of his tricks—he’d kept a few in bay to use for whenever he and Ron played. However, Percy couldn’t exactly claim that wizarding chess was his thing. He had learned how to play initially from Ravenclaw wizarding chess clubs that he’d been to. One of his biggest points of pride before was that he had beaten Roger Davies in a game of wizarding chess. He knew he would never be able to again. It was just that once, but it was all he needed.

But Ron wasn’t listening to him. He had intentionally given Percy the white pieces and took the black ones. “I’m going to teach you, you dumb prat,” he said. “But you better learn fast because I’m not a patient teacher. I tried to teach Harry once, and it was a bloody torture experience.” Then he realised what he’d said and flushed. “Sorry.”

Percy smiled at him. He thought it was somehow hilarious that his one-and-a-half-year imprisonment was akin to Ron teaching Harry wizarding chess. It was just… funny.

“Stop giving me that look,” Ron said, wagging his finger. “I know you don’t find anything funny.”

“Yes, I understand,” Percy said, still smiling. “I am such a spoilsport.”

“Godric, you don’t know half how much of a spoilsport you are,” Ron said. “Every time you talk when we’re watching a Quidditch game, you make the game even less interesting than it was.”

Percy was suddenly aware he hadn’t watched a Quidditch game in ages. And he so desperately wanted to. He didn’t know the stats of his teams anymore.

The minute Ron opened his play, Percy suddenly remembered how to play wizarding chess. It was all coming back to him in one fell swoop, smacking him over the head faster than he could imagine. He suddenly recalled all the other plays they played a million years ago. It took Percy about eleven seconds to decide how he wanted to open his play.

“Hey!” Ron shrieked at him. “I wasn’t going to start with that if I knew you were going to…” he was fuming. “I thought you didn’t know how to play. Godric, Perce, you’re such a liar.”

Then Ron started to laugh, and Percy couldn’t help but laugh with him. And when he accidentally knocked his piece over, they laughed even harder.

“What’s so funny?” Ginny said as she walked in, raising an eyebrow at them. “Godric, you two are unbelievable! Who laughs over the most boring game in the world?” she huffed and walked over to the fridge, taking out leftover lasagna from last night. “But I’m glad you’re both having fun.”

Ron looked affronted at the idea of having fun with Percy. “I’m not having fun with Percy. We were just…”

Percy was smirking. “Yes, you were. We were sharing a joke.”

“Oh, shut up,” Ron said. He looked like he wanted to throw chess pieces at him. “You wouldn’t know a joke if it bit you in your arse.” But he was smiling, still at the edge of laughter, as if one slightly funny thing could make him laugh again.

“Do you not like boys anymore?” Ginny asked. “Do you not like Oliver anymore?”

Nobody had asked him outright if it was the truth or not. In reality, Percy did not think of kissing or having sex with anyone anymore. The thought that he and Oliver had had sex before felt like it belonged on another planet.

“Well, there is the fact that I have this… reaction to things,” Percy said. He remembered how the male nurse had come closer with their sponge to wash their chest and how physically ill he felt that he had to ask for a female nurse. “And I’ve not thought of Oliver like that since…since before my treatment. I’ve been slightly preoccupied.”

He found it strange to say Oliver and him like they could be an item in the real world without any real consequence. The thought made him both anxious and curious. But he could still feel the familiar feeling of nausea forming in his stomach whenever he thought of anything sexual.

Immediately, his mind was filled with images of young boys in positions he didn’t want to see them in or grandfatherly figures with slashes all over their bodies. They looked like they belonged on an Auror’s desk, pending a Wizengamot investigation. A part of him was still terrified that if he were allowed to kiss boys, he would do unspeakable things.

“Maybe you should,” Ginny said, shaking her head. “I think it’ll help you a lot. And he asked about you a lot last year.”

Percy hated himself for the immediate fluttery butterfly feeling in his chest that was replaced by the nausea that had come with thinking of another boy’s flesh. “He had? Asked about me?”

“Yeah,” Ron said. “I don’t know how blokes show interest, but I think he still likes you.”

“The same way we do it—you’d know that if you had anyone interested in you,” Ginny raised an eyebrow at him.

Ron stuck her tongue out at Ginny, who stuck her tongue out back at him. Percy rolled his eyes.

“Very mature,” he said. “Listen, Gin, I don’t think I can be with another person after…everything that’s happened. Besides, there was the fact that I nearly collapsed when Bill gave me that hug the minute we went out of the hospital. I’ve been under treatment for a year and a half. They’ve told me that the kind of person that I was—well, they’ve shown me pictures of little boys and old men all in disgusting compromising positions. They’ve said I’d be a predator if I weren’t treated. And they’ve been saying those things for ages. I mean…this whole acceptance of people that are like me, that’s relatively a new thing. How do they know that…that I’m not going to turn out like that? Maybe they were right.”

“Yeah, Perce, they were right about giving you toxic waste to drink, making you violently sick and killing thirty-three people,” Ginny said, deadpanned. Percy turned pink because she’d made an exceptionally good argument.

“Yes, I understand that, but I don’t feel comfortable discussing this,” Percy said.

It wasn’t as if he could just erase one and a half years of being told that he was a predator, either. He didn’t know how to let go of that as much as he didn’t know how to let go of the fact that he was still stuck in that room most days.

“Perce, you’re never going to feel comfortable discussing this,” Ginny said with a raised eyebrow. “I think that the earlier that I bring it up, the better it is for you because it means that you get to stop thinking that everything they told you last year was true.”

She made a lot of sense, but nobody thought he would be kissing blokes the day after he left.

“I can give you a magazine,” Ginny said.

Instead of rejecting it outright, Percy raised an eyebrow and said, “What are you doing with magazines?”

Ginny rolled her eyes. “They’re not mine!” she said. “They’re mum’s.”

Ron looked like he was going to pass out. “That’s disgusting.”

“What did you think? That mum was going to go celibate after she and Dad had divorced?” Ginny rolled her eyes. “You’re even stupider than I thought! I saw them a couple of months ago. I might be the youngest, but I’m also the most mature. I’m like older than Perce by a few years mentally.”

“Ginny, I love you very much,” Percy said. “But I’m not going to pilfer through my mother’s pornographic material.”

“You should do something,” Ginny said. “You know, Perce, I think you make yourself sicker every day you’re still there in that place, listening to everything those people said to you. I don’t know how much you can expect us just to tolerate mentally going back to a place that’s destroying you.”

Percy thought that was unfair. “You’re acting like I go there out of my own volition.”

“Maybe you are,” Ginny said. “Because I think the real world is too hard for you.”

He opened his mouth to protest but couldn’t say anything. That was undeniably true. The real world had always been too hard for him to live in. He thought of being stuck in this wheelchair with his oxygen tank. He had given himself no chance. He thought of how he had looked at the chess board and had told Ron that he didn’t know how to play.

Was he making himself sicker?

“There’s going to march tomorrow,” Ginny said. “It’s going to be for gay people. That’s what your kind is called now—gay people. They’re not called monsters or predators or anything like that. Everyone’s coming. I think even Dad is coming—even though we’re not supposed to talk about him. We’re going to be wearing rainbow colours. Even Ron’s picked out his shirt. I think you should come and see what it’s like now. You’ve not been outside since you’ve come home from the hospital. I don’t think that’s good for you too. And I think you should talk to someone.”

Percy wondered who decided that they should wear rainbow colours. He did not want to wear any rainbow colours. He was happy wearing a single solid colour, like blue. He would wear blue, and he would stay at home.

“I don’t like large crowds,” Percy said.

“I don’t like fucking rainbow shirts,” Ron said. “You’re coming. Gin is right. What will you do all day tomorrow if we’re all out? Probably space out and imagine yourself locked in that weird white room again.”

Percy suddenly wished he had not shown anyone in his family that white room.

He heard knocking at his door when he sat on the chair in his room, ready to sleep after he’d taken a shower and changed into a pair of pyjamas. He saw Bill, who was particularly red-faced, standing by the door. Bill walked into his room as if he were committing a crime and had shoved a magazine on Percy’s lap. When he saw that it was a shiny new copy of the same magazine that Oliver had shown him the first time before they’d had sex, Percy went red himself.

“Did you buy this?” Percy asked, wishing he didn’t ask that question because he was sure Bill had.

“Yes,” Bill said. “I bought it and walked around in public with it and nobody’s sent me off to Azkaban.”

“Oh,” Percy tried to imagine the scenario of his very heterosexual brother walking into a shop and asking for a... magazine like it was the most normal thing in the world. He felt touched by how thoughtful it was, even though he still thought it was stupid. “Did you look at the photos?”

“Um… they’re not my thing,” Bill said, smiling at him. “But I think that you should.”

Well, it was better than looking through his mother’s magazine stash, but he still felt wholly uncomfortable.

“I don’t think I can do it,” Percy said. It was all too fast. Just that afternoon, Ginny had brought up that he should be looking at magazines again, and that very night, Bill had bought him one. It just felt all too soon. He could feel the bangers and mash he’d eaten at dinner rise in his throat. “I feel sick just thinking about it.”

Bill stood there awhile, and Percy knew he was thinking about something.

“What?” Percy said.

“I don’t think that you’re straight, Perce, just because they made you feel sick when you look at photos of other men. I think that’s just a reaction they’d hard-wired your brain to feel when you’re in those scenarios, but if you let yourself, I think you can be around a bloke again,” Bill said. “I mean, you don’t find women attractive. You’re not straight.”

Percy was sure he wouldn't be able to get an erection if he looked at photos of women.

“You have to understand how difficult this is for me,” Percy said. “I’ve been in that unit for ages. They’ve been telling me all along that the way that I am isn’t right. And now, you’re trying to force me to be that again, and I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I can re-become the person that I was before they’ve made me so ill, Bill.”

“You can,” Bill said. “Maybe not in one night, but if anyone can do the impossible, it’s you.”

Percy felt angry. Why did he have to do the impossible? Why couldn’t everyone just leave him alone? Didn’t anyone understand how tired he was? How he was barely holding onto his own life? How he often wished he’d died because that was easier than imagining living with his neuroses?

“Is Dad coming to a parade tomorrow?” Percy couldn’t normalise what he was in the new world.

“Yeah,” Bill said, smiling at him. “I’m going to wear a dress.”

“Even if I weren’t treated, I still wouldn’t wear a dress,” Percy said. He had no idea why his sexual orientation had anything to do with cross-dressing. “I felt like such a freak before. When I found out that I was like that… does everyone else feel that way when they think about sex? It just seems so unnatural.”

“You should see the stuff that Charlie is into,” Bill said. “Straight people are crazy, Perce. Look at you. You’re so innocent. I can imagine you enjoying the most vanilla sex ever with a boy.”

“What do ice cream flavours have to do with sexual intercourse?” Percy asked, confused.