Epilogue
There were a lot of things about Godric’s Hollow that Hermione hated.
She hated how small it was, how you could walk the entirety of Main Street in under 10 minutes, passing by its singular church, post office, and pub on your way through the town square.
She hated its quaintness and how every house and storefront was lined with trimmed hedges, tended to perfection by their finicky owners.
She hated the way the town was nestled deep in the British countryside, surrounded by rolling hills and greenery – the exact opposite of the high-rises and city skyline that she was so used to in London.
Yes, there were a lot of things that Hermione hated about the town. But most of all, Hermione hated the people.
Stuck up, arrogant, and generationally wealthy, most of the families in Godric's Hollow had been living in the town for decades. The town was home-ground for aristocrats and lords and ladies of old who had more money than they knew what to do with. And so, they spent it on their children by sending them to Godric's Hollow Grammar - one of Britain's most prestigious boarding schools.
Hermione had no qualms with spending money on your child's education; the only thing she had a qualm with was going to school with the rich arseholes.
Most of her classmates at GHG, who boarded at the school during the term and then returned to their mansions and estates in Godric’s Hollow during the holidays, had all known each other since birth, as had their mothers and fathers and grandparents. It was an incestuous pool of relations, if incest was social.
And if they hadn't grown up in the town then they had been sent to the school by the most prominent and powerful households from all corners of Great Britain, and thus knew each other anyway—or at least, knew of each other—simply by virtue of belonging to a family whose last name graced the covers of newspapers, books, magazines, and court judgements.
Either way, there were no secrets in Godric’s Hollow. Everyone knew everything about you, good and bad. Unfortunately, the good went unacknowledged, and the bad spread like wildfire through the mouths of retired grandparents, bored stay at home mothers, and the press.
Hermione had never—to the best of her knowledge—been the subject of the school's gossip. However, some would have said that it was preferable to be the name on everyone's lips than be what Hermione was: completely, entirely, invisible.
She may as well have been a ghost for how quietly she traversed the halls of Godric's Hollow Grammar. Sometimes during class she would look down at her hands to make sure that she hadn’t actually turned into a phantom, or a chameleon that blended perfectly into the school’s ancient brick walls.
When she had first started at GHG two years ago her arrival at the boarding school had inevitably stirred its stale social pool and had given the students something to talk about.
During that first week everyone had stared at her: the shiny new toy in the dusty old toybox. Questions about her family and what they did featured in every conversation that Hermione had that week, delicately and elegantly snuck in by her well brought up classmates. Like a candle being snuffed out, Hermione watched the interest fade from their eyes as soon as she revealed that her parents were dentists, that she was there on a scholarship.
After it became apparent that the new student in Sixth Form was shy and uninteresting and—biggest of all sins in Godric's Hollow—an absolute nobody with no claim to fame or a famous last name, they all went back to the cliques and friendship groups that had been predetermined before they were born and left Hermione alone.
This suited her just fine. She was content with what her life had consisted of these past 2 years - school, study, repeat. No plans on the weekend, bar her shift at the pub. No dates or parties or society events. Just her and her mountain of books for company. She never really felt lonely and even if she did, she couldn't let it occupy her mind; she had her grades and a scholarship to maintain. Her family was well-off, but nowhere near well-off enough to pay the exorbitant tuition and board at GHG.
Besides, this year was her final year; she couldn’t afford to lose focus now, not when there were final exams to ace and university applications to perfect.
The end was nigh; she could almost see the light at the end of the tunnel. And that light looked a lot like Oxford University. Or Cambridge. She’d even settle for UCL if it meant that she could get far, far away from the wretched town and her wretched classmates and move to London or New York or some other metropolitan city that she had dreamed of living in since she was young, full of culture and art and music and life, and not people who judged you based on your net worth or your family name.
No, nothing could go wrong this year.