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Hermione spent the next day and most of that night finalising her end-of-semester assignments. On Wednesday morning she got up early, showered, brushed her teeth, dressed, and paid a visit to all of her professors, handing in her perfectly formatted and meticulously bound work two days before the deadline.
She told the school administration that she was leaving to go home early due to a family emergency and was back in her room and packing before other students had even finished having their breakfast.
She hastily folded her clothes into neat little piles in her suitcase and stacked her books on top – the books taking up more space than her clothing.
She dragged her suitcase down roughly 500 ancient staircases on her way down to the school’s Entrance Hall, its small rubber wheels making a ruckus as they rolled over the castle’s stone floors, turning students' heads as Hermione passed by.
She just stared straight ahead, walking briskly and dragging her noisy suitcase behind her.
She only allowed herself a glance back when she finally crossed the school gates and the black iron bars of Godric’s Hollow Grammar closed shut behind her with a resounding clang.
Hermione shivered as she squinted through the morning mist, trying to make out the 8th Year Girls tower from where she stood. She pictured her shared room, her cupboards, her bed, her bedside table...the little corner of the universe that Hermione had all to herself.
It was all stripped bare now, emptied of any and all belongings. The only thing left of her existence was a note that she had written to Ginny.
Hermione dragged her suitcase through the wet grass of the school grounds and then the cobbled streets of the town, making it to the Godric’s Hollow train station just in time to catch the first train to London.
She rested her forehead on the cool window of the train, watching the landscape.
The ropes that were binding her insides tight loosened with every mile that she travelled further away from the school. She slumped back in her seat and settled in for the half-a-day journey to the city, feeling a sense of calm wash over her for the first time in weeks.
Before long, she was struggling to stay awake. The mad scramble to finish her work before the deadline had drained her, yes, but it was more than that. The term had drained her. For the first time, Hermione truly felt her exhaustion. It was as though her entire body was made of lead, her eyelids weighed down by stones.
Despite her body being exhausted, her mind still whirled. Too tired to fight, she allowed the onslaught of thoughts that she had desperately tried to keep at bay since the Astronomy lesson on Monday night. In between feelings of embarrassment, indignation, and gloom, her mind assaulted her with images that she could not slot into the neat category of ‘hate’, no matter how hard she tried.
In the privacy of her own mind she thought of an indeterminable shade of blue-gray. She pictured a halo of blonde hair in the sunlight, and sweat-soaked skin. She thought of someone with a cool, hard exterior who smouldered and burned in the centre.
~
Several hours later Hermione stood facing a building that, had she not known was an active and functioning bed and breakfast, she would have assumed was abandoned. The three-storey apartment might have once been impressive and grand, but now its chipped paint exterior and boarded up windows gave it an aura of abandonment and neglect, as if it had been years since someone had stepped foot inside it.
Hermione stood on its front steps, swaying slightly on her feet. She had woken up at King’s Cross station, the last stop on the line, from a long and restless slumber. Somehow, she had managed to navigate her way through the crowded and busy streets of London while still slightly disoriented and blinking away sleep, and had finally made it to her destination: the Old Oak Inn.
She hesitated slightly before ringing the doorbell, wondering if perhaps she had gotten the address wrong. A minute later the heavy wooden door creaked open and an old woman peeked through the gap, looking at Hermione with a blank stare.
“Hi, my name is Hermione Granger. I booked a room here for the next 3 nights…” she trailed off as the woman continued staring at her, showing no sign of recognition. I’ve definitely got the wrong address, she thought to herself and was about to apologise to the woman for disturbing her when the woman turned around and walked into the house, wordlessly gesturing for Hermione to follow.
The unmistakable scent of mildew assaulted Hermione’s nose as she entered the B&B. Inside, it was no less grim. Hermione followed the old woman down a long, dark hallway and past a set of stairs that ascended to an even darker second level. A spider landed on Hermione’s arm and she brushed it off, spooked.
Hermione wondered, seriously, whether she was about to get murdered.
They entered the reception area. Hermione brushed off a thick layer of dust off a guestbook and flicked through it while the old woman retrieved her booking. She read the latest review.
Ada and Arhur were wonderful hosts. My family and I have never felt more welcome–5 stars.
Room 3, 1957.
The old woman checked Hermione in, gave her her room key, and then vaguely pointed at the ceiling.
“Is my room upst–” Hermione began to ask, then stopped when the woman turned away and busied herself with the cold chicken and mushroom soup that had been sitting on the reception desk.
“Uh, okay. T-thank you,” Hermione squeaked.
After some searching she found her room. Unsurprisingly, it looked much like the rest of the B&B.
She collapsed spread-eagle on the double bed, the ancient metal bed frame creaking underneath her weight. She watched dust bunnies float in the air, caught in the afternoon sunlight streaming through the open window – the only one, she assumed, that hadn’t been bordered up.
The sounds of downtown London bled into her room. She listened to the sirens, the different accents of the people passing by on the street below. Before she knew it, she had fallen back into the exhausted sleep that she had never quite left at King’s Cross Station.
~
Hermione spent the next 3 days in London, using the time officially left in the term to explore the city. It felt weird to be out in the open world, knowing that her classmates were still at school.
She wondered what Ginny was up to, what she had made of the note that Hermione had left her, letting her know that she was leaving to go home early. She didn’t want to admit it, but she could feel a distance opening up between herself and her best friend, like a crack in the pavement that incrementally gets wider and wider, until one day you trip on a hole that you hadn’t realised was there.
She also thought about him. She constantly checked her watch, wondering what class he was in, what he was doing. Whether he thought about her, or was regretting what he had said…
Whenever she could feel herself slipping into these thoughts she had to shake herself, smack herself out of her pathetic rumination. It was rare that she had any time to herself during the school term and she refused to waste any of it dwelling on something that served no purpose. If one thing was clear, it was this: Draco Malfoy was what she had always known he was.
A rude, self-important, arrogant, rich prick.
And so, Hermione wondered about the city’s busy streets, ducking into book shops and vintage stores and cafes and restaurants, allowing herself to dip into her hard-earned savings for the occasional exorbitantly priced meal out.
She people-watched wherever she went. Investment bankers rushing about Lombard Street with bags underneath their eyes. Posh women strolling around Kensington in designer clothing, matcha lattes clutched in manicured hands. Packs of young hollering teenagers moving like prey animals through Camden Market, safe in their numbers.
She saw the other side of the city as well. The middle-aged cashier working at a 24/7 convenience store trying to keep his eyes open at 2am. The young waitress at an upscale restaurant who accidentally spilled a glass of water on a customer and tried to keep her tears at bay while she apologised. Her bed and breakfast host staring wistfully at the black and white photograph that she kept on the reception desk, of a young couple on their wedding day.
Hermione found herself daydreaming about what it would be like to live there – this time in the city, not in the suburbs where she had grown up. She imagined herself older, strutting down the CBD streets in a power suit on her way to somewhere important. A client meeting? A conference? Maybe it was just to her office in some high rise building where she worked in a position that was worth all the study and no sleep and exhaustion that she put herself through, year after year since she was 11 years old.
She hoped it was all worth it, in the end.
~
On Saturday morning, the first real day of the term break, she left her room keys at the front desk of the B&B and once again lugged her suitcase to the nearest train station.
The train ride to her parents’ place was the opposite of her journey to London from Godric’s Hollow. Her anxiety was a living creature, growing inside her with every passing mile.
Hermione dug her nails into her palms and tried to calm the rate of her breathing, which started to get faster and faster as she began to recognise local landmarks outside the window: her old school; the supermarket that her parents always shopped at; the local pub.
Everything was drab and grey and…normal. The borough where she grew up was worlds away from Godric’s Hollow and the ancient castle filled with antique furniture and artwork, and the quaint little town that exuded wealth and affluence from every brick and stone. Even the King’s Hearth, where she worked, wasn’t really a pub as much as it was an upscale restaurant that just happened to also serve pints.
Not here, though. Here the pub was just a pub, and the people who frequented it were not likely to be anyone for whom paparazzi might be waiting outside.
Her family house looked almost indistinguishable from every other house on the street. The only thing separating their home from other two-storey townhouses was the slightly overgrown grass on their front lawn, the overly full letterbox that was bursting with mail.
Hermione breathed in deep. She had tried to put this moment off for as long as she possibly could, but she was here now.
She slotted her key into the lock and pushed the door open. All at once she was a child again, coming home after school, not knowing what she would find inside.
“Mum? Dad?”
She hated the way her voice squeaked. She stepped tentatively inside, kicking over an empty bottle of wine as she did so. It rolled down the hallway, the sound of the glass on the wooden floorboards ringing through the house. Hermione held her breath until the bottle stopped.
She walked down the hallway and into the living area. The room looked like it had been hastily tidied, but Hermione’s trained eyes spotted the tell-tale signs everywhere: the wine glasses lined with day-old stains on the coffee table; the empty bottles placed near the sofa.
She made her way to the kitchen. Bottles of spirits were scattered throughout, all in various stages of being emptied.
Hermione had never lied to anyone about her parents being dentists.
They were. They had been.