Summer (1975)
Dear Mary,
I don’t know if this is right, or if you've ever thought of it at all, but I’d like to write to you this summer. It gets lonely in the country. There isn’t much but sheep and the fish in the sea to keep you company, neither of which talk very well. I’m completely sure that Marlene doesn’t feel the same way, she has the boys and her brothers, but I’ve never been sure about you.
That’s the whole point of me writing, I suppose. Do you get lonely?
(P.S. I wouldn’t be angry if you don’t ever respond, but if we could never speak about it again in that case it would be quite wonderful.)
(P.P.S. I’m joking. I think. Something tells me I’m a little bit afraid, or possibly embarrassed? Spare me, either way.)
Yours in an earnest campaign of letter writing,
Lily Evans
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Dear Lily,
I do get lonely. I miss Hogwarts more than I hate writing twelve inches for Slughorn's class. In London there are a good deal of people to talk to, some who I even like enough to hang around, but it doesn’t feel right. I feel like I’m living a replacement life while my other one goes on pause.
I would adore to keep writing you, if you’d really want.
(P.S. I responded, but we still don’t have to talk about it.)
(P.P.S. You’re a laugh, Lily Evans.)
To a summer of grand boredom,
Mary Macdonald
Chapter 1: Summer (1975)
Mary did not think highly of summertime, not like her friends in the neighborhood did. She pretended, always with great success, that she hated the place that she was sent away to doing the year. She told the other girls sweeping tales of nasty swots who tormented her because her shoes fit tighter, or had scuffs, or were simply the wrong kind. She stretched out in the sun on particularly sweltering days, sneaking into clubs and breathing in the stale air. She didn’t really listen to the music that she heard in those packed rooms. She stored it in the back of her mind, moving through those nights like a video camera collecting stories to build a very specific saga. There was no one in the whole city of London, she thought, that could help her derive the same enjoyment as the girls she’d left behind back at school.
Sometimes, when the nights would get too hot, or through weeks where rain would seem to pour endlessly, she would sneak into her closet, which she always kept locked, and check that her school things were still there, that they hadn’t been pawned off in some expensive oddities shop. She wouldn’t have been shocked, nor would she have blamed her mother, if those things had been taken. It was somewhat selfish of her, she thought, to keep Hogwarts all to herself the way she did.
When money was particularly tight and they got down to their last scraps, all she could do was talk of the wide forests, the crystal gray lake, and the vast castle. She made sure to steer clear of things they could never have, the meals, the beds, the clothes, and the magic.
With her friends too, she held back what was really important. They would spend long days haunting spots around the city. Ceaselessly, her friends spent all of those hours asking her a thousand questions.
“Oi, who’s your bloke again?” They nagged.
“Time for a new fella, eh?” They prodded.
At school, this practice was easy for Mary to carry out. She answered questions with perfection because there were boys to talk about. She had no problems getting them, keeping them, cutting them loose, and then brilliantly performing the story.
She had to be confident in order to survive, but it was different back home. In the neighborhood, she was turned into something inescapable. The bad and dirty parts of it, the days where her sisters went hungry and her mother turned angry fists against them all, wouldn’t wash away just because she got a pretty boy to snog her. In her neighborhood, the pretty boys all had the same kind of vengeful mother. Worse, they could see her for who she was, vastly different from all the boys at Hogwarts.
There were different figures emerging into the forefront of her mind as the awful summer drew to a close. When her friends asked her about school, she wouldn’t tell them about these people. It felt like adultery, or at least breaking some kind of spell, to talk about her Hogwarts friends to the girls that could never be them.
Lily Evans had populated Mary’s despised summer with letters of her simple adventures. Lily wrote of walks through the rolling green Irish countryside. She talked of tending to her garden and reading her school books in the shade of the tree, or under a soft beachy breeze. She described a simple fairytale, one in which Mary had two parents who both loved her very much and put a whole meal on the table every night.
Marlene wasn’t one for writing letters, she was far too skittish, so the only correspondence Mary and Lily got from her were brief and jagged descriptions of training Quidditch with the other Mckinnon children (of which there were many) and Potter and Pettigrew, who lived in the area. Unlike Mary and Lily, she came from a wizarding community. Her parents were magical, and used it openly in the close company of their family friends. Thus, unlike Mary and Lily, she didn’t despise the summer, and wasn’t a very good penpal candidate.
Instead, Mary and Lily took up a strict letter writing campaign known only to them. She threw herself into writing the perfect responses, describing a life in London that she hoped would make Lily as envious as she felt of her house in Kerry. She wrote of her sisters with loving fervor and Lily described the fights she had with Petunia. She told her of the smoke and crowded streets and Lily described the sheep that her family kept. They exchanged stories like people who’d never met before, though they’d known of each other's lives before. They’d been friends ever since they’d met each other as terrified first years who’d managed to sit in the right train compartment, but Mary had always preferred not to really talk. It was Marlene and Lily who shared, and she who sat back and gave them only the littlest pieces of her London life, but she came alive in her letters. In a symbiotic exchange, Lily did too.
They gave away so much of themselves in those letters. Mary still wasn’t quite sure what she could take back.
On a slickly cool rainy night, the last night before she was set to leave for term, Mary kissed each of her little sisters goodbye and slipped out onto their tiny balcony and sat with her legs dangling out over the street, slipping over the surface of the road like a stone glancing over the surface of a mill pond. Her life was packed into a trunk in the room behind her with the city's lights splayed out in front.
It was strange to go back to school and enjoy it. It was odd to remember all the summers she’d dreaded as a small child, detesting the idea of sitting through hours of maths and reading, but she couldn’t wait now. The qualms she felt, the pangs of hurt for her sister or the girls she left behind were quelled by pure excitement. Even her fears about the letters could be easily stamped out. Lily wasn’t a danger, she was her friend, or at least easy to avoid.
The impressions of Hogwarts weren’t so hard to reach. She remembered with ease the walks through the corridors and the long talks with her friends. She could feel the delicate wood of her wand in her hand. There were things to be done, a life to be had, outside these stretches of city blocks, and she was ready. When it came down to the skin and bones, the pounding heart, she wouldn’t miss the city, nor the summer, in the slightest.