The Arrival
Dear Mary,
You were in my dream last night. Isn’t that odd? It was almost like an interview. I caught you just as you were leaving someplace. You were in the light but I wasn’t, which makes sense enough to me. You looked beautiful too, I knew you looked better than I did, even though I couldn’t see myself. And it felt like if I’d asked you anything you would’ve answered it, like we were writing letters but we were really just talking. I don’t know why, but I remember asking you so many things. I remember you telling me everything. I could’ve sworn I was going to remember those answers forever, but I guess I didn’t.
Isn’t that odd? What was I asking you for? I’ll read through our old letters and try to figure it out better. There must be some reason that I can’t think of now.
(P.S. I know I ask this of you all the time, but don’t call me strange, even though I am.)
(P.P.S. And please don’t tell anyone. It feels like a secret.)
Dreaming,
Lily Evans
---
Dear Lily,
If I’m remembering the right night, I know I had a dream of you too. I always have dreams about parties, so you tend to be in mine a lot. Like, I need people to populate these extravagant events I throw in my head, and you seem to be my favorite guest. Whatever the reason is, I remember dreaming about leaving my very own party with you following me. At some point, I remember stopping to look back at you. I remember you being in the dark, I think, like you remember, but I don’t remember any questions. I just remember you looking at me and me looking at you, like maybe you were dreaming of asking me something inside of our dream. Does that make sense?
Its odd, but I’m not sure if that even matters. Can it really be that odd if it happens to two of us? I’ll toss that question around, I guess, and look back into our letters the best I can.
(P.S. You’re never strange to me.)
(P.P.S. It’s a secret now, officially titled.)
In your dreams,
Mary Macdonald
Chapter 20
On the Hogwarts Express, Mary twisted her ring back and forth anxiously. She’d been so ready to go home, and yet felt dread for it now. In everything that had happened this first term, she’d forgotten the misery of missing everyone.
Everyone sat in the compartment mirroring the positions they’d held on their way into the school, but it was all different. For starters, Sirius and Remus were gone, leaving Mary hanging on to Lily’s every word, lost for the conversation partners she usually went with when James was in the picture.
“Eh Petey, it’s going to be excellent snowball weather back home!” James was counting all of his excitement on his fingers, and Mary couldn’t help but frown.
She knew Lily was watching her, which meant she had to look her best. Still, it was hard to compose her face. James Potter sounded like a positively gigantic oaf.
“Ohh, Prongs you are so in for it,” Peter shot back, his mousy features pinching mischievously.
“Aren’t you two a little bit old for snowballs?” Mary to be nonchalantly judgemental.
“No such thing! You really must have more fun,” James joked, and she rolled her eyes.
Lily got up to sit next to her, moving away from her boyfriend's side. “Hmm, I’m equally skeptical.” She agreed with a little smirk.
“Well then you’ve got to join us next Christmas! Everyone can come, it’ll be a grand snowball try-out day.” He got so excited about these things it was hard not to smile infectiously, but Mary was confident and very stubborn. She leaned against Lily’s shoulder like any normal girl would and rolled her eyes.
“I’m not sure Mary’s built for snow sports,” Marlene piped up, joking over a Holyhead Harpie edition of some Quidditch magazine. “She just about broke a leg when we’d go on winter runs.”
“Is that true!” Lily giggled. Mary finally let herself smile.
“Hey, snow in the city doesn’t act like that! It’s witchcraft, I tell you.” The boys were smiling at her too. She’d forgotten that they must actually like her, as in, enjoy being friends with her, and she felt somewhat awful for the things she thought about them. They were good mates, at their core.
“Maybe we’ll start you off slow with the snowballs, Macdonald.” James nodded at her, trying to be funny and diplomatic, which he accomplished easily without much acceptance from Mary.
“Ay, that’s fair enough,” she at least pretended to agree, all for the sight of Lily smiling.
Lily didn’t like it when Mary and James didn’t get on well. She’d told her as much before in simple, pleading terms. There wasn’t really a way or excuse for Mary to tell her about how she didn’t like it when Lily and James kissed, held hands, or made eye contact with each other, so she settled for calling him a prick and shaking her head, wondering why the hell Lily thought him to be worthy at all. Consumingly, she wondered what they talked about when nobody was else around. She couldn’t imagine the conversation, nor what could make it enjoyable. It was the smallest secret, and the thing she most wanted to understand.
“So it’s settled!” Marlene bridged the gap between them all, a person so wholly likable it made things very easy, “One of these days Mary is chucking snowballs at James and Peter.”
“Terrific!” James chuckled.
“Wait- wait- wait-” Peter began to object, and they all cut him off with a choir of laughs.
She leaned further into Lily’s shoulder. She hoped there would be laughter like that back in London.
***
At King’s Cross, Mary said goodbye to most of her friends at the barrier, quickly hugging Marlene and waving to the boys. They all had a train to catch heading for their own part of the country, leaving Lily and Mary to cross the barrier by themselves. She walked behind her through the station. They were moving to the city street itself, and Mary found herself quite confused. What was Lily doing emerging into London? She had far better places to be.
Just before they were about to mount the stairs, they both pulled each other aside, out of the stream of Londoners. Mary was standing in the pale winter sun, Lily in the lingering shadows. Like something they both tried not to remember, they knew that questions were lingering on Lily’s tongue.
“I wanted to say goodbye,” Lily said earnestly, half panicked, “I’m going to miss you terribly.”
“Me too,” she agreed, nearly joining their hands. It was the force of a completely unbreakable habit.
“Is it- are we- is everything going to be alright?” Lily mumbled sheepishly, dreaming of asking Mary something inside of her very own dream.
She understood the feeling, the hysteria. Who was to know what kind of spell could be cast in the weeks they didn’t see each other? Everything was so precarious and so easily denied, so easily faked. It was hard to know what could never be shattered. Even harder, there was an impossibility to figuring out if they wanted things to remain intact. Mary looked at Lily and understood that they both wanted something that might be awful, something permanent and branding and fixed into emotion and time.
“Everything is going to be fine, dear. It’s only two weeks, right?”
“Only two weeks,” Lily agreed.
“I-” Mary thought. She didn’t know what she was even going to say, but she knew it was bad. “Why don’t we get coffee before the Express, eh? Have your parents drop you off earlier.”
“Sounds wonderful,” they both painted conforming smiles and Lily nodded heartily, “I can’t wait.”
“Goodbye, Lily,” Mary reached out and squeezed her hand.
She felt a squeeze in return, “Goodbye.”
It was just the sort of thing that was barely real. They walked a very talented line, and did not acknowledge if it hurt.
Turning and waving, Lily disappeared above onto the London streets. Mary watched so fully as she climbed the rest of the steps, her hair shining and each movement something to be studied and committed to memory. Her mouth fell open and her eyes refused to blink. This was the last time she would see Lily Evans for two whole weeks. Butterflies flew in her stomach like they were kissing back at school. She wanted her, and was finally glad to have a perfect reason to keep herself from having her.
Mary finally stopped watching the space that Lily used to occupy when she remembered she had a train to catch. Then, she retreated back down the steps, her trunk rattling behind her like a coffin large enough to hold every stupid thing she felt.
***
Wandering down the street that held her flat, Mary felt distinctly like she did not remember this place anymore. All the people, all the buildings, were somehow changed in the way that she saw them. Crystally, she felt the need to go out. Like a woman on the hunt, she set forward with the intent to drop her things, change into something better, and find the Brixton girls.
Her sisters were in daycare with an elderly Jamaican woman who thought of the girls as her grandchildren. She would pick them up later tonight, before the actual plans started and after the plans were made. That, she looked forward to. An adult who wasn’t her professor and wasn’t her mother. An adult who could care about her even if she failed or ended up dead in a ditch, and her sisters in perfect tow.
She put on bell bottoms jeans and a winter coat, the uniform of Brixton girls. Once it was on she let herself look over the flat. It appeared that everything was in order. The couch was characteristically dented from where her mother slept when she couldn’t find the bedroom. The heater was on, and the TV remote was scattered onto the floor. She could smell and taste the life that would’ve been hers had she decided to be ordinary. How she wished she could do something like that. How she wished.
Whatever. It was time to go on the prowl. The more pressing issue at the moment was not how awfully strange she was, but how to fix it momentarily.
On this particular Saturday afternoon, the neighborhood was positively alive. It was briskly cold with a hovering gray cloud cover encasing the whole sky, but that didn’t seem to be stopping anyone. All the usual dealers went about their weekend business. Some wanker stood on the corner and attempted to proselytize people into some political party. She passed a woman counting change from her tearing leather handbag just out of earshot of the political man. It wasn’t a good time in her neighborhood. Not for her, not for anyone.
The first place to check for her “friends” was the shops. They tended to hover until they were kicked out or forced to buy the packet of gummy bears they’d been complaining about for half an hour. Niles, the man behind the counter, smiled at her arrival.
“Ayyyy, you just missed the girl’s mate!” he crowed happily. Niles was missing three of his front teeth, and his gums shone in the fluorescent light. At twenty-eight, he’d worked at the corner store for half of his life.
“Did they say where they were ‘eading next?” She dropped her Hogwarts accent and Niles deflated into his usual posture.
“Nah, nah, but they did mention you were coming back, eh! National holiday, when Miss Macdonald bugs off home from that fancy school of ‘ers.”
“Glad to hear it,” she smiled, despite herself, “School isn’t as nice as here.”
“Nowhere’s as nice as the projects, Miss Macdonald. No one’s gonna get you like the people that made you.” She nodded, understanding the truths that couldn’t be told unless someone really saw the place that she lived. Niles seemed to understand this too. He was full of the place he lived, or really empty of it in the form of those three front teeth.
“Suppose I check round Adanna’s? Don’t s’pose you think they’d be there?” Among his many talents, Niles always had a funny way of remembering things that he didn’t remember remembering. It only took someone to coax it out of him, which she was apt at doing.
“Now you say it, that does make sense!” He seemed rather glad, and she smiled. “That school has taught you well, eh? Very clever.”
“All you Niles! All you,” she tipped an imaginary cap and he laughed happily. He was an easy lesson to learn from. Who was she to be so sad all the time? This bloke was missing three teeth and he could laugh all the livelong day. That was that. She already felt drunk with London.
***
The girls were, indeed, camped out in Adanna’s flat. She knocked on the door with her signature style and could hear the clamor to let her in. Before anything even happened, a wide grin broke across her face. She was back, and more than Niles confirmed it. Finally, a place where she was on top.
“Mary!” A choir of voices met her with astounding force, pulling her into the cramped, gray space that passed for Adanna’s living room. She’d been there a thousand times before and immediately fell back into that comfortable memory.
“Oh lord, my Ma’s gonna have a fit when she sees you oh heaven!” Adanna was the first to cry out in direct address to her. “You’ve grown up, Macdonald, and it’s only been a coupla months!”
“Nah, nah, thas all talk,” Mary called sheepishly. She’d missed how loud they all talked with one another, they way everybody was always shouting over someone else.
“It ain’t, I tell ya,” another girl, possibly Juliette, the somewhat slag of the group.
“You’re even more of a stunner now, eh!” that voice was unidentifiable, but she smiled all the same.
Adanna concurred, “We need to take you out as soon as possible, that’s for sure. Is there a boarding school boyfriend to cheat on yet?” They all giggled and sent Mary tumbling for the spot of honor in the middle of the couch.
Sirius crossed her mind in several snapshots of easy handsomeness. His grin splashed across the back of her eyelids and his hair fell in cascading ripples every single time she blinked. In her ears, she could hear him calling her a piece of work and her accusation of being a huge waste echoed on repeat.
Second, she saw Lily Evans descending down the boys dormitory steps on the arm of a disheveled James Potter. She saw Lily’s hair fanning out on the mattress. She saw her chest rising and falling at a steady, pleading pace.
Of course there was a boyfriend to cheat on, and of course cheating was of the utmost importance. Sirius, bless his horrible, all-wrong heart, would understand.
“You know it!” she giggled mischievously, “you girls must treat me to some night.”
Then, the room erupted with laughter and a flurry of quick planning. It was too cold to go far, so they’d stay in Brixton. There were clubs that would let them in, they knew all of the girls well enough. She smiled as she watched it all happen, the plans forming around her, for her. She didn’t have to beg for anything; she didn’t have to make any moves just to be noticed.
The girls treated her to the plan. Adanna told her to pick up her sisters from daycare, take a rest, change into something even sexier, and be back at nine.
So, Mary was ready. Lily would be proud of her, that was for certain. Here was Mary, finally making things happen, convincing a whole group of people that she was something she would never be like it was nothing. She left without complaint to find the triplets, knowing that the girls would find good candidates for what she needed to do.
At the very edge of the doorway, she turned back to look at Adanna’s living room. She took stock of each girl, wondering with stabbing clarity how long it would take before they could tell.
Mary was a zombie girl, and she knew it. Already half dead to them all.