Secrets
Dear Mary,
What do you think Marlene is doing at this very moment? Sometimes I almost feel bad for her, like she’s missing out on the grandest secret we’ve played a part of in all our years at Hogwarts, and then I remember that she’s got all her brothers and all their magic and everything like that and I feel less bad. Does she really need us, you know? It never really seems like she gets sad about anything, except when the Quidditch team loses. I don’t know. The Holyhead Harpies are apparently undefeated through the season so far, so that made me think about her. I wish she understood me like you do. I don’t know. It’s ridiculous, but that’s what I feel.
You probably didn’t know you were in for such a dramatic letter, eh?
(P.S. I’ve decided we should all pop over to Liverpool next summer. Or Marlene can come see you or me or something.)
(P.P.S. Your invite to the Evans abode is, as always, standing.)
Emotionally sighing out the window,
Lily Evans
---
Dear Lily,
I bet she’s spitting into a bucket and climbing trees and roughhousing with the boys right about now, that’s what I bet. In all seriousness though, I don’t think she’s missing out on Hogwarts biggest secrets. We’re just writing letters, you know? Marlene detests any kind of writing to begin with, I can’t picture her standing the kind of conversations we have. Maybe if we keep writing about the Harpies, maybe, but even that is a very slim possibility. It’s not ridiculous to be upset that she never really gets anything. Of course she’s funny and of course she’s nice, but it’s not like she’s blowing through any emotional barriers. I wish she got it too, I guess. But I’d rather just talk to you.
You probably didn’t know that I’d be dramatic right back!
(P.S. I agree with your decision one hundred percent.)
(P.P.S. Only if Petunia won’t have my head!)
Gazing longingly in the direction of Killarney,
Mary Macdonald
Chapter 28: Secrets
“He’s such a goddamned prick,” Mary bit out over a spread of books in the library. Lily nodded her head vigorously. She was positively overjoyed at Sirius’s betrayal, telling Mary incessantly how he was a right arse and didn’t deserve a bar of her time.
“They’re all pricks,” Marlene grumbled along with her, though she simply took issue with their nonstop discussion of James and Sirius respectively. “Best get on with the readings now, eh?”
Mary shrugged and sighed loudly, crumpling a letter from Julien in her hands. “Whatever you want.”
He’d written to her about the triplets and their preparations for the Easter pageant, though it was still weeks off, and a date he’d had at the club he took her to over Christmas. A date with a boy, that is. She had tried not to frown as she read, favoring the pretended expression of light interest. Marlene shared her taste for nosiness, and surely would have asked what was the matter had Mary’s face fallen as she wished it to.
Lily, however, already knew the letter was from Julien. There was no use dancing around the fact. Mary couldn’t lie to her to save any of her skin. Besides, it felt good to have a boy to hang over her head.
“Put down the letter, Mary, hasn’t home heard from you enough?”
“It interests me more than Transfiguration,” she grumbled.
“Get out of this foul mood,” Lily shot back.
“My foul mood pleases me.” Marlene glanced between the two of them like a spectator at a tennis match.
“I don’t see how that’s possible at all.”
“Well you have a nice boyfriend to keep you company, eh?” Mary spat out sharply, right in Lily’s face, before uncrumpling her letter and continuing to read.
Both of the girls frowned tightly. She remembered, with a pit in her stomach, that it had been five nights since they had last been alone in the dorm. That fact stuck more in her head than the last time she had kissed her boyfriend. She frowned harder. Julien’s lad was a trapeze artist in the circus, or used that as some sort of cover for a darker trade. A trapeze artist, and Lily Evans was upset that Mary reminded her she had a boyfriend.
“You two bicker quite often,” Marlene chuckled, her eyebrows knitted together over a particularly large sentence in the reading. Though she was usually quite good at reading conversation, she was horrendous at schoolwork. The phenomena canceled each other out in a storm of ignorance. Recently, she had been put on the same Healing track as Mary and had turned particularly dimwitted. If Mary had half the mind to nose back into her business, she would’ve wondered what else factored into it.
“Yes, well, as I said before, I’m in the mood for bickering.”
Stormily, she set back to her letter while the others worked on their readings. Two days of being single now, was it? She had nothing to show. Julien had a lad who was a trapeze artist and Mary had nothing at all.
***
Mary failed the quiz in Transfiguration three days later. She spent the whole time, instead, staring at the back of James Potter’s head and wondering how his glasses didn’t slide right off from the sheer back and forth movement of his prickish slouch, before skipping Charms to smoke on the wooden footbridge.
The air was cold, February cold, a sting that pricked at her nose and watered her eyes. Time seemed to pass slower after the snow melted, once there was nothing cold to look forward to anymore. She detested Valentine's Day with a passion, especially after the dance announcement.
She heard footsteps loping up the wooden slats a long while later. It would’ve been lunch by then. The rest of her friends were either crammed into the common room or eating a wide array of foods in the Great Hall. She was glad not to be there, in so many words. Smoking in the cold was nice. It reminded her of London, the worst of both worlds.
Her feet dangled in the air below the bridge and she slumped forward to press her head against a painted wooden slat while she took her most recent drag.
Quiet footsteps lingered at the end of the bridge closest to the school. A brave soul, Mary thought, to be coming out into the cold like this. She turned her head the ninety degrees it took and caught sight, full in the face, of Marlene McKinnon’s mop of blonde hair.
The cigarette in her hand fell limply against the bridge.
“Good heavens above,” she gasped reedily.
On the other side of Marlene, her profile poking just barely out as she leaned over the edge, was Dorcas Meadowes smiling like she meant to.
“Blimey, blimey, blimey!”
They were talking there, joking in conversation that the wind carried away in its sweeping strokes. A fog lifted from her mind. A clearing through the clouds like she had not experienced in at least three weeks.
Someone else had a secret too, eh? Dorcas Meadowes threw her head back joyously and while Marlene pounded her fist explosively against the wooden rail. She saw it immediately, so true her deductive powers became something more like magic. Marlene was trading her Quidditch secrets. Those matching sly grins, the slightly malicious curve of their eyebrows. Marlene was trading her Quidditch secrets for Potions answers, clear as day.
***
“So I was smoking there, you know how I do that sometimes, and I was really contemplating why the hell I even go to this goddamn school, when I heard it!”
She’d run all the way from the foot bridge, her chest rising and falling intently.
“Or saw it really, I should say. Saw them! Standing there like they owned that bridge, my bridge, and I swear to God I almost died.”
“Mary-”
“I promise, I promise, I’m getting there!” Even as she rambled, she made note of the way Lily smiled. She saved it intently for later.
“Marlene and Dorcas talking on the bridge!”
Lily turned a remarkably shade of white, nearly as pristinely pale as the white pillows that her hair fanned all over. The evening light slanted over her freckles in a warm shadow. Marlene was at Quidditch practice, or meeting with Regulus Black to sell his brother down the river. Perhaps Barty Crouch Jr! Maybe even Evan Rosier! She chuckled a little bit, shifting her legs excitedly from their criss-crossed position to wrap her arms around her knee.
“Marlene and Dorcas?” she gasped. “You’ve got to be all manners of kidding me.”
“I cross my heart and hope to die, I promise, I swear-”
Lily giggled and pressed a finger lightly to her mouth, “I believe you, dear.”
“I told you something was going on,” Mary nodded knowingly.
“I can’t believe it.”
“Neither can I.” They both sat with their mouths dropped open, though Mary’s had a little bit more joyful of an edge to it.
“What could she possibly be doing?”
“Quidditch conspiring!”
“Oh, come now-”
“For Potions answers,” Mary finished.
“Heaven on earth, she’s selling them out.” Lily shook her head in utter disbelief. An all-too familiar feeling rushed into Mary’s gut, satisfied and proud like a dog might be after it brings home a particularly pleasing treat.
Sirius would have laughed at her, saying something like, Easy there, Macdonald. Your face might get stuck like that, lover-girl chic. Not that he would’ve understood what was really going on here. Not even Katy Canahann could explain that much to him and get him to listen, get anything at all through his thick skull. The thoughts simply rolled right off of her heart, even if they weren’t true.
“A regular Judas,” Mary confirmed. Her mother would’ve slapped her right across the face for the Biblical reference.
“Do we tell her what you saw?” Lily asked in the hushed, low tones that they so often enjoyed speaking in.
“Not yet, right?” she shook her head. “It isn’t hurting us at all, you know.”
“But still, the lads-”
“The lads are worthless. Who cares if they lose?” she bit out.
“Sure, yes, sure,” Lily gently rubbed her hand calmly over Mary’s forearm, soothing her just so.
“Besides, you know,” Mary shrugged.
Lily nodded, only slightly. A twitch, an admittance of guilt.
“It’s nice to know someone else’s secret,” Mary whispered. Her fingers traced along the edges of Lily’s face. There were freckles trailing along the line of her neck, nearly all the way up to her jaw. Just so, her eyelashes fluttered.
“Yes, it is.”
So, tugging at the back of her neck, Lily bent her into a kiss.
“I’m sorry about Sirius,” she whispered once it was through. “He was good to you, in his own way.”
“S’alright,” Mary murmured back to her, and brushed away a long strand of red hair.
“Who will you go to the dance with now?” Lily’s face fell into a kind of crestfallen sadness she’d never even thought possible. It looked almost fake in its sincerity.
She nearly laughed, “I guess I’ve been too caught up to even think about it. I mean-”
“What about Kingsley Shacklebolt? Sure, he’s younger than us but he’s handsome enough and respectable enough that no one would judge you for it,” she giggled in an excited interruption.
“I’m not really sure-”
“Or Remus perhaps! He’s always liked you, and he thinks Sirius is a huge prick right now, he was just telling me about it.”
“Lily, come on-”
They were knee to knee, arms and hands entangled. Had they been younger, maybe ten, maybe five, they could’ve been sitting in a pillow fort and telling bedtime stories. She wondered where the lines blurred, somewhere between thirteen and fourteen, fourteen and fifteen. Somewhere in the space when she looked at Lily and saw the whole world lighting up instead of her friend. She begged her not to thrust some date upon her. She begged her to kiss her again, in the same breath.
“Please, Mary,” Lily implored. “Please, for me?”
Mary nodded a little. She turned her face downward. What went wrong? Where did this happen? “Alright, alright. Remus it is.”
That was enough. Lily really did kiss her then, hard and fast. Just as she'd begged and begged and begged for it.
And Remus it would be, in the following days. He asked her with his hands in his pockets while he slouched across the bricks of the astronomy tower and smoked a cigarette. Marlene would officially have to go with Pettigrew now, or find one of the Slytherins to cement her transformation into a person no one could recognize.
“I’m sorry,” Remus told her after he finished with his asking and she finished with her acceptance. “I know it isn’t really me you want to be going with.”
Mary could tell by the slope of his sad smile and the following puff of smoke that it was not Sirius he spoke of for her.
She leaned her head on his shoulder, waiting for the moment of adjustment it took for his weight to support her own, “S’alright. “I know it isn’t me for you, either.”