The Ball
Dear Mary,
James wrote to me this week for the first time all summer. I was surprised it took him this long to begin with. Can you believe that he likes me at all? I don’t believe it, and I feel half sick even thinking about it with too much intent. He has handwriting like a seven year old, that boy. It was hard to decipher anything that he meant, both because he didn’t have much to say and I couldn’t read it.
Should I burn it? Or respond? I leave the decision entirely up to you.
(P.S. Your letters are much better.)
(P.P.S. I adore them wholly.)
Yours, lighting a match,
Lily Evans
---
Dear Lily,
Of course he likes you, dear. You’re beautiful, you’re smart, you’re kinder than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s more a question of who wouldn’t fall for you, and why did it take him so long to do something about it? He’ll be loud about liking you now. That’s something to be proud of. Unless he has to write it down, then it might be impossible to understand.
You should do what makes you happy.
(P.S. I try, you know.)
(P.P.S. I adore yours more.)
Yours, watching the flame,
Mary Macdonald
Chapter 29
Mary’s mother sent her dress for the Ball in dramatically unfeeling form, even for her. It was a shabby purple thing, with white lace around the bottom edge that was fading to yellow and white, alongside gloves that were doing the same. Everyone was wearing gloves, as Lily told her, so she needed to wear them too.
She held it up to her body in the mirror while she was getting ready for class, pulling it taut to watch it hug against her curves.
You said you need a dress, so here it is. I borrowed it off Mrs. Gordon, so please don’t spill a pint or something all down the front of it. The girls say hello.
- Ma
That’s what her mother had written. All her mother had written, in fact. The triplets had slipped in their own drawings, at least. They’d probably been forced to take an unassisted walk down to the post slot and snuck it in all by themselves, the brilliant little buggers.
The dress wasn’t entirely that ugly when she looked at it next to her body. Comparably, she had more things to pick on with her form than the purple fabric that draped there. It was not necessarily dated or old fashioned or hideous at all. They gloves could be cleaned by a spell, she was sure, and so could the lace, but nothing she knew how to do would change the shine of the fabric, the scratch she felt when it met with her skin. That was what made it cheap, so distinguishable from everything else.
Remus had shared in her gentle sorrows at Hogsmeade a couple days prior. The pre-Valentines weekend trip, a lead up celebration to the dance.
“Dumbledore bought all the rough lads secondhand robes, did you know that?” he had murmured out of the side of his mouth and slipped a pack of fs into the waiting palm of a sweating fourth year.
“Can’t be as ugly as the dress my ma sent me,” she snorted.
“The handsomest couple at the ball, that’s what we’ll be!”
She looked at her stomach, her thighs. Did Remus think she was pretty? She thought she was pretty, maybe, if too big in some places and too small in some others. Pretty like somebody you wouldn’t feel bad kicking out of bed. Pretty like when the sun went down too late in the summertime.
***
“Only one more night!” Lily giggled excitedly, hanging onto James’ hand as they walked back up towards the castle after watching Quidditch practice.
The week had passed in a flurry of preparation that left Mary feeling exhausted and rather empty. There was no time for anything pleasurable. No time for long study sessions in the library with Marlene and Lily, no time to tuck against the freezing window panes with Lily and talk and talk and talk. No time for anything but chattering with their classmates about flowers and dresses and dates. Lily took to the planning like a bird to the sky. She dazzled girls with her intricate arrangements and made the lads guffaw with her promises for all of them. Remus called her an automaton, a robot of party planning and social priming. Mary called somewhat foreign, and found herself more depressed than not.
“Blimey, Pettigrew is going to be some sort of the death of me. He thinks I really want him, how is that?” Marlene groaned.
“Well you are going to the dance with him, to be fair,” James shrugged.
“It’s all your fault, Mary, you stole Lupin right out from under me!”
“Not my fault he chose me!” She flipped her hair with a giggle.
“And I suffer the consequences,” Marlene feigned a fainting episode and they clipped faster at their walking pace.
Mary looked over her shoulder back down the path, on accident and on purpose. Sirius walked a long way back with one of the fourth year Chasers, a lad probably trying to score some whiskey or cigs. She smiled a little at the smirking slope of his eyebrows. A pang at the back of her heart missed him and did not understand why. She’d never really liked him. She knew that. But she missed him just the same.
He smiled back, waving and rolling his eyes to the bloke he was walking with. Catch himself on, you know? he would’ve said. Thank God, thank everything, that they didn’t have to go to the Ball together.
“Where is Remus anyway? I meant to give him back a book he leant me.”
“I didn’t know you were reading something, love,” James chuckled and swung the hand that held Lily’s jauntily as he walked. Mary hadn’t known she was reading one of Remus’s books either. She could tell by the down-turn of her green eyes that she had not meant anyone to know, that her little admission had been entirely by accident.
“Ah, I couldn’t get into it,” she shrugged quickly. Her voice moved quicker than it’s usual even, intelligent temperament. “It’s not important at all, really. I was only just wondering.”
“So where is he?” Mary jumped in to save her, receiving a grateful smile.
“Nowhere!” James yelped cheerily. “You know Moony, he’s probably off with Peter or in the library or something, you know?”
“Of course, of course,” Lily shrugged.
“That makes sense,” Marlene concurred.
“I just hope he’s pretty by the dance tomorrow!”
As the sun set on this scathingly boring Monday evening, Mary succeeded in getting all of her friends to laugh. The air clipped coldly at her face, but a smile lit at her insides. At least Marlene hadn’t abandoned them yet. At least Lily had her head thrown back into a chuckle.
***
Mary commandeered the mirror to do her hair, which was a far more involved process than for either Marlene or Lily. She pinned some parts of her curls back, teased some parts of it higher and higher. She primped and preened, knowing she had to be beautiful. For Lily, obviously. She couldn’t embarrass her at the ball she’d spent all week ensuring would go perfect.
With her dress on, it all started to come together. Her hair achieved its proper volume, the purple fabric of the dress clung where it needed to and hung where it did not.
She did her make-up leaning over the sink, pulling at her skin to apply soft lipstick and sharp, dark eyeliner and hints of wafting black eyeshadow. Mary examined her smile, her teeth, the pull of her lips against the skin of her cheeks. She turned around and looked at the back of the dress in the mirror. The zipper was fraying away from where it was sewed in slightly. Maybe someone would rip it off of her already.
“Oyyy, some of us have to get pretty too, you know?” Marlene drawled from outside the door, knocking furiously.
“For Pettigrew?” Mary fired back and continued to apply on blush, then contour.
“Merlin, five more minutes!” Marlene squawked back. Lily, at least, understood Mary’s intense need to get beautiful in such a short span of time. She understood, acutely, why all of this meant so much.
Still, Mary obliged and finished her routine with haste. She clasped a silver necklace around her neck and fastened big hoop earrings to her ears and pulled her gloves on for one big, dramatic entrance.
Tentatively, the door to the bathroom crept opened, letting in a sliver of warm light into the rest of the room. Marlene and Lily turned where they stood, each done up in their own fancy dress and teased up hair and heavily applied make-up. They turned where they stood, and, even if it was only for her benefit, let their jaws hit the floor.
“You look like a ride, Macdonald!” Marlene guffawed loudly. “Oh boy, oh boy, no wonder Lupin chose you!”
Mary smiled weakly, immediately conscious of her chest and the way it heaved and her legs and her stomach and even her smile as it shook on her face.
“You are so beautiful,” Lily murmured under her breath. She reached her hand out to clasp around air before withdrawing her shaking fingers quickly, like she hadn’t even meant to reach and try to hold. She probably hadn’t meant to say anything at all.
“You’re both too much,” she teased quickly, making up for the slip in temperament.
“Well I say your good looks are too much,” Marlene joked back easily.
Mary watched with unease as Lily just stood there swaying back and forth and stammered a little, never dropping the smile on her face. Mary felt herself falling into a matching manner. Lily wore a dress of emerald green, dark and bottomless like one might expect of the deepest parts of the forest. It matched her eyes. If Mary looked too hard at all she started to feel faint, her heart dripping from her chest to her stomach.
She hoped that Lily could not tell what she was thinking as the words all but poured from her eyes. It would be all too easy to know, only by the lovesick daze splashed across her face, that she held all the power in their situation.
“Shall I check if the lads are waiting?” Marlene asked nonchalantly. Her dress was a darker maroon that strayed just far enough away from some offensive shades of red, though she wore it as if she had no care in the world whether it looked good or not. Mary suspected that she held similar regards for Pettigrew. They had both accepted the necessity of going out with each other for one night and one night only, putting aside all feelings of intense awkwardness.
“Wonderful, yeah,” Lily waved her down the stairs, leaving the two of them alone.
The silence, as often happened, was short lived.
“Lily, I-” she longed to touch her, to reach out and feel her hips beneath her hands, but they didn’t have time for that.
They had time for nothing, really, but the fierce press of their lips together, so hot that it could’ve burned Mary at the touch. She leant forward, hopelessly moving in for more, and came up with a hand silencing her. Lily was white in the face and shaking her head as if to say, No more, not now.
Mary forced herself to step back. She smiled sheepishly.
“You’re even prettier than I thought you’d be,” she whispered quietly.
“You thought about it?” Lily asked her, tossing her air back like it did not matter in the slightest.
“Of course I did.”
For a moment, their hands brushed. The idea passed, the faint acceptance of a spark that could not be ignored. Then Marlene fell back into the room to whisk them away.
***
The boys brought a flurry of distraction, each clad in their individually ridiculous wizard dress robes. She felt for poor Remus, clad in his plain black fabrics. They complimented each other in their shared shabbiness at least, and she broke into a wide smile when she saw him, knowing there would at least be some fags in his pockets for them to share.
James, on the other hand, sent her into some sort of shock. He was dressed in dapper black robes that were a similar style to Remus’s, though different in every other respect. His waist coat was made of fine silk that rippled smoothly against the flickering light of the sconces, his tie matching the elegant make of the vest. Mary frowned as Lily took his arm and pulled herself closer to Remus.
“Alright there, Mary?” Remus must’ve heard her groaning, as he looked down and smiled.
“Alright, yeah,” she shrugged.
“You look nice,” he told her, like that would help at all.
“So do you.” They both laughed at that, looking simultaneously at their hand-me-downs.
“Sure,” Remus shook his head, full of chagrin. “Sure.”
“Oi! I think I see Sirius!” James chortled happily from up ahead just as they were set to make their way down the grand staircase.
Sirius, only slightly before them, was accompanying Katy Canahann down the steps, as he had often been spotted doing these days. They made a very handsome couple, or he brought out all the attractive qualities that would’ve usually hung dormant in Katy. Whatever the matter, they both looked expensive, slightly pissed, and entirely unbothered to be at the event. Exactly how Sirius preferred it.
Still, his face lit up when he saw James.
“Blimey!” he cried out and turned around, stopping half the student body in their slow trek to the Great Hall. “You look positively radiant, my good fellow!”
Remus shook his head and murmured sideways to her, “Pricks.”
She laughed loudly, maybe more than she should’ve, as James and Lily hurried on so that the boys could pat each other on the backs. It occurred to Mary, as Remus joined in her guffawing, that she didn’t quite know why he was cross with Sirius at all. Whatever the matter, it had him murmuring viciously scathing remarks about the knuckleheaded tendency of the other two boys.
Only Peter and Marlene, dragging up the rear in a stunningly awkward fashion, could get him to change the subject.
“Lovely decorations, eh?” Pettigrew remarked as he approached.
“Why yes they are,” Mary agreed with a giggle.
“Definitely,” Marlene concurred.
“If I wouldn’t sound like a nancy for it, I’d say yes too,” Remus snarked, making Peter go decidedly red in the face.
“Nonsense,” Mary reprimanded, though they still spent the rest of the walk in silence.
Lily, as she strode along with James, Sirius, and Katy Canahann, did not look back once.
***
Mary found out, very quickly, that she never wanted to go to a ball ever again. The decorations were all loud shades of red and pink. There were ice statues carved into cherubic figures or tall, imposing hearts. Lights twinkled up above, blinding her every time her eyes changed course. Worst of all was the music, the awful grating, shiny sound of wizards trying to imitate something inherently Muggle.
Remus agreed with her, though he had a very different view of what qualified as music. On several occasions fist fights had nearly broken out in the common room over Diana Ross versus Bowie. Still, both of them had attempted to dance with each other on four separate occasions already and found the task to be absolutely impossible and were instead resigned to slumping on the sidelines.
Only Lily and James were able to actually enjoy the dance floor. Mary watched them spin in circles miserably, making wide and enamored eyes at each other. She remembered Lily’s lips on her own. She wondered, for a long time, if she’d imagined it.
Sirius, all by himself, was an annoyance too. Katy Canahann was positively throwing herself at him, so visible that Remus had to avert his eyes several times.
“Are they aware we can all see them?” Marlene asked after a particularly torrid kiss.
“He probably doesn’t care,” Remus groaned. “The right prick.”
Then, once again, he went stonily silent, and the night dragged on.
About halfway through the evening, after the entrees and main courses of pink salmon and shrimp had made their rounds, Marlene disappeared. Lily and James were far off across the room chatting with some of the other Quidditch lad and pretty girl couples. Peter was trailing them, as he often found a way of doing. That left Remus and Mary to stew, making only marginal attempts to chat with Marlene, all the way up until she vanished completely from the room.
Mary even stood up to look, wheeling around in deliberate circles with her hands on her hips.
“Leave it, eh?” Remus grumbled at her. “Marlene’s a big girl, she’ll find her own way.”
“She’s always running off these days,” she shook her head and sat down again.
“Like you don’t do the same thing,” he laughed darkly, in the most pessimistic manner possible. A timid looking Hufflepuff shuffled forward to ask them for fags and promptly ran in the opposite direction when they witnessed his face.
“I’d never abandon her like that,” Mary retorted harshly and frowned in the direction of the wayward Hufflepuff.
“So the daily trips you and Lily take to some mystery place are completely different?”
Mary shook her head, as the blood flushed into her cheeks. “I- I- well, yes. I think they are.”
“And what makes them that way, eh?”
“They just are,” she told him. Her fists clenched over the table. Remus stared at her, almost daring her to speak further. Such perception in those eyes, familiarly dark like those of all the boys back home.
“I thought so.” Then he shrugged, like it did not at all matter.
“You don’t think they all notice, do they?” Mary looked far across the room to where they all stood, the shiniest, happiest boys and girls at their school. They were laughing loudly, all at once it seemed. Laughing at Mary and Remus, alone at their table. Later that night they would go back to their rooms and open the paned glass windows and smoke the fs that Mary and Remus sold them.
“No,” he patted her hand under the table and smiled as best he could. “No, I don’t think they do.”
“Good,” Mary murmured. “Now I’m going to go for a smoke in the courtyard. Maybe Marlene’s out there.”
He smirked and nodded his head listlessly, “Alright Macdonald, alright.”
***
The courtyard was lit to a very unsatisfactory degree, forcing Mary to slink against a stone half-wall, rubbing moss on her already slightly soiled dress. Marlene, of course, was not actually anywhere to be found. She took a long drag of her cigarette and puffed into the night air. It was cold, as Valentine's day ought not to be. What an awful idea, that this Sunday they’d all march down to Hogsmeade and go about their silly little dates.
Things were bad enough already. Mary had not seen a Slytherin speak to another house since she had seen Marlene and Dorcas Meadowes talking on the bridge. Not even Regulus Black and Sirius. Not even brothers.
Mary took another drag and let the feeling sink in. Maybe wizards would understand what it felt like to be Muggles soon. Endless squabbling, endless division. Muggle-borns already hated themselves, just as all the other Jamaicans in her neighborhood did and just as all the girls did too. Just as she and Lily did every night when they fell asleep together. Maybe most wizards would come to understand that gut punched feeling, like you were being eaten from the inside.
That was when Lily Evans, in her radiant dress, stepped into the shimmering courtyard. Mary was hidden from the entrance by a recently sprung row of hedges. Faint music floated over top of the plants and the smell of roses bloomed into the air. All because of Lily, of course.
They found each other quickly, and both in foul moods.
“You left,” Lily told her, as if Mary’s legs had not done the literal walking.
“It was horrible in there,” she snapped back. “The music is awful.”
“They tried to cover Dancing Queen, it was like my ears were being assaulted.” They both giggled a little before frowning again.
“Did you and James dance?” Mary blew smoke from her mouth, her eyes hot and angry.
Lily sighed, “Mary, come on-”
“Did you?”
“We did, a little,” she said, sheepish if she wasn’t so clearly pleased about it.
“Good then, eh?” Mary laughed sharply. “Can’t imagine why you’d be out here then.”
“Shouldn’t I ask you the same thing?”
“I was looking for Marlene. She’s been with me the whole night, you know.”
“Oh,” Lily kicked a rock and shifted closer to her. Her arms were crossed and her pinky brushed against Mary’s arm in a way that could not be accidental. “That’s nice then.”
“You still didn’t give me a reason,” Mary’s words caught in her chest. She wanted to hold her hand and touch the side of her face. Lily’s jaw was always soft. Briefly, she finally remembered that Remus had spiked the punch at their table.
“Do I need one?” Lily demanded. They both knew that she never did.
Mary took her cue, and dragged them both out of the courtyard, past prying eyes of couples trying to get away from the noise, passed gaggles of girls giggling over secrets. As they left, the decor quickly shifted from that of the ball back to regular Hogwarts. Streamers dissipated from the walls and the light turned from soft pink to fire-red.
“Where should we go?” Mary murmured quietly, though it still produced an echo. She felt drunkenly sick, angry to her core. If Lily played innocent again, boy would she have a ball, she thought.
“A room, anywhere you want, I don’t care,” Lily murmured breathlessly. Her fingers wrapped around the part of the wrist where Mary’s heart beat.
“Come on, you have to care,” she shook her head, hopeful that maybe Lily didn’t care for once. Maybe they would simply pop back into the dormitory and do it like any other pair would without fear of Marlene finding out. Mary felt, in her heart, those kinds of feelings. But maybe she was just drunk.
“I don’t, I swear,” she returned breathlessly. “Here, let’s go here.”
And just as Mary was about to pull her close and ask her why had she really come to see her in the courtyard, if it didn’t really matter at all? Why had she come, really? She didn’t need a reason, but Mary wanted one. As her mother still prayed each morning for her father to come home, she wanted one.
Just as she was about to declare it for the world, Lily shoved open the door to an abandoned classroom and stopped dead in her tracks. Her grip tightened around Mary’s wrist and the sound of her rapid breathing stopped.
“Mary-” she gasped. “Mary.”
Weakly, she staggered from the doorway, and Mary saw what had stopped her so firmly. Marlene was sliding off of Dorcas Meadowes, dragging her hand across her lips as if she was washing off something foul. They’d been kissing, both pressed up against each other. Mary felt a shudder run through her heart, pumping through her blood. She needed a cigarette in her hand, falling from her mouth, because she remembered what that felt like. The rush, the indecision, the terror. She saw it all in Marlene’s eyes.
“Oh God,” Mary said. “Oh God.”
And the door slammed shut behind them.