just let me in
It begins, as do most of the good things in Lily's life, with the library.
The library in the public school just down the road from her house barely counts as such; a dozen shelves lined with dog-eared copies of the same classics schoolchildren read (or ignore) every year: Shakespeare, the many pages scribbled over and half-heartedly highlighted; Dickens, with scribbled childish diatribes against too much description and doodles of bug-eyed Uriah Heape and Ebeneezer Scrooge; Austen, with pink girlish lovehearts doodled around Mr Darcy's declaration of love and absolutely no other writing anywhere in the book. There's a collection of children's books on lower shelves, a much richer selection thanks to Mum, who raised them with a Roald Dahl in one hand and an E.B. White in the other, and a collection of colourful, squashy cushions on the animal-printed rug. Every afternoon, Mum brings her primary school class down to the library to read them all a story; Lily remembers afternoons spent lying on the animal rug, tracing a threadbare giraffe with her finger and listening to the stories of Cinderella and the Three Musketeers. As she grows older, as she reads her way through the library, it grows small and close around her shoulders, like a coat bought two sizes too large for you that eventually you break through the seams of; the little ordinaries of the library come clear to her, the watermarks on the walls and the crack in the ceiling, the way the lights always dully flicker because the lightbulbs are never the right strength, how faded are the murals of Matilda and Bilbo Baggins, and how long the desktops take to boot, whirring and whining, to life.
And yet it's a sanctuary of sorts, a place away, away . When Sev's whining becomes too nasal for her to stand, when Tuney turns thirteen and declares she absolutely cannot stand the sight of her little sister, when Dad's cough bothers him more and more with every passing cold day and the lines around Mum's eyes become tight with worry, Lily can hide in the library, where it's always warm and smells of dusty pages. She can tuck herself into the tiny gap between two shelves in the back left corner, and watch the dustmotes circle in the evening light, and turn the soft pages of a book she's read all too-many times.
She's thirteen and gangly for her age, one afternoon in grey November, curled up inside this hideaway she's outgrowing with a pile of books she pulled from their familiar places on the shelves on her way to safety. She's sniffling, because Tuney screamed at her for using her curling-iron to melt little plastic beads together into a mural until she ran out of the house crying, and her eyes are still sore from it. Mum says it's a stage, that all girls go through it and that Tuney's just growing up, and Lily thinks she would like nothing more than to fly off with Peter Pan rather than ever grow up, ever . She's flipping through the same copy of Emma that she's read too many times by now, looking for the part when Mr Knightley takes pity on Harriet and comes to dance with her, when a bookmark slips from between the pages and falls into her lap.
Quite literally into her lap. Of such little coincidences is fate wrought.
Curious, she picks it up and runs her fingers over it. It's not a cheap paper bookmark, not even the kind made from printed cardstock like the ones Mum buys for her birthdays; it's a strip of polished metal, a rich bronze in colour, with a hook on one end to slide over the pages and keep the owner's place. And it's stamped with a crest, deep and heavy, the type that knights carry on their shields in her beloved copy of King Arthur and The Knights of the Round Table . The crest is divided into four pieces, with a snake, some sort of small animal like a badger, a bird of some sort, and a lion, and underneath it is a scrolled banner bearing a phrase in a strange language. Beneath the entire thing is the name "Hogwarts".
Lily's lips form the word soundlessly, again and again. It sounds like a place out of The Hobbit , somewhere Bilbo and the dwarves would stop by, or like the name of a wizard Merlin would know. Hogwarts . She's never heard of it before.
Curiosity drives her to her feet and across the room to the row of dusty desktops lined up in their workspaces. She fingers the metal bookmark over and over again, feeling all the little indents and designs, while she waits for one of them to finally blink tiredly to life, and then types into the spacebar Hogwarts. She clicks on the first link that comes up, and her jaw almost hits her collarbone.
She wasn't expecting it to be a school, she never dreamed a school could look like this; all gabled windows and soaring roofs, palatial classrooms, boys and girls in pressed uniforms and ties and carrying stacks of thick leather-bound books. There are so many photos, glossy and rich with colours even on the dully-lit screen, and she clicks through them slowly, like a starving child looks at a collection of sweets. The school is enormous, with a dining-hall and a swimming-pool and teenagers in bright uniforms swimming and playing football and rugby and riding horses , something she's only ever seen on telly or in her books; there are photos of more teenagers with various silver badges on their uniforms and their names in taglines identifying them as Prefects, Head Boy, Head Girl, Captain of various teams; there are photos of school plays, concerts, recitals, debating teams, speech tournaments, the school newspaper, everything pristine and shining, crisp and exact like the image of precisely what a boarding school should be. There are class photos posed on the sweeping front steps to the double-front doors, flanked by professors and the white-bearded headmaster, the overhead trees in crisp autumnal hues, various school ties a blaze of blue and green and yellow and red, and the overhead banner proclaiming the same motto in Latin, nunquam titillandus draco dormiens .
Lily doesn't even look away from the photos, starry-eyed and open-mouthed, until the little timer at the bottom of the screen flashes to alert her that she's been online for a full half an hour, and then the sun is sinking blood-red towards the horizon and she can almost hear her mum calling her in for dinner from here. She runs home skipping over the cracks in the footpath with one fist clenched tightly around the bookmark, visions of starched uniforms and a library like a cathedral in her head, and that's - well, that's the first domino to fall.
Students at Cokesworth Primer have free access to the library computers, and Lily uses her allotted half-hour without fail, sometimes switching from one to the next to the next to keep researching for as long as possible. She learns that Hogwarts Preparatory College is one of the top three public secondary schools in the United Kingdom, ranked alongside Eton and Harrow, but with an even longer history of coeducation; there are portraits on the school website of women from the eighteenth century in the uniform, black robes flowing and the school badge emblazoned on their chests. She learns that graduates have doors open to them at every university in the UK, and most universities in the world; that the same graduates have access to jobs and markets and careers that the daughter of a car mechanic and primer teacher has barely heard of - astronauts, engineers, politicians, barristers, even Prime Ministers and diplomats and Supreme Court judges. She learns that the array of classes offered is staggering, that there are dozens of extracurricular clubs and teams, and Hogwarts students are expected to excel in whatever endeavour they choose to take on. She learns that the competition to get in is fierce, that the tuition is nothing short of astronomical, and that they expect the very best. Within two weeks, her mind is made up and her heart is set; she wants to be a Hogwarts Prep girl.
Lily comes from a family of settlers; she knows this, deep down, even as young as thirteen. Dad's happiest tinkering away with his engines and meeting her Uncle Haz for a pint and reliving their glory days in a short-lived college rock band every other week. Mum genuinely loves teaching her children, and with her gardening and her music, she's happy as a lark. Tuney, forever short and snappish these days, has no loftier short-term ambitions then learning how to do a French tip on her nails, and her future is split in the great divide between beauty school and secretarial school. For her, school is a place to meet up and gossip with her friends, a place to bat her eyelashes at the older boys and pretend not to know her younger sister.
But Lily's always been clever. Mum and Dad say so, all her teachers have said so, Sev says so -- usually when he's trying to flatter her into doing what he wants, but still -- even Tuney says so, sneeringly, when she deigns to notice. She's read every book in the library, and school is easy to the point of boring for her. Looking at these photos, feeling the Hogwarts crest under her thumb, makes her brain itch for a challenge unfelt since she mastered long division.
She doesn't mention it to anyone; it feels too much like telling what you wished for when you blow out your birthday candles, if you say a wish it won't come true. But she prints off a photo of the cavernous Hogwarts Library to tuck under her pillow, and she carries the metal bookmark everywhere she goes like a charm, and she begins to work for what she wants for the first time. She wears her library card thin ordering books from every author she can find, she writes up enormous lists of books to read and to study, she requests books for learning French and Latin and advanced mathematics and global history, books that take weeks to come to their little town and that she devours. She learns how to conjugate verbs in French, how to write essays far more advanced than the basics of introducing herself and her family; she teaches herself Latin declensions, starts translating from the Cambridge Book of Latin Exercises , and learns that the Hogwarts motto is "never tickle a sleeping dragon". She finds that funny. She practises geometric and algebraic equations until she goes slightly cross-eyed, and she quizzes herself on the Korean War and the Crimea and the history of the Middle East, and she reads everything ever written by Tolstoy and Dickens and Dostoevsky and Georges Sand and Walter Scott and Fitzgerald...
Rose Evans becomes very accustomed to coming upstairs after midnight to find her youngest sound asleep on yet another library book. She becomes even more accustomed to coming upstairs to the light still on and a stubborn child in her footie pyjamas insisting she can't go to bed yet, she isn't finished yet, notebooks full of careful cursive and her hands stained with ink, eyes hollow with exhaustion and the same stubborn set to her jaw that Rosie herself wore when she told her parents she was going to be a teacher, not a nurse.
January comes and goes and Lily turns fourteen. Dad's cough is worse than ever, and Uncle Haz has moved into the downstairs bedroom to help out at the shop more often. Mum bites her lips when she's distracted, which is always now, and she sighs over bills and uses the calculator three and four times before writing cheques and Tuney has a parttime job at the local salon. Lily quietly sends away for the application forms to Hogwarts, and rushes to intercept their mailman every morning before dawn for weeks.
Spring comes in a rush of flowers, and Mum takes to setting Dad up sitting outside in the sun, where the sunshine "will do him good". Tuney decides on secretarial school after all; half her wages from her job go into a piggybank on her bedroom windowsill, which she rattles every evening as if to reassure herself its still there. Lily's technically too young for a parttime job, but when she volunteers to tend gardens and pull weeds with her chin out and her head up, people smile and pat her on the head and accept. When she brings home her earnings, Mum sighs, but the set of her shoulders eases infinitesimally. Lily fills out her application forms for Hogwarts in her best cursive, in the middle of the night under the bedsheets with a torch. She lists her marks and the recommendations from her teachers and writes a three-hundred-word essay comparing the American and British postwar writers. She pays the application fee in the fivers she's earned mowing lawns, and then sits through her end-of-year exams over-prepared and queasy with nerves.
The air is sticky with summer heat on the evening they all come straggling home from work, Dad leaning on Uncle Haz's shoulder and smiling the smile he wears when his chest hurts and he's trying to be brave about it. Tuney comes in from her job at the salon, fulltime now, and immediately collapses into a chair with a gusty sigh and kicks of her fashionable pink kitten heels. Lily, sunburnt on the back of her neck, t-shirt and shorts clammy with sweat, grimy up to her knees and arms covered in scratches from Mrs Helworth's stubborn rosebushes, pointedly kicks the shoes into one corner, ignores Tuney's screech of LILY! and opens the fridge in search of lemonade. Mum is the last in, her greengrocer's apron slung over her shoulder from her job over the summertime, her own shoes held in one hand because she's always walked home barefoot over the sloping back lawns and always will. Tuney says it's the height of tackiness and swears she'll die of embarrassment every time she sees it. Lily thinks that if Tuney did actually die every time someone did something that personally offended her, she'd be mouldering six feet under by now.
She's taking long, cooling, blessed gulps of tart lemonade when Mum calls her name in a voice that sounds as if she's about to be scolded. "Would you mind explaining to me," Mum asks, holding in one hand -- Lily's heart leaps upwards to lodge in her throat -- a cream-coloured envelope of thick heavy cardstock with a very familiar seal stamped in one corner. "Why I'm holding a letter from one of the best prep schools in the country, and why it's addressed to 'Miss Lily Evans'?"
Lily lets out a strangled noise and dives over Tuney's legs to grab it. In reality, once she gets there, she takes it very gently, and notices in an absent sort of way that her hands are shaking.
"Oh, lovey." Mum squeezes one of her hands. Her face has gone quite white, and her eyes are dancing with something barely suppressed.
"Well, go on then!" Dad says, with one of his hearty, jolly, everything's-grand-sure laughs. His eyes are darting between Lily's face and the envelope. They meet Mum's eyes, and the two of them share a look fairly crackling with -- is that hope? Lily wonders, in some small corner of her mind. Is that the thing with feathers, now flitting anxious about the room? "Open it, love."
She can't take the looks on their faces, just can't -- she has to turn her back. Her hands are shaking so badly she almost rips the envelope clean in two, but she manages to unfold the letter. It's not typed, but handwritten in a sharp, angular cursive, and the top is stamped with the same crest she's slept with under her pillow for a year now.
"Dear -- " Her throat fails; she coughs explosively and tries again. "Dear Miss Evans, it is with great delight that we inform you that there is a place for you -- "
Her voice is drowned out in the sudden chorus of shouts and cheers. Dad half-drags her down onto the sofa and into a hug, shouting incoherently about "my daughter! My Lily!" Mum covers her eyes with one hand and drops into a chair, half-laughing and half-sobbing; Uncle Haz lets out a whoop and hugs her around the neck before whisking Mum off her feet and into a clumsy waltz, complete with shouts of "you little genius, you!" and "why didn't you tell us?"
"This changes everything!" Laughing, tears on her cheeks, Mum comes stumbling over to cup Lily's face in her hands. " Everything , Lily, my God, a place like this...oh lovey, oh my darling." She pulls Lily into a hug scented of lavender and green things, and Lily could almost cry herself. "I'm so proud of you."
"So - " she pulls back from the hug for a moment, pulse pounding in her neck. "I can go?"
"Of course you're going," Dad says firmly. "No question of it."
"What?" comes Tuney's shrill voice - the first thing she's said since Mum held up the envelope.
"Tuney, really." Mum says, half-laughing. "This is an amazing opportunity for your sister, we'd be fools not to take advantage of it."
Tuney crosses her bony arms over her chest, frown carved deep into her forehead. "I'm not spending my college money on her."
"Petunia." Mum and Dad snap at once.
"I don't like to hear that tone, Petunia." Mum says firmly. "There was no talk of using your college fund - "
"How else do you expect to pay for it?" Tuney snaps, and Dad winces. They don't talk about money in this house, never in such open terms, and Lily sees the sudden guilt and shame in his face like a blush.
"Enough." Mum snaps. "There are scholarships available, I'm sure, and...well, there are plenty of other steps we can take. The important thing is, Lily, that we are so very proud of you!"
Their pride is a warmth for her, a fire in her chest - Mum bakes an apple tart for dinner, and they all sing for she's a jolly good fellow over and over again, and hug her and exclaim proudly over the letter until late in the evening. And it's a hot knife in the ribs, when Tuney hisses as they're brushing their teeth that Lily's probably cost them Daddy's pension, and probably Mummy's too, and she's not getting her grubby little hands on Tuney's hard-earned money, and how can she be so selfish ...
The next morning, Lily takes herself and her piggybank shaped like a red double-decker bus down to the payphone in the town centre, and dials the number for the administration office. After a lot of clicks, and being on hold more than once, she finally manages to leave a message with a bored-sounding receptionist who promises that someone will be in touch shortly. That evening, a much brisker phonecall asks if they'll be at home the following Thursday at three to meet with someone from the college to "discuss the situation".
Mum irons everything in the house twice, hoovers until Lily swears the carpet is about to give up the ghost and go bald, and almost burns the place to the ground when she singes the first batch of biscuits. At a quarter to, they're all assembled in the living-room, starched within an inch of their lives; Daddy's wearing a tie. Mum's in her Sunday dress and her strand of pearls. Lily's in her nicest skirt, her blouse has been ironed three times, and she's scrubbed the grass stains off her knees so hard that the skin's gone strawberry-pink. When the doorbell rings, they all jump as if scalded.
When Lily meets Professor McGonagall -- Professor , she'd said, quite primly, not Miss -- she thinks for a solid moment she's forgotten how to swallow, thinks she can see her dream popping like soap bubbles before her eyes. McGonagall is starched and tidy in a tartan pantsuit, with gold buttons on the jacket and on the waistcoat underneath, with sharp heels and a tie with an actual pin in it; like some fantastic creature out of a novel. If she was a character in a novel, Lily thinks, shifting on the sofa, she'd be an intrepid lady explorer, like Nellie Bly; taking on the world with gumption and gusto, and damn the men who'd say she couldn't do it. She's even got a hat, a black wire one with a green ribbon, fastened to her sleek bun with an honest-to-God hatpin.
"Well now," says the woman herself, before Mam can offer her tea. She lifts a polished leather suitcase stamped with M.M. in gold leaf onto her knee, and pops the clasp. Then, astoundingly, she winks at Lily. "Shall we have a little chat?"
Minerva McGonagall is, as it turns out, the wonderful kind of woman of utter common sense and practicality, no sentimentality whatsoever, and with a brisk, businesslike matter-of-fact manner that makes her very refreshing to deal with. Over a folder of crisp, expensive-looking paperwork, while balancing one of Mum's best cups and saucers on one knee and casually dunking a ginger biscuit between words, she explains quite simply that there is a full scholarship available to students of "disadvantageous backgrounds" -- said calmly enough to spare even Daddy's blushes -- particularly to "students of such exceptional mental calibre" -- a comment that makes Lily blush red as a fire engine and tuck that bit of glowing praise quietly away into a warm place under her breastbone. For the first two years, under a general scholarship, all fees and all expenses -- uniforms, meals, even living expenses should she so choose -- are paid, depending of course on her maintaining her academic standing. In her penultimate year, she'll have to apply for a specialised scholarship in a particular subject area, such as Literature or Languages -- "your choice entirely, of course, but at this point I would strongly recommend the Literature department," she says, with a little twinkle in her eye as she looks at Lily. She's brought lists of all subjects offered, along with lists of materials for each class and lists of the required uniforms and equipment for all sports teams and clubs, the uniform code, the Hogwarts Code of Conduct, the Honour Code (a different thing entirely, apparently), the school song, the fight song for sports matches, the school motto, rules and regulations, and an outline of the academic calendar. Lily, taking this last, feels slightly dizzy at the sight of how many midterm exams and Christmas exams and Easter exams and end-of-term exams are ahead of her, and actually squirms a little in excitement at the thought of finally having to actually use her brain .
McGonagall is, as it turns out, not only a Professor of Ancient Languages -- another excited squirm from Lily -- and Deputy Headmistress, but Head of one of the four colleges into which Hogwarts is divided; Gryffindor, house of the lion. Originally, when Hogwarts was founded, she explains, stirring her tea, the four colleges were intended to segregate students from different parts of the United Kingdom: the Welsh into Hufflepuff, the Irish into Slytherin, the Scottish into Gryffindor -- her nostrils flare a bit with pride at this -- and the British into Ravenclaw. Over time, of course, the distinctions have faded, and now each college is renowned for brilliance in the classrooms, as well as on the sports pitches and in clubs. Still, the members of each college spend the most time with one another, in their respective common rooms, shared classes, and dormitories, as well as on sports teams. She's brought a list of the clubs offered, and nods approvingly when Lily says she's most interested in the debate team and the school newspaper.
"You will, I am afraid, be required to take a form of physical education for at least one term per year until your final year, and the same goes for an arts class," she says. "But you have plenty of time to choose one there."
Finally, after reminding Lily -- yet again -- that there is a limit to how many classes she can take per term, she takes another ginger biscuit, marks the necessary forms to fill out for Lily's scholarship, begs them to contact her at any time with further questions, and takes her leave with a snap of her heels on the hardwood floor. "I like that woman," Mum says approvingly, closing the door behind her. "And your granny would have liked her too."
Granny Moira was, herself, approximately as tough as old boots, and this is the highest compliment Mum can pay anyone. Lily hugs herself and nestles deeper into her armchair, grinning ear-from-ear and completely incapable of tearing her eyes away from the stacks of papers and the shiny, glossy brochure on the tea table.
Despite visiting it over the summer -- Mum and Dad beaming, Uncle Haz alternatively hugging her and slinging her shrieking with laughter over one shoulder, Tuney dragging her feet and rolling her eyes hard enough to sprain something -- Hogwarts seems somehow ten times bigger the first morning Lily approaches the front gates, breath cool in the early-morning air. The iron-wrought front gates tower over her, and are flanked on either side by statues of lions. The Hogwarts crest, likewise in iron, is stamped on either gate. Beyond them, the college is laid out in a mix of towering grey stone buildings of towers, arched doorways and windows, and flying buttresses, a Gothic-Mediaeval cathedral come to life, and four-story redbrick Elizabethan buildings in a cluster; the dorms, she knows. Mum put her foot down, refused to send her baby girl away for the whole term for the first time in her life, and honestly there's a part of Lily that's glad of it. Hogwarts is only two and a half hours away from home by train, after all, and as grand as it is, she wants to go home tonight to tell Mam all about it.
The college is in a small town, Hogsmeade, which is full of bookshops that Lily's itching to explore, cafes and coffeeshops, cute little glass-fronted boutiques, and pretty restaurants. The streets are actually cobblestoned, and most people are walking or cycling, not driving. There's a tram that runs down the high street, with a bell on front ringing merrily, and the footpaths are lined with interspersing trees and old-fashioned gas streetlamps, fresh out of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe . There's a river that runs through town too, spanned by bridges of wrought iron painted in blues, blacks, and whites, the last made of iron so delicate that it looks like snowflakes, not metal. The entire town is full of students in Hogwarts uniforms, even so early in the morning, outside cafes and sitting on the bridges, shouting to their friends and waving. They all look so tall, so crisp, so comfortable in their uniforms while Lily feels like a paper doll playing dress-up in hers.
It's brand-spanking new, her robe ink-black and her shirt starched white, with her red-and-gold tie -- how she jumped for joy when she got the news she'd been placed in Gryffindor! -- neatly tied courtesy of Dad and her knee socks itchy around her calves. Mum even tied off her long French plaits with a bit of red-and-gold ribbon to match this morning, before they all hugged her goodbye on the platform. She's not used to it yet -- at Cokesworth Primer, there was no uniform, she went to school in her jumpers and jeans -- but she likes how it makes her feel like a new person, a new Lily.
Almost hugging herself, she walks through the gate and into the crowd milling about outside in the sunshine. People are throwing balls, playing jumprope and hopscotch, lounging against the walls chatting and looking formidably cool, but she passes them all to go inside to the administration office.
"Lily Evans," she says to the sour-faced woman at the front desk. "I'm here to pick up my books."
Her textbooks are included in her scholarship -- and thanks be to God for that, Mum said quietly to Dad, hand over her heart looking over the book lists -- but she spent so long trying to decide which classes to take that finally there was no time to post her books to her before term began. She only finally settled on Global History and Russian Literature in the past week.
They come in a massive box, and she staggers under the weight of them down the hall and up five flights of stairs to her locker just outside the Gryffindor Common Room. Her locker is on the bottom of three, and she sits on the floor quite happily unpacking her books and putting them away. They're all bright and shiny and new just like her; the first time in her life she's had new textbooks, new school clothes, none of Tuney's hand-me-downs now. She stuffs the three for her morning classes into her back, hoists it straining onto her shoulders, and staggers into the flow of students heading into the Great Hall on the ground floor in response to the morning bell - an actual bell , its deep and booming chorus sounding out over the courtyard from the bell tower that's stood since 1129.
Morning assembly begins at eight sharp. By noon, most of Lily's illusions and rose-hued daydreams are falling to shards around her feet. Somehow, in a moment of brilliant and blinding arrogance, she hadn't connected in her mind that an "academically challenging environment" would be challenging for her . She's been so accustomed, all her life, to being the clever girl, the smart girl, the girl with all the answers; even in the past year, working her own self to the bone, she could always find the answers. And suddenly she has only the faintest idea of what her teachers -- professors , as they keep reminding her -- are referring to, suddenly she's surrounded by boys and girls her own age who do actually have the answers, who come up with them faster even than her; in Global History, Dorcas Meadowes' hand shoots into the air every time the professor pauses expectantly, while Lily's still struggling to wrap her head around what he's just asked. Every time her professors refer to "but of course, as we covered last year..." and "you'll remember from last year", she wants to put her head down and cry. Somehow she came here expecting to still be the smartest girl in the room; to work harder for it, certainly, but not to feel completely lost, so utterly set adrift in a sea of pleated plaid skirts and neckties, so surrounded by those who know immeasurably more than her. And none of them give the wrong answers, or guess, or have to be talked through their own thinking to the correct answer; they know , surely and utterly, as confident solving quadratic equations and triangular angles, recalling dates and figures, quoting texts and conjugating verbs, as she is when reciting the alphabet. They're so confident, when they're only her own age, and it makes her feel suddenly so very small.
It's glaringly obvious that she's new. Even amongst the others in her year, everyone has their groups and cliques already, everyone has someone to sit beside at lunch and in class. They eye her up and down as she passes, and it's so unnerving that she forgoes lunch altogether and sits outside in the courtyard pretending to be absorbed in Madame Bovary until the bell rings. One of the boys, a lounging lanky blond one, has nicknamed her "Lillian" by the break, despite every single professor making her stand up in the front of the classroom and introduce herself to start off every lecture.
She also learns, at the razor's edge of sidelong glances and snickering in the girls' toilets, that there is a very great difference in uniforms, between hers and others. The cost of hers is included in her scholarship, but of course Mum got her things a size up, to grow into, as she always does with anything new Lily gets; these are to last her for as much of the next four years as possible. But for the first time in her life, she's glaringly, sickeningly aware that the hem of her skirt comes past her kneecaps, while the other girls' flirt with regulation length two inches above the knee; the cuffs of her button-up come halfway down her thumb, giving her mitten paws -- she's always liked them before, and suddenly she's flushing and pushing them up to her wrists. Even her shoes are wrong; she's in her favourite trainers, the green ones she's doodled flowers and bees all over, but the other girls are in crisp blue-and-white saddle shoes. They were in the uniform catalogue, but they weren't mandatory and she hadn't imagined that everyone would be wearing them; they're only shoes, after all. But by lunch she's so uncomfortable with the sidelong glances and giggles over her trainers that she flips through the catalogue, wishing she had enough cash on her to maybe get a pair of the saddle shoes -- and then she goes hot with shame all over, because they cost a cool seventy-five quid per pair, because she's already head-to-toe in brand new clothes and not satisfied with what she's got, because she's getting herself all bent out of shape over shoes , of all things. But shame sits hot like tears in a lump in her throat for the rest of the day. Even being able to answer correctly a series of questions about the Norman Conquest doesn't make it go away, and it's with a violent surge of relief that she finally hears the bell ring at the end of the day.
But she can't say all that to Mum. All the way home, bundled up in a window seat on the train struggling not to cry, she wanted nothing so much as to lay her head down on Mum's shoulder and cry it all away in stormy gusts of anger and embarrassment. She wanted Mum to smooth her hair and tell her it would be alright, to make the topsy-turvy world right again with common sense and love and a "don't be silly, mo ghrá ." But no sooner has she stepped off at her platform than she sees Mum waiting for her, and Daddy, both of them grinning and excited and wanting to know all about her first day...and how can she tell them. How could she look them in the eye and say "I made a mistake" and "I don't want to be there" and "Please, let me come home and stay home". Besides, she knows what they'd say; an education is too important, especially one such as this, which she can never get in Cokesworth, and all the places it'll take her, and she was the one who wanted this, and she'd be a fool to let this opportunity pass her by. So she bites her tongue and puts a smile on her face, and tells them all about how exciting her first day was, how pretty Hogsmeade is and how grand the college is, how strict the rules are and how tough her professors are, and shows off her fancy new books and tells them about her history class and pulls dramatically-agonised faces over maths and over and over again says how happy she is.
She cries herself to sleep that night, piles of catch-up work and reams of homework spread out around her, and her bedside lamp flickering tiredly. In the morning, she washes her puffy eyes in cold water before breakfast, and Mum plaits her hair for her, and she climbs back onto the train with her chin up and her teeth clenched.
It doesn't take forever to get better, only about a week - but it's a long, exhausting, draining week before it begins to feel, however remotely, that the all-encompassing weight of the world on her shoulders is easing, just a bit. The professors are strict and the homework load doesn't lighten at all, and she's working until easily one or two in the morning already trying to catch up on last year's outlines, but the first all-shining brilliant glow in her new world is her two literature classes per week, one on Shakespearean literature, and one on female poets. She knows enough of Shakespeare already that reading As You Like It and The Tempest isn't too much of a challenge, and for the other, well, she has Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath for company, old friends for years gone by now. When they were little, Mum kept a book of poetry open at the kitchen table for them to learn from; Lily can remember lisping "I am Nobody, who are you?" when she was still too small to stand at eye level with the table.
The second little glow for her world is McGongall, who takes all the Latin classes, plus Ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Gaelic for the upper-formers, and who insisted on placing Lily in Latin II instead of Latin I. Blessedly, the Cambridge Book of Latin Exercises prepared her enough to know her vocative tenses from her ablative, and McGonagall in their first week makes them all copy out very helpful flashcards of noun and verb declensions, which Lily has already decided will change her life. They have piles of homework, as in every class, but McGonagall keeps it interesting enough that homework is a pleasant puzzle for the mind, something to calmly sift through and relax over, rather than the biology diagrams and the geometric equations that reduce her to frustrated tears on a nightly basis.
(She cries, but she holds a Kleenex in one hand and furiously swabs at her cheeks while still scribbling with her other hand. It might be hard, but she's not going to give up.)
The third bright spark introduces itself on Lily's second Monday, and it comes at the perfect time. It's not gone eight in the morning, and the blond twat who first nicknamed her Lillian , a twat with calfskin-leather loafers and a smug lazy grin that she wants to smack off his face on principle, has stolen her bookbag and is holding it over his head while his cronies laugh and Lily demands in increasingly loud tones that he give it back .
"Or what?" he asks, smirking that stupid smackable smirk and dangling it just over her head while she grinds her teeth and silently wishes gallstones and kidney failure on him. "What'll you do, cry all over me?"
"I'd say she's more likely to drown you in your own blood," comes another voice, rather dry. "Stop being an ass, Hewitt, and give her her bag back."
"What's it to you, Lupin?" Hewitt drawls. "You fancy her, or summat?"
Lupin, a lanky boy with a mess of honey-golden-brown curls and a nasty scar on his cheek, rolls his eyes. "Where'd you pull that from?" he asks, arching an eyebrow. "I'm amazed you could find it up that overblown arse of yours."
Hewitt gapes like a particularly unattractive fish, and Lily takes the initiative to kick him hard in the shins. When he yelps out loud and doubles over, Lupin snatches her bag and slings it easily over one shoulder. "G'wan then," he says, lounging against the wall with a look full of double-edged menace. "Give it over, game's done."
Hewitt glares at Lily. "You won't get away with that, you little -- "
"But of course she won't," Lupin puts in. "Go off and cry around the school that a girl half your size nearly made you cry, you wanker."
"And she'll bloody well do it again if you don't leave her alone." Lily snaps. She throws a glare at Lupin. "I can speak for myself, thanks."
"Never said you couldn't." he said mildly.
"Precious," Hewitt sneers. "When's the wedding?"
"Oh, fuck off." Lupin shoves off the wall. "C'mon, Evans, assembly's about to start."
Hewitt's cronies, two ugly boys with no more brains between them than a gopher's, look at him as if waiting for his signal to make further trouble, but after a moment he sniffs, says "this isn't over", and pushes past them, knocking Lupin's shoulder deliberately hard as they pass into the Great Hall.
"Terrifying." Lupin mutters, handing off her bag. "D'you keep bricks in there, Evans?"
"Why? Thinking I should just hit him with it next time?" She shoulders it, suppressing a groan; her textbooks are already starting to kill her back.
"That, or just drop it on his foot, put him out of commission." Lupin straightens his own bag on his shoulder, rubbing his collarbone where Hewitt hit it with his gargantuan shoulder. At her blank look, he elaborates "He's the Ravenclaw footie captain, and they're ahead of Gryffindor for the season's start."
"Wow." she says drily as they make their way into the Hall. "Thanks so much for that utterly unhelpful bit of information, I'll be sure to store that away."
"What, you don't like footie?"
"Never played."
"What about to watch?"
She shrugs. Daddy's more of a hurling man; he'll watch the Gaelic football too, but she doubts that's what Lupin means.
"You're in half my classes," he says, dropping into the seat next to her. "What's your first name?" Professors refer to everyone by their surnames, with only 'Mr' or 'Miss' to precede them.
"Lily. What's yours?"
"Remus." At her look, he sighs. "Yes, Remus Lupin. My mum's a nut for Latin mythology."
"That's the only possible explanation," she muses. "That, or you're secretly in a cult."
He snorts. "If anything I'd be the leader of the cult."
"Aim high," she says, nodding seriously. "Dream big. Follow your dreams."
Remus Lupin is, as it turns out, like a camouflaged animal; he possesses a remarkable ability to blend in, be it into a wall or a crowd, and escape attention, but once you've noticed him, you can't stop noticing him, as if you've been inducted into some inner world, blessed with some inner gift; he chooses to appear to the few, and then he exists constantly in your life like the smell of mint on your favourite sweater after a long day lying in the garden. Especially, Lily thinks, if you're an animal with similar camouflage to his: in this world of perfectly-tailoured uniforms and expensive shoes, schoolbags made of supple fine leather and wristwatches that cost as much as a car, in a place where students keep their showjumpers and dressage mounts stabled down by the river and talk casually of weekends on the yacht, Remus is like her. He's not the new kid now, having been at Hogwarts already for two years; his uniform fits, but is well worn-in from actually wearing it for more than a year, whereas most of their classmates get a new kit for every term. He wears patched-up high-tops, and carries a canvas backpack like hers, not a leather satchel. Perhaps most glaringly of all, he doesn't have the posh, boarding-school private-education in-the-nose crisp accent that everyone else seems to; his vowels are broad and flat, common, like hers -- though he's so flagrantly Welsh that they sound not at all alike, but she can hear the similarities all the same. And he's a scholarship student too, just like her; his mum is actually one of the cooks, a plump always-smiling woman named Hope with a crown of blonde hair that barely reaches her son's shoulder. They have a little cottage on the grounds, where Remus grew up in sight of the college towers; he brings Lily around for tea on Thursday afternoon during the break, and Hope brings out scones with raisins in them and fat knobs of butter, so happy that her "little Remus has made a friend" -- this said to the gangly fourteen-year-old who pulls an insulted fact and sits on the low stool with his knees almost up to his ears.
Hope, Remus explains between bites of scones, wasn't always the cook. She used to be one of the cleaning ladies, and she'd spend half her shifts devouring every book in the Hogwarts Library until the Headmaster caught her at it, laughed, and gave permission for her to check out as many books as she liked. Eleven years later, their cottage is floor-to-ceiling with books, she speaks three languages including Welsh, and Remus grew up with languages easy on his tongue and his nose in books until he was proficient enough to earn a full ride to the college.
Lily likes him all the more for that; knowing he's a latchkey kid like her, coming home to make himself beans on toast and do his homework at the kitchen table as she does. Knowing he grew up half in the real world and half between the pages of novels, as she did. Knowing that Mum would like Hope, which makes Lily like her all the more too. Most of all, she likes that she's suddenly not alone, not the only common muck in this strange new world. The burden is abruptly eased by having someone to sit with at lunch and in class, to bicker with over notes and share books with, to do her homework with on breaks -- he's brilliant at languages, already far past her in Latin, but they're about level in literature and history, and she can just about beat him out in maths. It doesn't make the workload easier, or the stacks of homework any smaller, or the other boys any less obnoxious -- but to have someone at her elbow is to have an anchor against the currents that constantly pull as if to drag her under.
You have been myfriend, she thinks, looking at his head bent over their Biology diagrams and listening with a grin to his cursing of the mitochondria. That in itself is a tremendous thing.