Hunger

"At seventeen I started to starve myself / I thought that love was a kind of emptiness / And at least I understood then the hunger I felt / And I didn't have to call it loneliness / We all have a hunger." 

Florence & The Machine, "Hunger"

Susan crawls along the floor of her parents’ bedroom, feeling her elbows get carpet burn from the harsh fibers of the rug, but she doesn’t care about that right now. Not when she can see her father dead on the bed, with his hand extended over the edge, red drops falling and staining the white rug her mother had loved so much.

If she’s not careful, she’s going to follow him. 

She’s got a kitchen knife in her right hand, and she’s gripping it tight enough that her knuckles are white. She manages to pull herself completely under the bed—an easy hiding spot to locate if the intruder knows there’s another person in the house, but she’s counting on him not knowing that. There was nothing to indicate she was home. Teenage girls are always out late.

Outside the bedroom door she can hear the sounds of a body being dragged across the floor. Her mother, Susan knows, though she tries not to think about that.

She fingers the knife and barely dares to breathe when the bedroom door creaks open again. She can’t see the man, only his expensive oxford dress shoes—a light brown, with dark splashes on them Susan knows must be blood—and his matching trousers. 

He sits down on the bed, and it creaks above her. The metal wiring deeps low, just skimming the top of her back. She was too big to be hiding under the bed anymore. 

She hears the sound of movement above her, and she can’t even begin to guess what the man is doing, but she sees her father’s hand being pulled up and back onto the bed. The drip, drip, drip of his blood onto the floor stops. She stares at the red stain it left.

She pulls her left hand forward to cover her mouth so no sound escapes, afraid she'll give away her position. Her face is wet, she realizes. She’s crying—she might have been crying this whole time, and she hadn’t even noticed it.

The man on the bed gets up and begins to walk towards the door, and Susan’s heart flutters at the thought that she might actually get out of this alive. Her parents would want that for her, she knows.

She slowly pulls her hand away from her mouth, and in the blink of an eye, a pale hand with long, nimble fingers and protruding claws reaches under the bed and pulls her out, like the monster from the horror movies she used to watch with her friends. 

As she eyes the beautiful, twisted, and bloody face of the intruder, her last thoughts are on the old folk tale her grandmother used to tell her about a monster named Voldemort who drank the blood of the youth for immortality. 

In the end, grandmothers always do seem to know everything, don’t they?

Draco was, in a word, a bitch. She had a bad habit of not thinking about or caring about anyone else. Harry had known this for years, observing it firsthand—well before their parents got married and they had to move in together. 

That’s why Harry is surprised to hear her knocking on her bathroom door. 

“You’ve been in there for ages,” Draco says, “what’s wrong?” 

“Just a, uh, nosebleed,” Harry calls through the door, staring down at the blood on her hands. 

There’s no reply for a long moment, and then Draco opens the door, which Harry had, stupidly, forgot to lock. 

“Fuck, what’s wrong with you?” She yells, backing up to stand in the small space between the bath and the toilet. “Don’t you know not to come in when it’s occupied?”

Draco doesn’t respond, staring first at Harry’s bloody hand, then her bloodless face, and finally, her eyes turn towards her thighs, where her pants are stained red. She looks up at Harry, face both questioning and judgemental at once. 

“It’s my first time,” Harry mutters. At sixteen, she’s a late bloomer, and she had never really been taught what to expect. Her fancy public school had left sex education up to the parents, and Harry’s mum died well before she could’ve ever given her the talk. And lord knows her dad would never do it, nor would her new step-mum. 

Draco’s eyes soften in an uncharacteristic display of pity. Their relationship had shifted from overtly antagonistic to grudgingly tolerating each other after Harry’s dad married Narcissa. Harry wasn’t sure how much of it was due to their parents' marriage and how much of it was the lingering shock of Draco’s dad going to Azkaban for fraud. Either way, Draco had changed, and here she was now. Acting concerned for her new step-sister and former school nemesis. 

Harry kind of hated it. She had never liked change.

“Alright,” Draco starts, “wait here.” 

Harry stands awkwardly while she waits for Draco to come back. She feels something drip down her leg and shivers at the unfamiliar sensation. She feels disgusting. If this was womanhood, she wasn’t sure she wanted it. 

Soon enough, Draco comes back with clean pants and a box of tampons from her own bathroom. “Here.” She passes them off, leaving in a hurry without saying anything else.

Harry makes sure to lock the door after her. With her luck it’d be Narcissa who would come in next. 

She hopes in the shower to quickly rinse off, the feeling of dried blood on her legs making her wince. It’s as she’s crawling out of the shower and pulling a tampon out of the box that she reaches her next hurdle. 

“Draco?” She calls through the door, half-hoping Draco’s left so she doesn’t have to have this conversation. 

“Yeah?” Draco calls back, from somewhere further down the hall.

“Do you have any pads?”

Harry can just hear Draco’s sigh through the door. “No, I don’t wear pads.” 

Harry fiddles with the tampon in front of her, studying the plastic applicator. “I don’t think I can use these tampons.”

A beat passes. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I don’t know how to,” Harry stops, the awkwardness hanging heavy in the air. “How to, you know, insert it.”

She hears shuffling from outside the door. “You use the applicator.”

“I don’t know how to use the applicator.”

There’s a light thud against the door, like Draco leaned against it. Harry can hear the exasperation in her voice. “You better tell me I am the best step-sister ever after this. But I’ll go and get you pads.”

“Thank you!” Harry calls. 

“Yeah, yeah.” Harry can just hear Draco shuffling down the hall and the sound of the front door opening and closing.

She doesn’t want to sit down, scared she’ll just end up getting more blood everywhere. So she pulls on her oversized jumper, and walks over to the window in the bathroom, pulling the curtain to the side to watch Draco leave. 

Her platinum blonde hair, much straighter and tamer than Harry’s, floats behind her as she comes to a stop right in front of their neighbor’s house. 

Harry huffs when she sees their new neighbor, an admittedly handsome middle-aged man named Tom Riddle, is out in his yard. The sun has already set, leaving only the faintest glow behind. It’s just enough to see Draco twirl her hair as she stops to chat with Tom. 

Harry can just imagine her blush. 

She tries not to be too harsh on Draco. She’s doing her a favor after all, and everyone in their small town of Hogsmeade thinks Tom Riddle is attractive. Plus, Draco is only seventeen. It makes sense she wants to flirt with him. Harry just thinks it’s also stupid of her. Nothing could ever happen between them. Nothing should ever happen between them.

Tom must think similarly, because he shoos Draco off after just a minute. Harry watches as Draco takes off in a light jog to get to the nearby corner store before it closes for the night.

She smiles to herself. She hadn’t had many friends back when she lived in Godric’s Hollow, ever since her mother died. Everyone thought she was too morbid—too quick to anger. 

Her father had said moving to Hogsmeade would be good for them, and that Draco and Narcissa would be good for her. He said she needed a maternal figure. 

Harry still wasn’t sure how much she had actually factored into that decision, since he had decided to marry the mother of the girl she hated, but she couldn’t lie and say Narcissa wasn’t good for her dad, in their own strange way. 

Draco and Harry were the ones left to fit their jagged edges together in a semblance of step-sibling comradery. Like they hadn’t spent the last couple of years taunting each other with increasingly vitriolic insults. 

She’s still looking out the window, studying her neighbor, when he suddenly looks up and they lock eyes. She closes the curtain as fast as she can, but it’s no use. He saw her staring. Harry can feel the blood rush to her face in embarrassment. 

As if this day couldn’t get any worse, now the neighbor probably thinks she has a crush on him too.

“Someone broke into the Bones’s house last night,” Harry’s dad says the next morning during breakfast. His face is buried in the morning newspaper— The Daily Prophet. “They didn’t steal anything, but they killed them—Giffard, Annalise, and Susan. The whole family.” 

Harry hears the clink of Narcissa dropping her spoonful of porridge back into the bowl. “How terrible.” She says. “I’ll need to send my condolences to Amelia.” Even in her shock, she is still the epitome of grace and beauty. Harry kind of hates it. She hates how her dad decided to move on from her mum with this woman who is the opposite of everything Lily Potter was. 

The fact that she’s thinking about this instead of the Bones's death only makes her feel even worse about her hatred of her new step-family.

“Susan’s dead?” Draco says at the same time as her mother. “She’s in our grade.”

“She was,” Harry whispers under her breath. Ever since her mother died when she was nine, she’s been too casual about death. Everyone has made a point of telling her that isn’t normal. 

Her dad coughs, “Well, it’s a good reminder to be thankful for everyday we have isn’t it. Gosh, sixteen. Terribly young.”

Her father’s words make Harry’s heart jump in her throat. She wasn’t particularly close with Susan or anything but she had friends who were close to her. Hell, Neville had a crush on her. She makes a mental note to send him an email later to check in on him. He wouldn’t be back in town until August 25th, the week before school starts, when she’s hosting all of her friends, but Harry wants him to know she’s thinking of him anyway.

She’s been trying a lot harder to be a good friend recently, though she isn’t sure how well she’s doing.

The conversation changes to lighter topics after that, but Harry can’t move on from picturing Susan as she had been at the end of their last year—still carrying baby fat in her cheeks. It’s hard to think that she's dead. 

In her memories of Susan, she looks strangely like Harry’s mum.

“Did you hear about Hannah Abbott?” Hermione asks her the next day. Harry can’t tell if it’s her poor reception that’s making Hermione’s voice come in staticky over her flip-phone or if Hermione is about to cry. 

Harry feels bad for hoping it’s the first one. She’s bad at comforting people. “Yeah, my dad saw it in the paper yesterday.” 

She leans against her motorbike, phone between her shoulder and her ear, eating an animal shaped bar of fancy chocolate her boss at Honeydukes gave her for free when she saw Harry grabbing a pad from her bag. 

“Is your godfather involved in the investigation?” Hermione asks. 

“I dunno know. I haven’t talked to him since early June. He’s still kind of on the outs with my dad.”

Harry hears Hermione exhale on the other end of the line. Ever since Harry’s dad started dating Narcissa, tensions between Sirius and her dad were high, since Narcissa and Sirius were technically cousins. And Sirius had a thing about his biological family. Harry didn’t know any details, but she could guess.

Honestly, at this point, Harry was over the drama, but Hermione—as her closest friend—had taken it upon herself to be offended on Harry’s behalf. 

“I could ask Remus though, if you’re really curious.” Harry says, munching on her chocolate. 

“No, I don’t want you to get even more involved in the drama just to satisfy my curiosity. What’s that sound? Are you eating something?”

“Yeah,” Harry says, “My boss gave me a free chocolate bar. It’s the nice stuff too—those chocolate frogs Ron’s obsessed with.”

“Wait, your boss gave you a free chocolate bar? I thought you said she was super stingy. You told me you don’t even have an employee discount.”

“And I don’t. But I started my period for the first time, and she found out and took pity on me. It turns out she has a heart after all.” Harry rolls her eyes, stopping once she spots movement in the house across from her. Snape—her chemistry professor at Hogwarts—was up and about. She narrows her eyes. 

“You got your first period?” Hermione exclaims, way too loudly. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

Harry groans, straightening up. “Because it’s not a big deal. And honestly, it’s kind of embarrassing how much later I’m getting it than everyone else.”

“Well, I think you’re lucky, Harry. You know they call it ‘The Curse’. You just got out of a couple extra years of it.”

“There is literally no way it’s that bad.” Harry says. Snape opens his front door to grab the mail, and she pointedly moves her gaze away so she won’t be forced to exchange pleasantries with him. There are few people she hates more than her teacher, and the feeling is mutual.

Her eyes turn towards the ground, where in between her black converse lays a small pool of blood. “Fuck,” Harry murmurs.

“What did you say?” Hermione asks, but Harry isn’t paying any attention to her. She had just changed her pad two hours ago. How can she have already bled through it? Is that normal?

“Hey, Hermione, I need to let you go, okay?” She doesn’t hear what Hermione says in response before she closes her flip phone and rushes into the house—practically going into a dead sprint to get to the bathroom. 

'The Curse' indeed, she thinks spitefully.