Hunger

“I am hungry / I have been hungry / I was born hungry / What do I need?” - Mitski, “Abbey”

A week later, Harry is—for the first time since her father married Narcissa—alone in the house at night. Her dad and Narcissa are having a date night at some new restaurant that opened in the famous shopping district Diagon Alley, and Draco is who-knows-where. 

It’s nice, Harry decides. Before her dad had remarried, every time she was alone in the house, she was haunted by her mother’s ghost—by who should’ve been with her. Now, she just enjoys the relaxing quietness that comes with an empty house.

Plus she’s nursing a killer headache, which makes the timing convenient. She had taken some ibuprofen an hour ago to try and get rid of it, but it hadn’t helped. Everything feels like too much; it’s overstimulating. The sounds are too loud, the light is too bright, and even the smells are too strong. 

Narcissa’s perfume specifically seems to linger in every crevice of the house, assaulting Harry’s nose. Maybe she could buy her a new, less strong smelling one for her birthday or something. She’d probably like that honestly, especially if it’s a fancy one. Though she might have to ask her dad to tip in if she buys one of those.

Harry pulls her sweater—technically her mum’s—over her nose to try and block out the smell of Narcissa’s perfume. It kind of works, but it leaves her smelling her laundry detergent instead, plus some strange other smell Harry almost thinks is her mum’s despite the fact that it’s been years since she could’ve last worn this sweater. The scent relaxes her, and her headache eases just slightly.

She’s lounging on the couch with a blanket on her lap when the doorbell rings. The sound goes right through her ears to bang on her temples, reigniting her headache. She rubs her forehead as she slowly gets up to open the door, groaning to herself the whole time. 

She’s got her blanket thrown over her shoulders and her unstyled hair is tangled plus she’s wearing joggers. She must look like a mess, but whoever is at the door will just have to deal with it. That’s what they get for knocking at her door at—she checks the clock—10:30 at night.

The wooden floor creaks under her as she throws the door open to see her neighbor, Tom. “Hi,” she says. It sounds about as welcoming as she feels, which is—of course—not at all. Her neighbor graciously ignores it.

“Hello, Harry,” Tom says, shooting her a beautiful smile. His teeth are a pristine white and perfectly straight, making him seem movie-star perfect. It’s almost enough to distract her from the fact that Tom knows her name. Her dad must’ve mentioned it. Or maybe Draco did. God knows she talks to him enough. “I was hoping you could do me a favor, and lend me a pack of beer. I’ve got a date tonight.”

Harry shuffles awkwardly on her feet. She’s never talked one-on-one with her neighbor before and wasn’t prepared for how disarming his gaze was. His undivided attention was strange, making her feel special, but not in a “you’re a pretty girl way”. Instead, she kind of felt like a specimen pinned to a wall and studied. 

“Yeah,” she responds belatedly, “no problem.” 

Tom just looks amused, like he’s used to this response from people. Harry bitterly thinks that he probably is. You could get anything with a pretty face like that. That smile probably flustered women all the time.

He reminds her a lot of Draco in that way. Both beautiful and used to people stumbling around them. Harry was too plain and awkward for that—granted she didn’t really try. Where Draco was careful to wear the latest fashion and do her makeup religiously, Harry was macabrely attached to her dead mother’s clothes—all of which were painfully from the 70s and 80s—and rarely wore anything else or took the time to do her makeup or style her curly hair. 

She turns around to grab a pack from the kitchen, leaving Tom standing just outside the doorway, despite the fact that she left the door open for him to follow, if he wanted. She thinks that’s actually kind of considerate of him. That he realized his teenage neighbor probably didn’t want to be alone in her house with a grown man she doesn’t know. 

“Here,” she says, walking back to the doorway and holding the pack of beer out. Tom reaches out halfway, but stops before he can completely grab it. Harry’s eyebrows furrow at the strange move, her headache getting worse the longer she stands at the doorway. She extends her arm a little further towards Tom, and he finally grabs the pack of beer from her. 

He shoots her another movie star smile and a “thanks darling,” and he’s off. Against her better judgement, she leans against the door frame and watches him go. He is attractive, she admits to herself in the quiet of her mind. 

Once he’s back on his own lawn, he turns around, and they make eye contact. His smile widens, and he winks at her. Embarrassed at being caught watching, she slams the door shut, her face flushing red. 

Okay, maybe she understands Draco’s obsession with their neighbor a bit better, now.

Harry gets up bright and early for her shift at Honeydukes the next day. No one else in the house is up yet, and she’s not expecting them to be—they all had a late night last night. Her dad and Narcissa apparently went to a pub after the restaurant, meaning they didn’t get back until the early hours of the morning, and Draco had apparently guessed that would be the case and had taken advantage of it to flaunt her midnight curfew. 

Must be strange when you actually have a social life, she thinks to herself. She wishes she could visit Hermione in London or Ron at the Burrow. Or that she could make friends in Hogsmeade as easily as Draco does. 

Her headache from last night is gone, but her senses still seem abnormally sharp. Especially her sense of smell. She wishes to herself that she was closer with Narcissa, if only so she could recommend she wears less perfume. Hell, even her dad’s aftershave is a bit too strong for her tastes. She can say something to him without causing offense, at least. 

She’s painfully hungry though, and she ends up eating three bowls of cereal before she forces herself to stop, still not fully satisfied but unwilling to eat more before lunch. She kind of wants beef, but they don’t have any in the house. Narcissa and Draco don’t eat red meat, which means her dad has stopped eating red meat. Which means he’s stopped buying it. Harry slaps her tongue against the roof of her mouth and swears she’s almost drooling over the thought of a steak. 

She shakes it off and throws her mom’s old Queen hoodie on before rushing out the door to her motorbike. Just before she gets on it, she spots Tom standing in the shadows of his front window. She has half a mind to ask him how his date went last night, but she thinks that would be weird. Especially since he isn’t even outside. Besides, he works night shifts, so he’ll probably be heading to bed soon. 

She gets on her motorbike and gets ready to leave, but the motorbike doesn’t start. “You’re fucking kidding me.” She mutters disbelievingly under her breath. Sure, the bike is old—dating back to her godfather’s teen years, which was ages ago now—but it’s always been reliable. 

She turns over her options mentally. She doesn’t really want to wake her dad up to ask for a ride to work, and she had sold her childhood bike when Sirius gave her this one. She sees Snape leave his front door and she remembers he has a bike, though he doesn’t use it much, if ever. Grumbling under her breath at the idea of actually talking to him and asking him a favor, she jogs over to him.

Her relationship with her chemistry professor is… odd, to say the least. He used to be close friends with her mum before they had a bad falling out in secondary school. Once Harry was born, they tentatively rekindled their friendship, but Snape still hated Harry’s dad and was ambivalent towards Harry at best. Still, despite his distaste for Harry personally, he was willing to help out occasionally, in the memory of her mother. 

“Hi Professor,” she said. She rarely ever calls him professor, even when they’re in class, but she wants to start out on a good foot for her request. 

Snape turns around from where he’s locking his front door to stare down at her. When Harry was younger she used to shrink under his gaze, but she’s over that now. Even if she’s going to be short forever. “Oh,” he says. “It’s you.” 

“Yeah, it’s me,” she agrees, bulldozing over how obviously he wants her to leave. “My motorbike isn’t starting, so I was wondering if I could borrow your bike to get to work today.”

He purses his lips, not looking at her, but Harry knows this look from her childhood, when her mum was still alive and Snape at least pretended to like her. He’s going to give in. “Let me unlock the garage,” he says, and Harry stops her satisfied smile from showing on her face. The less positive emotions she shows around Snape, the better. He hates happiness.

Snape’s slow about unlocking the garage, and Harry is starting to get worried she might be late for her shift, but she doesn’t want to push her luck by rushing him. So, she waits as patiently as she can. 

“Have you met our new neighbor?” Snape asks unexpectedly. 

Harry blinks, baffled at the fact that Snape is talking to her more than he absolutely has to. “Kind of, he came by last night to ask for beer. That’s the first actual conversation I had with him, though, and I wouldn’t say it was a real conversation. But dad and Narcissa met him, and Draco has talked to him loads.”

Snape hums in acknowledgment. “He’s strange.” Snape says, and Harry has to bite her cheek in order to stop herself from pointing out the hypocrisy of that statement. Ron had taken to calling Snape a vampire, which says enough about how normal he is, Harry thinks. “Don’t talk to him more than you have to.”

Harry doesn’t know how to respond to that. Snape isn’t the kind of person to give out warnings about people lightly, but she has no idea what Tom Riddle could’ve possibly done to warrant Snape telling her this. She almost asks why, but something about the look on Snape’s face stops her. It says he doesn’t want to say anymore on the matter. 

He’s done talking, and Harry isn’t going to drag the conversation out.

Snape finally opens the garage, and Harry grabs the bike, says a quick “thanks”, and is off to work, cycling as fast as she can. She swears she hears Snape mutter something about “ungrateful teenagers” under his breath, but she’s far enough away that she couldn’t hear it even if he did say it. She must’ve imagined it.

Despite worrying she’d be late, she actually gets to Honeydukes early. She must’ve been cycling very fast, she thinks. All those football practices and drills must be paying off.

Harry gets off in the early afternoon to find that it’s just Narcissa at home. She works, technically, but as a part-time event planner, so her schedule is strange. Harry never quite knows when she’s going to be home and when she isn’t. 

And as guilty as she feels saying it, she really doesn’t feel comfortable being alone with Narcissa. 

She just doesn’t know her at all, and trying to get to know her feels like a betrayal of her mum’s memory. She knows that’s ridiculous and not fair to either her dad or Narcissa, but it doesn’t change how she feels. So, she mostly avoids being home alone with her, and when she can’t avoid it, she hides in her room like a recluse.

She follows that pattern today and stays in her room until it’s finally late enough that her dad is home. She goes downstairs just in time to sit through yet another awkward family dinner, where her dad tells Draco and her about his and Narcissa’s date night—blessedly leaving out some stuff—before Harry finally escapes to go on her evening jog.

She didn’t go on a jog or do any time of exercise while she was on her period—her cramps were too bad—and she’s surprised by how much she missed it. It feels relieving to stretch her legs after so long cooped up in the house. She ends up jogging for much longer than she normally does. Normally, running is a necessary evil to stay in shape for her school’s football season, but that’s not how she feels today. 

The air is warm and it’s slightly windy, but jogging makes it feel perfect. She thinks to herself that this must be how dogs with their head out the car window feel. It’s freeing. 

She doesn’t want to stop, but when the sun is completely set and she’s still a kilometer out from home, she forces herself to go back. 

Tom is outside when she jogs past. According to her dad, he’s renovating his house, and by the looks of it, he’s doing it himself. He keeps bringing wheelbarrows worth of dirt outside his house to be hauled away. Harry has no idea what he’s doing, but it seems like a lot of work. 

He waves when she passes, and she waves back.

When she finally passes his house and is in front of her own, she sees Draco outside with a boy Harry’s never seen before. She’s leaning against his car, and the boy is obviously flirting, but Harry can tell Draco isn’t fully paying attention. She keeps looking back to where Tom is, wearing a tank top and probably sweating from all the manual labor. 

Harry’s never actually asked where Draco goes when she’s out of the house in the summer, but it seems like she’s always gone and when she comes back home, she’s always got a new boy hanging around her. 

Harry thinks it’s really annoying, especially when Draco obviously doesn’t even care about them. Harry’s never even been on a date with anyone before. She’s only ever had the one crush on Cedric Diggory, and he ended up asking out Cho Chang—which Harry doesn’t blame him for, Cho Chang is very beautiful. 

But the way everyone looks at Draco is frustrating, and now she has to live with her and deal with it constantly. It’s definitely a blow to Harry’s ego. 

Draco and the boy don’t even look at Harry as she walks past, and Harry can’t help but overhear their conversation. 

“There’s a new horror movie coming out this weekend, and I was wondering if you wanted to go with me. You know, just me and you—no Pansy or Blaise or anyone.” The boy says. 

“What’s it about?” Draco asks, like the movie is the determining factor of if she’ll accept his offer. 

Harry looks back and sees she’s got her flirty smile on her face. She can’t help but compare it to Tom’s smile from last night. They look eerily similar. 

Faced with Draco’s charms, the boy stutters his response, “It’s, uh, about vampires and werewolves. It follows a hunter as he tries to save a town that’s, like, become a battleground between the two species.”

Draco hums and twirls her hair around her finger. It’s so stupid and over the top, Harry can’t believe it works. 

“Well, I don’t really like vampires and werewolves and all that stuff, but I guess I can make an exception for you.”

The boy smiles like Draco just made his whole day and Harry forgoes the front door in favor of the entrance to the backyard, where she keeps her footballs. 

When she’s angry she likes to kick them against the house, and something about the whole interaction she just witnessed rubs her the wrong way. 

She slams against the gate and stomps towards the nearest football. She kicks it against the house. It lands with an audible bang, and she kicks it again and again. The rhythm of it is relaxing.

She’s jealous, Harry realizes as she kicks the ball. She’s never had a boy show half as much interest in her as that boy—she doesn’t even know his name—showed in Draco, and there’s no way Draco’s even halfway serious about him. Narcissa would’ve been talking all about it if she was. 

Her anger about it is irrational and far stronger than it should be. She feels almost berserk, clenching her fists. For a moment, she almost thinks her anger will never leave. 

She kicks the ball one last time, and when it hits the wall, it deflates. It lands on the ground like a sad balloon, whizzing air out and sounding like a dying cat while it does. Harry stares at it dispassionately, her anger leaving her as the ball flattens.

She huffs and looks down at her hands. Where they were clenched into fists, she has perfect half-moon circles of blood, though when she feels her palm for the cut, there’s nothing there. Her skin is unblemished. 

“Weird,” she murmurs to herself.

She looks up and gets ready to go back into the house. Her eyes catch on something in the fence. Right there, in the middle of the gate, is a broken plank of wood. When did that happen? She hadn’t noticed it when she opened it earlier. 

Was she that distracted?