you meet him your first year. you are small and timid and this is your first time being out at school as a girl. your hair is shoulder length and every smile you give is tinged with fear. he walks up to you, swaggering and tall and so, so confident, and offers you his hand. in that moment, you are shook. in that moment, he looks like the nicest boy you've ever seen. his hand is rough and his name is riddle, tom riddle, and it fits him, a boy so puzzling he chose to befriend a redhead with no friends instead of literally anyone else.
he is thirteen. you are thirteen. you are both outsiders to this world, this odd cavern of high school that you both know you don't belong in. he is your first friend. he shows you ways of thinking that you had never thought of before. he tells you (and eventually shows you) of animation, of drawings so similar when played at full speed on a computer they look like they are moving. to someone else it would be old news, but you were home-schooled. your mother tried to protect you from the horrors of boys and girls, people who would not understand you and reduce you down to your bits. you did not have computers. you had brothers. and your brother ron had a friend, harry. you had harry's smile and dark skin and lighting scar his horrid family had given him. you had feelings in your chest that fluttered, but then you came to school. harry is a year above you and while he also came young, he does not seem to see you. tom sees you. tom shows you things, and skips class. with tom, every day is an adventure.
but tom is not your only friend. you befriend another girl, luna. luna is bright, with radish earrings and witchcraft magazines. luna is a pagan, and with her, you learn of a world you thought wasn't real. luna teaches you how to be a girl among other girls. she is not well liked by the other kids in her grade, who call her loony and steal her shoes in gym class. but hey, neither are you.
tom begins to get weird around november. he reads books on hitler and stalin, and he begins discussing world domination. he wants so-called gender deviants to go to camps. he does not know about you, you think, and so you argue with him. he still likes you, and likes debating you, but you can tell he is slipping away. he brings you to a room in the school's basement often, and you two waste time there together.
luna hates him. by january, she brings it up with you. she says he has a predatory way about him, like the female spiders that eat their husbands. she knows about your being trans, and tells you he is disrespectful. you try to defend him, bringing up his catholic upbringing in the orphanage. she tells you she's heard stories of him. that he does horrible things on school field trips. she tells you he creeps her out, and after that, you cannot look at him the same way. you spend more time with luna, but he tells you he misses you, and tries to get you down to the basement room. he tells you he no longer wants to kill all the sodomites, and that he just wants world domination. he tells you he loves you, and that you are his only friend. you try to bring up his school friends, draco and dolores, but he tells you they don't really care about him. by february, he's begun cutting himself. you feel an obligation towards him, your first friend, so more often that not, you climb down the stairs instead of going to history class.
you begin losing time. at first, you think nothing of it. your memory has always been shite. but when you go to the chamber, which is what you privately refer to the basement as, you feel uneasy. you begin forgetting whatever it is you do with tom there. you hate the fact that you can't remember. you want to know why you shudder when he looks at you too long. you want to know why you fear being touched, and flinch when he comes too close. you want to know why you have begun mistrusting your best friend. you are afraid, and you talk to luna about it. she tells you your memory will come back. she tells you not to worry, that she's read about this in psychology books. she tells you not to assume anything too bad.
you begin remembering in april. tom grabs your shoulder to get your attention, and you flinch. in your mind, he has grabbed your shoulder before, pinning you to the concrete walls of the chamber. you shake your head, confused. when would that have happened? tom's never been anything but good to you, but these menacing images of him come back anyway. tom's smile is now not comforting, but creepy. you remember him whispering, ginny. ginny, he whispers, and you listen for what he will say next. everything is an adventure with him. but this is not an adventure you want to have.
sometimes you have terrifying nightmares of being called a boy, of someone-tom, your mind supplies, but you will not believe it- touching your crotch, rubbing himself against you, putting his /thing/ in your butt. you wake up with a sick, squeezing feeling in your chest. you wake up, but these do not feel like dreams.
soon it becomes too much. you tell percy, your older brother, everything. he doesn't believe you. "tom?" he laughs, still writing on his english homework, "tom's just a kid. he would never do something like that. it's just a dream." and so you go on, avoiding tom and dealing with memories you cannot fathom and nightmares you wake up shaking from. you tell yourself percy is right. you are making it up. this did not happen to you. or if it did, you must have deserved it. you're a trans girl. you should be glad anyone is touching you at all. kids your age all want boyfriends. why did you not want this? why do you feel like you are falling apart?
harry finds you one day, crying on the stairs. he looks at you, and asks what's wrong. you begin to shake your head, say "nothing," and leave, but something in his eyes makes you pause. he has suffered too, you think. so you tell him about it, about phantom touches and bruises you had written off as soccer accidents all making sense and what percy said and you deserved it you deserved you deserved it. by the end you are crying, and you ask him, brain desperate for an answer. "am i a freak?"
"no," he cries, emphatic. "no, you're not a freak. you trusted this boy and he touched you in places you didn't want to be touched. he violated you, and that's wrong, but it doesn't mean you're wrong. you did not deserve it and you're not a freak." harry sighs, wiping his hair off his forehead. "ginny, do you want to know a secret?" you nod, afraid to ruin this moment of believing his words. "i, i, my cousin, dudley, he used to sneak into my cupboard at night. he would touch me and i tried telling my aunt and uncle. they told me i was a perverted freak who needed to stop making up stories. they beat me for that, because they didn't want to believe their perfect little dudley had the capacity to hurt someone. people don't like acknowledging children can do damage, ginny. but they can. it's not that he's just a kid. he's a dangerous kid who hurt someone else, and not fighting back and remaining friends because you couldn't remember were both perfectly valid things to do. you are allowed to be hurt and scared and angry. he broke the law, he took your body away from you, and he cultivated an image of being good so nobody would believe you. you are not a bad friend, and you are a victim. we're allowed to hate the people who hurt us, even if other people don't want us to." harry is terrified, his heart pounding by the end. he never told anyone what his cousin had done. but ginny had gone through the same type of damage and he'd be damned if he would let ginny go through the hell he had.
you feel something you haven't felt in a long time when he says these things. you feel like you have a friend, and the relief of knowing someone else has gone through the same thing, that you aren't alone, well, you can't help but break into a giant grin about that.