Something came to threaten my cynical happiness from that first night of my fourth year, and my knight in shining armour did not save me yet.
 

A high pitch scream, almost like a howl, tore into the open night of the Forbidden Forest and before we left for bed, it was once more stressed that, “Under no circumstances must you enter the forest. Do not enter the forest.” The hall was vacated at last.

Of course, he didn’t know what was on the horizon, around the corner for him then, or he might have had a distraction planning his revenge. But, for then, he settled for going to bed, where he tried counting sheep, reading books, everything, but the problem wasn’t that he was tired: he could see perfectly well that he was tired. It was that every time he closed his eyes, Romeo. Thought. Of. Juliet.

“Trying to seduce someone, eh?” a smooth voice butted in, which came from off-side, and my cousin James. “Who?”


“None of your business.”


“Malfoy.”

“Tom!”


“Malfoy?” James snorted, “Why would you want to be with that slime ball?”

First of all, I focused on that little dream, the spark of hope hidden beneath my bed, of my parents, family friends, of the puma, and finally (through no fault of my own), a little spark of energy shot through me as I remembered that moment down by the lake, when his arm gently brushed against mine. “No!” I shouted, and in the same moment as I forced the image of the puma back into my mind, I was down on all fours, my body morphing painfully into the wildcat I had been trying to perfect for a good couple of months by now.

We sat there in silence, in a soft, calm sort of misery together for a long time, staring into the fiery flames as they flickered in the darkness. I shuddered, for it was still cold, nearing winter now, and he pulled me into his arms. It was a strange sort of feeling, so wrong and yet so right all at the same time. It all happened before either of us knew what was happening.

I sneaked a peak: it was albino, nothing like any werewolf I had seen, perhaps two or three times the usual size, and stood on its hind legs. It stopped, and then leapt. I screamed, couldn’t take it any longer, giving away our position in exchange for Victoire’s own. “Great, now look what you’ve done,” Scorpious yanked my arm and started to run.

It wasn’t time for me to give in yet, I hadn’t been given my soul back, hadn’t earned it back, so for now- I’d just have a small nap. Snored embedded themselves into my thoughts, as I tried to assure myself that this was the way to go. I would handle everything when, at long last, I woke up, feeling more refreshed. As the dementor sucked the last of my life away from me, I was so full of hope, and I didn’t understand it for a second.
 

She coughed, sneezed, spluttered, curled up in bed with fever. If the girl didn’t arrive soon, if she didn’t pass the test, who would she have to blame but herself? If when she finally found the great Bernadette Charvet, they were both dead in their graves.
 

What happened next none of us expected. As the sun seeped in, and she passed on into the next life, her body crumbled to dust in a pile on the floor as the light hit it. My skin turned paler, smoother, and the wrinkles lifted. My youth was returning once more, to what had once been considered ugly by the vainest of Hufflepuffs, who had never ceased to tell me so.