When Ginny first boards the Hogwarts Express at 11 years old, in secondhand robes and mind full of hope, she opens the first compartment she sees and finds another girl already sitting there. Ginny's brothers have already found their own friends, leaving her, the annoying baby sister all alone.
Ginny is usually never nervous, or at least tries to act that way. She is a Weasley and she shares genes and parents with Fred and George. But she thinks of what Bill has told her about the Hogwarts Express-how everyone always becomes the closest friends with whoever they sat with on the train to Hogwarts-and this dries her throat.
Ginny has never had a friend before, who voluntarily chose to become close to her. She has been surrounded her whole life by her Weasley brood of brothers and she has been neighbours with Loony Luna, but she would never think of them as friends. Tom, perhaps, was the closest thing she had, but he was living inside the diary that her mum had bought for her. He couldn't sit next to her on the train, or to be sorted into the same house, or work together during class, like she desperately wants.
The other girl-a brunette, with an unmarked tie so she must be a first year like her-is staring at her, having noticed the open door and the scruffy girl by now.
"Um, hi." Ginny manages to squeak out, her palm sweating with nervousness. She wants to make a good first-impression, wants to find the thing called friendship like all her other brothers have, but in front of the other girl, she feels very self-conscious.
The other girl doesn't say anything, only raising her eyebrow lazily as if she is unimpressed. She scans her from head to toe with her very blue eyes, and Ginny is painfully aware of the worn robes that her mother took in and mended and used to belong to Fred or George.
"My name is Ginny," she blurts out to avoid the awkward silence. "I'm in first year. Do you mind if I sit here with you?"
The girl is silent for a moment, casting unimpressed looks on her ratty trunk, but rolling her eyes, she replies, "If you must."
Ginny grins and bounds in the compartment with her trunk, the door sliding close behind her. She heaves the trunk up on the luggage rack by herself, although it takes her a few tries to brace herself and to maneuver it up. When she turns around and throws herself on her seat, the other girl has resumed her previous activity of staring out the window, her posture the meaning of dignified.
Ginny looks out the window but doesn't see her parents in the crowded platform. She glimpses a brief flash of red hair and thinks that could be it, but it is heading away from the platform back to the archway that leads to the muggle side of the station. She sneaks glances at the other girl, and decides to make conversation.
"My name's Ginny." She says. "Ginny Weasley."
"I know." The other girl says. "You told me."
Ginny is beginning to be annoyed. Can't this girl take a hint? Or is she being purposely rude?
"What's your name?" She decides to just ask straight out.
"Astoria Greengrass." The other girl-Astoria-says, her chin jutting out slightly.
"Are you excited to go to Hogwarts? What house do you think you'll be in? I want to be a Gryffindor like the rest of my family." Ginny says, smiling. Her brothers call her a motormouth sometimes, saying that she talks too much, but Astoria doesn't seem like the type that talks very much. Still, Ginny is good at speaking, and she will try to get to know Astoria. Perhaps they could be friends by the end of the journey then.
Astoria is looking at Ginny with a clinical eye, like she is just studying something not particularly interesting. "Don't you have something else you could be doing? Like reading or something instead of making stupid conversations?"
Ouch.
Ginny opens her mouth to retort scathingly-the good thing about growing up with six brothers was that there was no shortage of colourful words she could use-but then the door opens again and another girl, older than her by the looks of it and Slytherin, judging from the tie, is standing on the other side of it.
"Astoria." The girl says. She is blonde with blue eyes and tall, but she looks very much like the girl sitting across from Ginny. "What are you doing here all alone? Come on, you can join us in our compartment-I've even told Malfoy to behave himself."
Astoria stands up and follows her sister out without any glance back to Ginny, and the compartment door closes silently behind them. Ginny, with her wounded pride as her first attempt at friendship got rejected harshly, just quietly pulls her diary out with a scowl and begins to talk to the one person who has been there for her.
It doesn't matter anymore that Tom isn't real, that he isn't sitting beside Ginny right now. The only thing Ginny wants right now is the companionship of a friend, someone she could talk to and share her hopes and fears with and who isn't one of her brothers who'd just make fun of her. Just because Tom doesn't have a body doesn't mean he's any less real, and right now, the quietness of the compartment and Tom's unquestioning sympathy is beginning to heal the wound she received from the earlier rejection and making her feel better.
Ginny is beginning to think that the rumour of the Hogwarts Express that Bill told her won't ever come true for her.
Then the door opens again and a different blonde this time-Loony Luna with her ridiculous spectroscopes saunters in and throws herself down-in a much more delicate way than Ginny did-without so much as a hello. An eager looking boy with mousy brown hair and a camera in his hands trots in after her and begins talking a mile a minute, and Ginny is denied even this simple comfort of talking to Tom in privacy now.
Ginny looks around the compartment, a crazy blonde in front of her, reading a magazine upside down and a boy bounding around like he'd had too much sugar, taking a photo of everything, even attempting to open her diary until she'd threatened him, and agrees with her previous opinion that the Hogwarts Express theory is absolute bull.
Later, at the sorting ceremony, Ginny watches "Greengrass, Astoria" be sorted off to Slytherin amidst a round of polite applause, and thinks that there is no way the two of them would ever have been friends. When she is sorted to Gryffindor, the hat barely taking a moment to decide because she is a Weasley, and it takes a special kind of courage to grow up as an only girl in a house with Fred and George, the mousy haired boy with a camera, a "Creevy, Colin", is waving at her enthusiastically with an empty seat next to him. Fred and George accidentally drop a water balloon full of red and gold slime on their heads while she's eating pudding, Percy is lecturing them in an annoyed sort of voice and Ron and her crush; the famous Harry Potter, is nowhere to be seen.
She doesn't know why she glances over at Astoria in that exact moment, but she makes eye contact with her, who is surrounded by Slytherins-her sister on one side, Draco Malfoy talking to a pug-faced girl on the other, and still she can't shake that feeling of anger at the brunette from her mind, who had been the first person Ginny had wanted to be friends with.
Ginny looks away.
