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"Because," said John Mark steadily, "I do not think we make any progress until we go back to the point where we failed and seek to put it right."
Twice Freed, Patricia StJohn
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There was no mirror in Marietta Edgecombe's flat.
There wasn't much other furniture either: an old desk that served as table, work surface, writing desk; two mismatched kitchen chairs; three storage crates stacked on their sides for a make-shift bookshelf; a rickety old tallboy; and a lumpy mattress under the window. But there was still no mirror.
There had been quite enough mirrors in her life for the past year and a half.
Everywhere, there were mirrors. In bathrooms. In hallways. In shops. Even the muggle cars which lined the street outside her flat had mirrors sticking off them. Everywhere, anywhere: mirrors, mirrors, mirrors. Each dreaded reflective surface a horrible reminder of the huge, gilt edged mirror above a mantelpiece filled with china trinkets – in which horribly, suddenly, IT had struck.
IT. That was all Marietta ever thought of IT as. A jinx, a hex, a curse mark – none of those sounded like the unique and all-consuming blight on her life that had struck in that mirror in Umbridge's office. Looking back, which she did as rarely as possible, Marietta could only remember that evening vaguely; in fact, that whole span of time vaguely. All the Healers, from Madam Pomfrey to St. Mungo's, said it must have been the stress, "amnesia from shock."
Amnesia? It had been weeks before any memory of those classes with Potter had come back, mostly at Cho's patient prompting: "You do remember, Marietta! The Reductor curse, the one Parvati Patil reduced the table to dust with... Remember?"
Sort of. Enough to remember the Know-It-All at the front of the group; the one who was quite capable of putting some sort of memory charm into a parchment as well as five cursed letters.
S...N... E... A... K...
Marietta never put her hands to her face if she could help it. Sometimes it seemed as if she could never get rid of the feel of those spots beneath her clutching hands, trying desperately to hide them with her cloak. That moment in the mirror – that was not vague. Beyond that, she could only remember the massive feeling of pressure, the week-by-week reluctance to accompany Cho in what was forbidden, banned, risk-of-expulsion-without-any-NEWTs...
But that hadn't sent her to Umbridge's office in cold blood. Sneak. Such a simple judgement – all you could really expect from a Gryffindor. She'd kept coming, hadn't she? No matter how she worried. If you're a stupid noble Gryffindor, of course, you don't worry. But it hadn't been her worries that had sent her to Umbridge, either. She wasn't a Teacher's Pet – unlike someone else. It had been Mother, making a surprise Floo call through in her shift as Security Monitor for the Hogwarts floo connections. Mother, who had said: "Darling! You look so worried!"
Ravenclaws take advice. IT was the result.
The problem was – Ravenclaws are also wise. And in the very darkest hours of the night, somewhere miles down inside her, Marietta knew that Granger's curse was also just.
No matter why she'd done it, she'd done it. SNEAK.
Everybody hated her. She didn't blame them. She hated herself.
That was why she was here, in the flat with no mirror.
The first instinct was to hide: to hide her face behind her cloak and then, when that didn't work and Umbridge and the Headmaster and McGonagall and the Minister and a whole gaggle of Aurors had peered at her – Marietta could dimly recall Umbridge shaking her for some reason – she hid herself. Week after week in the Hospital Wing, while Madam Pomfrey tried everything to get IT off. Eventually, despite all Marietta's pleas, Madam Pomfrey had turned her out. And then she had met it. Hatred.
Umbridge was in power, Dumbledore was gone, and the closed-down DA to a member, Cho excepted, hated Marietta. And they must have been spreading it, too, for dislike as well as ridicule poured down on her from the rest of the school. Even from those who neither knew, cared nor suspected what had happened; even from those who did not even listen to the school gossip, there was no quarter. This was Ravenclaw, after all, the House of the Wise and the Clever. After about a month, even the most bookish seventh years had looked at her in contempt: "Haven't you figured out how to get that off yet?"
That wasn't the worst of IT. Contempt, dislike, hatred – sometimes she could put her balaclava'd head high and ignore them; sometimes she could put her head down and flee to some distant hidden corner to cry. All those corners Cho had cried in over Cedric's death came in handy.
The worst was the end of term: the uproar that exploded in the Edgecombe family on her return home. What had happened?! Why hadn't she told them?! What was it?! Who had done it?! Why hadn't Madam Pomfrey fixed it?! What did she think she looked like?!
There were no corners to cry in, at home. Nowhere to hide, nowhere to get away from the ceaseless onslaught. None of the jeers at Hogwarts had expected a response. Madam Pomfrey had accepted amnesia and "I don't know." Here, at home, people wanted 'Answers.'
"I don't know" was not considered acceptable.
Marietta stuck by her answer. Granger had been all too right – once. She was not going to be right again.
She was taken to St. Mungo's. Again. And again. And again. The Healers did the same double take, asked the same questions, tried the same remedies. They too moved slowly from the shocked to the sympathetic to the patronising to the irritatedly frustrated. (Marietta wasn't blind – she could see people cringe when she came down to breakfast everyday.) And, eventually, like Madam Pomfrey, the Healers said they couldn't get IT off.
Mother, who had had to take another day off work to take Marietta for her appointment, just when the Ministry needed all hands on deck to deal with You-Know-Who returning, got very cross that day. Marietta sat and cringed and finally cried while there was a major dust-up at the main St. Mungo's reception desk. Did the entire out-patients department have to know she was "left looking like a freak!"?
She couldn't stay like that, of course. So she was taken to various apothecaries. Marietta had always loved Mother's energy and determination, the way she had raised a family and run the home and still kept up an excellent career in the Floo Department. It was how Marietta had always wanted to be: to be clever and popular and capable all at once. But when suddenly all you want to do is hide and cry and die of shame and sorrow, such energy is wearing. When your feelings are raw and covered in hex spots, every briskness seems to be a personal attack, seems to trample in hobnailed boots over one's soul. Getting told off for being 'hyper-sensitive' and crying all day long didn't help either.
Apothecaries in Diagon Alley, the two apothecaries in Hogsmeade. They said if Madam Pomfrey couldn't fix IT, it couldn't be fixed. Mother got up and marched out with Marietta in disgust. The Indian apothecaries in Birmingham. The Chinese apothecaries in Liverpool. A funny little Apothecary called Wootton, whom Mother said afterwards she was sure must have been a Squib, down in Sussex. And, finally, back to Bobbins Apothecary chain in Diagon Alley. "She'll have to cover it up," said Mother briskly to the serving witch at the make-up counter.
Wear thick make-up. Keep your head in your books. It was a relief to get back to the place where doing that could render you safely invisible. Hogwarts and her NEWTs appeared as a nine and a half-month haven of peace.
Except, of course, she didn't get that either. Marietta curled up into a ball on her bed and wept when the decision to close Hogwarts after Dumbledore's death was announced the next morning – not completely stimulated by grief for her late Headmaster. Closing – early. No NEWTs. Sent home...
She wondered just how Granger had managed to put such a massive curse to make everything go wrong for the Sneak on just one piece of parchment.
She didn't stay for the funeral. Mother came to collect her. Marietta had spent as much of the next miserable fortnight as she could in her room, resisting all efforts to take her to St. Mungo's again – until the morning the Wizarding Examination Authority letter came.
The WEA had decided, in view of the closure of Hogwarts, to award NEWTs on the basis of coursework achieved during the year. Her grades weren't what Mother commented on:
"Well, I don't know what we're going to do with you to have a graduation picture taken that's fit to be seen."
A handful of E's, two A's and a T – that was the last straw. Marietta wished now, in the flat with no mirror, that she could have amnesia about the half-hour that followed. To really truly not remember her furious shrieks and Mother's bitter anger – the pent-up torrent of wild emotion, hurt and anger and betrayal, that had poured forth; until Marietta had said "I'm leaving! You treat me like I'm six years old! So I'm leaving! I'm leaving!"
And with desperate haste, before the sneaking sensation that she was being ridiculous and stubborn and hyper-sensitive could catch up, she had.
Typical run-away teenager – as far as her best friend's.
Cho was very kind and very sympathetic. Her parents, in the middle of trying to decide whether to stay in Britain or pack up and go back to their childhood town in China, were less so, but offered her a bed for a night or two.
Awake on the camp bed, listening to Cho's soft breathing so familiar from seven years sharing a dormitory, Marietta considered her options. She too could go home; apologise and admit to being hyper-sensitive; probably tell Mother who had hexed her; and go on with the same life as before. A sneak who hid behind Mummy.
Or she could not go home. She try and prove that she wasn't being silly and childish and over-wrought and disappointingly immature; try and make a go of things. Was that even possible with SNEAK across one's face?
At three o'clock in the morning, lying on her front so there was no risk of seeing herself in Cho's wardrobe mirror door one way or the dressing table triple mirror the other, Marietta decided she couldn't go home.
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