When the Free Summer Comes
Lavender Brown is unashamed of the scars that rip down her back from the column of her neck to the flare of her hip.
She knows she would have been, once. There is a girl, a tiny remnant living in a tiny pit in her chest, who still is. That girl wants to throw on the thickest jumpers in the dullest colours, pull up polo necks in July, tug her sleeves down to her wrists and arrange her hair to cover the tiny whispering scars that start just under her jaw, threading out like ugly vines, thickening down into the red ropes of tissue that flow down her back. She wants to crawl away and disappear, because all she had was 'pretty' and that's been ripped away.
But that girl is so quiet and weak; gone, changed, buried by Greyback, or maybe even before, by the Carrows, or maybe it was just the way she struck her head on the stone floor of the entrance hall when the balustrade had crumbled behind her and she fell so, so far. But there is little schoolgirl left in Lavender Brown, and when the free summer comes and the DA reassembles in its incompleteness (the empty spaces, the quiet where there should be voices are like scars, too, ugly rents of malformed healing and they're more painful than the ones she wears inlaid in her flesh), she dresses in jeans and loud crimson silk, a halter that ties in a bow at her neck and falls away to leave her ravaged back and shoulder uncovered. She ties up her hair and glosses her lips and wears her tarnished beauty with burning pride. It is not in Lavender Brown to be ashamed.
She wears the rest of her scars in her eyes, but everyone she knows wears them there. She smiles and laughs and it isn't the same, but at least it's free.
My silly, selfish boyfriend has broken up with me. I wrote this before. I'm having a rough time of it, so I imagine I'll be back into writing the angst and tragedy in no time. Hey, who knew a breakup could be such a lovely cure for writer's block?