Once Upon a time, I had a certain Friend. This Friend was the ULTIMATE HARRY POTTER FANGIRL. She went the whole nine yards—3 copies of each book, all the merchandising, all the shipping, all the squee-ing over Tom Felton and Rupert Grint, you know the deal.

However, there was one aspect of HP fandom she could never really get the hang of. That…was Fanfiction.

She did try it once, though. She got as far as mapping out the whole plot in her head, planning how she would write each and every chapter, right down to the love scenes (of which there were many).

Then, she went and told me about it.

"Ok, so I was sprawled out on my bed last night, trying to sleep with the TV blaring in the apartment next door loud enough to bring bits of plaster off my roof, and all of a sudden I got this really super-excellent idea for a Harry Potter story, and I know I don't own Harry Potter, that's JK Rowling, but then I remembered that I could publish it as fanfiction, so I just HAD to get up and jot it down. You know how it is.

See, it's Harry's last year at Hogwart, and he has a gigantic crush on Ginny, but he's afraid to tell her, and he walks into the Potions classroom one day and he accidentally steps into an alternate dimension where this higher being named Nigel tells him that he will be training for the final battle with He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, since he's got to kill him to save the world and all, but you already knew that.

…Anyways, this higher being—what was his name again? Oh, yeah, it was Nigel, I think—can read minds, so he looks inside Harry's skull and sees how much he loves Ginny, and at the end of his training he has a "birds and the bees" talk with Harry and tells him to go for it, and he must be right, right, since he's, you know, a higher being who just HAPPENS to know everything, but Harry acts like a stupid prat and doesn't listen, 'cuz he's the hero—plus, if he did, that would be the end of the story.

When Nigel gets sick of him, he zaps Harry back into the Potions classroom, and it turns out that even though Harry's been training for what feels like five years, he's only been away for about five minutes, and no one's noticed he's been gone, so then Ginny walks into the room—apparently she's really really smart, so she's been transferred to an advanced system that happens to put her in the same class as Harry—and he decides not to worry her by telling her, so they just sit next to each other and make potions.

Skip to nighttime, who knows how many days later, and the whole time, Harry's been in a funk; he can't think about anything but how much he loves Ginny(it doesn't help that she's in all his classes by now), and so he's sitting in his favorite chair in the common room, thinking about Ginny for a change of pace, and he hears someone crying, and it sounds like her, so, being Harry Potter, follows the sound into his dorm, and for some reason Ginny's on his bed crying, so he goes and sits with her and comforts her, and somehow he never bothers aking why she's crying at all.

When Ginny stops crying, he walks her back to the door of her dorm, and talks to her and gives her a pat on the back, even though he's really staring at her lips and wondering what they feel like, and once the door closes behind her, the dorm stairs do that Slip-N'-Slide thing, and he falls all the way down, knocks his head against the stone wall, and knocks himself out, and Ginny hears all the commotion through the door, so she peeks out, and when she sees Harry bleeding on the floor, she goes all pale and rushes to cradle his head in her arms, and over the next couple of week, Harry develops a serious illness from his injury and becomes delirious, so Ginny stops going to classes just to care for him, and one night, in his delirium, Harry starts talking to her and he spills everything—how much he loves her, and for so long, and how he's afraid to ever say anything because she's his best friend's sister.

Afterwards, he passes out from the stress of that secret, and the sleep apparently does him some good, because after a few hours he comes out of it and actually talks to Ginny for real, and he finds out that he told Ginny that he loves her, so he gets scared (for SOME reason, he can face Moldiewart—I mean Voldemort—but not a sixteen-year-old girl) and puts a Memory Charm on her, so she forgets he even ever got hurt, and in doing so, he subjects himself to a year's worth of emotional torture, in which he feels a surge of such longing every time he sees her, it borderlines on physical pain.

In such a sad manner do two years pass…

And at the two-year reunion, Harry and Ginny finally meet each other again, and the reminisce about the day Hermione and Ron got married, graduation, you know that old chestnut, and Ginny talks about how nice all those memories are, which causes Harry to start crying(?), and when Ginny asks him what's wrong, Harry finally decides to tell her everything, even the fact that he cursed her to keep her secret, and to his surprise, when he's done, she smiles and tells him that she always loved him too, so they talk awhile and fall in love all over again and decide to get married, and at the wedding there's all sorts of love and joy in the air, except for Dudley and his new wife, who were invited for who knows what reason, because they ate the entire wedding feast, including the whole cake, and they have to be wheeled to a Muggle hospital in a Mack Truck to have their stomachs pumped. The End."

At this point, I felt obligated to say that her story sounded like a cheap soap opera. To this she replied,

"Oh, crap, you're right."

She paused, thinking.

"You know, I really wish my neighbors would stop watching the Young and the Restless at two in the morning."

At this point, she promptly stuffed her manuscript (which she told me to burn) into my hand.

…

I hope she doesn't read this.

Finis

If anyone out there watches the Young and the Restless…do YOU understand the plots in that show? 'Cuz I can't follow it at ALL…