Disclaimer: Not mine, etc.
Author's Note: This story is funny if you think low self esteem paired with sexual promiscuity is funny.
Seriously, lighten up!
When I was little, I told myself that as soon as I went away to secondary school, things would be different. The summer before my first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was the most anticipation-ridden of all. I was ready to escape everything – my parents, who didn't understand me, my sister, who didn't understand me, and the Muggle boys down the lane, who thought I was peculiar.
Of course, I wasn't really escaping my sister; she was one year my senior, also attended Hogwarts, and would come to be a continuous presence in my school experience.
It wasn't that I disliked my sister; it was more that she disliked me. At earlier ages we had played together and invented our own games, and our parents understood neither of us. But when she moved on to school she embraced the culture of gossip and scandal (though, since 11-year-old scandal was largely non-existent, it would take several years for my sister to grow truly embroiled; as a first year, she merely watched from afar and schemed) to a point where I felt I no longer knew her.
Then school began, and with it, the disappointment. Every summer I returned home and swore to myself that I would do better next year. Nobody knew the real me, I kept telling myself. I had no close friends because everyone else was just as confused as I was. My sister's friends were not true friends; they were all caught up in this gossip-ridden, pseudo-dramatic world together, naively embracing every minute of it.
But by the time I had completed a lackluster fifth year and was looking achingly toward the sixth, I was running low on optimism. My one consolation was the hope that when my sister graduated her seventh year the coming June, I would finally be free to live my own life, released from her shadow at long last.
When I look back on it now, I realize how little I was prepared for! How little I knew, how naïve I, too, had become! I thought I was a prophet of truth in the murky halls of teenage anxiety and commotion, but I was just as pathetic as all the rest of them, and just as eager to be sucked in.
My sister and I were both in Gryffindor. When I was first sorted, I found this strange.
"I'm not loyal," I thought to the hat. "I can't even stand my own family."
"You shall see what you shall become," the hat replied.
I thought that was pretty pretentious of it, but that was that; a Gryffindor I became.
My sister had a friend named Lily Evans. They were roommates and often inseparable. I had something of what one might call a "girl crush" on Lily Evans. She fascinated me. She was beautiful and confident. She knew she had everything going for her – intelligence, wit, and the attentions of one James Potter, a boy also in my sister's year who I thought was exceptionally amusing. He had a friend, Sirius Black, and also two others, Remus Lupin and Peter Pettigrew. I thought the four of them were amazing – if only because their friendship seemed so pure! If only I had been born a boy, I sometimes thought. Then there would be no petty female drama, no pressure to be beautiful and confident like Lily Evans.
I wondered if Lily Evans' family was perfect as well. Sometimes I reasoned it was surely not; life never dealt cards in such a way. Or perhaps it did.
Anyway, my sixth year was to be one of aching transformation: by the end of it, I had changed myself from an insecure, peculiar nobody into a nymphomaniacal slut.