Couple featured: James and Lily Potter

"Don't you ever get sick of wearing your glasses? I don't think I've ever seen you without them except when you're asleep," asked Lily one night, as she lay beside James in the dim light of the bedside lamp. Before her boyfriend could say a word, she took off his black, rectangular glasses and put them on her own face.

James protested at the blurry sight of Lily wearing his glasses. "Lily, I can't quite see you, you realize."

She grinned wickedly and kissed him on his nose. "Didn't see that coming, did you?"

He smiled in spite of himself, and put his arm around her. The two of them sat in a comfortable silence for a few minutes until the still-bespectacled Lily broke the silence.

"My father used to have glasses like these," she mused.

Mr. Evans had been dead for less than a year. James looked at her, and he thought he could detect a sad expression on her face. He let her continue speaking.

"When I was really small, I didn't know what glasses were, you know? I'd take them off his face and put them on mine. I looked like a cartoon, with giant glasses and a baby face. They kept sliding off my face." She laughed softly at the memory, and James joined in.

"I remember when I first got glasses," James said. "I was right put off. I was only four, and no one else my age that I knew wore them. I'd keep hiding them in mum's room, which now, thinking back, was a horrible hiding-spot…thank Merlin I've improved at that. I remember one time I dug a hole in the garden, and hid my glasses in the hole. I told my mum and dad that I'd lost them, but the first thing they saw in the spring was a garden gnome wearing them. We had a laugh years later, of course, but at the time I was in so much trouble."

Lily giggled. "When I was four, my parents, who were tree-huggers—I mean, my sister and I are named after flowers, for Agrippa's sake—dressed me up like one, too. I'd go to Muggle school in tie-dyed shirts and hemp skirts and flowers in my long braided hair and I knew all the lyrics to the Beatles songs. Thank Merlin I grew out of that as soon as I was old enough to pick out my own clothing, although my mum was rather fond of pink flowery print, which clashed horribly with my hair."

"Did I ever tell you the story of my pink flowery shirt?"

Lily shook her head, intrigued. "Do tell."

"One of my great-aunts bought me the most fashionable shirt in Muggle couture in 1965, which happened to be a vividly pink flowery shirt. I hated it so much that I inadvertently burned it—oh Lily, don't give me that look, I was five, I couldn't control it. But the next day I found the shirt in my closet again, and I was horribly dismayed. Turns out my great-aunt had seen it catch fire and bought me another. I tossed it the moment I grew out of it."

Lily buried her face into James's arm, which was around her shoulder, trying to hide the fact that she had dissolved into laughter.

"Hey, don't you laugh! I pulled it off!"

"I'm sure you did," she said in between giggles. James couldn't help it—her laughter was so contagious—and he joined hers. He snuggled in closer to her, and within a few minutes, he had fallen asleep.

Lily glanced at the boy asleep on her shoulder, smiled, removed his glasses, and turned off the light.