"You're flicking it wrongly," observed Eileen Prince, looking down her long, thin nose at her nine year-old son. "You need more wrist action, like this." She flicked the marble across the table with her forefinger, jerking her bony wrist slightly with the movement.
"I don't like Gobstones," Severus scowled. His thin, pale face looked ill in the late afternoon light of the untidy, south-facing kitchen. "Can't we play chess instead?"
"Don't call it Gobstones when your father is in the house," hissed Eileen, glancing at the cobwebbed ceiling. "These are ordinary marbles, anyway, until you learn to play properly - and then only when your father leaves to see his - his friends. And no, we can't. The Muggle set is broken, and you know your father would disapprove of the set your uncle sent you. I don't know what my brother was thinking; he knows Tobias hates magic…" Her voice trailed off and she looked severely at her son. "You haven't told him about the set, have you?"
"Of course not!" Her son looked slightly ill at the idea. "It's under my bed with my books…Mother, may I go and read in my room?"
"I would rather -" began Eileen, but heavy footsteps on the wooden stairs interrupted her. They looked nervously at the door.
"Mother, I think…"
"Out," Eileen said, knocking the marbles into his hands. "The back door. Go, now."
Severus shifted uncomfortably. "Mother, shouldn't I stay to protect-"
"You forget that I lived through a Muggle world war," said his mother dryly. "You are nine years old, Severus Snape, not a hero." She glanced at the door into the hallway again. "Go."
Severus went, slipping easily and silently out of the back door just as he heard the other door crash open and the unintelligible slurring of his father, drunk even at five in the afternoon.
It was mid-June, and outside Spinner's End the sky was surprisingly cloud-free, but the heat left the polluted river reeking of sewage and rotting plant material. Severus turned his back on the dismal river and stumbled through the narrow streets, his neck hot under the merciless sun and the pavement hard beneath his worn shoes.
Severus wandered aimlessly for some half an hour before the dirty, narrow streets of west Cokeworth, lined by rows of identical, impassive terraced houses without front gardens, began to slowly open up to wider streets with cleaner pavements and rows of semi-detached houses. Here, Muggles were sunbathing in their gardens or watering their rosebushes and neat square front lawns. A few of them eyed him distastefully as he wandered past, his hands in the pockets of his too-short jeans and shabby black shirt. Others glanced pityingly at him over their hedges and looked away when he scowled at them angrily, embarrassed at their looks of sympathy.
"Lily, stop it!" came a shrill, frightened child's voice from an open downstairs window of one of the houses as he passed. "Lily, it isn't funny!"
Severus' scowl deepened. He hated other children - especially girls - and the whining one sounded like one to be avoided at all costs. He hunched over and began to walk faster, glad that a stout hedge stood between himself and the offending child.
"Don't be silly, Petunia," giggled a voice, high and clear, floating after him. "Look - I can make it do anything…"
"It's a trick," came the first girl's voice. "You've got strings on it - really thin strings, so I can't see - I know it's not flying!"
Severus froze.
"It is flying, Tuney!" he heard the excited girl say. "Is, is, is!"
He turned, heart thudding, and inched back down the street quietly, peering with difficulty through the dense hedge. Between the stubby leaves, he could make out two small figures in dresses. One, redheaded and laughing, knelt on the grass with her back to him. Something small and green - a tennis ball, he realised suddenly - whizzed in an almost elliptical orbit around her head, looping under her arm as she stretched a small hand out to the other girl who stood defiantly before her, hands on her hips,
Severus took a deep breath to control his excitement. He had never met a witch or wizard his own age before, aside from brief glimpses of less-than-subtle, wizarding families passing through with their children, occasionally staying at the Riverside Hotel near his house. Cokeworth, it had always seemed, was a very Muggle sort of town.
Until now.
"Lily, I don't like it, you know I -" She broke off, staring over Lily's head at the hedge behind which Severus stood. "Lily! Lily, someone's watching!"
Severus ran.
It was over a week before he had a chance to leave the house again. Between his schooling with Eileen and his father's demands that he run errands and do chores, Severus rarely had a moment to himself. He spent the following days in a constant state of distraction, unable to focus on his work with his mother. Somehow, he knew he shouldn't tell her what he had espied through the hedge in the street at the other end of town, but he contented himself with the knowledge that there was finally someone he could talk to about magic who wouldn't be afraid of the topic like his mother, or in complete fear and disgust like his father. It was a shame it was a girl, he felt, but it was better than nothing. Severus Snape had learned at an early age to take what little luck came his way.
On a Monday afternoon, therefore, when his mother claimed to be too 'indisposed' to teach him that week, he plucked up the courage to find his way back to the garden where he had seen the redhead playing with magic.
They weren't there.
The skinny nine year-old lurked cautiously on the street every day for the next three days whenever he had a spare hour in the morning, before his father woke up in his daily lunchtime stupor. He was usually there by ten o'clock, attracting curious looks from the neighbours, who didn't know what to say to the ill-dressed, silent boy with the black hair and quick-moving eyes. On Friday, however it was after three o'clock before he could leave, and nearly half past when he reached the house, flushed from having almost run across the town.
Once again, of course, they weren't there.
He sagged against the lamp post and closed his eyes, his long dark lashes contrasting sharply with his pale skin. Maybe the family had moved. Maybe the girl had just been visiting. She could have been from anywhere - and Severus, who had never left Cokeworth, would never find her before Hogwarts. Maybe -
"Are you waiting for someone?"
His head jerked up hopefully.
"Oh, it's you," he said dismally.
The thin, horse-faced girl folded her arms across her chest and glared at him icily. "Who are you? Why are you standing outside my house?" she demanded.
"It's not important," Severus lied flatly. Noticing her clean, well-pressed grey pinafore and knee-high white socks, he jolted slightly. "You've been at school," he said slowly. "All week - you were at school!" He was immensely relieved to realise this. It had not occurred to him that the horse-faced girl, though obviously a Muggle, must have Muggle parents. This was a family who lived entirely in the Muggle world with Muggle customs. Of course they wouldn't have been playing outside on a weekday morning. He felt idiotic.
"Of course I have!" Petunia Evans stared at him distastefully, eyeing his patched jeans and wrinkled grey jumper. "Don't you go to school?" she asked disdainfully. "That doesn't look like a school uniform."
"My mother tutors me, actually," snapped Snape, his pale face flushing. "Do you live here?" He pointed towards the house beyond the hedge. "With a girl called.." He paused to remember the name. "Um, called - Lily?"
Petunia looked askance at him. "How do you know my sister?" she demanded. "I don't like you. Go away." She turned her back and moved towards the simple iron gate set in the small gap in the hedge.
"Wait!" called Severus desperately, his mind working overtime. This girl was clearly a Muggle; that meant it stood to reason her parents were too. It was only the Lily girl that he could speak to. "I need to speak to your sister…please," he added, uncomfortably.
"She's at art club anyway," Petunia informed him, her back still turned and her nose high in the air. "And I don't think she'd want to speak to you. I'm going to find out who you are and my daddy will tell yours to make you stay away from us."
Severus groaned, but the threat was too palpable to ignore. "Fine, fine, I'm going," he scowled, turning away. "It wasn't important anyway." He stalked away down the street, angry and flushed, but armed with a plan.
It didn't take him long to find the Muggle primary school; it was only a few minutes' walk, and there was a bench opposite the tall wire school fence, behind which the wide, single-floor brick comprehensive school squatted, looking miserable and grey. It was quite at odds with the descriptions of Hogwarts he had read about in the books hidden from his father beneath his bed, and he was relieved - not for the first time - that his mother taught him, rather than having to go to a horrible school like this.
It was half past four before he saw Lily emerge from one of the doors and cross the playground, her red hair tied back in a sensible ponytail and a brown leather satchel slung across her body. Under one arm she carried a large sketchbook, but from this distance it was hard to discern anything else remarkable about the girl.
Severus bit his lip nervously as she drew nearer, crossing the road towards him and humming under her breath. For the first time, he was able to take in her clear, pale face; he noted the small nose and the dusting of freckles across her cheeks. Her eyes, framed by sweeping fair lashes, were beautifully green when she glanced briefly at him, clearly disinterested in the stranger, and his mouth went dry as she passed.
He wanted to say something - but what? How? He felt stupid again; this was just a girl, and - judging by her sister - a Muggle-born at that, but he had no idea how to approach her or what to say. Suddenly he was horribly aware of his too-short jeans and the fact his legs and arms were long and gangly; he knew he was too thin, and that his nose did nothing to help the situation. All in all, the idea of shambling up to a girl and telling her she was a witch suddenly seemed horrifying.
He waited until she reached the end of the street and turned left, disappearing around the corner, then let out a moan of frustration, bringing a fist down onto his skinny thigh. He was never going to get this right.
That night when he lay flat on his back on his single bed in his hot, box-like room with the plain, beige wallpaper, feet bare and covers kicked back to lessen the awful summer heat, he cursed himself again and again, muttering insults to himself and to the world. He was a descendant of the pure-blood Prince family; destined for Slytherin before he was even born, and now he was being thrown out of his depth into a sea of bewilderment.
He thought of her eyes glancing at him and glancing away again, unaffected, and sighed miserably, rolling onto his side and curling up into the foetal position.
She had been beautiful.