Eloise Midgen stared at her reflection in one of the many mirrors in a girls' bathroom one evening.
The Yule Ball was coming up and most other girls were talking about it excitedly; planning their outfits, what they were going to wear, what boys they hand their sights on... but she wasn't.
She didn't feel worthy to gush about such things.
Running a hand over her face, she sighed as she felt the rough, red pimples covering her face, running her appearance.
She didn't have a killer figure, a large chest nor did she have the most... manageable hair, but her facial flaw was the one that made her feel the worst.
She could exercise, go on diets and such to manage her weight. She could use spells and potions to try to manage her hair- even if they were temporary as such things tended to wear off- but nothing ever seemed to work on her face.
It was only a year before she started Hogwarts that all the problems with her looks had started.
She'd been a cute enough little girl.
Dimples, bright eyes, a cute smile...
Then puberty hit. And puberty was not kind to her at all.
Neither were her fellow witches and wizards...
Sure, she'd managed to make some friends here at Hogwarts. She was on good terms with Hannah, Susan and her fellow Hufflepuff girls, Padma Patil and Anthony Goldstein in Ravenclaw, but she heard the whispers everyone else said behind her back.
Then there were those who said those things to her face...
Eloise looked up to see her reflection looking back at her sadly.
"Nobody is going to ask me out to the Yule Ball..." Eloise sighed. "I'm not pretty, funny, outgoing, smart... Nothing. I'm nothing special at all..."
"Nonsense! You're not that bad!" A voice in the back of her mind spoke to her.
"But I'm not that good either..." Eloise thought back.
The insults she'd endured... She knew she was nothing special, but there were others in the school that were even worse off in the looks department than she was...
Millicent Bulstrode looked like she could be Gregory Goyle's twin sister; a giant, pale boulder with long, black hair... yet they chose to harp on her and her acne even more.
"Come on, Eloise." She straightened herself and washed her face off, cleaning away the tears that had threatened to gather. "You've endured this before. All this fuss over a stupid Yule Ball... There's no need to work yourself into such a foul mood..."
Eloise straightened her posture and left the bathroom, heading down to the Great Hall for dinner.
Sure she was nothing special in the looks department and she wasn't likely to be asked to the Yule Ball, but that didn't mean she had to beat herself up about it. She could go on her own and have a good time. Why would she need someone else to validate her looks and make her feel special about herself?
I wrote this for The Potions Class Challenge on the Harry Potter Fanfiction Challenges forum. This one is for the Beautification Potion and one of the prompts for that potion was to write about somebody who feels ugly. I thought Eloise might be one of those people, based on what we know of her in the books.
Also, she's represented as Gryffindor in the movies, but I always got the impression that she was a Hufflepuff, based on little things in the book, so I write her that way.