DISCLAIMER: Everything you recognize belongs to J. K. Rowling.
She fixed him with a withering glare and walked away, and in that moment James Potter realized how few people knew the truth.
It had started in Potions. He should have known better than to pick a fight there, because in the dungeon choked with smelly fumes and bubbling cauldrons, Snape was in his element. He was giving Snivellus the home-field advantage. But Slughorn was a teacher who easily overlooked misbehavior on the Marauders' part—James, Sirius, and Remus were, after all, prized members of the Slug Club—while scolding Snape, who had been kicked out of the Slug Club after that incident with Dark Magic on Mary MacDonald. It was too good an opportunity to waste.
James nudged Sirius and they consulted for a moment, while Peter leaned his chair to tipping point to get into the conversation and Remus hunched over his textbook, as he generally did when they were clearly up to no good. Minutes later, James and Sirius simultaneously pointed their wands at Severus Snape's cauldron, and his potion exploded in his face. A pair of fireworks soared out of the cauldron and proceeded to spell swearwords on the ceiling. Someone screamed; Snape covered his face with his arms but he couldn't hide the fact that his nose was rapidly expanding to the size of a large melon from the half-brewed Swelling Solution that had splashed it.
James and Sirius and most of the class were roaring with laughter as Slughorn tried to restore order and asked Snape what on earth he had put into his potion to make it explode and then exasperatedly sent him to the hospital wing. And then James looked up and realized that Lily Evans was standing at his desk, looking as though she wished he would die.
He really should have known better than to fight in Potions because Snivellus sat beside Evans. And anything that made Snape look stupid just made Evans that much less likely to ever go out with James.
She demanded to know what was the matter with him. She told him that she had had just about enough of him, and that he, James Potter, and his stupid friends—Remus looked an inch tall when her glare brushed over the remaining Marauders—were cruel and immature and she wished they would just grow up already.
"You know you love it, Evans," James said, and he charmingly ran a hand through his hair.
It hadn't seemed possible for her glare to become even more furious, but it did.
Severus had a hard life, she told him, her voice dangerously low and barely audible to the crowd that had congregated around them. Not that he, James Potter, would know anything about that.
And then Slughorn broke it up, and patted Evans—the only student he favored over James Potter and Sirius Black—on the shoulder, and sent everyone back to their seats.
The cauldron fumed, and meanwhile, so did James.
She didn't know what she was talking about, he thought furiously. She naively thought that she and Snivellus were the only people who knew hardship, the only ones who ever faced hurdles bigger than painful breakups or that Transfiguration essay due on Tuesday. She called him immature, and yet she was the one too naïve and self-centered to see that everyone else struggled too.
James had a good life, he admitted that, but the Marauders didn't. Lily had no idea what his friends went through. She hadn't seen Sirius shivering on the Potters' doorstep, dragging his trunk and his broomstick, and possibly crying, though it was impossible to say for sure in the pouring winter rain. She hadn't seen the dark look that passed over Peter's face whenever his Muggle father was mentioned, the bum who had abandoned him and irreparably broken his mother's heart. She hadn't seen Remus lying curled on the floor of the Shrieking Shack.
They hid it well, James realized. The Marauders were so happy. They joked, they laughed, they teased each other and everyone else, they pulled prank after prank and would go down in the annals of Hogwarts as the greatest troublemakers the school had ever seen. First-years were awestruck, girls swooned, and every student in the school—with the obvious exception of the Slytherins, but who was counting them anyway?—looked at them with admiration.
And Lily Evans, James added as an afterthought. She was the other exception.
They had it made, or so it seemed. They had the brains, the looks, the talent, the money, and—again, with the exception of Evans—the girls. And yet there was so much more than met the eye.
He wondered if anyone outside of their circle of four knew all of the darkness and secrets and turmoil that lurked under the Marauders' smiles and banter and pranks.
After class, Slughorn made his way over to James and Sirius's desk and took five points from Gryffindor for their disrupting the class. Then he awarded them ten points for their truly expert spellwork. They walked out of the classroom, ignoring Remus's eye-rolling and laughing at Peter's excitement over the whole affair, and their classmates congratulated them and laughed and a Ravenclaw third-year who had just heard the story nearly fainted when Sirius winked at her in the corridor. James caught Lily Evans's eye and she glared at him and he surprisingly didn't care, because he knew she was wrong, absolutely wrong.
They had to faff about sometimes; they had to be immature, because in so many ways they were all growing up too fast and if they didn't have some fun in the crazy, messed up world they were living in they would all go mad.
Someday it would all come out: their secrets and their hardships and everything they worked so hard to hide. Someday it would catch up with them. But not today.