Hello one and all and welcome to 'A Rare Occurrence'. This is my first fanfiction so go easy on me. The characters are a little (okay alot) OOC. Harry is more nerdy and Hermione is more relaxed, but in the end I like how they turned out. So... on with the story!
Part Un
October 1-Sunday
We all have a place that we dread, a place that we would like to avoid at all cost but never seem to be able to. It's what you would describe as the most depressing place on earth (i.e. hell). For me that place is Captain D's.
Reasons why
1) It's a major hang out for the elderly (AKA the really freaking old). It's true, the frail grandmothers and grandfathers of the world just love them some fish- especially here in the south. You can just look around and almost feel death creeping in. They're so crooked and bent that you can't help but to feel depressed and wasted away yourself. Almost as if they are sucking the life away from you to keep alive themselves.
2) It's also a major hang out for the morbidly obese. From just a glance you can tell they've already given up and are just waiting for the day that they finally choke on the wrong chicken bone. The morbidly obese are one of the quickest ways to feeling sympathy for humanity. Plus, they have a fierce rivalry with the old folks for most grumpiest that can get pretty out of hand sometimes.
3) My mother told us that she was divorcing my father in a Captain D's but I'll get to that later.
4) I. Hate. Fish.
I guess I mainly have a problem of imagining the lives of other people too often. It use to be a game I played with myself on long car trips but somewhere along the way their lives began to blend with mine and it became too sad. The lives and stories I imagined for the people made me feel sorry for them. And because I was pretending to be them, I also felt sorry for myself. Now I try to avoid situations where I easily empathize with those around me for the obvious reason of not wanting to depressed all the time. It's the universal law of self-preservation. Unfortunately, my family never seemed to notice this and still forces me to go to Captain D's, my personal hell, on a weekly basis.
Like most people I enjoy wallowing in the occasional sea of self-pity (I wouldn't say that I was better at it than any other teenager, but I'm fairly sure that if it was a paying job I'd be richer than Donald Trump), but it does get a bit repetitive after a while even for me.
My father and twin younger brothers were having some kind of in-depth argument about the engineering that went into a super building and I was doing my best to ignore the sad state of the people around me. Even to me a proud nerd on almost every level, conversations about construction seemed extremely boring. I had just finished my fries when I spotted my miracle- Harry Potter.
I'm sure that every high school in the world has at least one Harry Potter in its stocks. You know the one; the classic cliché genius who is to be either avoided like the plague or bullied like a pathetic street pup surrounded by emotionally disturbed teens. I can't say that I did either, or at least I didn't intentionally. To be honest he just wasn't someone I noticed all that often. Harry was in more than half of my classes in school and even worked in the same store as me during the summer, but I don't think I can remember saying one word to him other than "hey" before this fateful meeting.
Poor Harry was the embodiment of a tortured genius. He was too lanky and tall to blend in with the crowd like I tried, and succeed, to do. He had a terrible lightning bolt shaped scar on his forehead and his dark hair had an Einstein madness to it. Other than the hair though, Harry didn't actually look all that nerdy and had very little acne whatsoever. It didn't matter though. He sat alone at lunch. He sat alone in class. He sat alone on the bus. He was a goddamn loner to the core. Harry also had the unfortunate luck of being born in a small hick town to even smaller minded parents, so his "book smarts" weren't exactly being praised at home. The school didn't have any way to accommodate him so he was stuck in the dumb classes with the rest of us. All in all, he was prime bully material for people like Draco Malfoy. Of course I didn't find any of that out until later. Like I said, I hadn't really notice Harry Potter. He was just another sad sack I tried to avoid lest I fall into his troubles like Alice into the rabbit hole.
On this day however, Harry was my salvation; my way out.
"Hey dad, I'm going to go over and sit with my friend." I said as I stood up from my seat. My dad seemed too caught up in his debate with my brothers to care at the moment and simply shooed his hand in acknowledgement. Before he could drag me back for "family time" I quickly turned away and stalked to Harry's table by the door. He sat alone as always.
The closer I got the shyer and stupider I felt. I considered keep walking right passed Harry and through the door, going far, far away from this place. I was forced to throw that idea out however when I remembered that I would have no way to get home since I couldn't drive and didn't even have a car. By the time I actually reached his table I felt completely and utterly dumb.
"Uh…Hey, can I sit here with you?" I asked with a voice gruff with nerves. I don't know why I was nervous though since I doubt he cared either way. Harry didn't answer. He appeared to be deep in thought and was chewing absent mindedly on a piece of fish while reading an extremely thick book. I gathered my courage and asked again; still no response. Again I tried, and again no luck. Put off, I tried one last time, this time while poking his shoulder harshly.
"Can I sit here?" I asked loudly. Harry jumped, obviously startled. He looked up at me puzzled and I realized that he hadn't been ignoring me but had honestly not notice my presence for being so wrapped up with his book. 'Crap' I thought, 'Now I've scared the poor boy for life.' All I had wanted was to get away from my family.
"Sorry, I just- I asked you a few times but you didn't notice. May sit here?"
"Sure." he said. He looked so wary that I almost wished I had a sign above my head saying 'Safe Zone'. I finally sat down and an awkward silence passed between us. I glanced out the window then back to Harry who hadn't gone back to his book like I thought he would.
"You don't have to stop reading if you don't want to. I did mean to interrupt you." I said, hoping he would go back to reading so the silence wouldn't be so awkward.
"Its fine, I was about to take a break anyway." He replied. He fell silent again after that and seemed to have no intention of making more conversation. 'Great there goes my way out of talking' I thought. After a long pause I started again.
"So you're Harry Potter, right?" I asked. It was a pretty stupid question because as I said before I was in most of his classes so of course knew his name. I was desperate to get rid of the silence though. A stupid conversation was better than none.
He nodded and cut through my bullshit by saying "And you're Hermione Granger." So, the lame introductions were made. The stage was set. And still we lapsed into silence.
To avoid his gaze, I surveyed the scene around me. An old woman with a bright yellow parka on hobbled by our table, with her daughter walking not far behind, ready to assist if needed. To the left, a group of young children mocked fat man eating alone. I could just barely make out grease and ketchup stains on his shirt. There was also an alert middle age woman sitting at the table to the right of ours, seemingly on the prowl for young men. She wore a track suit, and carefully scrutinized every man under 50 that walked through the door, searching for the perfect person to take home tonight. It didn't take her long to realize though that the Captain D's on Dessen road wasn't the best place to look for a suitable mate on a Sunday evening. On the far side of the restaurant there was an elderly couple sitting in a content silence; their hands were intertwined at the end of table. They reminded me a little of my own grandparents actually. Its old people like them that make me a little less terrified of growing old. I glanced back at Harry to realize he had decided not to look around the whole room as I had, but to rather stare at the people in the ordering line. A wise choice, as the fat man had just accidently dropped his last piece of fish on the floor, and looked ready to cry.
Many excruciatingly long minutes later I began to regret my decision. Surely, a dinner with family wouldn't have been this awful would it? Plus Harry had just enough of an abused puppy air about him to make me start to feel sorry for him. Yup, this was a terrible idea.
"So why did you come over here?" he asked, pulling me away from the fascinating view of the Captain D's parking lot I had settled on a few moments before. A group of stoners were hanging around on trash bins outside and some employer had just charged over, ordering them to leave. Harry's voice sounded strained as if he was just as desperate for conversation as I was.
"Oh, I wanted to get away from my family." I said.
Harry looked over to were my father and brothers sat. "Is that them?" he asked nodding to my family.
"Yeah."
"What's so bad about them?" he asked still sounding hesitant as if he expected me to start lashing out at him at any moment.
"They're not bad" I said, "They're just really caught up in a debate over the construction of the Sears building right now and I guess I just wanted some different conversation."
"Well I don't know if I'm really the best person for that." He said with a smirk, making fun of the earlier silence. I laughed, glad that we were finally getting somewhere. I was even gladder still to see that perhaps he wasn't the complete sad sack I thought he was.
"You seem to be doing fine now." I replied.
"We'll see."
"That we will. So…" I paused, frantically scanning my mind for a topic now that he seemed ready to talk. "What are you reading?" I finally asked. It seemed like a neutral enough question to start with.
"Dante's Divine Comedy."
"Oh I read part of that at my old school. It's pretty intense, huh?" I was happy for once that my old school had been so strict on Literature class. It hadn't helped at all at this new school, but maybe that wasn't the point. Maybe the class had been purposely created for just this type of situation. I had always been at the top my class. I took pleasure in it, but here intelligence didn't seem to matter. Harry was a prime example of that. 'At least we can talk about that for awhile until my family is ready to go' I thought.
"So far it is. You moved here at the end of last year from Detroit, right?" 'Or maybe not' I thought.
"Yup, so what do you think of Inferno?" I asked hoping he would drop the previous topic, but it seemed as if his natural curiosity wouldn't allow him to pass up learning something new.
"Why did you move? It must be a big change coming down South."
"My parent's got a divorce. I moved down with my father and brothers to be closer to my grandparents."
"Don't they usually reward custody to the mother in divorce cases?" he asked.
"Usually. I guess my mother didn't want to have us." I said, wishing he would stop asking questions. That is, until he asked a question I had never before considered.
"So why do you think they broke it off?" And honestly I had never thought of why, only that they had. The divorce had happened so abruptly that I didn't have time to question. It was just there all of the sudden like mushroom that popped up over night and I had to deal with it. It hadn't seemed to matter at the time what caused the divorce, just as it doesn't seem to matter what had caused the mushroom.
After a long pause I began to speak with my face half hidden behind my bushy hair, "My mother was pretty young when she got married and had me and the twins. She was right out of high school. I think- I think she just never got a chance to live you know? And then one day waiting at the bank or something it just stuck her all of a sudden that she felt cheated. That feeling grew and grew until she finally gave up. Gave up on marriage and gave up on us. She wanted to be free." My voice trailed off as I thought about it. It seemed so obvious now. As much time as I spent imagining what other people's lives were like I had never once thought about what my own mother felt like.
"I'm sorry I brought it up." Harry said looking remorseful as he studied my face carefully.
"It's fine." I said, "It still feels a little raw, but I'm glad you asked about it. I haven't talked to anyone about it in a long time. The subject is kind of avoided around the dinner table if you know what I mean."
"My family has a lot of those kinds of subject too." he said, looking at me right in the eyes, "Do you see her often? Your mom I mean."
"No, not since-" My statement was cut off by my dad calling for me, signaling it was time to go home. I looked at Harry sheepishly and we said our goodbyes.
While I had started out basically using Harry to get out of dinner with my family, I had ended up really enjoying his company. It was strange how much I had wanted to leave in the beginning, and then how sad I was to go in the end. I looked back at Harry who was once again intensely reading his book, and told myself that I would never ignore his presence again.
Well, that's it for now. Let me know what you think! Because I'm new and clueless xD
