I used to forget to eat for days at a time. Daddy would try to remind me, but I was a little girl who sometimes couldn't care less about what she should and shouldn't do. Eating to me wasn't something I had to do to help my body—it was something I would do when I wanted to, just like I would skip in the daisies and hold my hand to the butterflies when I liked. After Mum died, I stopped talking for a little bit, which was okay because Daddy did, too. Sometimes I would wake up in my little room at the tippy top of the stairs and look out the window towards the trees, waiting for the sun to cut through them, when I would hear Daddy banging pots and pans and then the sound of frying eggs and a tea kettle whistling. So I'd go down and sit at the kitchen table dutifully, knocking on my chair three times before sitting down as I have done since I was very very small, and ask him if he needed help. He always said no. He'd bring me eggs and a slice of toast and get his own plate and bring the tea leaves and boiled water and sit them on the table. I would pour myself a cup of tea, swing my bare little feet, pull at the lace on my purple and green nightgown, and watch my father. Sometimes he would eat his toast, but sometimes we'd both leave the table in silence and the cold eggs and toast would sit on the table getting soggy and crusty until dinnertime, when I may or may not have been hungry.
I always put on my clothes at 8:00 in the morning because that was when Daddy started the presses for the next day. A neat "sving, vashoom, clamp, auch-zing" thousands of times a day was what my daily rhythm was based on, and it took nearly 48 of them for me to put on my clothes. When I was ten, I always wore a combination of tights, skirts, sweaters, and little garden boots. My favorite tights were lilac and I liked best my blue and purple skirt with billywigs printed on it that Mum and I had designed when I was eight, even though it was far too short for a 10-year old. My favorite sweater was a soft, clover green, and I wore lots of jewelry when I felt like it. I had five pairs of galoshes—purple, black, green, red, and yellow—and one pair of dirty work boots which I liked very much.
Sometimes after I dressed I would run and run and run as far and fast as I could. I would spin and gallop and leap and stare at the sky as it became a blur of white and blue and I would travel through space and time because I simply never kept track of it so much when I ran like that. Sometimes I would run all the way through the village to the other side and down towards the Burrow where I would watch the twins taunt Ronald in the yard and Ginny sit on her mother's lap while they watched Charlie and Bill practice flying. Sometimes this made me very sad to see Ginny with her mum, and I would forget about the sky and running and the beauty of the trees and the butterflies and I would stop. And sometimes I stared. And a few times I cried.
Mrs. Weasley didn't mind. So sometimes she made ginger biscuits for Ginny, Ron, and me. They were very nice biscuits, but I only sometimes like ginger and I hardly ever found eating very interesting, so I made a game of catching the garden gnomes with them, and when I had found the cutest one, I would wave goodbye to the Weasleys, and run right on home with it. Sometimes I would climb to the top of a pretty tree in the woods and sit amongst the thinnest and weakest branches just to feel airless, and my gnome would enjoy that sometimes, too. The air and the trees, the sky and that grouchy little gnome that I ended up naming Reginald made me happy—if only for a moment—as I watched the breeze ruffle the skirt around my knobbly knees, my dirty work boots kicking back and forth, with the sun above my head, and butterflies in my mind, and flowers too if I could manage it.
Sometimes I would forget to come home, and I would watch all the stars rise. Right after mother's death, Daddy sometimes forgot to come find me, but that was okay, because I always knew when I was needed. It wasn't until I was eleven that he really started paying attention again. By then, I'd found all his books on magical creatures and all mum's books on experimental charms, and we had something to talk about again.
We were both very happy.
But I still wouldn't eat.