I
Prologue
This is the story of how I learned that first love was just that: first love. More often than not, first love does not stay; it changes and alters with time to become nothing more than a memory. When I was thirteen, I thought I had found the boy I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. Of course, at thirteen, I was naïve enough to think that I was part of a fairy-tale and that I would get my happy ending. In reality, I suppose you could say that I did… but not in the way I was expecting.
I remember the day well; it was a Tuesday morning in late September 2019. We were sitting in Defence Against the Dark Arts and Professor Creevey was making us write an essay on Boggarts, my best friend (and cousin) Roxanne Weasley was sitting beside me, scribbling away with a slight frown etched on her forehead. I remember wondering if she could hear how hard my heart was beating.
That was the day I fell for a boy I didn't know, a boy my father had warned me to stay away from, a boy with platinum blond hair that fell in front of his grey eyes as he leaned over his parchment. That was the day I fell for Scorpius Hyperion Malfoy. When I was thirteen, I thought it was love… I thought it was love because I was too inexperienced to know better. Besides, I was a hopeless romantic from a young age and I was constantly looking for a boy to be my Romeo.
From that day on, until just before my OWLs, I nursed a secret crush on the evasive Slytherin boy with grey eyes. I never told anyone, not even Roxanne, my best friend… I often wonder if I had just been open with her then, if any of this would have happened. But wondering about such things is a pointless exercise because we can never really know the answer. I preferred to keep silent – I think I found it more romantic or something equally irrational.
But my decision to fall for Scorpius Malfoy was not the only thing that happened that day which later played an important role in my story. No, that was also the day my other cousin, Lucy Weasley who was in the year above Roxanne and I, got asked out by her long standing crush, Charlie Goldstein, a shy and reserved Ravenclaw. Of course, it was not until much later that this affected me.
So, before we begin, perhaps I should tell you a little about myself. My name is Rose Olivia Weasley and I am the daughter of Ron and Hermione Weasley – but you probably know that – I also have a younger brother called Hugo and far too many cousins to list off here. Like the rest of my family, I was sorted into Gryffindor along with Roxanne and Albus. The three of us had always been very close, Albus was the son of my parents' best friend and we lived on the same road in Godric's Hollow. Roxanne on the other hand, was the unexpected daughter of George and Angelina Weasley who owned the shop where my dad sometimes worked so we would often spend ours running around the shop with each other. As much as I loved Albus, Roxanne was a girl and every girl needed a best-girlfriend, so she became mine.
Those were the simple days, the days before exams and boys took over our lives. My story starts just before the Easter Holidays in my Fifth Year, in the Potions classroom that always gave me the creeps. Professor Zabini was in a particularly foul mood which was probably the reason that when his favourite pupil walked – or rather gilded – in late, he made her sit with us Gryffindor miscreants. She was a girl named Vivian Nott and no one really knew anything about her other than the fact her father had been a Death Eater, as had her grandfather before him. She was a beautiful girl with lustrous, black ringlets and a pale complexion that my freckles and I envied greatly; she was quite small but still managed to retain an air of dominance wherever she went. At the time, I hated her. I hated her for one simple reason: she was Scorpius Malfoy's best friend.
Anyway, I am getting ahead of myself; let's rewind time a little… The date was the 19th of April 2022.