Red Rover, Red Rover
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Disclaimer: I do not own this story. It is from a short story by Carrie Snyder that I read on the airplane flying home. I also do not own the characters (created by J.K. Rowling) and I am merely toying with them for my own pleasure.
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Author's Note: As I wrote in the disclaimer… This story is not mine. It is a Harry Potter version of a Carrie Snyder short story. It is a very different kind of story. Be warned. Some of the parts don't really fit together because these characters were not written as Harry Potter.
The plot is simple. Figure it out yourself. If you don't like it, don't review. I like my world "unflamed."
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Sober, we talk about the dog. Draco and Pansy have a brand new puppy, a Saint Bernard with rolls of fat at its neck and a need to chew.
"Put your shoes up high or leave them on," says Pansy as we come through the door. She kisses each of us on the cheek and takes our orders for drinks before we're halfway down the stairs.
I keep my boots on, even though they're wet with snow. They make me look taller.
"I've never had a boot I could wear with a skirt before," I say. The puppy worries at my laces. I kick it away while Pansy is distracted with the martini shaker.
Drunk, the men take turns examining my ring. We are not a large party; four couples in various states of fidelity. One pair we know only by proxy, through Pansy and Draco. The woman is a model, emaciated but with breasts. We've brought another couple, Terry and Padma – good talkers, sarcastic, their fights are entertainment.
Draco and Pansy are official, the marrieds. I have never been more ravishing than at their wedding reception: a transparent dress, heels I could barely stand to walk in, so intoxicated the groom and I danced together to a slow song without feeling anxiety. Pansy didn't want an engagement ring.
"I had sex five times last night," Pansy tells me when we're both reaching for the same bottle of wine. I assume she means with Draco.
The man who came with the model grips my hand and peers drunkenly at Harry's offering. "Did he get down on one knee?" he asks.
"Yes," says Harry, even as I am saying, "No."
Everyone laughs.
"I designed the ring myself," I say as the stranger bobs over my fingers. "I mean, we decided to get married months ago. The ring wasn't part of it."
"I did get down on one knee," says Harry.
"Maybe you did."
"Of course he did. He would," says Pansy. "Draco tried, but I made him stand up again."
Draco staggers from the kitchen with a platter of homemade ravioli stuffed with spinach and ricotta cheese. These prove underdone, but we rave. Draco folds my palm gently inside his own to better see the ring. He strokes my knuckles with his spare hand. Pansy is watching from the other end of the table. I pull free. We are seated boy, girl, boy, girl, not by couple, at Pansy's bidding.
I stumble upstairs to their bathroom. There is something green stuck between two teeth: spinach. I dig at it with a toothbrush from the cabinet. I hope it's Draco's.
I have a crush on this friend, I admitted to Padma before we came tonight, but without naming him. She shrugged, big deal. As long as you don't fool around.
Actually, I said, this feels worse than a crush. Like being sick.
Don't tell me, I don't want to know, she said.
Who can I tell? I asked.
Tell Harry. She laughed.
When I came out of the bathroom, Draco is waiting on the dark landing.
"Oh," I say.
"My turn," he says, and moves to brush by me, but instead brushes against and we stall, my breasts against his ribs, our arms at our sides.
"I hear you had sex five times last night," I say.
He glances toward their bedroom with the dark duvet pulled to the pillows. He is thinner than he was this summer, when we danced together. Some days he cannot walk.
I had to marry him, Pansy told me. This is my life. I will look after Draco, Pansy told me. I am his wife.
She didn't need an engagement ring.
We turn away from each other. I wait for one moment outside the bathroom door, swaying, but Draco doesn't switch on the light. Soon this apartment will be too much for them. Too many stairs. I have never seen Draco fall.
Even Terry admires the ring. "You've seen it before," says Padma in disgust.
"I'm just looking."
"You just want to hold Hermione's hand," says Padma.
"I'm looking at the ring."
"Look at mine," says Padma. She's not really jealous. We've had this conversation before: how she and Harry could get married and live contentedly, if not passionately, but how Terry and I, if married, would end – though who would wield the instrument? – in murder.
I carry the dishes to the kitchen. The puppy whines form the corner where she's been confined to a cage.
"That looks so cruel," I say.
"For her, it's like a cave. A safe place," explains Draco, coming in with a handful of forks.
We look at each other and then away. Pansy is behind us, kneeling at the puppy's cage. "She's sad. Poor little beastie," says Pansy. "She needs a walk."
"What about the dishes?" I say.
"Leave the goddman dishes," says Pansy. "It's a party."
For the walk, the puppy is squeezed into a little red sweater Pansy's mother has knitted for it.
"When did you become little-red-dog-sweater people?" asks Harry. He's finished perhaps half a bottle of Scotch and still is not slurring his words. I am glad not to have taken off the boots because laces might prove unmanageable at this hour, in this state. Padma has to be pushed off the couch and Terry thrusts her arms through coat sleeves.
"I need a little nap," Padma complains.
"It's a party," says Terry. Everyone seems to be saying so, as if we'd all forgotten.
The model's boyfriend pukes in the street almost as soon as we are outside. Effluvia hits the tail end of a BMW and sets of the car alarm.
"I should take him home," says the model.
It is cold enough to freeze our nostrils together, to make us cough as we run down the sidewalk, away from the noise. The model and her boyfriend flat down a cab and are driven away. We wave after them.
"What a pair," says Pansy. "I don't know why we hang out with them. Do you?"
Draco says, "You always invite them at the last minute. When you can't think of anyone else."
"It isn't a party with only six people," says Pansy.
"Don't forget the dog," I say.
"The dog doesn't count," says Draco. "No one else wanted to come to our fling."
"That's not true," argues Pansy. "I was deliberately selective."
We cross the street and skid down a hill that was filled with families on sleds earlier in the evening. The puppy is off her leash, barking and weaving and snapping at her red sweater. She tears a corner loose and threads dangle.
"Oh no, your little poo-poo sweater," says Pansy, attempting a futile mittened repair. The puppy growls and plays with the threads, rolling in the snow, inflicting further damage.
The car alarm still sounds, honking and flashing. I run further and further along the brink of the steep and slippery hill. Below us cars pass on the highway that runs like a river through a sunken valley. On good days, I can pretend it is a river and the noise and exhaust of the cars a constant tide pulling toward the unseen but believable ocean. Why are some things more believable when unseen?
And then, some things are less.
There is a stone fountain, silent for the season, a cherub rising from its middle, fat and insouciant, cheeks bulging to blow on a stone bugle. It has no penis, nor did it ever have one, neutered and ridiculous from its inception. On the far side of the fountain, I pull off my mitten and bend over the finger that is blessed with the ring. The diamond does not glisten as it should. I have run so fast, lungs splitting, that no one else is nearby. I hear their voices laughing and shrieking, spreading in all directions.
But here is Draco.
He pants as he falls at my feet. He buries his lean, white face in my lap and holds the exposed hand, draws the fingers into his mouth. I slip from the fountain's rim and into the snow, my knees bared beneath the coat that is not quite long enough, the boots that are not quite tall enough.
"We won't," I say. It is impossible to tell who is on top, who presses whom into the cold, whose lips avoid whose.
"We could," he says, but he doesn't.
"Let's roll down the hill," I offer. It seems to me to make no difference, one impulsive error or the other. It is not a river, after all. The cars are unknowing, brutal. It would not be a kiss either. It would be the end of the game.
We look at each other – artificial light from tall black lampposts, glare from the snow. We cannot stop smiling.
"You'll be okay," I say.
"I won't," he says, "I'm dying."
"You won't die," I say.
The smiles are torn and taut, the gravest smiles in the universe.
"You will," he says. "I will. We're all dying."
"Not yet," I say.
When the tumour was deemed inoperable, Pansy called to say she was throwing the party. The last fling. Or the first of many last flings, she said.
Oh no, I said to Draco, hanging up the phone. I can't do this.
Draco wrapped his arms around me, like he does when he doesn't know how else to care, and pinned me to him. I felt mummified by his embrace. One remedy for panic.
"It's not catching," Draco tells me, his breath bright, frozen heat.
"Okay," I say. "I'll kiss you. But why?"
"Because I want you to," he says.
Ahh. I lean in and against hi, wet and cruel, tongues and teeth, the scamper of blood through veins, flicker on the skin like shock. His hands press my ears, push me into the snow. I am fallen.
Sadness is warm, spreading like a leak, pooling inside my mouth.
Terry reaches the fountain. "Hey guys," he says casually, kicking sparks of snow onto my splayed boot. He sits heavily on the rim of the fountain and fumbles through his pockets.
"You don't smoke," I say when he pulls out a tarnished cigarette packet.
"And you're getting married," he says. Draco and I are still not parted. Draco wants to warm my red hand, the one crippled by the ring; he breathes on it as I sit up. My knees are numb.
"It's not what it looks like," I say.
Draco laughs. Still holding my hand, he lurches onto the fountain beside Terry. "It's exactly what it looks like," he says. "Give me one too."
The two of them fumble with the lighter, heads bent together, united. Before tonight, they were never willing to agree. But I am glad it is Draco sitting beside Terry on the fountain rather than me. in my mind is the inverted picture: me on the fountain beside Terry, Draco in the snow. I couldn't bear to partake in that scene. I would rather pretend sacrifice.
Pansy finds us next. "Oh my God, you're smoking? You gave him a fucking cigarette?"
"Pansy," says Draco.
"Give me that." She doesn't notice me knelt in the snow. She yanks the cigarette from Draco's hand and throws it, spinning and flaring. The puppy gives chase.
"Do you have any idea how enormous that dog is going to be?" I stand and walk toward it, though I can hardly bend my legs. I find the cigarette, glowing, undampened by the fiercely chilled snow, and put it to my lips. I draw lightly.
It's been two and a half years since I quit. The butt end is fat and awkward in my mouth, foreign and unwanted. But it is right to be wTerryg.
"Off the wagon?" slurs Padma. She and Harry hold hands as they approach.
"I'm so drunk, it doesn't count," I declare.
"How is it?" asks Harry. He is leading Padma, which is why he has her hand.
"Do you know those dreams where you're holding a cigarette and you can't remember how you got it and it's already too late because without even noticing or doing it on purpose or actually making a choice the cigarette has found you? And you're, like, this isn't me. I'm not doing this." I could be shouting, if only there were breath enough.
The puppy is at my laces again, tugging and growling. I stand firm.
"Do you know what I mean? Do you know that kind of dream?"
"Yes," says Harry.
I take one more drag and drop the cigarette into the snow, kneading it beneath the surface with the toe of my boot. My perfect new boots, perfect with this skirt; my perfect old skirt, perfect with these legs; my perfect familiar legs, perfect with this body; my perfect known body, uninvaded, far from mutiny, lit.
Pansy is holding Draco, smashing his face into her face, kissing him, so that he won't have to hear what I am saying. Her mittens press his ears.
Terry struggles upright, takes Padma by her free hand. With Harry on the other side, arms swinging, the three of them look like children playing a game: Red Rover, Red Rover, let Hermione come over. But I am loose.
I could kick free from the puppy's growl and snap. I could plunge to the snow, rolling rolling rolling, into the ravine and the endless currents of water pulsing, flashing, passing. Or I could turn and run back toward the nagging car alarm and the apartment with too many stairs where await more glasses of vodka or gin or Scotch or some sweet liqueur that will make me want to vomit. Draco will pour, his hands shaking uncontrollably, the lip of the bottle smacking the glass. A nightcap. I'll wake up hours later and stumble to the bathroom and expunge myself of all ill.
That is what I choose. Easier, of course. Less dramatic. Bloodless. There's probably a fence at the bottom of the hill anyway. There would be.
Hours later, Harry calls from the bedroom. "Do you need me, Hermione?" And he waits for an answer, for some return. He is patient, not because he needs to be, but because he is.
"Do you think Draco is really dying?" I say into the toilet. "Do you really believe that he will?"
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Author's Note: There we go.