I took a shallow breath of the stifling, heated air smothering so heavily against me, knowing exactly who was behind me and exactly how much I wished they were instead lying at the bottom of Hogwarts Lake. For a little while, I attempted to pretend that my follower didn't exist, and walked briskly across the emerald lawn that sloped, velvety and sunny, down towards the Forbidden Forest. Ah. To no avail. A twig cracked behind me as I continued walking. Dammit, I thought in supreme annoyance, quickening my pace and ignoring the sudden rapidness of my pulse.
I could hear the…thing…behind me hastening to catch up with me. That's IT! "JAMES POTTER! WOULD YOU STOP BLOODY FOLLOWING ME?" I finally shrieked, turning to face my pursuer. That cocky, arrogant nitwit…Blast. He's looking disarmingly attractive today.
His brown eyes met my own with a warmth and familiarity I was not eager to reciprocate at that moment, the stupid twat. "Oh, is that what I'm doing?" he inquired with unconvincing innocence, tilting his head in that way that was so adorable and that he damn well KNEW worked every time…
Not this time, I thought grimly, surprised at the ease with which a scowl twisted my face.
I turned abruptly away from my so-called boyfriend, trying desperately to ignore the loud staccato of my heart, almost certain that he, too, could hear it. I walked as quickly as I could, hoping to put as much distance between the Most Annoying Marauder and myself as possible. If he follows me again, I'll just KILL—
A hand, large, strong, and tanned, closed very rapidly around my arm. Make that the Most Persistent Marauder. "Lily, just hang on a minute and tell me what's wrong," he urged in a husky voice, his grip on me tightening ever-so-slightly. Uh-oh. He's using his Sexy Quidditch Player act to full advantage. Time to get out of here, Lily.
Swallowing my pride, and any progress that the women's movement had made up until that date, I applied the first tactic that sprung to mind: hyper-sensitive girlishness. "JAMES! Let go, you're HURTING ME!" I screamed, struggling to wrench my arm from his grasp. To my relief, his grip slackened and I successfully reclaimed possession of my limb.
I turned to face him again, gritting my teeth so hard that I had a sudden, fleeting fear of destroying a filling, and in the reflection of his glasses, I was confronted with my own angry face. Good Lord, I look like Petunia, I discovered, horrified. It was the truth. My eyes were narrowed to angry slits, and my lips were pursed so tightly that they nearly disappeared inside of my mouth.
"Lily…God, Lily, you know I didn't mean it," he began softly, his expression startled, with the slightest visible edge of "Oh, shit". He reached for my hand, but I was not letting him off the hook that easily. Oh, no, dearest. You've got a bit more than that to be apologizing for.
"Save it, James," I hissed, so coldly that I wouldn't have been surprised if I had coughed up an icicle. Rubbing my arm quite deliberately, I flounced away from him, and he seemed to have finally gotten the hint through his thick skull, because this time he didn't follow.
I stomped into the common room, so angry that I was shaking slightly. Somehow, it seemed, my anger had increased threefold, just on the walk up from the grounds to Gryffindor Tower. Only James Potter can bring out the best in me quite so successfully.
I started to storm past Sirius, who was lounging in the wingback chair nearest the dormitory stairs, but he seized a handful of my robes as I passed. What is it with Marauders being all grabby today? "What's got you so worked up, Lils?" he asked lazily, taking in what I'm certain was a very vivid flush painted across my face; classic Evans heredity burning bright. My coloring was not a good one for hiding one's emotions.
I sucked in a breath and whipped around to face him. "Prongs," I seethed, yanking my clothing out of his grip and glaring at him with all of the James-Related Crazy I was feeling at that moment.
To my extreme aggravation, his response was not at all appropriate to the situation. "Ahh, I see. You two fight like an old married couple, really," he laughed heartily, flashing me the toothy grin that had earned the hearts of countless simpering, spineless girls the school over. Gag me with a broom.
"Look, Padfoot," I shouted, my fury bubbling over, my hands finding their way to clamp onto my hips in my second Petunia-sort-of action that day. "I'm sure he'd much rather be married to bloody Narcissa!" At my own words, tears announced their rather unwelcome appearance to my eyes by sending one sliding down my nose, and I attempted, unsuccessfully, to blink the rest of the buggers back before Sirius noticed.
Sirius looked as though I'd just informed him that I was carrying the lovechild of Severus Snape. "What?" he croaked, his grayish eyes widening to the size of Galleons, and the Most Coveted Mouth of Hogwarts flopping open in an unattractive imitation of a dead fish.
"You heard me," I mumbled, my quite justified anger morphing with incredible speed into crushing self-pity. And the stupid wanker has no clue that I saw him…I zoned out for a moment, remembering the scene…
James had been sitting on a bench next to Narcissa, who was strangely devoid of her boy-toy, Lucius Malfoy, in the courtyard near the greenhouses. And they were talking. Trusting and naive, I assumed their little pow-wow was harmless. Unfortunately, it seemed I was quite wrong. Suddenly, the little tramp put her hand over his, leaned over and plants one on him! Right on the lips! MY boyfriend's lips! I cursed her from the tips of her bleached-out hair to her obviously charm-enhanced bosom. Not to mention that James hadn't exactly seemed reluctant to find himself swapping spit with the slut of Slytherin. Walked right on by, I did, succeeding in what felt like the colossal effort of holding back tears…
"Lils?" came Sirius' voice softly, snapping me back to the present. I glanced at him, and it wasn't until I saw the concern that had edged out his usual pretty-boy grin that I realized that several more of those very annoying tears had made a mess of my face.
"Lils, what happened?" he asked very carefully, as though afraid that any wrong word would intensify my crying. It appeared that he, too, subscribed to the male belief that too many tears may eat away at a woman's skin, and therefore tears were a very harmful force to be reckoned with. I let out a quivery sigh and flopped unceremoniously into the chair across from him. For just a moment, my voice went on strike. I cleared my throat, playing the tear-gas-armed National Guard to this little protest, suddenly feeling that I'd been sucked beneath a giant, extremely cold wave of misery.
"I saw James and Narcissa kissing," I whispered, studying my shoes intently in lieu of looking at Sirius and letting my hair fall in a red curtain over my face.
"WHAT!" Sirius yelped, jumping to his feet. I peered up at him through the rather effective shroud of my own hair and bit my lip.
"Did I stutter?" I spat, glaring up at him. Sirius appeared lost for words, a phenomenon that was second in rarity only to the occasions on which Severus Snape washed his hair.
Deciding to circumvent the inevitable feeble excuses that James' best friend was bound to come up with in his defense, I stood abruptly and started to clomp off towards the dormitory.
But I paused and turned to face Sirius, who was in the process of closing the distance between us. "Padfoot?" I began meekly, not sure how to phrase my question. I just needed him to know that this was strictly a James-and-Lily problem, and he was most certainly not allowed to go tell James that I knew what he had done. He would find out soon enough.
"Yeah?" His voice was kinder than usual, and it was slightly gratifying to know that one of the most arrogant boys in the school could still muster up a soft spot for old practically-married Lily Evans. However, a beat later, his skin paled slightly, and a look of horror stole across his face. "No way, Lily, no way in HELL," he declared vehemently, shaking his head in a sort of panic.
"No way what?" I asked in confusion, unable to fathom what on earth was wrong with him now. Sirius did have a penchant for Firewhisky, but he wasn't falling over or acting a drunken lecher, so a bottle of Ogden's Finest was not to blame.
Sirius continued to shake his head as fervently as if he were trying to see how much he could get his brain to roll around in his skull, and his eyes were opened to their fullest extent. "There's absolutely no way you can convince me to interrogate Prongs," he stated, making a slicing motion with his hand. "No way. Zip. Nada. So not getting involved."
Oh, the nerve of him! My hands reflexively curl into white-knuckled fists that, though small, have proven themselves on occasion to be more than effective. My infamously short fuse had officially run out. There's only so much male idiocy a girl can take in one day without being driven to the brink of insanity. I feared I was nearly there, if in fact Padfoot had not already succeeded in shoving me off headfirst.
"Sirius, SHUT UP!" I exploded, glowering at him fiercely enough that, in a perfect world, he would have been reduced to itty-bitty Black globules, and completely aware that my face was probably an attractive shade of angry, boiling red by now. "Not only did you completely miss the point, but you've got your head so far up your own arse that you failed to notice that I DO NOT NEED YOUR HELP!"
With that, I spun around and ran up the stairs in a fury, ignoring his reproachful calls of "Lily? Jesus, Lily, calm down. Lily, come on…"
By the time I had reached the dormitory, my anger had cooled somewhat, and I felt completely and utterly drained. What a day. And it's only five o'clock.
I trudged over to my four-poster and leapt quite inelegantly onto it, warranting a horridly loud shriek of protest from the bedsprings. Ignoring this, I flung myself onto my back and stared vacantly up at the velvety red canopy above my head.
So James…and Narcissa. He's cheating on me with that disgusting tart. Perfect. I groaned loudly and covered my still-warm face with my hands.
As if I don't already have enough reasons to hate her. I ticked off the list on my fingers.
One, she thinks that just because she's Sirius' fourth cousin once removed or something, she has the inherent right to use him as a dating service. She tried unsuccessfully to seduce Remus, she had poor Peter doing her homework for a month and a half, and she had a little fling with James before we got together. Not only that, I grimaced. But once she hooked up with Lucius, she became bent on setting up all of her drippy girlfriends, too.
This wasn't really helping my mood any, but I continued to revel in hatred of Narcissa. Two, she's always talking about how she's shagging that horrid Lucius Malfoy…like he's some sort of spectacular catch…Three, she thinks Snape is all right, which is a terrible misjudgment of character on her part, but she certainly doesn't seem to think so…
I was looting despondently through my mind for number four, when I heard a timid voice, quivering in a soft Irish brogue, saying "Lily? Lily, are you all right?"
I looked up, mentally kicking myself for forgetting to draw shut the draperies surrounding my bed, and met the large doe eyes of Shay Sullivan.
Shay and I weren't really…friends, per se. In fact, I really didn't like her at all. I wasn't much of a "girl's girl", as they say, because I spent far too much time with Sirius, Remus, Peter, and…that other guy.
I forced a smile onto my face. "I'm fine, Shay, thanks."
Shay's wide-eyed expression of concern didn't so much as flicker, and without my permission, took a seat at the foot of my bed, her chin-length sandy bob swaying slightly against her jaw.
"Lily, you can't fool me!" She gave me such a patronizing smile that I had a sudden, irresistible urge to push her violently off of my bed. I only glared at her in return. Apparently, my glare was somehow telling, because her mouth dropped quite suddenly open, and her hand flew to cover it. "Oh, gracious, is this a-" She lowered her voice slightly, despite the fact that she and I were the only people in the room. "-BOY problem?"
Argh. Must she be so…correct? Deciding that I simply wouldn't answer, I flopped rudely back down onto my pillow, hoping she'd get the hint.
Her gasp of sympathy was so dramatic and so coated in Shay's special brand of innocent, false sincerity that my skin crawled. "Oh, Lily, I'm so SORRY!" she exclaimed, and the pity in her voice was like a smack in the face. Since my shoulders were back against my pillow, she lay a hand across the part of me that was nearest her, which just happened to be my right shin. "Oh, dear, don't worry. It'll all turn out right in the end." She literally sounded like a grandmother. All she needed was a little tin of gingersnaps and a pair of crochet needles sticking out of her pocket.
It was just too much. I jerked my leg away from her condescending little pat and got out of bed very quickly. What am I to her, a charity case? She doesn't even like me. I appraised her coolly. And I find it hard to believe she has any illusions that I don't feel the same way about her.
"W-well…if you ever need a listening ear, you know you can come to me," she said, with such unbearable sweetness that I'm sure the angels all felt the sudden urge to take a Maalox and have a lie-down.
"Gag me, Shay," I snapped, and strode right back out of the dormitory. Forget it, I'll take Padfoot over Miss Sweet'n'Low any day, I decided, hoping against hope that I would not find James Potter waiting for me in the common room.