Still fuming over her embarrassing defeat in Potions, Lily Evans strode across the Entrance Hall, scattering a group of nervous looking first years as she strode through them.

Her angry stride was broken, however, when a pair of hands clamped down on her shoulders from behind.

"Lily-girl! What's the rush?" Lily turned to stare into the beaming face of Terry Turpin.

A smile broke onto her face and she pulled the Ravenclaw into a hug. "Terry! God I've missed you!"

"Calm down, Lily-girl, it was only a few months of summer, not a few years." But his twinkling eyes as he spoke betrayed the laughter behind the jibe. "Although I won't pretend I wasn't hurt by your avoidance of me these last couple of days…"

Lily punched his arm playfully. "Summer for you may have been a wonderful, blissful couple of months with all the joys a full-blooded wizard can enjoy in the wizarding world, but I was cut off! Trapped! In the muggle suburbia, no less! With the most muggled muggle of all – my sister!"

Sympathy crossed Terry's face. "That bad was it?"

"Worse."

He pulled his face into a jaunty kind of smile, attempting to be encouraging. "Oh well, you're back at Hogwarts again! You can relax now."

"Relax?" Lily asked, raising an eyebrow. "In our fifth year? With our owls looming and the professors all breathing down our necks and giving us lectures on how we can't afford to relax?"

Terry laughed. "You should have been in Ravenclaw, Lily. You'd fit right in. I think a few of the girls are already showing signs of impending breakdowns. Lucy Bradfurst came back from Transfiguration last night and sat down staring at a wall, breathing much too heavily, for over an hour. And it's only the third day of term."

"Oh no… if the Ravenclaws aren't coping, how am I meant to?"

"Oh calm down, Lily-girl. You're one of the best in our year! You'll do fine."

Stunned momentarily by the compliment, Lily waved it off. "No I'm not. I'm not even pure-blood. And my euphoria potion was a complete disaster today in Potions!" She added when Terry opened his mouth to protest about her comment about blood.

"Although that was partly due to sabotage," she continued, remembering her anger. "Some jerk decided it would be funny to steal my fennel root."

"Why'd they do that?" Terry asked, looking genuinely baffled.

"Isn't it relatively obvious?"

"No… not really?"

Sighing wearily, Lily raked a hand through her long red hair. "Forget it. You wouldn't understand: you're pure-blood. Listen, let's just go into lunch, I'm starving."

Frowning slightly, Terry followed Lily's lead and headed into the Great Hall where the mass of the student body were sprawled out along four long tables in a noisy mess.

"I'll be in the library after dinner if you wanted to join me later." Terry said, pausing just inside the large doors to the hall. Doing her best to pull a weak smile onto her face Lily nodded. "I'll have to see how I go, but I might see you."

Flashing her one last smile, Terry gave a cheerful wave and walked away towards the Ravenclaw table, where he sat with a group of guys, a few of whom had their noses buried in books but greeted him as he sat nonetheless.

Glancing at the Gryffindor table, Lily saw to her dismay that the dark haired boy who had boasted of stealing her root was sitting nearby, having somehow beat her to the Great Hall. Next to him, the dreadlocked boy was tossing small tomatoes in the air for him to explode with his wand, much to the delight and laughter of a small boy sitting across from them, and a gaggle of giggling fourth year girls looking on with adoring eyes.

Lily sighed again and made her way to the other end of the table. Not passing any familiar, friendly faces, Lily sat alone and mechanically reached for a buttered roll.

Pulling a book from her bag at random and propping it up on the table before her, she tried desperately to concentrate on the words.

But the nagging feeling attached to her sinking heart kept distracting her.

Lily loved Hogwarts. Loved the castle. Loved the grounds. Loved the history. Loved the classes, and the magic she learned in them. She felt more at home here than she had growing up in the muggle world, with the constant fear that she would be exposed as the freak she had thought she was. The one responsible for all those little unexplained "accidents" that kept occurring. Here at Hogwarts she wasn't treated as a freak. She was surrounded by other freaks, so to say. Here at Hogwarts she found she could be happy. Yet sometimes… sometimes even here she felt like an outsider. As though she was only second rate. Four years of off-hand comments and snide remarks left a bitter imprint on her.

Of course Terry wouldn't understand the significance of her fennel root being stolen. He had never known the stigma of being muggle-born.