Now, I know that my fifteenth birthday has been listed above as the first key event, but that's a night that I relive only in my worst nightmares, screams ripping from my throat to this day so many years later. I'm afraid that I can't bring myself to write about that night at just this moment, so we'll save that night for later in the story, when it becomes necessary to share.
No, we'll begin with the day after my fifteenth birthday—the thirty-first of August and the day before I was set to return to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for my fifth year. Seeing as my family's manor is nestled in the rolling hills of coastal Ireland, we were pretty isolated during most of the summer. Those were the days of me and my two sisters—Astoria and Daphne—chasing each other on brooms along the hillside and rolling in the currents of the shore under the midday sun. But those were juvenile acts. I had no idea how much we would grow up so quickly, or I would have relished the moments of that summer.
I remember on the last day of that summer, the morning after the worst night of my life, I half-limped into the kitchen to find the two grinning girls assembling a picnic together. It was a rare moment where Daphne and Astoria were getting on fabulously, seeing as they were usually at each other's throats. They gestured for me to follow them through the door as they skipped towards the old english oak growing at the top of a hill that acted as our backyard. I was so touched that for a moment, I just stood and watched them, before stooping down to collect my cat—who had been rubbing herself against my ankle for quite a bit of time—and following them.
"The sun is just brilliant today, don't you think, Xan?" Astoria cried out gleefully as soon as I was in earshot, rolling around in the grass despite the silken sundress that mum had warned her against dirtying up. She peered up at me with her shining blue eyes, the trim bangs of auburn hair falling away from her pale face and splaying across the grass.
"Oh, I most certainly agree!" I chimed, tumbling ungracefully down beside my sister, messing up my own hair to get a giggle out of her. My entire body ached, but I rolled once so that I was up shoulder-to-shoulder with her, and loosened my grip on my cat, Eebie, who looked at me with distaste. "Sorry, Eebs," I apologized weakly to the young beast, who dodged my pet to jump onto Astoria's chest. Astoria grinned her gap toothed eleven-year-old grin.
"Get up off the ground before mum or dad see you acting up, you gits," snapped Daphne, who was sitting against the trunk of the old tree, rifling through the picnic basket that she had just finished packing.
"Don't be so uptight, Daph, they're on an outing," Astoria retorted, turning onto her stomach and, in the motion, pushing a disgruntled Eebie onto the ground.
"One of us has to be," Daphne snapped back at Astoria, glaring daggers at me. "You know how he gets," she lifted a pomegranate from the woven basket and took a chomp out of it, red juice running down to her chin.
A dark chill momentarily fell upon the three of us. Daphne wiped her chin with the back of her hand and shuttered. She was so lovely, I thought. Both of my sisters were quite lovely, as we all shared our mother's long and slender figure and thick auburn hair. While I chose to let my cascade down my back in disarray, Daphne's was cropped rather short at that time, a silky bob that cradled her pallid face. Her eyes were elsewhere, though. Some memory of something Father must have said or done—a screaming fit, I'd imagine. I looked to my other side and Astoria's face was similarly twisted in the discomfort of some old memory. Little could they begin to imagine what I had endured from him. I reached out to stroke Astoria's hair.
There was no need for me to say anything, though, as the tense moment was broken by the sounds of Eebie attempting to crawl into the picnic basket. "Get out of there, you bugger," I warned the little menace off with one hand, pulling out a sweet roll for Astoria and a mint and berry sandwich that they had made for me. Still starved for attention, though, Eebie actually tried to take a bite out of my sandwich.
"Can you believe this?" I declared as the cat pecked again at my sandwich, breaking my sisters' contemplative silence and getting a giggle out of both of them as I pulled the sandwich towards myself, causing the silver ocicat to collapse in failure of her mission.
"I can't believe we're all three going this year," Daphne said dreamily, diverting her gaze. "I'm so happy," she whispered to herself, as if her happiness was a crime to be hidden. I worried about Daphne when we were at school. She was always so worried and quiet, and the other girls in her year could be quite nasty.
"I am too," I agreed, smiling at her. When she turned her head to look at me, though, all that I saw behind her eyes was guilt. And I thought to myself: she knows.
…
Somehow, I ended up being the one to push our cart through King's cross: one ridiculously overstacked cart, piled up with three trunks and the separate cages of all three of our personal pets. Astoria was almost buzzing as we enter the station that morning, having kept it bottled in around mum and dad. She was going on about what house she was going to be put in—hoping that, like her sisters, she would be placed in Slytherin, but also considering the other houses in a way that made me more than slightly uneasy.
"If you're not a Slytherin, then you aren't truly a pureblood—or a Greengrass," Daphne reminded not-so-pleasantly.
"That's not true, Tori, don't listen to a word she says," I had to interject almost immediately.
"We'll see whether father sends you a howler or not when you wind up in Gryffindor," Daphne chided, happy to be teasing
"I will not be placed in Gryffindor!" Astoria almost shrieked.
"Girls, get along," I said absently, arching my back to push the heavy cart forward. Something pinched on my left side, though, and I was left grasping at it, struggling for air.
"Let me take it," Daphne said curtly, pushing me aside and trying to steer.
"No, let me!" Astoria cried out in annoying sibling fashion, also grabbing onto the rolling cart and doing everything in her power to make Daphne's job more difficult. I thanked Merlin that she was only like that with Daphne, and not with me. Thanks to their struggle, though, all of our luggage ended up swinging around into a nearby post with a resounding thud.
"I'll be steering that, thank you very much," I slipped back between the two and, with no more aches from two nights ago acting up, led them towards the barrier between platforms nine and ten.
Once I had left a grinning Astoria with a horde of nervous first years and Daphne with Blaise Zabini—the one boy in her year who seemed agreeable—I settled down with Eebie in our own private compartment, confident in my friends' ability to find me. The first of them to show up was Greer Weist, one of my two oldest friends at Hogwarts. Beautiful Greer. She was glowing from the summer, her golden-blonde hair pulled into a plait down her back and her chocolate eyes glistening with the eternal sun of wherever she had gotten her current tan.
"Morocco?" I guessed and she grinned ear-to-ear, attempting to envelop me in one of her famous hugs. "No hugs, I'm sore," I said lamely and she backed off immediately.
"New exercise regiment?" She guessed, stretching out on the seat across from me and reaching out to scratch Eebie behind the ears.
"Spot-on," I responded, trying to hold down bile at the thought of that night, how one might refer to it as 'exercise.' "However are you so cunning, my dear?"
Greer's laugh had a similar effect to that of a baby: it enticed one to laugh along with her. That's how Shey found us: dissolved in laughter in our train compartment.
"Laughing without me, are we?" She asked, lugging her trunk in from the hall. Shey was my closest friend: together we made up the star team of chasers for Slytherin's current Quidditch lineup, as well as an agreed alliance against the other two girls in our year of Slytherin: Talia Dawley and Eliana Bulstrode. Those two were simply insufferable.
"Every moment spent without you is a laugh to me," Greer responded easily, gasping sharply as Shey sat on her pelvis.
"Say that to my face, wench," Shey giggled at Greer's discomfort.
"Every moment spent without you is a laugh to me," Greer said again, indignantly this time. Shey continued to slump down on top of Greer until the slight blonde finally cried out: "fine! mercy! you win!" And Shey stood up, smirking triumphantly.
"Still got it," Shey remarked to herself, picking up her trunk and throwing it onto the overhead racks, her muscles rippling tightly.
"Damn, speaking of new exercise regiments," I said, reaching out to feel Shey's toned bicep. "Where'd you get so fit?" Shey was the shortest of the three of us and had been the pudgiest up until this past break.
"Training with dragons," Shey said proudly. "One of my mum's cousin's son's something-or-other works with them down in Romania, and he invited me to come and help over the holidays. It's quite a workout."
"I had no idea that dragons inspired such muscle definition," Greer said, mock-admiringly.
Shey waved her hands in front of both of our faces simultaneously and said: "enough ogling about me. How were your breaks?" And Greer launched into a story of her fast-paced, highly-sexualized summer romance with a dazzlingly handsome healer-in-training whom she met while staying at her family's estate in Morocco. I, for the most part, kept my mouth shut. Greer and Shey knew that my home life wasn't much to speak of, so they didn't prod. If I wanted to say something, I would.
Greer was just arriving at a particularly nasty detail—a deep blush had long-since been present on both Shey's and my faces—when I decided that It was time for a walk and gathered my robes to go change in the loo. Shey eyed my suspiciously as I left—she was wondering why I wouldn't just change in the compartment with my two best friends, in front of whom I'd been changing multiple times a day for roughly the last five years. If she asked later, though, I could just say that Greer's hot-and-heavy storytelling was getting the best of me.
It was still quite early in the journey, so there was no real line for the loo, seeing as most people hadn't yet begun to change into their robes. Once I was locked in the compartment, I grabbed my long-sleeved black dress by its hem and pulled it over my head in one stroke, a bit afraid of what I might see in the mirror. There were dark bruises on my hips and waist, as well as around my upper arms. There were parts that stung and parts that shone darkly, but all-in-all I was in pretty decent shape. My white button-down uniform shirt hid everything. In just the buttoned shirt and my underwear, I could be anyone. There was nothing incriminating. I lifted my shirt, though, and tenderly touched the places on my hips where the bruises were the darkest. It would go away, soon enough. Then there'd be nothing there.
I was disturbed at that moment by a knocking at the door. "So sorry, just a moment," I called out, stepping into my pleated black skirt and beginning to unroll the knee-high soot-colored socks that I would moments later be slipping onto my slender legs, leaving only the ivory-pale skin of my thighs showing between the tops of my socks and the hem of my skirt. The last piece of the outfit—for now—was a button-down black cardigan sweater. It was trimmed with silver and green and was, by far, the most comfortable piece of clothing that I owned. I then gathered the bundle of fabric that was my discarded black dress beneath one arm and looked in the mirror. The face that looked back at me was my mother's, from photographs of her youth: pale skin, high cheekbones, strong eyebrows and deep-set crystalline blue eyes.
"I'm so sorry," I apologized to the girl who had been waiting behind me, whom I recognized immediately as Angelina Johnson, a Gryffindor from my year and a chaser on her house's quidditch team. "Wow! Hi, how was your summer, Angelina?"
"It was fine, y'know. Quite a bit of training," she shrugged. She and I got on fine, mostly because all of our conversations to date had been about quidditch.
"Oh I know what you mean," I sympathized, "sore all over for weeks," she laughed curtly at this, and I recognized that the formality of our conversation had run its course. She slipped into the loo without another word and I turned back down the train corridor towards my friends. For whatever reason, though, I felt no immediate urge to return to whatever story that Greer was telling about Bert—or was it Bernard?—pinning her against the wall of her family's pool house, snogging her senseless as his hands began to perform other tasks that made her go senseless in other ways. I decided to take a walk through the rest of the train before returning to them.
That night in the Great Hall is something of a blur to me. I remember moments. Professor McGonagall calling out Astoria's name, several moments of contemplative silence on the part of the sorting hat, a shared glance of excitement between myself and Daphne, and finally, the shriek of the hat: "HUFFLEPUFF!"
At that moment, I'm sure that all three of our jaws dropped. Astoria immediately locked eyes with me across the hall, horror spelled out across her expressions. Pansy Parkinson turned to look accusingly at Daphne, as if it was somehow her fault that her younger sister had been sorted into Hufflepuff. I nodded encouragingly at Tori as the Hufflepuff table broke out into applause.
As she moved hesitantly into the ranks of her new house and I privately knew that despite her morose attitude, she was in the right place. Astoria was much too gentle and trusting for Slytherin house. She belonged where people would understand her, not use her best traits against her as weaknesses. When I glanced at Daphne again a moment later, she was glaring down at the table.
"Care to retire?" Greer murmured in my ear at that moment and I quickly abandoned worry about my sisters, knowing that Greer would have brought a fine-malt firewhiskey back from Morocco with her.
When we got up to the dormitory, though, Talia and Eliana—our two other roommates—were already perched together on Eliana's bed, gossiping about who had done what over the summer. They immediately fell silent as we entered the room.
"We'll just be a moment," Greer murmured to them as she walked over her trunk to begin searching for a bottle. Talia glared straight at me for a few more moments before casting a silencing charm around Eliana's bed and continuing to gossip.
"They might honestly be the nastiest two girls I've ever met in my life," Shey insisted as we climbed the stairs up to the astronomy tower several minutes later.
"Yeah, but they're harmless," Greer sighed. "You know who's truly nasty is that Fred Weasley."
"You mean one of the twins?" I asked. I knew the two of them vaguely from Quidditch—they were beaters on the Gryffindor team. I know that I should have hated them, that I was in a position in life where I was to be pitted against those like the Weasleys, but I couldn't ever bring myself to truly live up to that hate-fueled rivalry built around essentially nothing. So I just knew them from Quidditch.
"Yeah, just one of them," Greer said.
"Yeah but how can you tell them apart?" Shey asked, brow furrowed.
"Fred's the one that hexes us in the hall. At first, I thought that it was both of them, just because they're always together. But every time a Weasley twin hexes a Slytherin, it's Fred. I'm sure of it."
I bit my lip at this news, "why do you suppose that it's that way?" I asked. "I mean, they're identical twins…" ah, how little I knew.
"That doesn't mean they're the same person," Shey reminded. "Maybe he's just cruel, and his brother isn't. He's just a cruel person," that seemed to be the end of the conversation, as Greer chose that moment to uncork the firewhiskey, but it was a conversation that I would reflect on often, and was likely instrumental of my original attraction to the aforementioned boy in the weeks leading up to The First Incident with Fred Weasley.
hope y'all enjoyed the first chapter