A/N: R&R please!

Disclaimer: Do not own Harry Potter or associated characters/story lines. I do however own Melanie, her friends, family and the plot of this fic. Yay me!

Chapter Four:

Friends Made, Changed, And Lost

Kian Atkinson had been one of my closest friends since pre-school. All the witches and wizards in the area were sent to the same Muggle pre-school to lessen the change of widespread panic when one of them started doing something odd. Since toddlers couldn't control anything magical that they did there was a high chance that one of them would do something crazy like making all the chairs in the room fly around the room. That really happened by the way. They never could determine which of us did it. But it happened. It would be easier to deal with one or two scared pre-school teachers than twenty or thirty teachers across the city. It was at that pre-school that I met the people who would become a huge part of my life.

The first person was Kaya Lawrence who I would meet and become inseparable from by the fifth day of pre-school. She would become my best friend and stay my best friend for the rest of our natural born lives. Or so we have promised. It started during something our teacher had dubbed 'play time' and it meant just that: time to play. Now I've always been a I-want-what-I-want-I-get-what-I-want mind set kind of girl. I've never changed. I've always been that way. Even as a four and a half-year-old. So during 'play time' I wanted to play with blocks. This is a pre-school now, they have a lot of blocks. So the blocks Kaya Lawrence was playing with were not the only blocks in the room. Try telling that to a four and a half-year-old.

Try telling that to the four and a half year old me.

Kaya wouldn't share those blocks and that infuriated me. Nothing angered me more than a person who wouldn't share with the other children, namely me. When the teacher tried to pass off some other blocks as the same ones that Kaya was playing with and wouldn't make her share with me, I took justice into my own hands. How much damage could a four and a half-year-old do? I bit her. Straight on the hand. Then laughed. Want to know what she did? She bit me back. Then laughed, in my face.

That was the start of a beautiful friendship.

Then came Cam Osman. Cam was the new boy in town and we befriended him immediately. He came into the class about halfway through the year and seemed so withdrawn into himself because he didn't know anyone or the place he had been forced to call home. I think we scared him a bit when we ambushed him the third day he came to class. I mean we practically jumped him. But the look on his face was priceless. We had a nice conversation about becoming friends.

"Do you want to be our friend?" I asked, my head tilted to the side watching him.

"Yeah, do you want to be our friend?" Kaya repeated.

"Uh, sure." Cam replied.

And that was that. The three of us did everything together. Play time, nap time, recess, lunch time. We even stood together outside the school when our parents came to pick us up. That still hasn't changed...much.

Kian came into the picture only after Cam started to become gender conscious. That means he finally realized Kaya and I were girls. And we were his only friends. It was near the end of the year that he came up to us and demanded that we find another boy for him to hang out with. Make our group even. Two boys, two girls. Kaya picked the first boy who walked by us. It just happened to be Kian. I'm absolutely sure that we scared him.

He just happened to be walking by and Kaya stepped out in front of him, blocking his way. It's just crazy that it was Kaya and not me because that was something that I would have done. I had barely known her a year and I had already been a bad influence on her. It was short and sweet just like with Cam.

"Kian, you're going to come be friends with us and Cam." Kaya commanded forcefully, but somehow still in a sweet voice.

"Do I have to?" Kian stammered his eyes wide.

"Yes." Kaya nodded.

"Okay." Kian answered.

He may have been forced into the friendship, but it worked out. The four of us had been friends ever since. All through our Muggle elementary years we stuck together. We went to the same school and it was somehow arranged that the four of us ended up in the same class every year. For some reason I don't think it was a coincidence. It was probably the government's doing. Just like the pre-school. There were only about five or six witches or wizards at the school we went to. Ariolina Phillips was the fifth and a boy named Jason Carrigen was the sixth.

Then it came time to go into magical schooling. In the U.S. everything magical is intertwined with the non-magical. This meant that we were not separated from the Muggles in everyday life. In Europe there are separate 'worlds' for the wizarding and Muggles. Except for Muggle-borns you won't normally find a witch or wizard in the Muggle world. In the U.S. we're all intermixed. I walk down the same streets as the Muggles everyday. On the sidewalk you can't always tell if the person next to you is a witch or a Muggle.

The magical school in New York is run just like a Muggle school. We go to school during the day and then return home in the late afternoon. Our first year started right after Kian and I turned eleven, and right before Cam and Kaya turned eleven. It was exciting to be around, silly to say this way but here it goes, my own kind. It's kind of stupid, but it was so much fun finally being having permission to do magic all the time. Not that I ever did magic without permission before, cough cough.

We were the greatest, closest, do-everything-together friends...up until fourth year. We were fourteen. Teenagers. With hormones. That was just a joke. This isn't really all about teenage hormonal imbalances and whatnot. However, things changed. Some will argue whether it was for the best or the worst. Things changed between Kaya and Cam. They started fighting, all the time. Kian thought they had started to dislike each other and were drifting apart. I, however, knew them better then that. They hadn't started to dislike each other. They had started to like each other.

I think it was pretty much inevitable that we'd pair off. Being in such close proximity to each other on a daily basis, it was either grow to like the others more or get kind of sick of having them around. Or in my view that's what had to happen. But I could've been wrong. Anyway, it took almost three months for Kaya and Cam to sort through their issues with each other and become a couple.

Let's just say that was one of the longest years of my life. I didn't quite enjoy getting stuck playing mediator for them all the time.

That left Kian and me. It was hard not to feel that what if feeling. That little voice in the back of your mind that nags and pulls at your consciousness until you either scream or give into it. I gave into it. So when Kian asked me to the Spring ball, as more than just friends, I accepted. It was mid-April, by my fifteenth birthday we had been dating nearly four months. Kaya and Cam were going on six months.

With that, everything we had known about our friendships had changed. Everything about us had changed. Then this prediction came out of no where and everything was about to change again. And while the first time was for the better, it seemed the second would only be for the worst.