* summer, do your worst!

light your tinsel moon, and call on

your performing stars to fall on

headlong through your paper sky;

nevermore shall i be cursed

by a flushed and amorous slattern,

with her dusty laces' pattern

trailing, as she straggles by. *

-August, Dorothy Parker.


"Give up, mate, she's just not into you," Peter says to you.

Shooting him a glare, I mutter, "It's not that simple."

Remus's eyebrows draw together, and Sirius is scowling.

"I just can't get her out of my head. I want to give her up. I know it'll never happen. But my mind just won't let me, and the things I say sometimes aren't what I mean to say, or they come out wrong, you know, and she gets offended because she thinks I mean them when I don't because I don't want to hurt her. She makes my hair stand on edge," you complain.

Sirius glances up to your inky nest of hair and says, "We can tell."

With a growl, you try to flatten it as your friends dissolve into laughter around you.

Just then, the object of your fancy comes dancing into the room—although she's walking, but her pale limbs move with the fluidity of a ballet dancer, her hips gently swaying like palm trees in the breeze, her skirt brushing the skin just above the knees of her long legs—and your friends shut up.

"Look at her. Can't you see it?" you ask desperately.

Emotions flit through you as you watch your friend's face crumple. He says, "She's just a bird, Prongs."

She isn't just a bird. She is the rising sun. She wakes you up in the morning, and has the most brilliant yet opinionated mind you have yet to see. Her eyes have seen too much for her age, and her hair is the same brilliant scarlet as her personality. Change, creation, passion, fire; James has been hooked since the first word.

When she walks past you, she leaves a streak of patterned light behind her. She changes everything she touches.

"Hey, Lily? Go out with me?" you ask playfully. Against your will, your infamous smirk crosses your face. Maybe to hide the hopelessness you feel.

You shouldn't smirk at Lily, and you don't want to. You smirk at some girls, and Lily is definitely not some girl.

"No!" she yells at you, before stalking away to where her friends were.

Laughing, you hide your humiliation and once again give up.

You know it won't last.

You love her, you know it, but she's just not that into you.