Potential CW for this chapter and the next: bullying

10.

On November first, two years following the disastrous gala, Harry yawned as he sat at the back of a classroom. He was tired: his mother, for the third year in the row, had woken him in the night to share her memories of when he was a baby. After a sight like that, a boy did not sleep. He could not sleep, for fear that he, like her, would not know the difference between sleeping and waking. The horror. The shrill voice. The Green Light.

In the classroom, the children were oblivious to the history his mind dwelled on. Their minds were, for the most part, focused in anger on the clock.

"Children," the teacher said. Her voice had the harshness of the local dialect, the one that Harry had always known. "As you can see, bullying is not tolerated here. Until whoever does this comes forward, we will all sit, in silence, waiting. It doesn't matter if the bell rings. We will wait."

They had been sitting for an hour already. On returning from their time in the yard, there had been a commotion when one of the desks was found filled with grass snakes. The boy whose desk it was, Claude, had cried so hard he had to leave the room. The groundskeeper had been called in to remove the snakes, which complained in loud hisses about being disturbed from the warm dark place they had been found to sit, and the class had been returned to order. Then they sat in silence, while the teacher waited for the culprit to come forward.

In truth, Miss Lapointe's heart was still pounding in her chest. She had no idea what to make of the situation. Having been raised running around in the fields of an abandoned housing development of one of the local villages, she had no fear of snakes, but still the sight of so many gave her stomach a turn. How anyone could have gotten so many into the classroom was beyond her—and her usual suspect was, in this case, the victim. The remaining boys in his posse were hardly laughing.

One child in the room had gone pale and was shaking in his seat. Nicolas Baudin. That did not surprise Miss Lapointe. Nicolas was a short boy with asthma, and Claude's most recent victim. The staff had not caught the bullies in any action, and Nicolas was far too timid to speak up for himself, so Claude's crime had, as usual, gone unpunished. Miss Lapointe had no doubt in her mind that Nicolas had no part in this incident. She supposed that he was imagining the terror that Claude would wreak on him if no one came forward, and almost pitied the boy shaking in his seat.

The whole class was silent as the bell rang. The children looked at her expectantly, but Miss Lapointe did her best to remain stone-faced. She considered letting the girls go, but a moment after chided herself for the stereotyping. Girls could be just as cruel as boys. Worse, when their minds were set on it. This was only her third year teaching, but she had gone to school. She remembered.

Miss Lapointe sighed. This was exactly what she had learned to hate about her job. She had thought—a smart girl like her, shouldn't she share that, help shape the children of the country? She had thought. In truth, she had been carrying an idealized vision of children, thinking that if she were simply nice to them, they would be nice in return, and through that circle of niceness she would somehow shape them into brilliant students who loved to learn from her as much as she loved to teach them. Well, she had succeeded in that sense: the students loved her as little as she loved them. But she was not a woman who gave up so easily. Maybe teaching had not been the romantic career of goodness she had envisioned, but she would not let that defeat her. She would show these children at least something, before they were passed onto the next teacher.

One of the girls raised her hand tentatively. The other stared at her, but Miss Lapointe could see by the lack of guilt in her face it had nothing to do with the incident. "Yes, El?" she asked.

"Miss," the girl said. "Miss, some of us have to take the bus back to the villages. If we don't catch the bus, we'll not be able to go home, miss."

"That is true," Miss Lapointe said. "And this is a difficult situation, isn't it? But that is what happens, El, when this sort of incident occurs. We cannot just let bullying slide."

The children looked at each other in shock. She remembered having to catch the bus out of the town. The villages did not have their own schools, so they all gathered here, in this town just large enough to warrant one, but that meant the children had to be bussed over all together. Mostly their parents were farmers, or, if not that, were one of two workers in a store or café or bar. They could not spare the time to fetch their children. Miss Lapointe knew this too deeply: her own father had worked in a granary and her mother had been far too busy caring for her other six children to worry about one missing the bus. If one missed it in the morning, they spent the day helping out around the house. If they missed it in the evening, they had to wait until their father got off work at nine, and then the hour it took for him to drive out to pick them up. No, Miss Lapointe would not hold them so long that they would miss the bus. She looked at the clock, and gave it eight minutes. Enough the children would have to run, but not so much that they would be in any real danger.

The minutes ticked down with the children exchanging glances in growing alarm. The ones who lived in town—about a third—were not concerned over getting home, but they longed to be free of the oppressive atmosphere of the classroom in punishment. Many of the village children were sitting half out of their seats, prepared to bolt the moment she gave the word.

As the seventh minute ticked away, Miss Lapointe found herself disappointed yet again. She prepared her speech on why bullying was a horrible thing, and a warning that they would be losing their yard time the next day, but before she could clear her throat to voice it, the horrible scraping of a chair against the hardwood floors sounded in the classroom, making several students jump. She looked up.

The boy who stood in the back of the classroom was one of the village children. He wasn't one of the typical farmers or villagers, no. He lived out in the old estate that had been in ruins for ages. His mother, as far as she understood, was single, and English, and had short hair that made the older women whisper lesbian under their breath. But she had never had any trouble with James Jeannot. He was a quiet child, and played equally with the main groups of children. He never bothered any of the other children, and none of them ever bothered him. His school work was always done decently, and he had never caused trouble in the classroom.

"Yes, James?" she asked, but was certain that this was, in fact, the true confession. A quiet boy like him wouldn't speak up otherwise. "I put the snakes in Claude's desk, Miss Lapointe," he said. Most of the children gaped. He had probably known several since he had moved to France, so they too thought this was out of character. But how well did any of them really know the boy?

"Very well," she said slowly. "Mr. Jeannot, please come with me. The rest of you can pack up."

The class was a flurry of activity in the next seconds. She kept an eye on the boy as he came forward; there were a few shoulders in his way, but nothing serious. Now that she saw him among the rest of his classmates, she realized James was almost as small as Nicolas, and not so pudgy. She wondered that she had not noticed before, but he could be the prime target for bullies. She imagined his father must have been Asian or Indian, somewhere along; she'd met his mother once and she clearly was not, but the boy had tan skin that most of the children had lost this late in the year, and his eyes, beneath the round glasses, were so dark they felt unnatural. As he was quite small, he had never caught her eye, but to a bully the unnoticed were prime targets.

He stood in silence as she waited a few moments for the rest of the children to stream into the

cloakroom, then followed as she locked the classroom door. She was unnerved by James' silence. He wasn't crying or muttering, or laughing at having nearly gotten away with his prank. He didn't say a thing, and she couldn't see his face, but she didn't imagine there to be any guilt written on it. He didn't seem the type of boy that would feel guilt. The thought disturbed her.

They made their way down the hall to the teachers' office. Luckily, most of the other teachers would still be in their classrooms; most filled the hour after classes ended with grading, or left immediately following the bell. The few staff members passing through nodded as they entered, and old Mrs. Norman, the year one teacher, even said hello.

"Good afternoon, Jaime," she said fondly. "Did you miss the bus? Don't worry, your sister made it alright."

James smiled at her vaguely, but didn't say anything. Mrs. Norman looked to Miss Lapointe for answers. She shook her head and hurried James along to the couches near the corner, where he sat while she hurried to the secretary's desk.

"Hey, Di," she said. "Could you put in a call to Mrs. Jeannot? The mother of James, my class. Tell her I need her to come in for a meeting about her son. Urgently."

The woman pulled out a book labeled 'Lapointe' and started flipping through the pages. "What's the matter?" She asked, then leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, "Is it about the snake incident?"

"Yes," said Miss Lapointe. The secretary reached James' page, where his school portrait stared up at her.

"Oh!" the secretary exclaimed, tracing down to Mrs. Jeannot's phone number. "Him? But he's such a sweet boy!"

"Is he? I don't think I've ever heard a word out of him that wasn't strictly called for."

"Probably not," Di agreed, even as she reached to dial the phone. "But you know last year, when I was covering in the library because Jacqueline was out? He used to—yes, Mrs. Jeannot?"

Miss Lapointe left Di to sort out things with Mrs. Jeannot and returned to the couches. James had his feet up so he could wrap his arms around his knees. The teacher was going to scold him, but it was such a pathetic pose she could not bring herself to. Instead she took a seat across from him and looked—really looked—at the boy.

Underneath the odd round glasses, the boy's dark eyes were ringed pink, but his face was still. He stared back at her, expression caught between defensive and resigned. It was an odd mix. There was something else as well, but was it guilt? Fear? Pride? Underneath his silence she could not tell. Maybe she was imagining everything. His darkish skin was strangely slack.

"How did you do it?" she asked at last, as Di droned on in the background. The boy shifted, his head tilting in dog-like confusion.

"Aren't you going to ask me why?"

"Don't talk back to me," she said, but paused. "We'll get to that. How did you do it?"

James shrugged. "I found them outside, and picked them up and carried them back into the classroom. Snakes like dark, warm places, you know."

"I lock the classroom after lunch," she said. James looked up, like he was trying to remember something, but then shook his head.

"It wasn't locked, or I wouldn't have been able to get in."

She bit back a sigh. "And that many snakes? How were you able to get them all in?"

"The way anyone would, I suppose," he said. "They're really gentle creatures, at least with humans. They're too afraid of us to be otherwise."

She had never heard snakes described as gentle before.

"There must have been twenty in his desk, at least."

"Thirty three." At least he did not look like he would smile. This would be much more difficult if he found the situation amusing in some way, but he didn't seem to. That was reassuring to her, reassuring that this would not be a repeated case.

"Why did you do it?" she asked at last, when the silence between them had grown heavy. The boy's face grew more still, unnerving in the same way as his silence.

"Claude's a bully," he said, his voice a bit quieter, but somehow more resolved. "He's a bully and no one does anything about it."

"So you decided to bully him in return?"

At last, in the tiniest hitch of breath, the boy began to show some emotion beyond coolness. "You didn't do anything when he took Nicolas' lunch."

"Do you think I should have taken his lunch, to be fair, then?" she asked. "To just repeat the cruelty onto him? Do you think that sort of cyclic hate solves anything?"

"I…. don't know what that means."

"It means that when someone hurts you, you want to hurt them, and then they want to hurt you, and on and on and—"

"I didn't want to hurt anyone!" the boy cried, but then he shut his mouth and locked his jaw. She couldn't get a read from his eyes. As dark as they were, she couldn't try to understand them. It bothered her. Her eyes drifted around his face. His brow, she noticed, was a shade lighter than the rest of his face, though most of it was hidden under his fringe of ebony hair. His cheek wobbled, like he was physically forcing himself to stay still so he would not say anything else.

"You didn't?" she echoed, incredulous. "James, you put thirty-three snakes in Claude's desk. He had to go to the nurse's; they were scared he might hyperventilate at the shock."

"I know." He almost smiled—almost, but the look on his face turned into one of horror. "He's a vile, nasty person," he said, but his voice was small, and with none of that strength any more.

"Do you believe that, or are you trying to justify what you did?"

"I believe it," he said, and she believed him. But his voice remained small. "He's mean for no reason, and to people who won't stand up for themselves."

"So you think it's your job to stand up for them?"

"Someone has to!" he said fiercely. And he looked up and glared, like somehow this was her fault. "You certainly haven't."

That hit her in the gut. Here she was, trying to solve one incident of bullying, only to be pulling on the latest link in a whole chain. How little of the children's world was she seeing? She expected so little of them, yet they surpassed her worst expectations. Still, it was her chastising this boy, not the other way around.

"So you became the bully," she said.

"I—" He swallowed his words, and his gaze slipped to the side. But then he seemed to blink, collecting his fragmented emotions back together. "He hurt my sister," he said, much calmer. "And only someone vile would do that."

"And someone vile deserves to be hurt?"

He did not respond.

Miss Lapointe sighed, sitting back into her armchair. This was certainly turning out to be a much more complicated matter than she had wanted to deal with. She had hoped it would just be a kid who would admit it: he wanted Claude to suffer because Claude was a bully. But James refused to admit it, and so would refuse to admit he was in the wrong. Clearly he knew that he was not responsible for this sort of justice. But at the same time, he was also apparently expecting that she would be the one to deal it out, and she had failed. What was a child supposed to do, when he saw adults not raising a finger to cease injustice? Certainly he had not seen everything—they were trying to catch Claude in the act, so he could be taught an appropriate lesson—but then again, he was among Claude's pool of potential victims, so it must be a much more urgent matter to him than her.

They sat staring at each other for a good long while, until James once again lost his composure and slumped back in his seat too, his posture matching hers.

"What did Claude do to your sister?" she asked a few minutes later, when she remembered. He looked up again.

"What?"

"You said he hurt your sister."

The boy just stared at her. "Why?" he asked. "You're not going to do anything about it, anyways."

They waited in silence for some twenty minutes more. Finally Liliane Jeannot came through the front office. "Miss Lapointe," Di called back to them. "Mrs. Jeannot is here."

Is seemed too soon. James was from one of the villages; it should have taken his mother longer to get here. But they did live out on the estate, so, she mused, it was highly likely the Jeannots were both wealthy and eccentric. Mrs. Jeannot may very well have sped all the way here in some ridiculous car. Or she may have been reached at work—where did Mrs. Jeannot work? Miss Lapointe tried to remember as she stood, but she had only seen the woman once, and never spoken personally.

She led James out the door beside Di's desk, and they emerged in the office on the other side. Despite wracking her memories to recall the woman's profession, she was unprepared for the sight of the woman that stood waiting. In the most simple terms, she was beautiful. She looked like her son, it was true: the same silky black hair, though hers was loosely curled around her face; tan skin, though lighter than her son's; grey eyes. She was dressed in a pinstriped pencil skirt and matching blazer over a simple white blouse, as though she had just come from a secretary job in the city. James seemed to stiffen at the sight of her; Miss Lapointe wondered if this was in fact a woman coming off work, though she could not guess where Mrs. Jeannot could work within a half hour drive where such attire would be common.

"Miss Lapointe," she said gravely. Although Miss Lapointe wasn't sure she was not the same age as this woman, she suddenly felt very young. "I am not fond of being called out. Your secretary mentioned an incident, and was quite insistent."

"Yes," the teacher said. "Yes. Would you like to come sit down? I'm afraid we need to have a bit of a chat with James here."

The woman gestured to the plain armchairs in the office waiting area. "Won't here do?"

"I don't see why not," Miss Lapointe agreed. She felt, for some reason, like she was giving in, though it was a perfectly reasonable suggestion. The three sat at the three armchairs, and Di went back to her typing. Strange, Miss Lapointe thought. Three seemed like an odd number of armchairs to equip the sitting room. She had never noticed before.

"James," Mrs. Jeannot was saying before the teacher realized it. "Would you like to tell me what you've done?"

The boy shook his head.

"James."

His shoulders sunk, and he mumbled something. His mother did not so much as bat an eyelash.

Finally he said something, a bit louder, in English. Miss Lapointe spoke English decently after university, but she wasn't in practice and hadn't been expecting it, either.

"What?" Mrs. Jeannot asked, in French.

"I put snakes in Claude's desk."

To her credit, Mrs. Jeannot did not say anything, but confusion did reach her face. "Snakes?"

"He put thirty three, by his count, in Claude's desk," Miss Lapointe clarified. Mrs. Jeannot raised an eyebrow, though she seemed almost amused. She shook her head, and the expression faded.

"James," she chided. "Why would you do something like that?"

"He broke Holly's horse!"

It was the first time since his mother arrived that his passions were raised. The teacher was puzzled by the statement, but assumed that Holly was his sister and her horse was some toy. The intense response did not seem to faze his mother, however; she merely tilted her head and crossed her arms, bemusement working a furrow into her brow.

"So that's where it went," she said at last. "Regardless, it was wrong."

"It was," Miss Lapointe agreed, when James stayed silent. It was strange, but she felt at distance from the conversation. Normally, when parents were called in they tried to apologize for their child, or they yelled at them so aggressively it became clear why there had been a problem at all. But Mrs. Jeannot, like her son, seemed levelheaded to an extreme. She was certainly a good deal more effective in the interrogation than Miss Lapointe was, as the same questions the teacher had asked had taken the mother half the time to pose and had actually been answered. "Claude had to be taken home early. He was in such a state of shock. It was a terribly cruel thing to do."

"James knows that. Don't you, James."

The boy tried to stay quiet again, looking at his hands. The thin fingers were gripping the edge of the chair's cushion so tightly his knuckles were turning white.

"James. You know what you did was wrong, right?"

"Yes," he mumbled.

"It was mean."

"Yes."

"Do you feel bad about it?"

The boy hesitated, and looked up with the same expression had in their earlier conversation: slack-faced, calculating. "I don't know," he said honestly. "I didn't want to hurt anyone."

"But you still did it. You made a mistake."

He waited a beat, but nodded. "Yes."

Mrs. Jeannot nodded, and looked to Miss Lapointe. "I assume there is some sort of standardized punishment from the school regarding these sorts of things."

The teacher nodded. "Well, it is a bit of an unusual case. But there will be lines, in place of yard time, for several days. And he will need to apologize to Claude, of course."

"Of course," Mrs. Jeannot repeated. "James will do that. Won't you, James."

"Yes."

"Is there anything else you need from us, Miss Lapointe?" Mrs. Jeannot asked.

Miss Lapointe opened her mouth to speak, but found no words waiting on her tongue. This woman was an anomaly among mothers, a force of nature that seemed to lift the teacher up from her intentions and deposit her in an entirely different state. She had swept in and resolved the situation with all the pomp and circumstance of a herd of cattle crossing a highway—only quickly. Far too quickly, all things considered.

"James will need to get his things from the classroom," she said at last.

"Yes," Mrs. Jeannot said. "I will take him home, as the bus has already left. I assume Holly was on it by herself?"

"She'll stay with her friend Martel until we go get her," James said, as smoothly as though he had spoken to the girl beforehand. Miss Lapointe wondered at that. She would need to speak with the girl's teacher, to see if there was something deeper going on. Though put-together as Mrs. Jeannot appeared it seemed impossible to imagine anything out of place in their family life—besides the absence of the father, of course—Miss Lapointe could not imagine the woman in the suit coming home to the ramshackle manor house.

"Still, we'll have to hurry," the woman said, drawing her sleeve up to check an elegant silver watch. "We don't want to worry her."

The three of them stood, and Miss Lapointe found herself leading the way through deserted halls to the classroom. She unlocked the door and James slipped past, hurrying to his seat to collect his things.

This left Miss Lapointe in a curious position waiting in the doorway with Mrs. Jeannot. A quick glance out of the corner of her eye revealed that the woman's nose was longer than suited her profile. Somehow the teacher took satisfaction in noticing this.

"I trust something is being done about this 'Claude'," Mrs. Jeannot said quietly, eyes on her son. Miss Lapointe flinched slightly, but tried to disguise it by raising a hand to fix her hair. She caught herself and wondered why she bothered.

"It's been a difficult year so far," she admitted. "Bullying in the yard is common enough, but usually we can catch a child in the act before it grows into too much of an issue. Claude is… a work in progress."

"My daughter came home in tears yesterday, Miss Lapointe," Mrs. Jeannot said sharply. Her unsmiling face turned towards the teacher, staring down. Though her face was lacking in blemishes or wrinkles, there was a tightness in the skin around her eyes that made Miss Lapointe swallow. "She is only a six-year-old girl, a year one. They should not be expected to defend themselves from children of the upper years, should they?"

"No," Miss Lapointe agreed. "I'm afraid I wasn't even aware of the incident until I interviewed James this afternoon."

"This school's discipline system is a disappointment."

Miss Lapointe was still distracted by the intensity of her stare. Grey eyes like dusty cement. They could have been beautiful, on someone else, but on this woman, they were a weapon. Unnatural and cold.

Mrs. Jeannot looked away.

"I cannot believe that my children would be trying to take a bullying incident into their own hands without dire circumstances. James has been raised to the belief that bullying is wrong, Miss Lapointe. He knows the difference between a prank and cruelty."

"I expect so. But even the best of children slip up."

The woman clicked her tongue. James was returning, carrying his book bag across from the cloakroom. "Is that everything?" She asked her son. The boy nodded. "Alright, then. Miss Lapointe, I apologize for James' conduct, and the time you had to take out of your day for it. Good afternoon."

Mrs. Jeannot turned and guided her son away, a firm hand on his shoulder, without waiting for the teacher's response. Miss Lapointe watched them walk down the hall for a moment, then turned to lock the classroom door again. When she turned back, the pair was gone.

As she returned to the staff lounge to collect her own things, Miss Lapointe thought about the day's strange events. She still could not figure out how such a small boy had managed to get all those snakes into the desk. A bag, perhaps—but he still had to get into a locked room. She would have to check the windows; perhaps one of them was loose and he had managed to slip through. He was quite small.

As she came back into the office, she found Di staring into the space around the armchairs. "What a woman," Miss Lapointe said, assuming the secretary focused on the earlier conversation. "Honestly, I've never felt so out-classed. I ought to ask her for lessons in managing children."

Di didn't reply. Miss Lapointe sighed and went through to collect her things. Di was nice enough, but she could be a bit odd. They had been in school together, but while Miss Lapointe headed to University Di had married right away.

After the long day, it was a relief that her stack of homework to grade was light. She packed away her class logs into her bag and snapped it shut, looking out the window, trying to decide whether to wrap her scarf around her neck or leave it folded in the pocket of her pea coat.

Outside, the sky had turned grey, and wind was starting to pick up in the trees. Miss Lapointe's brow furrowed. Not an hour earlier the sky had been clear and blue, the early November sun shining down as the children hurried out the doors. Now the clouds hung heavy in the sky. She wound the scarf tightly around her neck, tucking the ends into her coat collar, and picked up her bag, rummaging in her pockets for her car keys. She had to put down the bag again and unbutton her coat, finding them in the pocket of her sweater, and by the time she was ready to leave again a thin but fast rain had started falling. Hurrying out of the lounge and into the office, she said goodbye to Di.

Di did not respond. Miss Lapointe almost hurried out without noticing, but she paused at the door and turned back. The secretary was still staring at the same spot amongst the armchairs. Her usually ruddy face had gone pale, and not a hair had moved since Miss Lapointe had gone past her first time.

"Di?"

Finally the woman looked up at her.

"You know," she said, voice dragging. "I sit here for nine hours, every day."

"Well, yes, you are the secretary…"

"There's not a lot to do."

"No?"

"And I've seen a lot of strange things."

"I can only imagine."

"But…"

The woman nodded towards the chairs. They seem plain and unassuming enough, especially now that Mrs. Jeannot had left them behind.

"We've only ever had two armchairs."

0.

A storm, evening. Two children sat in candle-lit dark. Out the window the grass whipped back and forth, swooshing like waves battered by the rain. Their mother had been called to the hospital, and there hadn't been enough time to summon their Uncles.

"Don't leave this room, either of you," she said, downing a potion and turning red hair black, freckles spreading to turn her whole skin tan. "And Harry, make sure you get some sleep. You have school tomorrow."

"Yes, mum."

She shut the door and the whole house shook with silence.

"Harry," the girl said, some time later. The boy didn't look up from his homework, chewing on the end of his pencil.

"Harry!"

"What?"

"I have to use the toilet."

"Then go."

"Mum said not to leave!"

"I don't think she meant that you couldn't go to the loo."

Silence. Harry finished the maths problem and went on to the next. He liked maths—not as much as reading, but it was like a game.

"Harry?"

"What?"

"I'm scared."

He sighed. "It's just down the hall, Hols." But he stood up. "Come on, I'll stand outside. That'll be fine, right?"

When they came back, he sank back onto his bed. Holly sat on the end of it, staring at his homework.

"What?" he asked again.

"Why don't I get to play the game?"

Harry blinked. His name was written at the top of the page, but it wasn't really his name. James Jeannot. Their mum always called it the game: "You'll play James, and you can't let anyone know that you're really Harry, or you lose. Understand? Understand, James?"

He didn't understand, and neither did his sister, apparently. "You do play," he said. "You call me James when we're in town, and you'll be Hollis Jeannot, at school."

"But if you're James, why can't I play Lily?"

Harry looked up at her. "You know I'm not playing dad, Hols," he said. "Its just his name."

"Oh," she said. She looked disappointed, though, so he indulged her.

"Well?" he said. "If you were playing Lily, what would you do right now?"

"Uhmmm," she said, biting her lip. She looked around, then grinned. "I know!" she said. She stood up and put her hands on her hips. "HARRY!" she shouted. "You put that candle out right now! It's time for bed, not reading!"

Harry laughed. "You'll have to work on it," he said. Holly pouted, but sat back down. Harry, however, was staring at the candle. "Want to play a game, Hols?" He asked.

"What type of game? A secret game?"

"Mm-hmm. Except you've got to keep a secret from mum."

She giggled. "Okay," she said. "What's the secret?"

"Come here."

He stood, pulling his sister towards the desk. The table sat on the corner of it, and they both stared at it.

"Harry? What's the secret?"

The candle went out, and the girl shrieked, grabbing her brother's arm.

"Harry! Bring it back!"

"Okay."

The flame re-appeared. He looked down at his sister, who let go and glared at him with nose wrinkled, and was about to say something when her mouth opened into an 'o'.

"That was magic!" she whispered. Harry grinned.

"Look," he said. The flame started bending back and forth, as though it were being buffeted by the wind that raced around the manor, but the rest of the room was still.

"Wow," said Hollis. "When do I get to do that?"

"I dunno," said Harry. "But you can't tell mum, alright?"

"Okay," she said. She looked up at her brother. "This means you're going to Hogwarts, right? Like mum and dad and Siri and Rem?"

"Not until I'm eleven," he said. He turned back to the bed, but his homework was suddenly less exciting now that he had magic and Hogwarts on his mind. His sister came over and laid down beside him.

"Harry," she said. "Tell me one of Sirius' stories about Hogwarts."

"You know them all as well as I do."

"I know. But I want a story."

He turned his head to face her, thinking. "Okay," he said at last. "Once, when Prongs was fourteen and Padfoot was fifteen, Prongs received a letter from home…"

11.

The radio in the car broke again. The storm brewing overhead was sending down waves of static, washing over the car with white noise. Between the buzzing, a woman crooned in German over a man an ocean away.

"So," said Lily. She spoke in English, as she usually did with her son, to ensure he did not lose his proficiency. Not that he would, with all the British TV he watched, but she still felt it was important to keep him aware of his true home. "Tell me about Claude."

In the passenger seat, Harry sighed and slumped. She had no doubt he would find guilt for what he had done; the boy could hardly tease his sister without worrying about it later. But he had still chosen to fill a boy's desk with snakes—Merlin knows how—and there had to be good reason.

"He's mean to everyone," Harry said. "He wasn't this bad when we started school, but then he started spending time with Jaque and Maurice and all three of them started picking on the others. I don't get it. Jaque used to be so nice."

"How are they mean?"

"Well, there's a boy in our class, Nicolas. He's from town, so you wouldn't know him, but he's supposed to buy lunch from the cafeteria every day, so he always has a little bit of money. Claude and the others take it to buy sweets."

Stealing lunch money? It sounded too ridiculous to be true, but when Lily thought back to her days in Primary, she could remember that sort of thing happening. "So why doesn't he tell the teacher?"

Harry shrugged. "Claude probably said they would beat him up. And the teachers don't do anything."

Outside the car, lightning flashed in the distance. She sped up a bit, thinking of Hollis, who did not like thunder, at her friend's house without her brother. Normally he would distract her during a storm, reading her a story or watching a movie or, on at least one occasion, giving in and playing dolls with the girl.

"And he broke Holly's horse," Harry added. It took Lily a moment to realize he meant Claude.

"She didn't bring it home with her yesterday."

"The teacher threw it away. She said it was in bits, and wouldn't let me have it."

"Did he choose to bother Hollis over something you did?"

"I don't know!" Harry ran his fingers through his hair. It was a habit shockingly similar to the one James had always had—only her son was always flattening his hair, not fluffing it up. "I mean, we mostly ignore each other, 'less we're playing football, but then it's just playing, right? I don't know why he would go after Hols!"

"That's the thing about being nice," said Lily. "Sometimes people look at a nice person and think they are weak, and if they think they are weak then they think that they're an easy target to pick on. They think if they pick on them, they'll feel better about themselves."

"That's stupid. How could picking on someone make you feel better about yourself?"

"Do you feel better after putting snakes in Claude's desk?"

Harry was quiet, and for a moment the radio came back in. Now a man was singing an old song alongside an acoustic guitar, wondering about lost days. Lily turned it down before the static could cut it off again.

"It was wrong of him to hurt Holly like that," Harry finally said.

"It was wrong of you to put snakes in his desk," Lily countered.

"Probably," her son agreed. "But no one else was going to do anything, were they?"

They came across another small village, passing through right as the rain finally started. Lily changed the radio to a local news station, an announcer warning of flash floods in the foothills. Lily wasn't particularly worried about their village or the mansion, which were firmly in the flatlands, but Harry watched the rain darkening the bare fields glumly. Sun was still lighting them in the distance, where the clouds broke off, but they were driving deeper into the storm. Lightning played far off ahead of them, and Lily sped up again. There was no one else out driving, in any case. She had no reason to go slowly.

It was times like this that the problems of raising her children among muggles became apparent. Driving from place to place was slow. It took forty minutes to get from the town to the village, and another fifteen out to the mansion. She couldn't have shown up in town without her car, however, or shown up too quickly, without raising suspicions. All the same, she doubted anyone would notice if she were to apparate them to just outside the village, but then they would have no car to make the final stretch. Flooing was simply out of the question among muggles, and besides, while she felt safer in France than Britain, there was simply no telling who would be watching the network. She had cut the mansion off from it after the Halloween gala two years before, when she had so foolishly connected directly to the Ministry of Magic. Ministry aside, there were several others with means of accessing records that could breach the mansion's security with a simple reversing charm—Dumbledore among them. It had been foolish to connect the mansion at all, let alone floo directly to the ministry. But what was done was done.

As the car slid past the first building of their village—the main granary—the sky had grown dark entirely. It was to be expected, of course, that the sky would darken earlier now that it was November, but it still made Lily nervous. She located the house of Hollis' friend as quickly as she could, and checked her watch. There was still a half hour left in her potion. Leaving Harry to wait in the running car, she hurried up the steps to the door.

A girl about Hollis' age opened the door. Lily blinked, but forced herself to smile. "You must be Martel."

"Who are you, then?" the girl challenged.

"Martel!" someone else called. The woman who Lily had expected to answer came into view: Martel's grandmother, Adele. "Sorry about that, Ms. Jeannot. The girl clearly needs to learn her manners!"

Martel stuck out her tongue.

"That's quite alright," said Lily. "However, I was wondering if my daughter had come by…?"

"Holly?" Adele asked. The way she pronounced the name pulled the 'y' up strangely, making the name sound odd.

"She went home when it looked like it was going to rain," Martel said. "Mathis was going to walk her home, but she didn't want him to, and we're not supposed to—"

"She went home about twenty minutes ago," Adele said, cutting her off. "Did you not drive by on your way down here?"

"I just got in from town," Lily explained, though all she really wanted to do was hurry off to find her daughter. The thought of the girl—the six-year-old little girl—walking home all alone made her nervous. "James missed the bus. We hoped she had stayed here."

"Did he really put snakes in Claude's desk?" the girl asked.

"Martel!"

Lily sighed, and crouched down to look at the girl at eye-level. "He did, and he knows it wasn't a good thing to do at all, Martel. He'll apologize to Claude tomorrow, and he is in trouble."

"Claude deserved it," the girl said with a shrug, and turned to disappear inside.

"Well," said Lily, straightening up. "I'd better hurry home, then."

"You don't need anything, out there all alone in that mansion, do you, Ms. Jeannot?" Adele asked. She was not the brightest woman, and certainly did not have the broadest world view, having been born in this very village, but she never failed to offer Lily any help she could.

"Oh, we're very good. Fixing up the place nicely." Lily stepped away from the door and down the stairs, back into the lane to open the car door.

"Alright," Adele called back. "But don't hesitate to call, dear. Good afternoon!"

Thank you! Your comments are like bursts of accidental magic-I mean, encourage bursts of editing.