"Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men."
― Joseph Conrad, Chance

Day Four:

Lily hadn't showered since she arrived at Hogwarts and she was starting to itch. She had tried staying up extra late, getting up extra early, but it seemed as though one of her roommates was always up. James got up earlier than anyone should in Lily's opinion, and Remus was up reading until Lily fell asleep waiting for her chance to sneak in there.

It was Sunday morning though, surely James would take today to sleep in, surely they would let her have just ten minutes alone in the bathroom where she could stop pretending to be a boy and scrub the layer of grim from her skin before people noticed that she was really starting to stink.

She pulled back her hangings, and mercifully James' were still shut. She looked around the room and saw that the rest of the boys' hangings were still resting peacefully around their beds. Lily sighed (quietly) and slipped out of bed.

After gathering her soap, towel and a change of clothes, she tip-toed into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. She felt a genuine sense of relief as the latch fell into place and she wasted no time in stripping off her night clothes and turning on the water. She let the room fill up with steam for a moment before she stepped under the stream and almost moaned at how good the hot water felt prickling at her skin.

Yesterday had been a weird day. She had accidentally flirted with James when he was only trying to be nice, she had an extremely awkward conversation with Sirius and then she had had to watch two shirtless blokes compete over who was stronger. She hoped she had handled that situation correctly. She hoped no one would think that anything was up with her, that she was sufficiently pulling off this whole, 'acting like a bloke' thing.

She had finished washing her hair when someone tried to open the door to the loo. Lily froze for a moment and everything was quiet. Then there was a click, and the door opened. Lily had pulled the shower curtain closed when she got in the shower, and she did a mental check of everything that was in the bathroom right now. Nothing incriminating.

"There's only one bathroom," James' voice said. She watched his shadowy figure through the curtain as he walked towards the toilet. "We don't lock the door."

Lily cleared her throat. "Sorry. House full of sisters. Force of habit."

"S'alright." James said. Lily pushed herself as far away from the shower curtain as she could, not that James could see anything through it, but because she wanted to put as much distance between the two of them as she could while she was naked and he was peeing, it seemed like the polite thing to do.

James flushed the toilet and then started back towards the door. "I'm going to breakfast in a few minutes, you want me to wait for you?"

"I'll just meet you down there." She said, stepping back under the stream of water.

"Alright." James closed the door behind him and lily let out a large breath. She quickly shut off the water and then peaked her head out of the shower. She had left her clean clothes on the counter, and her towel was right on top of them. She looked down at her naked self, and then at the door. She had changed the shape of her shoulders, and her jaw, and her brow, she had chopped off her hair and changed her posture, but under neither her clothes, she was still very much not a bloke.

She braced herself and then walked as quickly as she could without slipping on the flagstone floor, over to the counter. She quickly dried off, slipped on her panties and pulled on a pair of boxers over top of them. Then she pulled out her wrap, and encircled it around her chest a few times. Once she was sufficiently flat chested, she pulled on her shirt and then allowed herself to slow down. All the incriminating bits were covered now.

She was towel drying her hair when Peter walked into the bathroom. He nodded sleepily at her as he walked to the toilet. Lily bit her lip and pulled her pants on quickly, tucked in her boxers, then gathered up her dirty clothes and left the room before she saw anything she didn't want to see.

That was definitely more difficult than it had to be.

OOoOo

After breakfast with James, during which he talked exclusively about who had tried out yesterday and how almost all of them were hopeless, he went out to the Quidditch pitch to prepare for the final day of tryouts, and she went up to the Owlery to write Marlene a letter.

M-

I took a shower this morning and two of my four roommates walked in on me. One while I was in the shower, and one while I was getting dressed. Luckily no one saw anything but it was all just luck. James said we aren't allowed to lock the door because there's only one bathroom and- Gah! I'm never going to shower again. It's too risky with all of these boys coming and going as they please.

Also, they keep taking their shirts off and I don't know how to properly act like a girl around half naked boys let alone how blokes are supposed to act around each other when they are half naked. Aren't they going to think it's weird that I'm never half naked? I mean every single one of them sleeps in their boxers and then there's me who sleeps in a full pajama outfit.

Please don't tease me. Just try to help somehow.

-L

She sent off the letter with no real hope of Marlene helping her with her problems. There wasn't really anything that she could do. Also, when coming up with this plan, Marlene had brought up the problem of showering while sharing a room with all blokes and Lily had blown her off completely with a flippant, "I'll work it all out when I get there." She was most certainly going to get an earful from Marlene.

She headed off to the library after that. Hoping to get a start on all the extra studying that she was going to have to do if she had any chance in hell at keeping up with the lessons this term. Transfigurations wasn't the only class that she was worried about, though having Remus and James to help her with that class made it slightly less intimidating.

She settled down at a table that was in the potions section and gathered the textbooks for years one through three. Not wanting to be too ambitious she only grabbed three of the books she planned on close reading, otherwise she would have grabbed all six books at once. She also didn't want anyone to see her with them. She could tell them that she was getting a jumpstart on studying for N.E.W.T.S. but she didn't really want to be that person. The person that starts studying for an exam that wasn't until next term. She also didn't want word to get back to Sirius and James that she was that person because she didn't think they would have thought it was cool. They might actually stop being so nice to her and she didn't want that.

But she really couldn't be too worried about that because she was here to get an education so that she could become an auror. That had to be her top priority or what was the point of all of this? With that in mind, she opened the first book and began to read.

There are more than three dozen different uses for a single newt. Let's start with the eye, which is one of the most common potion ingredients-

"Excuse me."

-that you will be using this year. It's one of the most versatile parts of the newt, with five individual uses-

"Excuse me."

Lily looked up and saw the black haired boy from the Quidditch pitch yesterday. "Yes?"

"You're sitting at my table." He said, glaring at her second year potions book as if it had personally offended him. She wanted to shift her book bag so that it was covering the title, but it was too late for that. At least he didn't know that she was reading the first year book.

"This is a library table," Lily shook her head and looked back down at the text. "You can't claim the tables."

"I'm the only one who ever sits here. So it may be unofficial, but if you hadn't only been here for four days, then you would know that it's my table."

"Well, I'm only using half of it." She motioned to the empty other half of the table. "You're more than welcome to use it. Or one of the four other empty tables in the immediate area."

He stood there for a moment, not knowing how to handle her.

"What's your name again?"

"Marcus McKinnon. You?"

"Severus Snape." He cleared his throat and then set his stuff down on the other side of the table. "Why do you have that out?" He asked, pointing at the second year textbook.

"I said you could sit with me, I didn't say that we had to talk. I'm trying to study."

"Sorry."

She didn't really like this boy. He had been on the pitch yesterday with that other dreadful boy who had broken a broom and then called her roommates polygamous, marauders. He hadn't asked her why she had the book out to be mean however, and then she felt rude when she snubbed him out and he apologized.

She sighed, "I'm really behind in a lot of subjects, so I thought it wouldn't hurt to look over the previous material."

"You're going to look over all six years of old material for every class?"

"I said a lot of subjects, not all of them. I'm good with Charms and Herbology." One had to be well acquainted with plants at Beauxbatons. One would think that Potions would also be something they would need to know, but the Headmistress of yesteryears had deemed it too dangerous for such delicate creatures, or you know, girls.

Severus snorted and Lily narrowed her eyes at him. She shouldn't have said anything.

"You're not going to learn everything about potions just by reading the textbooks."

"I said I was behind, not that I didn't know anything."

"Right. So what are you reading right now?"

"Who the hell made you an expert on the subject of potions anyway? I can study however I want."

His lips curled up and she swore that she had never seen anyone look so smug in her entire life. "I'm top of our year at Potions. If you go up the trophy room, you'll see a plaque with my name on it-" Lily didn't like smug people very much.

"That's all very nice for you, and I hope you enjoy your time at the top while it lasts, because I fully intend on taking the top spot from you." And even though leaving meant that the smarmy, prat got what he wanted, she packed up her books and left the library to go and study on her bed.

OOoOo

Lily was leafing through the last few pages of the second year textbook when her roommates rejoined her in the dormitory. Sirius walked across the room and fell face first onto his bed, not noticeably bothered by the fact that he was covered in dirt and it was getting all over his bed sheets.

James looked positively giddy. "We're going to win this year." He did a strange little leap that made Lily's brow shoot up. "I can feel it. I mean did you see how he was flying?"

There was a muffled noise coming from Sirius.

"I know!" James shouted. Remus and Peter walked in after them, looking neither overly exhausted nor giddy, but some healthy medium.

"Tomas is telling everyone that he's your new prodigy." Remus said, looking somewhat amused.

Sirius rolled over on his side. "I'm going to have to pound that kid before our first game."

"He's just excited, his head will deflate in a few days." James waved away Sirius's comment. "Besides, did you see him fly?"

"Yes James, we all saw him fly." Peter said. "And he's very good. We're definitely going to win the Quidditch cup this year."

"Maybe that will get McGonagall off your back." Remus said. "Not that it matters much since this is our last year, but if you beat Slytherin in a couple weeks, she might go easy on all of us."

"Why would she do that?" Lily asked. The other four seemed to have forgotten about her, or just hadn't noticed that she was in the room because they all seemed rather surprised to see her sitting on her bed.

James shook his head. "McGonagall is really into Quidditch, she used to play back in the day." He looked at the books in her hands. "Marcus, have you been studying all day?"

"Not the entire day," She shrugged. "I wrote a letter earlier…"

"We've only had one day of classes; you know that right?" Peter asked, giving her a funny look.

"I know."

"Alright, McKinnon?" James laughed, running a hand through his hair.

Lily looked down and shook her head. "I'm fine you prats."

He laughed again and then turned his attention to Sirius. "Go and take a shower would you? You're stinking up the entire room."

"And who's fault is that? We could have been done ages ago, but noooooo. You wanted to have a practice right after tryouts so you could play with your new teammates."

"Yes, and you could have showered in the locker room."

"Well, I didn't."

"We know, Padfoot." Peter said. "Every single person you walked past in the common room knows it."

"Shove off, Pete." Sirius rolled off his bed, pulled his shirt over his head and then tossed it at Peter. Peter recoiled away from the offending object and kicked it back at Sirius, who was now toeing off his shoes and throwing them at James. He was going for his pants when James finally stopped him.

"Alright, enough stripping." Lily was looking down at her textbook determinedly, but she was pretty sure that James had cast a look in her general direction. "Just go and wash up so we can all go and eat dinner, yeah?"

Sirius tossed one of his socks over at Peter and then walked into the loo. Lily looked up and hoped that her face wasn't red, she really hoped that her face wasn't red.

James looked over at her again and gave her an awkward little grin and then looked away.

If her face hadn't been red before, it certainly was now. What in the bloody hell was that?

AN: Reviews?