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So far:

James and his mates would do well in Manchester's Magykl Horticulture Chapter, in Sarah's opinion, because they gossip the way old women do. The fact that they know everything about everyone, and are conniving enough to pursue every little thing that catches their attention? Incorrigible! Like how dare James and his fellow cronies eavesdrop on her and Joe? Like do they have no other business?

But Sarah can't lay into James, can she? Because then Ava McKinnon will be on her like a hawk, saying in her whiny voice that of course she knew that James and Sarah wouldn't last past one date. One "official" (read: faux) date and being made to sit together by a Sluggy who thinks he's Cupid do not a relationship make. But in order for James to actually learn how to woo (*cringe*) Lily, the charade has to be kept up for a little while longer.

Because while James has changed, a teensy, tiny bit, he's still insipid enough to be a treasured member of the Manchester MHC.

PLAYING PRETEND

CHAPTER 7

October 5th, 1976

"Hi Sarah!" comes the over-familiar voice of Joe, and I cringe. It's all James' fault, I swear. If it hadn't been for him, I'd have still been blissfully unaware.

And ignorance really is bliss.

But I'm not really one to avoid confrontation – I usually blunder through most situations by keeping mum and letting the conversation get as awkward as it can. And then when the conversation gets really awkward, the other party usually makes an active attempt to end said awkward conversation, and I just go along with it.

The thing is, I deal with confrontations by being non-confrontational, but it's not because I'm a doormat – don't get me wrong. I just think they're not worth the effort. Others might call it a very lazy approach to life, but I consider it a very enlightened way to deal with things.

I'm awesome, I know.

(I was just kidding, on the off chance that you thought I was being serious.)

Seriously though, I'll write a self-help book someday on how to get maximum result with minimum effort, just you wait.

Anyways, where was I? Ah, Joe, and my propensity for awkward conversations.

"Hullo, Joe," I greet him, not bothering to lift my head up. I continue scratching away onto the parchment about the antipyretic property of poinsettia leaves. It's an essay for Sluggy, and though I almost always get an O, if not an E, I put in as much effort into writing it as possible. All that extra knowledge I gain from working with my mother has to go somewhere, right?

"What's that you're doing? Need any help?"

"It's an essay for Slughorn, and no, I don't need help."

"Okay," he says, and then there's the sound of a pile of books being kept on the table. I look up to see that I'm right, that there are a whole pile of books. A casual glance at the spines tells me that it's all about Arithmancy.

I'm decent at Arithmancy. It's not like it's my favourite subject, but that doesn't mean I hate it either. Funnily, unbelievably, Sirius Black is the best in Arithmancy in class. Can you believe that? Lily hates it, being second after him, seeing as she's almost never seen him work out a single trigonometric spell casting equation in the common room.

Anyway, I'm sat here in the library, not knowing what to say, because what James said is running on like a broken cassette inside my hand. That Joe fancies me for no conceivable reason.

I try to focus on what I'm writing, but after being forced to scratch out the fourth word I've written in a row, I decide to just get it over with. I'm not going to ask Joe if he likes me, oh hell no. I'm just going to do some trial and error with small talk and see how best I can go back to pretending that I'm blissfully unaware.

At the same moment that I open my mouth to speak, Joe starts speaking, a firm but sombre expression on his face.

"So, I heard from Ava McKinnon that you're dating that Potter boy?"

"James and I are just friends for now," comes my automatic response, but I inwardly hit myself when I see that his eyes light up at that. So I tack on without pausing, "But we're hoping it will turn into something more."

He looks like a wounded puppy, but he shrugs it off and starts talking about the arithmancy used in drawing runes, and I can't help but feel the respect I have towards Joe grow. It's very rare to even feel a smidge of respect towards someone you know not in a professional capacity, but on friendlier terms.

It's safe to say that Joseph McIntyre has my seal of approval that he is a gentleman and person of maturity and grace.

Also, he's polite, charming, intelligent, sincere, and not too hard on the eyes either. I'm pretty sure that he'll find a girl someday, one who'll be attracted to him as well, and that they'll fall in love and all that.

Maybe it's just a cure for my hyperactive imagination, but I always like picturing how real life love stories would actually work out. And in this case, I have the oddest of feelings that Joe and his future love will bond over books, and that they'll probably meet for the first time in the library, if they haven't already met.

On a side note, Alice thinks I'd have done wonderfully in Madame Dorothy's Divination class, just because my imagination runs rampant.

Let it be known that I was the one who did Alice's Divination homework all through Third Year, before she pulled her Greengrass surname card on the Hogwarts teachers and demanded that she be let out of such a mundane and insipid class.

Needless to say, as a member of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, she got away with it.

But I'm deviating right now, and I'm thinking that I should start looking into the arithmancy behind potion-making. I'm guessing that it'll be like molecular chemistry, which I have a very lousy understanding of, so maybe after all, Joe and I can go back to existing the way we always have, being research buddies in the library, and fellow intellectuals.

(Ahem, he's the intellectual. I'm the pseudo-intellectual. But don't tell anyone that. Let the world assume and presume whatever it wants to.)

;;

"So, lesson first, or fun first?" I ask, as I hover in the air on Marly's Nimbus 1000. She'd been all too willing to lend me her broom when I told her that James and I were planning on having a 'date in the air'.

Anyway, it wasn't planned as much as it was spontaneous. When someone asks you for a game of Swivenhodge, you just don't say no. Especially when Swivenhodge enthusiasts are so bloody hard to find.

It turns out James likes the game, as do I – a mutual interest we had discovered only some twenty minutes back – and naturally, we were up in the air as soon as possible, fixing out the rules.

The game is actually very simple – the players sit backward on their brooms, and bat a water filled balloon to each other across a hedge using the brush end of the broom. Every time the balloon is dropped the opponent gets a point, and the first one to get fifty points wins.

Mum says an inflated pig bladder was used once upon a time, before we borrowed balloons from the Muggles, but I've never taken the time to check the veracity of her claim. (She likes to tease me a bit too much.)

James used to play it with his dad when he was younger, just the way I used to play with my mum, which is a really wonderful coincidence – completely serendipitous, I must say – because the game isn't that popular, at least, not as popular as Quidditch, which has had the world gripped since time immemorial.

"I want to say fun first, lesson second, but I have a feeling playing with me is going to be a very challenging lesson for you," he says snootily, tossing his head back like he has a crick in his neck, before doing a fancy twirl on his broom.

I've heard him tell snarkier, meaner stuff to other people, so I know it's all in jest. Who doesn't like a little ragging to get into the mood of the game? Anyway, it's not one of his better jibes.

"Oooh Jamesie, have you brought some parchment? You're going to be taking notes on how pathetic you are after you water the entire Quidditch grounds with all your dropped catches."

But who am I kidding? Generally, all-rounded Chasers are fantastic at Swivenhodge. And James is a damn good Chaser, if there ever was one.

"Oh, you're on, Davies," he grits out, his cheek dimpling cutely as he smirks at me, before doing a loop in the air. I roll my eyes at that.

James conjures a net (seeing as there isn't a hedge in the middle of the pitch some forty feet high, and seeing as we don't want to play close to the ground like children after conjuring a hedge) using his wand, only that the lines are made of silver and the illusion shimmers in the dying light of the sun. The hedge-alternative looks so pretty, I just want to stop and stare at it. It's not a real net, which means we can pass right though it, but that doesn't matter, because oh my Merlin, it's so captivatingly pretty!

"Ready?" he asks, coming back up into the air with a loaded balloon. I don't even want to ask how he and his friends had such a ready stock of balloons to spare – I'm hoping I've possibly saved some poor people from having water bombs and paint bombs splattered upon their heads.

"Ready," I say, leaning down on the broom, giving my most competitive look through the crisscrossing silver beams of the net. I try not to let the silver lines distract me.

I'm made of sterner stuff.

"And the game begins," he cries loftily, before serving.

I drop the first point. James drops the second point. Then the third. Then the fourth. By the tenth point he drops, I'm suspicious.

"Hold on, time out."

"What? Do you feel tired? Should you rest?"

I give him an amused look. Me? Tired? After just fifteen minutes? And that too in the air? Alice would kill me if my stamina were ever that bad.

Every week, Alice makes Marlene and me run for a mile, power-walk for three miles, and do this horrible set of ab-crunches that usually ensures that I collapse in a state of paralysis. She says it's good training, for being an Auror. Marly does the exercise because it helps her with Quidditch as well, but I do it just to keep Alice quiet.

Alice had apparently written Marly's godfather, Alastor Moody, and gotten this rigorous schedule from him. His suggestion had been that we do this every day, but if I were ever forced to do such strenuous activity every twenty-four hours, Alice's friendship with me would be irreparably damaged.

"Stop it," I tell him, my amusement over his concern that I was possibly tired still present.

"Stop what?" he asks, looking every bit perplexed as a perplexed person would.

My earlier amusement starts vanishing rapidly.

"James. Stop. Losing. On. Purpose."

"On purpose?"

So this is how he wants to play it. I sigh, push a lock of my flying hair behind my ear, and try again. I feel like a dragon, the way I'm huffing in annoyance.

"James. You're much better than this, I've seen you as a Chaser. Stop playing so poorly, and play the way you'd actually play."

"I don't know what you're talking about," he says, and there's something about the way he says it that makes me realise that A) I'm either a terrible player and he's letting me down easy, or B) it's yet another misconceived notion he has about humans who have ovaries.

"Are you losing points just because I'm a girl, or is it because you're actually pants at this game?" I ask as I fly closer, through the illusionary net, to stop right in front of him. I give him my best frown.

(Side note: Flying through the silvery lines feels warm, like stepping into sunlight.)

"You said it was a date."

I raise an eyebrow, unconvinced.

"The guy's supposed to make the girl feel special during a date."

I'm so tempted to just bang my head hard against one of the Quidditch hoops that are nearby. I settle for simply raising my other eyebrow as well and grimacing.

"When I said we could make a date of playing Swivenhodge, I didn't mean a date date. I meant it the way I tell Marly or Ali that we can make a date of going to Twilfit's in Hogsmeade."

"Oh."

"Right, and honestly, girls like me, girls like Lily, and any sane girl who's probably worth pursuing would want you to be yourself while doing something like playing this trivial little game. It's about the experience, okay? So if you're bloody fantastic at it, it's all right. Just don't brag about your skills or be too critical. Just go with it and have fun and try to show the other person a memorable game."

"Right, Professor Davies."

I glare at him, and continue doing so till he flies up next to me and then ruffles my hair. That makes me feel like a child, and I glare all the more.

"I want a nice fair game now," I tell him sullenly, imitating Madam Hooch perfectly.

We resume our game, and by the forty-fifth point James has won, I'm glad I refused to rescind my ten pity points. It's not that I'm playing badly – the score's 45-24 – but it's obvious who the actual Quidditch player is.

"You're wishing I'd gone easy on you, aren't you?" asks James smarmily. My telling off had worked, and James had gone back to being himself.

"I've actually been going easy on you all along," I lie, grinning back at him. Have more lousy lies ever been told in the history of lie-telling?

When we're down to game point, I manage to earn a point after a long rally, making the score a 49-32. Praise! Hallelujah! For what a stupendous save was that! And I placed it so perfectly, so damn perfectly, that James almost fell off his broom trying to save it!

I'm the queen of Swivenhodge, not– splash!

I'd been so distracted during my gloating that I hadn't seen the balloon James had sent my way – James, the horrible cheat, taking advantage of poor me during my rather egotistical praises about my skills – and as true Sarah Davies luck would have it, it had hit the top of my shirt, pricked upon the pin there, and drenched me in water.

You see, the thing is, I hadn't bothered to change out of my school uniform completely – I was still in my shirt, and I'd swapped my skirt for a pair of tights in my hurry to play. So like a character in every D grade film I'd watched over the years with David, I was the dumb blonde chick in a wet white shirt.

And why was there a pin on my shirt? Just this morning, I'd discovered that my top button was missing – the thread had been lose for ages anyway, so it was inevitable that it fall off eventually. I also learnt that Reparo only works on broken buttons, not missing ones.

Alice, being the mother-hen she is, had pinned my shirt up at the last minute, saying in a scandalised tone, 'You don't want these prepubescent boys to be dreaming of you at night, Rah!'

A few moments pass by, with me looking anywhere I can except at James, and him staring at my chest. Finally, when a breeze blows by and I start feeling cold, I clear my throat.

James and I fly down together, and he still looks stunned, as we dismount.

My mind is relatively blank, but the back of my neck burns. My face is probably nastily red at the moment from how embarrassed I am, and I don't want to dwell on such unpleasant thoughts right now.

"Here," James says quietly, and puts a guiding hand on my back, leading me to the locker rooms. I actively avoid looking at James' face.

Once we're in there, he gives me an old Quidditch tee of his, with his number fading on its back.

"I'd rather not have my dating tutor die of pneumonia," he says, a sly smile on his face, and maybe it's because it's so warm and bright here, but suddenly, my mortification at the whole thing disappears, it feels so laughable, so I smile and take the t-shirt from.

"Even if I were to die, I'll come back like Nearly Headless Nick just to help you with your love life," I say, grinning broadly at him, as I walk into one of the nearby stalls. When I come out, James is leaning against one of the lockers, eating chocolate.

I go closer, see it's a Cockroach Cluster, and wrinkle my nose in disgust.

"What?"

He sees me look at his hand once again, and he grins.

"Don't tell me you believe that rumour that Cockroach Clusters have actual cockroach eggs!"

I think the disgust on my face is very evident, because he continues.

"It doesn't. Trust me."

"And how would you know?" I ask.

"Because my family owns the patent for it. I know the ingredients."

It's the way he tells it, so matter of fact, without a hint of pride or condescension, and I know I'm supposed to respect him for how his voice was devoid of emotion when he said it, but I've never felt the difference in economic status be more prevalent than it is right now.

Of course the rich boy owns old patents, how else could he be rich?

We're not poor, definitely not, but we're the type of people who squeeze out every last bit of toothpaste from the tube, the type who wait for the right sales to buy bed sheets from Magyk Street, the type who don't have fancy desires because there are more practical things which require our gold.

"Why am I not surprised?" I say weakly, and James chuckles, misinterpreting my rhetoric question.

"Peter wanted to be doubly sure before eating one in Third Year, so I asked my mother and looked it up," he says, thinking I'd been talking about him knowing the ingredients.

And somehow, that makes me smile, just the teeniest bit, because how often do you come across a rich Pureblood who doesn't want to flaunt his wealth?

"You have to try one," he says, taking my wet shirt from my hand and giving me the box instead. I carefully pick a round egg, and close my eyes tightly before popping it into my mouth.

The last thing I see before closing my eyes is James watching me intently from near the laundry bin, having put my shirt in there. I open my eyes and grin at him, as the taste of peppermint explodes in my mouth, and he grins back, and we stand there, grinning at each other like fools, the entire time it takes for me to suck the egg.

;;

"You don't have siblings, right?"

"Nope, and thank goodness I don't," I reply, popping another Chocolate Frog into my mouth.

James and I are lying down on a picnic blanket, having laid it out on the sand near the bleachers, and we're watching the night sky. We're both pants at Astronomy, so it's not like we're here for any academic pursuits. We're just eating chocolate and talking.

If I ever need chocolate, I now know who to go to. James. James has an extraordinarily large stash of chocolate treats in his Quidditch locker. A Muggle with the same quantum of chocolate would surely have cavities.

"Haven't you ever felt lonely, as a child?"

"Not really, my cousin and my aunt lived some ten minutes away, and my aunt used to be out of town most of the time, so my cousin almost always lived at my place when I was younger. And I guess he was like a sibling, in a way. Why, were you ever lonely?"

"Not exactly, but sometimes I used to want people my age to play with. Not particularly a sibling, but most of the magical people at Godric's Hollow are old, and the few village kids that were there, my parents didn't want me to play with them because they were worried I'd break the statute."

"So how did you pass your time?"

"I used to booby-trap the manor and make up Quidditch plays in the yard. My dad's always encouraged the prankster in me."

I turn my head to see that he's smiling, and he's got a dimple in his cheek. I want to lift my hand and trace it, but instead, I go back to looking at the sky.

"What's your family like?" he asks.

"My parents are pretty cool people. I know that people our age usually hate their parents or try to be rebels, but my parents are honestly super cool. My dad's a Muggleborn and my mum's a Pureblood. My parents met here in Hogwarts, fell in love, and they're best friends as well, actually.

"My mum's family found out, and threatened to disinherit her. So she–"

"She ran away with your dad, and thus got blasted off the Rosier tree," James finishes, with a smile.

I'm about to ask him how he knows, when I remember that I told him about it when he asked how Narcissa and I were acquainted, on our first 'date'.

"And that's all there is, I guess," I say, smiling fondly at the thought of my parents, especially my mother, at being a 'rebel'.

I'd never tell it to their faces, but I actually do care about them.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see that James is staring at me, a curious expression on his face.

"What?"

"Nothing," he says quickly.

I turn my head fully and look at him with narrowed eyes.

"Your eyes light up when you talk about your family."

I shake my head and smile at him amusedly. I have nothing to say, though. So I put my hand out and reach into the Chocolate Frog box, only to find it empty. I sit up and upturn the box, and sigh – it really is empty.

"I'd get you another box, princess, but since we missed dinner, I figured you might want to grab a bite from the kitchens instead," he says, and my heart does weird pitter-patter sounds at being called princess.

Naturally, I choose to focus on the actual message only after my heart seems to come back to normal.

"You know where the kitchens are?" I ask, and I can feel my eyes go wide. It's not funny, the amused look that James wears on his face right now.

"You can be adorable, you know?" he says, getting up and ruffling my hair, but for once, I'm not annoyed, because I'm going to find out where the kitchens are, and I can't stop smiling.

AN: I've had a lousy day today, your thoughts and reviews would be much appreciated.

Update info: How does June 26, 2017 sound?