There were certain times that year—or that year to begin with, since it continued long after that—when Remus started to think about the way that straight men were different than queer men. Fundamentally different, somehow, he thought. He wasn't able to get much further than that in his head; he wasn't sure how they were different, or what made them like that, or what significance it had. But when James and other straight boys talked to or about girls, Remus just got a sense. He thought to himself that perhaps, if he were a Muggle, he would become an academic and write a book about it.

Remus lay on the couch in the common room, listening to James and a sixth-year boy make weird, uncomfortable comments as they looked at pictures of women in a lewd magazine someone's Muggle dad had bought for them.

"I'd like to show that one a good time," the sixth-year said. He said it as if it were a line he had heard somewhere else. Remus knew it was. Crudely, creepily, they adopted the words they had heard their fathers or older brothers say, the words jarring bizarrely against their childish teeth.

"She has too much hair," James said. There was the sound of a page turning, and Remus tried to focus on the ceiling above him and ignore the conversation.

"Now that's a good set of curves," a third boy—the sixth-year's friend—piped in.

Remus winced. He closed his eyes, and thought miserably of the group of second-year girls at the table in the corner, and what they must think of the raucous laughter by the large hearth. Remus prayed that they hadn't heard anything.

Hogwarts had no program which introduced witches and wizards to the adolescent realities of theirs or other's bodies. Remus had spoken to his mother about this once or twice—she was quite upset. Muggle schools, she told Remus, definitely provided at least a rudimentary education for teen-age students on the way their anatomy could be expected to look and function. Hogwarts seemed to operate on an older principle—one which mandated implicitly that the best education was one at the hands of one's peers and which attempted, without actually saying it, to make it difficult for students to find any useful information on sex, gender, or adolescence at all. Remus had heard that Prefect girls were told to take young witches to the hospital wing when they had their first menses and didn't understand it—this seemed, to Remus, to perfectly sum up how backwards the whole place was. It went without saying that teenage straight wizards, with no one telling them how witches could be expected to look or behave and with only their fellows as sources of information, began to turn irrevocably into douchebags.

"You think Evans looks like that?" the sixth-year asked James, laughing. James laughed too, the discomfort rocky in his throat and audible to Remus. Remus rose suddenly from the couch and began grabbing up his things to head up to the dormitory. He tried to make as much of a disturbance as possible, so that perhaps the boys would close the magazine and stop talking about it. He knew it was no use.

"I think she's better than Muggle pin-ups," James said. The repulsive syllables slid loudly into the air as Remus went up the stairs. "More integrity."

It wasn't as if James was really the worst. He was not worse than other boys. But they were all awful, and Remus felt as if he were the only one that knew it.

Queer boys could act as bad around girls—that was proved by Sirius, and by several other wizards in school who Remus were fairly sure were something besides heterosexual. They did and said offensive things to gain status among other boys. Sirius made as many sexist comments about the size of women's breasts as anyone else. Remus knew, too, that to some extent they all really believed all the awful things that got passed around the dormitories after dark—especially the purebloods, who had no other source of knowledge and so who had no choice but to believe made-up stories about charms which got witches into bed and intact hymens which had magical powers stifled only by Muggle mysteries like tampons. Sirius had genuinely believed for a long time that women were naturally inferior to men intellectually because all their blood flowed to their uteruses instead of their brains, and had only been persuaded that this was false when Remus brought him several Muggle anatomy books to compare with the rather ludicrous wizard charts and delivered a soporific speech on the circulatory system one evening. However, when queer boys said terrible things, their offensive statements were in certain ways different from those of straight wizards. Remus thought perhaps it was because the benefits they reaped from sexism were less about gaining physical sexual power over a witch. Remus watched the boys who laughed and snorted behind their hands in the hallway, watched them snap girls' bras against their shoulders. Remus saw that the repulsion their female classmates projected was mingled with fear.

Severus Snape was one of those people who didn't really understand the intimidation that came with making romantic advances at people. Everyone knew he had a crush on Lily Evans—along with James and most boys in Griffyndor who were older than fourth year—but he behaved as if it was a cherished secret. His mouth hung open when she was around; people made fun of him for it. Less pathetic was the angry expression that had begun to creep onto his face whenever it was suggested to him that Lily had better things to do than be around him. Snape behaved as if he deserved her attention automatically, on account of some childhood friendship or kindness toward her in the past. His lip curled and his brow furrowed and he slouched around Evans and her friends.

People made fun of Snape because he was disliked generally, and that made his bad behavior visible. Remus knew, though, that other boys behaved just as badly. Because they had friends who cheered them on in trying to woo unresponsive and irritated girls, it was overlooked. Remus knew—though this was never something that he would have said, then, because he was fifteen and it was hard to say this kind of thing when one only had three friends in the world—that it was just as bad when someone popular behaved inappropriately as when someone who nobody liked did it.

James of all people shouldn't behave like he did, in any case. It was like he became a different person, or like he forgot that witches were people. Remus hated being around him sometimes, which shocked and confused him, since James was normally decent and pleasant. It started getting worse in fourth year, when he progressed from being inhumanly quiet when girls were around to being unbearably and obnoxiously verbal. Statements that Remus would not have believed anyone could make themselves utter aloud, but which somehow tore from his lips like lewd, crudely-constructed missiles.

"I'm really sorry about that," he said to Lily Evans one day after James had shouted something across the room at her as they were leaving Transfiguration class. It had made all the boys laugh loudly and James had looked pleased with himself, but it was indecent and repulsive and—Remus thought—in many ways downright abusive. Remus felt it was wrong to defend James when he behaved like that, and tried instead to patch up behind him.

She shrugged, not making eye contact. Her red hair frizzed wildly around her brown, pleasant face as she drew her hat down further over her eyes. "I'm used to it," she said. "If it's not James, it's some dunce from seventh year."

"It's awful. I'm really sorry. I'll talk to him about it."

She looked up. "Will you? That'd be lovely." It was curt. Remus suspected he was guilty of boorishness by association.

"Witches always have to go through so much that wizards don't."

Lily nodded and brushed past him. They were moving in the same direction since they had the same class next, but she was trying to walk faster than Remus. He got the hint and let her, hanging back and waiting until she was a good ten feet ahead of him before speeding up again. He wished he could have a conversation with her that wasn't twisted and awkward because of Remus's association with James. That day in class, as they gingerly cradled large niffler pups and tried to get them interested in bits of tinsel, Remus looked around at the other witches in the class and the way they hung together in a pack. He wished for the first time in his life that he could be one of them—but he wasn't. He could not offer them solidarity or comfort them. It would be ridiculous and bizarre. He was a boy, even if he was an unconventional boy. Remus could only watch both sides, feeling alienated, and pet the niffler that wriggled in his lap, and hope that someday some of this whole business made sense.