Somebody stop me feeling empty
…I act out the abused, bewildered and confused oh
Tonight I'm yours but I don't feel it
You say it's all a game
But one can only play it
I have this thought in my head
And it's about being noticed
Empty by Amanda Ghost
The Stone household was very chaotic, to say the least. Nicole had three younger siblings and one older. The younger ones consisted of Ricky and George, the twin six-year-olds, Chelsea, who was eight. Nicole's older sister Miriam was nineteen with an infant son of her own, but apparently she almost always stayed in her room.
Chelsea, who was a spitting image of Nicole herself, had come running up as soon as the older girls had stepped foot in the house and thrust a toy wand in the redhead's face, shouting, "Alakazam!"
"That's Chelsea," Nicole said, pushing her little sister aside to welcome her new friend into the house. "Chels, this is Lily Evans, my new friend from school."
"You go to school with Nicole?" Chelsea's blue eyes grew huge with admiration. "I'm going to go there, too, someday when I'm old enough."
"Well, won't that be lovely," Lily said politely.
"Don't mind her," Nicole said, laughing, "or the twins, either. They're around here somewhere. My house can be a little crazy sometimes. But here, let's go up to my room for now."
And she took the other girl by the hand and dragged her through a kitchen and up a flight of stairs, then down another hallway into a large room.
"I'm assuming you have something to wear to the big party tonight," Nicole said, closing the door after them and coming to sit on her bed. She jumped up a second later, and went rushing to another door at the back of the room. She opened it to reveal a large walk-in closet. "Wait until you see my dress. You are going to flip!"
The redhead set her white box down on Nicole's king-sized bed and sat down next to it. She examined the room. The duvet was a royal purple colour, and around the bed hung matching velvet hangings. The walls themselves were painted a lighter purple that seemed to accent the dark colours of the bed. Her own room seemed ugly and dull in comparison, and she was glad that Nicole had offered to have her here instead of the other way around.
"Look at this," Nicole declared, coming out of her closet with a dress on a hanger. The dress was a deep, rich blue that brought out the darker flecks of colour in Nicole's eyes when she held it up against her body. "Isn't it fabulous?"
"Beautiful," the redhead replied, nodding enthusiastically. "I can't wait to see it on you!"
"I can hardly wait to wear it!" the other girl exclaimed, twirling around in a little circle, hugging the dress against herself. "I'm so excited for tonight! So come on, it's your turn. Let's see what you brought."
Shyly Lily reached into the white box and carefully removed the gown she had just received that morning, enjoying the feeling of silk against her fingers. She unfolded the dress slowly, not wanting to wrinkle it, and then she held it out for her new friend to see. It was a halter dress with a plunging neckline and would leave the majority of the redhead's back exposed.
Nicole's smile increased until the redhead thought that her cheeks might get stuck permanently. She tossed her own gown on her bed and went to examine the emerald green one. "Oh my," she said, barely containing an excited giggle, "it's so amazing! Absolutely gorgeous! Wherever did you get this?"
"Umm…well, it was sort of a gift from someone. From a certain someone, who also happened to be the one to invite me to the ball to begin with."
"Who?" Nicole squealed. "Oh, please tell me!"
"Potter," the redhead mumbled under her breath, hoping the other girl would let it go at that.
"Who? Omigosh, did you say Potter? As in James Potter?"
"Well…yes."
She let out a high-pitched scream, grabbed Lily around the waist, and danced around the room with her. "Omigosh! I can't believe this! That's soooo cute! You are so lucky! James Potter is…uh; he's such a hottie! Oh, I had no idea! No wonder you were freaking out about this so much earlier!"
The redhead couldn't help but get caught up in Nicole's enthusiasm. She grinned too, nervously at first, but finally she was able to loosen up enough to even giggle a little. But her excitement was cut short.
"What happens if I screw up?" she asked, and Nicole stopped dancing.
"Don't be ridiculous, babe, you'll be amazing! Don't worry. I've been to this kind of thing before, and I'll teach you all there is to know about it."
"I'm nervous…"
"Don't worry!" her friend repeated, and resumed their dance. "Tonight is going to be amazing."
Two hours later the family was seated around a large dining table eating lasagne that Nicole's mother—who was originally from Italy—had made. Robert Stone had left the United States and gone to Italy when he'd been in college for a student exchange program. There he had met Anita Giuseppe, and they had fallen in love and were married a year later. Two years after that, Miriam had been born. The three girls were all born in Italy, but the family had moved to England when Nicole turned eleven and received her Hogwarts acceptance letter in order to be closer to the school. The twins had been born soon after in London.
"Are you sure you don't want any lasagne, Lily?" Mrs. Stone asked. "You haven't had lasagne till you've tried mine! The recipe has been in my family for generations."
The redhead shook her head. "No, thank you, Mrs. Stone," she said politely. "I already ate back at my house, with it being Christmas and all. I've been eating all day it seems!"
This, of course, was a lie. The last meal she'd consumed had been four days ago. She pictured the green ball gown laying on Nicole's bed upstairs, and knew she couldn't compromise not fitting into it by eating any lasagne, no matter how good it looked or smelled.
"Yeah, Mamma," Nicole said, glancing down at her own food. "There will be plenty of food at the party tonight. We don't want to be rude by not eating anything while we're there!"
"Nicole, tu finisci la cena!" Mrs. Stone told her daughter, pointing to Nicole's half eaten lasagne.
Nicole pouted, then crossed her arms over her chest. "Perché? Ho poca fame, Mamma!"
"Not me!" Ricky—or George, the redhead wasn't really sure which one it was—said enthusiastically. "Ho molta fame!" And he shoved another bite of his lasagne in his mouth, as if to make a point.
Mrs. Stone reached out and patted the twin on the top of his mop of brown curls. "That's a good boy, Ricky."
"Sorry about that," Nicole said later back up in her room. "Sometimes my family will switch to speaking Italian randomly. Sometimes I even do it at school." She laughed, blushing a little as well. "I did it a lot my first year, if you remember."
Lily did remember a few incidents in which Nicole had answered a professor's question in Italian, and then she couldn't seem to understand why no one understood her response. And several times during the first half of their first year, Nicole would get very excited while saying something in the Great Hall or in the hallways, and would switch in the middle of a sentence from English to Italian, not even noticing until someone pointed it out to her. These incidents became fewer and fewer as they progressed further in school, however, and soon she had stopped them altogether.
"So what were you saying?"
Nicole shrugged. "She told me to finish dinner, and I said, 'Why? I'm not very hungry, Mom!' Then Ricky had to show off and tell her that he was very hungry."
"I didn't realize the twins knew Italian as well."
"Oh, yes, they can speak a little of it, basics, you know, but they can understand more than they can say. Same with Chelsea; she knows a little more than the twins, but not much. She doesn't know it as well as Miriam and I do, because we lived in Italy for most of our lives. But my whole family knows Italian, although it sometimes drives the others crazy when Miriam, my mom or I start speaking really quickly, or when we use words they don't know. Even my dad."
"That's so cool. I only know English."
"I could teach you a little Italian, if you want me to," Nicole said excitedly. "I offered to teach the other girls at school, too, but they weren't interested. But if I taught you the basics, we could hold conversations right in front of them and they wouldn't know what we were saying! It would drive them nuts!"
"That would be awesome," the redhead said, already picturing Monica's face.
"I'll start teaching you later then," the other girl said, clearly pleased. "Right now we need to start getting ready or we'll be more than fashionably late, and everyone knows that that is NOT okay!"
They both laughed, and Nicole pushed her friend into a chair in front a desk with a large mirror on top. "Now…let's get started!"
By seven o'clock both girls were finally dressed and properly made up for the party. Nicole had had to alter Lily's gown so that it fit her correctly, and now they both looked nothing short of amazing. But the redhead was having issues with the notion of being pretty. In her mind, putting the dress on had been like adorning a pig with a gold collar: pointless, because no matter what fancy accessories were added, in the end it was still going to be a pig. She paced along Nicole's bedroom floor until the other girl finally lost her patience.
"Evans, really now, I think your edging on paranoid," Nicole said calmly. "You look…nothing short of amazing, okay? You're so pretty I can't even think of a word good enough. So relax! Just take a deep breath and let it out slowly."
"I can't help it!" the other girl cried, putting her face in her hands. "I feel like I'm going to vomit…" Except that there was nothing in her stomach to vomit for once.
"Look, did you want to head over there early? We might be able to catch the boys before the rest of the party guests arrive. Then you'll see what a huge deal you're making out of nothing!"
"That's easy for you to say," the redhead muttered, resuming her pacing. "You've done this sort of thing before. I'm a social outcast, Nicole! The local freak! Sometimes I think you forget that!"
Nicole went over and grabbed her friend by the shoulders. "You have got to stop saying that about yourself," she said firmly, shaking her a little. "You aren't a freak, and you only think you are because of Monica and the others, and they were just jealous of you, to be honest. They notice how all the boys look at you—have looked at you for the past six years. You are gorgeous, and they know it, and it scares them because before you showed up the world revolved around them. But you can't let yourself start believing what they tell you, or they'll win in the end, and all of this preparation will have been for nothing."
"Thanks, Nicole," the redhead said tearfully. "I really needed that I think."
"No problem. Just don't even think about crying, because I did not just spend two and a half hours getting ready just to have you ruin all your pretty make up!"
In the end, Nicole ended up dragging Lily out of the house and into her car. "We can't really walk the whole way in heels this high," the raven-haired beauty had said. "I'll park the car when we get closer and we'll walk the rest of the way. Now, just remember what I told you about breathing and not letting anything ruin this for you, okay? And you'll be fine."
They had indeed arrived before anyone else had. Nicole rang the doorbell on a huge mansion that paled Dean's house down to a mere shack. How embarrassing, the redhead thought, remembering the night before when James had stayed at her house.
A pretty woman in a black velvet gown, who was still putting on delicate pearl earrings, answered the door. She smiled at the girls warmly, and gestured them inside. "Hello, Nicole. How have you been, dear?"
Nicole smiled back. "Hello, Mrs. Potter. I've been well, and yourself?"
"Oh, you know," the woman sighed, rolling her coffee-coloured eyes at the ceiling. "Work's been an absolute nightmare, as usual. But what else can you expect?"
Mrs. Potter welcomed them inside to a large living room, in the middle of which was a huge, green pine tree decorated lavishly with ornaments and tinsel, on top of which was a huge golden star. Nicole seated herself comfortably on the couch, while the redhead chose a burgundy armchair. Mrs. Potter then walked over to a large grand staircase and called, "James dear! Some more of your guests are here!"
"If you'll excuse me, ladies, I still have to get ready," she said when she came back. "James and the others should be down shortly—oh, why I don't think we've had the pleasure of meeting," she added, as if seeing the redhead for the first time.
Lily jumped up and went to take Mrs. Potter's outstretched hand. "Hello, Mrs. Potter, I'm Lily Evans."
"Oh, I should have known," James's mother said brightly. "My son has been talking about you quite a bit lately, as it so happens. He said you were Head Girl this year. Congratulations."
"Thank you," the girl said shyly, averting her gaze. Somehow she thought it would be rude to look into the older woman's eyes for too long.
"Well, I really must be going now, but it was a pleasure meeting you, Lily. I hope we have the chance to talk again. See you ladies soon!"
The redhead sat back down, waving a hand in front of her face, suddenly feeling hot. She was shaking, and that was only from meeting one person! How on earth was she going to survive this night?