Disclaimer I: Oh my god! Shock! I have discovered that Harry Potter and all the things that come with it aren't mine!!! But oh my god! I do have a brain and I can create characters and places and things, even!

Disclaimer II: I don't own the song Let Me Show You The Way. That belongs to Natasha Thomas.

Let me show you the way
It's a game that we play
Oh everyday so easy
Let me show you the way
Oh just say what you say
So easily

"Let Me Show You The Way"

Enjoy.

Carrie-Rose

Jenna and Andie have wandered off. So has Lily. Andrea and her clone bimbos are probably out playing hookers so I'm left here in the dorm all by myself. But its not too bad. It means I can sit sprawled out on the carpet writing my journal. What's that noise?

It was just the shower. It had been left on, by Lily I think. She was in a rush a while ago, and just left with her hair kind of wavy and wet. It looks pretty like that. Andie and Jenna probably went to have a band meeting or whatever… I'm scared for them. I feel like by encouraging them I'm sending them to the moon, thinking they're going to be stars, and then crumpling the moon in their faces.

They think they're so wise. And experienced. All three of them think I'm the naïve one, but really, we all are. We're only fifteen. We have hopes and dreams and wishful thinking and drama and hysteria… I don't see how I'm going to be able to grow up. I'll be stuck as a teenager in a woman's body. Because I am changing, physically. I'm not the stick insect I was before.

I'm filling out, and I don't really know how to feel. I guess I am sort of glad because last year Jenna made me feel so guilty, she even made me resent the way I looked. I'm not comfortable in my own skin anymore, and I hate feeling like that. The guys don't look at my face anymore when they talk to me. None of them do. I don't think they even realise, but their eyes move up and down and up down, searching.

Maybe it's a teenager thing- not being comfortable with what you look like. But mine is deeper than that, I'm not comfortable with the person I am on the inside anymore, either. That is the trouble.

My friends have to go through with some truly awful things. It's terrible- but I'm the one stuck in the sidelines, experiencing it second-hand. I think it's just as bad. The only person who can bring them out of their troubles is themselves.

No matter how much I stretch for them, if I reach out my hand, show them the way, lend a shoulder to cry on, it won't work. Instead they'd knock my hand away and take the opposite route and cry their tears into their pillows. They thought- and think- I can't hear them, but I did, and still do. I never sleep much at night.

Night is for facing yourself and the things you've done. Sometimes they don't cry. They stare at the wall, blank and unmoving. There are no tears but its not a comfort. I think I do it, except everyone's so stuck inside their own battlefield inside their own head, they can't see for looking for a way out. Anyway, my problems shrink to the size of full stops compared to theirs.

They think they're so secretive.

XxX.

Oh, Jenna.

I saw you at meal times, eyeing any food carefully and dismissing it, fearful of inflated calories you had totalled up in your head. And eventually avoiding it altogether. I saw you walk from your house in Hogsmeade to the castle and back every weekday, tired and worn out from getting up at the crack of dawn like a rooster, forced to work for your own mother.

I saw the clothes getting looser, the mirrors getting shunned and everything being examined critically for a shred of fat. Especially yourself. You became a living skeleton, I could count your ribs just by looking once and the bones on your arms were about to burst through the skin.

I noticed the fingernail marks after you hugged yourself tightly from the cold and the beaut of a black and blue bruise you got after being knocked only gently. I watched your body and mind giving up, as every word, every touch turned you into a human teardrop. You were always so strong, tougher than that weak mush.

You were starving, and denying it with hissing spitting snarling venom as that bitch of a Monkey tried to pin you down in a hellhole of misplaced beauty. The Monkey was a name given to anorexia, because there had to be a way to fight her. She had you caught for so long, but you got better.

I watched as you kicked and clawed and fought tooth and nail to get rid of her. I'm so proud that you fought, and you won, like you always do.

Oh, Andie.

I looked over your shoulder as you scribbled intense feelings into dark pictures into that dark sketchbook of yours. I always smelled the sharp fresh zing of mint and the sharp something else when I was near you. I heard you wheezing and choking. I saw you curl inside yourself as that powder took effect on your mind and lungs, and I wished I could hold you until every racking cough and sob had subsided. I saw how it made you happy, for a while, and you would write furiously but soon after you would weep like the world was ending.

You were so unfocused, your eyes were either narrowed slants or moonbeam wide and blank, taking in nothing nothing nothing

You tried to be unfeeling, uncaring, untouchable, unreachable but I noticed how everything stuck to your skin like shards of glass, pointing inwards. It took Remora and a wide scale humiliation to break you, get you out of your habit that was slowly killing you. You were addicted. But slowly you shook it off, suffering almost every step of the way but battling on, like a soldier. You're strong, Andie.

Oh. Lily.

Your innocence and naivety isn't gone- not quite yet. But I know its going. I see you staring at that table, the table under the green and silver banner. Staring at him. Be careful. He's a serpent, and the Sorting Hat put him there for a reason.

But he makes you happy, I know that. You walk with a lightness and you smile differently and I heard you singing in the shower yesterday. You've never sang in the shower before.

Be careful, Lily. Do you not know this will end in disaster? Or maybe you do. Maybe you know things will go wrong and people will scorn and scoff and mock, but you just don't care. That's so brave. I wish I was like you.

Does he care for you? I hope so. A lot of other people care for you. Its in the nature of people to like people who are beautiful and intelligent and charming. You'll hate me for this, but I think James Potter does care about you. He hides it under arrogance, boyish behaviour and childish pranks. And he hides it under the "obsession" he has for you. Because… If you'll come closer to me, I'll tell you why he's obsessed. But I'll only say it in a whisper.

Remember Amber Donovan? The legendary Chaser with that long red hair and startling light blue eyes? James is in love with her. Still. He told me this in the strictest confidence and

Why am I writing as if I'm telling my best friends the thoughts inside my head? These are the words I want to say to them, but I'm scared. Scared of answers, scared of questions. Should I rip the pages out and give them to Jenna, Andie and Lily anyway? Why am I asking a goddamn notebook. This isn't even a magical one.

I'm not giving them the pages, I've decided. This is my journal. Oops. Went a bit OTT on the MY.

If I don't show anyone, then I can share my problems. The ones which are the size of full stops.

It's my sister. Charlene. Last year she went missing.

The funny thing is I have all this space. Pages and pages of blank cream coloured paper to write down my problems but now suddenly I don't want to. My throat hurts and my eyes are starting to sting. Maybe I should let a little water out to soothe them. I'm not crying.

Images of home keep freeze framing in my head.

I'm not crying.

It's 4am. No ones here. Where are they?

I'm not crying.

I've had a great today and just bought a beautiful dress. And I can't keep kidding myself that the water slipping off my face isn't tears. My face is getting sticky, from the mingled tears drying. But I can't stop crying.

I need to stop being so ungrateful.