A/N: Whoot! First double digit chapter! I never get this far in my writing, so this is kinda big for me :P Hope you guys don't mind the slightly angsty tone of this chapter. Feel free to review :)

While eating breakfast on Halloween morning, the Hall half decorated with bats, pumpkins and floating jack-o-lanterns, Arianna got the shortest letter yet from her Mom.

Where are you?

She wasn't even sure if it was from the same person who'd been sending her letters every day now. The majority of them were around the exact same as the first one she'd gotten, with words along the lines of "Oh I miss you" and "They tell me I can't be with you…", all written in French. This was the first one she'd gotten that Rose could understand, that wasn't addressed to "Ma fille", that didn't make her feel a hollow pang in her chest – this was the first letter Arianna got that made her go into a blind rage.

"Ari?" Albus muttered quietly to her as Rose kept voicing aloud the confusion she was experiencing at the unrevealing note. Arianna shook her head, seeing spots of red in front of her.

"Excuse me," she told her friends as she got up from the Gryffindor table. Somewhere down along the table, Louis Weasley's voice called to her, "Ah Ari! Happy Halloween!" She smiled blindly in his direction as several voices piped up words she did not take in – it didn't even occur to her to wonder why the heck they even bothered to talk to her.

"Hey Ari –" Scorpius's voice was right in front of her; she plastered the grin on her face, and walked as fast as she could out of the Great Hall, out of Hogwarts, out to the spot she went to the first time she'd gotten her letter. Ari stood facing the lake, assured that she was out of ear-shot distance from the castle, and let out a breath she'd been unconsciously holding in that made her feel dizzy.

And then she screamed.

It only occurred to Ari on her third head-splitting scream that she could've cast a few charms around her so no one would be able to hear her.

Oh well.

" –"

"Ouch. Doesn't that make you go deaf, hearing yourself scream like that?"

Arianna whipped around, for a second her heart pounding wildly, thinking it was –

"Oh, it's you," she said tiredly, as Albus Potter grinned a bit awkwardly at her.

"Ouch again."

"Thought you were James, you sounded like him for a second there," Arianna said, sick of lying for once.

"Fair enough." Albus said easily, sitting down. Ari turned away, towards the school.

"I'm going back."

"Ari wait! I'm not going to ask. Well maybe this one thing. What are you going to do on a day we don't have classes if you're going to avoid every living being you encounter?"

"You think you're so clever Potter."

"I'm not that different from James you know." Albus hurried to walk beside her.

"Yes you are. You're freakishly observant, you're quiet in front of most people, you have a lot of friends, or just people who like you because they trust and respect you –"

"And that's different from James how?"

" – and you think you can just help everyone you meet and save the world just like that!"

"I-I never meant it like that –"

"Ha! Well no one ever means it! Just-just screw off Al!" And she stormed off, mentally strangling herself.

"You had no right to talk to Al like that." Rose hissed as she came into the dormitory, startling the other four girls who'd been giggling over a piece of parchment. Ari lay in her bed, eyes staring unseeingly up towards the ceiling.

"We'll just get out of here…" Kathy, their ringleader, said in her I'm-so-cool attitude voice. Rose spared her no glance as they went out. She turned back to her unmoving friend.

"Aria –"

"Go away Rose." The girl muttered.

"NO! Albus was trying to help you, we – he – we're always trying to help, to be there! But you keep blowing us off!"

"I never asked for any help now, did I?" Arianna retorted, her voice rising a tiny bit.

"Arianna Li, you are a self-serving, selfish bitch, did you know that?"

Arianna turned to Rose, her face betraying no emotions, not anger, nor sadness, not even the pretence of trying to hide her feelings.

"Yeah."

"Albus, I hate myself." Rose muttered, a hint of a whine in her voice.

"Rose…"

"She just looked straight at me, and her face was like – poof! Nothing! She didn't even look like she was –"

"Feeling anything, if that's even possible. Yeah. You told us."

Scorpius, for the umpteenth time, fidgeted uncomfortably.

"I'm still not sure –"

"Ari would want you here. That she'd want you to know about her private affairs." Albus finished for his friend, tiredly, "Well she's so good at hiding things the fact that you know about her stuff means she probably doesn't mind you knowing right?"

"Al, what was going through her head?" Rose's cousin looked up at her sharply.

"How should I know? And –" he interrupted the other two before they could speak, "We know Ari hates when I try to decipher everything that goes on around me –"

"It is a bit creepy, it's like you're reading our minds." Scorpius said, faltering a bit at his friend's severe look.

"And she hates me so I should just keep my ungodly mouth shut."

Rose rolled her eyes, the anguished look on her face vanishing for once.

"Aww are we going to be sad over that again?" Albus went pink.

"Shut up."

"But seriously, she doesn't hate you. She told me so herself. She just finds you –"

"If she wanted me to know she'd tell me herself." Albus said firmly, ignoring his friends' shared there-goes-Al-and-his-high-moral-standards looks.

"Back to Ari though," Rose said seriously, "I've sort of accepted I might never know her full life story, let alone still be her friend tomorrow, but I wanna at least know what set her off this morning." She looked imploringly at Albus, "Please?"

"Guys, it's not right… Fine. But it's just a theory you know. I don't actually know everything that goes around me, I just guess."

I love trying to guess everything, about everyone, that goes around me.

I know I've never met my biological parents before, and I know nothing about them. Just that they're dead and that I shouldn't mention them in front of my adoptive parents because a) they don't know anything about them (neither does the place they adopted me from) and b) it puts my dad in a bad mood.

But I sometimes imagine. I sometimes wonder. I picture in my head what they would've looked like; the waist length almost-black hair my mom would wear in a braid, my dad's chestnut eyes, his long slender fingers, my mom's wrinkles from smiling so much. I make up stories in my head about how they met, where they met, how old they were when they fell in love, what schools they went to, how old they were, and how, they died. Sometimes I felt an aching in my chest if I imagined too much, but that was it.

They were just fantasies.

On my ninth birthday, after a fight I had with my parents over a test mark I'd just gotten back, I went up to my room, fuming. I couldn't help thinking that if it were my biological parents, my real parents, they would love me enough not to ruin my birthday like that. Where are you? I thought miserably.

When my mom, my unreal mom, came up to coax me into going down to eat some cake, she saw me crying. She mistook my tears for being about our fight.

After that night, I could never get the notion out of my head that my parents, the two people who were supposed to love and want the best for and had given life to me, had abandoned me.

Where are you?