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Chapter Twenty-One: Regarding Shoes and their Disguising of Sea Urchins
Well, I never thought it would come to this. Back in the room I'd grown up in, with the wallpaper I'd picked out when I was eight. Lying on my stomach in the bed I always got insomnia from, chin resting on my folded arms. The initials of my fifth year boyfriend carved in a heart on my headboard. The bright moonlight was coming in through the blue mesh curtains I'd chosen as a ten-year-old who'd grown out of pink. The black alarm clock that had inexplicably kept working since 1983 told me that it was a quarter to twelve. Criminy, and it was a Saturday, for Merlin's sake. I should have been awake, sitting by the fire with Severus at Hogwarts. Well, he'd be sitting, I'd be lying on my side with my head in his lap, asking him questions that I knew would annoy him since he was trying to read, Raphaela, do you not understand the concept of silence? But I couldn't occupy all my time with thoughts of Severus. I was going to have to spend two lousy weeks without him, with only my stupid parents for company. Dumb Christmas, what did it ever do for me? Nothing, that's what.
Well, my clock showed one, and I was still awake. Same thing happened for two and three, and then tiredness must have taken over because the next conscious thought I had was to throttle my father as he woke me up at nine. Of course, I'd been trained by Severus to wake up at six, but I'd forced myself to go back to sleep. If there was one thing that I could gain from this time spent away from him, it was being able to sleep in.
"Mrrrph," I said loudly and angrily as I pulled the covers over my head. "Go 'way. I'm sleepy."
"Get up, Raphaela," my father said in his deep voice. "Your sleeping til noon may have been all well and good for a sixteen-year-old, but you are an adult now."
I sat up straight and pushed the blankets down to my hips. "Well, I'm an adult who is sleeping in a single bed in her parents' house, so I think I should be allowed to act like a kid if I want." He frowned at me and left the room, and with a grumble I kicked the blankets off so that they fell from the foot of the bed and lay in a heap. "Stinkin' parents," I said, pouting as I took a dressing gown from the hook on the back of my door and padded barefoot down to the kitchen. My mother was cooking something on the stove, and I just caught the back of my father as he went into the lounge room. No doubt he'd sit in a recliner and read the paper for about six years. Damn stereotypes.
"Oh good, you're up," my mother said cheerily. "I've got the Andersens coming around for brunch in half an hour. What are you going to wear?"
I narrowed my eyes at her. "Only my underpants, and they will be on my head." She glared right back at me. "These Andersens wouldn't be the ones with the marvellously successful curse-breaker son that Dad's always trying to get me to leave Severus for, would they?"
"Oh, I haven't time to mess around in inter-family politics like that," she said breezily. "I've got you a nice new dress you can wear, anyway."
The 'nice new dress' turned out to be a hideous cream number that seemed to be made of crepe paper turned into fabric, with a hemline around my knees and straps so wide they'd intimidate an elephant. No, I would not be wearing that to 'brunch'. Who does brunch anyway? Last time I checked, my parents were not gay men. Or were they? I'd never really asked them before. "Mum," I called out as I rifled through my trunk for something to wear, "are you and Dad really gay men in disguise?"
"What?" she yelled back from downstairs. "I can't hear you dear, you'll have to come down here."
"I can't do that, I'm not wearing any pants," I yelled back.
"What?"
Well, that was unproductive. I'd put that down as a 'maybe'. In the end, I found a black miniskirt that I hadn't worn in about five years that would surely horrify my father, and paired it with a dark blue sweater. I went back downstairs, trying to finger-comb my hair so I could give the impression of having woken up earlier than ten minutes beforehand, and sat on the bench while my mother continued to utilise her culinary skills.
"Oh really Rapha, aren't you going to put shoes on?" she said, using a nickname she hadn't used in about fifteen years. I'd have to see if she did it again, though I hoped she wouldn't. It made me feel like an elephant, to be honest. "You can't walk around barefoot, you look like an urchin."
"A sea urchin?" I asked excitedly, as I extended my hands to poke her. "Look at all my spikes. They're venomous. You're going to have to go to the hospital because you used a poor word choice." She just looked at me in a very tortured, martyr-like way, and I had to titter behind my hand to prevent a guilting. Her guilt trips could strike down a harp seal. Wait, were they the big ones? Or the small ones? Were seals particularly resilient anyway? Well, her guilt trips could strike down something that was very big and resilient.
In order to avoid this, I went upstairs and donned shoes so that the Andersens wouldn't think my mother had found a girl off the street and paid her to pretend to be a properly functioning member of society. They might think that anyway, but the important thing was that it could not be blamed on my lack of footwear. I'd just gotten back down to the kitchen and sat on the bench once more (to show off my ability to follow directions to my mother, of course) when the doorbell rang. My mother, putting the finishing touches on a quiche, called out to my father to get it, and told me to go and be a gracious host. Gracious host my eye. The Andersens would be lucky to get out of here alive.