"If I were a pair of boots, where would I be?" Jac was standing in the middle of a mountain of clothes, shoes and books, looking utterly defeated. The dormitory was in an absolute state as five girls tried to decide what exactly to take home with them for the Christmas holidays and what could be left behind. Jac was determined that she could not live without a particular pair of light grey boots, a claim somewhat disputed by the fact that she hadn't worn them once in the entire term.
Lily was perhaps the most organised, with the exception of Beth, who had finished the night before and was serenely floating around, helping the others with folding clothes and finding things. Lily had packed a few books, the ones she needed to do several cruel over-Christmas pieces of homework, but she was planning on leaving a lot of stuff here.
By lunchtime, all five of the girls were thoroughly bored of packing and were attempting to use a range of spells to speed the process along. This was working fairly well until Karen nearly lost an eye when she returned from the bathroom and was greeted by a shoe to the face. They decided then that it was probably better to stick to the slower, but less dangerous method of picking stuff up.
Once they had closed all of their trunks and had made sure that they hadn't forgotten a vitally important textbook (Lily) or diary (Beth) or three pairs of robes that were stuffed in the back of a drawer (Jac), they congratulated themselves and headed down to lunch.
The rest of the afternoon passed by in much the same way as the afternoons before big days tend to do: interminably slowly. The girls put on some music and danced around, re-reading magazines a final time before throwing them away and chatting in the relaxed way that came after a great deal of work and a hard task accomplished. Lily hadn't told Jac or the others that she had given James the snowglobe, and she debated telling them now, but it seemed sort of irrelevant and also she really didn't want to.
So she let it pass and since no one brought up the topic of whether or not Lily had given James a second present, the fact passed unremarked upon. All Lily could hope for was that James, himself, wouldn't mention it, and she could never be quite sure what would happen when James Potter was involved. She simply had to wait, and hope that tonight and tomorrow would go by without anyone else bringing up the uncomfortable topic of whether or not she had any particular strong feeling towards James.
The day wore on, and snow returned, as if to assert that it was in fact winter, and as the sky grew darker, Lily prepared for a good old fashioned Gryffindor common room party. The girls had decided that no matter how everyone else was planning on dressing, it was almost the holidays and they were going to dress up. There was something comforting about knowing that you would not be the only one dressed inappropriately for the event. Lily decided that dress robes were a bit much and settled on a dress that she had left at the bottom of her trunk all year. The dress had been bought so long ago that Lily couldn't even remember the occasion she had first picked it for. It was a little too short, and worn, but she loved it, and it felt right that, after a year that had been marked by heightened distain for Muggleborns, she would end it by celebrating in the heart of Hogwarts in a Muggle dress. The deep blue velvet and flared sleeves were enough to make the dress eye-catching, but the silver thread that laced around the hem and made tiny stars sparkle on her sleeves made it something beautiful. Everyone agreed that it was lovely, and Jac offered to style her hair. Lily simply brushed it out and let it sit loose. It had grown longer over the term, but had kept its characteristic wave.
She had spent long enough tugging at the hem of her dress, and everyone else had dressed too. It was time to go downstairs and see if the party was anywhere close to beginning.
It wasn't. The common room was not deserted by any means but neither was there the tone of a party. None of the boys were there, and Lily was wondering about enchanting a note to fly up to their room, when Jac shoved her towards the stairs.
"Go up and get them?"
"I can't, the stairs will just force me back down." She said, thinking of the few times a year in which a first year, and on occasion someone a bit older, attempted to sneak up to the girls' dormitories.
"It doesn't do that for the boys' one." Beth piped up and everyone looked around at her, surprised. "Oh, shut up! I read it in Hogwarts: A History."
"Of course you did, Bethy!" Karen laughed, and she walked over to the stairs and stepped up a few to prove it wouldn't turn into a slide. It didn't.
"So why don't you just go up?" Lily asked.
"You're the only one not wearing heels. You have to do the walking. We might all break our necks."
She sighed, but knew that she was simply going to be whined at and badgered until she did it.
"Which one is theirs?" she asked, and Jac got the answer from a first year boy at a nearby table. When Lily was halfway there, she realised that she should have asked the boy to run up and get them. She knocked on the door, half hoping that they wouldn't answer.
"What d'you want?"
"Is that Sirius?"
There was a brief scuffle, and the door flew open to show a surprised-looking James, with the other three peering around from within the room.
"So, it's me you want?" Sirius smirked, then muttered something to Peter, who laughed. "Looking good, Evans!"
"Thanks." Lily tugged self-consciously at the hem of her dress.
"You look... good, Lily."
"...Thank you."
He stared for a moment, looking a little dazed and Lily wondered briefly if he had been stunned.
"I was just wondering... are you lot planning on coming down anytime soon. I've been sent up to hurry you along."
"We're pretty much ready... " James looked a little scattered and she took the opportunity to survey the room.
"So this is where you plan all your terrible pranks? I thought it would look a little more sinister..."
Sirius beckoned her in, and made a show of giving her a tour. She greeted Adi and nodded at Nigel, before sitting down on the bed Sirius gestured to, almost bowing in his show of courtesy.
Lily settled herself on the bed and looked around, spotting the still wrapped snowglobe on the nightstand. She pointed at it.
"I was sure that you'd have opened it already."
Sirius, Peter and Remus distracted her just then with their very strange reactions. They each looked as if they were desperately holding in laughter and they were all staring fixedly at James, who was looking with a heavy blush at the offended gift.
"What's wrong, did you open it?" She glared accusingly at James, who shook his head and quickly became very focussed on tying his laces.
She turned to the others.
"Did he? Did he open it?"
Sirius managed to shake his head, and then ducked down to look for something behind his bed. Lily was beginning to feel a little embarrassed. Had James told them about it, and they thought she was an idiot? Were they laughing at her?
She just wanted to return to the common room and not speak about presents or snowglobes for the rest of the night. Fortunately, she didn't have to wait long and soon she sprinted down the stairs, followed quickly by the four boys. They had a strange capacity for drawing attention and incidents towards them. Usually this was a bad thing, as it tended to mean trouble, but tonight, with the dullness of two weeks with Petunia looming overhead, Lily would have embraced anything that might make her last night here eventful.
The party had, as they tended to do, grown to involve far more people than comprised the fifth to seventh years of Gryffindor house. She could see more than a few Hufflepuffs and a handful of Ravenclaws, though there were no Slytherins, to her view, present.
Lily had decided, for her own sake, not to drink any of the firewhiskey on offer. She knew that she would thank herself tomorrow when she was sitting in a shaky carriage of the Hogwarts Express and not wanting to die. It was thanks to this decision that she found herself observing rather than taking part in the party. She watched as Jac climbed onto a table, and laughed as Sirius mimed a song into a bottle. It was a typical Gryffindor sort of party, it lasted too long and grew too wild. Most of them, if they had any sense, should have been in bed long ago, but the last night of term never felt like the right time for any great amount of sense.
Lily hadn't seen much of James, probably because tonight she wasn't in a situation where she was likely to embarrass herself, and James seemed to gravitate towards her worst moments. She found herself watching him from a fair distance as he chatted to a Hufflepuff girl, who was obscuring his face from her. She wasn't sure why but she kept looking back to them. She would have a conversation or fetch herself a butterbeer, but every so often her eyes would stray back to James and that girl, who seemed fairly taken up with one another.
It was nice. She wanted James to be happy, she wanted him to be interested in someone else, and to be with them. She reasoned that the reason she spent so much time worrying about rumours to do with her and James, and all things James-related, was that she had been particularly cruel to him in a moment when he had asked her out. Despite the fact that he had most likely been joking, she didn't like him to think that she was the sort of person to make fun of or be so cruel to someone who fancied her. Neither did she want him to think in any way that her reaction that day, and her unwillingness to talk about the topic, was because of any feelings she might have had towards James.
She didn't want to be the sort of girl who spent a perfectly good party pining after a boy and so she threw herself into the crowd, chatting to people, striking up conversations, making jokes, turning herself into the observed, rather than the observer. She didn't know if James was still with his Hufflepuff, and she didn't see him again that night, which she spent making sure that no one present could have said that Lily Evans was anything other than the absolute life and soul of the party.
She had been right to refrain from drinking. She found this out when she saw Remus the morning after, his usual well-kept appearance dishevelled and his face slightly green.
"Alright Remus? Fancy some toast?" She laughed smugly as he turned his baleful gaze on her, wondering why she was tormenting him.
Remus was probably resenting, as Lily did, the fact that as prefects, they both had to spend a little less time in bed that morning than their friends. They were required to guide the first years, and the forgetful second years, down to the train platform.
As they walked down towards the scarlet engine, Lily glanced back up at the castle, forlorn. She wished, desperately, that she had been able to stay at Hogwarts over Christmas. It was so beautiful and she missed it already. It hardly seemed like a trade to turn in the grand halls and all her wonderful friends, for creaking floorboards and Petunia.
Still, she would get letters and newspapers from the wizarding world. She turned desperately to Remus.
"Promise you'll write to me over Christmas? And get Peter, Sirius and James to do the same. I'll go mental if I'm stuck out there by myself."
Remus said that he would do his best to convince the others, but he said that particularly Sirius would be difficult to persuade, which she had known all along.