March 1991
Ever since I found out about Bill, I haven't been okay.
I couldn't hide it any longer: everything that had happened between us that I'd guarded so carefully.
It showed in the set of my rounded shoulders as I sat in the dining hall, back to the fire, cold inside no matter how it blazed. I didn't pick at my pork chop. I didn't see it at all. I just sat frozen, while all around me dishes clanged and kids called across the tables.
I sat for hours in the common room, blank-eyed. Mates came in and out, the portrait swinging constantly as the extrovert house never stood still.
All but me.
The only thing moving in my corner was my shadow flickering in the firelight against the crimson wallpaper.
They thought I'd gone daft. I could hear them. At first in whispers, all furrowed brows and real concern. I'd always been so hardy, and brazen. Such a Gryffindor.
It was frightening for them, especially the younger ones, to see their prefect this way. Not that I was any longer. I'd been stripped of my badge weeks ago. And now, I was in danger of failing out entirely. I'd cocked up any chance at passing a single N.E.W.T.
Without N.E.W.T.s, the Ministry was out as well. Oh sure, there were administrative jobs I could take, especially with my O.W.L.s (I only had so many because Bill did and I, his satellite, must follow his orbit.) But my Edinbourgeois parents were pureblood in magic and Chinese. It was shameful enough what happened to Jacob; I was their last hope for respectability, and a filing clerk position wouldn't in the least do.
A few of the girls from my dormitory approached in the early days. They plied me with smuggled treats from Honeyduke's and told me my unwashed hair was pretty. One placed an actual Cruppy on my lap, spilling the tussle of fur and wet tongue onto my inert form. I let it lick my expressionless face. It probably liked the salt from my tears dried long-ago and never rinsed off. My complexion wasn't the best at the moment.
Finally, even Rowan gave up.
"You know I'm no good at this," she'd whispered. "I never know what to say. I reckon I'll simply…listen."
But there was nothing to hear. Even had I wanted, there was nothing to speak. I couldn't find words to fit the shape of it, and any that I conjured just fell into the blackness that seemed to have taken up residence within. Rowan had put a tremulous hand on mine, tentative as always. For years I'd considered her my best mate, but she was a difficult one to get close to. It wasn't her fault. Khanna Grove sat on the outskirts of the New Forest. Even before Lockhart's trash "memoir", New Forest was more foreboding than our Forbidden one. Muggles couldn't find it; wizards didn't want to. Rowan grew up with trees and their little stick dwellers for playmates, her only exposure to the outside world through books and whenever her parents tuned in to Wizarding Wireless. Ashok wasn't born until Rowan was almost ten; he was barely speaking complete sentences when she packed off to Hogwarts.
I had been her first friend.
It was like finding the other end of a magnet. We clung to each other - she out of a loneliness she hadn't known she felt, I out of a yearning for a ghostly figure I only faintly remembered. Like the Khanna siblings, Jacob was ten years older than me.
What they never tell you about wizarding families is unless you're a Weasley, many of us grow up only children or the equivalent of. Wizards are rare; most purebloods like the Malfoys have only one a generation. Families with Muggle blood have a better chance of children near in age. Straight Muggleborns like the little Creevey boys are sometimes only two years apart. You can see it in their closeness.
Even if siblings are only five years apart, they're still quite young when school separates them. Ashok is shy when his stranger sister goes home for Christmas. In the same way, I barely knew Jacob.
Everyone is so overjoyed to receive their Hogwarts letter because we're starved for companions our age. Some students go wild with play, setting off so many dungbombs the faculty considered restricting our access to Zonko's. When I became a prefect, I almost agreed.
Rowan was never a troublemaker. Maybe my escapades proved too much for her. Maybe our differences were insurmountable.
All I know is, if we had stayed close, maybe Bill wouldn't have happened.
If we had stayed close, maybe she'd be able to reach me now. But it was too late. I haven't talked to her in that way for too long, and I couldn't do it now.
So eventually, she gave up too. And then it was just me and my shadow, looming like a dementor holding guard over me against the increasingly open chatter about my psychological state.
"She shouldn't be here."
"Send her to St. Mungo's already."
"I had an aunt who was barking. It started like this."
Look here, I wanted to say, I'm dressed. I use the lavatory like a human. I eat…sometimes. What more do you want from me?
But I continued to say nothing.
I wasn't mental. Just heart shocked.