excerpt from Bound for company by Nora Finnigan
NOTE:
I don't know if a statute of limitations exists for such a small offense as I am revealing to you in this section.
If it doesn't: this is autofiction, not autobiography. I do not claim everything in the memoir to be completely and utterly true, and I will testify as such to a court of law.
Now, let's move on, shall we?
end excerpt
December 15, 2022
After our last apparition lesson, Louis proposes an idea to James and me after we exit the Great Hall. We're each set to take individual licensing exams over the break. I do not doubt that Louis and James are going to pass but am unsure about myself. It took me half the lessons, including my own private ones, to try apparating for the first time, and I still haven't stuck the landing without a small stumble.
Louis stops us in the Entrance Hall and says, "Rose and I have been talking about dropping acid just before Christmas break. Want to join?"
"Not at all," James says immediately.
"Maybe," I answer.
"We'd do it on Saturday," Louis provides. "Let me know tomorrow at breakfast so I can buy the right amount."
"I've never taken any drugs," I let Louis know. I know Rose has, though not often, and a part of me has always wanted to try. Another part is terrified I'll lose control of me and not be able to handle it.
I surprise myself by letting him know without any hesitation. I am the type of person to agree to having seen a movie or heard a song I haven't seen or heard before. It's an instinct; a survival tactic; an evolution of defense mechanism. It's because my Mars is in Libra.
And here I am with Louis, a boy I claimed to once love and ached for him to love me in return, an obvious more-than-occasional participant in the usage of recreational drugs, and a bit of a cocky git, being completely honest about my lack of experience.
A fucking win if I say so myself.
"Well, personally, I like it better than others. Rose says the same," Louis tells me. "I can give you half a tab since it would be your first time. The effects would be much lighter, and you could save the other half for another time if you end up enjoying it."
This time there is an urge to prove myself, to agree to an entire tab as I understand everyone else involved has. Instead, I agree with half of one.
"Who else?" I ask.
"Anna and Albus, of course," Louis responds. "James, you are more than welcome to join if you let me know in time."
James declines once more with an awkward smile and a slight shake of his head. I watch the small bounce of his hair.
.
December 17, 2022
James, Deidre, and I make our way to the far edge of the lake in the early afternoon. James and Deidre have signed on to be our sober chaperones, which I assume consists of making sure we stay away from the rest of Hogwarts's population and don't jump into the lake. Deidre holds a bouquet in her hand, and her shoulder bag rests where it was crafted to — I assume the radio is inside. I try to decipher the bouquet, but the jumbled and contradictory meanings of the flowers make me believe she just found it pretty.
The rest already gather atop a large blanket. I recognize it as a throw Rose keeps in the dorm, but it looks like someone has charmed it a few sizes larger. Rose lays splayed across the middle as everyone sits around her.
I take my cigarettes from my boot and light one, inhaling the tobacco and nicotine as my nerves take over my body. I feel a slight tingle move throughout me as my chest tightens and my heart warms.
Rose lets out a loud, raucous laugh at something Anna says as James and Deidre find their own places on the blanket. James sits with his legs straight out in front of him and leans back on his hands, his glasses falling down the bridge of his nose. He uses a single finger to push them up.
Louis rises from the group and makes his way to me. His eyes are darker than I've noticed before and wonder if he's the lucky type whose irises change color with the sky. I find them beautiful in a different way than I used to.
"You know, those things will kill," he tells me.
I flash back to the train ride at the start of this term and remember how nervous he made me. His hand on mine as it held a pack of cigarettes. He doesn't reach out now, and I do not know if I want him to.
Too late, Angel.
I lie, "I'll quit someday soon."
Louis does me a favor by pretending to believe me.
.
After I join everyone on the picnic blanket, Louis pulls out a small baggie from his pocket. There looks to be a few individual, tiny squares of paper. These are what I assume to be tabs, and I assume right as Louis begins to hand them out. He breaks one in two and hands half to me.
"Half?" Rose inquires.
"It's her first time," Louis replies.
"I think she can handle a whole," Rose smiles. "This batch isn't very strong from what I hear."
Louis and Rose turn to me expectantly as if I have any idea what they're talking about. I look between them for what feels to be a long moment before uttering what feels like famous last words.
"I can handle it."
.
A fuzzy feeling in my face, vibrant colors, disjointed sounds. The world around me feels entirely unreal and hyper-focused, a flipbook unfolding before my eyes. It is terrifying and exhilarating. It is unlike anything I have experienced in my seventeen years.
James stands above me in the grass and says something, but I am too distracted to hear. I try to tell him to give me a second. The words do not form on my lips. He sits next to me and watches my movements. I stare at the enhanced colors of his face and eyes. The whiskey color I remember from my father's bottles stares back at me, intense.
"You're beautiful," I say.
Rose calls this the come up.
.
The soft fabric of my pants brushes against my legs most satisfyingly. I crinkle my socked-toes in the grass as I sway along to the soft melody Deidre's radio sings. I feel magical in a different sense than I do every day.
I grab Rose's hand so she'll sway along with me. Albus tries to sing along but doesn't know the words. Louis picks up Anna and spins her around, the sounds of their laughs mingling beautifully with the music. Deidre's braids of wildflower crowns on the blanket. James catches my eye, and I throw him a wild, toothy grin before Rose spins me beneath her hand.
The world is pure, big, and beautiful.
I finish my twirl and try to catch James's gaze once more. Rose notices this and leans forward to giggle into my hair. I do not lose my grin.
.
Louis sits across from me in the grass. I spot Anna a ways away, her short brown hair filled with iridescent glitter and what I assume to be temporary pink highlights. She smiles as she talks to Rose, her silver dress short and tight showing off thin legs. The longer I look, the wider her smile grows until it covers her entire face and her teeth sharpen and she becomes nothing but a smile atop a neck.
Everything is jagged.
"Finnigan, you don't look like you're having fun!" Louis shouts, sitting with his legs just like mine, our knees touching. His eyes are red, and his smile is lopsided.
I sway, and the entire universe moves with me. Looking at Louis through the lens of a hallucinogen revives bits and pieces of my schoolgirl crush. It wasn't long ago, anyway, that I looked at him like he was the sun. The colors of his face are spectacularly magnified, and his voice echoes, creating a delightful tune.
"I'm having fun," I simply say. My brain tries to find other words floating in the air, but they jumble and criss-cross until it feels like the world is an unscrambling puzzle in a travel book.
He takes each of my hands in his own, and, somehow, it's like I can't feel his grip while feeling his grip. His grip exists in echoes from a universe parallel to our own. I imagine myself in a dimension where I am braver and used to the way Louis's hands feel in mine.
Louis leans forward, quickly in this dimension but slowly in the other. I can see him still sitting up as his body moves closer, versions of him from the other universes echoing behind in technicolor. There is mischief in his eyes.
"I have a secret," he says lowly. The words are distorted.
I lean in, too, and mumble, "The world is a flipbook."
He ignores my words. "I used to notice the way you looked at me, and —" My stomach forms knots, my intestines wrapping around themselves and pulling tight — "I noticed the way you stopped. Where did you go, Finnigan? Who holds your gaze now?"
I pull my hands back, but he pulls them closer. His pupils are gigantic, covering the bright blue I know to be the color painting his irises. He looks demonic in a way, black where there should be blue and red-tinged white with veins like pulsing bloodlines.
"Is it James?" he asks me.
I breathe in, but the air feels like glass in my throat. Words try to spill from my lips, but all I can do is cough as my eyes water. Louis's grip tightens on my hands, and I feel it in every universe as I hold my breath until the pain in my throat lessens.
But before it can, Louis leans even closer, smashing his lips into mine. He is performing desperation in a way I recognize but wish I didn't. I do wish to know what a boy like him could be desperate for. I am transported to a party that feels worlds away, and Louis is replaced by Howie and there is music and there is nonsense and there is a need to remember and there is somehow regret over things that haven't happened yet.
Louis kisses me in many universes, but I can still feel the ones where he restrains his desperation.
I pull away from the kiss harshly, tugging my hands from Louis's grip with a strength I have to muster. I look to Anna to see her looking at us, and when my eyes return to Louis is he no longer Louis anymore. He is Howie, but then he is Natalia, then Rose, Deidre, Albus, and finally James.
James's face smiles kindly, but I know he is not James.
I scream, scrambling to stand, before grabbing my cloak and running towards the castle and my favorite tree. When I turn to look at the scene behind me, Louis is Louis once more, and Anna's fists are beating against his chest.
.
My tree is leafless in mid-December, and I try to ignore it's sickly, knotted branches as I hug my knees as close to my chest as my thick thighs and circular belly will allow me. The ghost of Louis's kiss lingers on my lips, or maybe, in another universe, his lips are still there. It's a universe where there is no Anna-shaped girlfriend and my feelings for James are simple and platonic.
I watch a lost balloon float through the sky. I imagine myself one, and instead of eating and lazing, I expand as a small man in a clown suit blows into a hole on my back. The more I imagine, the more real it becomes until I can feel myself slowly expanding. I let go of my legs and stretch them, watching as they inflate. My skin stretches; pressure sits around my bones.
I tell myself this isn't real, but rationality throws itself into the lake. My nerves are on fire. I shove the heels of my hands into my eyes as I will myself not to cry.
Nora.
He whispers my name like he knows I need him to. Hands I know to be strong lightly grasp my wrists, guiding my own hands away from my eyes. In another universe, I am still alone, and my hands are still pressed, the pressure pushing against my features. Here, James's face becomes clear as my eyes focus, but I wonder who his face is attached to.
"James?" I ask.
"It's me," he murmurs.
"Are you James?" I say, untrusting of my senses.
I flash to the small smile his face gave me while Louis was wearing it.
"Of course." He responds.
"You have to say it," I tell him. "You have to say who you are."
"I am James." His eyes widen. Is he afraid of me for him or me?
"What did you give me for my birthday?"
"I drew you an abstract drawing with a silly Beatles's lyric in the middle," he says, cheeks becoming tinged with a light pink glow. I suddenly remember it's daytime, and the slight existence of the sun begins to burn my skin.
only beneath sunbeams is it feasible to daydream
I pull my wrists out of his grasp and say, "When you touch me, you aren't touching me. It's like I can feel every universe on my skin like I know what every version of me in every dimension is feeling at every moment."
"I think your senses are just out of sync, and they're taking a little time to catch up with each other," he responds. "You're on drugs."
"I'm a balloon," I whisper. Or maybe, I don't. I'm never doing drugs again.
"You can't just scream and run away like that," James tells me as he moves to sit next to me. "You scared me half-to-death."
"I'm sorry," I tell him with as much sincerity as I can muster. I move to tap his arm or grab it — I don't know — but the moment my skin touches his, I feel it reverberate through every universe. I pull away.
"Why did you run?"
"You didn't see it?" My heartbeat drums in my ears. I remember the kiss, the changing faces, the not-James's smile in flashes like a book of polaroids.
"I heard you scream, but then Anna started screaming and hitting Louis, and the commotion fucked with Rose's senses," James tells me. "Deidre was able to calm her down with the radio and sent me after you once Rose told us you'd gone. I think I was with Al when you ran, and Rose refused to say why."
Bless my best friend and her Hufflepuff like loyalty even when under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug.
"Oh."
"What happened, Nora?"
"It was… Louis…" I stop.
It's Howie all over again. I don't want James to know Louis kissed me; I wonder what I think will happen.
"What did Louis do?" James questions — no, he demands. There is a hardness in his features and a harshness in his voice I am unfamiliar with.
How many times will the wrong boy kiss me before the right one does?
Another unwanted thought falls into my head as another minute passes. The clouded sun keeps trying to burn my pallid skin sheened with sweat. My heart burns in a different sense as I imagine a universe where Louis kissed me weeks earlier and there was no problem. I think it doesn't exist.
"He kissed me, James!" I yell unexpectedly. "He kissed me in front of his girlfriend. And then his face — it changed. He shapeshifted like a fucking metamorphmagus. He turned into everyone else, person by person, and then he turned into you. And then — " I stop myself.
"And then what?"
"And then he, you, it smiled," I say softer than before. "And it terrified me."
"My smile terrified you?" he asks with a small chuckle.
"Don't laugh at me," I answer instinctually. "This isn't funny."
"I'm sorry."
"He was wearing your face. I knew it wasn't you, James," I plead for him to understand the situation, to understand me, to understand that drugs are entirely fucking with my psyche. "I knew it was Louis wearing your face, but for a moment, I forgot about the drugs and believed it was all real."
"I'm sorry, Nora," James repeats.
He grabs my hand, but I snatch it away, afraid of the universes. I see a flash of sadness spread across his face, and it pains me. I reach out slow and lightly place my hand on top of his. The universes do not punish me for it.
"There was a time when I wanted Louis to kiss me," I admit, "but that's in the past now."
"You want me to punch him once he sobers up?" he offers with a toothless smile.
"I think whatever Anna does to him will suffice as punishment."
James and I sit in the same position for a moment, my hand still atop his. There is a flash of a universe where I did not reach out, and I fight the instinct to pull away. There is a heat between our skins and it makes me think of the kind of heat James and I could create.
In the distance, I see Albus running toward us, Rose not far behind.
"He kissed me," I say once more.
James does not respond.
I wish it had been you, I think, and for a moment, I worry I have said it aloud as James looks down at me. The thought quickly leaves my mind as I lean to rest on his shoulder. He places a hand on my knee; there is only feeling beneath his palm, as if in every universe, James eventually finds me and rests his hand here.
I can still feel the slight inflation of my body. His touch doesn't sober me or make the parallel universes leave my mind, but it feels better than not being touched by him at all.
.
December 18, 2022
I awaken the next morning with a heart-wrenching memory.
I wish it had been you.
I said it aloud.
.
AN: ANNNNND, we are caught up! From now on, uploads on this site won't be as fast as this is up to where I have completed. Chapter 15 is almost finished, hopefully, and then it will be slower up uploads speeds as I finish writing the story. My plan is to have it all finished by the end of the year!
All my love 3