Chapter 8
Mignonne Opens
Author's Note: Doesn't it annoy you, when you see a movie and the actor/actress gets drunk, but wakes up the next day smelling and feeling fresh as a daisy? Well, anyway. logically Jeanette should get a hangover. I have never experienced a hangover and in a perfect world, I will never experience one. But life isn't perfect and neither are people. Anyway, after an exclusive interview with my cousin (I saw him drunk once, red as a cherry, but he didn't talk funny), I have decided that the morning after is a very nasty experience so I sorta copied the symptoms of a migraine. (Read the guide on the Tylenol bottle.)
Jeanette spent most of Sunday morning in a painful sleep. When she woke up, she was dizzy, her mouth was dry, and her head felt like it had been run over by a train. Mrs. Weasley finally came and fussed over her.
"Shame on them. Shame! The others are irresponsible, but Remus. You poor thing." She muttered. Jeanette covered her ears, the smallest sound fried her nerves. Mrs. Weasley made her drink a bitter, gritty potion and made her take a cold shower. She looked and felt like a wet cat when she came out. The potion had diminished the pain into a dull throb, but it still hurt.
Getting dressed.was embarrassingly difficult. Her hands wouldn't move the way she wanted them to and her head. Once after a series of ear infections Jeanette had woken up dizzy, as like when she took a step, her foot hit air and she stumbled. Her mother said that her inner ear was unbalanced and poured a teaspoon of olive oil in it. It was that vertigo except worse. Mrs. Weasley got her another potion, but what Jeanette wanted were a few extra-strength Tylenol. She finally got dressed and realized that her shirt was inside out. Groaning, she put her head down.
"When I got a hangover Mum wasn't nearly as sympathetic," Fred said. She turned to look at him and then put her back down.
"Leave me alone or I'll puke on you." She muttered.
"She called me a no good lazy git," Fred continued in a casual voice, she could hear him sit down behind her.
"You are a no, good lazy git," she shot back, weakly. She lifted her head and let it fall back on Ginny's desk. Pain to knock out pain.
"Stop that," he shook her. He put down some pills and a glass a water. It took about five minutes and all the water to remember how to swallow. "Now," he dragged her to her feet, "time to take a walk."
"No."
"If you're going to be embarrassed, rest assured. Everyone already knows."
"What?!" Jeanette said groggily.
"Mum was yelling at Lupin as soon as he got through the front door. Watch your step. She woke the whole house up."
"I don't remember--" They were in the garden now. It was cloudy.
"George carried you upstairs so Mum could properly scold. She went on so long that we all left to get breakfast and then remembering what a fit Mum had been in, we decided that we might as well stay away the whole day."
"You?"
"Couldn't leave you all by yourself, could I?"
Jeanette stared at him, disbelieving.
"George, Bill, and Charlie reckoned I owed you something for the hell I gave you last week." He pulled a muffin out of his pocket and handed it to her. She stared at it. She didn't feel like eating.
"I forgave you yesterday."
"Eat your muffin." She looked at it distastefully. "Just walk then." Fifteen minutes later, the headache was almost all gone and the muffin was long gone. Behind the house, was a wet, grassy, lumpy land. While George was not as talkative and bit more mature, Fred was the regular chatterbox bouncing from topic to topic from girls to whoopee cushions. He was also all extremes, extremely happy, extremely sad (heartbroken when an experiment failed), extremely angry, but never in the middle. He felt everything so whole-heartedly, there was never any doubt about what others thought. He was admirable that away, so confident.
"I was thinking," Fred started. "You're not of age so can't open a shop." Jeanette opened her mouth to protest. "You know, I was thinking about expanding and maybe you could pay us to buy a shop under our names so all the legal gumbo mumbo is hoity-toity and you get everything when you're eighteen."
"The catch?"
"Ten percent of the profits."
"Okay."
"Oh, I meant ten percent of each of us so in total twenty percent." Fred added. She punched his arm.
"Whatever." She agreed, just happy fantasizing about her shop. They walked for a few minutes in silence. Jeanette smiling to herself and Fred with his face furrowed deep in thought.
"I don't think it's fair," Fred said suddenly.
"What."
"You got to go to your first Order of the Phoenix meeting yesterday and I haven't." Jeanette looked at him incredulously. Someone would actually want to go to one of those. "So what happened?"
"Nothing much," she lied. "They gave me something to drink and asked me questions."
"About what?"
"I can't remember," she fibbed airily.
"Don't worry, I won't cry." He leaned on her. "I've got enough cash. Moody arrived this morning with a whole stack of papers for you. Tell me, are you an alien?" She laughed. The rest of the day was fun. Fred capriciously decided to teach her how to fly a broomstick and they spent the better part of the early afternoon on that. She could actually zoom at around at the speed of two miles per hour. The rest of the time was spent looking at pictures with Mrs. Weasley.
Fred and George were clearly the rebels of the family. Just when everyone thought they were doomed to be short and solidly built, they sprouted. Still much more vertically challenged than Ron, Bill, and Percy (who over six feet), they were a respectable 5'7 and still growing. There were a variety of pictures of the twins torturing the siblings. A young Ron squalling at the sight of a spider that Fred was tangling from a string. Ron wailing holding a lollipop, a hole in his tongue. Ginny in tears as Fred and George switched the heads of her stuffed animals. A furious young Percy chasing the twins down the stairs. (There was still a dent of the floor, where Percy fell.) George slipping a frog into Bill's unsuspecting pants. The boys playing Quidditch.
The grandfather clock gonged seven times.
"They're coming home." Mrs. Weasley jumped into the kitchen to get to work. Jeanette helped. After dinner, Jeanette went home with Fred and George. The next two months passed quickly with weekly visits to the Burrow and no more Order of the Phoenix meetings. The nonstop fun was only interrupted by an owl, but soon Jeanette was back to normal again, a little quieter but it wasn't noticeable in the noisy, active Weasley household.. She created a variety of new products and perfected her potion skills. Fleur never mentioned the basket. She kept her hands out of the twin's accounts and the twins kept their hands out of her room. They purified Jeanette's exploding substance and consequently all three lost their eyebrows. This led to Jeanette creating eye brow pencils that drew convincing hairy eyebrows.
Time past too quickly and one morning day in late August, Jeanette, Fred, and George were sitting in a room in Gringotts poring over a piece of parchment that Bill was explaining. It was a lease, a lease for a store in Hogsmeade. Fred and George signed the papers, but Jeanette got the keys.
The rest of the day was spent packing and stocking the kitchen with enough food to last them to Saturday. That night they went to a restaurant and Fred broke another surprise. They were opening another Weasly Wheezes and this time in Hogsmeade. The store would be run by employees, but George would be there ever Wednesday and Friday. That meant, of course, that the twins still had a supply of balanced meals. On August 31st, Fred and George borrowed Bill's car and took her to Hogsmeade.
The store was small and dusty from being closed for over a year. There were apartments above the store that were equally dirty. Fred and George had as ingenious ways of cleaning as Jeanette. Together, they enchanted a mess of scrub brushes, mops, brooms, and anything else to clean by themselves.
The old pukey colored green paint was peeling. So while Jeanette covered the furniture and floor with sheets, the twins filled balloons with magical pastel paint and rigged them to a bomb. The fact that it was much than Fred and George's place and the fact that they were both helping made the job go much faster.
While the paint dried, they had dinner.
"So are you going to move in?"
"We bought out Zonko's and so there's no cleaning to do or anything. We just got some movers and stuff." As they walked her back to her shop, they gave her a very serious talk. Jeanette couldn't stop laughing. Imagine, Fred and George both telling her that boys were extremely untrustworthy and should be avoided at all costs. They told her to be careful and to never take any risks and blow herself up. Boys were not to be trusted. If she needed anything, just owl them. They would personally see to any problems. She got two very serious gifts from them: a little pastel blue screech owl and a large Newfoundland dog. They apparated after giving her a peck on the cheek.
The next day was filled with making stuff and putting them in pretty jars with ribbons. By the end of the day, the backroom was full. The shelves were still pretty full of ingredients and on the floor were stacked piles of products. Her two cauldrons took up a large amount of space.
(A/N: skip next paragraph if you don't care what Jeanette's apartment looks like)
Upstairs was a fifteen by twenty studio apartment. The staircase was enchanted so it didn't take up any room. As soon as you walked in you saw the kitchen counter. She put three glass vases with silk flowers on the counter to breakup the space. Tall stools fit under the table counter. The counter extended to one and half space opening before the wall of the bathroom. Once in the apartment you first passed a row of pegs of your left side to hang clothes. The left wall had a soothing Japanese scroll. Turning right you hit a glass and metal coffee table, under it were celadon colored sitting cushions. On the table was a single glass tumbler with bamboo in it. It doubled as a work place. Shelves were on the entrance wall. They were clear plastic and the far left shelves were full of books, folders, and little bamboo scroll holders. They were pretty with black ink decoration, some contained parchment and others writing utensils. The center and right shelves had aesthetic things. A few vases, seashells, and there was big gap where her new stereo would be. It had cost a fortune and she was shipping it all the way from Japan. A movable gauzy blue curtain shielded her sofa bed from view. The sofa bed was next to an extremely long window that faced east. She could open it if she had extra guests or at night. Her trunk was at the foot of the bed and in the corner was a hanging owl cage. She had cut a small circular window for Frederick, the owl. She had named it after the person who had given it to her. The bedroom was enchanted to be bigger than it seemed or at least it would in a few days after the plumber was done with it. The carpet was white, plush, and still a little damp from the furious cleaning. The room was down in soft powder blue, flecked in places with the occasional celadon or lavender. Cool colors made things seem bigger. She also had skylights put in, no candles please. She did have a little lamp on her counter though. She was praying that her business would skyrocket.
On September 2nd, the day Harry and his friends started school. Jeanette's Mignonne was open for business. The shelves were stacked with products. The display tables had her wonderful dessert tree and a selection of products to test. The two sinks had towels and soap. The only problem was no customers. Hour and then hours passed. Jeanette fiddled with the displays, jumping when ever she saw someone walk by. She fidgeted and by lunch time, she was beginning to wonder if all this was a mistake. She closed the shop to go to the Three Broomsticks for lunch and rushed back filled with a new hope. Still no customers. No customers.
Mignonne Opens
Author's Note: Doesn't it annoy you, when you see a movie and the actor/actress gets drunk, but wakes up the next day smelling and feeling fresh as a daisy? Well, anyway. logically Jeanette should get a hangover. I have never experienced a hangover and in a perfect world, I will never experience one. But life isn't perfect and neither are people. Anyway, after an exclusive interview with my cousin (I saw him drunk once, red as a cherry, but he didn't talk funny), I have decided that the morning after is a very nasty experience so I sorta copied the symptoms of a migraine. (Read the guide on the Tylenol bottle.)
Jeanette spent most of Sunday morning in a painful sleep. When she woke up, she was dizzy, her mouth was dry, and her head felt like it had been run over by a train. Mrs. Weasley finally came and fussed over her.
"Shame on them. Shame! The others are irresponsible, but Remus. You poor thing." She muttered. Jeanette covered her ears, the smallest sound fried her nerves. Mrs. Weasley made her drink a bitter, gritty potion and made her take a cold shower. She looked and felt like a wet cat when she came out. The potion had diminished the pain into a dull throb, but it still hurt.
Getting dressed.was embarrassingly difficult. Her hands wouldn't move the way she wanted them to and her head. Once after a series of ear infections Jeanette had woken up dizzy, as like when she took a step, her foot hit air and she stumbled. Her mother said that her inner ear was unbalanced and poured a teaspoon of olive oil in it. It was that vertigo except worse. Mrs. Weasley got her another potion, but what Jeanette wanted were a few extra-strength Tylenol. She finally got dressed and realized that her shirt was inside out. Groaning, she put her head down.
"When I got a hangover Mum wasn't nearly as sympathetic," Fred said. She turned to look at him and then put her back down.
"Leave me alone or I'll puke on you." She muttered.
"She called me a no good lazy git," Fred continued in a casual voice, she could hear him sit down behind her.
"You are a no, good lazy git," she shot back, weakly. She lifted her head and let it fall back on Ginny's desk. Pain to knock out pain.
"Stop that," he shook her. He put down some pills and a glass a water. It took about five minutes and all the water to remember how to swallow. "Now," he dragged her to her feet, "time to take a walk."
"No."
"If you're going to be embarrassed, rest assured. Everyone already knows."
"What?!" Jeanette said groggily.
"Mum was yelling at Lupin as soon as he got through the front door. Watch your step. She woke the whole house up."
"I don't remember--" They were in the garden now. It was cloudy.
"George carried you upstairs so Mum could properly scold. She went on so long that we all left to get breakfast and then remembering what a fit Mum had been in, we decided that we might as well stay away the whole day."
"You?"
"Couldn't leave you all by yourself, could I?"
Jeanette stared at him, disbelieving.
"George, Bill, and Charlie reckoned I owed you something for the hell I gave you last week." He pulled a muffin out of his pocket and handed it to her. She stared at it. She didn't feel like eating.
"I forgave you yesterday."
"Eat your muffin." She looked at it distastefully. "Just walk then." Fifteen minutes later, the headache was almost all gone and the muffin was long gone. Behind the house, was a wet, grassy, lumpy land. While George was not as talkative and bit more mature, Fred was the regular chatterbox bouncing from topic to topic from girls to whoopee cushions. He was also all extremes, extremely happy, extremely sad (heartbroken when an experiment failed), extremely angry, but never in the middle. He felt everything so whole-heartedly, there was never any doubt about what others thought. He was admirable that away, so confident.
"I was thinking," Fred started. "You're not of age so can't open a shop." Jeanette opened her mouth to protest. "You know, I was thinking about expanding and maybe you could pay us to buy a shop under our names so all the legal gumbo mumbo is hoity-toity and you get everything when you're eighteen."
"The catch?"
"Ten percent of the profits."
"Okay."
"Oh, I meant ten percent of each of us so in total twenty percent." Fred added. She punched his arm.
"Whatever." She agreed, just happy fantasizing about her shop. They walked for a few minutes in silence. Jeanette smiling to herself and Fred with his face furrowed deep in thought.
"I don't think it's fair," Fred said suddenly.
"What."
"You got to go to your first Order of the Phoenix meeting yesterday and I haven't." Jeanette looked at him incredulously. Someone would actually want to go to one of those. "So what happened?"
"Nothing much," she lied. "They gave me something to drink and asked me questions."
"About what?"
"I can't remember," she fibbed airily.
"Don't worry, I won't cry." He leaned on her. "I've got enough cash. Moody arrived this morning with a whole stack of papers for you. Tell me, are you an alien?" She laughed. The rest of the day was fun. Fred capriciously decided to teach her how to fly a broomstick and they spent the better part of the early afternoon on that. She could actually zoom at around at the speed of two miles per hour. The rest of the time was spent looking at pictures with Mrs. Weasley.
Fred and George were clearly the rebels of the family. Just when everyone thought they were doomed to be short and solidly built, they sprouted. Still much more vertically challenged than Ron, Bill, and Percy (who over six feet), they were a respectable 5'7 and still growing. There were a variety of pictures of the twins torturing the siblings. A young Ron squalling at the sight of a spider that Fred was tangling from a string. Ron wailing holding a lollipop, a hole in his tongue. Ginny in tears as Fred and George switched the heads of her stuffed animals. A furious young Percy chasing the twins down the stairs. (There was still a dent of the floor, where Percy fell.) George slipping a frog into Bill's unsuspecting pants. The boys playing Quidditch.
The grandfather clock gonged seven times.
"They're coming home." Mrs. Weasley jumped into the kitchen to get to work. Jeanette helped. After dinner, Jeanette went home with Fred and George. The next two months passed quickly with weekly visits to the Burrow and no more Order of the Phoenix meetings. The nonstop fun was only interrupted by an owl, but soon Jeanette was back to normal again, a little quieter but it wasn't noticeable in the noisy, active Weasley household.. She created a variety of new products and perfected her potion skills. Fleur never mentioned the basket. She kept her hands out of the twin's accounts and the twins kept their hands out of her room. They purified Jeanette's exploding substance and consequently all three lost their eyebrows. This led to Jeanette creating eye brow pencils that drew convincing hairy eyebrows.
Time past too quickly and one morning day in late August, Jeanette, Fred, and George were sitting in a room in Gringotts poring over a piece of parchment that Bill was explaining. It was a lease, a lease for a store in Hogsmeade. Fred and George signed the papers, but Jeanette got the keys.
The rest of the day was spent packing and stocking the kitchen with enough food to last them to Saturday. That night they went to a restaurant and Fred broke another surprise. They were opening another Weasly Wheezes and this time in Hogsmeade. The store would be run by employees, but George would be there ever Wednesday and Friday. That meant, of course, that the twins still had a supply of balanced meals. On August 31st, Fred and George borrowed Bill's car and took her to Hogsmeade.
The store was small and dusty from being closed for over a year. There were apartments above the store that were equally dirty. Fred and George had as ingenious ways of cleaning as Jeanette. Together, they enchanted a mess of scrub brushes, mops, brooms, and anything else to clean by themselves.
The old pukey colored green paint was peeling. So while Jeanette covered the furniture and floor with sheets, the twins filled balloons with magical pastel paint and rigged them to a bomb. The fact that it was much than Fred and George's place and the fact that they were both helping made the job go much faster.
While the paint dried, they had dinner.
"So are you going to move in?"
"We bought out Zonko's and so there's no cleaning to do or anything. We just got some movers and stuff." As they walked her back to her shop, they gave her a very serious talk. Jeanette couldn't stop laughing. Imagine, Fred and George both telling her that boys were extremely untrustworthy and should be avoided at all costs. They told her to be careful and to never take any risks and blow herself up. Boys were not to be trusted. If she needed anything, just owl them. They would personally see to any problems. She got two very serious gifts from them: a little pastel blue screech owl and a large Newfoundland dog. They apparated after giving her a peck on the cheek.
The next day was filled with making stuff and putting them in pretty jars with ribbons. By the end of the day, the backroom was full. The shelves were still pretty full of ingredients and on the floor were stacked piles of products. Her two cauldrons took up a large amount of space.
(A/N: skip next paragraph if you don't care what Jeanette's apartment looks like)
Upstairs was a fifteen by twenty studio apartment. The staircase was enchanted so it didn't take up any room. As soon as you walked in you saw the kitchen counter. She put three glass vases with silk flowers on the counter to breakup the space. Tall stools fit under the table counter. The counter extended to one and half space opening before the wall of the bathroom. Once in the apartment you first passed a row of pegs of your left side to hang clothes. The left wall had a soothing Japanese scroll. Turning right you hit a glass and metal coffee table, under it were celadon colored sitting cushions. On the table was a single glass tumbler with bamboo in it. It doubled as a work place. Shelves were on the entrance wall. They were clear plastic and the far left shelves were full of books, folders, and little bamboo scroll holders. They were pretty with black ink decoration, some contained parchment and others writing utensils. The center and right shelves had aesthetic things. A few vases, seashells, and there was big gap where her new stereo would be. It had cost a fortune and she was shipping it all the way from Japan. A movable gauzy blue curtain shielded her sofa bed from view. The sofa bed was next to an extremely long window that faced east. She could open it if she had extra guests or at night. Her trunk was at the foot of the bed and in the corner was a hanging owl cage. She had cut a small circular window for Frederick, the owl. She had named it after the person who had given it to her. The bedroom was enchanted to be bigger than it seemed or at least it would in a few days after the plumber was done with it. The carpet was white, plush, and still a little damp from the furious cleaning. The room was down in soft powder blue, flecked in places with the occasional celadon or lavender. Cool colors made things seem bigger. She also had skylights put in, no candles please. She did have a little lamp on her counter though. She was praying that her business would skyrocket.
On September 2nd, the day Harry and his friends started school. Jeanette's Mignonne was open for business. The shelves were stacked with products. The display tables had her wonderful dessert tree and a selection of products to test. The two sinks had towels and soap. The only problem was no customers. Hour and then hours passed. Jeanette fiddled with the displays, jumping when ever she saw someone walk by. She fidgeted and by lunch time, she was beginning to wonder if all this was a mistake. She closed the shop to go to the Three Broomsticks for lunch and rushed back filled with a new hope. Still no customers. No customers.