Chapter 1: Fairy Tale

Katie was my best friend.

I say 'was'. Past tense. Once 'was'…Not anymore. A memory. Katie Bell is dead.

Not dead like in stories…only to return the next day in a great expanse of light, claiming to have played a trick. Or dead like a muggle cartoon…bouncing back a moment later. Dead dead.

I want to cry. I really do. All I want to do is sob into my pillow. To cry until I have no more tears. Weep all the tears that I've held back since Lee told me this morning. Just this morning. It hasn't even been that long and it's already felt like four eternities.

I wasn't there. I wish that I was…The greatest regrets are ones after they can be fulfilled, though. I wasn't. That is that. I can't let my mind be consumed with Maybes…with What If?'s. What's done is done.

Katie was the kind of person that you couldn't help but love. A person that you couldn't help but want to be around. In my first year, I had attached myself to her in desperation. We were two scared girls, not knowing what the future would hold for us. We had been inseparable since then.

I remember back in our dormitory, Katie would busy herself in her free time by reading books. All sorts off books…Anything, really, to catch her fancy. Her favorites were Fairy Tales. She would come across the most fantastic passages and read them out loud to myself and Angelina. They mostly had to do with bravery, or the rescuing of a damsel in distress.

She would declare, after each and every reading, that she would once live a Fairy Tale life. Stomping her foot and lifting her chin stubbornly, she proclaimed that one day—her prince would not only come, but she would get to slay a couple of dragons along the way. She promised us that she would not rest until she saw every inch of the bloody earth. Magic to match.

" 'Licia! Angelina!", Katie called excitedly to her friends. "C'mere! I want to read you this!"

Katie sat, more or less, hunched over in an armchair in the Common Room. Her hair pulled up out of her face and her blue eyes trained on the book in front of her. As if she looked away for a moment, the words may jump off the page itself.

Alicia situated herself on the coffee table across from the chair that her best friend sat in. Glancing at her watch, she crossed her legs under her. Used to these odd moments where Katie forgot dinner or Hogsmeade, she just calmly looked to Angelina. Angelina, who had been holding a conversation with the Weasley Twins, glanced over.

As soon as Katie was sure that she held their attention, she began to read:

"Many of the pyramids of Egypt are cursed with an anti-muggle spell. This was amazing magic for this time and the spells worked surprisingly well. Mummified muggles are still found, even today, with many abnormalities that can only be described as magical.

She looked up from the pages grinning, even at this macabre fact. "Brilliant, isn't it?" she asked the girls, looking from face to face, then back at the book. "I'm going to see it one day! I'm going!", she proclaimed, her disposition from sunny to explosive. "Egypt! How grand!"

"You mean hot?", Fred interjected. "Horribly uncomfortable weather down there. Bill-"

"-Works there for-", George interrupted.

"-Gringotts and-"

"-We went to see him this summer. You remember-"

"-Don't you KB?"

Katie looked wildly from one twin to another. But had them sorted out when Fred used his nickname for her. "Yes. But then of course you remember the pranks that you sent me, o 'course…"

"Well, yes. We did manage-"

"-To find some shade-"

"-Inside a joke shop-"

"-Funny little place it was. You'd think-"

"-That the owner-"

"-May have heard of English at one time, or another."

Angelina snorted, rolling her eyes. "I'd put my money on it being illegal, nonetheless." She swatted Fred over the head. "Even in Egypt…" She sighed playfully.

Katie, lost in thought, began to laugh. "I don't care…I'm still going…"

And me and Angelina would believe her. I'm not sure whether it was the tone of her voice or the conviction written on her face…But we always believed her. We knew that Katie could do great things. We had seen it done. And we knew. We knew that she would hold true to this pledge.

And…now…Katie was gone. And one promise lay broken. Shattered, as if nothing. And suddenly…When I look at a book, I want to throw it across the room. It reminds me of everything that Katie cannot be. Everything that she will never do.

Every Fairy Tale that she will never live.

Once upon a time.