Harry watched the girl pick at her food, not even pick, really. Just push it around her plate. She made little piles, little spaces of emptiness, and to the untrained eye it looked like she had eaten. But Harry knew better. It was what he used to do…before.

For Harry, now in his second year at Hogwarts, life was divided into before and after, and the great event that divided his life was the owled message that flew into his aunt and uncle's house.

That letter drifted in and saved him. He'd been the red headed step child banished under the stairs.

The girl was in her first year and her name was Crystal Scarlett, as Harry knew, because she was famous before she got here, as he had been. Her parents were frightful wizards, rumored to have dabbled in the darkness but still respected, somehow. The way people speak with forked tongues, golden on one edge and flint on the other. But this girl was in the rumor mill, too. Their strange daughter thought to be mute for the first six years of her life then she suddenly spoke. That was true, by all accounts. The rumor was that she was an abandoned Muggle, taken in by the great wizards and trained in the ways of magic.

But it never stuck. Like teflon, duck feathers, the spells rolled off her and the Muggle rumor gained credence through the years, the momentum of a snowball downhill.

Now she stared at her cooling, congealing food, and Harry noticed the slenderness of her neck and the colorlessness of her hair. Her hair was thin and caught between dark blond and light brown. Her eyes were big and dark, but dark blue or brown he couldn't quite say. She sighed and dropped the fork with a clatter, and she looked like he felt at all those birthday parties for fat Dudley.

"There she is," Ron said in his nasal voice, materializing at Harry's side. Harry nodded and looked at Ron's red hair, always a hair color he had a hard time believing. Ron's hair brushed his eyes, smooth and flat and red as lipstick.

"She's a Muggle, you know," Ron said in that way he had of making everything sound like an emergency.

"It's a rumor," Harry said, noticing the girl's pointed nose, dusting of freckles across the bridge. Ron cocked one red eyebrow.

As they watched her a tear fell and landed on the table and she swiped at it with a napkin.

"I've heard she can't do any of the magic," Ron was taking joy in this, the joy of another's pain and Harry didn't really blame him, knowing how Ron had grown up poor in a big family, second hand clothes and cabbage soup suppers and all that, but he looked at that girl and felt his own before and knew about pain.

"Back off, Ron, huh? What if it is true? How'd you like to be a helpless Muggle here?" Harry's voice was perhaps sharper than he had intended, and Ron winced as though Harry had slapped him.

"Yeah, you're right," He hung his head, the straight red hair obscuring his eyes completely.

She got up quickly, grabbed the tray, scraped all the food into the trash bin. She leveled a look at Harry and Ron. Ron's head was still down and he didn't see, but Harry did.

He wanted to chase after her. He watched her go through the doors that lead to the stairs and he wanted to run and catch up with her, apologize for Ron even though she hadn't heard. Hold her hand, kiss the freckles on her nose.

He sighed, shook his head, headed for class with Ron in tow.