Chapter 6: The Dream
Harry felt sleepy, which was odd, because he knew he was already asleep and dreaming. He must be.
Carrington College, where he was comfortably curled up in a gray armchair, didn't really exist, after all. Neither did the girls sharing the room with him, who were oblivious to his presence: Erica Gorelli, the heroine of a book series sweeping the wizarding world, and some of her best friends, Lizzie Hertzfeld, Lanie Connor, Anna Schmidt, and Edith Lee.
But it didn't matter. He was having a good dream, and he was willing to sacrifice a lot to keep it that way. Feeling sleepy was not a problem at all.
Fran Anderson came in through one of the swinging doors of the lounge where the girls were relaxing and leaned on the back of the couch, listening to the story Erica was reading aloud. She was the resident advisor of the insane dorm hall that the third Erica Gorelli book was named after. As far as Harry could tell, RA was a position much like prefect, and a dorm hall was something like a Hogwarts house, except quite a lot smaller.
Fran was a new character in the third book, but she was very important already. She was the leader the girls had been looking for through books one and two, and Harry was beginning to see why the reviewer in the Daily Prophet had said book three was probably the best, although all four released to date were good. The fun in the hallway never seemed to stop, and Fran, supposedly the figure of authority, was in the thick of it most of the time.
Harry found himself comparing her to Percy Weasley, but somehow he couldn't picture Percy dancing in the hallway at midnight or starting a wet paper towel fight in the bathroom.
Fran's best friend, Rose Egree, was also a new character in book three. She was a musician, like Edith and Erica herself, but unlike Edith, a cellist, and Erica, a singer, Rose played piano and clarinet. She had a sweet personality and a laugh that most closely resembled the sound of a very small dog being sat upon. The girls loved to knock on her door and claim they were calling the SPCA to report her for cruelty to animals.
Harry yawned. Erica's voice blurred in his ears. It reminded him of Hermione's voice, he noticed dimly. Of course, Erica had an American accent, but they still sounded quite a lot alike...
Lizzie's red hair was catching the light oddly. He could have sworn he saw Lanie with red hair too, but he knew hers was brown...
And Edith's hair was black, but it was usually long and glossy, like Cho Chang's. Now it looked short and rumpled, like...
...like Harry's own, he realized from a long way off. He tried to open his eyes to get a better look, but they were dragging shut. As he watched Edith move her hand to drop a checker into the board, he felt his own arm lift, and for a moment he felt the slick plastic edge of the checker in his hand, before his eyes closed completely...
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Harry shook his head, wondering why he had been thinking it was odd to feel a checker in his hand. Of course there was a checker in his hand. He was playing Connect 4 with Ron, and he was just about to spring his brilliant trap that would force Ron to give him the victory.
At least, he would do that as soon as Ron noticed the game rather than the story Hermione was reading aloud, while Ginny combed her hair out for her...
"Ron?"
"Uh?"
"Your move."
"Oh. Sorry." Ron turned around and examined the board, then smoothly slid a black checker into one of the seven slots.
It was not the move Harry had wanted him to make.
Annoyed, Harry dropped his red checker into a random file on the other side of the board.
Ron grinned. "Four in a row. I win."
He shot his black piece home, finishing a diagonal line of four, and Harry groaned. He'd fallen for a set-up of Ron's, while trying to set Ron up himself. To make matters worse, it was the same set-up Ron had used in one of their earlier games, not ten minutes ago.
"What does that make, five times running?" Hermione asked, looking up from the book. "Harry, why don't you just admit you'll never beat him?"
"Because I will," Harry said, raising his right hand as if swearing to something. "I make that my life's goal from this moment onwards. I hereby vow that someday I will beat Ronald Weasley in a game of Connect 4!"
Ginny, Hermione, and Ron laughed, and Harry felt a strange kind of dizziness. For a moment, there seemed to be two Harry Potters, each with his own idea of where he belonged and what he could do... and it felt as if they were fighting, one insisting that this existence, here, at Carrington College was only a dream, and the other...
The feeling faded. Harry came back to reality. Of course Carrington wasn't a dream. He was a first-year student, a freshman, here, just like Ron and Ginny and Hermione, though the school year technically hadn't started yet.
Ginny was a year younger than the rest of them, so by rights they should have been sophomores to her freshman, but the three of them had been able to wait a year for her to finish attending... wherever it was they'd all gone to school... before coming to America and taking Carrington up on four full-scholarship offers.
Still feeling rattled by the idea of his life being a dream, Harry checked his pocket for his student ID. Yes, there it was, "Harry James Potter" with his seven-digit ID number, his signature, and his picture grinning up at him. But he looked too old...
No, that was the dream talking. He looked nineteen, just as old as he was. Ron was nineteen too, and Hermione would be in a couple of weeks, and Ginny had just recently turned eighteen...
Ginny. His lovely girlfriend. Soon, he hoped, his lovely fiancée. He knew the legal age of adulthood in America was 18, so he could ask Ginny to marry him any time he wanted, but he wanted to make the proposal special. He wanted them to be able to remember that magical night all their lives.
The dream Harry stirred again, as if at a trigger word. You can't ask Ginny to marry you! You don't know if she likes you! You've never even held her hand, or kissed her...
Harry rubbed his forehead, feeling the familiar scar beneath his fingertips. That was simply ridiculous. He and Ginny had been together for three years. They had first held hands at Halloween, in his sixth year and her fifth at... their old school... and first kissed around Christmastime. He was very much in love with her, and sure that she returned the favor whole-heartedly. And he even knew that her parents approved.
I'll ask Fran for some ideas. She's good with that kind of thing.
As if thinking of her had summoned her, Fran Anderson, their hall's RA, came in through the swinging doors on her rounds of the Rivers residence complex. "Bed for freshies," she said in a mock-scolding tone. "It's past two. Come on, get going..." And when they didn't get up fast enough to suit her, she snatched a pillow from one of the couches and began swiping at them with it. "Shoo, shoo, bed, now!"
Laughing, Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny fled from the pillow-swinging RA, down the hall, around the corner, down the stairs, and through the swinging doors into their own hallway, painted white from waist height up and bright green below. The bottom color varied from hall to hall, so that one could tell where in the enormous Rivers complex one was without looking out the window.
The first door on the left had four names posted around the door – a quad. The names were all imposing ones like Gwylan, but Fran had said the girls who lived there were very friendly. But there was no time to think about that, because Fran had just arrived on the scene in person, pillow still in hand, and the only way to escape her was to get to their own rooms.
Hermione and Ginny nipped in the second door on the left, and Harry and Ron just made it through the third before Fran reached them.
Breathing a little hard, Harry surveyed the room, and his dream-feeling came back, stronger, insisting that he'd never seen it before and he didn't belong here, and that the posters on the wall, like the one of Puddlemere United football team, signed by Harry's old school teammate, goalkeeper Oliver Wood, were wrong somehow...
Harry sat down on his bed and closed his eyes. Fran was right. It's late and we need sleep.
"Harry? You all right?"
Harry opened his eyes and smiled briefly at Ron. "I'm fine. Just tired. You going to bed?"
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As he brushed his teeth in the common bathroom up the hall, Harry's thoughts returned to the quad at the end of the hallway. Fran had said one of the girls who lived there sang in the college choirs, and she was going to ask that girl to help Harry and his friends with their choir auditions.
I doubt I'll make it. I've never really sung at all. But Ginny wanted to sing, and she was afraid to go out for the choirs alone, so she had asked – begged, really – Harry, Ron, and Hermione to try out with her. Hermione had agreed straight off, bullied Ron into saying yes, and then the three of them had worked on Harry as a team until he agreed as well.
At least we had some time to prepare. Word had it that the Carrington choir director demanded that his choirs be able to sight-sing – sing music directly from the sheet, without ever hearing it. This, of course, required that one be able to read music, which none of the four had been able to do a year ago.
It was nice to finally find something Hermione couldn't do faster than everyone else...
To everyone's surprise, including his own, Ron had been the one with the hidden talent for music. Notes and rests and time signatures, the lines and spaces of the staff, sharps and flats and keys and pitches, all made sense to him faster than to anyone else. He had even started experimenting with playing the piano at Harry's house, since the Burrow didn't have one.
Harry and Ginny had learned at about equal rates behind Ron, becoming decently proficient by Christmas time. It was a bit more impressive for Ginny, since she was juggling a full school schedule as well, while Harry had very little else to do.
Hermione had trailed them both for a time, until she got over the shock of not being the best at everything, reaching an acceptable level of skill only just in time to sing Ron "Happy Birthday". Her sense of rhythm was very sure, but she still had trouble with accurate pitch.
Whereas Ron has perfect pitch... That had been another of the surprises of the music lessons. Ron could tell, with his eyes shut, what any note was, whether it was played on an instrument, sung, or produced by something completely different. Harry had told him flatly he was going too far when Ron announced that the toilets in the house flushed in A-flat.
Harry wondered idly what key the toilets here flushed in. I could ask. Now's a perfect time...
Nah, I'm not really that interested.
Harry's guardian Remus had helped them a lot in their musical work. I had no idea he played. Or that my dad and mum or Sirius had, for that matter... Harry's father had played the oboe and his mother the mandolin, while his godfather Sirius had been a drummer. Harry was more interested in something he could play to accompany a singer, so he was planning to ask Fran's musical friend if she knew anything about guitar classes.
A singer? Be honest, Harry. You want to accompany Ginny. Putting the basket with his toiletries back on his dresser, Harry smiled at the photograph of Ginny, hanging in pride of place on his wall. She had developed a lovely high singing voice, what Remus called soprano. Hermione was a high alto, Ron a tenor, and Harry a baritone, or high bass.
I wouldn't mind accompanying Ron or Hermione, though. Or even myself, if I ever get good. Maybe we could learn to sing together...
"G'night," said Ron, flipping off his bedside lamp.
"Night."
Harry climbed into bed and turned off his own light. As he closed his eyes, his thoughts swirled dreamily around a recitation.
Harry James Potter, room 113, Gardner Hall, Rivers Complex, Carrington College...
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Harry opened his eyes slowly. Ron was snoring in the other twin bed, but that wasn't the sound that had awakened him.
Somewhere in number 12, Grimmauld Place, someone was playing the violin.
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(A/N: Hope you like it. I know it's kind of long on exposition, but I hope I kept it enjoyable and readable...
Thanks Caprice-Ann for being my most faithful Resonance reviewer so far!
Thanks also to any new R&Rers! If you like it, tell your friends, if not, tell your enemies!)