Train rides were quite possibly, in Lily's opinion, about as boring as Hogwarts could possibly get. She had only Alice and Katie that really meant anything to her, and she kept well in touch with them over the summers, so it wasn't like she was waiting for September 1st so that she could catch up with her friends. Which is why she found it entirely ridiculous the way the students could run around so crazily.
"Is there no order around here at all?" Lily said to Katie and Alice when a boy ran into her on the platform, spilling the contents of her trunk everywhere. He didn't even manage a sorry or stop to help her pick her things up. She really didn't need it though – with one swish of her wand, it was all neatly packed again.
"No, but my bet is that that's why you were made Head Girl," Alice replied with a grin.
Lily gave a mock frown, but replied with, "Yea, that's what I intend on doing, too."
She was met by a short gasp, and a giggle from Katie. "I don't know how far you'll get with that, Lilykins."
"What? Why?" she retorted.
"Well, when you've seen who the Head Boy is, you might see what she means," Alice finished.
Lily pouted, ready to ask who could possibly be the Head Boy and why they would think that he would be irresponsible, when she turned around to bump into the chest of none other than James Potter, with a suspicious looking badge pinned to it, slightly right of Lily's face. Upon closer inspection, she noticed with slight shock that it was the Head Boy badge.
This was going to be a year from hell, for sure.
Lily blushed as she took a step backward. James rubbed his chest where her head had smashed into his collarbone. Alice and Katie giggled.
"Oh stop it you two. You're being stupid!" Her face flushed. She wished a hippogriff would come flying through the window and kill her on the spot, but she had no such luck.
"We're going to find a compartment. Come along later, hun." They quickly retreated, whispering feverishly. Lily sighed and turned back to James.
He was looking at her strangely. She couldn't understand his expression. He had an almost detached sort of interest in his eyes, but it didn't go further than a polite, "Hey. So I see you're the Head Girl." He seemed almost disappointed. Lily's heart turned over unexpectedly, causing her to have to catch her breath. "Though, I mean, I guess that would have been sort of obvious. I suppose mine was a little more startling."
Lily nodded. She wasn't sure what to say. She could have smacked herself for being so rude. She felt extremely horrible. But he was looking at her again, and she could feel his hazel eyes gazing so deeply into her own that she thought he could read every thought she had ever had. She blushed and looked down at her toes.
"Well, bye then," James said awkwardly. "I'll see you in the Prefect compartment later?"
Lily wasn't listening, but she suddenly felt an uncomfortable silence. "What? Oh .. um … yea … later then …"
James regarded her as though she had some sort of disease, then shrugged and waved over his shoulder as he walked away.
Lily found Katie and Alice's compartment shortly, and collapsed into the empty seat they had left for her. The two of them watched her carefully as she buried her head in her hands.
"I am so incredibly stupid."
They looked at each other with raised eyebrows.
Lily had successfully made it through the day without any more embarrassing mishaps. She pulled herself together, regained her composure and her pride, and an hour or so later she appeared in the Prefect compartment of the train, ready to do business. She gave a long and dull speech about what she planned to have done by the end of the year. James gave a completely spontaneous, two-minute speech that was about twenty times better than Lily's. Lily ignored this.
The Prefects had quickly filed out of the compartment when they had finished being briefed, and James and Lily were left alone for the remainder of the ride. James sat engulfed by Quidditch Through The Ages. Lily picked up Hogwarts, A History and pretended to be reading it, but her efforts were entirely worthless. Every few minutes she looked up to catch a glimpse at James. He was, after all, incredibly handsome, as the girls staring in through the compartment door had seemingly all known for some time. After a while of being watched, Lily snapped the blinds shut, clearly annoyed. She heard dejected feet shuffling away in the corridor, and turned around to see James looking at her curiously. Lily grinned sheepishly, and James smiled slightly before turning back to his book. Lily hated herself.
The evening passed quickly, and Lily soon found herself waking up in her familiar four-poster bed. Except that it wasn't familiar, and she wasn't in her familiar dorm room with her two best friends and the two other Gryffindor girls her age. She quickly realized that she was in the Head Girl dormitory, and she could not argue; she remembered from the evening before being amazed at how extraordinary the furnishings were here. Lily used the shower in the bathroom she shared with James (what a shame) and headed down to breakfast. She always loved the first day of school.
James did not always love the first day of school. Actually, most of the time, James hated the first day of school. Because it meant, well, school. Not that he didn't like Hogwarts. Hogwarts was James' home away from home, as it was for many people. But he didn't like school, especially when he opened his schedule that McGonagall had passed out only moments before to find that he had his first day back with the two most horrid classes ever: History of Magic – can you say b.o.r.i.n.g., and Potions, with, of course, the Slytherins, and that nasty Slughorn character. So it was quite possibly the worst of all possible situations.
Except that it could get worse.
And it did.
Years later, James would come to regard this as one of the worst days of his life. Currently, though, he suspected that it was just another of those crappy first days of term. The owls came as he was biting into a piece of toast. He successfully ignored the annoying flutter of hundreds of wings until his owl landed on his plate gracefully and took a rather large bite out of his toast. James laughed and set it down, taking the letter from Apollo. He had named his owl after the Greek god Apollo, handsome and wise.
The bird stayed and waited for James to read the letter, almost as if he knew what was written in it, with a sympathetic look in his very orange, round eyes.
From further down the table, Lily watched James open a letter he had recently received. She watched his eyes roaming over the paper; as they went further down, his face quickly drained its color and his fingers began to tremble. In the moment that he finished reading and let the letter flutter silently to the table, she thought he looked incredibly vulnerable and weak. She wondered what could possibly have happened. She watched in shameful interest as Sirius noticed James' shocked expression and read the paper – his face, too, losing most of its jolly color.
The two quickly got up and left the room. Remus glanced after them, turned and caught Lily's gaze. She flushed a deep shade of magenta and returned her eyes to her plate, but not quickly enough to miss Remus' surprised expression before he rushed after the other two Marauders.
Lily couldn't really say she was surprised not to see James at the first Prefect meeting, or the second. By the third, she was mildly frustrated. By the fourth, she was concerned. He had also been missing about half of his classes, and when he did decide to show up, he was always so tired and sad looking. She started to feel immensely guilty for not being nicer to him, but she really hadn't seen him around enough to be able to say anything to him anyway. And what was she really supposed to say? She didn't even know for sure what was going on.
One evening about halfway through the second week of school, Lily returned to the Head common room to find James brooding before the fire. His hair was slightly matted and he had been wearing the shirt for three days now. She couldn't tell if it was the flickering shadows of the fire or her own sleepy, delusional mind, but the bags under his eyes seemed painfully dark. The boy before her had his hands buried in his hair, completely zoned out and sort of dead looking.
Lily slid her books on to the table by the couch and sat down next to James. She tried not to think about the heat that radiated from him. Now was not the time for suggestive thoughts. She sat with him in silence for a few minutes, and then she placed her hand softly on his knee.
James jumped slightly, startled, as if he hadn't even noticed Lily until she had put her hand on his leg. He shifted his weight a little and glanced at her from the corners of his eyes. Lily wondered how someone usually so beautiful could look so exhausted.
"James….?" She said timidly.
No answer. He was staring back into the fire, listening to the soft crackling of the flames.
"James… come on … talk to me. Please?"
Again. Lily felt helpless. She carefully lifted her hand from James' leg and ran it up and down his back, softly. That had always soothed her when her mother did it for her. She stared at him hopefully.
"James… James, you haven't come to a single Prefect meeting …" James sighed. Lily winced. She knew that would be the wrong thing to say. So why had she said it?
"Please, just … leave me alone…"
"James…" she tried again. "Come on James … you've been skipping class … I'm concerned about you …"
James turned and stared at her with such shocking intensity that Lily's hand fell limp on to the back of the couch. James stood up rather fiercely and strode toward the stairs that led up to his dorm.
Lily followed. "Wait, James, wait!" She was desperate. She knew he knew it.
James turned around and glared at her for a moment.
"James … please …" her voice was barely above a whisper, "you're making me so worried."
"Evans, just … just, go away."
"James, please!"
"Listen," he said, raising his voice as he came down the stairs. Even ground. "You are the last person I want to talk to about my problems, okay?"
"James … I just want to know if you're alright."
James looked so scary that Lily wondered if it was possible for anyone to regret their words as much as she did. "You have. No right." he growled. "I can't believe you."
"What are you talking about?" Lily was slightly frightened. James was glaring at her more intensely than he had ever glared at anyone before. She had, in fact, never even seen his wrath, let alone fury like this.
"You don't have any right to just come in here and tell me you care about me!" he shouted. Because he was shouting now. "You don't have any right to come around me and give me that look, like you are concerned with everything in my life! You don't know anything about me!"
"No, I don't know anything about you. That's why I'm asking!" Lily shouted back, but nowhere nearly as forcefully as James had.
"And I don't want you to!" he spat. He spun around and began to climb the stairs angrily, but seemed to have changed his mind. Now that he was worked up, he had something to say. So he stormed back down the stairs to about two feet from Lily. "You know what, you are ridiculous!" Lily looked outraged. "Do you want to know something? I spent six years of my life trying to get you to like me! You have no idea what I went through. I embarrassed myself over and over, but you always shot down any pride I had. I tried being nice to you, doing things for you, but that didn't work. I spent an entire year asking people what you liked, how you felt about things, what your views were, your goals. I changed everything about who I was for you, and you have done nothing but spit in my face!"
Lily opened her mouth to reply.
"No, I am not done yet!" he commanded. Lily closed her mouth. "Do you know how many times you broke my heart, Lily?" It was a rhetorical question. Neither of them had ever really counted, but they both knew it was enough times. "And yet for some ridiculous reason, I kept trying! And you kept being unexplainably rude and horrible to me! Everything you hated about me, I changed, and I was still never good enough for you, was I?"
Once again, Lily opened her mouth. But it was once again a rhetorical question.
"No, I wasn't. You wouldn't date any other guy, but you wouldn't even give me a chance. You have no idea what kind of hell you put me through. And I was stupid enough to believe that some day I would be able to change your mind. But do you know what, I was wrong about you Evans. You're not what I thought you were, and I don't want to ever have anything to do with you."
Lily was incredibly flustered by this time. She wanted to argue with him, shout at him, tell him that she did care and that she had noticed and that she was sorry and she did want to give him a chance, but he was worked so far past any point of comprehension that he could not stop himself. He had gained such momentum that Lily had never seen before; it wouldn't even be possible to stop if he had wanted to.
"I spent six years on you, Lily," he said, quieter now. "Six years. Do you know how long six years is? Well, it's a terribly long time, especially when you finally figure out that you've wasted that much time on something that's never going to happen. I've wasted six years of my life, six years wasted on you Evans, and there's nothing you can say for yourself. I just want you to know that this is my last year at Hogwarts, and I do not intend to waste it on you."
Lily's eyes were filling up with tears. James, who had lost all of his energy while putting the emotion into his tirade, looked years beyond his age in exhaustion. Lily bit her lip as his shoulders dipped. He seemed so old and weary.
"Please …" he whispered to her, "just leave me alone." James made his way up the staircase and Lily stood at the bottom, completely unable to think of anything to say. She winced when his door clicked shut softly, and slowly she collapsed on to the couch.
How could I have possibly messed things up that badly?
She wondered how long James had felt that way. Hundreds of thoughts were going through her head, and she had completely forgotten about what she had come to question him about in the first place. Lily fell asleep fitfully on the couch beside the fire and dreamt about being chased by red and green blobs.