Here's the thing: at Hogwarts, queers gotta stick together. Mary's heard that it's gotten better lately for the Muggles, but the wizarding world hasn't caught up with the times since the late nineteenth century when, decades too late, they started using indoor plumbing. Wizards still write with parchment and quills, and they don't know how to work TVs or phones or the Internet, which even Mary still doesn't fully understand despite the number of times Chrishell has tried to explain them to her. For god's sake, wizards act like your blood is literally dirty if your parents aren't magical. Stick somebody who bangs the same sex in front of them, and most wizards basically shit themselves.
But Hogwarts is a big place, and the student body is only getting bigger as Muggle-borns infiltrate the place and most purebloods start marrying Muggles and Muggle-borns instead of each other. The British wizarding population is growing exponentially, which means that at this very moment there are no fewer than four hundred and seventy-six witches and wizards in their year at Hogwarts. One hundred and eleven of them are Slytherins, and four of those Slytherins are queer girls—or girls that Mary and the rest of the students know are queer, anyway.
So around age fourteen, when they all first started questioning shit and crushing on the cishets, they were all kind of forced to group together—Hogwarts would have been awfully lonely if they hadn't. Mary and Christine, the lesbians, had been friends ever since the Welcome Feast in their first year, so coming out to each other sort of catapulted them from classmates who sometimes compared notes on the other girls so that they could talk smack about them to inseparable best friends and eventually, as of last year, girlfriends. Maya Vander came out as trans near the end of fourth year—she petitioned McGonagall to move her out of the boys' dormitories and into the girls' and everything. And then, of course, there's Chrishell.
Mary and Chrishell have shared a dorm since first year, but Mary never really talked to her until fifth year, when rumors about Chrishell being gay started to circulate. They weren't exactly true—Chrishell's not gay; she's bi—but her dumbass boyfriend, Justin, dumped her anyway, and so did the few friends Chrishell had in Slytherin. Christine doesn't like Mary and Chrishell's friendship—she hates Chrishell for how little shame Chrishell has about being a Muggle-born Slytherin—but what was Mary gonna do, leave the poor thing brokenhearted and friendless? So she took her under her wing, and it's all been downhill from there.
x
Bumping into Christine on the Hogwarts Express while they're on their way back to Hogwarts for seventh year is a shock, and not just because Mary literally almost runs Christine over with her trunk. "Sorry, sorry, sorry!" she bursts, reaching down to help Christine off the floor of the corridor. "Are you all right?"
Accepting the hand Mary sticks out, Christine pushes herself up off the floor and shakes her platinum hair out of her eyes. Mary swears that Christine's extensions have gotten even longer since the end of sixth year—when she stands, they hang almost all the way down to her knees. She's wearing fishnet leggings underneath a short dress that's got a swath of fabric cut out of the middle so that Mary can see the bare skin of her underboobs and part of her midriff. Not for the first time, Mary wonders enviously how the hell Christine's parents let her walk around like that during vacations when Christine's at home. She asked Christine about it once last year, and Christine just smirked and said her parents understand that she's got to enjoy high fashion while she can before she has to go back to Hogwarts and hide her figure under frumpy robes.
Apart from weekly letters, they haven't talked all summer. This isn't unusual—Christine can be really damn flighty and aloof when she wants to be, and she's never bothered to make plans with Mary outside of Hogwarts—but given that they started dating eight months ago, Mary would have thought that she'd elevated her status with Christine enough to warrant a few visits. She asked Christine to Floo to her house a few times, but Christine always just brushed off Mary's invitations.
"I'm fine, I'm fine. Good to see you, biatch," says Christine. "How was your summer?"
Mary rolls her eyes. "Same old shit. My parents dragged me to a fucking debutante ball, of all things. Can you believe that? I mean, what year is this again? You'd think those wouldn't even, like, still happen, or at least that they wouldn't make me go to one when I have a girlfriend."
"Pureblood fuckers," says Christine. She's pureblood too, of course, but only back two generations—her paternal grandfather was Muggle-born, which makes sense, as Mary had never even heard the wizarding name Quinn until she and Christine met. "By Christmas break, I'll have my Apparition license, and I'll stop by every day so they can catch us banging all over your house. Maybe that'll drive the point home."
"Gay and never going back," Mary agrees. "Come on, Maya's saved a compartment for us."
"Just her and us?"
"Well, her and us and Vanessa and Chrishell."
It's Christine's turn to roll her eyes now. "I don't see what you see in her. She's a fake-ass bitch, and I'm sick of the way she always plays the victim. Like, boo hoo, you're a Slytherin and your parents are Muggles. Your life is so hard."
"Play nice," Mary warns her. "You know why Maya and I hang out with her, and if you want to talk about fake-ass bitches, take a long, hard look in the mirror, girl."
"Oh, thanks," Christine drawls. Histrionically, she drops her jaw and widens her eyes.
So she and Christine are still on the same page, apparently. Mary's glad for it: ever since she started being friends with Chrishell and started defending her when Christine talks shit about her, she feels like there's been distance festering between her and Christine, even after they started dating. But maybe Christine isn't trying to push Mary away. Maybe Christine feels like Mary is pushing her away.
This is ridiculous, of course: Mary doesn't see why she ought to cater her whole life around Christine's whims just because they're girlfriends. She can have Christine and have Chrishell's friendship, too. You can have both. Mary's sure of it.
x
Christine's latest victim is Emma Hernan, whom Christine starts dragging through the mud for shit that literally happened in, like, fourth year, if it even happened at all. Christine was still in the closet to everybody but Mary back then and at the time was dating Peter Cornell, another Slytherin, who was a year above them. She's been claiming some shit about Peter cheating on her with Emma, which makes no sense to Mary for three reasons. For one thing, regardless of whether Emma was making out with Peter, Mary knows for a fact that Christine was cheating on him with Mary herself, and Peter finding out is what trashed their relationship. For another, Christine is a flaming-ass lesbian who has a girlfriend now, thank you very much—why the hell should she still be carrying around grudges because of some boy she wasn't even in love with? Finally, they are seventh years right now. At this point, this shit happened almost three years ago.
"I just don't see why you're getting so worked up about me being friends with Emma now when you never claimed to have a problem with her when you say all of this was going down," says Mary dismissively. They're up in Christine's dormitory, where Christine's roommates have all cleared out as requested to give the lesbians some alone time. Unfortunately for Mary, Christine has been wasting the last twenty minutes of what could have been a perfectly good hookup slogging on this business with Emma and with Heather Rae Young, who dated the guy, too.
"She and Peter hurt me, Mary. Yeah, I wasn't in love with him, but I still loved him. I was still loyal to him. I—"
"Honey, you know as well as I do that what you and I did with each other back in fourth year was about the furthest thing from loyal to Peter that you could have gotten."
"Yeah, but that's different," Christine insists. "I didn't cheat on him with another boy. I was confused and isolated and—"
"How were you isolated? You were the coolest girl in our year in Slytherin. Everyone wanted to be friends with you."
"With the image of me that they saw out there," says Christine, gesturing vaguely toward the door of the dormitory. "Nobody but you knew who I really was. You ought to know how lonely that is because you lived it too, Mary. Sue me for being a kid and making a mistake trying to prove to myself that I was someone besides who I really was."
"Christine—Christine—not everything is all about you. You get a free pass to fuck Peter over, but he's not allowed to fuck you over too? And now, three years later, I'm supposed to abandon Emma—one of the only straights who supported me when I came out, by the way—because you've decided to make up for lost time fostering this grudge against her?"
"Oh, you won't abandon Emma, but you'll abandon me? I'm your girlfriend, Mary. I'm your best friend. You're supposed to be on my side."
"I am on your side," Mary complains, "but that doesn't mean I only get to be friends with the people you haven't decided to go to war with. Maybe Peter fucked you over with Emma, but you fucked Peter over first. And it's not just about Emma. Chrishell did nothing to you—"
"Chrishell spends all her time going around bitching about me being a pureblood nutter to the whole school. My problem with Chrishell isn't that she's Muggle-born—it's not!" she erupts as Mary scoffs. "It's that she's obsessed with being Muggle-born. Like, we get it already. She has to spend all her time hanging out with Ravenclaws because nobody in Slytherin will have her. She's not going to get people to give her a chance if she keeps backstabbing them."
"Backstabbing them? Have you heard the things the other Slytherins say about her?"
Of course she has—Christine's the one who said most of them—but Christine pushes on without acknowledging this. "And she won't own up to it to my fucking face. Davina tried to call her out on Chrishell calling me a pureblood nutter, and Chrishell straight up claimed she didn't even remember saying it. I may be a bitch, but at least I own that I'm a bitch. I don't lie to people's faces."
But the thing is, Christine does lie to people's faces. Mary sees her make up gossip about other people all the time—sees her play the victim more than Chrishell ever has. Mary will always have loyalty to Christine for supporting her through some tough shit—the whole school, then her parents, finding out about her sexuality—but she's getting sick of the number of times she calls Christine on her shit and Christine dodges the point.
x
"I just don't understand what you see in her," says Chrishell. She keeps her voice low—Pince will have their heads if she hears Chrishell and Mary's conversation from the front of the library. "I know you have a history, but Mary, she's not a nice person."
Funny: Christine says the same thing about Chrishell. Pointing this out would just piss Chrishell off even more, though, so Mary doesn't mention it. "She's my girlfriend," she reminds Chrishell, "and her whole life fell apart when she came out. She didn't do it by choice, and her popularity tanked."
"Yeah, but popularity shouldn't matter," Chrishell argues. "I was never popular. You know how badly the other Slytherins always treated me because of my parents."
"Why didn't you hide it, anyway?" Mary asks. "People don't talk about it, but we all know that not everyone in Slytherin can be as pure-blooded as they say they are—there aren't enough purebloods left, like, mathematically speaking. Most of them just call themselves half-blood or whatever to get out of having to face the gossip, but you let word get out the second you were Sorted into Slytherin."
Chrishell shrugs. Her wavy hair is a lighter shade of brunette this year—Mary likes it. Mary likes a lot of things about Chrishell, and a good half of them are things that she wouldn't dare admit to Christine. "I was poor growing up—you know that. I hid it, and people always gave me crap about things they didn't understand were out of my control. I was the smelly kid because we didn't have running water, but people didn't know we didn't have running water, you know? When I came here, I got to start over, and I didn't want to do it the same way I did in Muggle schools as a kid. I didn't know anything about how the wizarding world worked, and I didn't want to get caught in that lie and have to feel embarrassed."
"But you said the Sorting Hat warned you this might happen if it put you in Slytherin. You could have asked to go somewhere else and avoided all of this."
They may be living in the post-war era, but the wizarding world hasn't gotten a whole lot more progressive since the fall of Voldemort ten years ago. Plenty of purebloods who didn't fight in the war are still pissed that Voldemort took his bigotry one step too far—that their attitude of purebloods being superior has been smeared, that it no longer commands the respectability that it used to, only because people used it as an excuse to torture and murder Muggles and Muggle-borns instead of just lording over them. The half-bloods and Muggle-borns have totally ostracized any purebloods who try to defend themselves or their families if they're not blood traitors, and it's left the purebloods to order themselves into a ruthless hierarchy where you beg the Hat to make you a Slytherin so that you can congregate with people who are just as pissed at the impure wizards in the school as you are. It almost makes you feel sorry for them for being in such a precarious position, both socially and politically, because of course there are all these new laws stripping purebloods of the privileges they've enjoyed for centuries, and most of them just don't know how to deal with that without feeling like they're being oppressed.
Mary understands where the purebloods are coming from: after all, she's one of them. It wasn't until she and Chrishell became friends two years ago that she started to realize her parents' generation, at least, are getting what they deserve, and that her generation should be fighting against what they were born into instead of clinging to attitudes that produced people like Lord Voldemort in the first place.
"Maybe I should have let the Hat put me in Gryffindor or wherever instead," says Chrishell. "I'm sure that would have been easier. But I don't belong in Slytherin because I want to make friends. If I cared about making friends, I would've been a Gryffindor or a Hufflepuff. I belong in Slytherin because I want to make something of myself, and what more can I make of myself than to be the person who woke up all the purebloods?"
"Yeah, but you complain all the time about being mistreated. If you really didn't care—"
"I never said I don't care or it doesn't affect me. But more than I care about being well-liked, I want to be seen as motivated and driven and successful and ambitious—all the things that go hand in hand with Slytherin."
"So basically what you're saying is that you're a Slytherin because you care about your reputation," says Mary.
"Don't we all? I mean, reputation is a huge part of what most pureblood Slytherins are trying to regain, isn't it?"
"I guess," Mary admits.
Christine can say what she wants about Chrishell, but Mary really respects her for not letting anybody's beliefs about what she should or shouldn't do hold her back from going after what she wants. Sure, she's a backstabber, but so are Christine and Mary and every other bloody person in this house. At least Chrishell doesn't go after people just for being Muggle-born, like Christine does.
They keep studying (which is really mostly just purporting to study while gossiping) for another half an hour, when Pince really does get fed up and kick them out. They end up migrating to their dorm; their roommates are all still down in the common room, so they've got the room to themselves. Chrishell stretches out on her bed, and after a moment's pause, Mary joins her.
"I wish you weren't with her," says Chrishell, and Mary knows exactly whom she's talking about. "It makes it so much harder to be friends with you."
"Why do you both freakin' think it has to be an either/or situation? Can't I have you both?"
Chrishell laughs, but it sounds hollow. "I'm pretty sure that's not how this works."
"Not how—what do you mean?"
Apparently Chrishell has said too much because she claps a hand over her mouth, then grins a little. It takes a second for Mary to put two and two together. "I didn't mean it like that," she tells Chrishell abashedly.
"Well, maybe I wanted you to."
"Girl, don't tempt me. Christine…"
"Isn't here," Chrishell notes.
Mary gulps.
x
It's January by the time anything actually happens. Mary isn't planning on it—Christine frustrates the hell out of her sometimes, but she's still Mary's girlfriend, and that still means something—but one day, when they're alone in the dormitory, something in her just snaps. Maybe it's because she's getting sick of the way Christine always has an axe to grind with someone and won't ever give Mary a straight answer about why. Maybe it's because she's sick of being lied to. Maybe Mary's just a shitty person with no loyalty and a grudge.
Because Christine doesn't Apparate to Mary's house to hang out over Christmas like she promised she would, and she starts giving Mary shit about being friends not only with Chrishell and Emma but with Amanza Smith, too. When Mary tries to call her out on acting jealous when Christine herself hardly gives Mary the time of day, Christine just deflects it, insisting that Mary wants to spend time with everybody but her and that Mary is the one shutting Christine out. That's probably the part that hurts worst: Christine is spinning away and yet tries to pin the whole thing on Mary. Well, no more.
They're alone in the dormitory when it happens: they're practicing Human Transfiguration on each other, and Mary is helping Chrishell with the wand movement when her hand lingers just a little too long on Chrishell's. Chrishell looks at Mary. Mary looks at Chrishell. There's a moment where her breath catches and her stomach drops to the floor, and then—
xxxxx
It doesn't matter how word about Christine gets out—the point is that Mary knows now, and she can't believe that Christine never came clean to her. The breakup was messy, with Davina Potratz finding out about Mary and Chrishell and spilling the beans to Christine—but Christine had over six years before that when she and Mary were close, when she could have mentioned it anytime, and didn't. Mary knows she shouldn't care, not when Christine isn't her girlfriend or even her friend anymore, but she can't help it: it sucks.
It's a couple of weeks before she finally corners Christine in the common room about it. "You'd think it would make more sense to me now why you went so hard after Chrishell for all those years, but honestly, it makes less sense to me now than ever. You're fucking just like her, Christine. Your blood is as dirty as hers, and you tormented her for being honest about it."
"You know what, Mary? Fuck off. Go back to your perfect little life with your perfect, sleazy martyr of a girlfriend, and go die there."
Feeling vaguely guilty, Mary fucks off. She wonders, not for the first time, whether the world outside these walls is just going to be full of the same old political bullshit.