The phone chirps dully through the layers padding the house.
Hermione's teeth creak.
Each crossing feels more barricaded than the last, as if the tendrils of her mother's suffering coil around her arms and legs as she fights through the wreckage.
As if it might swallow her whole.
She tucks her tailbone in the narrowing crevasse of a hall, her threadbare sweater sliding down her shoulder. A burst of air puffs from her cheeks as she cups a hand under her belly, hauling herself over the newly-metastasized mass of stacks.
"Shit—hnng!"
She rears back to catch a teetering tower of Better Homes and Gardens, four stacks deep and rising above her head. The pile lists at a point of no return, its weight bearing down on her.
An earthy growl vibrates deep down from her well of frustration. She pushes back with all her might.
The tower cascades backwards, sliding into the heaps of detritus behind it.
It rebels, buckling back onto her.
The spray of magazines shoves her against a wall of newspapers.
Collapse.
When she opens her eyes, the phone is still ringing.
A blanket of commercial paper weighs down her legs; she's splayed across a bowed surface of newspaper stacks.
The wall of her belly tightens, not painfully.
But not nothing.
She breathes through it, staring up at a ceiling fan she had forgotten about.
The tightening stops.
She stands shakily, the shining magazine paper sticking to her legs and dropping around her feet.
The phone chirrs.
Curse that caller and this fucking house and goddamn Better Homes and Gardens.
She scrambles to the kitchen and snatches up the phone.
"What is it?" she snaps.
"Hermione… sorry, is this a bad time?"
Harry.
The boy who narced.
"No, Harry, it's not a good time."
"I just wondered if you'd like to help me deliver letters to the planning commission at city hall." Harry pauses. "Nagini filed another permit to expand their warehouse on the south side of town."
Interesting.
He used the shipping corporation's name, rather than its owner's. Not like Riddle himself actually bothers with paperwork. But still.
Harry continues,
"I got some of the neighbors and people from school to write in their dissent. I asked Ron if he wanted to help, but he seemed really out of sorts. Have you seen him?"
Hermione bites the side of her cheek.
Harry must not know she's aware he called Lestrange.
Right?
Who turns their friend in to child protective services and then solicits them to help with boring administrative tasks for their personal vendetta?
Does he think by filing a complaint, he's helping her? Would Harry betray her just to get her out of this fucked up life?
Another twinge seizes her belly, hardening like a rock.
Maybe ratting her out is a kindness.
"Hermione? You okay?"
Her breath flutters.
"I can't come today, Harry," she grinds out. "Talk later."
She hangs up.
The tightening goes away with a half bottle of Sunny D and a lie down.
Afternoon slips into evening, the short daylight giving way to streetlamps filtering through her faded eyelet curtains.
Hermione putters around her lamplit room, tidying.
Band posters have covered the pink walls, painted when she was ten. In some ways, the decor is frozen in that year; Hermione doesn't like to collect things in her space. Besides books.
She flips open her spiral bound notebook covered in a bokeh of starry-eyed kittens and holds Constructive Analysis in one hand, jotting down phrases of formulae with the other.
Time slows.
The algorithmic theory prisms in her brain, fractals of applications and possibility.
She pulls out a sheet of graph paper from her backpack and tries out the lambda-technique on an equation she previously thought was non-constructive.
Oh hell yeah.
Her mechanical pencil scratches eagerly in the quiet of her room, a ghost of a smile curled on her lips.
The knock on the door feels rude, like a douse of cold water on her head. Her skyscraping thoughts smack into the ground.
She pushes back from her desk with a grunt and battles her way to the door.
"Harry." She slumps in the doorframe. "I told you—"
"There's no time," he interrupts, and Hermione finally registers the agitation lurking under his sweeping bangs, the fear winding his shoulders tight. In a pool of street lamp light on the curb, his rusty Honda is still running, growling pensively.
"It's Ron," he says.
It was perhaps the only thing Harry could have said to distract Hermione from her anger and suspicion.
Her voice fills the tight cabin of his Honda,
"Why the hell would he agree to go with that filthy degenerate? They're not even on speaking terms!"
"I don't know!" Harry rakes his black nails through his swooping hair, gripping the steering wheel. They weave through traffic on the interstate, headlights glaring through the slush-rain.
"Did he give you any warning?"
"Warning?" he scoffs, "Warning, like 'oh hey, Harry, I'm thinking about cruising town with the school's slimiest dropout dealer, maybe we'll end up at a crack house later?'"
Hermione slams her fists down on the dashboard.
"You said he seemed out of sorts!"
"Yeah…" Harry's lips twist. "I might have downplayed it a bit."
"What the hell does that mean? Why didn't—"
"He's really hung up on you, Hermione!"
Harry's shredded voice lingers in the air.
Shit.
Hermione sinks back against her seat, deflated.
She starts and stops several replies, guilt slithering into her chest.
The turn signal clicks and they exit the freeway, navigating a series of smoggy, industrial streets with boarded buildings and trash-strewn underpasses.
"It's not your fault." Harry gentles. "I shouldn't have shared that."
Not like he's been keeping anybody's secrets lately.
"Why bring me along then?" she asks, trying to hold back her bitterness. "I don't expect you're particularly fond of my decisions."
Harry sends her a perplexed expression.
"Because he wouldn't come with me the first time."
"The first time?"
The Honda's brakes squeak as they pull up alongside a twisted chain link fence. A squalid rambler crouches behind an overgrown lawn, illuminated by the edges of a drawn curtain.
A muffled bass thumps from somewhere inside.
Harry kills the motor.
"I wouldn't bring you in here if I weren't desperate, Hermione," he says.
A chill rushes around her as she pops open the door and steps out into the night. She shivers, wrapping the open sides of her now unzippable jacket more tightly around her.
"It's that bad?" she asks. "I always thought Malfoy was such a poser."
Harry winces.
"Stay close."
At the back door, a bulky delinquent peers out at them; he's wearing a tilted Undefeated hat and a murderous expression. Hermione recognizes him from middle school, but can't remember his name. He waves them away with his meaty paw.
"Nah," he gruffs. "Get out of here, Potter."
Is that a pistol tucked into his basketball shorts?
"I'm here for Ron Weasley," Harry insists. "We'll just get him and go."
The muscle frowns, his porcine eyes squint into slits.
"Is that fuckin' Potter, Crabbe?" a voice filters from deep in the house.
"Get him quick," Crabbe says, widening the door.
The moment Hermione steps inside, she's disoriented.
It's mostly dark.
Bruming clouds of ganja and cigarette and blast obscure the room's edges; cheap tracklights with colored bulbs shoot strange beams through the shifting air. Eminem rages from a pair of oversized speakers turned up to migraine levels.
...See I'm influenced by the ghetto you ruined, that same dude you gave nothing, I made something doing...
But it's the people that grip Hermione with discomfort: a few from school but mostly tatted, shift-eye strangers five, ten, twenty years older than her. She's hung out at too many bowling alleys to be frightened of tweakers, but now, their haunted looks carry a different weight.
They stare at her from over their handles of jack and smoke-curling bowls, eyes lurking with the same chaotic descent that could easily snatch up her future. She can feel herself edging along the very cusp of it.
One wrong move.
They pad across a littered shag carpet and Hermione keeps her eyes down. Might as well look out for sharps scattered on the ground.
... Mommy's knocked up 'cause she wasn't watched over, knocked down by some clown when child support knocked...
Harry leads them through the house to a room with a flatscreen tv strobing back at a set of four spellbound faces. They're holding video game controllers, thumbing buttons madly. In the corner of the room, a familiar figure slumps over a beanbag chair.
"Ron!" Hermione darts forward. She squats down, her holey tights stretching around her knees.
He's passed out, head tipped back, breathing slow.
She snatches up Ron's cheeks in her hands and pushes back a drooping eyelid. He smells like sweat, weed and misery.
... What did I do? I'm just a kid from the gutter making this butter off these bloodsuckers. ..
"Ron," she cries. "Ronald, wake up!"
He makes a gurgling sound.
Draco Malfoy pauses the game and eases back in his leather armchair, a fitting throne for a bottom-shelf street king.
His flaxen hair is slicked with grease under a cocked, flat-lidded LA hat; brash tattoos insinuating dubious threats scrawl across his wiry frame. A black Famous tee drapes from his cocky-slanted shoulders and he wears a chunky gold chain. Probably real. Maybe not.
He's confident on his home turf amid a flock of bootlickers, Goyle, Zabini and Nott.
"Back again, Potter?"
His lips spread in a crocodile smile, his yellowed teeth set with grillz. Hermione feels Draco's carnivorous eyes, raking her up and down. Looking up her short skirt.
"We're just here for Ron," Harry replies, his anger barely controlled.
"And you brought your bushwhacked little wrist-slasher?" Draco caws. "Did you pup her up, or did carrot top over there?"
The gallery snickers and hoots.
"That's enough, Malfoy," Harry warns.
"Don't bother with Weasley, he works for me now. How do you like that? Your ginger bitch, slinging my glass on the streets?"
Ron is not responding, even when she slaps his cheeks. That's when Hermione spots the tourniquet. The needle.
Wrath seizes up in her like a tightening spring.
"He's drugged!"
Harry lunges forward.
"What did you give him?" he roars.
"Chillax, Potter." Draco leans back, leather creaking. "Weasley's in the middle of a little education."
"So you shot him up?"
"Just sampling a new line of merchandise." Draco laughs idly.
His lackeys follow suit, but their hands linger meaningfully at their belts or just under their coats.
Hermione unties the rubber around Ron's freckled bicep, shooting daggers at the reclining kingpin.
"Harry, help me," she says, hitching one of Ron's arms over her shoulder.
Ignoring the mocking jeers, Harry crosses the room and helps her heft Ron out of the beanbag chair, his legs dragging and head lolling.
"Take him if you want," Malfoy snorts, turning back to his video game.
"Bitch can't handle it," a sycophant adds.
"Whining baby bitch."
Heavy rapping on the door startles everyone in the room.
"Fuck!" Draco squawks.
"Police, open up!"
The house begins to swarm like a kicked anthill.
Lights go out and bottles clatter across the floor with the rapid shuffle of stale, sweaty bodies.
Someone collides with Hermione in the dark and she loses her grip on Ron.
"Quick, let's go!" Harry's voice cuts through the chaos.
Hermione can't be caught here.
I find any additional warning signs, Lestrange had said.
But Ron.
The door bursts open and an icy rush streams into the murky building. Gruff, male voices weave with yelps and pleads, the thud of running feet and struggle.
An iron grasp finds Hermione's arm and yanks.
"No, stop, I'm just helping someone!" she cries. "Ron! Harry!"
Hermione thrashes against her assailant.
"Let me go! He needs help!"
Her boots land against the officer and he retaliates with a blow that flashes like white lightning. Her teeth clack hard.
But she lashes back.
Unrelenting, the wall of muscle tows Hermione, her limbs flailing, out of the house and into the moonlight. Rain flecks her face with cold droplets.
She screams.
"Harry!"
The massive shadow of a police officer lifts her like a doll.
Hermione writhes and yells and curses at him. His next blow could kill her, but she can't turn off the defiance.
The feral ravening.
A dark, grinding-metal pang wracks up from deep in her pelvis.
She snarls and snaps and kicks at him.
A hot, sticky drip slides down her leg and she knows. She knows.
But she hovers over the thought, not acknowledging it. Not yet.
The officer is about to thrust her down to the cold, soggy lawn when a spitting blur intercepts them.
A thunderous voice tears the night,
"What the devil are you doing, you criminal meathead?!"
Hermione's feet are back on the ground, her knees shaking, pain splitting her.
She's dizzy.
Moonlight washes Tom Riddle's tortured face with a mercury glow.
He's so fucking beautiful.
Rain presses his hair to his forehead, his warrior's jaw steeled, his dark eyes burning for her like the vengeful wrath of a slighted god.
"Hermione?" The anger on his face vanishes, replaced with naked, zealous devotion.
He bends down to her. Slowly, like a man of the land, familiar with moving around skittish creatures.
She shakes, still in the deep void of shock, but she doesn't recoil.
His gaze fixes between her legs and he slides tending fingers up the inside of her knee. They come away, coated with black in the darkness.
"Oh, God!" he unravels.
I'm his weakness… she thinks, slipping into delirium.
Tom scoops her off the grass as she sinks, as easily as if she were a little bird.
Her head is so hazy.
Will I see your face, baby? Is this goodbye?
The officer's voice drifts away.
"She's part of a drug bust."
"No, you wretched, miserable imbecile," Tom rages. "She's bleeding!"