Lily continued to hate me throughout the year. I pretended to hate her back, but my friends saw through my bluff. They teased me incessantly, stopping only when I threatened to curse them with a Jelly-Legs jinx. They took it seriously; I was pretty darn good at those. She hated me mostly because of my taunting of Snape.
Ah, Severus Snape. I haven't introduced him yet, have I? Snape was a boy in the first year with us, and he slavered over the Dark Arts like they were a particularly large piece of banana cream pie. The Sorting Hat had put him in Slytherin before it had even touched his head. Gryffindors and Slytherins have an inherent rivalry (I think it's been going on for centuries; sometimes I wonder if the house ghosts weren't the start of it), so we hated him from the start, but only as badly as the rest of the Slytherins.
But then we had Potions, Transfiguration, and Defense Against the Dark Arts with the Slytherins, and it didn't take long to figure out how much of a git this Severus Snape was.
We hated each other from the very beginning, from our first Potions class. I was jealous of his talent with potions; he envied my skill in Defense Against the Dark Arts. Not that Potions was my favorite class (Professor Slughorn was… not the best- he tended to favor students who flattered him with crystallized pineapple), but I was the undisputed best in everything else. He cared only about Defense Against the Dark Arts. I couldn't wait to rub my talent for Qudditch into his sallow face next year, when I was allowed on the team.
And then there was another acquaintance. After things at Hogwarts had settled down, the school began separating into social ranks once more. There were the smart and popular, consisting mostly of rich purebloods, down to the scum of the earth (like Snape), and then the people out on the sides, like the nerdy geeks and disturbed ones that make you think that they should be locked in Azkaban, not Hogwarts.
Sirius and I were definitely at the top (of the first years, at least- one git, a Slytherin sixth year prefect named Lucius Malfoy never missed an opportunity to inform us that he would always be our superior). Remus sat up there, too, because we were his friends. It wasn't long before we noticed another small boy tailing us around. His name was Peter. Peter Pettigrew.
He was a rather small boy, and timid, like a mouse. He had tawny hair and a shaky smile. Before long, he had joined our little group of friends, turning us from a trio into a foursome. We abused him good-naturedly fairly often- he reacted so well to it. He would turn bright red and look as though he were about to start crying unless we said we were joking. It was great.
Remus continued to make up excuses as to where he'd go every month. It was this more than anything that made us want to know what was wrong; if he had to lie about it, then it must be bad. He could just have told us it was a secret, and that would have been the end of it.
But he kept telling us that his mother was sick and needed him home, that his father had broken his leg and couldn't move, that his parents needed him home to care for his little brother for a bit. We stopped believing him after the third time. Sirius was very curious. Towards the end of our first year, he began spending hours on end in the library.
And still, Lily hated me. It wasn't like I taunted Snape horribly- he was a greasy slimeball git who deserved it anyway. No one liked him; he was very poor and about to drown in his obsession with the Dark Arts. But I've already explained all this. Point is, he deserved it, full on. I had no regrets when I threw a Jelly Legs jinx at him out of the corner of my mouth or when his book bag accidentally split along the seam. He deserved it.