Professor Mulgrave was hardly surprised by the tittering that erupted in the room. Rosie turned a bruise-y shade of red and sank low into her chair.
"Alright, alright." he said waving a hand. "Back to our lesson."
This happened at least once a year and sometimes more often than that. If he were lucky, the laughter would die out and the class could resume as normal. Occasionally, the wrong person would say it and it would become a 'thing'. It was even worse when someone perceived, ahead of time, the likelihood for such a mistake and then orchestrate the misunderstanding. Once, but only once, he witnessed a room of students so perceptive, some of them openly groaned and rolled their eyes. They hadn't been fooled. But Rosie had not orchestrated this. Poor Rosie made a genuine and common mistake.
He sighed and turned his back to continue the lecture. What else could he do? If he said anything, he might make it worse. There was only one person in that room that could have stopped it that day and Lydia had no intention of doing so. Rosie squirmed and looked up to catch Lydia glaring back at her. She shook her head.
"NimMMple." she hissed, emphasizing the 'm' and she whipped her head around to focus on the lecture. The other Slytherin girl at the table snorted under her cape. Lydia was well on her way to being 'ascended' to head girl of her house. The Slytherin's unofficial official tradition was that the head boy and head girl were chosen by their predecessor. If Lydia said nothing then the Slytherins wouldn't stop. Rosie was already a well established punchline with several of them and this incident, coupled with Lydia's deep disgust at the mistake cemented that. Lydia might have been able to call them off but did not because sometimes she wasn't there. She was studying or playing piano or yawning through her very easy, boring responsibilities as prefect to a house full of focused, ambitious peers. She had been assured she was inheriting a good bunch from the previous head boy. She wasn't impressed with his language or his pomposity, it and he bored her and she made it clear by staring, head tilted, lips pursed slightly. He knew not to show her that she made him feel insecure and small and insignificant. He knew she could cast spells around him and that one day she would do important work or make a big discovery. She impressed him because she meant it: she was a real, actual snob and walked with all the earned arrogance of someone whose work speaks for itself. She never meant to injure peoples' feelings but she sometimes did. He knew he had made the right choice, she would make an excellent head girl someday soon.
"I'll meet you there, dah-lingk. I just need to collect all my nipples…" and what seemed like an entire castle of Slytherins burst into peals of mean-spirited, shrill laughter. Rosie forced a jovial chuckle but it didn't work. Truth told, the Hufflepuffs weren't very fond of her either. The other Rosies in her own house had given up on her and her obsession to get into the Slytherins' good graces. She might have had a different time at school if she had had allies but very few students walked with her or, if they did, they did so begrudgingly out of house loyalty, a sense of enraging obligation. When they snuggled down to sleep, they couldn't quite understand why they gave her such a hard time. Rosie wasn't rude or mean, she wasn't even mousey per say, there were far shyer students in every house and, initially, they understood through instinct, to keep a wide berth but they too realized over time that it wasn't shyness at all.
Rosie wasn't even that quiet so they couldn't understand how or why it happened. Nor could the Slytherins if they cared to dig for why, which they didn't, but Lydia knew. It wasn't even a risk she took to say that Rosie had pronounced her name wrong that day a few years ago over breakfast. She just said it. And the look on her face that she had been pronouncing it wrong had been worth it.
Rosie had been bold to walk up to their table.
"Hey Lydia. Really great that you got into Slytherin."
"Who?" Lydia seemed to ask genuinely.
The Slytherins giggled or looked over their breakfast for a better look at why this bumblebee was buzzing around their table.
"Lydia, we kno-"
"Lee-dy-ah"
"I'm sorry?"
"It's pronounced, Lee-dy-ah."
Rosie hadn't known what to do so she just turned with something like a curtsy and scampered back to the Hufflepuff table where her housemates were just as confused as to why she'd go to another house's table in the first place, especially when there was a table full of people ready to get to know her sitting right there.
The closest Slytherins asked afterwards, concerned, if they too had mispronounced Lydia's name.
"No." Lydia replied flatly. It took them a moment to replay the moment in their minds and then they dissolved into continued laughter. Lee-dy-ah. It confused everyone else outside of her house because they were pretty certain it was a joke but they also couldn't be certain until she made friends with Dorcas and, surely, she knew how to pronounce her own friend's name, which she pronounced as Lydia which is what they had all been calling her anyway. At first Lydia thought it was a little funny, if not unfortunate that she had given herself a mispronunciation of her own name as a nickname but her detachment, her coolness, her complete lack of neediness all spoke to a maturity that the Slytherins respected, loved and understood. All of the Slytherins had to fight for the affection of someone like that at home so there was a strange familiarity of that behavior from one of their peers except she was someone who would sit with them, would speak with them. Sometimes she gave them a nod or smile of approval. Rosie was Lydia's wonky, desperate reflection. They would have bullied Rosie even if they hadn't liked Lydia.
Rosie superficially irritated Lydia. How could such a girl have the name of such a lovely, sweet smelling delight belong to such inelegant, sincere, agitating Hufflepuff nuisance? Somewhere deeper, not much further from that feeling of annoyance sat atop an ocean of sublimating emotion, an emotion something like hate. Rosie was a careless that Lydia could never afford or want to be. She had a disregard for her station and her place. Just the thought of her could make Lydia furious. And the thought that someone like Rosie could even make her way into her thoughts made her even angrier so Learned to not think of her at all and she would continue to say nothing.
Lydia's detachment would grow until she would find a way to separate her emotion from the girl, until Rosie was just another student she had to run into occasionally and then until she felt nothing at all for her either way and in doing found a way to forget, though she didn't think of it that way, but Lydia got to a place where she could walk past Rosie as if she was invisible. Rosie stopped existing to Lydia so there it was. Heidi once petitioned for a meeting between her and Lydia to resolve another matter concerning members of their houses. Heidi had used Dorcas as a go-between but on the subject of Rosie, Lydia had declined and both Dorcas and Heidi could sense in Lydia's body language that there would be no negotiating around it.
It was in the quiet library that Lydia told Dorcas to, "remove your affection from that one." and Dorcas, knowing that Lydia made very few requests like this outright did so out of loyalty. Rosie didn't become invisible to Dorcas but her attention became less urgent. Heidi sensed this in Dorcas and followed suit in her own way and the Hufflepuffs did by extension because Heidi was one of their favorite prefects and, before that, still had the goodwill of what had happened in her family earlier. Also, she baked a mean pastry. Besides the last, they really didn't need that much of a reason but all of the reasons came together into a congealed mass of apathy toward Rosie. Then Lydia left school. Dorcas and Heidi followed and just like that everyone who would have been there to remember the details and inside jokes were replaced by a new group of students with their own alliances, interests and insecurities. Professor Mulgrave braced himself for the lesson as he did every year.
Rosie died in the wars and never stopped forgetting to the very end. She lacquered over her memory of school so that it wasn't so bad and, at the very end, it hadn't been as the Slytherins eventually moved on, first when Lydia left and then they got bored. The younger ones had no context and so it made them seem foolish, like they were trying too hard, like Rosie herself, so they were scolded and the drag quieted down to nothing. Rosie's life in between school and her death, who knows. Did she get married? Did she have children? She may have been happy. Maybe she remembered something but maybe not. Once you forget or, if you lie to yourself too often for too long, what memory is one even trying to recall? What is there to remember? There is nothing left to forget.
