Chapter 5: Like Cardboard, But Cheaper

"Dad," I say. "Dad."

"Lucy," he answers, and I can tell right there that he doesn't have any more answers than I do. "It's going to be all right."

I'm not close with my dad. I'm not even mad at my dad all the time the way I am—was—with my mum. His war stories are pretty cool—once you get past the part where he started out as a disloyal sack of shit, I mean—but most of the time, he just drones on and on about broom tampering and stops me any time I try to go inside Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes. Molly, the suck-up, was always the one who got along with him, and I—wouldn't say I got along better with Mum, exactly, but at least all those times I got pissed at her, I was feeling something. Sometimes, I try to find my love for my dad, and all I can feel is cardboard.

But now—I'm looking at him, and my mum is dead, and he's one of the only other people in this world who know what it's like to look for Mum's love and find nothing in return. Even if he loved her more. Even if I haven't wanted to believe in her since I was a little girl. Even though I don't understand why my face is hot and eyes are wet when I don't need her anymore. Maybe I didn't need her—maybe I did—but I'm standing there with my half-eaten sandwich on the floor in front of me and I'm admitting to myself that maybe, at least for a while, I'm going to need him.

"Daddy." My voice comes out as a wispy croak.

"Lulu," says Dad, just as quietly.

I run over to him and put my arms so tight around him that I can feel my body shaking—or maybe that's just because I'm crying. Hard to say. There's a lot of awkward silence going on behind me from Al and Dom, but tough. Let them send a fruit basket and walk away after the funeral like everybody else will. See if I care.

"I hate her," I whisper. "I hate her. I've always hated her. Damn it."

Dad has the good sense not to disagree. He's rail-thin and feels bony against all my pouches of extra fat, but he holds on and rubs my back until, an eternity later, I feel ready to let go. His face is dry. Mine isn't.

"Professor McGonagall said it was okay to pull you out of classes for a few days and—and bring you back home," Dad stammers. "We'll be staying with Grammy and Granddad."

"What's wrong with home?" I don't even know why I'm picking this fight. I like Grammy and Granddad Weasley.

"I thought it would be better for you and Molly to—" He looks like he can tell that I'm about to pitch a fit, because he changes course and finishes, "I just don't think I can stand to go back there. Not after I found her there."

So Mum killed herself at home. Until now, I didn't even think about the logistics of when and where she did the thing, but of course she had to find her opportunity, and of course somebody came back and found her—specifically, Dad. I wonder if he knew on some level that it was coming and decide that I don't want to know. As soon as I push the thought out of my head, though, I start wondering instead whether the weird way everyone's going to be acting from now on is going to be anything like how they acted when Uncle Fred died. Maybe they won't be as sad this time—maybe they loved Mum less than Uncle Fred. Or, at least, maybe everyone did but Dad.

"I, um. I have to pack. Can you give me, like, an hour?"

"That long?"

"It's a big-ass castle, Dad, how long do you think it'll take me to get all the way down to the dungeons and then up to McGonagall's office?"

"Right. An hour, then."

"I'll see you soon," I say, and I'm relieved to hear myself sounding more normal again. "Dom—Al—I guess I'll see you at the funeral, right?"

Al looks lost, and Dom says timidly, "We're really sorry, Lucy. I know how much your mum mea—"

"She didn't mean anything to me," I say steadily. "She was just a stranger I shared a house with."

"Don't test me," I warn her. "I'll see you guys later."

I look over at the elves. A lot of them look like they're teetering on the verge of speaking, until Darby finally asks in a squeaky voice, "Would Mistress Weasley like to take some sandwiches with her?"

I'm about to say no when what pops out of myself instead is, "Sure. Thank you so much, Darby. I'm sure my grandparents would love some."

Dad interrupts, "Luce, now isn't really the time for—"

"Just let me do this for them," I snap. I don't bother to identify who I'm talking about when I say "them."

I don't really need a whole hour to get from the kitchens to the dungeons and back upstairs, but it buys me a little extra time to pull McLaggen aside when I get to the common room. I can't entirely explain why I want to talk to him so bad. I mean, look at all the shit I give him. "Can we talk in your dorm?" I ask in an undertone, grabbing his shoulder from behind where he's sitting on a sofa with textbooks all over his lap.

"What?" he says distractedly.

"Well, I can't take you up to my dorm, so I thought yours would be more appropriate."

"What do you want, Weasley? Out with it."

"My mum killed herself tonight, dickhead. Now take me up to your dorm."

Wordlessly, McLaggen puts down his quill and parchment and unburies himself from the books immediately on top of him. Finally, he says in a much gentler voice, "Come on."

He leaves his books and crap downstairs, yelling at Smith to watch all of it and make sure nobody tries to rip off his moonstones essay. Up in the dorm, he sits down on the side of his bed and pats the space next to him, so I plop down right next to him, too. I look at him. He looks at me. I look at him some more.

"I'm really, really sorry, Lucy," he says eventually, and it's probably the first time I've ever heard him call me by my given name. "I know stuff with your mom was… I'm just really sorry."

"Thanks, Cormac," I mutter.

"Cormac is my dad, and my dad is a douche. You can call me C.J."

"Okay, then."

McLaggen puts a hand on my face. Like an idiot, I don't actually realize where he's going with this until he pointedly looks at my mouth and starts leaning in closer. "Hold up, cowboy," I say, flaring up immediately, putting a hand on his chest to shove him away. "I come to you all weak and girly and vulnerable in my goddamn time of need, and you try to take advantage? Come on now. I thought your mum taught you better than that."

"Shit. I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that. I just… I don't know what the right thing to do is."

"Oh, I don't know. Just, you know, listen, and don't put your foot in your mouth—or your hands on my ass, for that measure."

"You want me to listen? You're not even talking. Do you have anything to say about her?"

"Dick," I say. But he has a point. "Look, I'm sorry. I just don't know how to act about this."

"You don't know?" says McLaggen, and when I smile, he smiles. "I wasn't, uh—just now, I wasn't going to try to sleep with you. I mean, if you had wanted to, we could have, but that wasn't the point. The point was to do something other than talking. I'm not good with words."

"I noticed."

"Asshole."

"Look who's talking. Try again when my mum didn't just kill herself, okay?"

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah, all right," McLaggen says.

"See you later, Cormac."

"You know, you can't just mouth off in the face of your problems forever," McLaggen says when I'm on my way out through the door. "Sooner or later, this shit is going to catch up to you."

"Yeah, yeah."

"I'll be here when it does," he calls out as I'm closing the door, but I try not to think about it.

x

I don't even want to tell you what goes on over the next few days. There's a lot of people saying they're sorry and shaking Dad's hand and bringing so many casseroles over to Grammy and Granddad's house that Grammy has to charm a second icebox to have room to store them all. Molly is a total pain, making small talk with all the well-wishers in this very performative way like she only cares about Mum dying to the extent that it can get her sympathy from passersby. Dad puts on a good face when he emerges to work on funeral plans and get Mum's affairs in order, but he doesn't know that Molly and I have been listening with Extendable Ears when he goes into his childhood bedroom to cry. Grammy and Granddad are two of my favorite people in this world, but they, like McLaggen, obviously don't know how to act. Granddad has this perpetually heartbroken look on his face, and Grammy keeps yelling at me and Molly to help around the house like being snippy will cover up how sad she is.

I wish I could just fast-forward to the part where I don't care anymore. I keep telling people I don't care, that I never cared, but everybody just gives me sad, patronizing looks and I can tell they don't believe me.

But let me tell you about the funeral, because that at least is pretty interesting on account of Mum's Squib brother—my Uncle Léon—and his whole giant-ass Muggle family (a wife and five kids). Aunt Alison and my cousins don't know anything about magic, but it's still really important to Uncle Léon that all of them go to the funeral, which—okay, I know Molly and I aren't close, but I do get that Mum was his sister and he cared about her. Whatever.

The point is, for Uncle Léon's family to be able to attend without us egregiously violating the International Statute of Secrecy, we have to make the whole funeral into a Muggle-friendly shindig. Given that Mum and Dad's sides of the family are both pureblood and largely have no idea how to pretend to be Muggles, hilarity ensues.

Since Dad has really got no idea how to pass for Muggle, let alone navigate Muggle funeral homes, Aunt Hermione (whose family is Muggle) and Uncle Harry (who was raised by Muggles) volunteer to take the lead on planning everything. Granddad Weasley, of course, volunteers right away to help with the funeral planning, too, mostly so that he can pester Uncle Harry and Aunt Hermione to death with questions and make remarks about how ingenious Muggles are for their event-planning prowess.

Since Dad will be burying Mum on a plot managed by a wizarding company, planning the funeral and visitation is this whole beast of its own: the funeral home people don't know how to make their events Muggle-friendly, either. We can't have the visitation inside the funeral home at all because it's overrun with signs of magic, so we plan on doing it at our house, which Dad and Molly and I spend a good two days just stripping of any stray spellwork that the Renaults might find suspicious. After that, Aunt Hermione and Uncle Harry have to explain the concept of pallbearers. Granddad is delighted. The funeral home people are not.

For the whole two-hour visitation, it feels like we're all putting on a charade. We hold our breaths the whole time Uncle Léon's family are there, and so do everyone who knows who they are—all the Weasleys, Dad, Molly, Mum's parents. They raise their eyebrows at the other mourners' dress—one woman shows up wearing a full-on Victorian corset and gown, I kid you not, and another man shows up wearing a wetsuit with a sarong tied around his waist—but don't seem to notice the way everybody keeps self-consciously checking their pockets like they're naked or something. (Dad made visitors leave their wands at home.) It all seems to be going smoothly enough until Amos Diggory and his wife Apparate into the house, treading right on top of Aunt Alison's feet. Figuring that it's all gone to hell and needs fixing anyway, Granddad tears himself away from the Renaults to stick his head in the fireplace and call in an Obliviator.

"It must suck, being a Squib," I say conversationally to Uncle Léon while we're waiting.

"Lucy!" Dad hisses.

But Uncle Léon doesn't seem to mind. "You know, it did at first," he says. "But you get used to living among Muggles once you've done it for long enough. At least in our world I don't feel like a misfit."

"What's a Squib?" says my cousin Jack. "Or a Muggle?"

Uncle Léon and Dad exchange a look—like, well, there are Obliviators coming anyway to erase all this, what harm can it do—and then Uncle Léon crouches down to Jack's level, though he looks up at Aunt Alison, who looks rather faint, as he's talking. "Squibs and Muggles are people who can't do magic," he says, like he's trying to explain advanced calculus to a toddler. "Witches and wizards are people who can."

"Magic is real?" echoes Jack.

"Don't be daft, of course it isn't real," says my cousin Gabe.

"Percy, do some magic for them," says Uncle Léon.

"Let me just find my wand," says Dad, and he dashes off upstairs.

Aunt Alison turns to Uncle Léon and says, "Magic is real and you didn't tell me?" but Uncle Léon is spared from having to answer by a couple of Obliviators showing up.

I wonder what it must be liking, being able to just bring in an Obliviator when you get caught in a lie like that. Would the world be a better place if you could just get away with cheating and murdering and robbing whoever you want? By living under the Statute of Secrecy, we're obviously assuming that the world is better off with wizards getting away with hiding who they are from plenty of the people who are close to them—extended family, namely, but also immediate family in some cases, like Uncle Léon's. I know if I were a Muggle and my husband or wife were a Squib who knew about magic, I'd be pretty damn pissed if I ever found out they were keeping that from me.

The funeral itself goes a little better than the visitation did. Funeral home staff levitate the coffin out to the burial plot ahead of time. Once the Renaults and the Weasleys are all lined up on the grounds, Dad reads a little poem, and then he and the rest of my uncles lift the coffin into the ground. Then, they have me and Dad and Molly all toss white roses into the grave, as if any of this shit means anything at all, and then it's basically over.

"I want to stay home," I tell Dad staunchly while all the Weasleys are kind of hanging around waiting for the Renaults to go home—we're all planning on Apparating (or Side-Along-Apparating, in me and the other kids' cases), but unlike yesterday, we can't let them see that.

"Lucy, you know we're not going back home until tomorrow. It's family lunch and dinner at the Burrow first today. Uncle Charlie came in special for this and everything."

"I don't mean today. I mean after this. I don't want to go back to Hogwarts. I want to stay home with you."

It's not like I've thought this plan through at all or anything. I didn't even realize I was going to ask this of Dad until the words were coming out of my mouth. "Forget it," I say quickly. "It was a stupid idea."

"Your mother just died, and it isn't stupid," says Dad. His voice breaks a little. "Look, you have to keep going to school. I don't want you to get behind on your studies. But if you really wanted, you could start Flooing home with me on the weekends. There's nothing exciting going on at home—I usually work from our living room all weekend—but I'm sure your grandparents and aunts and uncles would love to spend more time with you. So would Hugo and Lily."

"Angelina's having the baby in a couple of months," I add. "I could help out after she does."

"It's settled, then," says Dad. "I'll have to clear it with Professor McGonagall, but I'm sure she'll approve."

Dad may be clueless and out of touch, but I guess he's good for something after all.