prologue

Torrance Drummond had learned three important life lessons before she turned thirteen.

The first she learned at the young age of nine, when her knees were covered in dirt and scabs and the hair that her mother carefully braided every morning was undone and unruly. Young Torrance had made a habit of rolling around in dirt and grass, staining her clothes and her skin. She would gather long strands of grass and delicate white flowers that tickled her skin and mash them together with thick mud and call them potions. She would gather up all of the flowers that she could and arrange them upright in patterns she thought pretty and called it her enchanted little garden. She would run out the front door as soon as she had enough breakfast to please her mother and only come back when the sun had been set long enough to start worrying her mother. She lived in the hills behind her house.

And it was with this unfaltering obsession with the dirt and the grass and the flowers that she made into her own little garden that Torrance got into her first fight. It was a solid looking boy, maybe a year or two older than her. He wasn't special, Torrance knew. As her mother always told her, she was the only special person around, and she probably shouldn't go blabbing on about it to anyone else she happened to meet; they'd be afraid of just how special she was. But that kind of insisting and pestering from her mother to keep her mouth closed about just how special she was was exactly what gave Torrance that extra little edge to snarl at that older boy when he was ripping up her favorite wildflowers. It made her furious, the way he tore up the petals and kicked up the roots and laughed like their destruction could only bring joy. Torrance had clenched her jaw and ground her teeth together and before she knew it she was running up to him like a madman, cursing him out with words she knew from her father that would make her mother run pale.

He laughed at her yelling, asked her if she was going to cry over the pretty little flowers. And he didn't know, but Torrance Drummond didn't cry. Not, at least, since she could remember. Torrance didn't like to cry. But he didn't know that. He didn't know that instead of rubbing her balled up fists into her teary eyes, like he thought most little girls, that Torrance would take those tiny little fists and ram them into his head, the ripped up petals flying to smack the boy in the face. Then it was him who was crying.

It was done after that, Torrance had thought. She won, like she always did. What Torrance thought the boy would do was run home and hang in his head in shame and learn to never mess with her again. But Torrance didn't know the boy, just as he didn't know her. And instead of toughening up, the boy went and ratted on her, leaving with a one week sentence to her room and a permanent ban from the garden, with nothing left for her to do. The boy had made a move she wasn't expecting and hit her so hard she lost the fight.

Lesson number one: don't start fights you can't finish.

The second came a little bit later, when Torrance learned that there was a word for just how special she was and that word was: witch. Her poor mother nearly fainted at the word when she first heard it. Because her mother and her father were not special, and Torrance had a new word for that too: muggle .

Finding out that the gentle pink sparks that she made fly around her room at night while her parents were asleep and the disregarded petals that slapped the face of the boy she didn't like were because she was a witch felt right. She felt vindicated. People in her small little town had called her a freak and a weirdo and now she was going to a school that they weren't even special enough to know about. Torrance felt better than everyone else.

It wasn't a feeling that lasted long.

Torrance started her first year loud. She voiced her opinions and her thoughts and took no shame in telling everyone around her how funny she thought it was that she ended up a witch when her parents were muggles. She told everyone how strange she thought the word was. She asked the people around her to explain the difference between Galleons and Sickles and Knuts because she just couldn't keep it straight. She talked in class and asked questions and didn't notice when people were laughing at her. It only took a few days for the whole school to know that this loud little first year in the red and gold uniform was muggle-born.

And it only took about a week for Torrance to hear the word mudblood.

It was some older girl. Some older girl in Slytherin with her robes shining and her dark curls long. She didn't know what the word meant but she wasn't thick enough to miss the venous way it was spoken. It was an insult.

Torrance was sitting on the edge of her bed, looking at her roommate and her long red hair and she said, "Lily, what's a mudblood?"

The question made Lily Evans turn bright red and haughty and she clenched her fists by her side and told Torrance that it was an awful, foul name for someone like them. Someone with muggle parents. And it was the confused look on Torrance's face that made Lily explain to her for a good thirty minutes that the belief in blood purity would give the two of them a very hard time for a very long time. "Honestly, Tor, if anyone calls you that you tell a teacher right away."

The suggestion had made Torrance scrunch her face up. She didn't like the idea of being a tattletale. People who did that to her back home ended up with mud pies in their face. Torrance was always the one being tattled on; she was never the one snitching. No, she could deal with this problem herself, like she always did.

"Some seventh Slytheirn called me in the hall. Y'know, the one with that crazy curly hair?"

This statement from Torrance launched Lily into another long rant about how that was Bellatrix Lestrange and that she was the most evil wench that anyone could possibly imagine. That Bellatrix and her whole family were evil and bigoted and that they slept with each other to preserve their pure blood. It was enough to make Torrance feel nauseous. She didn't know how anyone could think they were better than someone if their parents were related.

So the next time miss Lestrange walked past young Torrance and dropped her little insult at Torrance's feet, the younger girl looked up at her with bold eyes and yelled, "Why don't you shut your mouth? Your parents are cousins !"

The hex that hit Torrance left her in the hospital wing for the rest of the day.

Lesson number two: keep your mouth shut.

Last, Torrance entered her second year of school a little more calm and a little more knowledgeable and the word mudblood started to roll off her back like it was nothing. She knew a fair few hexes to keep herself safe, when she needed to. She did her schoolwork, even though Lily Evans, one of about four people who could tolerate Torrance and her volume, and probably her best friend, had to practically force her into the library. Some subjects came easier than others. Some came very hard. They all came easy to Lily.

Torrance was thinking about that when she left the library, her finished but overall not that great Charms essay in her bag. She could do the charms just fine, she just couldn't write about them. She didn't even know how she did them. Torrance really couldn't write about anything. But Lily, she was so good at doing it and explaining that sometimes Torrance had to wonder if she was lying about having muggle parents. Torrance went to Hogwarts blind, and felt like she had to work to catch up. Lily didn't have to do that work.

She was telling herself that she wasn't jealous of her friend, even though she knew she was, when she heard the yelling. Curious, she followed the sounds down the hall to the sight of two green robed and bulky boys using their wands and superior knowledge to torment some first year Hufflepuff and before she could stop herself, Torrance was yelling, "Hey! Leave him alone!"

And when all was said and done, Torrance had suspiciously wet lumps on her face that smelled as repulsive as they looked and just as many detentions as the two boys that started it.

Lesson number three: mind your own business.

And when Torrance entered her third year, she was a different person than she was her first year. She didn't talk loudly to anyone who would listen anymore; she didn't really talk to anyone who wasn't her small group of friends. She didn't boast about her muggle parents; she kept that information close to her chest. She didn't insult Slytherins in the hall and she didn't jump into fights. Because those three lessons weighed down on her mind those first two years. Every time someone rolled their eyes at the sound of her Scottish drawl or they avoided sitting next to her in class to avoid the way she protested against anything she thought to be an injustice, Torrance realized that those three lessons weren't living in the forefront of her mind enough.

So her third year was silent, hidden in the background with her redheaded friend. Nose tucked in books and eyes traveling across the common room to watch anyone else who dared to be rowdier than her. And she was almost disappointed to realize that even when she stepped out of the center of the room and off to the side, head tucked down, people still weren't inclined to strike up a conversation with her. They just went from being annoyed by her to ignoring her. Torrance had to admit that the latter half was better.

There was one benefit, though, to her newfound invisibility. Torrance was always too busy running her mouth to put it into practice, but she was observant. She watched the people around her and she knew them. She knew the way she talked and she knew the way they stood when they were uncomfortable and what their voices sounded like when they were lying. Torrance saw it all and she learned it all and while the world went around without paying her much mind, Torrance was paying everyone and everything mind.

Torrance paid a lot of mind to Remus Lupin, the first half of their third year, Because when she was noticing every other Gryffindor and all their peculiar little habits, she noticed that Lupin had the most peculiar habits of all of them. She noticed that the skin under his skin hung a little lower and grew a little darker once a month, around the same time he disappeared to the hospital wing and the same time that his friends walked around classes yawning and half-witted.

It didn't really take her long to put it together.

And it was really lucky for Remus that Torrance had learned her three lessons.