NOTES | So the last couple chapters have been pretty rough for these two, but I swear they speak to each other again this chapter. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Her friends keep up a constant stream of chatter on the way to their first class after lunch, like they know she needs the distraction. Which she does.
Transfiguration.
The new teacher has left the classroom largely untouched, something that Debbie isn't quite sure how she feels about. It's nice, in a way, that there are still some hints of her mother in the castle – like the cup of chalk on the ledge under the blackboard, and the shelves full of books across the back of the room. On the other hand, this gives the classroom the undeniable air of a space occupied by entirely the wrong person. Professor Chang is not Debbie's mother, and the little touches left behind are both welcomed and cheapened by her presence. There are small adjustments made that, otherwise, would have undoubtedly never been made, too – the teacher's desk is on the other side of the board, and there is a portrait of Caroline Ocean on one wall.
Debbie averts her gaze and takes her usual seat between Lou and Nine-Ball in the back row.
"Good afternoon," says Professor Chang as she moves into the room. She doesn't sweep in and take command of the room immediately the way Debbie's mother always did. There is too much of a bounce in her step to be particularly intimidating. She introduces herself, tells them that she was a Ravenclaw when she was at Hogwarts, drops the year she graduated. Fields a couple of questions about Harry Potter and the war when people figure out how the timeline matches up, and then dives forward into attendance. Debbie barely focuses, attention drawn back only when she hears, distantly, her name. "Deborah Ocean?"
Unmoving, unblinking, she corrects the woman automatically. "Debbie."
She can feel Professor Chang's pity when the teacher's eyes find her, and she doesn't want it. There is a worry taking hold in her head that if Chang is the type of teacher to hang a portrait of a deceased predecessor in her classroom, maybe she's also the type to say something here, now, in front of everyone. But she has at least a little sense, and only nods. "Debbie," she repeats. And that is the end of it, at least until the end of the lesson.
She's up out of her chair in a flash, but has barely made it halfway to the door when her near-freedom is snatched away. "Miss Ocean, can I speak with you for a moment?" Approaching the desk that used to belong to her mother, Debbie shoves her hands deep into the pockets of her robes and raises one eyebrow smoothly in questioning. "I just wanted to check in, see how you're doing."
Jaw tightening, Debbie resists the urge to bristle visibly. A complete stranger, sitting in her mother's chair and asking her if she's okay? Is that supposed to be reassuring? Is it supposed to make the last few months feel anything but wrong? She glances swiftly toward the door; Lou and Nine-Ball wait for her there, pretending not to listen. And beyond them, Tammy. Tammy, who she never wrote back to, a slight frown tugging at her lips and her eyebrows like she's worried, too.
Looking back to Professor Chang, Debbie nods decisively. "I'm fine," she says, maybe a little too loudly.
The next day, she skips transfiguration altogether, tells her friends she's not feeling well at lunch and goes back to the common room with Constance instead. This subject was never Constance's strong suit – she's a charms girl, through and through, and scraped by her transfiguration OWL without a high enough mark to make it to the higher level courses. Debbie curls up in a chair by the fireplace with a blanket and one of her mum's books and bails on her other classes, too, doesn't emerge until dinnertime. She determinedly does not look at the staff table for the entire meal, but Constance stage-whispers that Professor Chang is looking at her. Debbie pretends not to care.
The one class she goes to consistently all week is, surprisingly, herbology. She doesn't think she would be sticking with the subject at all, if not for the teacher. Herbology itself is sort of lame, but against all odds, Professor Longbottom is undoubtedly her favourite remaining member of the faculty. There are two types of confidence, the kind that has been learned painstakingly over time and the kind that has been instilled in someone's veins since the very beginning, and they present themselves differently. He has the learned kind, Debbie can tell. That gained her respect from day one. Her father has always been firmly of the opinion that herbology is essentially useless, but Debbie likes it. There is something calming about the greenhouses, being surrounded by flowers and leaves and the earthy smell of it all. And maybe there's that added bonus of it being something her father doesn't think is worth giving time to. Small rebellions only, for Debbie.
Professor Longbottom lets her hang around the greenhouses when she's supposed to be in other places. Maybe he figures that, at the very least, it means someone knows exactly where she is. He mentions something offhandedly about how he didn't have a good relationship with his old potions professor, but doesn't elaborate. She wonders what he knows about Professor Chang – they were in school at the same time, after all – and whether he tells her that Debbie sometimes sits in one of his greenhouses when she's supposed to be in the transfiguration classroom. She doesn't ask, though. Perhaps she doesn't really want to know. He gives her little tasks here and there ("If you're going to stay in Four while I'm in Two with the third-years, you might as well…") and she carries them out carefully, focusing all her attention on the jobs so that there's no space left to think about anything else.
It seems that her friends have taken it upon themselves to ensure that Debbie is never left entirely on her own. They know her well enough by this point to know not to try to pressure her into talking. If there's one thing she hates, it's being worried about, treated like she is fragile in some way. She isn't blind enough to think that they aren't worrying about her, but she appreciates each of them to the ends of the earth for not making it come across so obviously. Lou makes a conscious effort to check in with her periodically without actually forcing an in-depth discussion. Constance is always good for a distraction at a moment's notice, and Nine-Ball wordlessly lends Debbie all her transfiguration notes while she skips three classes in a row.
She feels lonely, though, despite their near-constant presence. It's not that she can't talk to them – because she can, and she does, and sometimes things feel almost normal again.
Almost, but not quite. Because her mother isn't here, and a million other things. Like how Danny isn't around to ruffle her hair when he passes her in the corridors, and she can't seem to figure out why she misses that, or how to write anything of real substance down on parchment to send to him. Like how her friends are doing their best, but she feels like she's simply going through the motions, and that's not fair to any of them. Like how the coursework for sixth year is more difficult and more interesting, and yet she can't bring herself to focus properly on it. And she keeps seeing Tammy – the girl is in almost every one of her classes and, besides that, has a knack for popping up everywhere Debbie is, so much that she genuinely can't tell whether it's purposeful or not – and she has no idea how to talk to her anymore.
Everything feels hollow, still. Maybe it will feel like that forever.
Sleeping is more difficult than ever. Debbie navigates the castle during the day like a ghost, pretending nobody can see the circles darkening underneath her eyes.
On Sunday night, she goes to the astronomy tower. It's been a while – all summer and one week, but her feet carry her there without requiring her to think about it. Tammy is already there when she reaches the top. She isn't sitting with her feet dangling through the railing to look at the sky, but instead sits cross-legged closer to the stairs, eyes meeting hers immediately, fingers twisting together in her lap. "Hi," says Debbie, faltering momentarily there in the doorway.
Tammy smiles softly. She hasn't been smiling at Debbie in daylight, just glancing her way more often than she needs to, like she wants to reassure herself that Debbie is still there. "Have you been sleeping okay?" she asks, skipping over a greeting entirely. The only answer she receives is a shrug, and they both know what it means. "I just haven't seen you up here lately."
Stepping out into the open, Debbie shrugs again. Belatedly, she realizes she's wearing the same sweater that Tammy's address found its way into the pocket of. "Maybe I was afraid I'd end up coming on a night you were here," she admits, surprising herself with how easily it comes out. The other girl doesn't flinch away from the honesty of it, and Debbie doesn't mean for it to sound hostile. She's been hesitant to put herself in any space where she and Tammy might be alone, after the sheer panic of the summer. This is a place for truths.
Blinking, Tammy waits to answer until Debbie has sat down next to her, as if to make sure that it's too late for her to turn tail and go back to the Gryffindor common room. "I've been here every night since we got back."
The question is automatic. "Why?"
A little cryptically, Tammy replies, "Maybe I was afraid you'd end up being here alone."
After that, it feels like maybe things are starting to go back to normal. Debbie isn't quite sure when, or how, her normal included sitting with Tammy Prescott at the top of the astronomy tower in the middle of the night, but there's no denying that the strange unsteady feeling dissipates a little in this space.
Still, it takes a little time to get back into that routine of talking that they built up at the end of fifth year. Once, Tammy told her that something permanent had shifted in her after her dad's death, and Debbie thought she understood, then, but there is a difference between comprehending the idea and going through those changes herself. There are a hundred things to grow accustomed to now – her mother's absence, Danny's less lasting but still difficult disappearance from her daily life, the small diamond hanging from a chain around Debbie's neck that feels more familiar to her each day.
"It was my mum's," she says when Tammy's gaze lingers on it, and it turns out those four words are enough to open up the floodgates, and then, very suddenly, she can't stop talking. She tells Tammy about the hospital and how her mother smiled when her friends came to visit, even though it wasn't a room for smiling in. About how Danny and Tess arrived when it was already too late, how empty everything felt after that moment, how her father started packing up her mother's things far sooner than she would have if it were up to just her. She tells Tammy about the books she's read, stashed away in her room and slipped as many as she could into her trunk when she packed it at the end of the summer. And the funeral and all the black and all the sorrys and how she didn't say a word out loud for a week, and how when she did again, her voice cracked.
There are too many things to say, and after all the words are out, she feels like there is still more. But Tammy is good at this – being there for people – and helps her start to work through all of it, one piece at a time, with all the patience in the world. She listens the next night when Debbie clumsily attempts to explain why she didn't write back, and she still listens the night after that when she struggles to put words to that fuzzy moment just in between sleeping and waking, where she feels okay until the realization that her mother is gone slams down all over again.
She still can't put her finger on it – on just what about Tammy causes her to open herself up this much.
— • —
Grudgingly, Debbie begins to attend her classes more regularly again. She still skips transfiguration some days, the days that being in that room feels too overwhelming to push through. Professor Chang smiles at her when she trails in behind Nine-Ball midway through the second week of term, the small kind of smile that means she's trying not to make a big deal out of it.
"It's good to have you back, Debbie," she says, as if Debbie's been sick for an extended period of time, or maybe on vacation. Maybe it's intended to be reassuring in some way, but it only makes Debbie's frown deepen as she finds her seat.
Slowly, over the course of that first month, she pulls herself together. Bit by bit, with Tammy's help, whether the girl knows it or not. Being able to talk to her at night means there is less for Debbie to bottle up and carry around with her during the day. She laughs out loud at lunch one day, and it feels nice instead of wrong.
Transfiguration, though, does not go quite so smoothly.
She is there, but only officially. Doesn't make a move to read the chapters she is supposed to read. Turns in a half-completed assignment even though Nine-Ball offers to help her finish it. Arrives late to every other lesson and asks to go to the bathroom twenty minutes in most days, wanders the corridors instead until someone catches her and asks why she's not in class.
She can feel the new professor's disappointment radiating in her direction whenever she's in sight, and maybe even takes a little pride in it, a little satisfaction.
On the first Friday of October, Professor Chang catches her on her way out of the classroom. Debbie has successfully avoided a one-on-one conversation with her since that first day of class, and crosses her arms defensively in preparation for this one. Her friends linger automatically at the door, but the teacher crosses over to shut it with a definitive click.
"I wanted to speak with you," she says, without any preamble, "about your performance in class." She doesn't sit down, but stands instead, shuffling through a pile of parchment until she finds one she's apparently looking for. "I'm not going to lie to you, Debbie. It's very early on to be this clear, but at this rate, you're going to fail the year. I know NEWT-level transfiguration is significantly more complicated than what you've learned so far. Is the material just too… difficult? Confusing?"
"Yes," Debbie lies. She doesn't know, is the real answer. Hasn't even been paying enough attention to determine whether or not she could learn this, if she tried.
Bewilderingly, the response to that is a smile. It's small and a little sad, but it's definitely a smile. "See, I'm not entirely convinced that it is," muses Professor Chang. And oh, Debbie doesn't know where this is going, but she doesn't think she likes it. She watches the teacher trail one fingertip down the piece of parchment she holds. "It says here you got an O on your OWL last June, and the rest of the staff seem to feel that this is your best subject. Maybe even your favourite one, too. It seems to me that it's a little unlikely that someone's understanding of a whole branch of magic could decline so far in such a short time."
Guarded, uncertain, Debbie frowns, asks bluntly, "So what are you saying?"
"I'm saying, maybe you just need a little help," says Professor Chang, and Debbie can already feel every part of herself defying that statement. The woman raises a hand before she can cut in. "Give me thirty seconds before you shoot me down, all right?" It's not a question, or at least not one that requires an answer. She makes a show of glancing at the clock before she nods, anyway. Regrets the sarcastic nature of that a little when the next words out of Professor Chang's mouth are, "When I was in my fifth year here, my boyfriend died."
There's a little silence here; Debbie has no idea what to say. She thinks Tammy would probably know what to say, what to do. Tammy is a thousand times better at this than she is.
"Afterward, it was… very hard for me to move forward." Debbie tries to listen the way Tammy would listen to her, if this was the astronomy tower and a handful of hours later. Her teacher describes things that Debbie has become familiar with. The loss of appetite, the lack of peaceful sleep, the inability to focus on much of anything at all. "Transfiguration was his favourite subject – which, of course, made it an incredibly difficult one, for me. Funny, isn't it, considering where I am now?" It's not funny, though, not the laughable kind. There is another loaded pause. It has been more than thirty seconds, and the mood has shifted so far that Debbie can't bring herself to point it out. Professor Chang shrugs minutely. "I know it's not the same as what you're going through. But once I got a little help, I got to find the joy in this class again."
"Help from you?"
"Merlin, no. I'd hate to subject you to more time with me when you already don't want to come to class." She's smiling again. Debbie's pretty sure she'll never understand this woman's range of emotion. "I'd like you to pay attention, though, when you're here. That's only going to help you." A big, careful breath, like she's working up to something big, and then: "I'm thinking more along the lines of a tutor."
Debbie shakes her head automatically, but Professor Chang is looking at her so hopefully, and she's just spilled her whole story about her fifth-year boyfriend and all of the uncanny parallels between how she handled that and how Debbie is handling this. Sharing that information was a tactic, and it's working. She knows because she finds herself sighing and answering, "I'll try it. No promises. And if I hate it, I get to stop." Professor Chang nods, and it's Debbie's turn to hold up a hand. "On one condition."
The differences between Professor Chang and Debbie's mother are particularly evident anytime she so much as thinks about the woman, but this is a big one: She tilts her head just slightly to one side, curiosity piquing, and asks, "What sort of condition do you have in mind?" This is exactly the sort of question that Debbie's mother would never have asked.
Hesitantly, Debbie adjusts her book bag's strap over her shoulder. "Can you take the picture down?" She doesn't look at it, hanging in the space it has been given on the other side of the classroom, but there is no mistaking which one she means.
A flicker of surprise crosses Professor Chang's face before it settles into a soft sort of understanding. "Yes, of course. I only meant to honour her in some way." She sets the parchment full of OWL grades down and reaches out a hand to shake. "You've got yourself a deal. Be here tomorrow night, eight o'clock."
On her way out of the classroom, Debbie stops, her hand already on the doorknob, and turns back, just for a moment. "She used to have a painting of a lavender field there. She said it was calming, cleared away everything else so we could focus."
— • —
"Tutoring?" Constance wrinkles her nose distastefully at dinner the next night. "Dude, that sucks. Maybe you could just bail."
This seems to be the general consensus from all of her friends, and Debbie is automatically inclined to share their opinion. But she's got an agreement with Professor Chang now, has even gone so far as sealing it with that handshake. So she will, reluctantly, give it a handful of sessions – just enough to have made a visible effort and prove, to both herself and the transfiguration teacher, that this strategy doesn't work. And then she'll call the whole thing off.
At eight o'clock, she taps her knuckles on the open door of the classroom to announce her presence, and Professor Chang smiles broadly, like she really is glad to see Debbie here at all. It takes about half a second for Debbie to zero in on the tutor she's found.
Tammy.
Of course it's Tammy. Without a doubt, the smartest person in the class besides maybe Nine-Ball, and no teacher is going to give her one of her best friends as a tutor. And besides that, Tammy is well-suited for this. Teaching. Most of what she knows about the girl lines up perfectly with tutoring troubled kids in her spare time: Ravenclaw, a prefect, soft and approachable and not at all the type to make things difficult. Just the type of person who is capable of melding herself carefully around someone else's learning needs. Really, she shouldn't be surprised that this is the choice Professor Chang has made.
For a moment, she's frozen in a strange sort of fight-or-flight stance. This is absolutely not the safe place where she has grown accustomed to spending time around the other girl, and she has no idea at all how she's supposed to talk to her in this setting. The idea of turning on her heel to leave seems rather appealing, like it would stop her heart from beating entirely too quickly and irregularly, but Professor Chang has already stepped in her direction to usher her further into the room.
"Debbie, glad you could make it!" She glances from Debbie to Tammy and back again, dark eyes flickering with an understanding that turns out to be completely off-base. "So I know you two don't exactly run in the same social circles, but – well, Tammy has the highest marks in the class, and I think this will be a good match. Let's just… leave anything else at the door, all right?"
Tammy offers her a small, hesitant smile, and Debbie's fears lose a little of their hold on her at the sight of it. "Yeah, all right," she answers carefully.
NOTES | Thank you so much for reading! Please let me know what you think of this chapter and the story so far in the reviews! Happy holidays and I'll see you again next chapter for some tutoring sessions, a Hogsmeade trip, and Tammy trying to become a coffee drinker.