XI


Sophie Roper was a girl of truly easy antics. She hardly bothered with what her friends spent half of their time worrying about – hair and boys and clothes and popularity. She had no desire to be liked, nor to be known. Her life was made of black and white decisions, where she often choose what would make things easier. A Slytherin, through and through, as her mother was keen on saying. She surrounded herself with people that made her life better, she made decisions that put herself in the way of her plans, and she focused on what was important. She does those things because she knows it's the smart decision, and it's what she needed to do to survive.

There was only one mistake that Sophie kept repeating – she was passionate.

She was passionate about quidditch. She was passionate about dueling. She was passionate about her family, her friends, and all the things that were dear to her. Because while Sophie never gave her heart easily, she never gave her heart in halves either.

Once she loves you, then she loves you until death.

Your mother's curse, dad had said once. What a curse, to love until you have your heart ripped out and you soul is given in a silver plate to another. And what else she could do, when this kind of love, this burning inside her is a bit too much, if not fight back with all the rage and all the inferno that resided inside her?

Sophie Roper was a walking disaster. But it's okay. It's okay.

(Except it's not).

Because she truly wants to be the best. And the best only have better people around them. She wants to care less about people and less about how Audrey's always need someone to look after her, and less about how Daphne smells like strawberry and vanilla and makes her feel like she's drowning, and less about how nothing those girls do make sense to her. She doesn't want to care about belonging, because it's stupid and she does not want to spend her days with something so stupid, so fragile – but she does. She does and she burns for such little affairs.

Sophie's always angry.

Half the time, she doesn't know what she wants. She knows what she's supposed to want, whoever – and how she tries to truly desire those things.

But in the end, tough, unruly Sophie Roper is a big softie. What pathetic existence, truly.

"You did what?", she asks again, because albeit Audrey lives in another plane of existence half the time – you know, the place that only belong to perfect beings such as Audrey and Daphne – she tries her best to keep up with her friend. Audrey is a good girl, her mother always said, she only needs someone to look after her a little. Audrey just needs someone to point her in the right direction and to keep that bleeding heart of hers wholly.

Sophie fits the job a little too easily.

"A new friend!", the girl repeats, fingers playing mindless with a little curl of icy blonde hair. With her head softly tilted to the side, Audrey got the looks of a little animal still trying to comprehend the world. Often than not, Sophie can't avoid seeing in her the baby birds her brother used to take care of when they were younger.

"A ghost friend?", Daphne asks. For what was the tenth time, Sophie had to take a time to notice how those girls can be so different. From all the perfection of Daphne, Sophie knows she isn't a natural either. Daphne had been taught her entire life who she was to be; and her entire life, she had been fighting this war inside her head about who she wants to be. Sophie isn't stupid – she knows what girls like Daphne are taught by their families. She tries, her hardest, to fit in the shoes that someone like Audrey had been born wearing. Daphne is all beauty and grace, but she never had the effortless glistering of Audrey's smiles.

Sometimes, if Sophie looks the right way, she can see the way Daphne's smiles turns a little sourer. Just a second, a fleeting moment where both girls clash in the world of pretty faces and silk dresses and expensive smiles that Sophie does not belong.

Daphne never says nothing, whoever, and neither does Sophie. For her jealousy is hers and hers only, and it's not one fault to have what someone else was born craving.

"A friend who's a ghost", Audrey corrected. "Listen, she can be annoying sometimes, and she can be mean, but she's lonely". She stops for a moment, stabbing her potatoes with a little too much strength. There's where she falls, Sophie knows. Audrey got the brains and everything else, but she has also been born with a heart made of glass. As long as you keep pressuring, it'll shatter one day or another. "You girls don't have to come with me if you don't want to. But I'll stop to say hi sometimes. If I was dead, I would've wanted someone to say hi."

"You are going to flunk any chance we ever had of being popular!", Daphne pointed angrily. "Moaning Myrtle is a freak, Rey! I thought it was enough that half Slytherin hates us because you are never far away from Potter & co, and now you want to make the indifferent rest to also despise the three of us?".

Audrey blinks, silent for half a heartbeat. Last year, before Daphne had been come around – more of a necessity when none of the other girls had been take to her kindly – Sophie and Audrey had been a lonely par. Sophie never cared for popularity very much, and Audrey had a world in her fingertips, so why would they care if people hated them? As long as they were left alone, then would be fine. Every decision back them had been foolish made looking for safety. Potter, bless the boy – and the fact that he always seemed to find Audrey, whoever she went – had been a saint taking them under their wings, making sure Gryffindors didn't took any chances against two lonely Slytherin first years. Sophie was no big fan of people in general, but the Golden Trio had got themselves in a small part of her heart for gratitude and gratitude only.

But Daphne never saw things like this. She was born an aristocrat with an aristocratic future; her plans included friends and popularity and a rich boy to marry in the future. She had to – and neither Audrey nor Sophie, who never had this kind of expectation in their shoulders, understood what being liked or not meant. Daphne looked at people and saw reputations, Audrey and Sophie saw opportunities.

"She isn't a freak! Maybe a little off the loop, but aren't we all?", Audrey augmented. "Who cares if people like us or not?".

"I care!", Daphne fumed. Her cheeks were flushed, and Sophie thought, for a second, that Audrey – for all her kindness and her breezily personality – never saw truly the privileges she had. Never would, probably; a white, rich girl with a dad that allowed her everything, and a family that could buy her way into anywhere and still asked nothing of her life. Lucky, indeed, and so blind. "God, Audrey, can't you be normal for once?".

Sophie wasn't stupid. For all her brashness, she knew when her friends were upset, or angry, or hurt. In Daphne, it came with silence and down cast eyes; for Audrey, it came from dimples and a cheerfully attitude and running away. So, when Audrey smiled a little too bright, put her cutlery down and said, "Sorry, can't do!", and got away as quickly as possible, Sophie knew something was off.

Never a dull lunch those days.

"What did I do, now?", Daphne wheezed. "She's always moody about something!".

"She's not moody, she's just Audrey", Sophie dismissed, taking a gulp of her pumpkin juice. "Prom queen never has her head out of clouds. She wants to be friends with a ghost, let her be friends with a ghost".

Daphne was silent for a while, munching on her food slowly. Sophie wished, then, to be able to read minds; what went on this girl's mind was a mystery worth of any spell, she thought. Daphne was brilliant in many ways, but hardly seemed to notice them; always looking for flaws, for ways to compete with her sister, Astoria, and to compare with Audrey. Exhausting, if Sophie had any opinions. Exhausting, to be so wonderfully amazing, and yet to be worried about so little.

"Whatever. You always pick her side", Daphne finally murmured, but her eyes were somewhere else.

"I don't care enough to pick sides, Daphne", Sophie rolled her eyes. In the corner of the eye, she noticed something that never missed – Audrey making her way out of the great hall, icy blonde hair dancing in her back, and a pair of emerald, green eyes silent following her. Sophie couldn't care less about boys and Gryffindors – for all she cared, they could both rot in hell – but oh, the entertainment it would do.

"Whatever, Sophie, whatever", Daphne also put her food away. "Astoria asked me to help her with Transfiguration. Maybe I should go".

"'storia needs help? Astoria?", Sophie snorted. "C'mon, the only person in the whole Hogwarts with bigger grades than Astoria is Granger. And you don't know transfiguration. Neither of us do".

For a second, Daphne put all her pureblood-in-the-making training to the side, buffed like an animal, and crossed her arms. Her cheeks were still flushed, and her hair was slowly getting of her ponytail, but Sophie thought nothing in her could do wrong. "Of course, I don't. I don't know anything, do I?".

"You know how to be annoying. And how to make pretty drawings – I think we could do a mean one saying 'Fuck you, Draco Malfoy' for the next quidditch game. What do you think about it?".

Daphne tried her best to give Sophie a little smile. Truth to be told, Daphne had no bad blood towards the Malfoy boy; they spent many summers playing together, as did half the other pureblood kids – one of the reasons that Pansy Parkinson disliked Daphne so much. Certainly, she had no desire either to be seen offending a fellow Slytherin. But Sophie knows she was more grateful for the offering than the real prospects of it, anyway.

"Nope – I'm not helping you to offend anyone. But you know what? I think I can design you a neat new face paint".

Sophie had no desire to do face paints either. In the Slytherin team, Draco was seeker, but that was supposed to be her. It was her that spent summer training in a new broom; it was her that watched every recap she could of popular games, learned every trick in every book she could find. But it was Potter who made into Gryffindor last year, and it was Malfoy who made into Slytherin now.

Sophie was hardly envious of anyone for any reason at all – she wasn't that type of girl – but of those boys? It burned and burned and burned.

She wanted to burn them, too.

But the prospect of doing face paints with Daphne – of making sure she kept smiling, that not even Audrey could make her sad, was that made Sophie happily say, "as long as you can fit a 'burn and crash, Slytherin' in my face. If I'm not playing, then no one else is".

X

Audrey was good with words.

She knew poetry, both muggle and magic, by heart, and had a long list of books stashed inside her trunk. For all the pages she spent reading, Audrey had sure she had lived a thousand of lives. Curious things, words were – and the stories they could tell. Therefore, when days went as a blur and she developed the habit of always looking over her shoulder, she knew a world that befitted her situation quite well.

Paranoia.

Funny stuff, it was. Logically, she knew she had no reason to truly be afraid; for all she knew, the only person in the grounds that knew of her heritage was Hagrid himself, and she didn't take him as the type to snitch on little girls. Her dad hardly showed up on England, neither had connections back home that could track her all the way down to Europe just to tell everybody – look, that girl is a half-veela.

And even if she had many of the telltales that spoke of her magic blood, Audrey wasn't a straight tell. For all she knew, her hair was too shades lighter than a Veela was supposed to be, her nose had a weird upturn she got from her granddad, and her eyes weren't all doelike as they were supposed to be. At least, that was what she told herself every night before going to sleep – after hours and hours looking at a mirror, trying to find things that validated her as a human, and not something in between.

But Audrey was going mental, she knew it. She knew it the moment she started to blow up to her friends; the moment she scratched her fingertips raw, and the moment she started to feel she was going to drown. Moments spent running to bathrooms to a quick cry started to become more and more frequent. After the quick showdown she had with Daphne in the Great Hall, the other girl had developed the habit of ignoring all together everything that was happening. Audrey went to classes with red eyes? Daphne turned her face and acted as if nothing was happening. Audrey started to cry in the middle of the dormitory? Daphne offered her a chocolate and asked the answer for a charms question.

Audrey never processed if she liked the dismissal of her friend – thankful for never having to explain why, suddenly, she had become a ball of anxiety and feelings she couldn't quite understand – or if she felt terribly offended.

Sophie, whoever, had noticed right by the first day that something was off. Whoever, as Sophie hardly knew how to be delicate about anything, she had taken first at saying that Audrey should man up, then accused her of being a cry baby, and finally developed the habit of losing it. Her humor went downhills, she started more fights than ever. The fact that Malfoy took the only empty spot at the quidditch team also helped no one, and thus, Audrey felt like the three of them were a walking nuclear bomb.

She never felt lonelier.

Over time, her picture-perfect days at Hogwarts become another experience she wished to run as fast as she could. Until this point, Audrey had hardly thought about Ilvermony at all, but now was all she could think of. More than once, she wrote a letter to her grandmother asking to be taken home, and twice as that she had throw the parchment to the fire.

Moaning Myrtle wasn't helping either. She was, certainly, a good crying buddy. Audrey could o Myrtle could be depressing. As ecstatic as she was for having someone else to share the burden of being the resident crybaby, she was also a spiteful, rancorous girl that would rather spend the entire eternity hating in Olive Hornsby – whoever the poor girl was – than to let go. Audrey was horrified when she discovered Myrtle spent years tormenting her bully; she hadn't to be a genius to understand that, despite her cruelty, Olive had never killed anybody.

What would her new ghost friend do, if Audrey ever failed to do her duties as her new friend? What if Myrtle decided to follow her around?

She decided to act very careful, then. Worst came to worst, she would do just fly her way back to America. Running never failed her, right?

Right.

She visited Myrtle every Monday and Thursday. Spent a couple of minutes and then went back to Slytherin or the Library, where she could hide with her muggle teen books all she wanted, and no one would pay her any mind. Things got easier when she had the brilliant idea of charming book covers to look like boring, heavy textbooks – safest to keep around in her dorm, since no one would willing pick up Chadwick's Charms. This took Audrey a week and a half of hard work, to discover a spell, learn how to do it at least competent and enchant some of her books. It did well, and had McGonagall found out, perhaps Audrey would've got at least five points for Slytherin.

She was just showing this to Myrtle – ironically, the only one to be interested, since she had been a muggleborn herself and quite liked to read fiction books – when the bathroom door cracked for the first time ever, in all the times Audrey had been there.

No one came to use this bathroom – it was an unspoken rule between all the girls, from eleven to eighteen. Audrey felt her cheeks flush and the tears she still had in her face – after a quick crying session, as usual – dry up a bit because maybe, just maybe, her friends had cared enough to come see her, and maybe Daphne would understand and help her with Myrtle and with her secrets and maybe, just maybe, she could tell them who she was and then –

Ginny Weasley had a dazed look on her eyes, hair a mess of reddish hues, cheeks flushed and hands firmly clutching a worn brown book. Audrey blinked, and she blinked back, and then notice the worst part of them? The girl apparently was crying herself to sleep ten times more than Audrey had been, because she had tears and snot and God-knows-what all over her face.

Shit.


A/N: hI bubblegumers! welcome to the next chapter. i hope you like it! corrected a few mistakes that i saw in last chapter + changed somethings i had planned on this. ALSO i replied to every review you guys left last chapter, so look into your PMs if you had not yet. love you guys and i hope seeing your feedback soon
can't believe we have like 100+ people reading this. all of you are amazing
i promise i'll make some nice surprises for the next days!