Disclaimer ;; Not. Ours.
Loosing Alice was like being a snake and finally shedding a skin that had been too tight for too long. Awkward, at first. I felt naked with no secure pockets to tuck all of my secrets inside, but the friendship between Alice and I had been run through the wash and come out too small to hold the only secret that really mattered anymore. Clinging to her would have been clinging to a single thread that once had been a security blanket.
I found new friends, old acquaintances who were suddenly little pots in which to keep my thoughts. A few here, a few there, never ladling out the full story into any opening so that none would overflow. And slowly, without meaning to, I discovered that one of the pots was just a little bigger, and began to favor her over the others.
She was a little Ravenclaw who went by Tim (or sometimes Tiny Tim, but only amongst us muggleborns, and only behind her back) because Septima Armaria Vector was quite a bit longer than she was. Strange, I thought, that such a small vessel could hold all of the knowledge that Alice's long, rounded bosom could not. In another lifetime, I had been Tim's rival in Arithmancy, but seeing Alice with James had shaken by hold on my studies, and now I needed Tim much more than I needed an O.
Tim was not a replacement Alice by any means. I had shaken off my torn black robes in favor of gray ones--not as vibrant, not as strong, but able to keep out the bitter cold of James's indifference. Tim's violet eyes were always serious behind her chestnut bangs, her thin lips pressed tightly and turned downwards at the ends. There was no laughter between us to lift the heaviness in my chest, but I did not have to hide that I struggled to breathe.
It was, I felt, less than I deserved.
To be fair, Alice did her part to keep me. She would crawl into bed with me when I chose to sleep in the seventh year dorm instead of the Heads' and whisper about her most recent date, and I knew that she meant me to share my secrets as well, but I remained distant. Eventually, she learned to talk to girls like Polly Akin who giggled and questioned, and I knew that she took as much pleasure in her new role as I took comfort in mine.
After a month, I began to sleep again in the richly decorated bedroom that was my privilege as Head Girl. After three, I never visited the seventh year dorm again.
One night, I lay in my wide, comfortable bed with the hangings wide open, staring at the gleam of moonlight on the handle of the skinny door set into the opposite wall. It led, I knew, into a common room that I shared with the Head Boy. (I had stopped saying his name, even to myself, when I had stopped sleeping in the old dorm. It made talking about him much more difficult, though I could never truly stop thinking about him--not even for an instant.)
Though I had cast a silencing charm three long months ago, his voice carried into my room and wound around my bed as though I were sitting beside him, enveloped in his arms. It carried with it a second voice, a female voice I didn't recognize at first. In only months I had begun to erase memories of Alice, replacing them with memories of him that seemed to grow more vibrant with time.
No, I thought stubbornly, pushing back the covers. They would not bother me here. Not when I had worked so hard at pushing them away. I walked to the door, trembling as I came even this much closer to the source of my agony, and cast a second charm. With a great effort I managed to push a bookcase over the door, obscuring it from my sight, for good measure.
His voice lingered like perfume, and his scent still crept between the cracks in the shelves. It was less pungent here than on Alice's robes every night when she returned to the dorm, but suddenly I found it difficult to sleep. I lay trembling beneath two frozen sheets until the first rays of light crept into my room.
Then I rose, dressed shakily, and went to breakfast.