She has gotten her Hogsmeade permission form signed by her father, and she is thirteen now and she will be fourteen halfway through the year. She has also chosen her own classes this year - Ancient Runes with Terry and Divination with Hannah. She feels old and mature, and she and Hannah spend the last week of summer together, talking about growing up.
She has never thought about what she wants to be before. Hannah wants to work in the Ministry, in Muggle Relations (they are always looking for Muggleborns or Halfbloods with good people skills), but Susan doesn't know. She's rather good at Charms and Herbology, but she doesn't know what she can do with that. The only thing about her future that she knows is that she wants to be with Harry someday.
On the train, she asks Terry what he wants to do, and he blushes.
"Well... I've always wanted to own my own bookshop..." he says in a near whisper, and Susan is not surprised, considering that at the moment she asked the question, he'd had his nose stuck in Magical Hieroglyphs and Logograms.
"I think you could, Terry," she says with a smile, and he beams at her.
"You could put it in Hogsmeade," suggests Ernie, "it's quite ridiculous that there isn't one. My copy of Standard Book of Spells, Grade Two, had the spine ripped off of it last year, and I had no way of getting a new one. I would think you'd get plenty of business in Hogsmeade with that sort of thing."
Ernie spends the rest of the train ride making poor Terry rather uncomfortable, discussing why this was the best time in history to start a business, until the Dementors come on.
The train is dark, and Susan is nervous. She grasps Terry's arm because he's closest. She would have taken an oath that she will never be happy again, it's so dark and cold... it's so cold...
All at once she begins to see the moment Harry was being bucked back and forth on his broomstick in first year. Her mind reels and she sees her mother crying and she can't remember why. She sees the day her labrador, Charles, died, and can't help but tear up and clutch Terry. He is clutching her just as hard.
She has never felt like this, and all she can think is that Harry Potter will never love her, she will never be good enough for him. The world is such a terrible place, and Harry needs someone to take care of him, and Susan cannot even take care of a lab puppy...
And just like that, it's over and done with. Susan is still shaken as she and Terry look at each other. Terry's eyes are brimming with tears, and Susan does not let go of him. She can't, because he is whispering something that sounds like, "Don't leave me, don't leave me, you're all I've got..."
As they walk into the Great Hall, Susan sees Draco Malfoy pretending to faint as the other Slytherins erupt in laughter. "What's that about?" she wonders aloud, and a sixth year girl named Elena Harris answers.
"Apparently Harry Potter fainted on the train," she says, disgusted, "and naturally that Slytherin boy's being a bloody prick about it. Like we all weren't scared off our arses!"
Elena Harris tends to swear when she is disgusted.
"What were those things?" asks Justin. Terry looks down at the floor, almost bitterly. He looks somewhat better and isn't crying anymore, but he's still pale and shaken, and Susan cannot let go of his arm.
"Dementors," replies Elena's friend, Charlene Branstone, with a shudder. "They make you relive your worst memories. My dad works at Azkaban, and everytime I got to visit him, I see images of my cat getting run over... scary little buggers, aren't they?"
The older girls walk away, and Justin looks enlightened.
Harry comes to the feast a bit late, after the Sorting is over. He spots Malfoy, and glowers. She wants to tell him he isn't a coward because he fainted, she wants to tell him she felt a bit like fainting too, but she can't. She lets Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley take care of him, because perhaps she was right when the Dementors were there. Maybe she can't take care of him.
Susan sulks for the rest of the feast, and no longer feels like growing up, if this is what it's like. She spends the night lying in bed awake, second guessing everything.
Susan likes Professor Lupin, but hates his lesson about bogarts. She isn't sure what she's afraid of when she walks to confront it. To her embarrassment and sorrow, it turns into Harry.
He is looking at her with a mixture of confusion and disgust, and she can't stand it. She feels like falling into a hole.
Before anything can happen, she quickly says, "Ridikulus!" and Harry turns into a hedgehog with unruly black spikes and glasses. It is the only mildly humorous thing she can think of at such short notice.
Professor Lupin looks halfway between amused and perplexed, but says nothing. Harry is one of his favorites, and he probably doesn't find him particularly terrifying. She asks him after class not to say anything to Harry about what happened, and she knows he won't.
Zacharias gives her hell about her Harry-bogart. He laughs the whole way to Potions and will not stop shouting things like, "Oooo, look out! I'm a speccy midget who can't comb his own hair! Ooo!"
Hannah tells him to shut up, and Justin offers to hex him, but Susan tells him he's not worth it.
Hannah is very confused. "I thought you loved him," she says. "Why are you afraid of him, too?"
Susan looks at Ernie, who has taken to smiling at Hannah every time she gets an answer right in class. They do their homework together, huddled over their parchment in the Common Room, and Hannah laughs fondly at all Ernie's pompous antics and blushes happily when he looks at her. They are happy in each other's company. Susan thinks they both know how they feel about each other without having to say anything, and Susan knows that Hannah will never understand.
The day before the first Hogsmeade visit, Terry asks her to go with him.
"Of course I will, doofus," she says with a playful hit on the arm. "You, me, and Hannah were going to go to Honeydukes, right? We might even get a little Christmas shopping done early, too -"
"Actually," says Terry. It is unlike him to interrupt her, but he looks so nervous that Susan doesn't comment. "I was thinking you and me could go together. Like... like... a date, I guess..."
Susan's eyes are wide and she stutters for a while before she can say anything. "I... Terry, I... I should have told you ages ago, but... I sort of like someone else."
Susan has never killed anything and doesn't know what a dying person would look like, but she thinks it might look a bit like Terry.
"I'm so sorry, Terry..." she says, and wonders if it will do any good.
After a moment, he smiles at her, and it lifts her heart though he still looks sad. "It's okay, Susan. You, me, and Hannah will go to Honeydukes after all."
He looks sincere, and Susan hugs him. She hopes she hasn't done something irrevocable.
"May I ask who it is?" he asks timidly. Susan thinks she owes him that much.
"Of course, silly," she says. "It's... Harry Potter."
Terry doesn't look surprised, and just nods. "I can understand that. And it... well, it sort of explains the bogart thing, doesn't it? Yes... I think I understand now."
Susan watches him as he walks away. He waves back to her with a smile that almost doesn't look forced, and she thinks that perhaps he does understand.
"Hannah," Susan says on a whim a few weeks later, "did you know that Terry asked me out?"
Hannah blushes and stares at her Exploding Snap cards (she is playing with Ernie, who is letting her win). "Well... I... er... I mean... yeah, he sorta told me he did."
"Did it surprise you?"
Hannah's blush deepens, and she tries to sound casual. "Not... not really. I kinda always knew he liked you, I mean... it's sort of obvious."
"I think you and Terry would make a sporting match," says Ernie, in his politician voice that means he doesn't know what he's talking about. "Always have. Fine chap, he is."
Susan feels nauseous, and considers letting Hagrid's maniac hippogriff kill her.
"If it makes you feel better," Hannah says as an afterthought, "he told me that after you turned him down, he started liking Mandy Brocklehurst. He says he's over you, and just wants to be friends. Well, you know, he said it more politely than that, but that was the gyst of it."
Susan feels supremely better.
The next night, after Hogsmeade, there is an attack on the Fat Lady, the portrait that guards Gryffindor Tower. Sirius Black is looking for Harry Potter. It's all over the school now, and when the students have to sleep in the Great Hall, Susan sleeps as near to Harry and his friends as she can without looking suspicious. She cannot hear what they say to each other, which is fine, she doesn't want to eavesdrop.
Hannah and Terry are with her, and Ernie and Justin. They stay up for a while, secretly whispering about the excitement.
"D'you reckon Harry'll be okay?" asks Justin nervously, because he rather likes Harry since he saved him from being Petrified.
"Of course he will," says Hannah, looking at Susan nervously. But Susan already knows that Harry will be okay. He's Harry Potter, and nothing can hurt him. He has survived You-Know-Who three times. Sirius Black can never hurt him.
Susan falls asleep before any of them, faster than she thinks she ever has, as she has never known before how comforting it is to sleep in the same room as someone invincible.
Harry Potter the Invincible is plummeting to the ground before Susan, and she cannot breathe. The presence of the Dementors isn't helping. He's going to die, Susan tells herself, and she is crying into Justin's shoulder, because he's there and Harry Potter is going to die.
"Susan!" cries Hannah. "Susan, he's okay, Dumbledore's saved him!"
The Dementors have been banished now, and there is Harry on the ground, splayed out almost gracefully. Hermione Granger and Ron are rushing the field, and Madame Hooch is already there checking on him. Dumbldore soon joins them. By the look on his face, he is livid.
Susan wishes more than anything that she were down there, and she hates Quidditch with all of her heart.
The worst part is that Cedric's caught the Snitch. Susan of course wants Hufflepuff to win, but not like this, and neither does Cedric.
"It wasn't fair!" he shouts at Madame Hooch as they take Harry to the Infirmary. "He would have gotten it if it weren't for those stupid things! Just call a rematch or something, please!"
Susan admires Cedric, even though he can't convince Madame Hooch to declare a rematch. The Hufflepuffs celebrate their victory in the Common Room, and she can't stand it. Susan goes upstairs to write Harry another get-well card he will probably never read.
Even though Susan worries constantly about Harry, she has never thought he couldn't handle himself. By the end of her third year, she cannot get out of her head that Harry Potter is only thirteen years old, and cannot be asked to deal with a madman out to kill him, nearly being attacked by a werewolf, and almost receiving the Dementor's Kiss.
Susan thinks Harry spends too much time in the Hospital Wing as it is, and that he should probably stop getting hurt now, thank you.
He is fine by the time they are on the train home. Susan strategically chooses the compartment next to his, and waits for something to happen so she can - do what? Be there for a boy she still hasn't spoken to? He has so many friends to help him. Why would he need Susan Bones, completely ordinary and dull Hufflepuff?
Susan has realized this year that she has nothing to set her apart from anybody. She is not particularly good, or even bad, at anything. She thinks that maybe part of growing up is learning your limitations, but all she can see are limitations. She cannot be with Harry Potter, who has always been too good for her, she cannot be better than Hermione Granger in any class, and she can't even beat Terry at chess. If this is growing up, she has nothing to look forward to.