The next day at lunch, the Gryffindor table was a gallery of unhappy faces in the middle where the five friends sat. Remus was worried and had been quiet all day, and an angry look had not left Sirius's face for a couple days. Sirius didn't like appearing sad but had no problem expressing anger. In fact, he was often very comfortable covering up sadness with anger. But even though his friends knew his emotions were often unreadable and deceiving, they had been talking quite carefully to him for a while as if he might explode.
"Remus, are you okay?" Peter asked.
"Yeah," he answered distantly. "I just...Have any of you heard if Madelin's sick or something?"
They all shook their heads except for Sirius, who had his chin rested on his upright fist and looked like he wasn't even listening.
"Why?" James asked. "Don't tell me your main squeeze has gone missing now."
Remus laughed half-heartedly. "No, she's just not in classes. Well, at least she wasn't in the one I have with her in the morning. And I'd think she would have told me if...Oh, I don't know."
"While we're on main squeezes..." Peter began, turning to Sirius, but he seemed unable to summon the nerve to ask the question.
"Is Sophia still not talking to you?" Lily finished for him.
Sirius dropped his fist on the table heavily. "That bitch," he said, crossing his arms. "What do I care?"
Lily and James exchanged a knowing look and everyone else lowered their eyes nervously.
Peter suddenly looked up and pointed at a girl walking past the Gryffindor table. "Isn't that one of Madelin's friends?" he asked Remus. "Why don't you ask her where she is?"
Remus looked up and saw that Selena Sterling was indeed coming near them on her way to the end of the table. Before she passed them he called her name and she stopped.
"Oh, Remus!" she said, her eyes widening. She came up to the table and said, "I wanted to ask you: Do you have any idea what's wrong with Madelin?"
"What?" he said, concern immediately readable on his face. "No. I haven't seen her in a while. Is she okay?"
"Not at all. Last night I found her crying in her bed but she wouldn't tell me what was wrong no matter what I did. And she didn't want to go to classes this morning, begged me to tell the teachers she was sick."
"You don't have any idea why she's acting this way?" Remus asked.
Selena shook her head sadly. "Me and Clara were just about to go bring her some food and see if we can talk her into coming down for the rest of her classes."
"All right. Tell her I hope she...well, tell her I..."
She just nodded. "Right, I'll tell her something that sounds nice."
And she walked away, leaving him looking much more worried than before.
"What do you think?" James asked him.
He shook his head in bewilderment. "I don't know. This is odd."
Monty Clubber, who was sitting on Peter's left, had been distracted from his own friends' conversation and started listening to theirs. Noticing this group seemed to remind him of something, and he said, "Oh - Sirius. What the hell was that about between Snape and your girlfriend in the library yesterday? You do still go with Sophia, right?"
"What are you talking about?" Sirius asked abesently, like Monty was saying something stupidly unimportant. But then he sat up straight and said, "Wait - Snape talked to her?"
"Well, it sure looked that way. I'm surprised you haven't beat him up again by now, 'cause he sure seemed to be making her upset about something. Never seen her that worked up in my life."
The student sitting with Monty tapped his shoulder to tell him something, and he had been about to turn away until Sirius reached across the table and grabbed Monty's necktie, pulling him forward. "Wait a minute. Tell me exactly what you saw."
Obviously surprised that Sirius really didn't know anything about this by now, he explained, "I was just sitting in the library and saw they were writing notes to eachother. I noticed because she was laughing out loud at something, and I saw they were each writing. On that special kind of parchment, I guess, whatever it's called-"
"Twin parchment?" Sirius suggested impatiently.
"Yeah! I thought this was weird so I was watching their faces, and at first it was like they were just having a friendly conversation, but then she suddenly got angry and stood up and starting yelling at him, calling him a liar. Then she just stormed clear out of there. Nobody could make any sense of it."
Sirius slowly let Monty have his tie back and then stared forward into space, the other looking at him wide-eyed.
"This could be bad," he said.
The only class Remus had with Madelin was in the morning, so even if her friends had convinced her to get out of bed he didn't expect to see her until after school. But on the way to Professor Constantine's room for his last class of the day he recognized the back of her brown head going down a hall and ran after her.
She was walking with sunken shoulders and with her face pointed to the floor, looking even smaller than usual. He put a hand out onto her shoulder. "Madelin?"
As soon as he said her name she tore away from him as if something hot had touched her. "Stay away from me!" she said quietly, backing away, her voice full of fear.
Remus just stood still for a moment, silenced in complete confusion. Then he started to inch back toward her. "Maddie?" he said, his voice trembling, reaching out to take her arm and stop her from backing up as she took in shaking gasps.
"Don't touch me!" she shouted, her eyes welling with tears. She was looking at him like she didn't even recognize or know him, like he was something entirely different from the person she had been dating for a few weeks. "You!...You...lied to me! You tricked me! You made me think you were a nice person!"
"But I don't understand….what are you-?" he began weakly.
"Oh, I get it now! Moony! Moony!" she shouted hysterically, and then before Remus even noticed her taking it from her pocket she shoved a crumpled-up piece of parchment into his hands and ran away, her sobs echoing down the hallway and several heads turning to watch her.
Remus looked down at the paper and slowly spread the corners apart so he could read it. He didn't have to read more than a few words that caught his eye around the middle and bottom of the page. He closed his eyes and folded it back up, starting to feel sick.
"What the hell is going on now?" James asked of the empty desk in the back of Professor Constantine's room which he knew was supposed to be occupied by Remus.
Sirius, Lily, and Peter turned their heads and saw what he was talking about. Lily immediately looked around the classroom. "That's strange."
"Prongs, I've got a really bad feeling about this," Sirius said quietly to James. "Last hour I kept noticing Snape looking at me with this kind of sadistic satisfaction on his face. I swear I'm gonna go mad if I don't find out what he said to Sophia soon."
James braced himself. "Do you have any idea what it could have been?"
"Yeah," he said surely. "The worst I can imagine."
"You think Remus being gone has anything to do with this?" Peter asked.
Sirius just shook his head in bewilderment.
"I don't know what is so important that the four of you must be congregating in the middle of my class," said Constantine in a mellow tone. Then his eyes narrowed, and he looked like he was mouthing the word "four" to himself in confusion. "Where is Lupin?"
"I don't know," Lily said casually, "but I'm feeling really nauseous, Professor. Could I go see Madam Trice, please?"
He sighed. "If you must."
"I'll make sure she gets there all right," Sirius said, standing up and taking Lily's arm.
"You'll do no such thing," Constantine said, sharply gesturing for him to sit back down. "She's a big girl, Black, she can get there on her own."
Lily said, "But Professor, I honestly feel as if I could pass out-"
"Enough!" he said, stamping his foot a little and pointing to the door. "You lot have already wasted five minutes of my lesson time."
Without saying any more, Lily rushed out of the classroom. As Constantine started lecturing, the others looked around at each other with slightly surprised and impressed expressions. Apparently even Lily could summon up some Marauder-like cunning and deceitfulness when it was necessary. But as they started going through the motions to pretend they were participating in the lesson, their looks were replaced with anxious, worried ones.
Lily's first guess of where Remus could be was right; when she walked into the Gryffindor common room she immediately saw him sitting on the big couch in front of the fireplace, staring into the tall flames with a terrible, hopeless, defeated look on his face that frightened her.
He seemed to know that she had come in but he didn't say anything. Lily sat down next to him on the couch and stared at him. He was clutching a piece of parchment in one hand with the written side face-down.
"I don't know what we're going to do," he said very quietly.
"What?" Lily said gently. "What are you talking about?"
He looked down at his lap sadly. "Madelin. . .It. . .it's not going to happen. She. . ."
Lily put her hand on his arm. "Remus, what happened?"
Then he turned over the parchment and showed it to her, and told her everything as her eyes scanned over the words on the page.
"I guess that at least it's better this happened now instead of later," Remus managed to say weakly. "I mean, I was maybe going to tell her, eventually. . .a long time from now. I never thought about it seriously, but of course I thought about what she might think. I never imagined she would. . .she would just. . ."
"But Remus, you can't just let it end like this. You've got to explain to her that-"
"No, you didn't see her! Lily, I can never talk to her again - she'll never trust me again. All I am to her now is a monster."
There was a flicker of something in Lily's eyes - shock or anger, he couldn't tell what. "Remus, you're not a monster. If she can't see that-"
"It's so easy for you to say that," Remus said in a calm, accepting voice. Lily would have preferred him to sound angry. "You don't even realize how incredibly, how exceptionally kind and understanding you are. When you found out what I am it didn't make any difference to you in the world. And it would be nice if that was how it always worked out for people like me, but the world just isn't like that. I guess I've been spoiled by people like you and Dumbledore and my other friends, but eventually I'm going to have to get used to that."
Lily looked at him in silence, unable to think of what to say. That she couldn't find a way to refute what he had just said was frustrating and deeply upsetting.
Half an hour later James, Sirius, and Peter finally got out of their last class and ran out of Professor Constantine's classroom as fast as they could. They flew upstairs from the dungeons so quickly that they were far ahead of any other Gryffindor students by the time they got outside of the portrait hole and were the first ones to go into the common room. When they stepped inside they found Remus and Lily sitting in silence in front of the fire. Remus was leaning over with his face buried in his hands, and Lily was rubbing his back comfortingly with her face resting in her other hand.
"What's wrong?" James asked.
Lily stood up slowly and faced the three of them. "We have a problem," she said. "Snape told Sophia everything. And Remus got this from Madelin."
She handed the piece of parchment to James, who was now wide-eyed. Peter and Sirius looked over his shoulder and all six of their eyes skimmed down the paper wildly. As they all got to around the bottom, Sirius said, in a voice that was quite unlike him, "Oh no. . ." When he finally looked away his eyes were closed and his hands were clenched into fists at his sides, but he seemed more shaken up than angry.
Remus stood up and took a deep breath, like he was resurfacing from water and ready to hit the air and face reality. "What are we going to do?"
"How many people do you think Sophia has shown this to?" Peter asked.
"There's no way to know," James said dully.
"No," Sirius spoke up suddenly. "Sophia didn't just go and tell Madelin about this. Why would she do that?"
"Target your friends, get back at you?" Remus suggested, not sounding bitter about it.
But Remus forgiving the situation wasn't enough for Sirius. "Look, I know that's not what happened."
"How do you know?" Lily asked.
"Because I just don't think she would do that!" he shouted, getting angry. "It's not like her! She's never had a problem with Remus, it's me that hurt her."
"Yeah, but for all she knows now I was in on a sick plan to get her old friend killed," Remus said.
"Padfoot," James said in a calming voice. "We don't know what happened, but we can't let her tell anybody else. It would get all over the whole school. We're almost done with our last year and I don't want to see Remus leave because parents and students aren't okay with him being here - because I know you'd do that even if Dumbledore wouldn't make you," he added to Remus, who gave a tired smile. "We can go to Dumbledore about this and he can talk to Madelin and Sophia-"
"No, please don't do that," Remus begged in an exhausted voice. Then he sighed. "Listen, if anybody else had been told about it, we would know. Madelin isn't going to tell anyone. She hasn't even told her best friends. I think she's scared to," he added with his eyes looking down at the floor. "We should just leave her alone."
Everyone was quiet for a few seconds. Other students were starting to come into the common room, filling the room with noise. Lily finally asked, "What about Sophia?"
They all looked at Sirius, knowing what he was going to say.