Chapter 2
Staring into the distance across the lake at a clump of dark green pine trees at the opposite bank, Lily Evans felt guilty once again about her unfriendliness towards James. She sighed, thinking that next time she spoke to him, she would make an effort to be more friendly. Then, maybe they could get along better, and she wouldn't appear to hate him.
The incident, however insignificant it really was, kept coming back to Lily over the following week. Lily was really hoping for an opportunity to make an effort to talk to James, and to her relief, just such an opportunity arose.
The next Saturday, Lily and her two best friends, Elizabeth and Gwen, strolled out once more to their comfortable lakeside haunt and settled onto the grass to drink the pint of ice-cold pumpkin juice they had brought outside with them.
Out of the corner of her eye, Lily saw James talking to Sirius in the cool shade of their beech tree, Remus with his nose in some book, and Peter looking out dazedly over the still, clear water. She just continued her animated conversation about the best hair potions. "Sleek Slime works so well!" Gwen exclaimed happily, her normally frizzy brown hair now glistening in the sun as she whipped it around, demonstrating the potion's wonderful effects on her hair. Lily nodded appreciatively.
"No, I think that new stuff called 'Glisten' works really well. You know, they say it's flecked with real diamonds!" Elizabeth squealed. The two other girls "ooh"-ed.
Lily opened her mouth to praise her own favorite hair potion, Golden Gleam Cream with magical fairy dust in it, when she saw on the edge of her vision a tall, lanky, dark-haired someone approaching her group tentatively. To Lily's very great astonishment, she felt her stomach swoop ever so slightly. No, that was just the pumpkin juice. She shouldn't have had so much. She definitely wasn't beginning to have feelings for James. True, she liked him, but only in a friendly sort of way (even if she did have a strange way of showing it...and they had definitely had a great deal of arguments and disagreements in the past, the previous Saturday being an example of one.).
Looking up from her seat on the soft-as-kitten-fur grass at James, Lily attempted a friendly smile. (She couldn't really understand why she liked him as a "friend" when she could honestly only count about four instances over the past two years in which she hadn't made a remark about his terrible jinxing habit and just been nice to him...) "Hi," said James, returning the slight smile, though with perhaps slightly more enthusiasm. "I was just wondering if maybe...you--"
"No thanks," said Lily brusquely, taking even herself aback, though her astonishment at her words was nothing compared to the hardly-concealed look of (once again predictable) injured horror on James' face. He quickly hid his severe (and admittedly expected) disappointment, replacing it with a fully unconvincing look of half-hearted indifference. Shrugging, James turned away, his eyes remaining locked on Lily's until the last second, as though by keeping unbroken the beam of their mutual stare he could force her to change her mind. But after glancing down at her glittering, rosy-pink fingernails, Lily looked up once again to find James trudging away in, to Lily, familiar defeat.
Frowning after James' receding back, Lily was brought back to awareness when Gwen, after a dramatic pause, asked Lily with a raised eyebrow and a small but knowing smile, "So, what's your favorite hair potion?"