Funkytown Disco was in a nondescript cinderblock building that had been painted, as Sirius's song went, black. There was an enormous flashing sign with Funkytown in blinking green script, with a blue border of revolving light that stood out hazy and bleary against the clear outline of the full moon. The line out front was enormous; Sirius pulled in up front between another motorbike and a stout red Beetle. The crowd hummed with conversation. A thousand different perfumes filled the air, the scents' owners smoking leaned up against the wall. Eglantine smiled at the bouncer.
"Cecil! How are you?"
"Same." Cecil, a frowning man built like an obese bulldog, managed a smirk. "Who's this one?"
"School chum. Don't worry, I still have room in my heart for you, darling."
"Yes, but the question is, is there room in the club?"
"Of course there is. There's always room for me. And Sirius."
"Sirius, eh? Cool name," Cecil remarked to Sirius, who was striding up with his helmet under his arm. "Weird name, but cool."
"Thanks," said Sirius, looking dubious.
"Head on in, Sheryl. Usual table's ready."
Sirius hurried behind her as the door opened just wide enough to admit them, single-file. Inside it was pitch-black except for the shimmer of the disco ball, and could've been silent but for the shrillness of the music.
"What the fuck was that all about? The usual? What are you, famous?" roared Sirius the second they were at the table, which was slightly removed from the noise.
"No. Just very popular."
"Have you slept with the bodyguard?"
"Cecil? No. I think he's gay, actually. He just likes me."
"He likes Sheryl."
"Oh, come on. Nobody in the entire fucking world is named Eglantine except me. I had to create a persona."
"Why? What's wrong with you as you are?"
She shrugged. "Oh, nothing, except for the whole 'magic' bit. Makes it kind of hard to blend in. I'm going to dance. Band should be playing in an hour."
Sure enough, Tyler from another band was on her in five minutes, almost right after she began dancing to the Bee Gees. He was tall, shaggy-haired, watery-eyed. Not attractive, but talented. He wore long bell-bottoms and smelled, like the walking cliché he tried so desperately to be, like patchouli.
"Who's the young lad?" shouted Tyler over the music. "Brother?"
"Friend! He's very sheltered! Never been to a disco before!"
"Has he found shelter with you?"
"Gross, no!"
"Good."
Tyler hadn't the faintest idea that she was sixteen, or that she found him entirely unappetizing and only hung with him because of his voice and acoustic guitar. She didn't even likeTyler's personality. He was shady and a male whore. He slept with women and never called them. They didn't even mind. It was all too pathetic.
She danced with Tyler, then with Sam, who was closer to her age—he claimed to Cecil and to her that he was nineteen, but she thought he must be at least as young as she was, if not younger. Sam was ever so slightly punk, which she had found inexplicably made her heart beat faster. It was all the black, she thought. It was mysterious. Pleasantly intimidating. She wondered if she'd still think Sam were attractive in normal clothes. Probably not, although it wasn't just the black, since everyone at Hogwarts wore it—Severus, for example—and they were most certainly not all attractive.
Sam was yelled at by his girlfriend, and so was Eglantine, and Eglantine slapped her off of her. Sirius tried to pull her out of the fight, but she was winning; but by the time he had, the girl was gone.
"Now I understand why Lily doesn't want to go to discos with you," he said, his lips pursed. He looked remarkably like his father when he was forcing himself not to yell at Walburga.
"Well, obviously it wouldn't be like this if Lily were here. We'd be having fun, dancing with boys together, and one lone stupid woman wouldn't bother attacking two girls at once. Men would be all over her."
"Is that what you want?" he asked incredulously.
"Oh, that coming from Mr. Sexy! It's all right for you to want every girl to fawn admiringly at your feet, but girls aren't supposed to like being admired by men—oh, no. How old are you, Sirius Black?"
"It's not that." He was pouting grumpily. Eglantine could sense an attack of weird coming on. Weird, fun-killing behavior.
"Whatever it is, it's obnoxious. If you don't like it, you can leave! I've gone home alone before."
"Not while I'm here, you're not."
"Suit yourself."
She didn't even know what he was doing most of the night—as she danced again with Sam, she caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye, being forcefully snogged by a girl called Tamara who had once offered Eglantine some strange drug in the women's loo. In that moment, in the back of her mind, she hoped that he wouldn't do anything so stupid as that—she realized she'd forgotten to give him an informative talk on Muggle intoxicants, like some overserious parent in a film—but the moment was soon overridden by a new song, a new dancing partner. After dancing with a few more people, some men, some women, some in group dances, she found herself in a corner with Sam.
He kissed her gently at first, his wide nose brushing her cheek. He was tall, with hard, bony shoulders—those, she already knew about from dancing—but she had never noticed before that he smelled of onions beneath his Drakkar Noir. Probably something his mother cooked for him. She probably thought he was out at the cinema with some dorky, made-up mate. Or maybe she didn't care what he did. Fine hairs on his neck changed color as the disco ball spun.
Then he was kissing her. His lips were forceful, graceless, dry. His teeth hit hers; he didn't seem to notice. His tongue was as long and exploratory as a bivalve's neck, flailing without destination in her mouth, stickily colliding with the roof of her mouth, her molars, her own tongue.
It was not a good kiss, as kisses went. In fact, it was revolting. But she kept kissing him, because through her eyelashes she could see, across the room, Sirius's angry expression. It amused her. Why shouldn't she kiss Sam? He was such a hypocrite—for all his "I'm not my parents" bluster, he was Orion and Walburga Black, incorrigibly pissed because one of his friends dared to snog a Muggle in public.
She didn't entirely think it was that. But that had to be an element in it. After all, she'd kissed what's-his-face on a dare, right in front of the entire Herbology class before the professor arrived. He hadn't even noticed that. Was it because of Sam's red hair? His outfit? His general mien of ambivalence? He didn't even know Sam. And she had already told Sirius that she wasn't interested in him except in a friendly capacity: any jealousy, or anything along those lines, was entirely off the table.
"Mm. Brilliant," said Sam. His voice cracked on the "brill." She could feel an uninvited stiffness beneath the Lurex of his trousers: time to go.
"I've had better," she said. "Excuse me."
She slipped beneath his arm before he could retain her to whine or cajole, and she strode across the dance floor, dodging the manic flailings of a drunken middle-aged couple who were trying to meld disco and the foxtrot. She supposed that Cecil had let them in for the amusement of all present, but they were something of a hazard.
"It's getting late!" she shouted at Sirius. "Let's go!"
At the mention of the word go, Tamara detached herself from the embrace of a bleach-blonde man in a pink motorcycle jacket and tossed herself towards Sirius onto the back of his neck, embracing him as if she were some sort of hog wrestler from Arkansas.
"Don't gooooo," she drawled. She'd obviously partaken of her own product. "Stay with me. It's much more fun here. Sheryl's no fun."
"Actually, I think Sheryl's a little too fun," Sirius said drily. "She's right. We're going."
Out on the sidewalk, Sirius unblocked his motorbike: somebody had double-parked, wedging it in. Cecil helped him maneuver it onto the sidewalk and around the crowd that still thronged around the door. Sirius asked, in an imperious and peevish voice that truly was Orion's, how to get out of the neighborhood, and they both mounted the bike. She didn't mention Sam—she was waiting to see how he'd handle it, if he'd have the arrogance to think she'd care what he thought. As soon as they were out of view, he took off into the sky, silently taking her directions based on landmarks below.
She liked him quiet. It was company, but without all that pesky obligation.
Back in the erstwhile hayloft, he flung his helmet into a corner, brow furrowed, lower lip out. He looked, to her, like a hairy baby denied a sweetie. He made it rather easy to laugh at him.
Not like Remus at all, she thought. Thinking this made her feel nauseated, ashamed. She had managed to successfully avoid thinking of him once this summer, even though in the back of her mind she acknowledged that he was the entire reason that she tolerated Sirius to begin with. Crevan's murder had driven him mostly out of her mind, and she had even kept herself from indulging in ludicrous daydreams about asking him to protect her, mainly because he had made it clear that he wouldn't be pleased by any such request. You're better off without someone like me, he'd said. What a fucking stupid thing to say, she'd wanted to tell him. Instead she had just said something like, "Well, you're probably right," which she'd hoped would sound sarcastic but which instead mainly sounded passive and wilting-flowery. She had pondered obsessively for weeks about how to prove to him that she was not better off without him; that he was the most perfect human being on the planet. No foolproof plan, no genius idea, had ever materialized, and she had resigned herself to a very halfhearted summer spent flirting with idiots at discos and hanging around her sister.
She was actually angry at Sirius in that moment for not being him, for not being her ideal, that one person who didn't seem to vex or tire her, the one who slowed down time from its usual squealing plummet down to something normal, something manageable. He was ordinary. He was amazingly bloody irritating.
"Exactly what is your problem?" she snapped. She wanted a fight. She wanted a scene. She even hoped perhaps one of her parents would hear and send Sirius forcibly packing back to Grimmauld Place.
"Isn't it obvious?"
She grinned. "No. Enlighten me."
"Um, well, might it possibly be the fact that you asked me to come with you to this disco, and then you completely ignore me, and then you're snogging some grungy Muggle—"
"I knew it! I knew that was it!" she said triumphantly.
"I'm not finished! No, it wasn't because he was a Muggle, it was because he was vile. When you were dancing with that group, all those glittery girls, he was smarming up to some black-haired girl in the same corner, obviously trying to put the moves on her, and you just—you just encouraged him to be like that—"
She snorted. "Shows how much you know. I told him the kiss was crap, because it was. I thought, what would I get out of saying no? I was curious about kissing him—I liked him. Turns out he smells like onions." She shrugged. "They can't all be good."
"All?" he asked incredulously. "You know how many girls I've kissed? Two. And you think I'm this womanizing Casanova."
"You wish you were. That's not up for debate. I never said you actually were one, if you look back on it."
For a second she wondered who the girls were, and if they'd been prettier than she was. Then she reminded herself that it didn't matter—this was Sirius she was talking to.
"Well, whatever, you make it out like I've got this slimy reputation sometimes. I haven't. But this guy—"
"Why's he worse than I am? Sam, I can guarantee you, is not nearly as well-liked as I am. Why're you not criticizing me for being, as you put it, 'vile'?"
"Because you're not. Vile. There's nothing vile about you." He swallowed. Suddenly he seemed not as angry anymore. "At all."
"Oh, no. You're angry with me, remember? Stay angry, why don't you? Or I'll make you angrier."
"How?"
She didn't like the way he was looking at her. She had limited options: hurl herself out of the hayloft, or, as she'd said, resurrect the brief flame of ire he'd had.
"The reason I don't like you is that I like Remus."
Is that actually going to make him angry? He only looked mildly surprised, then blasé.
"I kind of figured that you liked him. But I thought—I don't know. That you might also have come to like me. You know…" He gestured awkwardly at the house. "Seeing me all the time. Things like that. I guess…" He ran his fingers through his hair. "I guess not. Forget it. Kiss Mr. Glass Onion all you want."
She wanted to ask him, really ask him and make him be honest, why he wasn't angry anymore. It was as if a switch had flipped from a conversation she could handle—a conversation she could win—to something where she didn't understand the tactics, to something she couldn't win. She wasn't sure she could even recognize what victory would look like.
"Well, as it happens, I don't want to," she said.
"No? Why not?"
"I already told you. Because it sucked—literally. It was gross. I'd rather kiss anybody but Sam."
"All right." He shrugged. Before she knew what he was doing, he was kissing her.
Not just kissing her. Most boys she'd kissed had either been strategically pawing at her, with an aim to brush boob or butt or something else, or allowing their arms to hang stupidly at their sides. He touched her face, smoothed her hair back.
At first she let him kiss her because she was too surprised to push him back. And then she allowed it because it was the best-quality kiss she'd had in quite some time.
"Now, that was good," she said when their lips broke apart. "You should give lessons."
He smiled. "Thanks. So my lack of practice isn't exactly a handicap?"
"No. You're a natural. Perfect technique. Not a bit like kissing the wrong end of an octopus."
"An octopus?"
"Yes. Some blokes, they just suck you in too much, and then they thrash about in there like an octopus."
"Blecch. Please tell me you haven't kissed anyone that bad."
"Oh, yes. First time I went to a disco, in fact. Last year. Seventeen-year-old chap named Ronnie. Eurgh, I thought I'd never kiss anyone again."
"Bit unnerving, knowing that something as foul as Ronnie's tongue has been in your mouth. Especially since it doesn't seem a bit damaged by it."
"What can I say? I'm resilient."
She shuffled her gigantic shoes back and forth. This wasn't customary, the awkward silence. She couldn't believe she'd kissed Sirius. Part of her was surprised that he hadn't been her first kiss, two children wondering what it felt like, but that made it even weirder, in a sense. This was unprecedented. She'd never kissed a friend, just strangers, and family on the cheeks. She didn't know what to do afterward: with strangers, if one didn't want to kiss them again—and she didn't, though not for the same reasons she'd never wanted to kiss Ronnie again—one simply said "goodbye" and sauntered off. If one did, by some happy accident, even wish to be in the same room as them again, one left a number or proposed a meeting place and invited further contact.
Instead, Sirius was coming back into her room with her, whether she wanted him there or not, and he was going to be sleeping in her closet. Did he expect her to talk to him? Could she just go about her business and then go to sleep without having to address it again? Was it too much to hope that he'd forget about it entirely?
The situation annoyed her. She felt like sending him a clear message: ignoring him for the rest of his stay and writing a lot of love letters to people, for instance, and giggling about various moronic disco boys.
"We should probably go inside," she said. "It's late. You climb up the ivy. I'll open the window for you."
"So…"
"So what?"
He sighed. "Nothing. Nothing. Yes, open the window for me."
If it hadn't been for the shoes, she'd have been running inside, running up to her bedroom, shoving the window open. She had too much time to think, and as she crept up to her bedroom, she considered what a colossal mistake this was.
He would tell Remus. Especially since she'd stupidly told him that she liked Remus. Couldn't keep her mouth shut, like a child. And Remus wouldn't take her seriously after that: who would? She'd said she wanted Remus, and then she turned around and snogged his best friend. It's not like the circumstances—the fact that Sirius had moved in for it and not her, and that kisses didn't mean anything to her—would matter. It would just seem wrong.
And he would tell everybody. Kissing Sirius Black would follow her through adulthood, probably to her grave. Nobody would get that just because everybody else found him attractive, that didn't mean she did. Men would avoid her, thinking that they could never compare to Sirius. Women would be jealous. (Of what, exactly? She felt like telling someone about the farting, just so it was out there on public record.)
He was waiting, clinging to the vines. She thought of Romeo and Juliet. Hopefully nobody would expect them to fall in love and kill themselves, because she for one was not planning on taking any poison.
"You're really not going to talk about it at all?" he said. He was frowning. It was maddening—why'd he have to be so dramatic? Why did he have to make a thing about this?
"Talk about what?"
He slumped into the closet. "Stop being such a drama queen," she said to the door as it creaked shut. "It's unbecoming."