They had spent an hour before they fell asleep kissing each other, and another hour just lying there in each other's arms. Eglantine thought that the whole situation was strange. She hadn't expected, first of all, to like it this much. It was strange that it wasn't strange: that feeling his tongue rub against hers wasn't irrevocably awkward, that feeling the hard warmth of his chest against her shoulder wasn't too close for her to tolerate from him, that she didn't want to put a stop to any of it. He had nascent stubble, and it was tinted bluish. His upper lip was thicker than she'd noticed. He had tiny freckles right beneath his eyes.
None of this means anything, do you realize that? She wanted to say it, but she didn't; whether because it wasn't true, or because she just didn't want it to stop yet, she didn't know. There was a lot, she found, that she didn't know in regards to this.
She didn't want it to be real, because if it were real, it might change her into someone she didn't want to be. She wanted to follow in Bertie's steps—if her grades were good enough—and if not, well, there was always music. Music in the wizarding world was absolutely pathetic, and she knew she could fix it; but she couldn't fix it with some hanger-on boy, could she? He could only hold her back. Her brother had had a successful Quidditch career before he got married; it had only been since his marriage that he started to play less excitingly and in fewer matches. Bertie might've had more initiative to learn more curses, more defenses, if he hadn't been so tied up with his on-and-off fling with Marlene McKinnon. Her parents had long been the exception to the rule, but Sirius was not on par with them, and she wasn't sure she was either. She couldn't take the risk of picking such a close partner—and it was obvious that that was what he wanted. Better alone than with somebody that expected.
It was something more and worse than pleasant: it was comfortable. Comfort frightened Eglantine. It was how someone abandoned their vigil over their lives, lost control, made mistakes. Comfort was to be avoided.
She was relieved when he woke to go in the morning. She pretended to be asleep as he gathered his belongings and crept out the window, kissing her goodbye. She hoped he would never kiss her again.
He wrote her during the remainder of the summer. She burned the envelopes when she received them, not even opening them, because she didn't want to possess any knowledge that might conflict with her story, which was to be that they'd never arrived. In the weeks that followed, she saw a lot of Dave from the movies, whose surname, she learned, was Pucey. She was relieved that she wasn't going to ever get married, because what if one fell haplessly in love with a person named Pucey? Eglantine Pucey had the ring of sour-faced grandmother about it.
Dave turned out to be more interesting than she'd bargained for, and what was even more encouraging, he was useful. He was, apart from being funny, a musical virtuoso. He could play guitar, drums, piano, even the flute. He hoped to tour with the Beatles or the Who. They spent hours listening to records together. She even smoked pot with him, even though it only made her dopey and jittery at the same time. (He didn't suggest their doing it again: Dave was considerate.) They only kissed. It was rather glorious. She didn't love Dave, but she loved being with Dave. She wasn't restless, or passionate, or anything. It was perfectly calm, like being home alone, only instead of talking to herself she was talking to Dave. His mild blue eyes were almost gray, like a calm winter sea, and his hair fell across his eyes like Remus's did but she was even starting to compare Dave favorably to Remus. She wondered what Sirius would think about all this, about the fact that she'd chosen spending time with the Midlands' Musical Muggle over writing him back even once. She still felt a bit guilty, but she reminded herself that he would get over it.
August came faster than she'd hoped. She was startled when she found that she actually hoped that Dave wouldn't find someone else while she was at Hogwarts (or, as she informed him, "a stupid girls' school in Scotland that my grandmother went to"). Normally she couldn't wait for them to find someone else so they'd stop bothering her, but that was the thing about Dave: he didn't bother her. Eglantine deemed this as good as love, and when he told her he loved her back, he seemed over the moon about it, and she wasn't the slightest bit irate or bored that he was so happy. This hadn't happened before. On the basis of Eglantine's lack of negative adjectives alone, Lily was ready to plan their wedding (earthy, sort of a hippie vibe, in a barn somewhere, with lots of music and lemon tarts).
She did her shopping rather last-minute with Cam. People who made an event of it—first-years' parents and wealthy assholes—had already been there for several days by the time Eglantine and Cam visited Diagon Alley, and everybody was pretty well entrenched. Outside Fortescue's, Narcissa Black was sharing a large sundae with Lucius. Neither of them were eating it: Narcissa was placing the spoon artfully in her pink-painted mouth as she glared at passersby, likely making mental notes of their inadequacies; Lucius was reading the newspaper and making disgruntled remarks to Narcissa, who of course wasn't listening.
"Camilla! Cam Bertrand!" shrieked Narcissa.
"What the hell?" Cam muttered. She'd always been friendly with Narcissa—despite Cam's vocal distaste for both Bellatrix and Andromeda, who were the only people she really disliked (though Eglantine didn't really understand the Andromeda hatred)—but never really friends. The shrieking was unusual.
"Camillaaaaah! I'm engaged, did Mel tell you? Me and Lucius! We're getting married next year! At his family's manor home! In Wiltshire!"
"Oh. Congratulations!" said Cam. She hugged Narcissa awkwardly, as this was what Narcissa wanted. "Er—that the ring? Very—er—nice."
The diamond was the size of a small dormouse, surrounded with emeralds and set in glaringly polished silver. "It was his grandmother's! Isn't it nice! Antique!"
Eglantine was surprised that the world had not run out of exclamation marks immediately following Narcissa's engagement. She drifted inconspicuously away, up the stairs of Madam Malkin's, colliding hard with Frank Longbottom. He was older, graduated last year. The best word for Frank had been amiable—good-natured, not particularly bright, not stupid, just sort of friendly, like a smiling baby. Maybe she only thought of babies because of his round cheeks. They were the only round thing about him: he looked like a dandelion.
"Tina! How've you been?" He'd tutored her in Herbology a couple times when she'd been stuck in the greenhouses trying to comprehend it all, she remembered. It'd been one of his better subjects. And in return she'd helped him with Muggle Studies. His mother, an angry-looking character with horrid taste in clothing, hadn't been too keen on Muggles. She used to shake her cane at them in Kings Cross rather conspicuously, until the Ministry told her to stop.
"All right." To her, it seemed a loaded question because of Uncle Crevan, though knowing Frank, he hadn't put two and two together. "You?"
"Great." He beamed. "Just picking up my Auror robes. Alice and I both got picked up at the same time."
"Oh! Er—great." All she could think of was Bertie. The odds weren't exactly in Frank and Alice's favor, not lately. Bertie had been her casualty, but far from the only one.
"Nearly done with school, aren't you?"
"Well, not really. This'll be my sixth year."
"Oh. I thought you were older. Ah, well! Can't hurt for people to think you're older, eh? People usually think I'm about seven."
Laughing at his own observation, Frank jolted forward. Behind him were two Slytherins, Damon Mulciber and Tim Wilkes, shoving him aside.
"Ugh, get out of the way, would you?" said Wilkes, with an expression suggestive of a hooked bass. He stopped short in front of Eglantine, unsure of what to do. She could almost hear his thought process, trying to do the Slytherin Rat Algorithm in his head: how many "good people" versus "bad people" was she related to, and was it worth his while to antagonize her, and would he lose face by not antagonizing her?
It proved too difficult for Wilkes, because he just stood there.
"Are you lost? Do you need an adult to show you where to go?" said Frank. That was the thing about Frank. He was always nice. Even when being nice was wonderfully belittling to the person he was being nice at.
"Oh, like you're an adult, ass-face."
"No, but he is an Auror. And, unless you'd like to get on the bad side of an Auror," Eglantine added quietly, "which I'm sure your parents wouldn't be pleased about, I'd just be on your way."
The calculations he'd done with the Slytherin Rat Algorithm just got recalculated to include the implication of potential blackmail. This computation was entirely beyond him. Wilkes cleared his throat. Mulciber, a thin, weedy twerp of a person with about seven brain cells to work with, glared at the space between Frank and Eglantine because he didn't know who precisely to loathe in that moment.
"All right. But I'd—I'd watch out if I were you."
"Don't worry, I won't need to."
This struck Mulciber as oddly ominous, and he scurried, anxious to join Wilkes, off into the moving crowd.
"Odd people," Frank said. This was the closest, Eglantine knew, that Frank Longbottom ever got to calling somebody a git.
"Where I come from, we call them little arrogant motherfuckers, but you always were nicer than I was," said Eglantine. "Well, I've got to get in there. Say hello to Alice."