("These impulses come over me all of a sudden, and I just can't resist them.")
.
"It's all an act," Roxanne tells him during their studying (while she looks up from the daily horoscope readings). "That bitch-fight with Stella Fawcett over Keith?"
"You jinxed her." Lysander says, hardly believing what he is hearing.
"Only because Keith told everyone that he broke up me over the drama. I decided I might as well actually give him some." She laughs, a kittenish purr.
And that is the excuse when she tells him about how she left Ed Midgen with a bad case of the blue balls and when she sneaks into Hogsmeade for sips of firewhiskey, swearing to him that she will never try that again after he lets her hair down and she stops vomiting into the Hufflepuff's toilet. "The spectacles of experience; through them you will see clearly a second time," he says to her. She looks up at him in confusion. "Rolf," he explains his father. "He likes this muggle writer, he's always quoting him…his favorite is 'rob the average man of his life-illusion and you rob him also of his happiness'."
And then Lysander remembers those few terrible days after the Ball, where he and Rose were robbed but then Roxanne blinks, her eyelashes lower and she smiles and he smiles too and can't help but think how happy he is, the richest man in the world, to smell her vomit and hold her mane of hair.
