October 11, 2015
Rory floated somewhere in the zone between consciousness and sleep. Although she had closed her eyes a mere half an hour earlier, her body had already grown numb to the sense of being. She tried to access the part of her brain that kept track of where she was. It seemed that position should be tightly tied to touch, but as she tried to figure out what it was she felt, she realized that she had lost awareness of her arms intertwined across her chest and she could no longer process the unforgiving wooden bench wedged behind her back. She focussed harder on that feeling, or rather lack thereof, that should have tied her to a point in space. It was not there. This should have been disconcerting, the sense of being nowhere, but it felt almost familiar.
Shouldn't it bother me to not feel where I am? To not feel like I am? Rory asked herself. Why is this so normal?
Rory heard a wooden door creak open behind her as another student walked through the passageway into the corridor Rory currently occupied. She wondered if the student noticed her dozing.
Rory moved her eyes around behind her eyelids, slowly becoming conscious of the morphing green and red pattern made by the sun shining onto her eyelids through an adjacent window. She could open her eyes if she wanted to. Maybe she should. She could let the light flood in, regain the sense of touch that would tie her down to this place and time. Or she could not. At the moment, not opening her eyes seemed like the more favorable option.
What if people think you are weird for napping here? she asked herself. Maybe you should open your eyes and make sure the student isn't judging you. Afterall, it could be a Slytherin. They might spread some rumors about you. Or worse yet, it could be another Ggryffindor!
She felt a sense of dread fill her as she considering opening her eyes. She wasn't ready to be yanked back into reality. She wanted to rest here in peace for a few more minutes. The juvenile thought "if you can't see the student, the student can't see you," skipped through her thoughts. Rory smiled at how silly this thought was. This was definitely an instance in which closing her eyes would not prevent another student from seeing her. Rory wondered what would happen if she opened her eyes. Would she see the student? Would she suddenly regain that sense of being that she had apparently lost? Would she suddenly feel disoriented and out of place?
You can't even prove that you're in this passageway, she reminded herself. If you don't know your position, you don't have one. So the student can't know you're here.
Rory thought about this. Sure, there was no way to prove that the student noticed her unless she opened her eyes, but if she opened her eyes, Rory would know where she was, and therefore she would have a position and the student could notice her. Observing her position would change how her position was registered.
The taps of the student's footsteps faded somewhere off to Rory's right. She exhaled, not realizing until then that she had been holding her breath. Rory relaxed as she zoned in again on her sense of nowhereness.
Shhhhhhhh rushed the blood in her ears, lulling her even deeper into sleep's warm embrace. Images rushed into her head. The blur of the school grounds as she flew through the quidditch pitch, Jane in her Quidditch jersey. She thought more about the missing sense of being, Nate's addicting smile juxtaposed with an image of his glare.
Ugh, that glare. She was so confused about how to interact him.
Rory's thoughts drifted back to her sense of nothingness. She sensed no fixed position in space. While she remembered going to nap on this bench outside of the Muggle Studies room so that she could use its Internet access when she awoke, she slowly began to doubt that this event actually happened. She could still be on the bench, but maybe she only dreamed about going to nap on the bench. She could just as well be back in her bed in the Gryffindor common room, looking at the long day ahead of her. She could be herself from three weeks before, when she pulled an all-nighter with Isla and slept through her first exam. It was very plausible that a night like that would lead to dreams about wanting to sleep on a bench instead of in her bed. In fact, with this sense of nothingness, it seemed equally possible that she had just returned from a long day's work at Maria's restaurant. That waitressing job was extraordinarily exhausting, after all.
Bzzzzzzz.
Weird. That almost felt like her cell phone. She must be back in the muggle world. In a minute she would open her eyes to the speckled ceiling of Odi's blue themed flat, ready for her day off.
Bzzzzzzz.
Rory smiled half consciously. Day off here I come! she thought to herself. She was so ready to return to the train station. Last night's weird dream about the magic school could definitely be put to rest by returning to the train station. Ad what a weird dream it had been! It was clearly a sign that she needed the time off.
Rory slowly let her eyes flutter open, and, as always, she forgot to shield herself from the light beating down on her face. Momentarily blinded, Rory quickly covered her eyes with her hand and rolled over on the blue couch to avoid reopening her eyes to the cruel sun rays. Her hands and knees collided with the cold stone floor as she rolled off of the bench, not the couch.
Rory sighed, ruling out the option of being back in Odi's apartment, where the floor was carpeted. She really wanted the last month to be a dream. She really wished she could be back in Odi's apartment.
"Oh right," she thought, recalling her last text exchange with her brother. "I guess that option's gone now." Rory's mind flashed back to the blue leather couch, glass coffee table, blue walls, blue curtains, the small kitchenette adjacent to the only bedroom. All were now gone permanently from her life, never to be seen by her eyes again. Moisture gathered in the corner of her right eye, and Rory quickly swiped it away. Dwelling on this loss was a stupid waste of time, and the emotional response she had to it barely made sense; why did it bother her so much now when she barely even registered the loss when it was proposed?
Bzzzzzzz.
Rory was grateful that the constant vibration of her cell phone interrupted her nostalgia for her old home. When her vision finally cleared, Rory confirmed her position in spacetime as outside of the Muggle Studies room as she had originally hypothesized. Her phone screen rested on top of her rucksack, inches from her face. The screen was alight with the name "Odi," running across it. A smile spread across Rory's face as she anticipated hearing the comforting tenor of her brother's voice for the first time in nearly two months. She hastily picked up her phone and sat back on her heals, swiping the bright green phone icon to the right hand of the screen.
"Rory's phone," she croaked, voice drowsy from her recent escapade into the subconscious.
"Hey Rory! It's Odi. Glad we could finally connect."
"Yeah, I'm sorry it's been so long."
"Rory, it's been what, five weeks since you said you'd call 'soon'? Does that word mean nothing to you anymore?"
Rory rolled her eyes at Odi even though he could not see. The left corner of her mouth tugged into a smile at her brother's familiar teasing. "Yeah, sorry about that, things have been hectic here."
"I see," murmured Odi.
"No, you hear," retorted Rory, her face relaxing into a full grin.
"Ha ha." Odi's sarcasm was anything but subtle. "How's this new school of yours going? Are you hangin' in there? Adjusting well?"
Rory's gut clenched as her mind drifted to her first exams, the jolt of panic she had after sleeping through her first Potions exam, the stress she suffered through in the headmistress's office the next day trying to reschedule her exam and promised over and over not to mess up a second time. Rory was trying to do the best by her promise. She had confronted Isla about replacing the last-minute homework help with strictly-scheduled, hour-long homework sessions on Sundays at 4:00 pm, and so far, Isla had conformed to Rory's demands. Rory's thoughts then shifted to the approaching exams two weeks from now, and how much studying she had to catch up on before she was prepared to take them. And then she thought about Nate's attitude, permanently in flux. So was she adjusting well? The pit in her stomach told her no. But coming here was a choice she'd made on a whim, and as far as Odi knew, she was still enthusiastic about her decision. She couldn't go back on it now, and she didn't want to worry her brother, so she lied.
"Y-yes," she stammered.
Good job, she chastised herself. Real convincing.
"Astronomy is fun," she added. That was something normal, happy Rory would respond, right?
Without pause, Odi exclaimed "Glad to hear it! Do you know when your Christmas break starts? I was hoping to take off from work for a few weeks to spend time with my favorite sister."
He bought it? Rory questioned internally. Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. She hadn't entirely believed that lying would work, and she was slightly disappointed that it did. "December the first," she responded aloud. "I'm glad I'll get to see you!" she exclaimed. "How's work going?"
Odi's laughter chimed like bells on the other end of the phone line. "Work is going pretty great. I just landed another project and-"
Rory's attention shifted from her brother to the tap of steps approaching from farther down the corridor, in the direction she had heard the mysterious student's footsteps fade only minutes before. She could hear 3 distinct sets of steps, and familiar voices echoed off of the stone, reflective walls of the corridor.
"Where did you say she was?" asked a gruff voice that made Rory flinch. It sounded like Fritz. She did not want to deal with this right now.
"She's asleep on a bench over that way," came an unidentifiable, squeaky voice from farther down the hall.
Brilliant, Rory thought. Someone had noticed her napping on the bench. And they cared enough to alert Fritz, so the student probably had been a Slytherin. Really, what were the odds? Rory had wished that her drowsy suspicion of the student walking through the corridor had been paranoia. Evidently, it wasn't, and while the group could simply want to talk to her, they were Slytherins, and she was a Gryffindor. If the group held anything less than noble intentions, she wasn't in the mood to stick around and find out.
"Hey Odi," she said into her phone with no regard for whether Odi was in the middle of a sentence or at the story's end. She hadn't really been listening after all. "I think I have to go right now. Can I call you back soon?"
"Uh, sure, soon.." trailed Odi.
Rory squeezed her eyes shut. "Great! Talk to you later!" She quickly shut off her phone, not bothering to wait for him to bid her farewell. Rory yanked her rucksack off the floor and ducked inside the vacant Muggle Studies room behind her to wait for the group to pass.
As soon as she slid down against the inner wall of the classroom, she heard that same, unidentifiable, squeaky voice exclaim from the corridor, "She must have moved! I swear she was here!" Sneakily peering around the corner, Rory could tell that this voice belonged to a younger, shorter student she didn't recognize. The two others he was with, however, were all too familiar.
"You promised she was here in this hallway!" chastised Fritz. "I'm not paying you for this."
"What?!" shouted the squeaky voice. "I did everything I was supposed to! Pay up!"
"C'mon Fritz, why do you even bother trying to do this anyway," groaned Nate. "Can't we leave her alone?"
Huh, perhaps Nate decided he doesn't entirely hate me today, thought Rory.
Fritz scoffed. "Not this again, Nate. She's a Gryffindor. We are Slytherin. You've got to stick with your house on this one. Merlin's beard, she's a Hemmings! Her father was in our house, and she dares to get sorted into frickin' Gryffindor?! She's a traitor. And don't even get me started on how she keeps preventing my sister from hanging out with Jane. And then she dares to intrude on Slytherin turf by sitting in on quidditch practices?! The line has to be drawn somewhere. We gotta put an end to this."
Is sitting in on quidditch really that much of a problem? wondered Rory. Her heart sank as she imagined no longer studying at the pitch, here internal monologue of increasing stress being delightfully interrupted by the buzz of light-hearted practices. It was one of the few activities that she was still enjoying at this school, one of the few that she didn't think added any extra stress to her weekly schedule. She really didn't want to give that up.
Then she thought about the other accusations Fritz had made. Her father had been in Slytherin? At least now she knew some of the information he had tried to coerce her with. That was, of course, only true if Fritz was correct about her old last name, and Rory still wasn't persuaded that she identified as anything but "Rory Jones." Hemmings just felt so... not her.
"But not all Gryffindors are not necessarily bad to have around. You seem to think it would be perfectly fine for your sister to hang around Jane. I still don't understand what makes Rory any different."
That was new. Did Fritz think his sister was a friend to Jane, not a bully? That was confusing.
"Man, do you hear yourself? It's not just that she is one of them. She's a traitor. She's not just in their house. She is in the wrong house. Stop defending her. Stop trying to be your friend. It's not like she has any loyalty to you."
Nate rushed his hand through his hair in frustration, his eyes darting around the corridor furiously until they landed on Rory. Their eyes locked on each other for a minute. Rory heard a sharp intake of breath, and a second later, she realized that it was hers. She broke Nate's gaze to scoot farther back behind the into the classroom, but she knew that this action was futile since he had already seen her. Her mind raced. What should she do next? She could continue hiding in the classroom, in which case the other group could either ignore her or enter the classroom. The privacy of the classroom did not bode well for her in that case. She could also leave the classroom, in which case she would unquestionably confront the group. While this confrontation seemed safer than a confrontation in an empty classroom, she forfeited her opportunity to avoid conflict completely. Before she could form a concrete decision, she heard Nate say, "Fritz, we can terrorize her a different time. This is obviously a dead end. Let's go."
Rory exhaled, relieved that Nate seemed relatively unswayed by his peers today. As the three sets of footsteps drifted off towards the right end of the corridor, Rory slumped back against the wall and retrieved her phone to call her brother back.
