Lily and Ryan had known each other since primary school, but they became close after Lily's fifth year at Hogwarts, during the best and worst summer of her life.
Severus and Lily had recently become estranged, and in his absence, Lily spent more time with the neighborhood Muggles, particularly Chloe, Zed, Morris, and Ryan. Although they were two years older, she had been drawn to them for years. They were always friendly, and she'd even attend bonfires and other summer parties with them on occasion, but because she'd spent so much time with Severus, she'd tended to distance herself from them. The Muggles repulsed him—although Lily saw that mingled with his disgust was his familiar, intense fear of not fitting in—but whatever the reason for his aversion, and Severus' friendship always came first for Lily, so she generally stayed away too.
Sometimes the Muggles would see Lily around and, aware of the reason for her reservation, assure her that Severus was welcome to join them as well. Lily stopped extending this suggestion after a few tries, and contented herself with enjoying time with the Muggles summer weekends when Severus was away and holidays that he spent at Hogwarts. During winter break fourth year, she went to a New Year's party in Morris' basement. There, she'd had her first kiss with Ryan over cups of tequila-spiked punch as 1974 became 1975, She never told Severus about that, and it was one of the few occasions in which Lily wished she had close female friends with whom she could gush about the evening.
The summer of 1976, Lily finally immersed herself fully into the lives of her Muggle neighbors. She barely felt the absence of magic—that itch in her fingertips as they stretched for the cupboard where she stowed her wand. She even neglected to peruse her schoolbooks ahead of time, so busy was she with her newfound company.
As the four of them were older, they had driver's licenses, and Zed even had a car. Whenever the whim struck them, they would pile into the sedan and hit the road, sometimes for a nearby beach or shopping center but most often for the out-of-the-way convenience store where they bought fags and would stand around, speaking between drags about nothing and everything. Lily was the quietest, as she was obliged to keep mostly silent about nine months of each year of her life since eleven, but the others prattled on well enough without her help, and she loved it. It was different than with Severus, in which they could and often would pass hours of comfortable silence—different, but no better or worse.
She and Ryan got close when she asked him to teach her how to drive. They went to empty lots and Lily laughed more than she learned, which was just fine. Ryan got into the habit of inviting her over even when the others were unavailable. They would smoke weed in his room and he would play her his favorite records, and sometimes they would kiss in his bed and she would stare around at the posters covering his room, thinking that a Muggle life would not be so lacking, really. Although the others, particularly Zed, Ryan's closest friend, would joke occasionally joke about Lily and Ryan's sex life, no one really cared. That was what Lily loved about hanging out with the Muggles. No one cared. Everything was lively and casual and nothing was the end of the world. Sometimes Lily missed the intimacy of her friendship with Severus, but for the most part she was glad there was none of that with the Muggles. Chloe, Ryan and Zed were going to university that fall, and Morris was moving away to live with his father and work for his company, so Lily knew it was not likely that their group would ever reconvene for a summer similar to this one, and she liked that she didn't have to mourn that. Her other world was full of loss, of high stakes and of impending tragedy—the Wizarding War underscored almost everything everyone did or said. Every relationship was inordinately intense, everybody knew someone who had lost someone close, and no one knew who might be next. But the Muggles did not live like this—they were just kids whose biggest fear was imminent Adulthood.
Of course, life with the Muggles was not totally seamless. For example, early in August, everyone knew when Zed and Chloe made a covert trip to the women's clinic, and that for a while after Chloe declined invitations to spend time with the others. Lily wrote to Slughorn, asking him if he knew of any mild potions she could pick up in Diagon Alley that might help to improve a friend's mood. He sent her a parcel containing a vial of sky-blue opaque liquid, which Lily stirred into a brownie mix and brought to Chloe's house two blocks over. Chloe opened the door and hugged her, and the two played chess and watched movies all afternoon.
After consuming a few brownies, Chloe even agreed to go with Lily to Morris's house that night. When Lily arrived in his driveway with Chloe in tow, Zed and Ryan clapped, and Morris removed the joint from between his lips to whoop loudly. By the glow of the streetlights, Lily saw Chloe grin.
"She's back, baby!" Ryan said.
"Hey," Zed said, elbowing Ryan and then taking Chloe under his other arm as she approached
him. "She's my baby." Chloe blushed and she and Zed followed Morris through his house and into his bedroom. He unlatched his window and, as was routine, they climbed through onto the roof, single file.
The five of them sat on the roof for hours. The night was clear, and they watched the stars while Morris passed his joint around, extracting a new one from his seemingly bottomless pocket and lighting it each time they kicked the former. They were mostly quiet. Chloe and Zed lay intertwined while Ryan and Lily simply sat side by side, not quite touching except for their overlapping pinkies as they leaned back on their hands. At one point a ways into the night, after Ryan handed the third half-smoked joint to Morris, he turned to Lily and broke the silence.
"I love you, you know?" he said. "Like, as a friend, you know?"
Lily smiled. "I love you too," she said. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. "As a friend," she added, looking him in the eyes so seriously he had to know she was mocking him a little bit. He pressed his lips to hers and in her foggy high Lily felt as if they kissed for hours. They finally broke apart to laugh when Morris threw himself on his back and groaned melodramatically that he was surrounded by couples!
Lily did love Ryan. She loved him for many reasons, but the foremost of which was one she only realized retrospectively: she loved him primarily because he was so quintessentially Muggle. He was tall and thin, with sandy hair and ruddy, freckled cheeks. He did well in school. He had great taste in Muggle music. He was going to uni next year, and Lily was sure he would meet a nice Muggle girl and eventually have a few nice Muggle children. To anyone else, Ryan was the boy-next-door, but to Lily, he was an absolute breath of fresh air. He was a captivating window into what her life might have been had she never received her letter and, after a grating fifth year at Hogwarts, she had to admit things might've been simpler.
Although she would never admit it, part of Ryan's appeal also lay in the fact that she knew how gravely Severus would disapprove. She even imagined telling him, somehow, if they ever spoke again—she fantasized about the shock on Severus' face if, in the heat of an argument, she revealed she'd fucked a Muggle, countless times, in fact, and that he had been spectacular.
This was the part of the summer that hurt—the fact that Severus wasn't with her, and yet his absence was everywhere, and Lily thought constantly about relaying her life to him, as she had done for so many years. Sometimes she would fantasize about yelling at him, about bragging that she was better off without him, but often she would just think of him in the knee-jerk I can't wait to tell Sev about what happened way of things. Petunia made matters worse by constantly asking about him. Where's your gross little friend, Lily? and To have a friend like that is bad enough… but to lose him? and Who knew there was a hierarchy at your freak school? Let me guess—he's king of the freaks, and you're just a peasant?
The brunt of Petunia's taunts happened at the beginning of the summer, although they flared occasionally after their parents brought up Hogwarts or when Petunia found one of Lily's schoolbooks lying around the house. Relatively speaking, however, her and Petunia's relationship was better that summer than it had been in years. Lily was, for all intents and purposes, living as a Muggle. Although she often felt that way in the past when stripped of her wand over the summer, she realized now she was being melodramatic. Magic had still pervaded so much of her life; she wanted to talk about the Wizarding World, she read the Daily Prophet religiously, and she saw Severus nearly every day. This summer, although she wrote letters to Marlene and Dorcas and perused the paper every now and then, she was living at a great distance from the magical world. She often felt as if were playing a role—experimenting with the life she had learned to expect for eleven years, before she went to Hogwarts. It was not a better life, but Lily was surprised to find that it was also no worse. At Hogwarts, it was easy to fall into the mindset that Muggles' lives were lacking in some huge way, but that summer, Lily found that they were not lacking at all—they were just different. She liked different.