Chapter Three: Lilies and Roses
To speed up the process of uncovering Jane Doe's identity, James considered letting a frog loose at school and observing which of the girls reacted in terror, but decided, on balance, that half the students at Hogwarts didn't need an excuse to run screaming from an assembly, and he'd probably endanger the frog in the ensuring stampede. Sacrificing the life of a helpless amphibian for his own gain would also paint him in a rather negative light, even if Jane did hate them.
As January bled into February, he and Jane began to speak regularly, at least a few times a week, but nothing he learned from her gave him much to go on. Like him, she was quite competitive. Unlike him, she was very guarded, and determined to win their contest the hard way – that was to say, with a lot of rules and caveats – which in turn made him try a lot harder to be mysterious. In four weeks, the only pertinent piece of information he gained was that she had a sister who she didn't like very much, if the codename Bratty McBackstab was anything to go by, but that wasn't enough. She might have had more siblings he didn't know about. The whole thing might have been a great misdirect.
On the off-chance that the universe had finally brought James and his beloved together via the medium of a library wall, he asked his mates if Evans had a sister, but none of them knew, not even Remus.
"I thought you were good for this kind of stuff?" he had accused his friend, on a Saturday evening early in the month, while they headed into town on the city bus. Sirius, the only one of the four to have turned seventeen already, selfishly couldn't be bothered to learn to drive, so they were forced to use public transport until their situation changed.
"If any of us were going to keep tabs on Lily's family," Remus reminded him. "Surely, that would be you?"
"What even is the point of you three?"
"Why, even, do you want to know if she has a sister?" Peter retorted.
"I had a dream that she had one," James lied, then shoved his headphones into his ears and listened to "Heaven is a Place on Earth" by Belinda Carlisle on repeat until Sirius lost his patience and thumped him.
None of his friends appreciated power pop from the eighties, but they really should have. James liked music he could sing along to. Everything Sirius listened to sounded like terrified screaming.
As the days went on, though, he found himself less concerned by competition and more preoccupied by the advent of Valentine's Day which, as everyone knew, was the third most romantic day of the year, right after the Royal Rumble and the first day of McDonald's Monopoly. Valentine's Day was particularly interesting at Hogwarts because the student council sold plastic roses for charity, which one could have sent to whomever they liked for the reasonable cost of £1, with an accompanying note of one's choosing.
Normally, James and Sirius pooled their resources and sent as many joke flowers as struck their fancy, but James had decided to send a proper one to Evans this year, so he spent a lot of his free time trying to come up with the perfect anonymous love message. It needed to be smooth and winning, yet charmingly self-effacing, but confident, and witty, and indicative of a depth and intelligence that she would immediately find intriguing. He asked Sirius for help, but his suggestion of 'unlike this piece of shit rose, I've got a real prick to show you' was lacking in almost every area.
Jane would have been an ideal person to ask, but if she knew Evans and saw the finished message, his game would be up. His crush on Lily wasn't exactly the best kept secret in school.
Two nights before the big day, a decision was made to consult his mother for help. James found her reposing in her bed, rubbing some sort of lotion into her arms.
"Excuse me?" she said, upon hearing his grand plan, her eyebrows travelling so high up her forehead that her face mask cracked. "What are you, a pauper?"
"What?"
"Real flowers are the only way to go when one is wooing."
"Right," said James, and sat down on the edge of her bed. "But we're at school, so—"
"So? You think they won't deliver to a school?"
"Would they?"
Euphemia gave a disparaging laugh and adjusted the neckline of her silk pyjamas. "A tasteful bouquet of fresh roses, carried into the classroom and placed in her arms while all of her friends are sitting there with their awful little plastic flowers and their jealous little faces, will make a far better impression on a young woman."
"Do you think that will wor—"
"Effort, James. It denotes effort. How much effort can it take to slip a quid and a piece of paper into the charity box?"
"I'd have to swing by the student council office tomorrow, which is pretty far out of my way."
"I didn't raise my son to be cheap."
"It's not cheap!"
"Lily's very pretty, you know."
"I know that better than anyone, thank you very much."
"She's bound to get a number of those tacky roses from other boys," said Euphemia airily. "And since you're too cowardly to put your name to a gift—"
"I'm not a coward!" he protested, with an irritable jerk of the head that made his glasses slide down his nose. "I'm building up to it."
"Buy her a real bunch of flowers and you'll stand out. It'll make her feel special."
He frowned, considering this. Evans was special, but he'd never really wondered if she was aware of that fact. He naturally assumed that everyone agreed with him, and it came as a great surprise when people like Sirius claimed that she was merely ordinary. "She won't think it's creepy?"
"Oh, she won't, even if she pretends to," his mother assured him. "Now, fetch me my laptop. You can thank me when you're married."
As far as her contest with Prongs was concerned, Lily's decision to implement rules was based on a desire to ensure she clinched the most satisfying victory she could wrangle.
When she won, she wanted to win thoroughly. That meant Prongs slipping up in a disastrous fashion before he ever got a chance to narrow down a list of suspects, and in the beginning, she was quite confident that she could get him to do that.
Four weeks down the line, it had become clear that – despite his distaste for capital letters and proper punctuation – Prongs was no idiot. Try as she might, Lily couldn't get him to give himself away. It was a little frustrating, but mostly not, because while she failed to make the headway she wanted in their game, she found herself quite entertained by their conversations. In fact, she sometimes had to check herself when she felt the urge to text him, just in case she went overboard and seemed too eager for his attention. Her mystery pal tended to be rather pleased with himself, and that side of his personality did not need further encouragement.
The precautions she took with Prongs were similar to the kind she would have taken if she were texting someone she fancied, except she didn't fancy Prongs. She couldn't, because for all she knew, he might have been the complete opposite of her tall, dark, bespectacled type – not that she had a type, but if she did it would be that and James Potter would embody it – she simply enjoyed him.
Still, she kept track of who initiated each conversation to ensure that she never started more than half, lest he infer the wrong thing from her enjoyment.
"Stebbins?"
"One, from Valerie. If anyone else dares send him one she'll absolutely lose her shit."
"Pinkstone?"
Lily glanced over at Camelia Pinkstone, who was examining her cuticles, her long blonde hair wound in an intricate braid around her head like a glossy, golden crown. "A million?"
"Heaney?"
"One, and we all know who from." Last year's rose from Sirius Black had instructed Terry to 'cover you naked body in hot oil and deep-fry yourself,' so everyone was quite interested to see how he would top it this year.
"Black will get loads, of course."
"More than he deserves."
"I would have sent him one," said Mary. "But come on, I'm not pathetic."
Lily giggled, but quietly. Talking in class wasn't her usual thing, but it was the last one of the day, Binns was out with the flu - she had been right about it going around - and the substitute, Ms. Carrow, seemed quite happy to pop in a movie and sit at the head of the room with her head buried in her phone, so the whole class was otherwise engaged in atypical behaviour. Potter and Black were two seats to the left ahead of Lily and Mary, playing snap, of all things, which seemed more like an excuse for them to slap each other's hands as hard as they could than an actual card game.
"I almost sent one to Potter," she whispered. "Only I hate it when his lot get roses and Black reads all the cards out loud. He's got no idea how many girls he's sent to the loo in tears."
"Or he does and he doesn't care," Mary tacked on.
"Far more likely."
"And you did send one to Potter."
"What?"
"I was passing the office and thought I might as well do it for you," she said, and grinned at the look of horror that crossed Lily's face. "Don't worry, I sent it anonymously. He'll never know it was you."
"What did you say?"
"Something, something, I like your arse, something, something. I ripped it directly from one of your texts."
"I do like his arse," Lily admitted, her momentary panic subsiding. "But you're still the worst."
"It's for charity!"
"Yeah, sure, you're a true humanitarian."
Five minutes later, when Tilden Toots marched into the classroom with a comically placed Cupid's nappy over his uniform and a box full of roses to distribute, Mary was proven honest. Potter got two, one of which was undoubtedly from Helena Hodge, which meant the other was likely 'her' contribution. Sirius Black got five, Camelia Pinkstone got a staggering seven, Mary got three, and Lily, to her surprise, got three also.
"This one's from you," said Mary, throwing one card down on the table while the rest of the class consulted one another on their haul in a similar fashion and Black tried to wrestle Potter's cards away from him. "This one's from Eddie Bones, and nobody's signed this one but it's obviously that creep Forsythe. What about you?"
"Did you send this one?" she asked Mary, showing her a card.
"Yup."
"And then McNamee, I think. And this one—" Spidery handwriting, and the words 'I'm sorry' written in larger script than the rest of the message. She sighed. "This was Severus."
"Gross."
"More like inappropriate," Lily added, and carefully did not look at Severus, who was sitting across from her on Mary's side. She did, however, scrunch up the card that had come with her flower and toss it on the desk. Severus could read paragraphs that didn't exist from the smallest little thing, and she didn't want to give him any kind of encouragement to follow her out of the classroom bleating his apologies. "You're lucky. At least Bones is fit."
"I honestly thought Potter would have gotten you one."
"You want to believe he fancies me more than I want to believe it," Lily reminded her.
"Well, McNamee's alright, I suppose?"
"I suppose."
"Though there was that whole thing with him and Reshma Patel—"
A knock sounded at the open classroom door, and Ms. Carrow made a peculiar squawking noise, alerting Lily and Mary to the presence of a man holding one of the biggest bouquets of red roses that Lily had ever seen.
"How lovely!" cried Carrow, and practically flung her phone away in her haste to flutter her hands about like sparrows' wings. "Bring them over here!"
The delivery guy trundled over to her desk and held out the flowers. "You're Lily Evans?"
The greedy, enraptured smile on Carrow's face collapsed like a house of cards, while in the same moment the entire class took a collective breath, and Lily felt her face begin to boil.
"She's here!" Mary squealed, and poked Lily hard in the arm. "Here, here, here!"
Every pair of eyes in the room had turned on her. Every single one of them. People were murmuring. The delivery man made his way to her desk and Lily - throwing a baffled look at Mary - couldn't help but notice the enraged expression that had come over Severus Snape's pale, angular face.
No need to ask if he was behind this, then.
"Looks like you have an admirer," said the delivery man, and set the bouquet down on the desk in front of her. "I need someone to sign for these."
"I'll do it," said Mary, and reached for the pen he offered. "As you can see, my friend appears to have gone into shock."
Shock was underselling it. Lily was stunned.
She felt as if she'd been given a short of adrenaline, restlessly excited yet quite unable to move. As far as she knew, nobody fancied her enough to do something like this. Nobody had ever done something like this for her. This was the kind of thing that happened in movies, not in sixth form. It didn't even happen in sixth forms in movies.
This was weird.
This was so weird.
Was it some sort of prank? Was someone angling to see hope in her eyes, then laugh at her behind her back? Was she missing something obvious? Could it really be a prank? Who would spend that kind of money, just to be cruel?
She settled on a blank, wide-eyed silence. Just in case.
"There's a card!" Mary cried, pointing to a little white card that peeped at them from beneath a scarlet petal, then snatched it up herself before Lily had a chance to reach for it. "I'll read it!"
"What does it say?" said Camelia. "Read it out loud!"
"No—" Lily began, but too quietly, and Mary had already started.
"Dear Lily," she read aloud, giggling between words. "Though these roses aren't nearly as beautiful as you, I've found that nothing is, so please forgive my lack of imagination—"
"Holy shit," said Camelia, forgetting herself entirely.
"Happy Valentine's Day, and I'll try to do better next time," Mary continued, her voice getting higher and squeakier with every syllable. "Love, your secret admirer!"
"Holy shit," said Camelia again.
"LOVE!" Mary bellowed. "Someone's in love with you!"
Lily suddenly found herself surrounded by a bunch of girls, all of whom were talking at once, clamouring to see the card - which she eventually managed to extract from Mary's hands and read herself. Sure enough, Mary hadn't embellished one word of the message. There it was, in plain black and white, so sweet and articulate that anyone might have been forgiven for assuming that an adult, not a teenage boy, had written it.
Her eyes travelled up of their own accord and found James Potter's - snapped on to them as if she could sense him watching her - and he stared resolutely back, and the telltale bob of his Adam's apple told her that he'd just swallowed air, and for one particularly wild moment she abandoned common sense entirely and thought, you did this. You.
"—and so romantic," Alice Parker was saying, and nudged Lily's arm as she reached over to finger the card, which brought her back to the present, where grand assumptions based on hope were not made welcome. "Do you have any idea who sent them?"
"Um," said Lily.
"I have a theory," said Mary smoothly.
"I'm sure they don't really love me," Lily quickly interjected. "It's just a figure of speech, right?"
"Why say it if you don't mean it?" said Camelia.
"You must be thrilled."
"I don't — I mean, yes, they're lovely," she admitted, and smiled in spite of herself. "But I've got no idea who —"
"You're so lucky. My boyfriend never gets me anything like this," Valerie Turpin whined, no doubt glaring at Stebbins on the other side of the room.
"I hope you find out who he is."
"I hope he sends—"
"Okay, that's enough!" said Ms. Carrow sharply, her earlier lethargy apparently forgotten in the wake of having embarrassed herself. She rapped sharply on the desk. "Don't you all have study to catch up on?"
Her sudden snappishness sent the girls scurrying back to their seats, and effectively cowed the room for the rest of class, though Lily spotted several heads turning in her direction on more than one occasion. By the time the bell rang to signify the end of both class and school day, she had her things in hand and was ready to run, shooting out of the door ahead of everyone else.
Of course, she still had to wait for Mary, which made her dash for freedom a little pointless.
"I know who sent that!" she yelled at Lily as soon as she got out, bouncing up and down on her toes. "I knew it! I knew he'd come through!"
"Mary, you've got no proof—"
"Potter!" she cried, pointing at James, who had just left the classroom with Black at his side, his backpack hanging lazily off one shoulder.
"What?" Potter replied. He looked extremely uncomfortable, like he had a stomachache.
"Mary," said Lily urgently. "Don't—"
"You sent her those flowers, didn't you?" said Mary bluntly, and pointed at the bouquet in Lily's arms.
His normally beautiful features twisted in revulsion. "No!"
"You're such a liar," Mary countered. "Like it's not obvious that—"
"You're nuts, Macdonald."
"I think you'll find I'm perfectly—"
"Why the hell would I want to send her—"
"Wow," Lily interrupted, loudly. Her. As if the idea of liking her was so offensive. As if nobody could be less appealing. That one was going to stick for a while. "Thanks a lot, James. I know I'm not a model or anything, but you could have tried to sound a little less disgusted."
Potter's eyes widened. "No, I didn't mean—"
"Yeah whatever, message received," said Lily darkly, and turned on her heel. "Come on, Mary. I need to get these home."
It wasn't the most hurtful thing Lily had ever experienced in her life - not by a long shot - but certainly the most hurtful today.
Text Received from: Jane Doe
Sent to: Prongs, on Wednesday, 14th February 2018 at 4:56pm
...
Jane Doe: Did you get any of those Valentine's roses today?
Prongs: yeah loads
Jane Doe: I wish you could see how hard I was side-eyeing you.
How many did you send to yourself?
Prongs: i got a couple
you?
Jane Doe: Can't tell you. What if we were in the same class when we got ours?
I will tell you that I got at least one because almost every girl in school gets at least one, from their friends if not from someone who fancies them.
Prongs: who was yours from?
Jane Doe: No idea. Either I've got a secret admirer or someone's taking the piss.
Prongs: you don't seem like the kind of girl people would want to pick on
if you're saying you got AT LEAST one that means you got loads
Jane Doe: I didn't get loads!
Prongs: yeah right i bet you did
if you turn out to be the fittest girl at school and i've been texting you for weeks without realising i'm going to jump off a bridge
Jane Doe: Who's the fittest girl in school?
Prongs: can't tell you
Jane Doe: Why not?
Prongs: because you might tell her
you might be her
also, rather inconvenient this
but i've been in love with her for about two years so you know
that's great for me
Jane Doe: Wow.
That's pretty heavy.
Does she know how you feel?
Prongs: nope
we don't really talk much
or at all
and when we do i usually make a total arse out of myself and i'm sure she thinks i'm a prick
Jane Doe: So, what? You just pine for Dream Girl from afar?
Prongs: that's pretty much the plan for the rest of my life
Jane Doe: But you said you got a couple of roses.
She might have sent you one, you never know.
Prongs: nah
i'm not even on her radar
i'm like an 8 or a 9, and she's like a 500
Jane Doe: God, you can't even be self-conscious like the rest of us.
How can you be sure that you're in love with her when you don't know her very well?
Prongs: i just am, i dunno
she's gorgeous and clever and funny and brilliant at pretty much everything and she lights up rooms
i'm not exaggerating, she walks into a room and everything gets lighter
it's not like i'm choosing to love her, i just do
i can't help it
it's like nobody else exists when she's around
you can laugh at me if you want, my mates all do
Jane Doe: I'm not going to laugh at you because you're hurting over a girl.
I'm not a horrible person.
Why would your mates make fun of that?
Anyway, I have a crush on someone who basically rejected me, and that sucks, so I sort of get what you mean.
Prongs: that's crap, i'm sorry
whoever he is, he's an idiot because you're super cool
my mates make fun of me because we're blokes and that's what blokes do
Jane Doe: Urgh.
Men are awful.
Prongs: tell me about it, sister
Jane Doe: Hahahahaha!
I just spat out my tea.
Prongs: i thought you promised no laughing at me
jaaaaaaannnnnne
can you even see through your web of lies?
Jane Doe: Oh, shut up you drama llama.
Obviously I was laughing because you're funny and not because you're pining away for Dream Girl like some sad old pine tree.
Prongs: heh
heh heh
you think i'm funny
Jane Doe: You thrive on compliments, don't you?
Prongs: i need at least three a day or i'll collapse into unconsciousness
i can be brought back by an ardent round of applause but sometimes it's a close shave
i might die without constant reassurance
Jane Doe: Well, I can't let you die on my watch, I suppose. It'd be really awkward when I didn't know whose funeral I was meant to go to.
So, yeah, I think you're sort of hilarious.
You made me spit out my tea, which is quite the achievement.
Pat yourself on the back.
Prongs: oh i know i'm quite the comedian
Jane Doe: Gracious as ever, I see.
Prongs: hey, i can give as good as i get!
Jane Doe: Oh yeah?
Take your best shot, then.
Prongs: alright
i think you're dead smart
and witty
and you didn't laugh at my deep dark secret which means you're very kind
and i like talking to you
Jane Doe: Wow. Get you.
Four whole compliments.
Are you feeling charitable or was my life in danger?
Prongs: if you did drop dead
it would be because i killed you with a charm overload
Jane Doe: Okay, I changed my mind. You're literally the worst.
Prongs: wait no i can't...
air supply is...
depleting...
i think i'm choking...
the walls are
closing in
help meeeeee
...
...
Jane Doe: LMAO
Prongs: thank you
that was all i needed