Alone after the glittering ball
The black lake glistened like a teardrop on the grass.
Victor - the warmth and happiness she felt when she thought of being recognized as a girl for the first time, right in front of their faces too - Parvati and Lavender, pointy faced Malfoy whose cruel foolish words stung her more than she let on, hiding behind his father's riches - perhaps she could have forgiven Lucius more than Draco himself for looking down on her, cowardly and weak and young as he was. Before Ron. She had thought it would be exciting.. perhaps even hoped to see his discomfiture. But now that she had it she felt only weary anger towards him for spoiling a beautiful evening with her new foreign friend, disturbing the one evening she felt like a young girl, like a human being, happy and free of her cares.
Victor was kind and funny and sweet - a real dear. She had no great romantic attraction towards him, quidditch did not attract her and he was not as quick-tongued as she'd like a man to be, she mused. But she was grateful to him, for noticing her, for being a friend. It was a wonderful evening. Until Ron opened his big mouth again.
Ron.. it was always Ron, wasn't it? She wasn't sure how she felt about him sometimes.. She remembered seeing him for the first time as a child, tall and gangly, arms and legs longer than his older brothers, a mop of careless dark red hair and a sparkle in his blue eyes as he gesticulated. He had shot a look at her that first day, in the train compartment, and she had felt that infuriating self-consciousness again, that sense that this was a boy - a feeling dear sweet Harry with his clueless fumbling ways and his gentleness could never bring up in her. She turned up her nose, feeling an instant antagonism towards his warmth, his ease, his awkward lanky Ron-ness. That, she thought, is the sort of boy beneath my attention. And she humphed at his disdain for her. He was beneath her notice, wasn't he? I don't like such boys, she had thought furiously to herself.
And yet he stayed in her mind. And somehow or the other despite all her put-on airs, she found herself running, running far away, crying because that awful boy with his energy and his careless warmth, who slacked off classes and made his friends laugh - Hermione had harrumphed to hide a sudden pang of craving - his tight-knit group of red-headed brothers - Hermione could not fathom what it would be like to be be in his world, to feel that sense of almost but not-quite arrogant self-assurance in his belonging - that Ron Weasley would not like her.
And here she was crying over him again.
She had felt no attraction towards Victor on the whole as a person, though the glamor of a Bulgarian quidditch player, an international star who Ron looked up to, had come sweeping in to ask her, the bushy, bucktoothed muggleborn bookworm who hunched over books in the library. Yes, that was truly magical. She couldn't help smiling still in the satisfaction of it.
Though it wasn't completely true that she wasn't attracted to Victor. True, he was not an inspiring conversationalist, and the brawniness of a quidditch player could not really keep her captivated beyond an initial curiosity. But sometimes - from some angles - when the candlelight was sharp on his face, making his sallow complexion glow, the bent of his nose as he knit his brows together and looked away - when he pursed his lips in sudden irritation - sometimes, yes, she did feel her heart race, but the feeling would vanish the next moment as his face rearranged itself into its usual expression and he spoke with his kind interested vapidity - oh how flattered she was! And yet that night, she was left with the incessant feeling that she was grasping at something, at something almost that but not quite - what she was not quite sure.
It was that something she had grabbed at when she saw a sudden gleam in his dark eyes as he bent forward. It was that pleasurable darkness that enfolded her when his arms were round her in the garden, that almost-joy but not quite. But it was fun kissing Victor, practicing with him, Victor was kind and understanding and gentle and easy to kiss. It was nice.
She felt shame envelop her, shame at wanting that Ron Weasley who would never want her in the way she wanted him to, at being so easily hurt by him again and again, shame when she thought of what Victor would think, what everyone would think. She had a sneaking suspicion that perhaps - Hermione was not an avid reader for nothing after all - this vicious anger at his quidditch idol was his roundabout way of saying he liked her. And yet it gave her no happiness, curiously enough. For some reason all she could remember were Ron's half-sneaked glances at the voluptuous Madam Rosmerta with her throaty laugh, the coquettish simpering Lavender Brown, the poised womanly Fleur - all of them something Hermione could never be, could never fake. Thinking this made her feel more inadequate than ever, even with her fixed teeth. Teeth - what triumph she had felt at her newly shrunken teeth. They fitted her face better - she still felt the sudden shock and humiliation of Snape's comment in fourth year.. And yet sometimes she did wonder if it was a foolish thing to have done, to have let the opinions of a middle-aged bully affect her so. Your own are not so fine as all that, sir. Even when being sarcastic in the safety of her own mind, that honorific would never be completely omitted, not when thinking about a teacher, not when thinking about him. Though he wasn't really much of a teacher, Hermione thought rebelliously to herself, though she would never admit the same to Harry or Ron. And for all the volley of insults he hailed on Harry for being arrogant, in her private opinion he was one of the most arrogant people she had ever seen. Awful arrogant man, she thought angrily. She felt a sudden wave of resentment at the unfairness of him, at her own foolish desire for approval from a miserable old bastard. I can't really get approval from him or Ron, she thought with a sudden clarity. And even if I do, what is it worth? Nothing, she realized, it is worth nothing at all.
As though summoned by her wayward thoughts, she felt a sudden hiss as a spell spat past her, the red light scattering stray leaves and red petals. There was a lone red rose left on the ground, somehow not cut up by the force of the spell. Many years later it was the stark image of that blood-red flower on the moonlit ground that remained in her memory, and the tall dark man, with his pallid frowning face, long-fingered hands extending a long ebony wand, who stood across from it.