Petunia was the one who showed her how to put on lipstick.

She traced Lily's lips with a tube of bright red paint and placed a tissue between her lips. When she pulled it back, there was a kiss pressed into it, her cupid's bow outlined in scarlet. "There," Petunia said. "Bet you magic couldn't have done a better job than that." Lily had grinned, she had been so happy.

She sat on the edge of the bathtub and watched as Petunia leaned forward to get a better look at herself in the mirror. She darkened her blonde eyelashes with mascara, blinked, cursed, and rubbed at the black smudge that had appeared on her eyelid. Petunia had a date, and Lily was feeling shy. She wanted to talk to Petunia like she used to. Wanted to tell her that she had gotten her period last year at school, in the library of all places, while studying with Sev. And he had been the first one to notice it. Lily had cried, and Sev, bless him, had quietly spelled her skirt clean.

Lily had so many questions, questions that she was sure Petunia would know the answers to. But they didn't talk anymore. Petunia hated her. And then Petunia looked down at her, took her chin with one hand, the tube of lipstick clutched in the other, and said, "Pucker up." Lily had felt transformed, as if she had just undergone an ancient initiation rite, the kind she had read about in her History of Magic class.

Lily stood in front of her mirror and applied the lipstick to her lips. It's stupid. She was being stupid. She had Potions first thing this morning and there was a good chance it would smudge between the fumes and the heat, and then Sev would definitely laugh at her. She put on the finishing touches and blotted away the excess with a tissue. "Go get him," her reflection cheered, and Lily smiled.

She hurried through breakfast, occasionally stealing glances at the Slytherin table, but Sev was nowhere to be seen. Potter was missing from the Great Hall too. If he's bullying Sev again… She frowned, shoveled down the rest of her food, and said goodbye to her friends. "Where are you running off to so early?" Marlene cried out.

"I have revisions to do. I'll see you at Potions!"

She hurried down into the dungeons, taking the steps two at a time and nearly ran right into Mulciber. "Watch it, mudblood."

Lily drew up short. She could feel her face grow hot. "Watch yourself," she snapped. "I'm a prefect."

Mulciber shrugged and shouldered past her. "Still a mudblood though."

"Five points from Slytherin!"

Mulciber lifted his fingers in a rude gesture and trudged up the stairs. Lily continued on, a little slower, her feet heavier. She kept replaying what had just happened in her head, wishing she could come up with some devastating insult that would have cut Mulciber to the quick, but her mind came up blank. She's not Sev. She wished she was at times.

She spotted Sev already sitting at their desk inside the Potions classroom. He was hunched over, his hair hiding his face, and bracing his elbows against the table with his hands cupping the back of his neck. Lily breathed a sigh relief at finding him alone.

She fished out a mirror, checked her makeup, and walked in, dropping in the seat beside him. "You'll get a hump if you keep sitting like that," Lily said, parroting her mother, as she flashed him a smile. She waited to see what he would say about her new look.

Sev jumped in his seat and turned to look at her with wide, terrified eyes.

"Are… are you okay?" She asked, the smile slipping from her face.

"Fine. I'm fine. How long have you been sitting there?"

Lily arched her brow. "Uh, I just now sat down. Did you fall asleep waiting here or something?"

Sev gave a mix of contradicting answers; shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head and mumbling, "Yes, that's probably what happened."

Sev had always been kind of twitchy, but it had gotten so much worse this year. He jumped at shadows, lashed out at things that weren't there, and he'd started muttering to himself. A steady stream of nonsense from the sounds of it.

Severus stole a quick glance around the empty classroom, as if he was expecting Potter and his little thugs to jump out of hiding. He leaned forward and whispered, "Can I ask you something?"

He was so close, his breath stirred her hair. Lily felt herself blush and she fervently nodded.

"Have you ever heard of a jinx that made you hear things and… and feel things? Like phantom touches?"

Lily blinked. "What?"

Some strange, fever-eyed expression came over Sev's face. "I think Potter jinxed me," he hurriedly confessed. "I hear his voice constantly, even when he's not around, even when I'm alone. It's always vile and awful and– and I can feel someone touching me. Like, little quick touches, there one minute and gone the next. I've searched every book in the library I can think of, and I can't find anything like it. I've been badgering Slughorn for days now to get me a pass into the Restricted Section, but–"

"You've been hearing voices?" Lily asked, her brow furrowed.

"Don't– don't say it like that," Sev insisted. "Not in a crazy way. Potter did something. This is his fault, and when I figure out what it is I'll curse his tongue to flip inside out."

Okay. Okay, she can fix this. This was fixable. There were medications for this sort of thing now, right? And the Wizarding World had to have a cure. They had a cure for everything.

"Sev," Lily spoke slowly, in a quiet, soothing voice. "Maybe you should visit Madame Pomfrey."

He jerked away from her, and the sudden loss of his heat left her shivering. "I told you, I'm not crazy!"

"I didn't say you were–"

"You didn't have to," he snorted. "Madame Pomfrey, really? She'll have me locked up in St. Mungo's fast enough to make my head spin."

Oh God. "You like Madame Pomfrey, remember?" Lily urged. "You think she's the only one on staff that has any sense."

"She also follows Dumbledore's every order and he hates me. Everyone's always blaming me for the fights I get into with the Marauders, when they're the ones who start it!"

She'd had this conversation with Sev a hundred times, but it suddenly took on new meaning, knowing what she did now. Lily had always thought Sev was just prone to exaggeration, but this… this was paranoia.

Lily was not allowed to talk about Uncle George. Uncle George was sick. Uncle George was locked away. Uncle George did not exist.

She discovered him quite by accident. He had been completely erased from her father's life, and her grandparents'. Walking into their home, looking at the pictures hung on the walls, you would be forgiven for thinking Henry Evans was an only child. Every photograph of George Evans had been systematically destroyed, all but one, a small photograph of a little boy on a swing tucked away in her grandmother's Bible. Lily had found it, and when she asked about it her grandmother had sat her down and said to her, "You mustn't tell anybody," and she explained that George had been their perfect, wonderful little boy. And then, not long after he turned eighteen, something changed. A bomb had gone off inside his brain, and he was no longer just George. He was paranoid, suspicious. He heard things. One day her grandparents came home from the shops and found that George had taken a hammer to the living room wall in search of hidden cameras placed there by the government. George was placed in an institution after that. Disappeared. His pictures gone, the hole patched up and wallpapered over. There was never any George.

Lily sometimes wondered what it would be like to just pretend away a whole person, as if they had never been a part of your life. Could Petunia do something like that? Could she one day get so sick and tired of magic that she would take down her sister's photographs and pretend Lily had never existed?

Ophelia Queensbury, the fifth year Slytherin prefect, poked her head in the classroom. "Snape, I thought I'd find you here," she said. "Get back to the common room. Classes are canceled today."

Sev narrowed his eyes in confusion, but obediently gathered up his things. "Why? What's going on?"

"Just get to the common room. Slughorn will explain everything. Evans, you're supposed to come with me. Prefect meeting with the Heads of Houses."

Lily glanced over her shoulder as she followed Queensbury out of the classroom, but Sev wasn't looking at her. He was shoving books in his bag and his hair was covering his face again. He hadn't even noticed the lipstick.

"Alison Hayes never returned from Hogsmeade yesterday," Queensbury murmured in Lily's ear. "And some sort of skull has appeared above the Three Broomsticks."

Night had fallen, and Lily could just make out a small green light glowing softly in the direction of Hogsmeade from her spot in Gryffindor Tower. It looked like a far-off star.

Despite how crowded the common room was, no one spoke above a whisper. It was well-past curfew, and Lily – as a prefect – should be herding the younger years up the stairs, but nobody wanted to leave the safety of the common room. Alison Hayes was dead. Lily couldn't wrap her head around it. Alison Hayes was dead. Her body was found behind the Three Broomsticks, in an alley tucked behind some bins.

"It was Death Eaters. It's their calling card, you see. When they kill someone, they create this ghastly skull with a snake coming out of its mouth. They call it the Dark Mark," a girl whispered. "They killed a reporter for The Daily Prophet over the summer. My mum's an Auror. She told me about it."

When had it all started? She remembered there had been the odd disappearance or two last year. A politician, or a wealthy half-blood, or a community organizer. Grown-ups. Black had insisted it was the Death Eaters behind it all, and everyone had laughed at him. It sounded like crazy conspiracy stuff. The Death Eaters were just a silly political organization with a stupid name that held no real power. All they did was blame Muggles for the world's problems and anyone with half a brain could see they had no real plan, no direction; they were just angry, and they would soon fizzle out like so many before them.

Lily had never thought much about politics before. Her parents actively discouraged it. "You're a pretty girl, Lily, don't get mixed up in that sort of thing," her mother said. "I wish you'd stop running around with that Snape boy," said her father. "Tobias Snape is an agitator. He's calling for a strike. Times are bad enough as it is without a drunk day-labourer stirring up trouble." And anyway, Lily had too much to think about to bother with politics, like homework and getting her first kiss. There would be time enough for politics later, when she was grown up.

But this was Alison Hayes. Alison Hayes wasn't an adult. She was a kid. She was seventeen years old and she was at the top of her graduating class. She had gotten all O's on her NEWTs. She was going to be something.

"She was cut in half," Pettigrew whispered and Lily shut her eyes, but she could still see that flashing green light from beneath her eyelids.

"No way!"

"You're making that up."

"It's true, I overheard McGonagall talking about it to Flitwick. She said Hayes was bisected," Pettigrew said, carefully stressing each syllable. "She was naked too."

Lily opened her eyes. Pettigrew was sitting with his little friends– Lupin and Black and Potter. Lupin was biting his thumb and staring at his feet. Black was bouncing his leg, his arms folded into himself. And Potter– Potter was leaning forward, his eyes bright, his mouth parted. "Had she been– you know–" Potter asked.

"Potter!" Lily hissed.

"It's just a question."

"It's not appropriate!"

"Scared it might have been you?" Potter asked and Lily shut her mouth, her teeth cracking against each other. Her breath was fast and shallow. "You should be careful from now on. You're a Muggleborn too. Don't go off to Hogsmeade by yourself like last time."

"Don't tell me what to do," Lily growled. "And I wasn't by myself. I was with Sev."

Potter raised his eyebrows. "Really? Because I saw you get on one of the carriages heading back to Hogwarts. Alone."

"Something had come up, Sev had to leave–"

"He just ran out on you?" Potter asked. His brows were raised, his eyes wide, like he was shocked, but there was something fake about his expression.

"Probably killed Hayes himself," Black muttered.

"Don't say that!"

"Come on, Lily, I know you've heard the rumors. Some of the older Slytherins have even met Lord Voldemort or whatever his name is. Bet you Snape was one of them. Greasy little git loves it when we have to dissect anything in Potions. Hayes was just another frog for him to gut."

"Shut up."

"He is kind of creepy," Marlene spoke up from her spot by the fireplace. "He's always watching you."

"You said he left you. He could have been up to anything. He had plenty of time to murder Hayes."

"He's violent. Did you see the way he reacted when Sirius tripped him last year? I thought he was going to break his nose."

"Shut up!" Lily screeched. "Shut your fucking mouths!"

The entire common room was silent. They were all staring at her. Lily stood up from her chair and stormed up the stairs to her dorm, throwing open the door. She slowed to a stop in the center of the room and stared out of the purloined window, out across Black Lake where the green light twinkled in the night sky.