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Lily shook her head in disbelief. A posh boy. She'd only ever thought of a few snobby purebloods in Slytherin. But here he was, in Gryffindor, same year as her, in the same dorm.
The look on his face as he chuckled at the idea of the Potter Heir getting a job.
Looking back, she was a fool for not realizing it. Though it wasn't discussed as openly as it was in other houses, the words "pureblood," "half-blood," and "muggle-born" were never absent from the Gryffindor girls' bedtime discussions about the boys around them. Especially as the years progressed.
A boy's blood status, whether he was a pureblood or a muggleborn, would be casually and coolly commented on, like a subject he was good at, or the color of his eyes; and she was stupid, naive enough to take it at face value, like one's blood status is actually of the same worth of regard as one's hair style.
At her muggle primary school, kids who openly discriminated between rich and poor were looked upon unfavorably by teachers or other students, and were shunned, being called vulgar and snobbish. But the kids knew, of course. The rich were good, the poor bad. It was in the same small town, but her primary school was separate from Severus', who lived less than a mile away, and the rules were not to hang out with the "dangerous" kids from the other school in the neighborhood.
In retrospect, the fact that she went to Hogwarts and made friends and didn't feel inferior or superior in the school wasn't because she was easy-going, cool and open-minded; it was because she simply projected her mentality from that tiny muggle school in a small town, where every student was pretty much of the similar background. She was just narrow-sighted, looking only straight ahead, never bothering to look up or down.
What's the use of a report card with full of O's? She'd been just a naive fool inside a pretty bauble.
The start of her fifth year, the day she'd been praised by that bully James Potter for being a pretty flower blooming among weeds or some such, had been the worst day of her life since she'd entered Hogwarts.
..
Walking up to the Gryffindor girls' room, Lily was greeted by a dreary air; and the worst of the day was about to get even worse.
Edna Prewett. Her fifth year roommate. She'd been one of Lily's best friend until the second year, when she became a bit of a showoff and drifted away from her, but she was still a decent teammate. She was sitting on her bed, crying.
Several of her fifth grade roommates and the sixth year prefect were sitting next to her, trying to comfort her. The consolation didn't work, and Edna cried herself to numbness. The tears fell without a single sob.
Her depressed mood sank even lower.
Lily forced herself to cheer up. She quickened her pace and approached Edna.
"Lils." A voice, barely above a whisper, and a hand tugged at the hem of her dress.
Lily spun around. It was Mary MacDonald, her muggleborn mate. A really nice girl with a pleasant personality. She had a big heart, and if Edna was crying like that, she should have been there to comfort her, but instead she stood in the corner of the room, staring at the bed, her face sunken and withdrawn.
Then Edna's sobs escalated. At the sound of her sobs, Lily involuntarily pushed away from Mary's hands and walked over to her classmate. As she got closer, she heard her roommates' muffled consolations.
"Your brother wouldn't want you to be like this..." "Yeah, why don't you write him a letter, he'll write back..."
Edna's brother? It dawned on her that she had a brother four years junior. She'd heard about him when they were chatting in their first year of Hogwarts. Edna had boasted about how smart he was and how good he was at arithmetic even at the age of seven. But there were no first year with the last name Prewett at the Sorting Ceremony today. Could it have something to do with that?
Lily walked quickly over to Edna and lowered herself to the floor of her dorm room. She continued to sob, seemingly oblivious to her presence.
"Edna, may I ask what's going on?"
"..."
"Did something happen to your brother, and for some reason he couldn't come..."
Suddenly, the air around the girls turned frosty. Edna's sobs stopped. Slowly, the girl's head lifted, her blue eyes locked with Lily's.
"...It's because of you, Evans. Because of you!"
"Edna?"
Edna shook her head in the next moment, shuddering.
"No, it's all because of me! My fault! What arrogant fool have I been! What did I do, like being friends with you meant anything! What have I done, being so stupid and bragging, to jinx him? I ruined my brother! It's all my fault!"
Edna turned away sharply and buried her head in the bed. Her shoulders were shaking with sobs.
"Evans. Follow me."
Marlene McKinnon, the sixth year girls' prefect, grabbed her shoulders with a gentle but firm hand and pulled her to her feet. Completely bewildered, Lily followed Marlene's lead, pulling herself to her feet and following her out into the dormitory hallway.
"...What the hell..."
"Evans, don't mind over her. I'm sure she will apologize to you once she's calmed down."
"What the hell is going on?"
Lily raised her voice for a moment, then lowered it again.
"Do you think... Edna's brother... Her family's having trouble paying for school...?"
Then she asking about his attendance was certainly tactless thing to do. It was a well-known fact that muggleborn students were admitted to Hogwarts with almost no tuition as a special exemption from the Ministry of Magic.
Marlene shook her head at the naive muggleborn's question.
"The Prewett is a well-established pureblood family, not filthy rich to the point of paying for their unborn grandchildren's tuition in advance like the Potters and Malfoys, but certainly not so poor as not affording to pay for their son's admission. Her brother just didn't get an invitation."
"...Then..."
"Her family waited till the last minute, but he was finalized as a squib."
"Ah..."
Lily didn't know what to say, so she leaned back against the hallway wall. A squib. What must it be like to have a sibling turn out to be a squib, to cry so hard.
She thought about Tuney's inability to use magic. She didn't cry over it. But at the time, she'd hoped, thinking maybe Tuny's just a year late, and they will get the letter together.
'And I think I even felt a deep sense of disappointment that she turned out to be a muggle. Honestly, how long ago was it?' She silently reminisced.
It wasn't actually about magic, it was about not going to the same school. She had dreamed of going to the same boarding school with her sister, like Pat and Isabel at St. Clare's, and becoming Head girls side by side, like the twins in the girls' novels she'd read as a child, a dream she'd since discarded. Such was life.
Lily looked straight at the girl.
"Well, what did she mean, jinxed? Edna was mad at me, though she seemed more mad at herself."
Marlene sighed.
"It's a jinx in the wizarding world - or rather, among purebloods - that it's bad luck to tell anyone about a child who hasn't yet shown his or her first accidental magic... anyone, but especially a muggle or muggleborn."
"...Such a... I've never heard of that."
"Certain kinds of things, they're not written in books, and not taught in the open. But the purebloods are certainly aware of it."
"But why is it bad to talk about a child?"
The 16-year-old prefect smiled wryly.
"It's part of so-called Changeling Jinx. Muggles are, supposedly, jealous of magic, and if you boast in front of them about your baby or your little sibling, who has a great magical talent, muggles or muggleborns will swap their child, who can't do magic, for a wizard's child. Or they'll drain your child's magic and turn their own child into a wizard, and your normal wizard child into a squib."
"Wh...what?"
"Some traditional families are so strict that they even forbid their half-blood offspring to meet their muggle-side grandparents and cousins until the baby's first accidental magic. In general, it's rude to enquire someone about his or her baby before the child is officially announced to be magical. Unless you're really close friends or siblings, many people don't even know if their acquaintances have children until their Hogwarts invitation."
Marlene looked at Lily, and then spoke a little apologetically.
"Edna's boasting about her younger brother was out of line in the first place, and she is to be blamed, not you, even by the pureblood society standards."
Lily was too stunned to speak. She couldn't believe she was right now in the Gryffindor House. Such blatant hatred and vilification of muggleborns. It was vaguely labeled 'jinx'; but was this something that could be blithely passed off like 'bad luck if you break a mirror'?
"Changeling... vicious... unbelievable...!"
Marlene shook his head.
"I know it's bullshit. Edna already knows. But don't touch her now. Not tonight."
Lily took a deep breath.
"...Edna Prewett, she just accused me of stealing her brother's magic. The idea of a muggleborn stealing the magic of a real wizard to become a wizard... is a claim made by dark wizards."
Marlene flushed red at the word 'dark wizard', a worst accusation a Gryffindor could face.
"So, you're going to claim that Prewett is a dark witch? Go for it, Evans. I'd be interested to see the results."
"Ah, of course. A pureblood family is sacrosanct. How can a mere muggleborn student challenge that?!"
Lily blew out a breath. A 'mere muggleborn' was something she hadn't ever said herself since she'd been in Gryffindor, and she hadn't wished to. Ever. Now that she'd said it out loud, she felt like she'd admitted the blatant social gap between them and herself.
Of the two flushing girls, Marlene was the first to regain her composure. The sixth year collected herself and looked away from Lily.
"Changeling is a belief shared by dark wizards and other purebloods, a taboo several centuries, or millennia old in the wizarding world that its origins cannot even be traced. I believe it was born out of a sense of crisis and desperation felt by purebloods, rather than as a logical argument."
"Desperation?"
Marlene was silent for a moment, then spoke up.
"One of my first cousins is a squib. We waited and waited, but never received an invitation letter. The day after it was finalized, my aunt tried to kill herself. She was found and didn't die, but she's still not normal."
"Oh..."
"If my aunt were a dark witch, she'd be more inclined to infanticide instead of suicide. Anyway, what Edna is feeling is not out of line."
"..."
"You muggleborns wouldn't understand the grief, the despair when a close family member, a child, turns out to be a squib, you can't understand it. In a pureblood family... we don't have reliable statistics because they all hide it, but most purebloods have a sibling, a nephew or a cousin who eventually turns out to be a squib. I feel it's roughly one in ten. That's too high a percentage to ignore. And coincidentally, one in ten Hogwarts entrants is muggleborn."
"Of course it's coincidence! And not all muggleborns get into Hogwarts in the first place so it's meaningless!"
"Coincidence, yes. But you see, human emotions don't operate very rationally. I'll draw an analogy: in your muggle society, how would it feel to see 10,000 foreign children a year blithely coming into your country obtaining citizenship, while 10,000 of your own children, your own siblings, your own nieces and nephews are being deported because they were found to be ineligible for citizenship?"
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(Note)
In DH, the Death Eater-controlled Ministry puts the muggleborns into Azkaban for the crime of stealing magic from "real" witches and wizards. I theorize it was not an entirely out-of-blue accusation amongst the wizards.
After all, it's just human nature to accuse outsiders, even if you know it's unreasonable, when some of your children are born with a severe 'defect', while there're steady stream of outsiders with the characteristic that you desperately wanted your children to have.
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