Three years after Arthur had given them The
Talk, Fred discovered girls– the way Angelina bent forward on her
broom, streamlining herself for a dive, ponytail whipping behind her;
the thoughtful beauty of Eloise Midgen chewing on her pen as she poured
over her poetry notebook, however off-center her nose might be. Fred
discovered boys at about the same time–Cedric Diggory’s golden grin,
Cassius Warrington’s broad shoulders–and he stared after them in the Great
Hall.
George knew this, because
Fred told him in the little inventing niche they’d set up in an alcove
of one of the Hogwarts passages. He also
knew it because Fred had been the other half of his world for all of his
life– Fred didn’t like peas, so George ate them. George was afraid of
heights, so Fred dared and dared him into going higher and
higher–patiently, kindly, gently–until at nine George didn’t want to
get down from a broom, even for dinner.
When
one of them set it up, the other had the punchline. When one of them
started it, the other finished the sentence, or the sandwich, or the
job. When Fred stared after Angelina in the Great Hall, George noticed,
and looked to his plate.
When Fred
waxed eloquent about the grace of Angelina’s passes in practice, George
thought about what that meant for Oliver’s game strategies. He
remembered what it had been like, being afraid of air beneath your feet.
When Fred talked smugly about the gardens outside the Yule Ball–the
little niches and nooks, shadowed and cool, Angelina’s backless dress–George fiddled with their latest recipe for Puking Pasties.
Millicent
Bulstrode curled up with her cat in the Slytherin Common Room and read
trashy romance novels late into the night. She didn’t call them
literature but she did call them more worth reading than a lot of
so-called literature.
Their Head of House
didn’t care for enforcing curfews and bedtimes, except on the rare
occasion he got a bee in his bonnet and went about stripping House
points from everyone but his nonexistent favorites, so sometimes she
fell asleep out there with her cat purring in her lap.
She
survived a lot that way–Draco’s sneers at her plump hips and arms,
Pansy’s whispers, Gryffindors’ taunts in the Great Hall where she flipped
pages beside her morning eggs and read about fainting milkmaids and
brave dukes and sinister rogues with hearts of gold. She read through
that terrible last year at Hogwarts, and the war, and then her parents’
divorce, and then boring afternoons running the register at a magical
flower shop.
In the evenings, Millicent came
home from the shop and curled up under a big quilt in her cozy little
home. She wrote letters to friends met via owl mailing lists and long
lines at book signings. Her cat settled down into the little plush
hollow of her lap and purred as she read through the night.
Padma
Patil painted light into the curtains of her four poster in Ravenclaw
Tower– the insides, so she could watch constellations as she slept. She
and Parvati had shared at room, with big windows, at the top of their
parents’ spindly house. It had been on the outskirts of a small town and
on hot summer nights they had left the windows open and made up stories
about the stars.
Padma kissed
Eloise Midgen at the Yule Ball, when she’d tired of Ron’s bitter apathy,
and the handsiness of Durmstrang boys. She hadn’t tired of the volume
of the music, had liked how it beat through her skull, but Padma also
liked new things. So she’d tip-toed into a side corridor with Eloise,
and tried something new, and decided she didn’t care for it. She
preferred painting people, she told El, though kissing was alright
sometimes, and that worked out just fine for both of them.
It
was a book that clued Hermione in–when she told Ginny that it
had been a book that began her wondering, her sister-in-law would nod,
with no evidence of surprise, and offer to buy her another drink.
Hermione
read a book–a fun book, even, the kind of light and often Muggle
fiction that she mandated for herself to fit into the half hour after
her third morning meeting and before her working lunch. But she
resonated with a character in ways she rarely did. Eighty-six pages in
the book used the word “asexual” and Hermione paused, rereading the
page, as her tea went stone cold.
So she
read. She researched. She walked out to the public Muggle library to use
the Internet, because no matter how often she tried to get a router
working in their little flat the wizardry made it go grumpily awry. She
found forums, she found studies, she found books, and then she went home
to talk to Ron.
When Hermione was
done, Ron kissed her absently on the cheek, then paused. “Uh, was that
okay?” He shifted on their hand-me-down sofa and she fiddled beside him
with the fringe on a pillow.
“Yes, silly, it’s not–” She stopped, sighing. “I’m figuring it out.”
A bird shrieked outside the window with a warble that could be generously described as a song. Ron slung an arm around her shoulders and she leaned into him, shy. “You have some reading for me, don’t you?” he said.
“Well…” Hermione said. “Four books, a few pamphlets, some printouts. A bit of light reading.”
Ron choked on a laugh. “I do love you for reasons,” he said.
“Do
you?” she said. Her voice muffled into his shirt. He smelled like
George’s joke shop–polished wood and the sharp must of Peruvian
Darkness powder, firework ash and sinister sweets. He was warm and solid
under her cheek and she liked it, had always liked it–bringing her
back down to earth in the midst of swarming plants; pale and mouthing
off to a murderer in an abandoned shack; remembering the basilisk’s
fangs; remembering the house elves; caring so little except when he
cared too much; bitter and petty and brilliant and warm and hers. “Even now?” she said.
“For
a smart person,” Ron said, “sometimes you can be really dumb. It’s
gonna be okay.” He kissed her on top of her bushy head. “But are you
sure I can’t just–what’s that Muggle thing?–read the SparkNotes?“
Oliver
Wood poured over the training camp notes for Puddlemore United’s rookie
roster, gnawing at the back of his ballpoint pen. The other junior
assistant coach, a Muggleborn, had introduced pens to Oliver a few weeks
back and now his desk was bursting with every type and color. Oliver
scrawled a comment about left-sided feints, staining the paper with
easy, even strokes of ink. He was pretty sure he was in love.
Angelina
Johnson was the middle of three sisters and she thought that was one of
the things she liked about Fred–that he knew that if you wanted
attention, you had to earn it.
Fred
put in the work–the sort of work that made things look easy. But she
could see the edges of it, the years of practice that went into the
jokes that he and George tossed back and forth between their freckled
grins. They snapped Bludgers back and forth the same way, on the field.
That was how it started–she appreciated the lack of bruises and worry,
as she sped toward the goal. They had her back. They’d done their time,
and here they were, broad-shouldered, on point.
So when Fred asked her to the Yule Ball, she said alright–she knew this story. Pretty boy, pretty girl. She leaned her weight on
his arms on the dance floor, touched the nape of his neck in the cool of
the gardens. It was nice, sweet as a fairytale story. He’d clearly
thought about it a lot, and she appreciated his attention to detail the
same way she appreciated how he had brushed his teeth, and combed his
hair, and how he carried her books sometimes.
Maybe,
she thought. In a few years, after school, when she wasn’t worried
about grades, or futures, or Quidditch House Cups, or the way Pansy
Parkinson sneered at her hair. When she had a place to live, and a life
she liked, and maybe a dog. Maybe she’d grow into wanting this, the way
you were supposed to.
But then
Voldemort came, and then the war. Angelina lived in her parents’ spare
room and flew quiet missions for the Order. She heard Fred and George
tell stories on the radio, and met them sometimes when she came to give
Lee reports and news. She held Fred’s hand, she kissed his cheek, but
they didn’t have time for much else.
When
Fred died, she thought about his family–the Howlers and warm sweaters
his mother had sent him, and the way she’d looked up to Charlie as a
rookie on the Gryffindor Quidditch team, and Ginny’s red hair tied back
into a war banner, her freckles smudged with ash. Angelina thought about
the joke shop whose walls she had helped the twins paint.
She
thought about the house she had imagined, the little yard, the bed, the
kitchen table with a basket of apples in the fall. Fred had been nice.
He had asked her to dance. He had put in the work. Maybe they could have
built something, if she had just tried hard enough to want it.
Angelina
went home to her parents. She got a job at a local cafe, pouring
coffee, cleaning tables, paid to smile and pretend to mean it. Her
oldest sister came back from Germany, and her youngest sister left for a
teaching position in a little wizarding school tucked away in
rural Kentucky.
Angelina helped her
mother with the house, and her father with his medicines, and got up
before dawn so there would be hot, fresh coffee for the earliest risers
in town. One day, at the end of her shift, she found George Weasley
sitting in a booth. He was missing part of an eyebrow from an invention
gone wrong and he was surprised and pleased to see her, so she hung up
her apron and sat down.
They talked
about Fred, which was a weird way to begin a romance, but George had
loved him, and Angelina had thought she should.
But
they also talked about the war, about the joyous and goofy look Lee got
on his face when his little sister insulted him lovingly, about
Ireland’s chances for the Quidditch World Cup, about George’s plans for
the joke shop and Angelina’s plans to continue with her schooling.
“Hermione’s
got opinions about advanced magical learning,” George said, over ice
cream, two weeks later. Angelina had been listing out her pro and con
lists for universities–she never wrote them down. “If you want
opinions. You might not, though, fair warning.”
Angelina’s
father was sick again, but that was nothing new. Angelina had never
talked about it with Fred, because when you are sixteen and holding
hands with a cute boy, you are supposed to be thinking about life, not
death, and she had been trying.
But she
was twenty-four, now, and she had flown over occupied territory, holding
her breath, had snapped curses at cloaked strangers and known enemies
alike, had started thinking about what she wanted. George came by her
parents’ house later with loaves of zucchini bread. “I’ve got a little
box in the flat’s window,” he told her. “For vegetables.”
“I’m not going to sleep with you,” Angelina told George, matter-of-fact, four months into
something they weren’t naming. They were holding hands, passing through a
public park on the way home from an Indian dinner that sat heavy in her
stomach.
“Uh. Okay. Because of Fred?” said George.
“No,” she said. “I like how you make me laugh. I like how you listen. But I don’t really want to sleep with anyone.”
“Huh,” said George. “What about, just, actual sleeping, though? Fair warning, I’m a cuddler.”
Four
months turned into eight turned into a year. Angelina moved out of her
parents’ house. They gave this thing they were not naming a name.
They
held hands under the table at Weasley family dinners. Angelina liked
it–the noise, the speed of conversation, the way this family tossed
words and rolls across the table and make it look easy. They had put in
the work, and they were here–Arthur asking Hermione about subway
systems while Molly and Fleur teamed up on Bill. They had put in the
work. They were here. They made good things look easy, but Angelina
could see the years of love and learning.
Hermione and Ron Flooed home, but George and Angelina still liked to fly when they could.
The
flat over the joke shop was not a house with a little yard, but George
kept vegetable boxes in the windowsills. The stairs up were narrow and
creaky, but when they came home by broom they just landed on the tiny,
wobbly little balcony and came through that way.
Angelina hung up
her coat on a rack by the door and shook the damp of clouds out of her
hair. The smells of char, sugar, and wood polish rose up through the
floor, and she had been calling those lungfuls home for months now. Angelina’s mother had gifted her curtains for the windows, but she hadn’t hung them yet. The
kitchen table, which stood streaked with lamplight under the largest
window, was covered in old mugs and old mail and George’s experiments
and her schoolwork.
George chewed on his bottom lip as he worked through
early mornings and late nights, the shop closed and quiet under their
feet. Angelina spoke aloud as she studied, and he listened, and made her
tea, and puttered in the windowboxes until his hands were lined with
rich black dirt.
When Angelina brought home apples in the fall,
George enchanted them to taste like cotton candy, or eggplant, or brown
bread, and they dared each other to eat them the same way they had with
Bertie Bott’s Beans on the Hogwarts Express. The flat was warm,
especially once they put up the curtains. When they went to bed, they
stayed up late. George whispered in the dark, lights winking through the
smudged window glass, and Angelina laughed loud enough to fill the
whole room.