Ginny and Draco Do America, or, Dude, Where's My Eye?

"The situation's desperate," said Professor Moody. "Last ditch. We'll be down to fighting in the streets next."

"I know," Harry said brightly. "It always seems to work out that way around us, doesn't it? Well, as usual, we'll save the day. What do we need to do? Defeat Lord Voldemort with a paper clip? Fight back scores of rabid dementors by raising an eyebrow sardonically in their general direction? Build a spaceship to Mars with a piece of looseleaf paper and a stapler?"

"All in a day's work for us," yawned Ron. "It's getting rather boring, actually."

"Didn't I just say," growled Moody, "that the situation was desperate?"

"Well, what is it?" asked Hermione, fiddling with a gyroscope on a shelf and accidentally solving Einstein's problem of the integration of gravity with quantum mechanics.

"I'm down to my last gin and tonic." Moody shook out the bottom of his flask, looking into its emptiness gloomily. "Oh, and an evil force from beyond the grave kidnapped my magic eye."

"What?" exclaimed Hermione. "Oooh, that's really bad!"

Moody nodded solemnly. "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Then it's just a game. Find the eye."

"It's Voldemort, of course," said Harry.

Draco's silvery head popped into the doorjamb. "That's your answer to everything, isn't it, Potter?" he sneered. "There's a hair in your soup. The lock to your bedroom door is sticking. Mutilated bodies are mysteriously piling up just outside Gryffindor Tower. Ooh, it must be Voldemort!"

Ron looked up. "Sod off to another dimension, Malfoy," he said, in a tone that could have been more polite.

"No…" mused Draco, stepping inside Moody's office, "I think I'll stay here and annoy you, Weasley. It's too easy, I should be ashamed, really. A bit like drowning baby birds, or criticizing boy bands."

"Twit," said Ron.

"Creep," said Draco.

"Flit."

"Neanderthal."

"Nancy-boy."

"Subhuman spawn of the Cthulhu."

"Stop it!" said Hermione impatiently. "Professor Moody, what do we have to do in order to find your magic eye?"

Moody indicated a spinning rift in the sub-space continuum, located just over the stacked washer and dryer in the corner of his office. "Have you ever noticed how one sock disappears in each load of laundry?"

They all stared dumbly back at him.

"At Malfoy Manor, we have legions of house-elves to do all the dirty work. I've never lifted a finger in my life," said Draco, idly examining his perfectly buffed nails.

"Did your mother have any children that lived, Malfoy?" asked Ron.

"I know about the disappearing socks," said a small voice. It belonged to Ginny, who'd been sitting shyly at the coffee table, her homework stacked in front of her and completely hiding her face.

"Sorry, Weasley, didn't see you," said Moody. "Never can figure out how you get overlooked all the time, since you're nearly six feet tall and have flaming red hair."

Ginny ducked her head, attempting to shrink into the smallest space possible. "I do all the laundry at home."

"So you know," said Moody, "that it's always just the one sock."

She nodded. "It gets sucked into quantum space and violates the uncertainty principle."

"Ten points to Gryffindor," said Moody. "Not that the point system may matter much anymore once the fabric of reality has been ripped beyond repair, but it's important to bash on regardless. At any rate, I took advantage of the sock paradox to build a wormhole. It uses the magiphysical principles of randomness and uncertainty in ways that should draw you towards the magic eye, wherever in the world it may be. It has already generated a parchment-" Moody waved a scroll in the air "-that should, if properly treated, reveal a set of instructions for the search. Oh, and one other thing. There's a bonus if you get killed."

Harry started towards the whirling spiral over the dryer, which looked uncommonly like the flushing toilet in the old Ti-Dee-Bowl commercial.

"Harry!" exclaimed Hermione. "You can't just jump into it! That's-"

But she was too late. Ron and Draco were far too busy hexing each other in the corner to pay the slightest bit of attention. Each of them had ten differently colored neon fingernails with little golden bells at their ends by the time Harry's yell echoed through the worlds while he fell through the rift.

"I wanted to play hopscotch with the impenetrable mystery of existence," sighed Moody heavily, "but he stepped in a wormhole and had to go in early. Damn you, Potter, this square-jawed-Tom-Cruise-hero bit does get tiresome, sometimes--" The professor tried to grab at the edge of Harry's cloak. The spinning circle widened a bit and enveloped Moody as well.

Ron, Hermione, Draco, and Ginny stared at each other.

"Oh dear," said Hermione. "Harry isn't exactly dense, but he's not a pillar of lucid thought either."

"This isn't good," agreed Ron. "He's the hero who saves the day. We're merely the sidekicks. I provide comic relief, and you say clever things and take care of the exposition. What do we do now?"

"If we only had that parchment," sighed Hermione.

Ginny gave it to her. "I got it from Professor Moody before he was sucked into the wormhole," she whispered.

"Good job, Gin," her brother said vaguely, peering at it. "Now go off and play with Barbies or something; we're busy."

"It's blank," said Hermione. She tapped it with her wand, muttering Revealing spells. "Ooh, I know what it is." Her face fell. "It can only be seen with a potion brewed at the dark of the moon in the heart of the Forbidden Forest under the tenth leaf of the fifth branch of the oldest larch tree while watching a rerun of 'Monty Python.' I'm no good at potions."

Ron shook his head. "Me neither." Ginny made a negative motion with her shoulders.

"Well, well, well," drawled Draco, sauntering up to the table. "Looks like someone's input is needed after all."

"If you think you can upstage us by revealing the parchment's arcane secrets with a cursed forbidden brew from the Dark Arts-" began Hermione.

Draco took the parchment from her and turned it over. "Writing's on this side."

"Oh," said Hermione in a tiny voice.

Ginny laughed out loud, throwing her head back. They all turned to stare at her. "Sorry," she mumbled. Draco's eyes lingered on the little tendrils of hair that had escaped from the severe braid at the nape of her neck. He pictured her hair unbound, tumbling about her as they laughed and romped in a field of flowers, running, holding hands, sappy music playing from some mysterious source and vaseline hopelessly smeared over the camera lense-- No, no. He shook himself. The powers of ultimate evil he had sworn to serve did tend to rather look down on that sort of thing.

"I can't make this out at all," said Ron. "Apparently it's some sort of incredibly complicated spell cast by a wizard named 'Hertz Rent-a-Car.'"

Ginny cleared her throat. "It's a claim check for a Honda Civic."

"How do you know that?" her brother demanded.

"Dad was fascinated by car rental agencies last summer and collected receipts by the bagful. You weren't paying much attention."

"Oh. Right." Ron suddenly seemed inordinately fascinated by the skull and crossbones pattern on the wallpaper.

"That was the summer Fred and George turned him into a Mexican Hissing Cockroach," Ginny whispered to no-one in particular; or then again, it might have been to Draco, who was looking intently into her big golden eyes.

"That only lasted for a day or so!" protested Ron.

"Three months," said Ginny sotto voce.

"It did not-stop humming La Cucharacha, Malfoy!"

"We don't have any time to waste," said Hermione. "We've got to go through that wormhole right away." She grabbed Ron's hand. He immediately turned at least a dozen slightly differing shades of red.

"What about us?" asked Ginny, her voice louder now.

"Us?" growled Ron. "First of all, you're not going because it's too dangerous. Second of all, Malfoy's not going because I would prefer being draped with beef jerky and dropped into a pit of starving wolverines to traveling anywhere with him."

"It's this or another summer at Malfoy Manor," muttered Draco. "I think I'd take the wolverines, too."

"The world's smallest violin is playing, 'My Heart Pumps Purple Piss For You,'" said Ron sarcastically (which, come to think of it, has been determined by the Grammar and Intonation Police to be the only way in which that particular sentence can be said.) He turned to Hermione. "Let's go."

Ginny bit her lip. Her hands tensed. She leaped up from her chair and grabbed the parchment from her brother's hand. "Here-what are you doing?" yelled Ron. "Give that back!" Ginny shook her head and started through the wormhole, pulling Draco with her by the other hand.

"My, my, but you're full of surprises, Weasley," he said to her. "I never would have guessed. Or perhaps I should've. McGonagall never did figure out who mooned all the first-years' from the Astronomy Tower on the opening day of term; tell me, was that you?"

Ginny glanced back. "Damn," she said. "We haven't lost them."

The four whirled through a tunnel-shaped dislocation of time, space, and reality. It was rather reminiscent of the exquisite imagery during the extended sequence at the end of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or perhaps it had more in common with the nightmares one is generally plagued by after eating three pints of Phish Food Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream with a side of a deep-fried Snickers bar at three in the morning. At any rate, the ground rushed up towards them with sickening speed, and they tumbled, as one, into a green clearing in a forest.

Ron sat up and rubbed dirt all over his nose. Hermione made a tsking sound with her tongue, spit on a handkerchief she pulled from her robes, and started scrubbing his face with it.

"Oh, stop it, 'Mione, do-- that's what Mum would always do just before we went to the coven gathering on Walpurgisnacht, when she'd bring the potato-crisp-tuna casserole--"

"Way to create romance, Hermione," she sighed to herself, tucking the handkerchief away.

"What?"

"Nothing-- nothing--" She glanced from side to side. "Where on earth are we?"

The land was green and lush, and tall trees towered on either side of them. Draco was sitting up and talking to Ginny in a low voice, brushing her hair back from her forehead. Ron growled something incoherent low in his throat.

"You've got a huge piece of mud hanging right off your nose, Weasley," drawled Draco. "Looks like a perfectly enormous bogey. Here, right there--"

"Don't touch me!" Ron glared at Draco. "Don't ever touch me!"

"Someone hasn't taken their happy pills today," the blond boy observed snidely.

"Where are we?" whispered Ginny.

"Look." Hermione raised a trembling hand towards a huge sign, almost obscured by a large group of Japanese tourists who were slowly advancing on the four of them with little bows, brandishing tremendously complicated cameras that would have made Colin Creevey drool in ecstasy. "The Santa Cruz Mystery Spot," she read.

"Ooh, I don't understand," moaned Ron.

The sound of snapping and clicking grew louder and louder. The tourists poked one another and giggled. Several started posing next to Ron and fingering Draco's silvery hair wonderingly. One small group wouldn't stop feeling the material of Hermione's robes.

"Hey-- stop it! Stop! Now that's definitely a bad touch!" Hermione slapped their hands away, but there were simply too many of them, and now they were starting to undo Ginny's braid and pull out strands of her red-gold hair for souvenirs; her lips trembled and she wrapped her arms around herself, the situation looked desperate--

A legion of elves descended down on them from the hills, floating just above the earth, dressed in robes of shining green. an unearthly glow on their faces. Their hair was long and blond, and they all bore an uncanny resemblance to Orlando Bloom's portrayal of Legolas in The Lord of the Rings. They had long knives and quivers of arrows at their belts, except for one at the back who carried a surfboard. The tourists all stopped what they were doing and stared vacantly in front of them. One by one, they filed back to their tour bus.

"The Quenya have come to save us, the high-elves of song and legend!" gasped Hermione.

The lead elf stopped in front of her, filled with majesty and beauty beyond the like of the children of men. They all felt the power that was in him, a power that reached past time and space into the eternal dimensions of Middle- Earth and beyond. He opened his otherworldly mouth.

"How's it hanging, dudes," he said gravely. "Good thing we found you. We were just headed out to catch some tasty waves." He held out a lit joint. "Want a hit?"

They all stared at him.

"But you're elves," breathed Hermione. "You're supposed to be frolicking through the forest with harps and singing ancient lays."

All the elves snickered at her last word.

"Times change," the lead elf shrugged. "We hang out, tell fortunes, surf, run the local Renaissance Festival--"

Draco stepped forward.

"My man!" one of the elves exclaimed. "Gimme some skin."

Dracowasn't the least bit sure of what had just been communicated, but he jammed his hands behind his back as quickly as he could.

The elf shook his head. "Hopelessly uptight. You need your chakras cleansed, dude. "

"I'll bet they haven't even had their house feng shui'ed yet," added another elf.

"They need Zen meditation."

"Herbal cleansing."

"A Pilates class."

"A high colonic."

"If you've quite done figuring out what's wrong with us," Draco said coldly. The head elf moved forward again, and Ron, who was standing closest to him, backed off.

"No touching please, we're British," he said in a strangled voice.

"Please," said Ginny, plucking up all her courage, "if you could just tell us-- where are we?"

The elves stared at her in amazement.

"You mean you don't know?" the head elf asked.

"If she knew, would she be asking you?" Draco snapped.

The elf made a downward motion with his hand, which they could all now see was tattooed with henna. "Chill, dude. You're in California."

Ron, Ginny, and Draco all looked blank. But Hermione gave a little squeak.

"Oooh, I've heard of this place!" she moaned in terror. "I've watched imported American television programmes! They're all absolutely mad! They run about with guns and live in twenty-two minute segments with commercial breaks! Theme music follows them everywhere! We'll never get out alive!"

Unconsciously, Draco stepped closer to Ginny. Unfortunately, that also meant that he moved closer to Ron, who pulled his wand from his robes and growled, "Galerus Saltatus!" This was an extraordinarily unpleasant spell which forced its unlucky victims to perform the Mexican Hat Dance for thirty-six hours on end while yelling "Olé!" at intervals, and it would probably have led to no end of unpleasantness. However, nothing happened. Ron gave his wand a stricken look.

"You guys didn't pass through magical customs, did you?" the elf asked shrewdly.

"No," mumbled Ron. "We came through a wormhole that propelled us past time and space."

"Good way to avoid airline food," said the elf. "But it means your wands don't work."

"Oh, no," whimpered Hermione.

"We'll have to survive on our wits alone," said Ron.

"That's it. We're dead," said Draco.

Ginny threw back her head and laughed. Her pearly white teeth gleamed in the bright sunlight, and her full pink lips parted. Draco had a sudden vision of pulling her into a long passionate kiss until she moaned and writhed beneath him, begged him to rip her robes from her body in shreds, and--

"Ahem," said Hermione.

He suddenly realized that all the elves were staring at him and tittering behind their hands. Then he remembered that he'd unbuttoned his robes in the warm California air and was wearing only a T-shirt and a pair of very tight shorts beneath them.

"I've gone blind," said Ron, covering his eyes.

An hour later, they were standing next to a white Honda Civic in the parking lot of Hertz Rent-A-Car. Ron kept eyeing the automobile suspiciously.

"For heaven's sake, Ron," said Ginny with unusual spirit, "it's not going to bite you."

"I'm not so sure," her brother said, examining the grill.

"Dad's brought cars home loads of times. Remember the Chrysler minivan?"

"Yeah, all the other wizards teased him no end about that one."

"What about the time you and Harry took that flying car to Hogwarts?" Ginny's voice broke into the octave above high C when she said Harry's name, but Ron didn't seem to notice.

"That was almost five years ago, Gin. I just never paid much attention to any of the cars."

"Well, maybe you should have!"

Ron's eyes widened. "What's gotten into you, Ginny?" Then a realization seemed to hit him. "If we can't use our wands-- and we can't do magic-- oh no! That means I can't--"

"What?" asked his sister.

He closed his mouth with a shut. "Nothing! Never mind!"

Hermione eyed them thoughtfully. "Now I wonder what that was all about..."

"So you understand what to do?" asked the elf.

"I think so," said Hermione doubtfully. "We drive to our next destination, which is Santa Monica. There, we'll meet a wizard who'll give us our next set of directions. Seems simple enough."

"Right then," said Ron briskly. "Into the car. You-- and you-- and--" He held up a hand to bar Draco from getting into the Honda. "Not you."

"Oh, really," sneered Draco. "And just what do you think you're doing?"

"Leaving you in a Hertz Rent-A-Car parking lot in Santa Cruz, California."

"You're mad, Weasley. I always knew it. At least Potter has two brain cells to rub together, but you--"

Ginny caught at her brother's arm. "You can't simply leave Dr-- I mean, Malfoy here, Ron. We're thousands of miles from home. Where is he supposed to go?"

"Isn't there an ocean here or something?" Ron asked rhetorically (or considering his grade on last term's Muggle Geography, perhaps the question wasn't rhetorical after all.) "He can go live on the beach. He can dig with his little shovel and pail. He can eat sand for all I care! But one thing he's not going to do is get in this car and ride God only knows how far with my friend, my sister, and especially me."

"What did you mean by that last crack, Weasley?"

"Isn't it obvious, Malfoy?"

"Oh, please, don't argue," begged Ginny.

Draco looked at her in a distinctly dewey-eyed way. "If you don't want to me to, I won't," he said. The forces of evil gave a collective groan.

Ron yawned.

"I don't understand," Hermione said suspiciously. "Why aren't you more upset that Malfoy's talking to your sister that way?"

"Don't be stupid, Hermione," Ron said impatiently. "Isn't it obvious that he's--"

"Gay and happy and free are we,

We roam through the forest so wild and free!

At laws and customs we do scoff,

On Fridays palm readings are twenty percent off," sang the elves as they trooped away.

"Well, I finally did hear the elves sing," said Hermione. "I suppose that's something to tell my children someday. " She looked at Ron, who was trying, with remarkable lack of success, to stuff Draco into a garbage can that read "Santa Cruz Recycles-- It's Good Karma." "Look, have you thought about one little problem?" she asked.

"What?" yelled Ron as the blond boy pushed his head into the TypeIV-NBCZ plastics again. (Saran Wrap used for less than one hour on all-organic wheatgrass salads.)

"Does anyone know how to drive this car?"

Silence. Then:

"Uh-oh," said Ron.

Draco leaned back, crossed his arms, and smirked. "Well, well, well. It's nice to feel needed."

"You know how to drive?" Ron asked, his mouth agape.

"My mother gave me secret lessons last summer," said Draco. "We'd sneak past the rabid wolverines at the front gate of Malfoy Manor to the driving centre... she's not a bad sort, really, is Mum."

"We have to take him," Hermione said flatly.

"I'd rather be dipped in honey and thrown to the flobberworms," said Ron.

"You're going to have to ask him."

Ron was silent.

"If we don't find Moody's eye... and Moody... and Harry... we're stuck here."

Ron glanced at the tie-dyed hippie denizens of Santa Cruz moving around him, and gulped. "I could stand it," he said in a strangled voice, "if they didn't expect you to get in touch with your feelings. Alright. I'll do it! I'd rather be impaled on the branches of the Whomping Willow, but I'll do it." He shuffled forward.

"Malfoy, wouldjacomewitus," he asked his feet in a very unenthusiastic way.

Draco lifted an eyebrow. "I didn't quite catch that."

Ron lifted his head a bit more. "Would you come with us," he repeated in a monotone.

"I didn't hear the magic word," Draco said pleasantly.

"Please," Ron spat.

"With whipped cream?"

"Okay."

"And a cherry on top?"

"Yes!"

"So I get to sit next to Ginny the whole trip?" purred Draco, looking at Ron slyly.

"Oh!" Ron looked startled. "I suppose. If you want to. But you're not sitting next to me!"

"Hmmm..." Draco seemed to ponder this. "Could you please state that in the form of a desperate cry to God to
save you from an unholy death?"

"Malfoy--"

"Alright, alright." Draco held up a long, slender hand. "Let's go."

Ginny, in the front seat, sipped at one of the Diet Cokes they'd gotten from a machine in the parking lot. Draco smiled at her, uncertainly, almost shyly. Oops! The Honda Civic missed the rear bumper of the Geo Metro in front of it by perhaps half a millimetre. Perhaps it would be a good idea to keep his eyes on the road, for the moment. He was used to sneering and smirking, operations which were generally associated with wielding the power of life and death over menials, house-elves, and random Muggles that Father would bring into the house to torture over the Christmas holidays as he tried to do his homework in the next room , but a smile... ah, that was something different. He cleared his throat.

"Do you like that? Is it good?" He indicated the aluminium can.

Ginny rolled a mouthful around her teeth. "Actually, it tastes rather like malted battery acid. But you know, I'm getting used to it."

"I'll get you oceans of Diet Coke if you want them," he said impulsively.

"You know, I always thought you were the embodiment of pure evil."

"Funny," said Draco. "Mother used to say that was Barry Manilow."

"Well, you're not." Ginny gave him a heartbreaking smile. "You're rather sweet."

There were a few moments of silence. Then, from the back seat:

"Are we there yet?" asked Ron.

Hermione sighed and pulled a folded atlas from the side pocket of the car door. "You don't really understand just how big this country is, do you?"

Ron looked at the atlas, furrowing his brow. "Well, it's about as large as our part of England, isn't it? I mean Hogwarts to Ottery-St. Catchpole, maybe including King's Cross."

Hermione rolled her eyes.

"Well, you do realize that those are the only places I've ever been in my life!"

She unrolled the atlas with a snap, and it cascaded over the back seat. Underneath, she moved a little closer to him. "Let me explain a few things," she said.

The car pulled out onto Highway 68, towards Carmel and the long, winding Highway One that would lead them along the coast to the sprawling monstropolis that was Los Angeles. And towards the mystery that awaited them. Indeed, one might say that they were riding in a mystery machine towards an enigma that must be solved. It was a great pity that only Hermione had ever seen American television, or they could all have joined in a rousing chorus of the original theme song to Scooby Doo, Where Are You?, for it would have been highly appropriate.