Ginny Weasley and the Red Shoes

Chapter Eight – Just a Story

I’m lying on my bed with the curtains drawn. It’s very late and though I retired hours before anyone else, I’m now listening to the slumbering sounds of my roommates. The bed sheets are sticking to my body and I’d like to go take a bath, but I’m ashamed to admit… I feel much safer staying right where I am, for now.

Some Gryffindor.

At times like these I wonder if the Sorting Hat didn’t make a colossal mistake by putting me here. Although there was never any other house I wanted to belong to – or that my family expected me to be in for that matter – I can’t help feeling that I’m failing to measure up. Like now, for instance, when I’m trying every trick in the book not to think about what happened a few years ago.

Trick in the book. See? I can make a joke about it. Rule number one: nothing’s so terrible if you can make yourself laugh.

Did it actually happen? I ask myself this only because sometimes it doesn’t seem possible. When I’m here at Hogwarts – in the halls, on the grounds, at the dining table – I’m just a regular student, having fun with my friends and sailing through my studies. It will go on like this for stretches at a time. Then one day I’ll be talking to Hermione, or laughing with Colin, or looking at Harry when a stray thought will pop into my head: you all nearly died because of me. And no one has ever said anything to me about it.

It just doesn’t seem real. Or perhaps it’s that I’m letting myself be overly morbid. Rule number two: it does no good to dwell on such things.

I was told this not long afterwards, and for the most part I’ve stuck to that principal fairly well. It helped me immensely in the months that followed. I could go to bed at night and wake up in the morning, blissfully assured that no longer would there be inexplicably missing hours to account for, or schoolmates absent from the hallways, or the tortuous dread of being exposed for the foolish, weak, pathetic little girl Tom ultimately insisted I was.

No lasting harm had been done. Bless Dumbledore; his words saved me as much as Harry’s sword. I left Hogwarts determined to put that awful time completely out of my mind. Then just as I was ready to start off a new year with a clean slate, the Dementors showed up at the school, and with them… the nightmares. All the dark things still hidden in my soul.

Rule number three: a secret is only truly that if you tell no one else about it.

There are things I can never share with anybody – not my family, Professor Dumbledore, nor even Hermione. No one I can talk to about this. No one who could really understand. Well, maybe one person, but… he’s the last person in the world I want to have know such terrible things about me. If he doesn’t already.

Make that a big “if.”

I can’t help dredging it up, humiliating though it is – how much of that diary did he actually read? It’s pointless to wish that he didn’t see anything embarrassing. Almost every entry was about him. Or perhaps Tom simply told him – that wouldn’t surprise me at all. Regardless, he’s been too kind to ever say anything. While part of me is immensely relieved, another part wonders – isn’t the fact that he won’t talk about it even worse?

Isn’t it simply that he already does think less of me?

I have to get over this. I have to put it all behind me, once and for all. I have to forget.

I don’t hear the voice. I don’t see the face, that hair, those eyes –

That insidious form, so like… Harry’s.

For goodness sakes, silly goose, it’s just a boo-

Just a story, I mean.