Flip Side

Flip Side

At what point had it changed? At what point had one become the other? Or is she the one who changed? She does not know.

Ginevra Molly Weasley, fifteen and lovely and lonely at Twelve Grimmauld Place, knows many things. She knows why her brother Ron argues so much with Hermione Granger. She knows why her brother Percy does not answer her mother’s letters. She knows why Luna Lovegood does not act like other girls, and why she does not care. She knows why Nymphadora Tonks does not want to look like herself, and she knows why Remus Lupin will not come out of his room. She thinks on these things sometimes, but she spends far more time contemplating what she does not know.

She does not know why she no longer feels the same as she did.

Things used to make sense. She used to be able to forget abut danger and evil, sometimes. She used to trust that her family would always be there, loving and whole. She used to know what she wanted, and she used to daydream about Harry Potter, and she used to curse Draco Malfoy’s name with all the hatred she was capable of.

Things are confusing now. She is consumed with worries — about her family, her friends, the entire wizarding world. She wishes she could mend things with a quick reparo, but families and hearts do not mend so easily. She does not know what she wants, for it is a choice between many evils. She has acquired a mild dislike of Harry Potter somehow — thoughtless, patronising, self-important Harry Potter, whom she once fancied. Thoughts of Draco Malfoy fill her with a burning desire. She is bewildered.

At Hogwarts, she finds a knut on the ground. She picks it up on a whim, though she has not believed in this sort of magic since she was a child. She contemplates it in class, turning it over and over as she daydreams about Draco Malfoy’s cold silver eyes and elegant hands. He is quiet now, no longer throwing insults or hexes at her, and even held a door for her once, though she thinks he was too absorbed in his thoughts to realise it was her. He has grown taller than Harry, just as slim but broader in the shoulders, and she has caught him looking her way more than once. It pleases her.

She has also caught Harry Potter looking, and that does not please her. She knows he has noticed her at last, noticed a change in her, and he wants her only because she no longer wants him. He is still moody and bad-tempered, thoughtless and convinced of his own importance in everything and of everyone else’s inability to understand. He no longer patronizes her, but she finds his new behaviour shocking, sleazy, and off putting, and it makes her dislike grow stronger.

She contemplates the knut and wonders when, precisely, the coin flipped, for she has found herself inexplicably on the other side.