Myrtle

Myrtle

..........

My parents were both Catholics. They never attended the services; nor did they pray or read from the Bible. I remember though, that they refused to divorce, though their marriage was in ruins for as long as I could remember. And I could remember a lot.

My father had been a drunk for years, ever since I had been born. He would come home from wild parties, singing and howling happily, but that did not mean that he was in a good mood. It was likely he had been stuffed with food and liquor and he had to be driven back home. One of his few friends would come and leave him on the couch in our small living area of our trailer and he would be hiccoughing and yelling nonsense, often swearing sickening things at my mother and insulting me at the top of his lungs. He was drunk of course, almost to the point of losing consciousness, but I was not ever eight, and I thought he meant all those things he said. Each morning the house smelled of alcohol.

I remember that my mother was a dear, but when I aged I realized she was terribly controlled by my father. It took me a while to realize how brutally he beat her. Sometimes I heard her screams. She tried to cover bruises with what makeup she could afford, but I could make out scars along her face and neck and she was feeble and often shook when she moved.

She would come to me in the night and lay by me, trying to close out the sounds of my drunken fathers yells. She would take my string hair in her thin hand and play with it, singing me a song that I could barely hear. I'm sure that once, before she had met my father, my mother had been beautiful.

I had never been beautiful. It was peculiar how pudgy I grew despite how little I was fed. We never seemed to have food at my house. The ice box held mostly beer and stale milk and in the little pantry were crackers and apples purchased at the market place weeks ago.

"Myrtle, dear, you're Hogwarts letter has arrived," said my mother one afternoon, excitement barely clear through her melancholy, quiet voice. I took the letter happily, grinning broadly as I shredded the letter open. My mother was a witch, but she had been a squib all her life. I had been beginning to loose hope that I would never be accepted to Hogwarts, but when I opened the letter the day after I turned eleven, all my fear was gone and I knew that I would be leaving my home.

But I knew not the dangers that were to befall me when I went to Hogwarts. As it was at home, and through my neighborhood, and through my town, I was misunderstood. People took one look at my short and squat figure, my stringy grayish hair and the thick glasses that were constantly falling down my nose and they judged me before they got to know who I was.

I became quite alone, even more so than before. Several students, most of them much older than myself, tried to be kind to me, but after a while they forgot my name and tried to stay away from me. I dwelled by myself, mostly in the Library, with my large books of Shakespeare and Dickens, my head always buried in them. I did well in school, until the other children in my year started to taunt me for being a goody-two-shoes and a teacher's pet.

"Look at ugly miss Myrtle!" they would say as I walked through the halls, trying to avoid everyone as they taunted me. "Fat Myrtle, always with her nose in a book." Sometimes they would chase me, and once they even took my school books and threw them across the floors, taunting me. One girl in my year stood up for me, but they teased her as well and she remained quiet. Then I met Olive Hornby.

Olive was a Slytherin girl. She was in second year and at first I thought we would possibly turn out to become friends. She was hardly pretty--tall, and extremely thin with very short hair and dark circles beneath her eyes. Sometimes I saw her being taunted and picked on in between classes and my heart hurt for her, for I knew what she was feeling. One day we were alone in the halls and I offered her a smile.

"It's all right. They'll make fun as much as they want but we'll get through it someday, right?" I said to her in the friendliest way possible. The frightful girl shot me a glance.

"And what would a fat, ugly thing like you know about anything?" she snapped, looking me up and down. I winced. Her words rang in my head like nails scrapped upon a blackboard.

"I..." For some reason I had nothing more to say. This was the first time I had reached out to someone and they had lashed out at me angrily. I was too ashamed and hurt to answer; I ran off, in search for a place where I could cry alone. Slipping into the quiet girl's lavatory, I cried for hours after that.

After that it seemed everything came crashing down on me. The year was coming to a close and terrible and frightful things were happening at Hogwarts. Often I would hear whispers of a Chamber of Secrets, and myself and other students would walk down the halls and suddenly see a petrified student. Professor Dippet said that it could be the end of Hogwarts. I was worried. All the terrible memories of my life before Hogwarts brought sorrow and terror to me: my father drinking, my mother's screams as he beat her...the way the young children living by our house would come...throwing rocks through they windows as they rode away laughing...how I was ashamed to go places because I couldn't afford nice dressed like the other girls...

I didn't sleep well at night. I had nightmares or my past and future, and I how I might never see Hogwarts again if the attacks on the students continued. I was also worried that any day it was possible I could be attacked as well. I loved to read, and each day I read so much the older students mocked me, saying I always had my ugly nose in a book, and that I would never get anywhere in life if I stayed the way I was. So I stopped reading, and stopped studying, and teachers no longer liked me. They thought I was a quitter.

Olive Hornby was the worst. She was taunted as well, for she was poor--I could tell by her face, which held as much sorrow as mine--and terribly pale. Instead, though, of taking to offer I gave her to become my friend, she realized that she could get pleasure of taunting me in return, as I was even weaker and less popular than she.

"Myrtle--stupid, sulking Myrtle!" she would call after, several of the other Slytherins smiling behind her. "How can you even stand to go out in public with a face like that? Oh, I know--because it's hidden by those ugly glasses that make your eyes ten times their normal size!" She was laughing ruthlessly so many other students heard her.

I ran. Ran to the girl's toilet and flew into one of the stalls, wrapping my hands over my head, leaning against the cold wooden wall and I sobbed. Why was my life this way? What had I ever done wrong to anyone? Why didn't I have any friends like anyone else? Why was I born during such a dangerous age? Why me...? Why me...?

I didn't attend my next class. I stayed in the stall, worn out from crying and with a terrible headache. My nose was rad and a pile of tissues lay on the floor. I sighed, my face feeling stretched and stained from so many tears. I supposed it was time I returned to my dormitory to read...or cry several hours more; but before I could leave, the door creaked open.

Odd...

I thought. No one ever seems to come in here. I realized it might have been someone come to look for me. I was too shy to step from the stall, for the girl might ask why I had been crying; so I waited for them to leave.

The person was quiet, as was I. For endless minutes I waited to see if they would leave, when suddenly I heard a voice, speaking in an odd sort of language. My tears ceased for a moment and curious, I opened the stall, realizing that the voice--oddly familiar voice it was too--was too deep for a girls. Surely, a boy couldn't be in the girl's toilet--that would have been dreadfully embarrassing for them and for me!

"I think you're in the wrong--" But I never got a chance to finish my sentence for I was struck by a pair of blazing yellow eyes and when I saw them my body went stiff and I waited for a dreadful pain. But it never came. All I remember is a burning hot feeling running through my veins and head and then I remember crumbling to the floor, falling--dead.

Had a been a happy girl I'm sure it would be different now. I probably would be much happier, in a much better place, but still, after decades of sobbing and railing tears that I cannot feel running down my cheeks, feeling pains that people still seem to make fun of, I am confined to this same bathroom, as I have no where else to go. Does anyone care? No, of course not. They never cared. The never cared for Myrtle...Moaning Myrtle they call me. But, I think, if they knew why it is I moan so loudly as so long they would understand a little bit better.