Peeved 2

Peeved 2

"Granger! A word with you in private, if I may."

The long snake queue of first-year-olds had just dispersed to their respective classrooms; Hermione, who had done her duty as a Prefect, was briefly alone. Annoyed though she was at the intrusion, she was also quite amused at Millicent Bulstrode's tone. The Slytherin was obviously trying for a neutral, adult tone - to prevent anyone thinking there was anything personal about her challenge - and the result was -

"You sound exactly like McGonagall, Bulstrode."

"Great. I shall now go and kill myself."

"Can it wait? I'm going to be kind of busy for the next three hours. Suppose we met at six, by the side of the lake? South side?" (Then, in an undertone.) "Nobody can sneak up on us there."

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"No indeed, Mudblood," thought Millicent, "and at the same time it is public, so I cannot come on to you. Dear me, did our little incident upset you that much? I didn't realize I'd be so attractive to book-mad Mudbloods. I really ought to kill myself." And she went off chortling, by no means displeased. Two months earlier, the two girls, forced to clean themselves together in a private bathroom, had as near as dammit slipped into a precocious lesbian romance; and while Millicent had never - till recently - thought of it again, she had been increasingly suspicious that Hermione had not similarly managed to forget. A number of small, almost unnoticeable accidents - a nervous jump in the corridor; a sudden move away during Potions; the report of an unusually tense, snappy mood in the usually excitable and determined Gryffindor - had first brought her attention back to her, and then made her wonder. However, she had no interest in resurrecting the matter.

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Or had she? As she made her way to the lake, Millicent found herself contemplating what she could see of Hermione Granger, waiting punctually for her - a Ravenclaw or a Slytherin might perhaps have been late, but a Hufflepuff would have been too methodical and a Gryffindor too honourable. A man - or a woman - might have gone further and fared worse. She was more attractive than herself, one had to admit; not that that amounted to much, but she had quite a neat figure, a nice waist - Millicent's own despair about herself was her thick, muscular waist that no corset could subdue - and come to think of it, what had happened to the big teeth they used to mock so much? With some half-decent make-up, that wouldn't be half a bad face. Millicent grinned inwardly at the memory of Pansy Parkinson's fury, a year and a half ago, when she had been utterly upstaged at the Yule Ball by a for once well-dressed and well-made-up Hermione. As she met Hermione, she consciously removed every trace of grin from her face, and replaced it with a look of stern regard - one that had been known to make Slytherin first-year nervous.

"All right, Granger. Did you blab?"

Hermione did not need telling as to what. "Oh, please. Like I need them to think I'm desperate and without taste."

Millicent had been at the receiving end of this sort of taunts since she was three. They bounced off her like arrows off plate armour. "If you say that, Granger, you'll force me to think that you are desperate and without taste. I haven't forgotten your reactions, you know." She went on. "Anyway, I'm serious. Did you tell anyone?"

"No I didn't. Someone come on to you?"

"Mh-mh. Eloise Midgen, if you want to know."

"Eloise?" And Hermione openly laughed. "Shouldn't worry if I were you. I was always trying to fix her up with the boys, till I realized that she was starting to court every girl in sight. Every girl, I mean, who had a certain reputation... Mind you," Hermione became reflective, "you could do worse. She's the nicest girl in Gryffindor. She only wants someone to like her."

"Just about your mark, then."

"There's no need to get offensive, Bulstrode."

"Who's offensive? Look, honey, let's put it this way: you could have gone for me, but I could have gone for you. Now which of us has the better taste, and which would go for a dog?"

Hermione laughed again. For the first time, she really liked Bulstrode. The girl was stout, as stout of heart as of body. Only someone with a lot of inner courage would laugh like that at her own lack of looks. "Now you're flirting."

"Only because I knew you'd fall for it. So you're saying this is just Midgen being Midgen?"

"I think so. At least... why do you think she'd think you would make a mark?"

"My butch looks, I suppose... or else... do you suppose someone guessed?"

Suddenly the surface of the lake exploded, and a cackling voice rang out. "A Slytherin and a Gryffindor doing a Ravenclaw! This is ssssoooo romantic! Bet the school will be impressed!" Peeves the poltergeist hovered before them, giggling like a maniac, with not a trace of water on him - though by all appearances he had until then been lurking under the surface. "Catch you inside, Milly-honey, 'Mione-darling! Wheeeeeeee!"

The two young women looked at each other.

"Oh, shit," said Bulstrode forcefully.

"Not good enough," answered Hermione. "Oh, fuck!"

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The humour of adolescents and schoolchildren is a simple thing, and their memory is retentive. There was hardly a day in which someone did not approach Millicent or Hermione with loud kissing noises, or miming hugs and kisses. Each received ludicrous fake love letters from the other. Writing about them appeared on the walls, to the fury of Argus Filch, the caretaker - who, irrationally, seemed to blame them for the whole mess. Both girls had to develop a very thick skin to discourage the mockers; and even so, new groups constantly took up the notion.

It took Hermione a lot of intimate chats to convince Ron and Harry that the rumour was in fact groundless. One surprising side-effect of this was that Ron found himself examining his feelings and realized that he was not really in love with Hermione, did not want to marry her, and therefore had no right to be jealous of her. He took his own advice and tried to leave her alone. For a while, their intimacy cooled, but they did not cease to be friends.

It was worse for Millicent. Her family heard the rumours from a deliberately hurtful "candid friend", and, come the half-term holiday, summoned her home and put her through the kind of parental inquisition that makes the Spanish of old look mild, moderate, and well-meaning. It must be borne in mind that they had no great love for her: being both very handsome, they regretted the incident that had produced a child of no attraction at all, and, being unable to pretend that she was a changeling (the resemblance to both of them, in everything but beauty, was too marked), they took her plainness as a personal insult. So there was little chance that affection for her would make them relent their questioning and their implicit accusations. What outraged them the most, apparently, was that her rumoured liaison was with a Mudblood; and when Millicent found herself growing outraged at this - Hermione was better than that - she had taken a long stride along the path to freeing herself of their ingrained prejudices.

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"Look here," said Millicent to Hermione a few weeks into the mess, "at least we've got to get even with Peeves."

"I wouldn't say no," answered the Gryffindor prefect, completely neglectful of her office, "but what are we going to do? Even the teachers cannot control him..."

"I wasn't thinking of controlling him. More along the lines of humiliating him. And I thought the Queen of Charms Class might know how..."

"Well... there are a few charms and spells that might be combined... But what about your evil little Slytherin brain? Haven't you thought of anything?"

"Well..."

The two girls' heads wagged together for quite half an hour, and if anyone had come close, they would have heard quite a lot of giggling.

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A week later, little pieces of parchment mysteriously appeared in every room in Hogwarts. Each of them contained an invitation to the "Peeves Celebration Parade," that would take place in the Great Hall and garden at a specified time. Everybody smelled mischief, and, come the specified time, nearly the whole school just happened to be in the Great Hall and the garden, while the teachers just happened to be near their windows overlooking the garden.

Suddenly the back door of Slytherin house flew open, and Milly and Hermione came marching out. Hermione was rhythmically banging a pair of cymbals. Behind her, with an exaggerated marching step, came Millicent, holding Peeves on a lead. The poltergeist, bound by dozens of spells, was floating in mid-air, red-faced and furious, yet incapable of speech. Little bells hung from every part of him, jangling as he went by, and from his feet floated a banner saying "HOORAY FOR PEEVES".

Argus Filch was the first to overcome the general astonishment. Apparently beyond words, he emitted a joyous whoop and tried to cut a caper. The caper ended ignominiously with Filch sprawled on the ground, but he seemed to ignore the fall and the laughter that burst out, and simply got up and started walking behind the two girls, clapping hands in time to the cymbals. This was the signal for everyone else. An enormous parade formed, with nearly every student in the school marching and clapping hands in time, or banging on every noise-making instrument they could lay their hands on. Someone struck up a nonsensical version of a famous song:

Peeves will live in a yellow submarine,

A yellow submarine,

A yellow submarine...

- and the whole school sang, as they went marching in a figure-of-eight around Slytherin and Gryffindor houses.

After giving them a good half-hour, Minerva McGonagall manifested herself and put an end to the parade. But I think it can safely be said, that nobody heard from Peeves the poltergeist for a long time after that.

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Two years after graduating, Millicent Bulstrode met a Muggle of remarkable character and intelligence, who somehow seemed to find her attractive. (And it was not, either, to do with the one feature she thought attractive in herself, her ample breasts; in fact, he had not noticed them until she drew his attention to them. Not a breast man, apparently.) When she made her intentions clear, her family disinherited her; but her husband, a historian of brilliant accomplishments, swiftly became a full Professor in a top American university, with Millicent proud and happy by his side, eventually overcoming an unexpected shyness to start publishing excellent papers herself.

Hermione never married. She had passing relationships of both sexes, but she came to feel that her dedication to study and research got in the way of any permanent attachment. After her fortieth birthday, she rarely had sex with anyone, and hardly ever missed it. She eventually became Headmistress of Hogwarts - only the fifteenth woman, and the first person ever with a bisexual past to be so honoured.

Their academic position sometimes brought them together; and when they did, they always tended to make risqué little jokes and private allusions to a romantic episode that tended to loom larger in the memory than it ever had been at the time.

Peeves Celebration Day became a regular Hogwarts tradition.

Which all goes to prove the old Hogwarts proverb. "If you see a Slytherin coming, make way. But if you see a Slytherin and a Gryffindor together, duck!"

END OF THE STORY