In Between Years

When Hermione was home and lonely she made a rule, as rigid as she could, that she would think about how others had it--Harry, first, to keep her thankful, Ron to give her the jealous edge that kept her going--before she thought about her own situation. A pureblooded witch wouldn't have any time alone to think about her life. A wizard family would have made her complacent. She could have been born poor, or dim-witted, or Slytherin.

But in her Muggle clothes, against her best intentions, she felt that vague, unshakable indignation, even as the sun came apologetically bright over the clouds and her old friends circled pleasantly around her. They walked down the road and she fought it but she still felt it. At the end of the year other people didn't have to disappear.

They asked her about things at boarding school. Nina from across the street said: What's it like going away to one?

It's okay, she said. It's wonderful but it's hard to be away from it. It would be nice to have your world around you all the time.

Your world? Chloe said.

Your friends and all. Even your surroundings. We could go down the street now and there's your school, right? And there's the tree you like to sit under. It's hard to not be able to just go and call your friends.

They looked at her like they often did now, that little flash of open-mouthed incredulousness before they remembered this was Hermione who they'd played house with back then.

And she added: and then hang out, I mean.

Mattie nodded too vigorously and said she'd been to a camp like that, of course, and patted Hermione on the back. The others had begun to drift away from Hermione, as though an invisible person had begun walking between them.

When they weren't catching up they talked about things Muggle girls talked about. The conversations must have begun last September and continued, now, like Hermione had walked in at the middle of a lesson. Mattie was over Jacob. Nina was excited to be an old hand at secondary school. All of it blurred for Hermione, like a long conversation in a second language, but she thought of the Durseleys and she kept nodding at the right places until she was a little dizzy.

Jacob having been thrown over--Hermione wasn't sure but she thought she had the dim recollection of a primary school boy with that name, short, nose-picky--they began talking about others. There was a Matt, a Mike, a Phillip.

Nina looked dubiously at the bushy hair bouncing at the other end of the sidewalk and asked if there were any boys at the boarding school, but by the time she was finished talking around the subject they'd passed Hermione's house and she was gone up the walk. Her friends watched the door close and stood there for a moment; wordlessly, after that, they walked on.

Hermione took the stairs two at a time and locked herself into her room. What would she have said? She didn't want to think about it.

#

He's famous, kind of, and he's modest, and the new things they'd learned together--what's a wand, which house, witches and wizards and a culture just underneath the one they didn't quite get anyway--and the rough placement of all these lives they'd just learned about into their six hands solidified it: the three of them would always be together and he would always be there, famous, kind of, and modest. And kind.

At home in her room now there are school things creeping along the clean white walls. New pennants and photos and memorabilia are marching into old stationary-photo territory with each year and each new thing and each connection made and reinforced in the new world. In the middle, on her bed, she can see that line across the wall where the people in pictures stop moving, and in July she's willing it to recede farther already. Things seem to crawl when she's not there, not just crawl but atrophy, and she's afraid that being so far away for so long she'll lose things she's not sure she gained.

She knows they're thinking similar things. Everything ends with the year, and fighting trolls and transfiguring and the last pleasant minutes at the fire seem to harden into nostalgia until they're forced back open in September, and when she's gone from that she worries that she'll show up and have lost the key. That they'll be stuck as memories forever. She wonders if he's thinking the same thing.

Now it's dinner time and she's called downstairs and rolling off the bed she walks past the waving photos on one wall. Each day is another day further. Each lonely event is time in purgatory ticking down, and she doesn't know what happens when the clock runs down but she feels like she doesn't have enough time to prepare for it.

Last year when she had too much time and sat propped up at a desk, staring at words that would lose their way on the page, he walked up one empty night and sat down and apologized, awkwardly, said he missed her, asked her if there was anything he could do. She said no, eyes down, and he brightened up and said goodbye, and that was what he could do. And the words rearranged themselves on the page.

Her parents have always looked at her pictures from school, eyebrows up, and said: so that one's Harry?