Unhappy Smiles

Unhappy Smiles


Every morning, at the breakfast table, she smiles at him and says, “Hello, Remus.”

She smiles at everyone when she tells them hello. She smiles often. But she rarely laughs.

He doesn’t know why it bothers him, nor why he thinks about her smiling while he eats his breakfast. He does, though.

So he watches her. Watches her smile at everyone, then sit apart from them. He sees her eyes glitter with tears while she sits alone in her corner. She always is in a dark corner or shadowed chair, she’s never fully in the light.

Occasionally he talks to her, and she smiles at him and laughs, sometimes. He can always make her laugh, if he wants.

He wonders why no one else seems to notice she’s hiding from the world.

Then, one morning at breakfast, it hits him.

She’s so like he was, before he was friends with James and Sirius. He used to be the one sitting in the darkness.

He talks to her more. She needs a friend, and he knows how she feels. Her brother, Hermione, Harry, they don’t know how it feels to not have a friend, and they don’t know that she’s alone.

She hides it behind her smiles.

Her unhappy smiles.

And they haunt his dreams.


After a few weeks, she stops sitting alone every night. When he is there, she comes to sit by him, to talk to him. He’s glad that she has stepped away from the shadows.

One night, he tries to ask her about the Chamber. She smiles and says, “It’s over now. It’s done with.”

It’s not. There is still a sadness in her eyes when she smiles.

Who was there for her after her ordeal in the Chamber? he wonders. She had her brothers, and her mother, but she had no friends. She still didn’t.

Well, he was her friend.

But that was it.

Why does she not have friends? She was friendly. But there was no openness about her. Her secrets were her own.

And they would destroy her if she did not let them go.

She didn’t know that, though, and she cages then behind her smiles.


“Hello, Remus.”

She’s the only one who calls him Remus. He’s never really thought about that before.

He tries to think about why, but his mind won’t focus. There’s something wrong.

“Ginny,” he says, and grabs her arm.

“What, Remus?” she asks, and smiles. “What’s wrong?”

Her smile isn’t unhappy anymore. It’s empty.

He starts to speak, then stops. He doesn’t know what to do, what to say.

He can’t help but feel that, somehow, she’s gone.


That night, he dreams of a girl without a soul. She smiles at him, but he can see right through her. She turns around, and she’s only a mask.

He wakes up, overcome by dread.

Ginny.

He gets up, runs to her room. Something is wrong. It’s like it was this morning.

She’s sitting there on her bed, with a knife lying next to her.

She looks up at him. She smiles, and it’s the same empty smile from that morning.

“Goodbye, Remus. You were a good friend.”

Then she picks up the blade and drives it into her chest.

He sinks to the floor. He was too late.


For the rest of his life, his dreams were haunted by a teenage, redheaded girl with an unhappy smile.