Orange

    When I was ten, I was alone. Well, except for Mum and Dad, of course, but to a ten year old with no nearby friends or brothers, they don’t really count. I hardly expected my mother to get down on her knees with me and play with the little train or those Muggle Legos she had bought me. No; I was very much alone.

    The first few weeks after he had left, Ron sent letters every other day at least. I would read them all over and over again, until finally the ink around the edges of the paper was smudged and unreadable. Then I would put them away in a box Mum gave me for them, and await the next one.

    By November, they were coming weekly. I could be found every Saturday morning, hanging over the railing of the front porch, waiting for Errol to return.

    By the time the new year came, his letters were coming monthly. Thirty days in the hands of a lonely little ten-year-old did not do paper and ink wonders.

    Between letters, I would play. No, not with the new toys my parents bought me when they could afford, but with blocks and Ron’s old teddy bear. I only played with the blocks because they were orange, Ron’s favorite color, and because Ron had taught me how to play with them when I was small. I made extraordinary castles, with tall turrets and endless walkways leading to the ginger front door.

    No dolls for me; instead I would finish the castle and sit and stare, and wonder where Ron was in this miniature Hogwarts. Sometimes, as all little kids claim, I saw Ron walking down the wide orange hallways with the twins.

    And his teddy bear. It was old, once plush and the color of chocolate but now ratty and more of a greying tan than anything. The blue bow around it’s neck had faded into a bleached sort of white, and the little brass bell that hung under it’s chin clicked rather than rang.

    The left arm was ripped at the seams, hanging on by a teeny strip of teddy-bear-flesh, the yellow foam of it’s insides exposed like some gruesome injury.

    I was careful with it. I held it only ever by the right arm, kept the ribbon straight, combed it’s tatty fur. I slept with it at night, careful not to squeeze it’s arms right off.

    It smelled like Ron. I’m not sure how, because I doubt he wore cologne when he was seven, or even seventeen for that matter. But it did. Ron has always smelled clean, like rainwater, and mangoes, maybe, and cinnamon and nutmeg and oranges.

    That’s how that teddy bear smelled, too. When I hugged it close to my stomach at night, I used to pretend that it was Ron. Sometimes, I’d even sneak into Ron’s old room and sleep in his bed, with his Chudley Cannons bedclothes that smelled like kitchen spices and summertime. I’d close my eyes as tight as I could, and imagine that the teddy bear was Ron himself, holding me during a particular violent thunderstorm, and I’d fall asleep with dreams of orange clouds and a Hogwarts built from children’s blocks.

    I am almost seventeen now.

    Seventeen, and as feel as though I know next to nothing. The summer is nothing without the loudness of the twins or the haughty way Percy looks at the others in the house. But really, summer is nothing without Ron.

    I am very much alone, though the few visits from the twins and Ron speckle the dull expanse of endless warmth. I told Hermione once, the last time she visited, that I felt all alone. She just laughed, and told me I was smart and pretty, and made me feel silly. As silly as a ten-year-old feels playing with splintery old blocks and a shabby elderly teddy bear, only to remember.

    Knowing next to nothing. I still know that I shouldn’t feel this way, that I should get out of the shower faster so mum and dad don’t have such a high water bill to pay to the Ministry. But I do feel this way, and I sit for what feels like days, cross-legged, on the bottom of the mildewing old bathtub, the water pooling around my knees, my ankles, and eventually draining away.

    But still I remain, enthralled by the pure expanse of thin white skin, the tiny toffee freckles on my elbows and shoulders, and the chocolate mole on my stomach and the identical pair on my left hip.

    My hair is drying now, clammy, the mahogany burnished to a brilliant red stain, and the dry layers are frizzy, a scarlet halo around my head.

    The coarseness of the once-white but now sickly grey towels is familiar, as always, rough against my still-damp skin. The emerald corduroy of my skirt and the thin white collared shirt hang loosely on my frame, figureless, and I suddenly feel ethereal, waiflike.

    For the first time in years, I feel beyond content, despite my mother’s hollow calls of dinner and the gentle pounding of my dad tinkering in the garage, as usual. In these times, I feel beyond hope.

    The orange of Ron’s room is slightly less carroty now, more of a dark, dark golden yellow, but the double C’s and the flying cannons on the bedspread remain, as usual, faded but still intact.

    The teddy bear sits, long unused, on the trunk at the end of his bed. The toy has hardly changed in six years for lack of use; a box of orange blocks sits in the corner of the room, untouched by child’s hand for years.

    I am tempted to resurrect Ron’s flat with Harry and Hermione or to make a miniature Hogwarts, but all I can really do is stare at the memories, here in cubic form, and wonder what is going on, wherever he is.

    Ron’s mattress sinks from years of disuse when I sit on it, the orange contrasting with my clothes, and I am only discomforted that the bed does not accept me like it once did.

    With a sigh, I can find nothing else to do but to seize the teddy bear, as frail as I am, and, hugging it close to my stomach, stare at the carrot skies.