Comedy/Tragedy: The Story of a Doomed Existence

Chapter Nineteen: Not Bad Company

The next day, Sunday the fourteenth, passed quickly but began unpleasantly; this was the day that Professor McGonagall had arranged for the first-year girls' detention.

Lily met the other four girls at noon in front of the Great Hall; the prearranged time had been told to them, along with where they would meet, but none of the girls knew what their detention was going to be. While Lily waited for whoever was in charge of their detention to show up, she surveyed the other members of her dormitory.

Hana and Leanna's faces had healed entirely by now; both were rid of their eye patches and no longer had any acne or boils surrounding their eyes. The black eye that Lily had given Hana was all but gone; the girl's tawny skin concealed whatever traces were left.

Both girls were haughty and indifferent, choosing to ignore the other three members of their dorm. Lily suspected that they were probably happy as well, now that Lily was no longer popular and they were as worshipped as ever. Lily had also noticed that Hana and James did not seem to be speaking; apparently Hana's high opinion of the self-centered Quidditch player was not high enough to merit her being his girlfriend if he wasn't popular. And, indeed, both Lily and the 'Marauders' were being shunned by Gryffindor house, not that the former minded at all.

Lily turned her gaze away from the Anna Bananas and instead looked upon her former best friends. Despite the fact that Lily was no longer 'popular,' both girls refused to so much as look at her.

However, when Lily finally did capture Alice's gaze, she gave a start.

"When did you get your sores removed?" she blurted out, too surprised to realize how rude she sounded.

"You don't sound too happy about it," Lucy told her angrily.

"It figures she wouldn't even notice," Alice said pointedly to her friend, though she spoke in a loud enough voice that Lily could clearly hear what she was saying.

"Yeah. Considering that we haven't had the boils since before the Quidditch match!" Lucy exclaimed, smirking at the surprised expression on her former friend's face.

"What? That long?" Lily asked before she could stop herself.

"McGonagall gave us the removing cream a long time ago," Alice explained.

"Upset now, are you?" Lucy cut in. "Angry that we've managed to find a way out of this ourselves?"

"No - no, not at all!"

Lucy opened her mouth to let loose another degrading comment, but, before she could finish, a brisk cough from behind her caused her to whirl.

"There is no socializing," a dumpy sort of woman with lank gray hair told them. "You are here to serve detention. Bone, Evin, Surry, Sukuzi, Tomson?"

Without waiting for an answer, she strode out of the large wooden double doors of the castle and onto the lawns. She seemed completely unaware of the fact that she had mispronounced each girl's surname so drastically.

"Aren't you coming?" she whirled and glared at the five first-years.

"Yeah, right," Lily said softly, shaking herself to remove the conversation of moments before from her mind.

"We're coming," Leanna muttered darkly. "Old hag," she said in a quieter tone to Hana. The two girls giggled unmercifully.

And they did come, hurrying down to the grounds and in the direction of a small hut. The dumpy woman stopped so abruptly outside of this that Lily nearly smacked into her; instead she lost her balance and fell into the mud, spattering the dirty goop onto her robes and the woman's elaborate flannel clothing arrangement.

"Sorry," she muttered as she extracted her worn sneakers from the muck.

However, the soles of these nearly came off in her efforts, and Lily cursed under her breath; other than a pair of uncomfortable Mary Janes (her grandmother gave her a pair every year), the sneakers were the only shoes she had.

The dumpy woman surveyed Lily as though she had a large boil in the middle of her forehead. The redhead clearly heard her mutter, "useless brats" before she raised her voice to address the five students.

"You are here to serve a punishment as your Head of House sees fit. Normally Mr. Pringle deals with these things, but I suppose that that old hag up at the castle wanted me to deal with it for once..." clearly she didn't like the Deputy Headmistress very much.

"I am the wife of Ogg, so you will call me Missus Ogg. Understood?" she glared around at them, as though daring them to suggest any differently. When no one did, she continued, "Today you will be working on the edge of the forest, disposing of the pumpkins leftover from Halloween. They belong in the school's compost pile, but McGonagall won't let me have you go into the forest that far, so you'll just be moving the rotten plants to the edge of the forest. Don't slack off, though - they are old and moldy, and I'd be very much mistaken if I said that none of them would break when you try to move them. Teamwork is necessary, for even two of you are far too light to budge a pumpkin. Have fun, and I'll be back at dusk to observe the work of you troublemakers." She strode off, and, a moment later, the door of the cabin slammed closed.

Lily looked around at the other girls. Hana and Leanna looked revolted, and Lucy and Alice looked bored. When no one moved, Lily stepped around the edge of the cabin and into the pumpkin patch.

Sitting there were fourteen giant plants, each rather green with mold and easily as tall as Lily, though more likely to be twice her height. Knowing that her efforts would do little good, the redhead braced her hands on one of the pumpkins and pushed as hard as she could.

It was rather like trying to move a house, Lily decided, and was equally as impossible. She poked her head behind the cabin wall at the four girls.

"Are you going to help, or what?"

For a moment no one moved, but finally the girls tentatively walked into the middle of the patch. Each surveyed the area with gazes of equal disgust and indifference.

"Oh, this is pointless," Lucy told them all loudly. "I'm skiving off."

And, without another word, the tallest and strongest girl of the lot walked back toward the castle. Alice cast a look around the pumpkin patch, and looked nervously after her best friend, but she finally decided to follow. Leanna and Hana looked at the pumpkins and at Lily; it was difficult to tell which made them more revolted.

"Good luck, Evans," Hana smirked before she and Leanna followed the footsteps of their other roommates.

So Lily was left alone in the middle of a fly-filled pumpkin patch, staring around at the masses of orange. Knowing it was completely pointless, the redhead braced her hands on one of them and shoved as hard as she could. She heard a soft creaking noise and pushed harder, digging the heels of her dilapidated sneakers into the hard ground of the pumpkin patch. She thought that perhaps the noise was made because the pumpkin was actually moving. But this proved to be a big mistake; the wall of the pumpkin she was pushing on gave way entirely. Soon, what had been a pumpkin was a pile of moldy orange - stuff. The flies attacked the plant's meat and Lily stepped back to avoid them.

"I wouldn't have recommended doing that," a voice from behind Lily recommended.

The girl whirled around; what if Lucy and Alice had returned! But no, it wasn't two girls that Lily saw. Instead, Remus, Sirius, Peter, and James stood before her, watching with amused expressions on their faces as the flies buzzed around what had been a pumpkin. James, who had been the one to speak, opened his mouth again.

"I wouldn't have thought that you had the power to do that, Evans!" he exclaimed, scrutinizing her lack of figure.

"Size isn't always a good judge of self," Lily told him.

"She's got you there, Potter," Sirius grinned at his own short friend.

"And you and your friends have got to stop with the let's-sneak-up-on-Lily-and-scare-her-out-of-her-wits plan," Lily told them.

"Either that or you have to get better nerves," Remus laughed.

Lily rolled her eyes.

"So what are you lot doing here, anyway? Come to get me in more trouble with the teachers?"

"No, actually, we thought we'd help. There's nothing like spending a Sunday afternoon sweating in a patch of moldy pumpkins," James announced matter-of-factly.

"He's serious," Sirius mouthed at Lily, rolling his eyes. Lily grinned.

"No, you are!" Peter exclaimed jokingly. His friends smiled weakly; in Lily's opinion he was trying a bit too hard. But she smiled nonetheless.

"And it looks like you could use the help, seeing how your roommates abandoned you," James continued. "And you're a right damsel in distress, I couldn't help but come rescue you!"

"I am not a damsel in distress!" Lily exclaimed angrily. She watched Sirius and James exchange a meaningful look. "What?"

"James knows that, by telling you that you're a damsel in distress, he will win over your heart and convince you that he's your Prince Charming," Sirius explained philosophically.

"What makes you think I even want a 'Prince Charming'?" She yelped. "I - I - ugh!" She was unable to find words to express her horror at the boy's opinions.

"Because you're a damsel in distress, and all damsels in distress need a Prince Charming!"

"But, I - this conversation is going in circles," Lily accused.

"Caught on? Good, now we're here to help you," Sirius told her briskly.

"But I don't need help!" Lily wasn't going to let anyone who thought she was a 'damsel in distress' assist her in any way.

"Prove it," Peter grinned.

It turned out that it was a lot easier, and a lot more fun, to move moldy pumpkins when you were with people who found the entire situation to be utmost hilarity. While she and James were nearly bowled over by a pumpkin Remus, Sirius, and Peter had shoved in their direction, Lily imagined what this would have been like if she were working with the girls from her dormitory.

Lucy and Alice would probably have been pointedly ignoring her, Hana and Leanna would have refused to do anything to help move the pumpkins, and Lily would wind up being the object of ridicule on all sides. She probably would not have grinned once, and would have come out of the detention in a very foul mood. But instead, when she worked with the 'marauders,' Lily laughed almost the entire time. When the cloud-concealed sun disappeared beyond the mountains surrounding the castle, she stood up and wiped her dirty sleeve across her forehead.

"Oi, Potter!" she called across the pumpkin patch to where he and Sirius were wrestling with a particularly decomposed pumpkin. "It's getting dark, you all should go! If Missus Orc, or whatever her name is, comes back out, you'll be in big trouble!"

James looked intrigued at the prospect of getting into trouble, but Sirius tugged on the back of his friend's robes and turned up to the castle.

"Another time, mate," he said.

"You read Lord of the Rings?" Remus turned to Lily, an expression of intrigue on his pale countenance.

"I'll give you a galleon if you can find I book I haven't heard of, let alone read," Lily smiled at him. "But we'll talk about that later, go!"

The boy smiled back at her before turning and heading back toward the castle with Peter.

They were not a moment too soon; the large castle doors had barely shut when Missus Ogg came stalking into the pumpkin patch and stared down at Lily.

"So, you and those other filthy brats managed to move some pumpkins, big deal. You're still disgusting little horrors to me. Where are the rest of the imbeciles, anyway?" she looked around as though expecting Hana, Lucy, Alice, and Leanna to jump out from behind the one pumpkin that was left and shout 'BOO!'

"They - erm, they went back up to the castle already," Lily explained, hoping that the woman would buy her excuse.

"Hmm..." Missus Ogg stared down at Lily as though expecting to see something to prove Lily's guilt. Either there was nothing there or Missus Ogg didn't express a reply to what she'd seen, because the old woman nodded reluctantly.

"I see you discovered that magic doesn't work to move these," she snickered as she spotted the pumpkin Lily had disintegrated by accident.

"Erm, yeah," Lily improvised.

"Hmm...very well. I will inform your head of house of what you and the other brats have done, and we'll see if she makes me take care of you for another horrible afternoon." She spoke as though she had been out here the whole time too, not relaxing in her warm, comfortable cabin.

"Go on, get back to the castle!" Missus Ogg yelled when Lily didn't move.

"Oh - oh, okay. Erm...'bye," Lily told her before hurrying away into the night's suddenly brisk, chilly air.

The next morning, Lily woke incredibly early, considering that she hadn't gotten to bed until late. But it nonetheless remained true that, the moment six thirty's sunrise swept over her face, she could not go back to sleep. She wasn't even the remotest bit tired, she decided as she slipped on a very Gryffindor-y skirt; it was a burgundy color and the hem had gold stitching. It was, in fact, the only article of red clothing Lily owned; normally she avoided the color because it clashed so horribly with her hair. But today she felt rather bold. She also donned a dark gray sweater and some gray knee socks, actually matching for once. Her Mary Janes found their way onto her feet, for her other shoes had been very decrepit, not to mention smelled strongly of old pumpkins, when she had gotten back from detention that night. Lily pulled her hair back into a half-ponytail, letting most of it cascade down her back in the soft, frizz-free curls it normally was incapable of imitating.

For some unexplainable reason, she felt like grinning madly. There was something about today; the cloud-stifled sunlight still managing to filter into the room, its bright colors reflecting off of objects in the dorm, the glittering white snow casting patterns onto the castle walls. Wait, snow?

Lily let out a shriek of joy and leapt over her bed. She misjudged, however, and wound up bouncing off of the edge of the four-poster and slamming her ankle into her night table. Lily's large, heavy Potions encyclopedia fell from the nightstand and onto the opposite foot of her sore ankle. Hopping up and down, both with excitement and in order to escape some of the pain, Lily gazed out of her slightly open window.

Indeed, a soft blanket of the shimmery, white substance covered the grounds. It looked to be considerably thick, though it was difficult for Lily to tell from her lofty position. She breathed deeply, feeling the early morning's cold breeze on her face. The soft glimmer in the east announced that the sun might shine a bit, but it was cold and some clouds over the now snow-coated mountains looked as though they were threatening more snow. Or not threatening, blessing! Lily loved snow; the powdery, cool ice that tasted like, and rather was, frozen clouds.

Still grinning madly, Lily pulled her robes over her head, though she was too happy to bother with tightening them. Anyway, who cared if anyone saw her clothes underneath? She pinned her Gryffindor badge to her sweater and looked in the mirror, smiling as she saw the perfect Gryffindor grin back at her. Today she felt happy to be alive, to be a Gryffindor, to be a first-year, and to be herself, which was an unusual feeling. She turned away from Leanna's mirror and bounded into the middle of the room.

"Whassamatter?" a groggy Lucy blinked sleepily at Lily.

Lily supposed that the blonde girl was too tired to realize whom she was speaking with.

"Snow!" Lily cried happily, dancing around the room in a way reminiscent of the time when she had been 'making' latkes with her mum.

"Ohh..." Lucy smiled and peered out of Lily's window, grinning down at the luminescent covering of Hogwarts. When she turned back to Lily, however, it was with a disgusted expression on her face.

"You!" she yelped, as though she had just eaten something she didn't like without realizing it.

And she refused to so much as look at Lily for the rest of the time they were in the dorm together.

Lily stopped dancing and gathered up her materials for Charms, History of Magic, and Transfiguration, as well as a few books she dubbed 'winter-worthy' and a gold-and-black scarf that her father had given her for Chanukah last year.

"Good morning, fair ladies of the top of the tower!" she cried joyously, rousing the other three girls from their slumber. Each looked at her as though she were clinically insane.

"Snow!" was the only explanation she gave them before she turned out of the dorm and flitted down the stairs.

A few heads poked out of dorms to see what the ruckus was, so Lily made up a sort of song made up of the word 'snow' so that people would get the picture. Strangely enough, this did nothing to make them happy; most shook their heads and looked at her as though she were mad, rather than celebrating like Lily was.

"Snow, SNOW, snow snow, SNOW, snow," Lily sang to herself as she hurried down past the last landing.

She'd always loved cold weather, and found it truly bizarre that some people didn't spend every day of the year dreaming about the temperature going below freezing. She probably found people who didn't love the cold almost as strange as everyone else found her.

Lily jumped the last few stairs and landed gracefully on the rug.

"La, la, la, la, snow!" she sang again as she looked around the common room to see if there was anyone awake yet.

"Holy piranha eggs!" James exclaimed from behind Lily. She turned, grinning at his...unique...exclamation of surprise, to say hello.

He was dressed, certainly, but his robes were only halfway on and his hair looked even messier than usual. There was sleep in his eyes and he was yawning continually.

"Hi!" Lily called across the room with more volume than was necessary. She bounced over to the still-sleepy Potter. "Good morning!"

"There's nuffing good about it," Sirius' voice came from behind his friend. His hair seemed incapable of doing anything other than hanging in his eyes, unmussed, but his face was as sleepy as James'.

"Are you insane?" Lily asked him happily. "There's SNOW!"

And she was off again, dancing like she had when she was younger.

"And she asks me if I'm insane?" Sirius moaned. "It's too early for that sort of movement - energy - a-a-a-action," he yawned hugely. "I'm going back to bed."

"Snow, SNOW, snow snow, SNOW snowww," Lily sang again, from a perch on a large armchair.

"Come on, Potter," she called to James, who looked as though he wanted to follow his friend back to bed. "Don't be such a spoilsport, it's morning, there's snow, and it's a brand new day!"

James moaned, but he followed her out of the portrait hole.

"Lilyyy..." he whined once they were outside of the common room and Lily had stopped singing. "It's not yet seven in the morning!"

"Don't whine!" Lily admonished. "Be happy!"

"I can't believe that you are the one who's saying this to me," James said, jogging slightly to keep up with the redhead. "I've never seen you in the Great Hall earlier than eight!"

"Snow, dear boy, snow!" Lily said again.

"Enough with that word," James moaned.

Lily rolled her eyes.

"Fine, I'll stop singing if you put your robes on right and if you can manage to stop being so negative."

"Me, negative?" James rolled his eyes. "What about all the times you -"

Lily glared at him with the same look she had seen Professor McGonagall use; it worked wonders.

As Lily skipped through the hallways, James trailing her at a much slower rate, a brief thought inched across her mind. Why was she walking to breakfast with James Potter, her nemesis and the person she'd hated so much for the greater part of the school year? The answer was, as much as she tried to conceal it, James Potter and all of his friends were great fun to be around. James and Sirius were so funny, Remus could offer Lily an abstemious conversation if she were ever so inclined, and Peter, though a rather dull character, made the Marauders complete.

Lily smiled again and turned back to James.

"Shall we?" she pushed open the door to the Great Hall and followed James inside.

There were a few early risers, some who seemed as glad as Lily for the snow, and some who looked as though they would give anything for a cup of Professor McGonagall's tea-and-whiskey. Lily strode into the room and glanced up at the ceiling. The sun had not risen yet, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway; the sky was now almost entirely covered by pale gray clouds. Falling from these was the occasional soft, powdered snowflake, though all weather faded to oblivion above the tables so as not to get the food and students wet.

Lily twirled happily while James looked at her as though she were mad, then followed him to a section of empty seats at the head of the Gryffindor table.

"Mmm, oatmeal!" she exclaimed, helping herself to some of the warm food. James, however, piled onto his plate seven pancakes and all the meat in the area. Lily wrinkled her nose and helped herself to fruit, pointedly ignoring the scent of fried bacon as it wafted over her head.

Breakfast was quiet and rather subdued, though not in an oppressive way. Lily was content to enjoy the silence; she presumed that James would find it annoying if he could wake up.

Halfway through the meal, Sirius came bounding into the room. Whereas he had been devoid of any remote trace of energy an hour before, now he was as loud and as rambunctious as ever. He vaulted over his chair and sat on it backwards, cracked three soft-boiled eggs on his plate, poured powdered sugar in James' hair, and winked at Lily, all in the time period of about three seconds. Lily couldn't help but laugh, and found that there was more than one voice joining her giggles. Remus had slid into the seat next to her, and Peter was on the amber-eyed boy's left.

Despite the fact that Lily had arrived at breakfast almost an hour ahead of them, Sirius, Remus, and Peter managed to eat, no, devour their food in less than five minutes. James sped up to eat with his friends, and soon the four boys were standing on their chairs, trying to touch the falling snow.

Having attempted and failed numerous times to tell them that the snow was spelled to not be touchable by the students, Lily fell silent and opted instead for watching the Marauders wrestle half-heartedly as they reached for the falling powder.

"BOYS!" Professor McGonagall had just finished her tea and looked nothing short of incensed. Peter let out a frightened squeak and hid under the table. Remus dove into his bag and pretended to read some miscellaneous book; Sirius and James pretended they hadn't even heard the Transfiguration teacher.

The next few minutes of the morning passed so quickly that Lily wasn't quite sure what had happened. She was fairly positive that it had involved flying kippers, toothpaste, four broken chairs, and a gently levitating James before Professor McGonagall could sort everything out.

Lily accompanied Remus and Peter, both whom were howling with mirth, to Charms class. Professor McGonagall had held James and Sirius behind so that she could arrange for some sort of detention or punishment.

"Water Charms!" Professor Flitwick beamed around at the Gryffindors. "For lack of a better name, these simple charms involve nothing more than allowing your wand to produce a stream of water. The spells are so elementary, so simple and easy, that few textbooks even bother to add them in. However, the reason I like Ms. Goshawk is that her book contains very well described entries of even the charms that most witches and wizards consider to be beyond studying. I thought we'd start today off learning the charm, and then if enough people master it we'll go out into the snow and see if you can still manage to keep the water liquid in such a frigid environment."

Lily would normally have paid vigilant attention to what Flitwick said in a lesson, but she was distracted halfway through the tiny professor's speech on wrist flicking when James and Sirius burst through the door. After a hasty explanation to Flitwick, the two boys slid into seats on either side of Remus and in back of Lily and Peter.

"So?" Peter implored. "What'd she say you have to do? Not deal with Pringle or - was his name Filth? - again?"

"No, we don't have to deal with Filk again, or Pringle - thankfully," James breathed a sigh of relief. Clearly the memory of what Filch had done to him was still a source of torture in the boy's mind.

"Nope, but the batty witch is making me scrub in the kitchens and James clean the trophy room, every day after dinner for a fortnight! Crazy bat," Sirius coughed derisively. "When'll I do my homework, hmm?"

"Oh, it's not like you do your homework anyway," Remus rolled his eyes.

Sirius ignored him and called Professor McGonagall a name that made Lily say "Sirius..."

"What? I thought you were a Marauderette, I thought you could deal with a little language," Sirius told her, baiting her instincts. He was clearly in a very poor mood.

"Never mind," Lily answered coldly before turning back to Flitwick's lesson, part of which she had missed due to James and Sirius' complaining.

The rest of the day's classes passed in a similar fashion. Lily found that it was doubly hard to concentrate on her classes when she was sitting next to Sirius, who kept trying to convince everyone to skive off, and James, who kept doing things like spelling his shoelaces and Lily's socks to flash in a neon spectrum. She took to reading up on what they would be studying beforehand, so that it was less trivial that she pay any attention.

After Transfiguration ended, Lily and the four boys engaged in a snowball fight on the grounds. A few Hufflepuffs came to join them, and soon there was a furious battle-of-the-sexes sort of game going on. Lily was ultimately determined to defeat the boys, who kept throwing insults like 'girls can't throw' and 'ready to give up yet, Evans?' So she led a number of other girls in a very militaristic, carefully directed game that ended just before night fell in a very close defeat of the Marauders and whoever they had riled up to join their team. However, the girls got their reprisal several times over when James and Sirius pelted them all with a collection of powdery snowballs that exploded all over their clothes inside of the entrance hall.

Completely covered in snow, Lily and the Marauders enjoyed a warm meal and an evening in which Lily learned how to play Exploding Snap, though she did wind up losing some of her eyebrows in the process. Several Exploding Snap games after nine o'clock, Peter's nose got severely burned and everyone else decided to stop.

Lily was thoroughly exhausted after getting up so early and such a rigorous afternoon on the grounds, so she retired to her dorm and fell asleep within instants. She soon discovered that life with the four boys was a constant solution to any insomnia problems she might have had. Even after one day with them, Lily was quite positive that she would never have trouble sleeping again.

The next few weeks were very much proof of this.

Life was very different when one was a friend of the Marauders, as opposed to being best friends with Lucy and Alice, or being the most popular first year.

For one thing, Lily was constantly smiling. She couldn't help it, really; nearly every word that came out of James' or Sirius' mouth was a joke, not to mention Remus' quiet sarcasm. Peter did more of the laughing than the joking, but that was just his personality, Lily supposed, and it did nothing to hurt the pleasant atmosphere.

She also learned a lot more about the four boys, though she was still deciding whether this was information she wanted to know. James and Sirius were obviously the leaders. There was no denying that they spearheaded each and every campaign to wreck havoc on Hogwarts. Remus remained the quiet bookworm, who tended to protest against James and Sirius' ideas, but always wound up coming along anyway. Peter hero-worshipped James and Sirius, so he would always do whatever they said, and was constantly trying to make them laugh.

James had come from a well-known wizarding family who, though fairly wealthy, were also known for being generous and kind. His mother organized food parcels for starving wizarding families, while his father was an environmental wizarding journalist who wrote about things like 'The Effects of Flare Charms on the Ozone Layer.' The entire family, which included James, his parents, and his raving mad Great Aunt Edna, who he told many hilarious stories about, was very strongly against Dark Arts in any form.

When Sirius had first told Lily this, she had hardly been surprised; here was the reason that James was so against anything that so much as seemed to be involved with darker forms of magic.

As for James' best friend, Sirius came from a very different sort of wealthy family. The Blacks were stupendously rich, and owned a concealed house in the middle of London. The way Sirius told it, the whole lot of them believed very strongly in the Dark Arts; the exact opposite of James' family. Sirius would not say much, though. In fact, his family was his least favorite thing to talk about. Lily could tell that there were painful memories there, but she also noticed that Sirius sometimes cringed a bit when James was embarking on another rant about snotty Slytherin-based purebloods, but he seemed to be doing his best to remain genial.

Lily had been surprised to see that James would consent to being the best friend of a boy from such a family, but Sirius explained that he and James had met at some wizarding amusement park called Genie Alley when they were younger, and become close friends even then. They had been communicating in secret for the past few years, and were immediately reunited on the Hogwarts Express.

"Well, mate, there's no denying that your family is of a most evil sort, but you're all right, aren't you?" James had maintained when they were discussing Sirius' life one evening.

"Cheers, mate," Sirius had grinned.

Peter's life was hardly interesting, and rarely discussed by the Marauders. The few times that Lily had been able to supplicate some information out of them, there hadn't been much. She knew that Peter lived with his mother, for though his father was still alive and kicking, he did some sort of abroad work for the Ministry. From living a quiet life alone with his overprotective mother, Peter had become rather spoiled. Not a day passed when his mother didn't send him huge parcels of sweets. But though the other Marauders constantly teased Peter about being a 'mommy's boy,' they did not complain about the sweets that Peter shared.

And then there was Remus. He seemed very disinclined to discuss any home life, which of course made his three friends even more curious. It turned out that James and Remus had known each other for a good number of years, through some sort of parental connection, but never gotten together very much; Remus had always been very busy. Whenever James, Sirius, and Peter would try to inveigle information from their friend, Lily wondered about her far-fetched theory of over a month before. Could Remus be a werewolf? It certainly seemed like lunacy, but each one of Remus' implausible excuses convinced Lily even more.

"My mum wanted me to stay and help her at the house," Remus would say stiffly, before hastily changing the subject.

But despite whatever information they would - or wouldn't - let on, it was very clear to Lily that each of the boys, James and Sirius in particular, came from fairly prestigious and old Wizarding families. The only boy who wasn't a complete pureblood was Remus, whose great-grandfather had been part Muggle.

But not one of the Marauders seemed to care. Unlike Snape and many of the other Slytherins, James, Sirius, Remus, and Peter were the sort of purebloods who thought that blood didn't matter, so to speak. Lily was amazed to find out, both later on in her Hogwarts years and in her life, how unusual that particular attitude was.