Comedy/Tragedy: The Story of a Doomed Existence

Chapter Twenty-one: Unwanted or Deceived?

As the weeks passed, Lily began to wish more and more fervently that she had signed up to stay at Hogwarts over the holidays. The snow that blanketed the ground was powdery and soft, never mind that there was a snowball fight held on the grounds nearly every day. The lake's surface had frozen solid, and after Hagrid tested to be sure it was safe, the students were permitted to skate. Lily found herself wishing that she had brought her ice skates; they were old and falling apart, but she liked them and had skated on the river near her house every winter day since she was very young.

She had written her parents with a request that they send her the skates, but so far there had been no reply. It made sense, really; each night, and some days as well, howling blizzards swirled around the castle. Lily hoped that her mother had enough sense to stop Aristotle from going out in such weather. He was already such a poor flier; she didn't like to think what trouble he would run into if he were carrying a heavy box through this sort of storm.

So Lily contented herself with simply being outside. Sometimes she would do homework, sometimes she would participate in snowball fights, sometimes she would reread her favorite books, and sometimes she would simply stare out across the frozen lake, dreaming and thinking.

She had discovered a handy little charm for making what she called 'bluebell flames', though she did her best to keep it hidden. Hurley still hated her deeply (even more so now that he thought she might be behind H.U.R.L.) and would not hesitate to take points from Gryffindor, among other things. There were other teachers and staff, namely Filch, Pringle, Dulcissa and Missus Ogg, who would be just as happy for a reason to castigate and punish Lily.

The rest of Gryffindor remained angry with Lily - and James, for that matter - over all of the lost points. However, on the last day of term, a number of students changed their minds about Lily.

She had just managed to get free of double potions, in which Dulcissa had made them all stay behind so that she could give them lots of 'light, easy holiday homework that's not only great fun, but keeps you on your toes!'

Lily had wanted to get out as soon as possible anyway; the class had involved a nasty incident where Tawny the Slytherin had almost chopped off Lily's hand. The latter was quite sure that Tawny's knife hadn't slipped by accident. She was anxious to be free of the murderous-looking Slytherin.

"Miserable old bat," Lily muttered to herself up in her dormitory; she wanted to put her books away and put on some warmer attire so that she could be outside. "Not only does she have to be a horrible teacher, she has to give us loads of homework! It's the easiest thing I've ever been assigned, but I don't want to write twenty rolls of parchment on what can go wrong while preparing Potions ingredients!"

She slammed her cauldron onto the floor. Normally, these were kept in the dungeons, but it was the last day of term so they had been permitted to take them home. Not that they needed them for the homework, or even for class; each cauldron was filled with a very thick coating of squalid dust. Lily hadn't been permitted to touch hers since the first day of term.

Still muttering about Dulcissa's ineptitude and what she'd like to do to her to prove her spite, Lily changed into thick layers and the warmest sweater she had. Feeling considerably bulkier than was normal, she slipped her cloak and robes about her shoulders, picked up her wand and her History of Magic textbook, and hurried down through the castle's corridors and out of the large doors.

As soon as she was outside, Lily walked quickly down to her favorite place to sit: an ice-trimmed willow tree whose frozen boughs graced the lake's edges. She plunked her book bag down beside the tree's trunk and pulled out a large platter she had found in the common room.

A few carefully chosen words later, the redhead had a crackling blue fire going, all but obscured by the trees' long branches. She leaned against the trunk, reveling in the warmth of the fire and ruing all of the clothing she had worn; it was now very warm under the tree.

As the fire began to grow in ferocity, fed by some water Lily sprinkled on it (unlike normal fires, this fire grew when water was added), she slowly removed some of her layers of sweaters. The thick branches of the willow kept much of the heat in, so it soon grew even warmer, considering that the temperature outside was lower than freezing. Lily was in the midst of removing her second-to-last sweater when a voice startled her out of her pursuits.

"Is that allowed?"

Lily recognized that voice. She continued trying to tug the sweater off, but it seemed to have shrunk since she had put it on. Either that or her hair had gained even more volume. A final pull convinced her that it was hopeless, so she shoved the sweater back down around her neck, all too aware that her now rather frizzy hair had sprung up around her head. She swiveled around, trying to spot who had spoken.

"Nafeesah!" she gasped, surprised. She'd thought that the second-year wasn't speaking to her.

"Hi, Lily." Clearly, the redhead had been mistaken.

"Are you - erm, are you speaking to me, then?" Lily asked after a few moments of uncomfortable silence had ensued.

"It looks like it," Nafeesah grinned. "May I come in?"

"Sure," Lily's voice was equally uncomfortable.

The tall girl ducked underneath the willow's hanging branches and walked carefully over to where Lily was seated. She was still wearing her ice skates.

"You can sit down, if you'd like," Lily told her after even more uncomfortable silence.

"Right."

"So! It's nice and warm in here," Nafeesah gave another stab at pleasant conversation once she had settled herself.

"Yeah," Lily agreed. "It's a useful charm." She indicated the crackling fire.

"So...look, Lily," Nafeesah continued. "I just wanted to - to apologize for getting as mad at you as everyone else did. It's not your fault. I mean, well, it is, but you were supporting something important. How is the campaign coming, anyway? I know that you have some different friends now, and I haven't seen you spending much time studying. I was just wondering," she added defensively, clearly trying to show Lily that she wasn't prying.

Lily swallowed a little nervously and took the opportunity to commence removing her sweater. Of course, now that she welcomed the distraction, the wool garment slid off easily. Lily increased her efforts toward being inconspicuous by sticking a calm, collected expression on her face and gazing into Nafeesah's dark, chocolate-colored eyes.

"Oh - I've been a bit busy lately," she smiled and laughed in a high-pitched, uncharacteristic way.

Why do I have to be such a poor actress under pressure? She asked herself, annoyed and forgetting in her unfortunate condition that she was never a very talented actress.

The truth was, she had rather forgotten about her vow to regulate the Quidditch the teams and make fairer the way members were chosen. Somehow, when someone was a good friend of the Marauders, it didn't seem as important to bother with previous goals. The four boys had done absolutely nothing to motivate Lily's continuation of her project, and had even gone as far as to tell her it was a pointless endeavor. Now, Lily wasn't the sort of person who cared the slightest whether they 'approved' of her ideas or not, but it was very difficult to stay focused on something so tedious when she could instead be doing things like transfiguring Pringle's favorite seal to depict a fat pig around the elaborate 'P', as compared to the wand and potions bottle that had been there before. Lily almost grinned as Pringle's yell of fury echoed in her mind, but she told herself to remove the glazed look from her eyes and return to Earth.

"Erm...Lily? Are you okay?" Apparently, Nafeesah had noticed Lily's less-than-attentive aura.

"Yeah, fine! I was just remembering a passage from one of the books I've been reading for the Quidditch campaign," Lily lied.

"I thought that you said that you hadn't the time?" Nafeesah raised her eyebrows.

"Well, not much, but I still manage to read as many books as I can," Lily smiled at her, feeling guilt settle itself behind her happy-go-lucky expression. "The one I was remembering was about a talented Hufflepuff Seeker named Calliope de Forte -"

She broke off when a few rosy-cheeked faces peered into the willow's enclosure, probably in search of Nafeesah.

"Oh, there you are, Neef!" a Black boy with curly hair and a boyish face exclaimed. "We were starting to wonder! Come on, let's get back to playing. Michael Richardson reckons he's thought of a way for us to charm the ball to float!" He raised his eyebrows in excitement.

"Just a sec, Vester," 'Neef' grinned at him. She turned back to Lily. "This is my friend Sylvester Simmons," she explained. "But if you call him that, he's liable to take your head off. We call him Vester or Vestie."

"Neef calls me Vestie," Sylvester laughed. He rolled his eyes. "Other, normal people call me Vester."

"Nice to meet you," Lily nodded at him. So many nicknames!

"I'm Mel." Someone stepped from behind Sylvester. Lily looked her quickly up and down and immediately envied the girl's hair. It was some weird combination of red and blonde, but it was unlike any Lily had seen before. The only way to describe it was gold. Curly like Lily's, it fell to her shoulders and glimmered in the blue firelight. But what was most notable about this girl was her face, was her expression. She had a crooked grin that suggested she had a funny and slightly twisted personality. Her multicolored eyes glimmered mischievously.

Lily inclined her head in the girl's direction, smiling in her own way. Movement behind Mel distracted Lily for a moment. The final member of Nafeesah's entourage had stepped into view. Unlike the other three, she wasn't really smiling; she looked rather far-away and a dreamy look pervaded her hazel eyes. Her long, mud-colored hair hung in her face and she did not bother to brush it back.

"That's Meredith," Nafeesah announced once no one said anything.

Meredith blinked and seemed to come back to earth. She gave Lily a slight nod of the head and went back to staring at the blue flames.

"Would you like to sit down?" Lily suggested.

She had a good time with Nafeesah's friends. Nafeesah was the only Gryffindor, which surprised Lily; the Gryffindors she knew tried to keep their circle of friends within their House. But not in this case. The four students called themselves 'The Friendly Four,' as there was a member from each House, but yet they still managed to remain good friends.

Sylvester was a proud Ravenclaw, the only third-year in Nafeesah's group of friends, and somewhat of a neat freak. Meredith was a barely-present and dreamy Hufflepuff; she occasionally made some unusual and random remarks, but mostly kept quiet. The only words she actually spoke to Lily were the announcement that she wrote down everything. She proved this by pulling out an old and decrepit notebook and keeping what Lily presumed was a log of their conversation.

But what surprised Lily more than the odd Meredith or the overly neat Sylvester was Mel's House. She was a Slytherin, she told Lily happily, but Lily decided that she didn't act like one. She didn't seem to care at all that Lily was a Muggle-born, and had the sort of personality Lily had never connected with Slytherin. The only way to describe her was the word 'insane.'

Lily decided that she liked Nafeesah's friends. She knew that James would flay her alive if he knew she was becoming friends with a Slytherin, but she didn't care. They seemed to like her even more than the fact that she could produce fire and therefore warmth in the cold afternoon.

Each was fairly popular even outside of their close friends, so a sort of thoroughfare was created under the willow. The snowball fighters came to laugh and warm their hands, the ice skaters came to say hello and discard sweaters so that the fire would warm the damp woolen garments, and various other people would stroll by and introduce themselves.

Lily also determined that she liked this side of what could be called popularity. Perhaps this was because the only people she was now socializing with loved snow (a very noteworthy trait in Lily's opinion) and weren't the sort of twittering girls that had surrounded her before. These were people who weren't afraid to get dirty, and Lily liked that. She liked that the people didn't care so much about their own appearances to get dirty, whereas people like Amelia were, in Lily's opinion, overly concerned with such things. It struck Lily as rather ironic that the few people who she didn't mind talking to were the sort of people who were so incredibly different from her. These were the Quidditch players, the rather sporty people, and not Lily's type at all.

The final pleasant part of this type of popularity was the fact that Lily wasn't the popular one. People would nod at her, acknowledge her, meet her, but they weren't really interested in her. A few joined her in polite conversation, but for the most part she was left alone. It was very nice.

Lily presumed that she might not have even left, if it weren't for the fact that the short, squat Ogg came tearing across the snow and chased them out. Everyone scattered immediately, knowing that Lily's fire couldn't be allowed.

Though Lily didn't like athletics, she discovered that she could most certainly run if she wanted to. And she didn't stop doing so until she reached the Gryffindor Tower.

Still breathing heavily, Lily dove through the portrait hole and leaned against the wall outside next to the portrait-back, ignoring all of the people who were staring at her. She felt as though all the breath had been sucked out of her lungs by the particularly formidable vacuum her mother favored.

"Oi! Ravishing radish!" James yelled across the common room.

"Could you be any louder?" Lily asked him irritably after she had gained her breath and trekked across the common room. "And must you call me that?"

"Sure I could be louder!" James grinned. "OI, LIL -" he shouted at the top of his rather impressive lungs.

"Okay, I don't need the proof." Lily rolled her eyes, but she couldn't help but grin.

"And I don't have to call you that. Would you prefer 'Lily among the roses'? 'Crème Brulee of the puddings'? Or how about 'Beauteous lady of my desire'?"

Lily just rolled her eyes.

"Jamie's been pining for you," Sirius told her. "And so has someone else, in fact! As if you hadn't noticed."

"What are you on about?" she asked wearily.

He moved aside and Lily saw, quite clearly, what.

Aristotle had managed to get into the common room and was clearly causing as much ruckus as he could manage in his search for her. He was flapping his misshapen wings crazily and zooming around people's heads, pecking at just about anything he could reach. A number of people sported cut faces and hands, not to mention mussed hair. There were owl droppings in a lot of places and the wind from Aristotle's wings was rustling papers and books. A letter was flapping madly on one of his legs.

As soon as he had seen Lily, Aristotle flew over and started chattering loudly, flapping around her head so that all she saw was a mass of rumpled gray feathers. Finally, Lily managed to convince him to land on her arm. Achingly supporting the weight of her owl, she turned back to the students who were looking on with expressions that were everything from disgust to curiosity to anger.

"I'm sorry about that," Lily told them, smiling faintly. She realized now that Aristotle was the reason James' hair was rather matted and flattened on one side. "He's a little of a strange bird, but he's all right, really." Aristotle nibbled her ear affectionately.

"So, Lily, got a secret boyfriend?" Peter asked her obnoxiously, bobbing up and down in her face. It was amazing how much he reminded her of Amelia Hawthorne.

At Peter's words, James' face contorted slightly and Remus looked up from his book. Sirius, however, grinned unconcernedly.

As Lily surveyed James and Remus, both of whom seemed overly curious as to the prospect of Lily being romantically involved with someone, she remembered what had happened by the lake only a few weeks beforehand. No one had mentioned it since, but here was that strange conflict again. She frowned.

"Of course not, you dolt." Lily laughed, rolling her eyes in Peter's direction. "It's probably from my parents."

She reached up and untangled a regular letter from the owl's scaly legs. Here was further proof that the letter was from her parents: unlike people in the Wizarding world, the Muggle portion of the Evans family did not use parchment for their letters.

Ignoring the stares that everyone was continuing to give her, Lily slipped her finger under the envelope's sealant, pulled the wrinkled paper out, and began to read.

Dear Lily,

Hi, sweetie! Your last letter made me smile. Those new friends of yours are really something! I'm glad to see that you have met people who you have fun with, though I shudder to think of what your life must be like when you are friends with barbaric boys!

It's quite horrific, actually. Girls need the proper friendships so that they can remain correctly feminine and proper. How are you supposed to meet a nice boy somewhere if you rush around with a lot of troublemakers? The system of courting can't be that different in the Wizarding community than I ours, so please remember to act proper. I might not be one of the elite witches in your community, but that doesn't mean I can't be embarrassed by improper behavior! So be careful, honey.

Your father is doing very well, actually. A client in Germany wants him to handle a murder case, isn't that fabulous? We are going to go visit them over the holidays, all sorts of proper dinner parties and functions. I've been teaching Petunia proper German, as well as how to be the proper guest or host, but you don't know any of those proper things! I'm not trying to cast you out from what was supposed to be a proper family holiday, but I'm really starting to think that it would just be easier if you stayed at your school. A nice, proper holiday with your friends! Or maybe you could meet some more proper ones, girls who exchange hair potions or whatever it is that you witches do.

Your father agrees with me, though we'll both miss you considerably. I'm very sorry that we'll be missing Chanukah with one another, but if you could send some owls we'll send you your presents. We are leaving for Germany a few days before Christmas, so I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't send any owls to us if they won't arrive before the twenty-third. Think how incredibly improper it would be for a pack of owls to show up at the house of your father's next potential client!

We'll all miss you horribly, dear, and hope that you have a properly enjoyable holiday. Happy Chanukah, and do try to meet some proper friends!

Love,

Mum

P.S. I think Petunia wanted to add something on the bottom.

Hi little freak...

Haha, isnt it pitful that you the freak one mum and dad 'lik' is the one who stays behind. I get to go to germiny and meat handsom men and you haf to stay behind wit your freak freinds at your freak scool Well, so long, freak. Thank goodnes I dont haf to see you until sumer . Freak.

Signed,

Petunia

Lily snorted when she read each letter. Her mother's letter completely overused the word 'proper', whereas Petunia's - along with having incredibly poor grammar and spelling - had used the word 'freak' no less than six times.

Lily skimmed over her mother's letter again. She felt a wide mixture of emotions after rereading it. She certainly had wanted to stay at Hogwarts over the winter vacation, but it had been a hopeless dream; she also missed her family and wanted to see them again.

Well, she'd gotten her wish. Her parents had done nothing short of kicked her out, much as she couldn't make up her mind whether this was good or not.

"Lily?" Remus peered at her curiously.

"Mm?" Lily looked up at the four Marauders.

It suddenly seemed very blurry and distorted in the common room; as though she had been sleeping or had closed her eyes for a long time. There was a strange rushing noise in Lily's ears, and all the voices she could hear echoed and sounded as though they were from far away.

"Lily! You've got a funny expression..." Sirius' face popped into view, elongated by Lily's bizarre vision.

"I'm - fine," Lily told them, aware that her voice sounded nothing like normal. By talking about being fine, she had sufficiently convinced everyone that she wasn't.

"Lil?" James cocked his head to the side and peered at her through his hazel eyes.

"I need to - go - to go get the - I'll be right back," she told them haphazardly.

"What's wrong?" James put his hands on her shoulders and peered curiously at her.

"N-nothing - I've got to go," Lily told him, avoiding his eyes.

She wrenched her shoulders out of his grip and hurried across the common room, the letter clutched in a painfully hard grasp and Aristotle's claws digging into her shoulder where he had resettled himself after Lily was free of James.

"Lily! Stop! Tell us what's going on!" James shouted after her, concern etched across his bemused face.

But she didn't listen; she really couldn't bear to at the moment. Instead she hurried up the staircase, robes billowing behind her and hair bobbing around her head. She didn't stop until after she heard a voice behind her.

"Lily! Come on, don't do this," James berated her from the bottom of the staircase. She shook her head and continued onward, but a loud noise behind her made her whirl around.

James seemed to have resolved himself to do the most desperate action: he had started up the stairs to the girl's dormitory. Of course, as soon as he had leaped up several stairs, a long wailing note sounded. Despite herself, Lily clapped her hands to her ears and leapt into a miscellaneous dormitory, thankfully an empty one. With the bizarre way her hearing was behaving, the noise sounded even more distorted than was to be expected.

James, on the other hand, was taken completely by surprise and did some kind of twisted flip, crashing into the wall and descending unwillingly down the slide that had formed. Lily was very glad that she had hopped into the fifth year girl's dormitory. As soon as James had landed with a thump at the bottom of the stairs, Lily peered outside and saw that the stairs were slowly reforming back to their original state. Before she could turn back into the direction of her dormitory, she paused for a moment, indecisive as to whether she should nip downstairs and check to see if her friend were okay.

She had, in fact, turned down the stairs with this intention when a high-pitched twittering met her ears. Peering around the last landing, Lily saw what she assumed was half of Gryffindor's female populace, all simpering and squealing with concern. James sat in the center, an expression of fake pain on his face. He was clearly unhurt.

Lily felt the strange feeling pass over her again, despite the distraction James had offered. Sirius and Remus had leapt up at the appearance of her face, but she turned back around as soon as they maintained eye contact.

The door to the dormitory burst open without her touch and she made her way to her four-poster. Just before she collapsed onto her back, Aristotle took flight and amused himself by trying to open the owl treat-holding tray under his cage.

Lily turned her head to the side and stared up at the curtains. This was quite easily the strangest and most uncomfortable emotion she had ever felt. She knew she was unwanted, and it made her feel lonely, but then she wasn't even sure if she cared whether or not she was wanted. There was just something about the pure rejection of it all that had hurt Lily deeper than she even realized, as she lay on the bed, contemplating.

Why didn't they tell me? Lily asked herself, annoyance taking over her emotions for a moment or two. It wasn't right! If Mrs. Evans wanted to teach Petunia anything remotely resembling German, she must have had at least two months to work on it! They could have told Lily beforehand; unlike her sister, Lily could easily master any language she wanted.

"They're ashamed of me," she murmured sadly to herself. "Is it my appearance? Or my being a witch? Or is it just Petunia, being her own interfering self?"

She extracted the letter from her tightly clenched hand, which had wrinkled the paper even further, not to mention left a very curious pattern on Lily's hand. Glancing over it once more, Lily felt a sparkle of doubt in her mind. There was a very obvious contrast between the letters, supposedly because two different people wrote them. But for as long as Lily could remember, Petunia's writing had always been neat and her spelling not poor. She had, after all, managed to get outstanding grades in elementary school. This was mostly because she had bullied Lily into doing her homework (not that Lily minded; this was the one chance she was given to reveal her true self in her earlier days), but the redhead assumed that there had to be some way that Petunia passed tests and completed class work while still convincing everyone she was a genius. After Lily's discovery of Jacqueline Monique's trunk in her seventh year of life, she had no longer helped Petunia and the girl had suffered because of this.

Once again, Lily's eyes skimmed the parchment. It seemed rather obvious now. Petunia had sent this to convince Lily not to come home for the holidays. As a bonus for the fifteen-year-old, Mr. and Mrs. Evans would now think of Lily as irresponsible.

That is, they would if Lily complied with what the idiotic Petunia had thought she would.

"Honestly," Lily murmured to herself as she crinkled the paper into a ball. "What sort of idiot does she think I am?"

She tossed the ball into the air, pointed her wand at it, and a few Latin words later the paper ignited. Lily watched the ashes of the paper fall slowly to the dormitory's floor.

She'd show them. Petunia would learn that it wasn't that easy to swindle Lily into something like this. She'd show up at King's Cross as though she had never gotten the letter. Stupid Petunia. She'd learn.

With these encouraging thoughts still banging around her mind, Lily skipped back to the common room with what she imagined was a devious grin on her face.