The Left Behind

It's strange walking into the Granger house again after all these years. Everything is the same, to the point of eeriness--there's the staircase with the elegant, swooping banister that I always secretly wanted to slide down, here's the desk where Mr. Ganger spent every Saturday morning doing bookkeeping for the dental practice he ran with his wife, and out there, through the just-scrubbed looking window, I can see Mrs. Granger's prize-winning rosebush, a hint of green bordering the deep blue sky.

It's either a dream or a nightmare that I'm walking through, not real life. It can't be.

Hermione and I hadn't really spoken for years, and although knowing her made me a different person, a better one, I can't say that I mind this fact. I'm sure she didn't either--after all, the memories we share are easier to forget when we're apart. The last time I saw her was in line at the Boots downtown last summer, on a boiling hot day just before school started. For a second, I'd considered pretending I didn't notice her, or even putting down my packages and heading for the door. But before I'd had time to do either, Hermione was standing next to me, and we were ten years old again, awkward little girls unsure what to do with ourselves.

"Hey!" Hermione gushed, giving me the kind of incredulous up-and-down glance I've grown used to over the past few years. "I almost didn't recognize you!" She didn't say why, being at heart a kind person, but I could see what she was thinking just as easily as ever. Where's the rest of you? Were you kidnapped and starved by terrorists or something?

"How are you, Hermione?" I replied, doing my best to mimic her smile. "It's been positively ages."

"Oh, you know. I'm busy with school and such, so I don't have much time to spend at home." Her tone was clipped, dismissive, and if I didn't know better I'd have said that Hermione Jane Granger, the bravest girl I'd ever known, was scared out of her mind. She was always the first to stand up to bullies twice her size, the first to say what was unpopular but true. And maybe I'm the only person in the world who realized it, but it wasn't that Hermione was fearless. It was just that she was willing to risk more than the rest of us, I guess. "I'm only here for a few days before I head down to Ottery St. Catchpole to visit some friends from school. My new school, I mean." She was almost apologetic at the end, her eyes shifting down to stare at our shoes, which had suddenly become very interesting.

It was only natural that we were a pair, the two of us. In primary school, when standing out was the last thing you wanted to do in the world, Hermione had always been conspicuously smart, and I had always been conspicuously fat. Together, we found life bearable: I was strong enough to fight off the bullies, and she was smart enough to figure out how best to do so. When we were together, I never once had my brown-bag lunch stolen, and she never once got pushed into the mud puddles that ringed the playground every spring. Maybe we weren't quite like other girls, the ones who played foursquare during recess or braided each other's hair while waited for the bus after school, but we were happy.

"Funny how much busier I am, now that senior year is about to start. I'm hardly around too, what with my football schedule and all." It was only after Hermione left for her new school when we were eleven that I realized that I was good at something, and that all I needed to do to fit in at school was be the best goalie the team our ever had.

"I'm not going back to school this year," Hermione blurted. After the words had escaped, she looked shocked, horrified, to have said them. Or maybe even to have thought them. I nearly had to pick my jaw up off the floor, myself--Hermione, not going to school? She must have changed just as much as I had since the last time we'd seen each other. The Hermione I knew had always completed her homework weeks in advance and spent every evening memorizing her schoolbooks.

"Really?" I stuttered a bit, unsure what to say. "Are you..." Pregnant? Crazy?

She must have heard the concern in my voice, because the smile that had withered on her face bloomed again. "Oh, I'm fine. I just have some very important business to take care of. It's more important than school."

"More important than school?" I parroted. Surely, those words having passed through the lips of Hermione Granger must have been a sign of the apocalypse, noted right there in the Bible next to the dead walking.

"Very much so." Hermione's words didn't match her expression: they were heavy, serious, resigned.

We shuffled our feet for a few seconds, and the line ahead of us at the cash register moved forward. "Can I help one of you missus?" Asked the cashier, her pencil-thin brows disappearing under her thick fringe.

"Yes, of course. Sorry." Hermione stepped forward, placing on the counter the bottles of herbal remedies she'd been carrying.

"It was nice to see you, Hermione." I said over her shoulder, noting that she'd finally figured out how to mostly tame her poofy cascade of curls. "I hope that everything works out for you, with your thing. The important one."

And that was it, my last meeting with the girl I'd once been closer to than I was to my own sister. I put down my packages and stepped out of the store and back into the future, into myself.

My mother had phoned me at school when she saw the obituary in the Norwich Weekly last Saturday. And, for some reason that even I'm not sure of, I made the long train voyage from London to be here. To see Hermione's no-nonsense mother cry like I've never seen anyone cry before. To join the small cluster of locals in the sea of Granger relatives, and to gawk at the balding, red-haired man who stands near the casket laid out in the Grangers' spotless living room. The whole crowd of us watch as he blows his nose, a massive, resounding affair, into the ridiculously long sleeve of the graduation gown he seemed to have paired with a set of jodhpurs.

"Hello." Hermione's father appears at my side, looking as if he is the one who's dead, not his only child. His skin is pasty, his eyes red, and his hair mussed from the way he keeps running his hands through it. "It's so lovely of you to have come. I know it's a long trip from the city, but Hermione would be so glad to know... Would be delighted...." He can't seem to find words for what Hermione would be, if she knew that I was here at her funeral. If she knew that someone in the real world cared for her, even if just a little.

We'd had a sleepover the night before she went to her new school, the impossible one way off in the Scottish highlands where they taught people to turn matches into mice, or so Hermione said.

Spread out on our New Kids on the Block sleeping bags in the very room where she now lies, Hermione and I had watched the stars long after Mrs. Granger had made us turn off the lights.

"I can't believe this is happening to me." Hermione had been breathless at the thought of the escape this Hogwarts place was offering her. "I just know that everything is going to change, and that I've been waiting my whole life for that letter to arrive. And for tomorrow."

"I guess you have." Back then, as a little girl, I'd somehow managed to never say much. Especially not around Hermione. The only thing bigger than that girl's words were her ideas, and everything I had to say--everything I was, really--paled in comparison. Even if I had known how to translate what I was feeling into words, I probably should have kept them to myself. I was betrayed. Hurt. Terrified. For the first time since kindergarten, I would be facing school without my best friend. And she was to be spirited off to some fairy castle, picked out of everyone in all the world to be special and different. Now, all these years later, I can finally sum up what I felt: hatred. For smart, cute, perfect little Hermione and the perfect life she would no doubt lead.

"It's like I never really belonged here, in this place. In this real world. And that's why no one ever likes me, and why I've always been so different." It was a horrible admission for Hermione, who even at eleven had a kind of pride most adults never develop. She didn't talk about her problems, if she had any, and certainly never admitted weakness.

"I like you, Hermione," was all I could think of to say as I ran my hand over the perfect curves of Jordan Knight's face.

Hermione had fit in at her new school, I suppose. We'd never talked much after she left, and there are certainly enough strangely dressed people milling around her parents' home to attest to her popularity. There are parasols and stripes worn with plaids and a boy with messy dark hair who sits by himself in the living room, staring at Hermione's still figure as if he might have the power to bring her back, to make her yawn and stretch and climb out of the satiny bower where the sensible among us know she'll be spending the rest of forever.

I want to cry, a little. No matter how I might have felt about her leaving me, I knew from the moment we met that Hermione really was destined for different things. I'd just always thought that different meant better.

Hermione's father gives my hand a squeeze and walks back to where his wife stands, encircled by her sisters.

My feet carry me forward, toward her casket, even as I will myself to turn around, to leave, to go home to where my parents wait, my favorite dinner ready and my old childhood bed turned down.

Hermione's pretty face is smooth and unlined, her lips turned down just a bit at the edges, as if she might really be asleep, and we might all be actors in her bad dream.

People don't just up and die like this, do they? Perfect, beautiful, young. When no one is looking, I reach out and touch her hand, just to be sure. She's cold, like ice, like metal. Hermione Granger, the girl with whom I'd spent practically every moment until we were ten years old, is dead.

And then it occurs to me, what I should have known all along: maybe being normal, being sturdy and unremarkable and not particularly special, isn't so bad after all.