Just One Question

Harry felt decidedly out of place. He was sitting in a compartment of the Hogwarts Express, heading up for his Sixth Year as a student of wizardry, and all he'd heard since the train left Kings Cross was Ginny Weasley, nattering on to Luna Lovegood about how she'd dated Dean Thomas over the summer, and all the things they'd done together, up until the time he got a little too fresh and Ginny had to send him packing quick smart and she took up with Michael Corner again.

"You've got to be really, really careful about that sort of thing," Luna said, trying to sound as if she was giving advice to a younger, less experienced student, even though Ginny and Luna were both Fifth Years and Luna, as far as Harry knew, never fancied anybody. "If you make the slightest error in judgment, you could be stuck for decades with the wrong sort of wizard."

Harry tried to tune Luna out as if she was a radio playing an especially obnoxious song, although he did wonder in passing, based on what she'd said, what divorce was like in the wizarding world. He'd learned so much, he sighed, looking out the window at the landscape flying by, and there was still so much more to learn...

At least he now knew why Dean wasn't in the compartment with Ginny. Since Dean shared a dormitory room with Ginny's brother Ron, Harry wondered whether it was a bad break-up, something that would lead to two of his dorm-mates shouting at each other or throwing hexes, or demanding that Harry take sides, like those occasions when Ron fought with Hermione...

No, Harry told himself, I don't care. Let them fight it out. I don't care.

Harry had been telling himself for months that he didn't care, about anything and everything. He had watched Sirius Black, his godfather, his parents' best friend, get hexed during the battle at the Ministry of Magic three months before. Sirius had fallen into an archway, but had not fallen out. He was told that Sirius was dead, and that was probably the worst news he had ever received. The one person who cared most about him was gone, and it hurt. So he tried not to feel anything at all, to keep the hurt at bay. And so far, he had succeeded. Unless you count those times when he awoke late into the night, with no sound other than Hedwig stirring in her cage, and he realized that both his face and his pillow were still wet with tears...

But there was no way he'd admit to that in public, in the daylight. Never to Ron and Hermione, curse them, who were sitting in the Prefects Compartment, several cars up the train, and didn't have to listen to Ginny and Luna with their inane prattle about boys.

"Now, Mongolian wizards understand all this," Luna was going on, even though he doubted that Ginny was really listening. Neville Longbottom tried to seem interested, but he too was beginning to look a bit glassy-eyed. "Mongol wizards do up your astrological chart the minute you're born, and they keep it on file, somewhere, and then they compare them all, and on your sixteenth birthday you get an owl telling you who you're going to marry."

Harry didn't even know if that was a real custom or not. It could have been something Luna's father invented to fill space in The Quibbler, the rather bizarre weekly newspaper he published. It was strange even for the wizarding world.

Harry just sort of pushed himself into a corner of the seat and looked out the window, hoping that the others would take the hint and leave him alone. After a few minutes, Ginny and Luna did leave to look for some friends. Neville was still in the compartment with Harry.

After a couple of minutes of silence, Neville cleared his throat. "Saw my folks the other day."

This was something he wouldn't have said the year before. He never talked about his parents, two former Aurors who were driven mad by Lord Voldemort and were living out their days in a closed ward at St. Mungo's Hospital. Harry had accidentally found out about them, but after the Daily Prophet wrote up the battle at the Ministry, plus everything else that had happened, Neville decided to tell him.

Harry felt he had to say something. "How are they doing?"

"All right, I guess," Neville shrugged; then, he sighed. "Who am I kidding? They're incurables. I could throw myself under this train and they'd never know it."

Harry made a sort of non-committal grunt and turned back to the window. No matter how he felt about Neville's parents, he really didn't want to be bothered.

A few minutes later, there was a light tapping on the compartment glass. Harry didn't turn to see who it was. He heard the door open, then Neville said, "Oh, hi, Cho."

Cho Chang was truly the last person Harry wanted to see today, and that list included Draco Malfoy. She was in a different Year and a different House, but she was still one of the prettiest girls Harry had ever seen. He fancied her from the moment he first saw her, in his Third Year, when they faced each other in the Quidditch stadium, because she was Seeker for Ravenclaw...

That was the only match they'd ever played against each other. Quidditch was suspended the following year for the Tri-Wizard Tournament, and the year after that Harry had been banned from playing Quidditch by Dolores Umbridge. The letter from Professor McGonagall that came with his book list, confirming that the ban was lifted, was one of the few pieces of good news he allowed himself to enjoy that summer.

"Erm, Neville, if you don't mind, I'd like a minute to talk to Harry. Alone."

Neville turned to Harry; Harry was still looking out of the window. He could see in the window's reflection of the compartment that Neville was grinning; all it did, Harry thought, was make Neville look foolish.

With no reaction from Harry, Neville cleared his throat, saying, "Well, of course, I mean..."

Neville rose, but had stepped on his own robes, and nearly fell onto the other seats. Then, after another minute spent rounding up his pet toad Trevor, he ducked out of the compartment, leaving Harry and Cho alone, seated opposite each other.

"Hello, Harry," Cho said, softly and a bit nervously.

Harry didn't say anything. I feel nothing for you, he kept telling himself; I feel nothing, nothing at all.

"How was your summer?"

Harry still didn't say anything.

"I sent an owl on your birthday. I never heard back; I don't know if you got it."

Harry still didn't say anything.

"Yes, well, if that's the way this year is going to be." Cho was back on her feet now. "I'll see you around, Harry."

"Wait!"

Cho stopped with her hand on the door. Harry was looking at her, and seemed to be surprised by his own outburst. He recovered quickly, though, and turned back toward the window. He tried to seem as if he didn't care at all when he spoke again: "I suppose you wanted to ask about the D.A.?"

"Actually, no, but, since you mention it..."

"I don't know yet, okay?" Harry's voice had an angry edge to it. "I mean, the Ministry has changed its tune, hasn't it? Now it admits that Voldemort is back." Harry watched Cho; the mere mention of Voldemort's name was enough to unnerve many wizards, young and old. Cho's expression, however, didn't change. "Anyway, there's no more need to keep it a secret." Harry waited a second, then shoved in the knife: "I'm sure Marietta will be disappointed."

Marietta Edgecombe was a dorm-mate of Cho's in Ravenclaw and a member of Dumbledore's Army. She was also the daughter of the witch who ran the Floo Network for the Ministry of Magic. The year before, Marietta's mother had pushed and cajoled her daughter into telling Madam Umbridge whatever she might know about Dumbledore's Army. Marietta almost succeeded, but was prevented by a Memory Modification charm. She also had a jinx placed on her: a severe case of acne in which the pimples spelled out the word "Sneak". This was Hermione's doing, and it had taken most of the summer for mediwizards at St. Mungo's to sort out.

Cho's eyes started to blaze. "I came looking for you to see if we couldn't get past our arguments from last year. Obviously, I was wasting my time." Again Cho stood up to go.

"No! Stop!"

Cho turned to Harry, who again looked as if he'd surprised himself by speaking to her. He tried to put back on his detached air, but he still felt a bit nervous, even if he couldn't have said why.

"That is, erm, you can go..."

"How nice of you to let me."

Cho's cool response had an effect: it awakened the butterflies that lived in Harry's stomach, which usually only came to life when he saw Cho. Still, he pressed on: "But first, answer me a question; just one question."

"All right," Cho said, and sat back down across from Harry.

For a moment, Harry completely forgot what he wanted to ask Cho. He simply wanted her to be there, with him, the rest of the way to Hogwarts... But then he remembered, and his voice turned to ice again: "Just tell me why, why you stood up for Marietta, when she could have gotten all of us expelled, or worse!"

Cho looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. She took a deep breath, sighed it out, and looked at Harry. "Because she stood up for me. Maybe you didn't notice, but she was just about the last friend I had."

"Well... Well, no, I didn't notice."

"I know I brought it on myself, the way I acted after Cedric was killed." Cho paused, and took another deep breath. "And, no, Mister Harry Potter, I am not going to start crying over him again. I think I've finally gotten that part of my life under control. Anyway, it was as if all of my so-called friends got together and said, 'Right, she's not going to be any fun this year, let's leave her alone.' There was Quidditch, too, I suppose, but that's just a few hours a week, and two matches, maybe three. And that was part of the problem, too, what with Cedric being a Seeker.

"Harry, you have to believe me, I would have gone completely mad if you hadn't started Dumbledore's Army. I could be with people; I had a purpose in life. I would never set out to betray that."

"No, but you were mates with the person who did."

"Harry, you don't have the first idea!"

"About what?"

"About what I went through last year: the nightmares, the memories, the doubts and uncertainties. Marietta was the only one--the ONLY one, Harry--who didn't turn her back on me. And when her face got jinxed, I couldn't turn my back on her. All at once the others in the Army hated her, and the rest of Hogwarts was laughing at her. And I knew what that felt like, Harry."

Harry's eyebrows crinkled behind his glasses. He was drawn into Cho's story in spite of himself. "How could you know? You've always been..."

"Popular? Friendly? I had to work at it, harder than I worked at being a Seeker. I knew that it could all disappear in a moment--and, last year, it did.

"Harry, do you know why my Patronus is a swan?" Cho seemed to have changed subjects completely; it caught Harry a bit off-guard, and he only shook his head. "When I was young, my favourite story was 'The Ugly Duckling.' I was convinced that I was that duckling..." Cho's voice started to break, but she stopped and got hold of herself. "I could never count on the people who said they were my friends, because, like Marietta, I had something written on my face."

Harry's mouth had gone dry; he swallowed and asked, "What was written there?"

Cho looked straight into Harry's eyes. "Chinese; Not Really British. Not One Of Us."

Growing up locked in a closet under the stairs didn't keep Harry from learning about the world, and he knew about race prejudice. He'd seen Dudley and his gang make a sport out of chasing the few Indians or Pakistanis who lived in Little Whinging. He had simply never imagined that Cho Chang would experience it.

"Harry, I know you understand what it means not to abandon a friend. You were in here just now with Neville Longbottom, and he's something of a joke around Hogwarts. Yet you're strong enough to stand by him. And I had to be strong enough to stand by Marietta when nobody else would. I know what might have happened, and, if it had, maybe I would have felt differently. But I couldn't just abandon her; there's been too much between us. I'm sorry, but I couldn't change that, even now."

Harry's stomach was pitching now like the cars of the Hogwarts Express, rocking to one side and then to another and never coming to rest. It had been so much easier to resent Cho when he didn't know about her own pain and fear--or at least if he could push it out of his mind. Other memories started crowding in on him as well--memories of their conversation in the Owlery last year, their kiss under the mistletoe last Christmas...

Cho suddenly stood up. "I'd better be going." She put her hand on the door.

"Cho! Wait!"

Harry was on his feet now, too. He still had no idea why, or what he wanted to say to Cho. He only knew that he felt something, for the first time since Sirius Black died, and wanted to go on feeling it.

Cho stayed by the door, with her back to Harry, and, when she spoke, Harry could hardly hear it. "Do you mind if I ask a question, Harry Potter; just one question?" Harry didn't say anything--he couldn't say anything--so Cho went on. "Last year, we... we had some nice moments together. Do you think we can... try again?"

Cho had turned to face him. She seemed as nervous as Harry felt. Then, for the first time in what felt like forever, Harry smiled.

So did Cho. "I'll see you around, then." And she was gone.