On Just A Smile

ON JUST A SMILE

You came late that first lesson, cheeks flushed as if from sexual encounters. It made you look healthy; nothing else about you did except your smile, the one that won you Witch Weekly's Most Charming Smile Award. No one would believe it, now, I know, but that's your own fault. It was almost comical that you and Gilderoy Lockhart should be the only two Slytherin boys of your year, because there was no greater contrast. He was dashing, golden, swashbuckling and very conceited, while you made yourself attractive and charming when need be, protected the people that needed it and didn't believe all the good things said about you.

You disrupted my class from the start: falling asleep on Lily Evan's shoulder, participating when no one else would, Transfiguring quickly so you could leave class early. That is what piqued my interest in you, that you infuriated me so.

Teaching only the sixth year that term, I had time to investigate my students. In your files, I discovered the reason James Potter and Sirius Black didn't like you and your incredible Divination skills, the ones that predicted the ways everyone in the school would be affected by Voldemort; I read it twenty years later and you were right, and I concede to your Divination skills.

You were the most well-liked person in the school, something that had needed either careful planning or spontaneous goodwill. Unaware of your popularity as you were, I would opt for the latter, which you performed either coldly or sincerely without fanfare. You often sat at other tables when you ate, and somehow you, a Slytherin, were welcomed.

You were never a proper Slytherin in terms of ambition, but you were confident and higher things snuck upon you. You probably didn't mean for it to happen. Maybe you were the luckiest person I ever knew. Maybe you made things happen without trying. Why try to understand it when happy oblivion could explain it away?

I wished you could have stayed for class longer. I wanted to see more of you, and for some reason the class morale went down when you left. I tried to make you several times, but when I did another teacher would reprimand me for making you late to another class. You must have spent very quick cameos in each class to be in all of them, but got good marks. Some of your classes were Advanced-level while others were Ministry regulations like Fine Arts.

One night you were sleepwalking and I found you and brought you to my room. You were yelling when you awoke, as if in the thrall of some nightmare, and I soothed you to silence. I asked why when you woke and you said you got louder when the cold came. You told me about how as a child you used to wake from the cold and run several kilometers to a deserted spot where you could scream. I kissed you then, and so you left. There was always something innocent about you; you were a year younger than your classmates and grew too quickly.

When you left in May, leaving early once again, I asked you to write me. You looked at me silently and I got a letter the next night. Your letters were never purely English. There was always some foreign phrase absently slipped in, usually translatable. You'd write me with a Quick-Quotes Quill and sometimes other people speaking to you at the time got into the letter: your lawyer, your French maid, your little sister Charlene, your friend Petunia Evans and her brother. It made your letters alive in a way.

I wrote back, of course, but I never knew what to say. I stuck to safe topics like your friends and the papers I was marking. I could never be as interesting as you and everything you had. You had a timeless Muggle utopia that didn't include wizards, that no one could blame your leaving Hogwarts for. I can never express my wonder for your happy life away from here. I felt so guilty to be happy when I heard of your return to teach.

Without anything happening to either of us, our letters slowly became long epistles. As August came upon us, I began to think about what should happen when we would meet at Hogwarts. It would be very different from when we last saw each other, and I was at a blank on how to act.

I went to Diagon Alley the next day, my mind drifting occasionally. I had just entered a shop I hadn't meant to go in when you saw me.

"Professor McGonagall!" you said, and gave me your award-winning smile, the one that no one would be aware of now. Your sister was with you, a toddler with already beautiful features, and your friend Lily Evans had accompanied you. I made all the right responses, and stayed with you during your shopping trip. We ate luscious sundaes at Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlor as you flirted with his daughter Florence. It was a warm day, and you gave up the pretense of wearing robes. Your clothes underneath were Muggle hand-me-downs, from your father you said, and they had been trendy three years ago. You could still wear them with style.

It was late by the time we left, but the sun was still blazing in a way that made me think of your eyes. You didn't mention anything about going our separate ways, and so to my delight I was able to stay with you. You had a nice-looking Muggle car that we sped to your house in; your friend Lily called you a lead-foot more than once.

You lived in a veritable Gothic mansion in an area so old that many houses had been turned into tourist attractions. Several people took pictures of me, still in my robes. Some of them took pictures of your beautiful little sister, who brandished an award-winning smile that was the resemblance between you. We retreated inside the safety of the gates and lay lazily on the lush grass and watched the sunset and, later, the stars. In that moment I was as young as any of you and my presence was accepted. It was then that I knew how to be content.

Our midnight supper was a pizza from a Muggle takeout and we parked ourselves on the ten-foot dining room table, groaning at our gluttony. You brought your sister to bed and soon your friend Lily went as well. We were the only ones on the long table now, and by an unspoken whim went to the ballroom, the site of where you wrote many of your letters.

You asked me to dance with a laugh and that smile of yours and we danced to the sound of the crickets. You mused upon the many people who had danced here before and sang for me in a voice that made everything in the world good again. There was nothing outside the ballroom that mattered, for inside there was you, and you were singing for me. I laid my head on your shoulder as your strong voice lifted towards the heavens and this time, it was you who kissed me.

When we were back at Hogwarts, we lived on those moments of heaven and smiles and kisses and the occasional song. There was no question about what we had, for again you didn't try to understand it when happy oblivion could explain it away, and it was the highest point of my life that I could join you in it.

I would have lived life forever that way you know, with the empty classrooms and walks on the grounds at night and our spot in the Forbidden Forest. Those outings made up the most part of our relationship and I wouldn't have had it any other way.

You left Hogwarts early, a predictable course, and nearly didn't take your NEWTs. I brought them to you and after you took them, we went to bed together. It was the only such intimate time between us.

We spent the summer together, with visits from your friends. The look on your face when you were holding Lily's baby was one of the things I treasure to this day. You would have made an excellent parent. Maybe you already are one.

At the end of the summer, I went back to school and you went to Muggle university, a hard thing to wangle for a wizard. You wanted to become a lawyer, and you couldn't have picked a better career for yourself. We wrote each other the same way we had before and spent holidays together.

You told me everything in your letters. Your professor at Oxford said you had better go into the kind of law that needed the most manipulation. You had become a Death Eater, probably not of your choosing more than Voldemort's. You were appraising wizarding wealth for a Ministry project to initiate bail. You had met Narcissa Malfoy and she was very nice.

With the mention of Narcissa Malfoy, I decided to myself that our relationship was over. I never told you, but I think you knew it because you started to have an affair with Narcissa and I latched on to Bilius Weasley. We met later at the Longbottoms' New Year's Eve party, but you were playing with their son Neville in your maternal way and I was playing canasta. You smiled at me then, and that was enough. Whoever said it's hard to get by just upon a smile was wrong.

After a friend of yours was murdered and another joined the Dark side as well, you told me that you'd had enough and you became a spy. You came to Hogwarts occasionally, and was civil.

With the death of the Potters, you were gone. I imagined you had been there with Lily, as you often were, and been killed as well. We left you for dead and that was the end of it. I cast you out of my mind and tried to forget your eyes and your voice and your award-winning smile, the one that no one would suspect you had.

But a smile like yours isn't the kind you can forget–even when it belongs to a snarling unjust Slytherin professor with a big nose and greasy hair.