The Perils of Confusing Liquors

It was more or less necessary that Tom was to have a girlfriend. All of the other Slytherins had girlfriends excepting Christian Stiebel, and the reason for that was most likely his penchant for dropping live puppies in boiling water. Tom was handsome and charismatic and brilliant and poor but so honest and brave, therefore people wanted to see him with a pretty girl who was devoted to him despite his poverty and poor background, someone who loved him for the intelligent, misunderstood soul he was. And so on.

So he surveyed the available Slytherin girls close enough to his age to be deemed acceptable by the public. There was ebullient Rosie Marsh, who was blonde and acted it. No. Tom detested blondes almost as much as he detested empty-headed people too caught up in foolish trivialities to make something of themselves, and Rosie was both of those. She had also been more or less 'around', and would sully his flawless reputation. He mentally crossed her off his list.

Anne Rieth, Carmen Gable, and Helena Gardner were all pretty and pragmatic, and he would have considered them further but they were already dating assorted members of the Quidditch team. Tom Riddle did not openly take other men's possessions for his own-he was much too good, too honest for that. They were out. So were the pushy sex symbol Eloise McCardell and the newly single redhead Caroline Mack; Tom Riddle would sooner slit his wrists and dive in a salt bin than be publicly seen with Mudblood filth, no matter how chesty or desperate they might be.

That left Claire Ladd, Cheryl Cleese, and Magdalena Norell. Magdalena Norell looked like a beautiful girl who had run face-first into a steel door and then developed severe acne. Cheryl Cleese was absolutely beautiful, and ruthless. Tom approved. She was also, however, such a poor student she barely managed to stay in school. Tom expected no great feats of intelligence from any girl but neither did he tolerate blind stupidity in someone he was to be seen with. That left Claire Ladd and he was forced to admit he knew little about her. She was a good student, reasonably attractive, pureblood, and unattached. That much he knew.

In eight days, Tom Riddle subtly found out more about Claire Ladd than anyone would really care to know. She had a white tomcat named Paris, preferred coffee to tea and green to blue, and wore a skirt slightly shorter than school policy dictated. Most of the girls at Hogwarts wore their hair short or pinned up, to mimic the Mudblood 'wartime fashions' of the day. Claire often declared it laughable that witches would mimic Mudbloods and their stupid fashions, their stupid wars. She wore her black hair long and swept dramatically over one eye, slightly waved at the ends. In the style of Mudblood actress Veronica Lake, actually, but Tom found that amusing. If she was hypocritical, she was stylishly so. She was exceptionally cruel to other girls, most especially Mudbloods, but was not attached to any of the various cliques that females always seem to group into like farm animals clamouring for a herd. She had History of Magic, Defense Against the Dark Arts, and Potions with Tom but had never spoken to him save the occasional 'pass-me-that-quill-would-you'.

Tom sifted lazily through all the information he had so far collected on her and concluded that she would be his girlfriend.

It was easy. One smitten look tossed casually her way in Potions and her friends were buzzing delightedly in her ear on the way out of class. Tom, deliberately taking longer than usual to pack up his quills and cauldron, picked up a half-whispered, half-squealed "Did you see that look he fancies you I can tell...those eyes!" and suppressed a smile.

Tom allowed several more classes to go by without a word to her, noting with self-satisfaction the occasional piqued glances she sent his way under the pretence of looking out the window to the afternoon sunlight on the lake. A few more seemingly-awkward glances, smitten looks, and dropped quills or knocked-over books whenever she spoke, and Miss Ladd was certain he was infatuated with her. She added a little extra to her Lip-Reddening charms and shortened her skirt an extra inch, and he couldn't help but notice with dry amusement.

He asked her out in that cutesy, stupid way that females liked-they were working together on a project and she asked him for his notes and he gave them to her only with a page stuck in the middle with 'Come out with me next Saturday? -Love Tom' in big curly letters. She'd paged through them coolly and seen the page and laughed and he knew he'd got her, and just like that they were boyfriend and girlfriend.

They went out for three months or so and everyone loved how good they looked together-tall, slender, poor, handsome Tom and tall, slender, glamorous, clever Claire. They walked in the hallways tall and straight, in the circle of each other's arms. He showered her with stupid, sappy, inexpensive-but-well-chosen presents that females like and she had sex with him on occasion. It was fun; she got a handsome boyfriend who doted on her and he got a better image and something to distract people from his other hobbies. People were less inclined to ever be suspicious of Tom now that he had a soft spot, had someone he loved, had a girl of his own like all the other boys did, excepting Christian Stiebel because of his love for tossing other people's owls into fireplaces.

He knew everything about her, especially everything she'd want in a boyfriend and because of this she thought he was the perfect man, and so in love with her, and so brilliant and charismatic and so on. She was deliriously happy and he was dryly pleased with his newfound unavailability. They became a dual entity, Tom-and-Claire. No one could really think of one without the other.

End-of-year-exams rolled along and people got kind of accustomed to them this way and didn't think Tom-and-Claire was as cute a couple as they were. The newness of it was gone, and they moved onto more interesting things like did-you-know-Christian-Stiebel-asked-Magdalena-Norell-to-the-Ball and can-you-believe-Rosie-Marsh-got-only-four-O.W.L's with the blind enthusiasm of pigs at the trough. Tom was kind of tired of the constant fawning and love notes and carefully manipulating smitten looks and occasional sex. It was something of a bother, all told, and not really worth the effort anymore. He had gained an alibi but had lost a bit of his identity-no longer really Tom but part of Tom-and-Claire. He began to consider how to remedy this.

But Tom couldn't drop Claire like a used glove as he originally planned. It would be fun to see that aghast horror on her pretty little face as it dawned on her that he'd lied to her from day one. But Tom-and-Claire could not be ended by Tom. He was the good one. Mean old Tom dumped the best thing that ever happened to him because blah-blah-blah, they'd say. And it couldn't exactly be ended by her either as then he'd be laughed at. Clever, pretty Claire dropped Tom because blah-blah-blah, he couldn't keep her because blah-blah-blah. No; if either one of them was to end it, the whispering would cost him his flawless reputation. Tom let it turn over in his mind as the end of his last year at Hogwarts approached. A conclusion would appear.

Two weeks later, years and years after Tom Riddle had made his plans to make of himself a new person and exactly how to do so, a conclusion appeared. Two seventh-year girls celebrating the night before graduation went into hysterics in the Slytherin dormitories. Tom Riddle heard them three walls of solid rock away in his own dormitory and smiled.

They saw Claire Ladd joyfully and quite conveniently dead, drowned in her bathtub with her pretty side-parted hair floating above her bloated body and one delicate hand laid casually on the rim of the tub, next to the near-empty bottle of giant wine Tom thought was a nice finishing touch. Under examination, she wouldn't be poisoned or cursed or strangled. She was simply so drunk she couldn't keep her head above water. After all, that happened sometimes to exceptionally stupid and foolish (in a word, female) people when they mistook giant wine for regular liquor.

He'd taken rather careful pains to arrange her remains just so. If people drowned on their own, he'd learned, their throat closed and they died of asphyxiation, their lungs air-filled and buoyant. . If people were drowned, they struggled and ended up breathing water, the telltale sinking of the bodies a sign of murder. He'd met her that night and she'd insisted so they'd had sex. He'd given her enough giant wine to kill a horse and slid her in the water. She'd drowned almost instantly and he'd put his clothes back on and headed back to his dormitory and caught a good eight hours' sleep.

When they told him, he didn't cry but just looked so empty it hurt people's hearts to even look at him. He didn't speak but just looked at pictures of his beautiful girlfriend dead the night before graduation and pretended to fight the tears that weren't really coming. The next day he'd received his diploma with the class of 1943, taking pains to leave the haunted look in his eyes. Lots of girls cried, even the Gryffindors, because if Claire wasn't exactly loved, Tom was admired by all and Tom-and-Claire even more so. He received a lot of sympathetic hugs and claps on the back and made his speech as Head Boy and cried at the podium in front of everyone. Armando Dippet made his speech in turn about how sad it was that seventeen-year-old Claire Ladd drank giant wine by mistake and drowned in her own bathtub and so on. Most everyone cried and Tom didn't speak to anyone, keeping the grin off his face and the tears flowing with great skill.

That day he left the eye of the wizarding world. Everyone assumed he'd gone someplace quiet to grieve. Their own silly jobs, their silly after-Hogwarts plans, their silly lives in general were much more important than where Grieving Impeccable-Record Orphaned Model Student Boy went to weep over his girl.

So Tom Marvolo Riddle neatly and silently cut all strings tying him to Hogwarts and disappeared to forge his new identity, to complete the transformation he had begun seven years before.