Sticks and Stones

Sticks and Stones

They fought on the train.

There were four of them in the compartment, and they were barely past introductions and the train barely out of the station before three were tangled up in fists and punches and bites and kicking on the floor. Indeed, the introductions might have been the problem, for a boy named Sirius and a boy named James were immediately at odds: what else could one do, faced with a snobby girlish star name or a name as common as mud, but push the other into the floor and hope he'd swallow enough dust to muffle his words? James had nails in the soles of his boots, and might have carried the day, except the third boy pulled them off and, in a sudden streak of audacity, threw them out the window.

After that the three were fast friends. They walked into the hall together barefoot, pretending not to feel the cold stone floor; and the fourth boy, the one who had stayed in the corner of the seat, followed after in the way that people follow, when they don't know anyone well enough to tell that they're not wanted. He went on following, too, in the days and weeks after; every so often James or Sirius or Remus punched him and told him to piss off or sod off or jump out the common room window, but he absorbed the blows the way a bolster might, and none of them liked him well enough to beat him away properly.

They had probably been telling him to jump off a bridge, the afternoon that they met the Slytherin girls. The girls were two or three years ahead of them as well as Slytherin, and therefore as foreign as mermaids. They laughed at the boys and told them to get out of the way, in high ringing tones like strings of bells. James glowered and Sirius turned his nose in the air, but Peter stuck in the middle of the floor, stuttering "Y-- Y-- Y--!"

They are mermaids, Remus thought. He's drowning. Peter stammered and gasped, and the girls giggled until they grew tired of it all, and went to walk past him. And then Peter attacked. These weren't higher beings, not any more, they were flesh and blood, and scared pink flesh in torn robes, at that. Peter broke their wands, pulled out a phoenix feather worth more than his mother's house, spread purses full of Galleons across a flight of stairs, and all that time never spoke a word more than "Y-- Y-- Y--!"

And he got away with it. He went to Potions quite naturally and poured ethanol in the solution of moly by mistake, and the professor looked at his round pale frightened face and patted him on the head like a child of seven, and told the Slytherin prefects off for outrageous fibs when they reported Peter brawling in the corridors. So Peter was the luckiest, and maybe the bravest. So they let him come along. That was what they said-- we're letting him come along-- though in truth nobody quite knew any more whether Peter was tagging along with them, or whether they were tagging along with Peter, awaiting the next explosion.

They expected another explosion. He would have been too dull to stand, otherwise. But they expected to be out of the way when it happened, the way boys in ordinary armies expect they can play football with a hand grenade.