Over My Head

Chapter 3: School Hard

"I lost an island in the ocean"-Over My Head, by Furslide

I was working the day shift at Hogshead once again when Hermione And Company walked in. It was an unnoticeable, subtle Saturday in most people's minds, spent mostly just killing time. I suppose you could say that that's all I was doing also, as bussing tables isn't exactly all that important to mankind, but I had my reasons. I was taking a yoga class taught by a muggle-born woman. She'd adapted yoga to the "magickally inclined" as she called us. She spelled it that way too, with a "k". At first I had just signed up as a joke, to make fun of the other girls at Hogwarts who were taking it. At that point, in late November, however, I was the only one from school who'd been able to stick it out.

Harry, of course, decided that it would be fun to sit at a table that I waited on. As I walked listlessly toward them, I dropped my eyes to the dirty ground. I couldn't tell what it was with this girl, but something about her made me feel inside out and open to public scrutiny. It was almost as it had been when I had a "crush" on Harry. Only then I hadn't been...sexually mature.

"What do you want?" I asked in as polite a voice as I could manage.

"Three butterbeers," Harry stated. He was sitting conspicuously close to Hermione...I pushed that from my head.

"What's wrong with you, Gin?" Ron asked without even looking up from the table he was so interestedly staring at. Maybe he was just avoiding looking at his two best friends, but I of course preferred to not see it that way.

"Sod off."

I walked away. I could feel Hermione's eyes on me, but I chose to ignore her, even as I went back to their table to give them their drinks, and even as Draco Malfoy came in and she shot me astonished looks as I walked out holding his arm.

"Did you see the looks on their faces?" I whispered to him as we walked toward my yoga class.

"I think Potty looked kinda hurt...like he thought we were fucking....maybe we should do that sometime..."

"I'm over you honey. Gay now, remember?"

"You keep saying that, but one of these days I'll change your mind, I swear."

"For your next birthday I'll do something, okay?"

"Well, alright." We'd reached the place. "I'll see you soon Weasley."

"No, you won't." I smiled mysteriously. It was our usual departure. He tried to act the spooky-stalker part, and I fed him a line from a muggle movie about Aliens and secret agents...

I walked into the room, draped with dark purple and black tapestries; the wood floor had a few mats laid down on it. There would only be four of us today. To the casual observer, it would appear that there were three students and one teacher, but to one who had seen the setup before, there were two students, one teacher, and one...well, me. As the muggle-born, Hati, explained it, I was "apart from the others, very much your own, in a different world almost. You glow when you are here. You know the instructions before they are spoken."

I suppose the near-constant flattery made me keep up this class.

***

Nighttime came along and I was with her again. My mind was entirely elsewhere, though it really had no specific place else to be. And in the morning I was gone again, just as if I'd never been there in the first place. But really, that's just the way I worked. I was like smoke; you could see me well enough, but when you tried to touch me, keep me there, I was gone, and if you closed your eyes for just a second, I could be seen no longer.

That kept things easy for me. If I didn't stay in one place too long, I formed no emotional attachments, ran no risk of hurting myself.

Well, emotionally hurting myself. I was fine with the physical.

The morning I was down in the Great Hall early, hoping to avoid the crowds of people. Unfortunately, brother dearest was soon to show up, flanked by none other than...

"Harry, Hermione, Ron," I said without looking up from my cereal.

"Ginny," Ron replied in what I'm sure he thought was a cold tone.

"Ginny," Harry then repeated.

"Yes. We have established that my name is Ginny. Well, actually, it's Virginia, but you know..."

"Look, I'm not going to beat around the bush," Ron began. "We saw you the other day with Malfoy."

"How nice."

"I thought you would show more judgment. Malfoy, of all people?"

"What are you talking about?"

"You and Malfoy..."

"What? Do you think we're...together or something?"

"Well..." Just then, I saw Draco and Blaise walk in and sit over at the Slytherin table. I joined them, ignoring the protests of my three interrogators.

"Hallo," Draco said as I sat down. "How're your Gryffindor friends?"

"What friends?"

"Good point."

"What would they think of that?" Blaise asked, tossing her dyed-black hair over her shoulder in what seemed to be a flirtatious manner.

"Oh, they might appear offended. I'm not sure they would really care, though." I grabbed an apple and began tossing it up and down.

"They seem fairly put-off," Draco said, surveying them.

"Can we not talk about them?" I kept my voice calm, even though my anger was flaring. It tended to do that whenever Hermione was brought up.

"Overreact much?" Blaise interjected, again with the flirtatious tone.

"They bother me. They act like they're gods gift...gifts, I guess, and they never bother with the time of day for anybody else."

"Agreed," Draco replied bitterly.

"You two have thought about this way too much," Blaise said as she sipped orange juice. "So they're a bit full of themselves. I mean, who isn't? And Draco, you of all people shouldn't be talking. Can you even count the girls you've slept with and then completely avoided?"

"I can give a fair estimate."

"Honey, you're doing more harm than good to your case," she looked over at me, laughter shining in her eyes. "Virginia, would you come with me?"

"What about me?"

"Girl stuff, Draco dearest. And please stop pouting. It makes your face all funny." She walked around the table and grabbed my hand, pulling me off in the direction of the Slytherin tower. As we neared the Portrait whole, she turned to me and said, "So have you given any thought to what you're wearing to the winter dance? You know the Yule Ball thing?"

"I wasn't going to go."

"Not going? Why wouldn't you go?" She whispered the password to the portrait so that I couldn't hear it. If any of her housemates knew she'd given a Gryffindor the password, they'd probably lynch her or something. We stepped inside the cold room. I felt more welcome there than I ever had in my common room. I was quickly forgetting all about my little run-in with the Saviors of the Generation.

"For starters, no boy in his right mind would ask me to go, and even if one did, I wouldn't really want to. I'm not all that interested in the opposite sex." She was leading me up to her room. When we got there, she closed the door behind us.

"Well I'm not either, but I'm still going. I see what you're saying though. Boys are so boring sometimes." She began looking through the clothes in her wardrobe. I was starting to like her, but I had no idea why. If anybody else had exhibited such behaviors towards me...I realized suddenly that I liked her because she wasn't like anybody else. She was nice to me. She treated me as an equal. Sometimes even Draco failed to do that. "Here," she said triumphantly, holding up a black dress. "Try this on. Promise I won't look."

"Alright, but I don't see the point. I look awful in dresses." I slipped out of my all-black outfit and into the all-black dress. I liked black. "How is it?"

"If that's you when you're awful, I'd love to see how you look when you're done up right." She smiled and pulled me in front of her full-length mirror by placing her hands on my hips. An odd sensation began to grow there, but it was gone as soon as she pulled herself away from me. "You would look good with black hair. I'm changing mine to blond tonight. You should come over here then." As I stood staring into the mirror, I placed a hand on my long, dark-auburn locks that curled ever so slightly at the ends. I was trying to imagine myself with black hair. As it was, I didn't look much like a Weasley anymore. My skin was a pale, milky white from lack of sun and my arms were slightly muscular, unlike the over-weight women of my family. Not to mention the whole being sixteen thing. I wasn't a little girl anymore, and it was very, very obvious. My eyes had always been an odd silvery-blue color, but you couldn't really notice them with all the freckles. Now freckle free, even with the red hair, I was looking more like a Malfoy than what I truly was.

"Sure, I'll come. What time should I be here?" I could use a friend, I decided in that instant. Draco had never really been one because I wouldn't let him. If I could let Blaise in, just a little bit...I had no idea why, but suddenly she seemed better than being alone.

"Eight o'clock, be right outside the portrait and I'll let you in. You might want to bring an invisibility cloak or something. You'll be staying late."

"An invisibility cloak? I've never even seen one, let alone owned one." I was enjoying the way I looked in the tight, formfitting dress too much to be all that outraged at her offhand mention of such a rarity.

"Draco has one. You can use his."

"Believe me, I'm definitely coming tonight." A small smile formed on my lips. I'd lied when I said I had never seen an invisibility cloak. I knew Harry had one. I'd found it in my first year, when I was ravaging his things during my insanity...or maybe I should say sanity. Well, during my huge crushes on him and Tom. Now, for one night, I might just have everything Boy Wonder did...except Hermione.

"Bring whatever dresses you might own."

"I think I might have one."