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Adam found the smell of his dorm comforting. There was always a little dankness in the air, the consequence of the Slytherin dormitories being located underground and under the lake. There was a little bit of the smell of dusty-oldness, but an oldness that felt dignified. Old books, old leather, old tapestries. Things that grew more valuable in their age rather than just worn out.
Entering the dorm, Adam gave into a moment of childishness and plopped himself back and down on his bed. He loved this mattress, the emerald blanket, the glossy hangings off the canopy he could pull shut to create a den of privacy. It was a bed that welcomed him, felt more his than his one in the trailer, where he was made to feel guilty for taking up space and money and having the needs of a living person.
The other boys trailed in after him, slower as they roughhoused their way up the steps. Adam sat up, not wanting to be caught in a moment of vulnerability. Soon their talk of their summer adventures filled the dorm as they shucked off their ties and kicked off their shoes. Talk of what broomsticks they got or would be demanding for their birthday; of how boring their annual family vacation to France was; of parties thrown and lazy days of nothing and annoying siblings.
“What about you, Parrish?” asked Tad from the bed next to Adam’s. “What did you do over summer?”
Adam had spent the previous summer the same as he had the one between his first and second year: doing his homework assignments in the privacy of his bedroom when his father wasn’t home and finding odd jobs to do around the trailer park to make petty cash to help pay for school supplies. His mother had spent the most all of her long stored galleons, knuts, sickles for his first year supplies.
Thankfully, Hogwarts’ tuition was free. Thankfully, mom’s books weren’t so outdated to be useless. From how Adam could tell, the wizarding world liked its old, reliable ways of thinking, even when it came to prejudices. But potion ingredients, parchment, quills, and ink all cost money. Soon, letting out the hem on his robes wouldn’t be enough to keep them fitting.
From a very early age Adam had learned to be self-sufficient. No one was going to make sure he did his homework except him. Many times, he wouldn’t eat if he didn’t make his own food. Money for school supplies weren’t going to come from anywhere other than himself.
Not old enough to get a real job, doing chores for his neighbors was his only means, even if there wasn’t a lot of spare money to go around the trailer park. But some kids could spare part of their measly allowance to have Adam fix their bikes for them. The old lady who lived in a trailer at the far end of the park could spare part of her late husband’s pension for Adam to pull weeds and do other laborious tasks she and her arthritic hands no longer could.
Tad’s inquiry was a trick question. It was a waterway with rocks that needed to be navigated. Adam wore poor obviously, always had, but even more so among his peers from old money families. Slytherin had a disproportionate amount of them, it seemed, wizarding families that had trackable lineage back for centuries and the accumulate wealth and societal clout that went with it.
“I did my homework,” Adam said, because a lie would too easily caught on and because the full truth would be unfathomable to these boys and was not a truth he wanted to share with them anyway. If they wanted to make fun of him for being bookish or boring, Adam hardly found those painful insults to take.
This answer cleared Adam from Tad’s and the other boys’ attention better than Adam could have anticipated when Roger swore suddenly and revealed he had forgotten about the homework entirely. So instead, laughter and teasing were laid onto Roger instead.
#
Professor Poldma had a puff of white blonde hair that looked like dandelion fluff. Adam had seen her around Hogwarts a handful of times throughout his first two years of education, but unlike most of the other professors, she didn’t regularly attend meals in the Great Hall. He had never interacted with her, and the fact of her didn’t calculate at all into his decision to sign up to take Divination as an elective.
When given the option to select electives at the end of second year, Adam had chosen three: Ancient Runes, Care of Magical Creatures, and Divination. Ancient Runes had sounded like something properly rigorous that he could work his mind over. Care of Magical Creatures he had chosen because although he had already read Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, reading and knowing weren’t the same. A proper wizard should know what magical beasts looked like.
Adam didn’t have the same rationale for Divination. From what he understood, Seers were born, not made. There wasn’t much application for it in the broader magical word. But despite his serious nature, he had still been an almost thirteen year old subject to childish flights-of-fancy, as rare as they for him and even more for him to act on. There was something alluring about seeing the future. After all, Adam was already resolutely looking forward towards the rest of his life. A glimpse into that -- reassurance -- would a gift, a guide, another path forward.
There seemed to be a similar giddiness amongst the rest of the third years who had signed up for Divination, the group small enough that it was a mix from all four houses. The classroom was located at the top of one tower, in an obscure room that required them all the climb a steep set of ladder steps to get in. The room stood out as mystical even already located inside of Hogwarts, a place brimming with the magical and bizarre.
Adam took a seat on a low cushioned bench that actually might’ve been a footstool in a former life. As there were two or three seats per small round table, there was a flush of activity as his classmates tried to arrange getting seats with their friends and away from their school age equivalent of enemies; this didn’t concern Adam, so he just took in the front row, as he preferred, and let everyone work out their minor dilemmas around him.
Professor Poldma sat behind a small table tucked off center at the front of circular room flipping over tarot cards -- or what Adam assumed was tarot cards, perhaps she was just playing solitaire -- and not reacting like she had even noticed students tromping into the classroom. Then, when she must’ve flipped over what was the last of the cards, she leaned back in her seat to observe them like a farsighted person holding a newspaper at the exact correct distance to be in focus.
Only when all of the students had finally taken seats -- some pleased, some frustrated -- did Professor Poldma look up. And when she looked up, she looked right at Adam, who had been caught looking at her. There held an intense moment of eye contact until Adam pulled his gaze away, staring down instead at his textbook, that he had dutifully set before him on the table when he had first sat.
“Welcome to Divination class, students,” Professor Poldma said, her voice quiet and lilting, with a little scratch to it that betrayed age. It was one of those quiet voices that people, even children, silence themselves and lean in to hear. She did, after all, possess knowledge of something they all wanted to learn.
“In this class we will be studying the theories and methodologies of divination, and we will attempt in engage our inner eye. I warn now that foresight is a rare ability, but if any of you are so gifted, it is a blessing and danger that walks along a knife’s edge.”
There were shifting about the classroom. For a welcoming into class, this wasn’t what they expected. When Adam dared look back up, Professor Poldma had her steady gaze on him. It lingered for a moment, long enough for something shivery to settle in Adam’s gut, before she turned her attention to the class as a whole.
“Now turn to page five in your textbooks. We will be reading aloud from the introduction.”
#
Adam was excited to visit the village of Hogsmeade for the first time, although perhaps for differing reasons than the other third years. They talked about visiting Honeydukes, Zonko’s Joke Shop, and getting something called butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks. Adam really didn’t have pocket money to spare for shops, but he was eager to see how wizards and witches lived when they weren’t secreting themselves away from muggles, as Hogsmeade was a rare village comprised of only wizards and witches.
This was part of Adam’s personalized education he had chosen for himself along with class assignments. He would make himself fluent in the ways of the wizarding world. Once he had tasted magic for the first time at his wand fitting in Diagon Alley he knew he couldn’t go back to the way of living he had been raised in. He wouldn’t become his mother.
Adam and his mother had yet have that conversation about her being magic and her abandonment of it, or more like, Adam had yet to ask her. She didn’t volunteer personal insight or meaningful conversations. She only talked in the ways that were necessity for the steps of survival. The fact that she was too was magical was hard to believe. Everything about the wizarding world that Adam had witnessed so far had been so vibrant. Magic itself took energy and force of will. Vibrant was the last word Adam would use to describe his mother. She seemed, rather, to have been sapped of all color years ago.
The day the mass of students -- third year to seven -- tromped down to Hogsmeade for the first visit of the year, the weather was moderate and the air earthy after an early morning rainfall. Adam had only one planned visit. In his last Divination class on Thursday, Professor Poldma had asked Adam to come and visit her in the house she lived in the village. “That is, if you’re not too busy with friends,” she added on, in a knowing kindness, although there was no way she could know he was friendless. She only ever saw him during class time.
And what a strange class Divination had been so far. They had only studied tea leaves yet and just started tarot cards, both things students could look up and memorize meanings whether they had some inner eye or not. Professor Poldma always drifted around the classroom as they practiced what reading they were doing, listening in, giving pointers, asking questions. But Adam would swear her tone shifted whenever she came to stand over Adam’s shoulder.
“What do you see, Adam?” she’d say.
Adam would stare down at the tea leaves and his eye would see some shape in a clump he hadn’t before or his fingers would twitch at the flipping of a tarot card. And then, when Adam would flip through the textbook to find the interpretation, she would say, “Don’t rely so much on the book,” and then drift away.
Now she had invited him to her home, and he felt both nervous about it and curious. He had the address scratched out on a corner of parchment, but it was obvious which house it was, even from afar. It was painted bright blue, although the paint was peeling it a quite a few places, and there was sign beside the front door that read: Psychics in Residence. Tarot readings, Palmistry, Spiritual Guidance, Inquire inside for prices.
Adam hesitated, then knocked.
They door was yanked open fast enough for Adam to start.
The person who had opened the door was a girl, shorter than Adam but probably his age, with dark hair with a barrage of multi-colored clips causing it to stick up at every angle at haphazard.
“What do you want?” she said, after eying Adam up and down with an aggressive expression on her face.
“I’m Adam,” he said, unsure.
“Persephone’s Adam?” she countered.
“Who --?”
The girl rolled her eyes. “Professor Poldma to you. Persephone’s doing a reading right now, but you can come in and wait.”
Adam was led into an overstuffed living room. Overstuffed with furniture, couches and armchairs. Overstuffed with knickknacks on the windowsills and shelving, with paintings and photos and other hanging covering the walls. With a coffee table holding a stack of Witch Weekly magazines and leftover cups.
“Take a seat,” the girl said. Adam set himself on the edge of one couch. The girl sat across from him. Adam picked at a hangnail, the ease of smalltalk not natural to him.
“I’m blue, by the way,” the girl said.
“You’re --?”
“Blue. My name’s Blue,” she said, speaking a little louder as if to accommodate for bad hearing. “Persephone’s like my aunt, but not really.”
“Okay,” Adam said. That explained a little of something.
“Go ahead and ask,” Blue said. “Ask me why I don’t go to Hogwarts.”
“Why don’t you go to Hogwarts?” Adam said.
“I’m a squib.” There was a dangerous glint to the narrow of her eyes, like she was daring him to comment.
“I don’t know what that is,” Adam said, and hated having to admit his ignorance. Every time he didn’t know something he should he felt exposed, as if an imposter.
Blue’s glare softened slightly. “Are you a muggleborn?”
“My mother’s a witch,” Adam said, “but…” it was the first time he had ever added a ‘but’ to this statement, the regular response when questioned on his heritage. “I didn’t know that until I got my Hogwarts letter.”
Blue leaned back into her seat. “You know how muggleborns have muggle parents but are magical? Squibs are like the opposite. They have magical parents but don’t have any magic themselves, or not enough… they’re rare.”
Before their conversation could continue, a man exited down the steps out the front door without acknowledging Blur or Adam in any way. A voice trailed down the stairs after him, Persephone’s: “Blue, send Adam up now.”
Blue pointed up the staircase. “Up and to left. Yell if you get lost.”
Upstairs, in what might’ve been called the drawing room, Persephone was seated at a small table by a picture window overlooking the main street of town. Adam sat across from her without instruction knowing that’s where she’d want him to be.
She was shuffling a deck of tarot cards with a smooth ease and then fanned them out, holding them toward Adam.
“Pick one,” she said.
Adam reached out with a confidence -- he wasn’t sure from where it had welled up -- and plucked out a card without a hesitation.
“The Magician,” he said, looking at it, knowing that she was about to ask.
Persephone hummed lightly. “And what does that mean?”
Adam squinted, searching his memory. “Power, skill, concentration, resourcefulness.”
“Someone’s been studying,” she said. “What does it mean to you?”
Adam laid the card out on the table in front of him. The card was worn, kind of like the ones loaned out for practice in the classroom, although this set, judging from this one card, had much more detailed artwork.
“It doesn’t mean anything to me,” Adam said.
Persephone hummed again. She looked out the window. Outside, the number of students in Hogwarts robes outnumbered the villagers.
“Do you know why I asked you here, Adam?” she said, her voice like a bell.
Adam could say no, but he did know, or, he had a solid guess.
“I think that you think that I …” to find the right words for it though. He touched the Magician card in front of him. “Could do this.”
“I knew I would be getting a seer this year,” she said. “I had sensed it. You have the gift, Adam, if you let yourself learn it.”
Adam sat there for a while, not sure what to say. Persephone put the Magician card back into the deck, then set it before him.
“I want you to take this,” she said.
Adam instantly said, “I can’t.”
Persephone raised her eyebrows so that they came above the frames of her glasses. “It’s an old deck, a spare” she said. “I don’t need it. In fact, you’d be doing me a favor, taking some clutter out of this old house.”
Once Adam had put the deck in his pocket, he was sent on his way. Blue was still downstairs. “Hey,” she said upon seeing him. “Let me show you the Shrieking Shack.”
Standing at the fence, staring at the shack that was the size of a thumbprint on the distant hill, Blue said, “They say it's haunted, but I’ve lived in Hogsmeade my whole life and I can tell you the real story. A werewolf lives in it.”
“Werewolves are only wolves one night a month,” Adam said.
“I know that,” Blue said. “It’s like a werewolf full moon retreat.” She then grinned at him, betraying her joke.
Despite, or maybe because of, her purposefully disarrayed hair, her combat boots, her shredded skirt, and smudge of eyeliner, when she smiled at Adam right then, something in his gut clenched. He found her undeniably pretty.
#
A week out from the Hogsmeade trip, a letter came by owl during the breakfast delivery time. At first, Adam hadn’t thought it was for him, tried to shoo the owl away from his bacon. He only looked at the name on the envelope when the owl gave him a nasty peak to the back of his hand.
The letter was for him, from Blue. An unfamiliar feeling squiggled in chest.
Dear Adam,
Everyone was so mad when they found out Persephone had tricked them out of the house for the day you came over. They all knew she’d be getting a seer in class this year, and I don’t think that’s happened in like ten years. Now they’re all going to be here next Hogsmeade weekend. I apologize in advance. I don’t even like living with all of them.
This that had talked a little about on their walk to and from the Shrieking Shack. Blue lived with her mother, Persephone, and an assemblage of other pseudo-relatives -- all seers of some sort except her -- in the bright blue house in Hogsmeade. “You came on an unusually quiet day,” she had added. The unusual part was a mystery now solved.
Of course, that is assuming you are coming back to visit. I hope you do. You’re not like the other Hogwarts students. Most of them are jerks. My cousin Orla is a seventh year. Have you met her? Don’t go out of your way to meet her.
Write back. Bye.
#
Ancient Runes and Care of Magical Creatures hadn’t been as strange as Adam’s Divination experience by a quarter into the term, but they had been interesting just the same.
Ancient Runes was a properly rigorous academic pursuit, the learning of a dead language. Care of Magical Creatures, held outside by the edge of the Forbidden Forest by the groundskeeper’s cabin, spending time petting nifflers, hardly felt like a class at all.
While there was a few students who crossed over between these electives, Adam had noted, in particular, one because he exhibited completely different behavior between Care of Magical Creatures and Ancient Runes. He was a Gryffindor boy with a head of dark curly hair. In Care of Magical Creatures he partook in petty mischief that seemed to come along with boys their age and the fact that they were outside on the grass instead of ina stonewalled classroom: shoving his friend’s on the shoulder and dropping flobberworms down the back of robes. In Ancient Runes, he exhibited the exact opposite, an intense concentration on a dry subject matter.
But other than that observation, Adam didn’t have time to concern himself with other people’s study habits.
#
“You haven’t been practising, have you?” Persephone asked the second Hogsmeade weekend. A powdery snow had fallen the night before, dusting Hogsmeade and the Hogwarts castle and grounds with a fine, ghost-like layer of snow.
Adam had been delayed in the downstairs of the house by the cohort Blue had warned him of. Blue and him had been writing back and forth since she sent the first letter. Blue would write about her rather eclectic and strange family as if they were normal and sometimes slightly annoying. Adam would write back about what he was learning in classes and the scathing inner thoughts he had about certain classmates.
“I haven’t,” Adam admitted, because he hadn’t except for in class.
He had brought that deck of tarot cards back to dormitory after the first Hogsmeade visit and spread them out just randomly on his bedspread. He stared out at them but with no attempt to a doing a reading. Hearing footsteps coming to the room, he hurried them back into an assembled pile and hide them under his leg. Later, he moved the deck into his truck and there it had stayed.
Persephone drew her finger down the frosted glass of the window they sat beside, drawing a little swirl.
“Students,” she said, “usually come into my class excited about the prospect of divination, of being a seer. It’s a fanciful idea. But when faced with the reality of it, the responsibility of it… it’s intimidating, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Adam said.
“But you’re here.”
“Yes,” Adam said again.
“And I have a feeling you’re not a person who would be here if you didn’t want to be.”
Adam nodded.
Persephone set a different deck in the center of the table. “Alright then. Shuffle the cards.”
#
When it was discovered that Adam would be staying at Hogwarts for Christmas break, he was invited to come down the bright blue house on Christmas day. Being a professor, Persephone was able to wrangle special permission for Adam to leave school grounds for this unique request.
The house was crammed with more people than last time Adam visited. Perhaps there were other invited guests here, or perhaps everyone was just home today, or perhaps everyone was just stuffed into the downstairs rooms of living room and kitchen. There was a chaotic, celebratory energy throughout the whole place, from the moment Blue answered the door and tugged him inside by the sleeve. There were people talking over people, handing presents to each other, tossing scrapped wrapping paper into wastebaskets or at people like snowballs, waving wands over their mugs to heat up cocoa that had gone lukewarm with lack of attention.
A mug of cocoa had been pressed into his hands by someone Adam didn’t know soon after he had staked out a seat at the end of the one couch, afraid to navigate this fray. There were plates of cookies, crisps, and half-sandwiches on the coffee table for the taking. Crammed in one corner was a scraggly evergreen, a little too tall for the room, the top branch curled over at the ceiling. It was decorated with an eclectic set of ornaments that swapped positions when you weren’t looking. At the other end of the couch, a woman produced sparkling bubbles from the end of her wand for the baby on her knee to clap and grab at.
Blue squeezed in the narrow space left beside Adam. She had an open cup of yogurt in hand.
“There’s more food in the kitchen if you want,” Blue said.
Adam had already head three half sandwiches, five cookies, hot cocoa, eggnog -- another delivery from an unknown woman -- and a handful of crisps. “No thank you,” he said.
In the corner of the living room, Adam spied Maura -- Blue’s mother -- and Calla -- another one of Blue’s not-aunts -- pouring gulps of an amber liquid from a glass bottle into their mugs. He could pretty well what that was about. It wasn’t the first pass that bottle had taken among some of the adults in the room, but it only lead to them laughing louder and one carol that fizzled out after the first two lines when the lyrics were confused and forgotten.
This was nothing like any Christmas Adam had ever known. This was what a happy family looked like. While Adam was grateful for the invite, to be here, jealousy burned in his gut anyway. These people were better off than Adam’s family, but hardly rich, not like so many of Adam’s classmates. They had that sense of practicality of scraping by. Divination was treated with skepticism even in the wizarding world, Adam had learned from Blue’s letters. Yet here they were, pressed together with each other, a contentedness, a love filling the entire space.
Adam irrationally thought about how this wasn’t fair, although he had learned long ago fairness had little dictation on the way the world worked. Adam also thought -- briefly but painfully -- that person the reason he didn’t have this was because his family was tainted and he along with it.
“Come with me,” Blue said into his ear, and he went, following her up off the couch, through the ringer of the crowd, and out onto the front porch. The porch was empty except for them.
It was dusk already and flurries had begun to fall, dancing around on the light breeze.
“I have something for you,” Blue said. She produced a package from a large pocket of her oversized cardigan sweater.
“I didn’t get you anything,” Adam said, taking the package from her.
“That’s okay. I didn’t really get you anything. I made it.”
Adam pulled off the twine holding the wrapping shut to reveal a lump of mixed matched fabrics. It was a winter hat made up of strips of wool, felt, and flannel sewed together. It was a little ugly, probably took a lot of work, and was exactly like something Blue would make. Adam loved it.
Blue smiled one of her smiles Adam couldn’t believe were for him when Adam pulled that hat over his head. Then, as the skies grew darker on Christmas Day and the streetlamps petered on down main street, Adam leaned in, Blue leaned in, their mouths met, and they shared both of theirs first kiss.
Adam never had a Christmas like this before.
#
In Divination, they had moved on from tarot cards to star charts. Adam still practiced tarot in his spare time, but always in exact private. He waited until his dorm was empty and would sit on his bed with all but one of his curtains drawn shut. He needed light, but he wanted only one to yank shut if he heard one of his dorm mates approaching.
Adam dealt out different spreads: horseshoe, celtic cross, three card, tree of life. Not reading for anyone, he technically was always doing the reading for himself, but that made him hesitant to dig too deep into the meanings. Persephone had been right, the reality of divination, of the ability to know so much, maybe too much, was intimidating.
Still, Adam couldn’t hide his eyes to trends that popped up during his practice spreads. The Magician. Often in readings there was a card that showed up to represent the inquirer. This was Adam’s.
Wheel of Fortune: turning points, change. Page of cups: beginning, renewal. Ten of cups: perfect and lasting contentment, peace, and friendship. An odd one, Adam always thought, nothing like him. He felt eternally locked in battle with the reality of life.
Lovers. This one made him feel hot under the skin as he thought of Blue, of her breath hitting his face the moment their short kiss broke apart, both of them pink-cheeked but willing to blame it on the cold air. He thought of her each time even though he knew that’s not necessarily what the Lovers card meant. It could a variety of things about a variety of different types of unions and relationships or love and choices.
#
The next Hogsmeade weekend was an unseasonably mild early spring day. When Adam knocked on the front door of the bright blue house, Maura answered. Her hair was done up in a messy bun on the top of her head and she looked a little stunned to see him there.
“Oh. Oh. Oh,” she said, remembering, “Persephone can’t work with you today, but Blue’s here.” She then two-stepped back to the house, leaving the front door hanging wide open and shouted up the stairs: “Blue, Adam’s here!”
Blue came to the door from way of the kitchen.
“Oh, there you are,” Maura said.
Blue had her hair in a similar messy bun as her mother, held up with a tie-dye scrunchy.
“Hey,” she said, seeing Adam standing in the doorway.
“Hey,” Adam said back. It was the first time they had seen each other, person-to-person, since the kiss. They had written, of course, but this was different. Being in the same place at the same time meant it could happen again.
Maura snorted then hide it as a cough. “Have fun you too,” she said, like it was a forgone conclusion they would hang out.
It was a forgone conclusion. Adam had figured he would hang out with Blue some portion of today, after his tutoring with Persephone. He thought, judging how Blue already had shoes on -- converse sneakers paired with rainbow striped knee highs -- she was planning on this too.
Blue slammed the front door behind her as a message to her mother.
Once they were alone on the porch, she stuffed her hands into the pockets of her bomber jacket. “So… do you want to go to the Three Broomsticks or something?”
“Sure.” This too had been anticipated. He had scrounged together the leftover funds from his school shopping for a date-like something, or whatever this turned out to be.
The Three Broomsticks was clattering with students thankfully free from the the confines of winter and the castle. Blue and Adam both purchased mugs of butterbeer at the counter and Adam was warmed to see Blue too counting out spare knuts and sickles instead of handing of a galleon like it was nothing and waiting for change. Blue expertly scooped in and claimed a table right as its previous occupants stood up to leave.
“I usually don’t come out in the village on the Hogwarts weekends,” she admitted, sipping at her drink. “I hate Hogwarts students. They’re mostly jerks.” She had said as much before. Adam didn’t have to ask why, but as if to prove her point, Tad and two more of Adam’s dorm mates approached their table.
“Who’s this, Parrish, you’re girlfriend?” Tad asked.
Blue pegged Tad with a very vicious glare and said, “Who’s this, Parrish, an asshole?
Adam made a little choking noise of laughter.
“I know who she is,” the boy at Tad’s left elbow -- a socially climbing second year that Adam didn’t know the name of -- said. “She’s the squib who hangs around here.”
Roger at Tad’s right elbow said, “Wow, nice catch Parrish. Couldn’t even get a date with a real witch.”
“Do you have any idea how sexist you sound right now?” Blue said back. “Women aren’t prizes to be bagged.”
Adam wanted to say something, but Blue was so fast with her responses, so sure. All Adam was used to doing was absorbing the harsh words that came his way, to face it with stoney silence, reveal nothing, and keep going. But this was someone insulting Blue, his friend, his… whatever.
Adam’s not really sure how it escalated to the point of Blue standing up on her tiptoes, pronouncing, “I don’t need magic to do this,” and pouring what remained of her butterbeer over Roger’s head.
When Blue stormed out, Adam followed. They found themselves again at the fence near the Shrieking Shack. Once there, Blue’s self-righteous anger simmered down into something else. She kicked one of the fence posts then pressed the heels of her hands to her eye sockets. When she dropped them away, she said, “I hate Hogwarts students.”
“I’m sorry,” Adam said, for the ways his classmates had acted back there, for every other Hogwarts student who had done something similar, for himself for not speaking up. The last one seemed to be the last on Blue’s mind.
Blue turned around and leaned against the fence. Adam stood a little way off, afraid to move closer, afraid he hadn’t earned it. He picked at a loose thread at the sleeve of his cuff then gripped his hands tight to stop himself. He didn’t need to add more wear and tear to his already secondhand robes.
Blue sighed. Overhead a pair of songbirds took flight from a tree, chirping away.
“When you’re a squib,” she said. “You don’t belong in the wizarding world, but it’s too late for you, growing up in it, only not get your letter… You don’t belong in the muggle world either.”
Her jaw tensed. Adam caught it, watched it, that suppression of emotion he was personally familiar with.
This tough girl, outspoken, eccentric dresser, bold enough to pour drinks over boys at the pub, had just exposed her carefully harbored weakness. Adam honestly didn’t know if he could ever do the same.
#
“I usually start crystal balls this time in the term,” Persephone said after class one afternoon to make up for their missed Hogsmeade session. The sun was glaring through a peaked set of windows set deep into the stone wall, the light cutting askance the classroom floor, roughly in half.
“They’re perfectly harmless for students just playing pretend, but for a seer scrying can be dangerous. Certain preparations -- mental preparations and precautions -- need to be made.”
Adam nodded in that dedicated, serious way of his, ready to prepare.
“Something is distracting you,” Persephone said, not even raising her dark eyes from her work of counting rolls of parchment, making sure everyone’s essays had been turned in today.
Something was distracting Adam. He didn’t know what his tell was, though. He harbored something pride-like when it came to being unreadable, unknowable, unprovocable. He had the appropriate amount of respectful politeness with his professors, accommodating as he had to be with his classmates, but otherwise self-focused, self-determined, here for himself first because no one else ever was. Blue was the first friend he had ever had, and that in fact was distracting him.
Ever since the incident in the Three Broomsticks, things between them had been different. It was hard to judge, exactly, not seeing her in person regularly, but there had been a shift in their letters. They were no longer the quick every other day affair, but lingering longer gaps between responses. Adam was in part guilty of this, struggling with his responses, procrastinating writing them, putting in excuses that classwork was picking up and he wouldn’t be able to write back as fast as before.
The content of the letters had shifted as well. A stiltedness had taken over all they wrote back and forth, a rigid recount of days spent as opposed to private inner thoughts.
Perhaps Blue, after exposing herself, was putting walls back up to heal. Perhaps she hadn’t liked how Adam had -- or hadn’t -- responded that day, like Adam himself didn’t like it. Perhaps she had realized, just as Adam had, that he was an interloper of sorts. She was a magicless girl in a home full of magic, a sightless girl in a home full of seers. And here along came Adam, invited and talented, taking up space and attention. He imagined that could foster resentment.
Adam didn’t know how to negotiate people’s hearts or personalities. He didn’t know how to negotiate friendship. He didn’t know what he had done right or wrong, or what to do going forward, right or wrong.
Persephone said, “Get out your deck.” Persephone’s statements never sounded like demands or orders, but soothing suggestions that Adam had permission whether or not to follow. It made them easier to follow.
Adam removed the deck of tarot cards from his bag and handed them, with an itch to cling tightly to them instead, into Persephone’s outheld hands.
She smoothed her thumbs over the the worn edges, over the smooth gloss at the top. “They’re becoming your cards,” she said. “They barely recognize me a wink.”
Adam had known these were Persephone’s old cards but he hadn’t really thought about them being Persephone’s old cards. His life thus far had involved plenty of hand-me-downs and secondhand things: the very robes he wore right now included. Was the deck different? It felt different. The deck had always felt different than his other meager possessions, the deck being embedded with meaning.
Persephone laid her arms across the table, palms upward, the invitation clear. Another thing that wasn’t Adam’s strong suit: people, friendship, and touch.
Adam laid his hands in hers. Her skin was soft, her grip light, barely a grip at all just the barest curled of her fingers over his.
“Close your eyes,” she said with the instruction of a teacher. Adam did. “Now breathe.” Adam did. “Slowly.” Adam tried.
As he sat, hands held, eyes closed and breathing as instructed, the tension in his shoulders and the defensive coil that ran up his spin loosened. This wasn’t sleep. This wasn’t studying into the late night hours until his eyes couldn’t focus on bookprint anymore and having to surrender. This was a foreign practice: rest for rest’s sake.
“The world will always be hammering down your doors with obligations and regrets,” Persephone said, voice as willowy as a dream that Adam couldn’t be sure if he heard from inside or outside his head. “Sometimes you need to let it go, clear your mind, your heart. Cleanse your soul.”
Adam listened, and Adam took another long drawn breathe.
#
Exam time was consuming. Not only had the exams gotten progressively harder each year, now Adam had three more classes to study for. Even more, Adam wasn’t aiming for a passing grade, he was aiming for near perfection, the top of his class, straight Outstandings.
Between homework, studying, tarot practice, and his overall pursuit of perfection, he tried to take breaks to attempt the mediation techniques Persephone had taught him. Sometimes trying to tame his warring thoughts was battle inevitably lost; other times he was able to ease some sense of stress that had been tearing apart his insides.
Shortly before the last Hogsmeade weekend of the school year, Blue sent him a letter that mentioned offhand in the last sentence that she wouldn’t be around that day. With no more details, Adam could only suppose at the truth of it, and wavered on that decision depending on his fragile mood. When he dwelled too hard on it, too hard to even get his head focused on a passage in a textbook, meditation came in use.
Still, it wasn’t a tragedy. He could use that time to catch up on his History of Magic notes. Adam had started his exam preparations early as the students were sitting their OWLs and NEWTS, thus unfathomably early compared to the other students in his year.
Adam wasn’t going to let his academic plans be derailed now, not for anything. He wasn’t that weak. He couldn’t risk being that weak.
#
The end of the school year came as a rush. It was all build up, a hike up the hillside, with studying and exam anxiety, and then he reached the peak, and it was a rush down the otherside. The exams were done and with them the classes. Then came the leaving feast where the House Cup winner was announced -- Ravenclaw this year, who had also won the Quidditch Cup -- and then it was time for trunks to be packed. The train would heading out in the morning.
Heading back to the trailer park was never something Adam had looked forward to, not at the end of the day back when he was in a Muggle school and not at the end of term now. Dealing with his father was playing a game a Russian roulette with a couple extra bullets in the chambers. He had yet to find new warmth in his mother since the discovery they shared magic in common.
Yet he went, yet he packed, yet he let himself remember this was one more successful year down with four more to go. Of age at 17 in the magic world, with a proper education, with top grades, he could crack open the options of this world for himself. Summer could be beared, a necessary rough patch in the pursuit of his ultimate goal.
As the students gathered by the front gates of the castle, loading into the carriages in small groups, Adam waited at the back of the clump, lingering the longest he could. It was only when most of the group had diminished with only the last few carriages to be filled and set off towards the train, when he was near the opening of the gate, did he spot her. Blue, hardly camouflage in her bright teal dress, waiting just outside the gates, off the carriage path by the bushes, flushed green by early summer.
“Hey,” he said, leaving his trunk behind, coming over to her.
Blue scuffed the heel of her boot in the dirt. “Hi,” she said back. “I wanted to -- I wanted to wish you a good summer. I don’t think that’s actually a thing. Wishing someone a good summer, but I’m doing it. And, um, see you when you get back.”
Adam didn’t stop the half-crook of a smile that showed up on his face. He couldn’t hide all of his tells all of the time. Maybe there were even some places with some people that it was better not to.
“You have a good summer too, Blue.”
He ended up with Blue’s arms wrangled around his neck in a hug. Touch was still foreign, but it wasn’t, it turned out, necessarily bad.
“You’ll write me, right?” she demanded, upon letting him go, and it was certainly nothing less than a demand.
“Yes, but you’ll have to write me first. I don’t have an owl.”
A prefect waiting with the last carriage, waiting for Adam, cleared her throat aggressively loud. Adam had to rush off from there.
On the ride to the train, and then on the train to the station, Adam was left pondering the nature of attachments, the danger of them and the allure: Hogwarts, magic, Persephone, Blue. More things to miss, but more things to look forward to.