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Stepping onto the train in her fourth year, Ginny called Luna “Loony,” dismissively, thoughtlessly. That was just her name. That was the name of girls like this, the wide-eyed children whose ranks Ginny had proudly left behind.
A year and hundreds of pages later, Ginny snarled at two boys for using the same hurtful lash of the tongue.
There was so much growth between those pages, glimpses of a girl learning what she wanted to fight for.
How about this story? Arthur Weasley lurked in Muggle used bookstores, bringing home battered comics, penny and dime mystery novels, swooning romances for Molly and Charlie, and once an old bound copy of Shakespeare’s collected tragedies.
Ginny holed up with the Shakespeare the summer after her first year at Hogwarts. She needed other people’s tragedies to retreat into and an excuse to sit in an secluded corner where no one would touch her.
She wrapped herself in all the stories, but got drawn back to Hamlet. The men there went mad in their minds, and the women went mad from their hearts.
Ginny vowed, if she went mad, it would be in Hamlet’s shoes. She would be the hero of her story. If she went mad it would be from the head, from ghosts whispering in her ears, from guilt and bottled rage. If she went mad, she would destroy her world before her self.
She would wreak her wrath, not drift off the page.
They never spoke of Ophelia again after her funeral scene. At twelve, Ginny sniffed and went back to savor Hamlet’s poisoned death. That was what you would expect, of a girl who put flowers in her hair, who broke, who climbed trees that hung over rivers and had the silliness to fall in.
At eighteen, a war veteran, a general, a wounded victor mourning friends, Ginny combed through the pages. She tried to find some trace of Ophelia, some perfumed fingerprint slipped between the words, the sparse fragments of the story the bard had forgotten to record.
When first brushing by Luna Lovegood in the Hogwarts hallways, Ginny did not think much of her. Barefoot, bullied, dead mum, so you stare into the middle distance and play the mad innocent waif. Ginny scoffed and practiced her hexes, over and over, in empty classrooms.
Lavender and Pavarti were brainless whisperers. Ginny liked the tough practicality of the Quidditch girls, the way Hermione saved the world. I will be stone. I will not be Ophelia. Her next Reducto blasted a chair to pieces and she scrambled to pick up the shards.
Luna went whimsically barefoot for nearly all of her fourth year. It was a long time before Ginny discovered that this was because someone had stolen Luna's shoes.
Luna was not Ophelia either. Luna went down to the cold waters of the Lake, and she probably sang silly little ditties her mother had taught her, but they were lullabies to the Giant Squid.
It never would have surprised Ginny if Luna had come to class with flowers woven in her hair, singing about rue. But by her fifth year, Ginny would have asked her why, though probably not quite understood Luna’s answer. But she would have listened.
Even if you don’t look close at the woman dancing just outside your comfort zone, her story still exists.
Ginny refused to be Ophelia but sometimes she felt like she could not escape Persephone. Dragged down to the cold depths, she had eaten Riddle's pomegranate words whole and now she had to spend half her life in his grip—he claimed her nights with fear, stole moments of frozen sunlit life when someone in a green-hemmed robe stepped too close, spoke up in the back of her mind when Ginny was just trying to be a good little schoolgirl. He took apart the people around her with low, cutting phrases.
Loony Lovegood, Ginny’s ghost whispered, she’d be easy. A few kind words to a lonely little girl; her soul’s already half in the clouds.
Ginny’s Riddle was always cruel but rarely wrong. He was wrong here. Luna had too much self to be lonely—no, that wasn’t quite right. She was lonely, but Ginny’s gift of friendship to the odd little Ravenclaw would always pale in comparison to how much Luna’s friendship gave to Ginny. Luna would not have been easy.
On a particularly bad afternoon, holed up with homework she couldn’t wrap her mind around because her traitor head was busy panicking about the icy hiss of old ghosts, Ginny imagined Riddle trying to go after Luna. She laughed aloud, startling herself, as her imaginary Riddle tore his pretty hair out at Crumple Horned Snor-whatsits, whimsical logic, and a kindness that was so tough he would wither before it.
Luna wore her self on her sleeve, sure enough, all she was and wanted to be on display for a scornful world, but she kept her heart close. Luna described others' kindnesses, over a loud speaker or in a whisper, with a tone of mild surprise. Ginny, who had a dark she never asked for in her chest and basilisk venom in her invisible scars, appreciated that Luna didn’t expect anything from her, except an ear, sometimes, a hand, an adventure.
Three boys called her Loony in the Great Hall and flicked peas at her. Ginny rose to a modest height and a towering rage and felt like a worthy lioness for the first time since the Chamber.
Upstairs in the Burrow as war brimmed on the horizons, Ginny called Fleur cow, named her Phlegm, made faces and cut with tough sarcasm. Ginny had no time for little girls, no time for women who liked pretty things, liked looks, who probably read stories about dragons and damsels and wanted to be the damsels.
Ginny had been the damsel.
She had been the pretty little thing looking for a rescuer with bright green eyes, the boy with the scar or the boy in the book. Ginny scoffed at Ophelia and she scoffed at Cho’s tears, Lavender’s giggles; but mostly she was scoffing at the naive little redheaded girl who had trusted a boy named Riddle and let him eat her whole.
Ginny felt guilty. The let—she let him eat her. She wrote back. She wanted. She felt weak and vulnerable, broken not wronged. Let. She blamed herself for not being, at eleven, the kind of Gryffindor who charged with a sword.
Fleur tossed her hair and Ginny cringed, sneering, and felt the sarcastic daggers lodge somewhere inside her.
They fought a war. Bill got his scars. Fleur snarled at Molly for thinking that would change anything at all, and Ginny felt startled respect curl in her stomach. Fleur and nearly a dozen others risked death to wear Harry’s face and keep him safe. Molly bound George’s ear and Ginny watched Fleur cry over Mad-Eye Moody.
When Fleur and Bill married, Ginny was a bridesmaid. Luna wore a yellow dress to the wedding, and a sunflower in her hair. She wore the color of sunshine, because light is luck. She warmed Ginny's soul; she always did.
At the perfect center of the room, Fleur radiated, luminescent. She was snobbish beauty and genuine kindness, but also swift magics and sly wit. Fleur was not a hero with a sword. But Luna would never be a lioness. Cho wept for wounds that weren’t even her own. Lavender Brown was a silly girl and a brave one.
A year from this sunlit wedding, that sentence would be Lavender Brown had been a silly girl and a brave one. After the battle, Parvati would sit in the Great Hall with her own wounds and comfort a professor four decades her senior. They would weep over a girl with bows in her hair, a lioness, a damsel, a child.
Ginny read Hamlet again, after the war, after long dangerous nights at Luna’s side, after a hard earned acceptance of the flowers in her own dying hair. It was not Ophelia who she raged at, then, but the old bard himself. Ginny read through the lines, furious about flower-bedecked girls and their untranslated songs.
I am Ophelia and you did not tell her story. Ginny went downstairs, where Fleur, pancake batter on her cheek, teased Bill as he fried the cakes.
Where is the way her wide eyes can focus into a strategist’s sharp gaze? Where are the things she loved that were not doomed men?
After her funeral scene, no one spoke Ophelia’s name.
Ginny grabbed a broom from the shed, because there were few things that kept her steady like the gut-dropping acceleration of flight.
We are not your Ophelias, she told the skies. Ophelia was not yours, not yours to call mad, not yours to doom. She was not your story to half-tell and to forget.
They saved the world, the children of Hogwarts. Ginny fumed that in the midst of praising the Boy Who Lived, of cooing over the symbolic union of the pureblood boy and the Muggleborn genius, that people’s eyes would drift over Luna, careless. The odd one, she lost her mother at nine. It drove her mad and strange; how sweet of these heroes to pity her with their friendship. Ginny rose to a modest height and a towering rage.
Ginny read her children Hamlet, using her best voices and stuffed animal props. She added scenes. Ophelia loved to dance because her mother taught her. Sometimes she loved fortune telling and rabbits, had a dear friend she walked hand in hand with, looked like an old ghost. On some nights when Ginny’s Ophelia went mad she went cruel. Other days, on warm afternoons, Ophelia wanted to go to university out of the country just like Hamlet and learn about the wonders of the world. She always sang.
Sometimes Ophelia climbed the tree over the river that killed her because she saw a bird’s nest high above. Sometimes she climbed the tree over the river because she was desperate to leave the ground behind.
“Why didn’t she get a broom?” Lily Luna asked, scorn all over her freckled face.
Ginny gathered her daughter close. “When you feel like Ophelia, Lily, you get a broom, and you fly away. But you remember how lucky you are. Never mock those without your options.”
When Ginny married Harry it was not because he saved the world. It was not because he saved her. She liked the way their scars fit together, and he loved to fly almost as much as she did.
In her third year at Hogwarts, Ginny glanced into a compartment of the Express and said, “It’s only Loony Lovegood.” Hundreds of pages later, she threatened the boys who dared to use the name.
Hundreds of pages more, and they had fought together, raised an army, stood shoulder to shoulder in battle.
Harry named his only daughter Lily Luna for a woman who had given him life, and another who had given him wisdom and comfort after loss. Ginny named her daughter after two soldiers, a mother and an explorer, a Head Girl and an outcast.
Ginny didn’t know who Lily would grow up to be, but she would not laugh at girls who made giant lion hats that roared. She might be as enraptured by smoke and mirrors as Parvati, or be a Quidditch jock bumping shoulders with boys twice her size, or a shy flower, or a flaunting, impeccable queen of the halls—but she would know better than to laugh. Lily would grow up with her Aunt Luna’s dreamy hum and bulging stories, with anxious, hyper-competent Hermione, Molly’s warmth and Fleur’s careful, careless beauty.
When they told her she was not like other girls, Lily would laugh and ask them if they had ever met a girl who was.