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“I’ll cover you in flowers someday, Julie-girl”
~Lurlene McDaniel, Don’t Die, My Love
The boy is bleeding on her bathroom’s tiles, the wound seeming to pulse like darkness does when you close your eyes against the sun, and Myrtle remembers how he stumbled in here in search of his toad once, sniffling, pudgy, eleven-years-old, and so like her that she disliked him on the spot. Gryffindor by mistake, shoelaces coming undone, and would he stop wailing and let her cry in peace?
Now he’s not sniffling, and he’s no longer pudgy. He looks like it’s already wartime and, even stuck here, Myrtle knows it is.
That day, when he asked her about the toad, she yelled at him that this wasn’t a pond, thank you very much, and threw her shoe at him. It went right through his heart, and he folded his small, chubby hand over it as if he’d felt it.
“Myrtle,” he said then, staring at her with wide eyes. “A plain shrub, native to the Mediterranean region.”
She screamed at him to get out, get out, get out. It was one of those days when she forgot she was dead and tried to drown herself.
“Myrtle,” he says now, his thigh oozing blood and staining everything sunset-red, reminding her of how she hasn’t bothered to look out the window and see a sunset in forever. “Often prescribed for fever by ancient physicians.”
She smells rust and remembers how once the bullies made her put ten dirty coins in her mouth and then spit them back out, from the one worth the most to the one worth the least.
“That’s no fever,” she says, and falls over him to press her palms to the wound, as if she can touch him, as if it will help.
“It feels cold,” the boy says, tilting his head back. “Cold is good.”
She lays her head there and breathes against the blood, trying to breathe the pain away.
*
They used to call her Moaning Myrtle long before she died – break her glasses, and she cries, tear her textbook in half, and she cries, put coins in her mouth and she’ll cry them out instead of spitting – and how everyone laughed.
“Moaning, moaning,” a boy sneered once and shoved his hand up her shirt, and it felt like slugs, but she didn’t yell, because it was the first time someone had touched her.
They laugh at her now, too, and they think she’s some perverted, sick – but what do they know? Sometimes, she floats on her side and curls her arm around herself, pretending, only even though the arm always seems cold and impersonal, it never feels like someone else’s.
Touch-starved, she thinks, and remembers how her mother wouldn’t ever hug her, wouldn’t kiss her after Hogwarts. She was a religious woman, and thought that witches, like devils, burn when you spill holy water on them, burn when they step into a church.
“I didn’t burn after all, mummy,” Myrtle laughs. “I drowned, instead.”
It takes her longer than usual to remember that she didn’t.
*
“What spell was it?”
The boy – Neville, she remembers – smiles bitterly, the way people do when they looked so deep into the world’s throat that they’ve seen all the rot in its stomach too.
“Not a spell, Myrtle,” he says, and shakes his head. Myrtle thinks, good for you that you still bother to shake your head at things. “Alecto and her bloody Muggle Studies – she said that since I’m so enthusiastic about them, I should like Muggles’ primitive punishment methods, and threw a knife at me.”
She watches the mouth of the wound gape open as if in surprise at the absence of whatever put it there.
“Shouldn’t you do something about it? Clean it, wrap it with something, that sort of thing?”
“Yes,” he breathes, but doesn’t move, like someone who has to get up from bed but mumbles about five more minutes, just five more minutes.
“I’ve decided to hate boys like you,” she announces, remembering Harry, remembering Draco, all of them coming here with their problems and leaving after she’s given them a clue or listened perched on a washbasin, caring that they needed help, caring that they cried, and when did anyone last care that she did, too?
“Oh?” Neville breathes, and rips some of his shirt off to tie the fabric around the wound.
“You never even asked how I died,” she whines, and there it is, Moaning Myrtle, always moaning, always wailing, always with the complaints—
“Ah, see,” he says, and sounds bashful. “I wanted to know back in first year, I swear, only I thought it rude to ask. And then— Well, you threw that shoe at me, later.”
“It went through you and fell in the toilet,” she mumbles into his trousers, and he laughs. It echoes like nothing has for a long time, like dripping taps never do.
“I’m sorry?” he says, and she laughs, too. It’s unfamiliar on her tongue, like some exotic sweet you’ve never tasted before, and she sucks on the inside of her cheek, trying to chase it.
When he pretends to brush her hair off her forehead, she pretends to feel it.
*
He insists on cleaning the blood later, and she watches him wash it away, not with his wand but with rugs and hands, scrubbing at it and scratching it out of the cracks between the tiles. She wants to say, don’t, and imagines lying down in all that red and making an angel the way people do with snow – the way she will never again do with snow – just to feel the warmth of it, but then she remembers that she wouldn’t feel anything, not at all.
It won’t smell like rust anymore, and as he wrings the rugs out, she flies through the pipes, and watches some of the blood fall into the lake, the dance of red in the green water like something’s been bit there.
From now on, she knows, there’ll be a lot of biting, and a lot of blood.
*
When he comes again, weeks later, she throws her shoe at him again, forgetting it won’t hit him, and as it goes through his chest, he clutches it like he did that day years ago. There’s a swelling beneath his eye in the shape of fingers, and oh, how she hates him.
“I see how it is,” she snarls, and when did she get like this? “You only come here to lick your wounds, don’t you?”
“Myrtle,” he says, voice gentle like flowers. “Can you tell me about the plants that grow at the bottom of the lake?”
She’s already crying again – all those years, and she still haven’t cried all her tears out, haven’t cried herself to nothing – and he pretends to brush her tears away with his knuckles. She sniffs, and pretends to touch the bruise under his eye away.
“It’s like a whole other world,” she tells him as they settle next to each other on the wet tiles, and he pretends to put his head on her shoulder. “There’s a forever of grass down there, only it grows up high like trees and dances like Swan Lake. There’s seaweed that looks like hair, and hair that looks like seaweed, and there are those yellow flowers, similar to daffodils, that look like they used to be baby stars, only fell too soon.”
He closes his eyes, and she wonders if his neck hurts from all this pretending.
“No matter what happens up here,” she says, voice rough. “Down there, everything is green and alive.”
He smiles.
“I wonder if I could go there, when Hogwarts gets destroyed.”
He straightens, and she misses the weight of his forehead even though she never felt it.
“It won’t get destroyed,” he says, fierce like something he must have grown into sometime between now and crying for his toad.
“It might,” she whispers, and remembers that the lake is empty and cold even with all that seagrass, remembers that even if she could stay there, she wouldn’t want to.
“Why are you stuck here, anyway?” Neville asks, and she remembers all that hate and how it felt in her blood, like poison, like champagne, like the end of the world so a new one could grow in its place.
“Don’t you know?” she says, bitter, malicious, bad, bad, bad, she’s always been oh so bad. “Don’t you know how I died here because I was hiding from Olive Hornby—”
“How you died here because Tom Riddle told the basilisk to kill you,” Neville interrupts, and suddenly, she remembers how she’s not thin, how she has pimples, how her glasses are ugly and thick.
“How I died here because I was hiding from Olive Hornby,” she goes on, telling him about the only thing she’s sure of. “How later, after death, I wouldn’t leave her alone, and how she went to the ministry and they banished me here.”
“Oh, Myrtle,” he says, sounding older than anyone still in school ever should.
“I hate her.”
“Because she made fun of you?” he asks, and she doesn’t know how he does that, how he can sound both understanding and doubtful, how he can sound kind and yet like he’s saying, that’s not good enough.
“You don’t know this, but I should have died from drowning,” she snaps, and twirls away, down sewers, down pipes, down where there’s no one, only the sound of water, and Merlin, how sad it sounds.
*
“Myrtle!” he yells, arms spread, and what a sight – seventeen, his bones no longer awkward, his limbs no longer graceless. “I’m sorry, alright?”
She doesn’t say a word.
“Tell me about the plants that grow at the bottom of the lake?”
“A whole lot of weeds,” she mumbles, and oh, how he smiles.
“Don’t you know weeds are just wild flowers?” he says, and Myrtle thinks that she’s never known anyone so kind before, that maybe, had she known him in 1943, she’d have struggled when they tried to drown her.
“I know poems about war that have flowers in them,” she says, and it’s quiet, but echoes, so that he won’t miss it. He closes his eyes, like he knows she’ll tell him one, and she’s hopeless, so she does.
“In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row,/That mark our place; and in the sky/The larks, still bravely singing, fly/Scarce heard amid the guns below.”
She’s a Ravenclaw, and expects praise, how clever, how smart, you remembered all of it? But he doesn’t say how clever, he says, how kind.
“I miss novels and poems the most,” she tells him, and when he brings a couple of hardcovers the next day, cradled awkwardly in his arms, she looks away so he doesn’t see her face. All this time underwater, and she’s forgotten how it feels when your skin is not wet and you start to cry.
He turns the pages for her, and she reads aloud, until it gets dark and he falls asleep, until she has to watch him curl up, cold, and can’t do anything because ghosts are not allowed touch.
“When I was still alive,” she starts, curled up around him anyway. “They didn’t just call me names and steal my books and throw my glasses around. They tried to drown me once, my head pushed down the toilet, and they almost did, too. Now, sometimes I forget that’s not how I really died.”
It takes her a moment to realize that he hasn’t been snoring for a while.
*
In winter, he wears ugly jumpers and gets sad a lot. He mentions his parents and asks her if she thinks it’s cold in St Mungo’s.
“No colder than here, I’m sure,” she says, and urges him to put on a scarf. It’s freezing in the bathroom, as if the room is but the lake’s lung, as if the castle won’t keep it warm out of spite.
“Do you ever get cold?” Neville asks, eyeing her with worry. She’s wearing her summer robes, because she died on a hot, June day, sweat stains on her shirt and the sun like a place where someone ripped the sky open.
“No,” she says. “Only hungry.”
“Really?”
She doesn’t say anything, because she meant touch.
“I feel a bit cold when you touch me,” he says, as if they really touch. “Does it work the other way around, too? Do I feel a bit warm to you?”
“I—”
She doesn’t know what to say. He smiles, patient, always so patient, and stretches out on his back, limbs spread like he’s a little boy and like his bones don’t know the shape of a man in a coffin yet. He holds out his hand, bitten nails, scraped knuckles, the imprint of a wand bruised into the palm, and she pretends to take it. She falls on him like snow and curls into him as if he’s a blanket, and it feels like he could be one, when she closes her eyes.
“Warm,” she admits, and wonders if he feels her like a memory. “I might be imagining it.”
“I think that when you imagine something, that’s it, it exists,” he says, and she puts her nose to his neck, because she can’t touch him, but she can smell him, and he smells like sweat and earth and everything good.
“I don’t want you to be cold,” she says, and he pretends to put his hand on top of her head.
“I’m not.”
*
“So you hate Hermione?” he says one day, books all around and sunlight like something alive, like birds.
“I can’t help it.”
“Why, though?” he asks, puzzled, and doesn’t judge anymore – maybe never has.
“Because when she cried in a bathroom and a beast found her, her friends rescued her. When the same happened to me, no one rescued me, and I had to wait for hours right next to my dead body before someone bothered to look.”
She almost regrets telling him when he smiles so sadly – as if he doesn’t believe in flowers anymore, as if he hates the world.
“You’re not a very good person, are you?” he hums, and she doesn’t throw a shoe, because she’s nestled inside him again, like a pretend-soul.
“I’m just a girl,” she says, and when he folds his hand over his chest, she pretends to feel it on hers.
*
He rebels and rebels, and the Carrows hate him, snapping at him like wolves, howling like there’s a moon above and he’s a morsel they’ll sharpen their teeth on. He writes slogans on walls and saves others, he refuses to torture and trips the siblings with spells. He’s lost blood, his lip never quite heals before someone splits it again, and one of his ribs is cracked.
Myrtle’s forgotten, somewhere along the way, sometime as she collected the years like beads of a necklace, sometime between the dripping of two taps, that she has a heart.
“I was running from Amycus when the room appeared. I asked it for someplace safe.”
“What was it like?” she asks, pretending to finger his blood away.
“It was your bathroom,” he says, and smiles wryly, as if there’s some irony to it that she’s missing. She supposes no one wants their safe place to be a toilet. “I thought I was on the wrong floor, at first.”
“What does it mean?” she asks.
“You Ravenclaws,” he laughs. “Everything has to mean something, always.”
“Always,” she admits, and treats it like a riddle, like she’s still alive and has to get back to the Ravenclaw tower before curfew, has to guess right.
“Everyone hates me,” she says at last. “That’s why it’s safe in here.”
He crosses his arms like he’s trying to hug her, and she smells the collar of his shirt, wishing she could keep it.
*
“I don’t hate you,” he says, once, cheek nestled on a poetry book page.
“It doesn’t count. You don’t hate anyone.”
“I like you, then. And I hate the Carrows, anyway.”
She loathes the world for letting him learn hate.
“I think you’re no longer safe here. Not even in my bathroom.”
“You’re not safe, either, are you?” he says, angry, and sits up, hair tangled and cheek red. “You can’t even leave this place.”
“Nobody can hurt me, now,” she tells him, trying to smile like a Gryffindor would, all bravery and confidence. He frowns at her, the way a person might when they’re playing cards against someone, and know they’re being cheated, but haven’t yet figured out how.
“Then why do you still cry?”
She whimpers, because she didn’t know that dead hearts could break.
*
“Have you ever read Hamlet?” she asks him one day. “You know what I like about it most? How Ophelia dies by drowning in this lovely river, in a dress and surrounded by flowers.”
“I—”
“Not ugly, not killed by a monster, not in a bathroom.”
“Oh, Myrtle.”
*
She remembers how before she turned out to be a witch, her mother would card her fingers through Myrtle’s hair, and adjust her collars for her before Sunday Mass, and kiss her forehead like a leaf. She remembers eating apple pie and how grass felt under hands and how her fingertips were always paper-dirty from old books.
Neville whines, trying to set the bones of his wrist back in place, and she’s never wanted to be alive again this much before.
“You should rest for a while,” she tells him, knowing he won’t listen. That’s what war is all about – boys never listening when you ask them to stay.
“I can’t,” he whines. “The D.A. meetings—”
“If you die, I won’t let your ghost in here,” she says, and he laughs through pain, laughs until maybe, for a second, he forgets it.
*
“I have to leave, or they’ll kill me,” he says one day, and she knew it was coming, because outside the window, the sunset is like a rose, and he smiled at it. It’s something she read in a book once, published two months before she fell dead, how one loves the sunset, when one is so sad.
“I hate you.”
“Myrtle—”
“Just go, and be safe, and don’t come back or I’ll kill you before they get the chance!”
He smiles, sweet like there’s no war after all, and reaches out, honey-slow, cupping his hand inside her chest, right where her heart was once.
She doesn’t have to pretend to feel it.
April, the cruellest month.
*
“Myrtle, I think you could leave,” he says, once it’s the battle, once the castle is crumbling and burning and in pain. Back in one piece, bruised and scratched but whole.
“What do you mean leave?”
“I mean, to hell with the restraining order, or whatever it is, to hell with the Ministry of Magic, to hell with them all. You can leave if you want and not be trapped here—”
“What do you know!” she yells, and she has no shoes left to throw, has already thrown both at him.
“Aren’t you tired of this place?” he says, exasperated. “Aren’t you tired of it flooding, of it in flames, and you stuck here—”
“I’m not stuck in this castle,” she snaps, angrier and angrier. “I’m stuck inside myself!”
He stares at her like she’s insane, and she hates him for seeing something better than she is, for being surprised that she’s not—
“Moaning Myrtle, forever ugly, forever fourteen, and I’ll never grow out of the fat, and the acne, and the glasses, and I’ll never be anything but myself!”
He looks at her until she feels small, and then he shakes his head.
“Myrtle,” he says, slow, slow. “In Greek mythology, sacred to Aphrodite, er, the goddess of beauty and love, and Demeter, the goddess of fertility and grain. Did you know? Virgil relates it to Venus, too, and it was often used in, well, wedding rituals.”
She stares at him, this boy awkwardly telling her she’s not ugly the only way he knows how – by stammering about plants.
“Oh, yes, weddings! Those things I’ll never get to live through! It doesn’t matter, anyway, since no one would marry me, not in a thousand years—”
“I’d marry you now if I could,” he says, and the world crushes to pieces, the way it once did already, the way it wasn’t supposed to again.
She sniffles, and folds her arms across her chest. He looks so serious, all grown up and sure of things.
“Well, a little too late—”
“In some other world that I promise to always believe in, you’re seventeen, or nineteen, or twenty-one, and a Neville is mumbling something barely coherent, asking you to marry him, one knee dirty from grass. You have a yellow flower in your hair, one that’s half daffodil and half fallen star, but, glasses or not, he only sees you.”
He looks so tired and desperate, asking her to understand, but she hasn’t understood a thing in a long while.
“What about this world?” she asks, and flies through him, so that he can’t pretend they could ever touch.
“When you imagine something, it exists,” he says, stubborn, and she cries, and he doesn’t say anything else, because it’s war and he has to go.
He always has to go, and she will always, always have to stay.
*
When he kills the snake, she doesn’t see it, but she thinks she can hear the heavy body fall.
*
“Myrtle!” he yells, and how it echoes. “Myrtle, come on, come out!”
She curls up inside the pipes, and pretends that he never stumbled here, not even as a first year to search for his stupid toad.
“Myrtle!” he yells and she runs away into the lake’s cold throat. “Has anyone ever given you flowers? Myrtle, for Merlin’s sake!”
She can smell something, after, wet earth and a forever of green. She thinks it must be what after-the-war is like, and stays underwater where she should have been all along.
*
It’s days later when she peeks out the drain because her bathroom smells like the kind of June when girls don’t die. She almost can’t bear to look, because it’s heartbreak itself, a thousand flowers, wild and in all colours, stagnant water between them.
Red, yellow, blue, purple, pink, and she hasn’t seen anything like this in years. And there, at the heart of it all, laid out in the shallow water, Neville, limbs close to his body this time.
She doesn’t cry yet, because she won’t hear his breath over cries.
“Are you d-dead?” she asks, because he’s learned it now, the way bodies look when they no longer have souls.
“No,” he says, and opens his eyes. “But you are.”
He sounds like the war hasn’t ended yet.
“I’ve never gotten flowers from anyone,” she whispers, hovering above him and smelling the summer of it all, the earth under his nails and the grass rubbed into his shirt.
“Well, these are all for you,” he says, and when she cries, the tears fall through his cheeks.
“I wish I could kiss you.”
“You don’t,” he says, and shakes his head. “I’d probably be terrible, all wet and spit and broken noses.”
“I’ve already imagined it nice,” she confesses, and he laughs.
“I forget my own name half the time, but I promise to never forget you,” he says, pretending to slide her hair behind her ear, because if she’s Ophelia, then this is no meadow.
If she’s Ophelia, then this is her grave.
She smiles, and pretends to kiss him as she lies down, cradled inside him, their ribs scissoring, their hair tangling, their eyelashes brushing together. The last thing she does before she’s gone and away is cup her hand where his heart is, and she doesn’t know if she’s imagining it when she feels it skip a beat, but when you imagine something, it exists. She doesn’t cry, and she doesn’t drown, and it smells like flowers, and like June will never end.