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The walk from her house to Alice and Frank’s has always been longer than she expects.
Alice reminds her often, how a vehicle could easily cure all her problems and complaints, which always descends into a mess of iffy questions and inevitable answers that always come up with that, and for this reason Pandora will always take a twenty five minutes walk to get to her destination.
It’s always the same story, too, happening nearly everyday as if life was just an endless cycle of never ending circumstances: she arrives at their house, usually cold because the English weather never liked its residents that much, knocks on the door one or five times and is then usually faced by a sick looking Alice, who calls her dumb and then lets her enter.
This time though things don’t go as she usually would expect them to, because when Alice opens the door she has a rather joyful smile on her face, replacing her signature grimace she has always carried with her since Hogwarts. It’s an eventful day, Pandora reckons, a very good one too, though she can’t help but feel strangely taken aback, and for that she furrows her brows.
“Are you okay?”
Alice’s smile slightly falters, “What?”
“Why are you smiling,” Pandora steps on the little house, making herself space in the hall. “Like that .”
“What,” Alice closes the door behind her with her foot. “Can’t a person be happy to see her beloved friend?”
“Not when the person is you .”
Alice shakes her head. “Shut up.”
“I will in a minute,” Pandora replies with a grin, searching around for something undefined, like she’s never been in the same exact place in the past two years.
There’s a noise, then. It’s different from the usual cracks which pop out every now and then, or the insufferable quicks of the rat that had taken residence in the house and that they later found after months of strange dissimulation. This noise is the one of Frank, who in the gist of coming down the stars, all happy and giddy and raising a hand towards Pandora, misses a step and casually falls onto the floor.
///
“So,” Pandora starts, placing her hands on the counter. “What do we have here?”
It’s a silly tradition, really. It started in fifth year, when Frank took a peculiar interest in gardening, and by all means made it Alice and consequently Pandora’s problem, for Frank’s well regarded manners hide an hatred for socializing and result in them having two friends at best. The hours they spent in the Greenhouse during their last years of Hogwarts are hours they will never have back, and Alice sometimes worries about it - their lack of neurons or what not -, but then Pandora lights up the long awaited and most importantly free blunt, and everything is fine again.
“We are lacking,” Frank prompts, while they wash their hands. “This one took years to grow.”
Alice kicks their shins.
“Yeah, sure,” Pandora smiles. “Hand it over.”
“Why don’t you just stand up and take it yourself.”
Pandora huffs, sinking into her chair. Alice is too busy blowing on her tea to care. “Is that how you treat your guests? You give them orders ? Maybe that’s why no one comes to your house.”
“She’s right, Frank,” comes Alice, not looking up. “Just give her the fucking spliff.”
Frank gasps, quite accustomed to Pandora’s snarky comebacks but never to Alice’s - even though Pandora would define herself as a more respectful person than her friend in the grand scheme of things, just not with Frank - and finally gives in.
“Finally!” she lights it up with a snap of her hand, elbowing Alice. “Come here, love.”
“Leave me alone,” Alice battles her hand away, slowly falling onto the table. “I’m tired. I want to sleep. And never wake up.”
“She had a bad shift,” says Frank.
“Like always!”
They sigh, stealing the blunt from Pandora’s hand and taking a long drag. And another one. And a couple more, too. “Like always.”
Alice and Frank, differently from her, chose the unbearable life of sleepless nights and a war with themselves more than the outside world, the origin of endless people’s complains and reasons of the increase of annual suicides, also called a job. Being full time Aurors with a love for peaceful afternoons (Frank) and indie night gigs (Alice) is hard, or so Pandora can assume, as their unconscious pessimism and eyebags are possibly the most negative things she’s seen in years.
“I knew your smile from before was too good to be true,” she rolls her eyes. “Boring, the both of you.”
Alice raises an eyebrow, turning to face her. “Sorry I’m not an unemployed person who sits on her ass for the whole day.”
“Sorry I get to sleep at night and I’m not a bitch to people?”
Frank stifles a laugh.
“The fuck are you laughing at,” comes Alice. “I can’t believe you two. First you become friends thanks to me and then you betray me.”
She pouts, putting a hand on the bridge of her nose and letting blood rush over her. The green of her shirt fits her, Pandora notices, swallowing her in ribbons of the tragic baggage she carries behind her back and the mean persona she so tries to maintain. If you go underneath, forget about her black fringe and hooded brown eyes and slightly crooked lips, you will find a whiplash of all dark colours emerging from a river of perfect reflections and stubbly poses, but also the ridden pulsepoint of someone kind, dishevelled, who conceal their margins just to fit into your frame, and does it beautifully. Alice is, for lack of better words, the most tender person you could ever meet, if you try to venture closely, and don’t suffocate in her hazard presence.
She is also really fucking dramatic, but that comes later.
“It was love at first sight,” Frank smiles sarcastically, putting their feet on the nearest chair.
“Let’s say love at third. First sight you were Alice’s friend, second sight you were Alice’s personal pet, and third sight you were,” she leans in a bit, assuming a mysterious tone. “Frank.”
“What a love story,” Alice snorts.
“You’re just jealous.”
“Sure,” she says to Pandora, raising the palm of her hand.
There’s a moment of silence in which both Pandora and Frank look at Alice taking a haul and letting the smoke flutter through the air of the suffocating kitchen, and then something tragic happens, something Pandora always fears with her whole being but loves to see every time they smoke: Frank stands up.
This, too, is a silly tradition. Possibly more inefficient and irreverent, as takes place from the first one and is a clear result of Frank’s ability to get high after four singular drags and approximately ten minutes. It all started when they first started smoking, when Pandora got rid of the ‘classmate’ label and began to consider them as friends; it all started and never stopped, because even now at twenty years old Pandora can still sense the surge of laughter swelling from her lips like she did when she was fifteen, even though Frank has not profaned a word, yet.
“Pandora,” they start. “Remember the guy you dated?”
Immediate confusion settles over her. “Uh?”
“The one, you remember him, the one who always wore that weird hat? He was–”
“Oh yeah,” she says, putting a hand on her blonde braids. “I do remember.”
“I do too,” Alice says, snorting. “Prick.”
“He wasn’t that bad.”
Alice suddenly glances up at her, a look of disgust on her face. “He what ? He was awful, terrible, ugly and pathetic.” She takes a drag, pointing at her housemate. “Even Frank despised him.”
“He was cute at first, but then,” a grimace forms on their face.
“I should’ve known from the moment he told me he was a gemini,” Pandora says, grinning. “Like, Italian and gemini? Pick a struggle.”
Alice gasps, her black hair falling onto her face. “Ma vai a cagare.”
Touching Alice’s Italian side and zodiac sign is always a brave action, as she believes wholeheartedly in the beauty of both. Pandora often makes fun of her for that, for which she always receives a response that contains italian insults and the same old explanation on how gemini is a better sign than pisces.
“I actually think those were his only redeemable qualities,” she adds.
Frank clears their throat. “I was explaining something here.”
“See, Alice, you interrupted Frank.”
Alice widens her eyes, her mouth falling open. “ You interrupted them first.”
“Yes, now shut up,” they say, leaning over the counter. “So, I was saying, yesterday I went to the coffee shop, the one on the far side of the city, next to Sirius’s–”
“We know what you mean, Frank.”
“Okay, wonderful. And I was ordering a coffee–”
Alice interrupts them, again. “That's what usually happens when you go to a coffee shop.”
Pandora huffs. “Will you let them speak!”
Frank sighs, while Alice rolls her eyes. “I was ordering a coffee and you know who worked there?”
“Fede–” Alice coughs when she sees her friend glaring at her. “Pandora’s ex?”
“No.”
“What.”
“No, there was a nice girl,” they say, nonchalantly. “She was called Emma, I think.”
Pandora looks at Alice, who looks at her, who then looks at Frank, and in a moment they all start laughing. It’s not something considerably rational, to laugh like that; Pandora squeezes her eyes and snorts and throws her head back like someone has just told the greatest joke of all time, and she knows there’s a war outside and they are grown adults now and should think about more serious stuff, but it certainly doesn’t look like it, in Alice and Frank’s little kitchen.
“Then why did you tell us.”
“Because,” Frank replies, an enormous grin on their face. They love to make their friends laugh, they’ve always had. “When I was on my way home I did find him and spilled all my coffee on him.”
Alice looks at them weirdly, still laughing. “On purpose?”
Frank quietly smiles, and raising their eyebrows, they say, “Who knows.”
“If he still wore that ugly hat, then you’ve done the right thing.”
“Alice!” Pandora guards her. “You two are so mean.”
“Do you remember when I had to pretend to be your mother just so you could go out of his house?”
Frank burst out laughing. “And she had to call you three times for him to believe it.“
“Do not ,” Pandora chides out, pointing a finger at the both of them. “Bring that up now. It was truly humiliating.”
“Okay but it was funny.”
“ Humiliating .”
“ Funny .”
Pandora huffs. “Stop laughing at my misery. I hate you both. So much.”
Alice seems to contain herself, still immersed in the multitude of joy fluttering around the air, and tickles her. “No, you don’t.”
Pandora battles away her hand. “But I should.”
“Shut up, pass me the joint.”
“Oh no, this is mine now, none of you will get another hit until I’m– Frank !”
Frank, who in the midst of it all has stolen the blunt from Pandora’s hand, and is now at the other side of the kitchen, quietly smiles at them. “Were you saying?”
///
Their trio has never been defined by one astonishing course of events. It often happens that a friendship forms to the extent of someone else’s misery, shared in wistful sarcasm and skewed laughs, and Pandora would like to pinpoint the exact moment in which Frank and Alice’s life intertwined with hers, but she always fails to do so.
It’s accurate to the way their friendship has grown in the years, and continues to evolve: peacefully. They’ve found each other in third year, when Frank was known as the loser - a cool loser, she has to admit - and Alice as the lovely friend whose distinctive trait was the glacial eyes she acquired whenever someone spoke badly about her loved ones. She has a picture in her mind, of the two of them walking to Potion class together, when Slytherins and Gryffindors had a joint hour, and her watching them, their closeness, and envying maybe the warmth that they seemed to radiate with their presence. A quiet warmth, one that could be truly felt only if you stood near them, and one that Pandora wanted to suffocate in, coughing black dust afterward.
The second picture: sweaty hands, Alice’s books scattered on the floor, Pandora’s nervous ‘Sorry’ echoing through the walls of Hogwarts. Third picture: a new friend, glinting smiles, making fun of Slughorn’s strange manners. Fourth one: the warmth embracing her, making a fire with her hands, burning not because of the flame but because of the mundanity of it all; after that, the flood, curing her sorrows and injuries.
Frank and Alice have forgotten about these moments, but Pandora, she remembers; she is full of memories digging their grave into the cherubs of her mind, and every person she has ever encountered in her life has its personal graveyard, full of flowers and constellations for she remembers but forgets every human’s wrongdoing if they are close to her.
She takes care of her hair the way her mother used to, she relaxes and looks at the mirror and thinks about the times in which the person she was looking at was her and not herself. She remembers her mom’s lingering features and black eyes, an heart-shaped face and dark skin, adoration she treasured in her and made her swear that if she had to become one person, swap body with someone else and live life like she had never been born, the person might as well be her mother. She wrinkles her nose the way her dad did when scrutinizing the freshly new wands which had arrived at the Ollivander shop, rolling them from hand to hand, bringing it close to his face. She loves like them both combined, a perfect somersault of her mom’s sepia gold touches and her dad’s blood-smeared pupils after a long day of work; her mom’s tactful words and her dad’s child-like being. It’s like one was blue, the other red, and Pandora was the combination of them: purple.
A purple of a different shade depending on the person in front of her. For Frank she loves like lilac, soft for a graceful touch and imposing of something greater; the lilac flutters around Frank’s face when they make an unfunny joke, when their reassuring words cut through Pandora’s ribcage and come close to her heart. Lilac is the first time they spent some hours together without Alice, when they found a friend in the other.
Alice is different, and the shade has often changed during the years. It’s now violet, which seems such an unoriginal colour she sometimes would want to change it, but there’s something so peculiar in the unoriginality, when you’ve discovered every bit of someone else and could easily draw their organs by heart if they asked to. Alice feels like that, like a third arm she can’t cut off now. And therefore, violet.
The two of them are ingrained in Pandora’s soul, taking residence in her mind and body so much that she sometimes wonders how it would be like for them to descend into the same person, form a somersault of limbs and hair and brains which would make it impossible for one of the three to leave. That’s what love feels like, she supposes. Not platonic and certainly not romantic, but one that transcends all meanings and unfulfilled explanations, one that has you long and linger for someone the same way a pet does with its owner. She loves them both, more than anyone and life itself.
Her internal monologue is interrupted by Frank’s voice, who gracefully tells Alice to fuck off. Looking up, she sees them on the couch, both trying to occupy as much space as possible. And she loves them, and she would never outright tell them that, so she smiles, and tells Frank to fuck off, too.