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It’s a day in June when Lily’s life falls into a stupor. When Mary watches and feels raw with the not knowing, the lack of power she has to stop her friend from falling back into the grey.

The words still ring in Mary’s head and she remembers herself; stumbling up from the lake and just standing on the sidelines, laughing a little to begin with. It was just the boys and their antics, until it wasn’t and Marlene was pulling on Mary’s sleeve as they chased after Lily.

They had found Lily, eventually. She was curled up in a window seat carved into the stone of the Ravenclaw tower. She was fine, she had insisted, just sick of Potter and his bullshit. Just fucking sick of it.

That night, Mary pulls back the curtains of Lily’s bed, finding Lily eyes unfocused, just lying there on her side.

‘Hey,’ she says, resisting the urge to approach her friend like a skittish cat. Lily rolls over.

‘Come on, Lil. We’re going out. Follow me.’

Lily groans.

‘Please? For me?’

Mary's grin is stupidly wide when Lily picks herself up.

She ends up dragging Lily and Marlene out onto the lawn, stomping through a secret passage the boys think they guard so cleverly, like no one else knows about it.

Marlene clutches a bottle of firewhiskey, clinking against the walls. It’s much too expensive for Mary, for any of them three, stolen from James’ stash. Pay for that you, prick. The theft was not as satisfying as Mary would have liked, what with James standing by the door saying Tell her, I’m sorry, would you? Tell her? Tell her?

Mary did not tell her. Lily wouldn’t have wanted to hear it.

The three of them sprawl themselves out on the lawn. It is a dark, weedy green, sloping towards the pool of black that is the lake. It all looks fake, here at night; the lake like a melted inkwell, the lawn like coconut icing on a cake, like the painted set of a children’s tv show.

Marlene grabs Lily’s hand, makes her sit up as she drinks. They empty the bottle, burn their throats dry with liquor, and Mary and Marls grin dumbly at each other, like they’re doing something, like they’re actually helping.

Lily just stares - at the lake, at a point in the middle distance - a little crinkle above her nose as she sits, quiet and stiff and tired, eyes searching and desperate but not seeing. Not seeing Mary looking at her.

They make quick work of the booze, and the world seems to be turning faster now, unstable on its axis.

After a while, moments coated in wariness, where they don’t speak, just waiting for Lily to say something, Marlene falls asleep. She lays quiet in the damp amber light, a theatre actress lying dormant in the spotlight after her tragic, avoidable death. It’s the only time Marlene looks soft, when she’s sleeping. Mary almost conjures a blanket, ready to tuck her in with a perverse kind of enjoyment in the irony.

Instead she shakes her friend.

‘Oi, Marls,’ Mary says, ‘bed, yeah?’

Marlene blinks and nods and picks herself up, loping back to the door they came from. She’ll be fine, Mary thinks, tiredly. She’ll be…

She turns, watching Lily stumble in the direction Marlene went, sliding down the wall of the castle and melting into the shadows. She drags an unsteady hand across the stone where it meets the grass and tilts her head to the sky. Lily’s hair is a lightning storm, a dust cloud, a beacon even in the dark flood of the castle’s shadow.

Mary can’t stop herself from going to her. It’s an electric charge, and Mary loves the feeling of her hairs standing on end. A child with a balloon, rubbing her skin raw.

‘Lily, talk to me, yeah?’

Lily slouches against the wall. She looks at Mary with a flat expression.

‘D’you want to go back to the dorm?’ 

Lily squirms and stares at Mary. ‘Do you want to go back to the dorm?’

‘No, I just-’

‘I don’t want to go back to the dorm, Mare,’ Lily stares at her, incredulous, almost angry, ‘I don’t want to go back to the dorm.’

‘Okay, okay, just…talk to me,’ Mary kicks the wall with the toe of her boot, ‘Please.’

Tell me something, Lily. Give me something to work with. Mary is selfish, even in her caring. ‘I mean - we can’t stay out here all night - what if the giant squid tattles on us? What then?’

‘Could you just shh?’ Lily tilts her head to the side, eyes glassy, frowning at Mary. 

Oh she’s drunk. 

‘Never,’ Mary squats down in front of her friend. ‘You know me, babe.’

Lily smiles, exasperated, but she smiles and looks at Mary.

Mary inches closer, sitting now. And for once, Lily doesn’t close up like a bug curling up under the shadow of a bird. She just holds Mary’s gaze.

‘It’s just, it’s always like this,’ Lily gulps down air, looks away. ‘It’s … same old cowshit. I don’t know why I keep clinging onto him. He’s shit ,’ she barks out a laugh. ‘It’s like… why do I keep expecting different?’ 

Mary understands that. Often now, she can’t bring herself to trust anyone at this damned school. It’s a cycle of wanting and moving closer and holding down a person in her hands, her ex-boyfriends, classmates who were kind once, even teachers. Then it all gets broken by something about the way she is; too loud, too brash, too muggle, too black, too much.

And it scares her. It scares her how she falls into the loop, again and again, over and over at this fucking school. 

Lily is shaking.

Mary swallows. ‘Isn’t that just what we do? We just have to...keep on expecting different. That’s what having faith in someone is, right?’

‘Mm,’ Lily shrugs non-committedly, turning to face Mary again as she inhales loudly.

‘I mean I’m saying you put your faith in the right person or anything but-’

She gets a shove.

Mary thinks for a moment. ‘Do you want-’

‘I wanna get pissed.’

‘We’ve run out of firewhiskey, Lil.’

‘Shhhhh,’ Lily holds a finger up to her lips. Something kicks in Mary’s chest. ‘Why are you here?’ Lily huffs. ‘Stop, stop trying to protect me, or help me. I don’t need help and I just- I don’t like it I don’t want it I don’t want to be around you guys right now. I don’t like you.’

Mary swallows, hurt burning on her skin like a hex gone bad. If Lily didn’t look so pitiful, face frozen in a perpetual snarl, maybe Mary would leave her alone. If Lily wasn’t her friend, if Lily hadn’t been there since she was 11. 

Mary looks away. ‘Fuck off. Look, how much have you had?’

‘It’s annoying,’ Lily says.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mary says, words fizzing with sarcasm.

‘It’s insulting.’

‘I’m sorry, Lily, please, just, oh- uhm.’

And with that Lily falls back onto Mary, knocking the breath out of her and ending up in Mary’s lap, choking with weak, humourless laughter. She’s hot to the touch, burning up and Mary can’t think to do anything but hold her.

‘Hey,’ says Mary, and Lily looks up at her with starlight in her eyes.

‘I miss him,’ she says, ‘I still fucking do,’ and something in Mary cracks. 

Lily keeps just staring , lucid and surreal and breathing in time with Mary, back to chest, chest to back. 

Mary brushes Lily’s hair out of her eyes.

‘Shh,’ is all she says and she hopes it’s comforting. 

Mary holds Lily as she sobs, and bites her tongue, a forgiveness of sorts for this girl, a girl who deserves so much more. Who clings to cold relationships by the skin of her teeth.

Mary wants to kill Snape and leave him gutted on the Slytherin table in the Great Hall. Oh, she wants it.

But now, she only takes the empty firewhiskey bottle from Lily’s shaking grip and pulls her arms behind her back, holding her like a criminal until her body stills and her breathing evens out, the sobs stopped, the pain sinking back down into her stomach, packed away.

‘Shh,’ says Mary, and turns Lily’s head, makes Lily look at her. 

‘Shh,’ says Mary, wiping away Lily’s tear tracks with her thumb, softly, slowly. 

She hopes she’s doing this right.

She sees Lily watching her, breathing quiet now, cheeks tear-streaked in a way that irritates her acne, red, burning. Alive.

She’s beautiful.

Mary’s breath hitches. 

Oh. Beautiful.

She wonders vaguely if her thoughts are leaking out, if they can all hear them, even far away; the whole castle, all her friends, everyone, Lily.

Fuck, is all she registers now, dropping her hands down, all too aware of Lily’s breath on her neck. She turns, sees a flash of pain in Lily’s eyes. The grey-green of them always seems to be bubbling over with some new emotion, like a cauldron left unattended over the heat.

‘You’re, you’re tired,’ Mary breathes and looks into the night, ‘you need sleep now, c’mon.’

Lily watches her, blinking and tilting her head to the side as Mary forces herself together, forces herself forward, then pulls Lily up.

‘C’mon, Lily.’

‘Come onnnn, Lily,’ Lily repeats back to her, all thinning venom and collapsed heat, whiskey-breath.

Mary hikes up her skirt and wraps her arm around Lily’s shoulders, stumbling with and against her friend.

They walk Lily, muttering and pliant, a rag doll against her shoulder. Mary doesn’t know what to do with that. They haven’t done this before; Lily usually shuts herself away when something happens, though you can always see it all burning in her eyes when she comes back out. It was Mary that didn’t let her this time. Fuck.

She takes Lily up staircases and avoids looking at her directly. She feels her weight, Lily’s soft curves pressing against her own and Mary doesn’t know what to do with that. She feels the strength of her body against another, against Lily’s. She feels the strength of Lily’s gaze on her. Lily, looking.

They crash around corners, twin stars colliding, dying, and Mary can still feel the heat of Lily’s lips pulsing below her ear. It’s a type of intimacy; the long walk home.

She pushes Lily into bed, still in her grass-stained clothes, and watches her fall into sleep, grunting softly. 

Mary doesn’t sleep much that night, too sober and too hot somehow, a column of searing heat in the damp Scotland Summer. 

I don’t like you, Lily said, and Mary still held her in the dark till her body stilled.

She’s beautiful, Mary thinks, unbidden, over and over, again and again. Mary wraps her arms around her chest to touch her shoulder blades, just breathes.

~~~

18 July 1976

M, listen - It’s not something I want to think about anymore. It’s too far gone and I’m too tired to unpick it all. When I focus on Sev too much I end up not sleeping at all.

And jesus, it feels like anything that happens with those boys, any boys, is just suffocating; they just want all this shit - it feels like they’re asking everything of me. I can't give them that - I don't even know if I have that in me.

Fucking Potter; he makes me so angry with all his bullshit. He’s never thinking about me, only himself, only what he wants. And I’m so angry about it and it makes me feel sick that I feel this much towards this fucking boy , even in anger. I just want to feel nothing.

And I know…he’s just a kid, just like you or me and he doesn’t know better, but fucking hell, I can’t stand it. Whenever I see him looking at me, I feel like they are ants crawling beneath my skin and biting at me.

It would be so much easier if I just gave into it. It would be so easy . It would be better, good for me, maybe. 

I don’t know, M.  Do you?

~~~

They go home for the summer. Lily doesn’t phone for weeks and Mary doesn’t want to notice. Not with her family that have missed her so much , her mother kissing her on the cheek like she’s five years old again, returning home from primary school. Not with the soft light glinting on London windows grainy with grime, the bedroom she has shared with her older brother for as long as she can remember. 

Mary is home, and still, all she thinks about is Lily. She wants a surgery, a pill, something to take it away, the sick of these thoughts, nattering on in the background. She needs them to shut them down, for her own sake and Lily’s, for their lives ahead of them.

Mary knows what is important, she always has, being her parents’ child. Her parents who fled from South Africa back before they really knew what England was. Just a faint outline of a country in the distance, somewhere that was not here, not this. Somewhere where a family could stay together, not forced apart into different bantustans, not cut off from each other, from family , for the varying colours of their skin. Ubuntu, my love.

Mary knows what’s important. Being here is important. Her Utata, hands cracked from work, placing a box of chocolates on the table for her Umama; that’s important.

She wants to soak in this space, this little house that her family have made their own; filled with beautiful things and colour and reminders of all they can’t go back to; places Mary can barely remember, places she’s only seen on TV, only ever shown when filled with crowds rioting or homes being bulldozed.

She goes to Marcus’ football matches, watches him kick another kid in the shins, and runs onto the pitch to tell him off, trying not to let how much she’s missed with him ache too much. She makes samp and beans with her Utata, happy to be around him again, laughing at his jibes at her, listening to the same jazz record as last year, flipping it over again. 

And still, it’s a strange relief and panic that steels over Mary when Julian calls down the hall:

‘Mary, phone for you!’

She puts down the book she was reading and walks up the hall into the living room, trepidation building.

She snatches the phone from Julian and jerks her head towards the door, grasping the linoleum benchtop in some approximation of ready.

‘Hello?’

‘Mary, it’s, um…it’s Lily,’ Lily’s voice crackles across the line, almost embarrassed.

‘Alright, Lil?’

‘Alright.’ Lily’s voice sounds loud and whispered through the phone, as if she’s breathing into it, as if the phone wire and her vocal chords are entwined.

Silence stretches between them, painfully slow, like honey dripping from a spoon. Then there’s a sound like thunder, Lily adjusting her grip on the phone, microphone mashed into her shoulder.

‘You there?’ Mary says, holding her breath, even now.

‘Yeah…mm, yeah, I’m here.’

‘Yep,’ Mary says, shortly, and she feels unweighted, unmoored. ‘Me too.’

Mary turns, catching her youngest brother peeking over the burgundy lip of their couch. She bites the inside of her cheek, smiling.

‘Did I tell you Marcus is winning football this year?’

Nothing.

‘Oh, Lily,’ she wills false enthusiasm into her voice. ‘This is top notch stuff, you know. He’s not winning the tournament. No, he’s winning the team. Last game he kicked Ritchie, his own goalie, in the crotch, laduma ! He scores, the honest-to-god little legen- Oi!’

Marcus sprints at her, with all the zeal and energy of an 8-year-old football player who spends his afternoons running the length of their local oval. He jabs her sharply in the stomach, little bastard, leaving Mary bent over and gasping into the phone as he runs down the hall.

‘Fuck.’

‘You okay?’ comes Lily’s voice, loosened.

‘Wha- yeah.’

‘If that was Marcus sounds like you had it coming-’

‘Oh, piss off .’ 

Mary listens to Lily cackling over the phone and breathes easier at the sound.

‘Hey Evans?’ Mary asks.

‘Yeah?’

‘Did you want to talk about anything in particular? You called me, remember?’ Mary adopts the voice she’s been using to rile up her younger sibling, doesn’t know why. She feels ridiculous, even more so when Lily replies, tone serious and wiped blank.

‘I don’t know.’

A pause.

‘I just…sort of wish I could just stay at school all year. Like, I can’t fucking function here, Mare,’ Lily is whispering furtively. ‘It’s- I can’t…’

Lily sighs into the receiver. There’s a noise like a thunk, like Lily has hit her head back against the wall.

‘Petunia isn’t helping,’ Lily says, ‘obviously.’ Her voice is distant, sounding defeated in a quiet, hopeless kind of way like she knows she won’t ever be able to articulate what she really wants to say.

‘That…makes sense,’ Mary says, inadequate.

‘I miss magic, I really do,’ Lily continues. ‘I can’t wait for next year, when I can actually do magic at home. No more having to listen to Pet’s phone calls through the wall.’

Mary smiles wryly against the plastic of the phone.

She feels cowardly, somehow rude asking: ‘Do you want me to visit? Now, I mean. Shit, do you want to stay at my place?’ 

Lily is silent for a beat.

‘No, that’s alright.’

‘Wait, though, did something actually happen?’ Mary asks, overcompensating. ‘With Petunia?’

‘I- No, no,’ Lily is whispering again. ‘Just-’

‘What?’ Mary’s heart feels too big in her throat.

‘Just the usual.’

What ‘the usual’ is, Mary hasn’t figured out yet. She thinks she might be able to make guesses, but how could she know she wasn’t exaggerating? How could she know she wasn’t building up a tragic backstory for her friend; treating her more as character than reality, than person.

Run away, Lily. Run away. You’ll be better for it. I can give you anything they can. I can try.

Mary wills her thoughts to reach Lily as she pushes down her questions, her caring, turning to face the door as it opens. She smiles steadily at her parents as they bustle in from the shops, talking loudly in Xhosa.

‘Are your parents here?’ Lily sounds small. 

She should never be small. This whirring, lightning storm of a girl.

‘Um, yeah.’

‘Sorry,’ Lily’s voice comes down the line, scratchy.

‘What for?’

‘I’ll let you go, your parents probably don’t want you using the phone, yeah? You don’t have to call me again, I won’t call you.’

‘What?’ Mary swallows down a selection of profanities, glancing over at her Umama. ‘Lily, I- What? Lily, you can always call me, Jesus, I, I always want to talk to you.’

The phone breathes with Lily’s voice. ‘Okay.’

‘Okay.’

‘Bye, then.’

‘I- bye.’

Lily hangs up and Mary feels the phone buzzing in her hands, alive like a wounded animal. She cradles it, feeling her throat contracting, heart barely beating.

~~~

6 August 1976

She hugged me today. For the first time in years, and M, I couldn’t hug her back, I froze and I fucked it up for both of us.

We used to play bandits together and run away almost everyday, like we really wouldn't come home this time, like we had any bargaining power at home.

She pulled me out of the house and into the street and we’d sit under the train tracks at the bridge and listen to them rumbling over our heads. And she’d make up these wonderful stories for me - oh god, why don’t i remember them? 

We don’t exist anymore like that. It’s my fault, isn’t it? It always is with Pet.

I wish I could tell her about you. I wish I could tell you about her. About her this way. But I’m always crying and tearing at my hair when you or Marls hear about her, because she’s always done something and god I hate her but I still miss her, I still do.

I can’t talk about her around you both unless I absolutely have to, unless I’m bursting with the hurt. 

I miss her, of course I do, but I’ve gotten used to it with her. Not like.

Not with you.

~~~

Past Midnight; 1971-1973

Sometimes, during their first years of school, Lily would get nightmares. Sometimes she would wake up screaming and somehow Marlene slept through it all, every time.

On these nights, Mary would creep out of her bed to sit in the warmth of Lily’s quilts. She would always grab her wand first, conjuring sparks to float lazily above their heads, so she could see Lily, so Lily could see that she was there, and not just another phantom of her dreamstate. 

The two of them used to fit just right, their eleven-twelve-year-old bodies curled and yawning together. 

Lily would stare at Mary with large, shining eyes, wet with tears. And Mary would tell Lily things she didn’t know about herself, pulling desires like teeth to display for Lily, to stave off her tears. 

Mary didn’t mind. Lily’s quilts were always warm.

Lily would watch her, twisting her hair into thick plaits the way her sister taught her to. 

Mary’s hair was too coily for that type of braid; her Umama did her braids, had her sitting hours on end in front of the tele, watching cartoons and sit-coms and footage of protests about a war, about a bomb, about a white man sitting at a mahogany desk. Mary would sit and watch and feel her head shrink to a more manageable size. 

They weren’t yet old enough to refuse each other in their bed, not ready to kick out a best friend looking for comfort. That’s all it was. That’s all it had to be.

All Mary wanted was for Lily’s dreams to be clear of the bad things, the things they never talked about, never on any of the countless nights she found herself watching Lily blink sleepily and tie her hair up into knots and unravel them again and repeat and repeat and repeat. She never used magic for this kind of thing.

Mary would talk, stammering:

‘I want to live by a lake or…or a river and,’ she pauses, ‘oh my god, I still need to learn how to swim. Umama won’t let me get lessons.’

Lily would watch her, a face like a porcelain moon in the darkness. Still, but for her hands working quietly, pulling at the roots of her hair.

‘Well, I’ll swim every morning, and I’ll have a house, with a tele that I can watch all day, can you imagine?’

Lily would shake her head, blinking sleep away. ‘I’d rather read books.’

‘Oh but Lily, ’ Mary would say, too loud, much too loud for so late at night. ‘The tele has so much, especially the music and the soapies. We get to watch it on the weekends,’ Mary would nod, like it was one of the laws of the universe.

Mary began talking in the voice the newsreaders speak in, a clipped RP accent so unlike her own, feeling a foggy kind of safety that only came from being someone different.

‘Rain, smog - yes; a constant in London life. Make sure to close your windows before heading out this morning, and bring a jacket to keep you fighting fit. The workers of London must not catch a chill!’ Mary cleared her throat dramatically and folded her hands in her lap, gaining 50 years of pretension in one action.

This had left Lily stranded for a minute. She let go of her rope and buried her face in her pillow, hiccuping with laughter. Mary’s rib cage would always white-hot watching her best friend laugh, feeling like the best person in the world for that.

‘I just, I want a big family like my parents did - my three sons and a gorgeous little daughter and their father in my bed. Like this, like now.’

‘He’d be old, ’ Lily whined, face twisting in displeasure, and Mary laughed at her.

‘No, my husband would be lovely and young. Anyway, what do you want your husband to be like?’

Lily lifted her hands up to undo her left braid.

‘I don’t know…someone nice,’ Lily sighed. ‘Someone who could make me laugh.’

‘Not handsome?’

‘Have you seen the boys in our year?’ said Lily, scrunching her nose in that way that would always leave Mary in the dust, giggling profusely.

‘Yeah, but the older ones. The older years…they start to look better, right?’

Lily lifted her head back up to look at Mary with something strange written on her face. It was only afterward, when Mary laid her head down on Lily’s pillow, did she realise she’d forgotten to breathe.

Another night: ‘Shh,’ said a girl in the milky darkness. Hush little baby. Lily undid her braids and spun them once more, straw into gold, gold into straw, straw into gold, again, again. 

There was one night when Mary woke up with her face mashed into a thick rope of red hair, Lily’s lips inches from her neck. She spent the day swallowing quietly.

There was Mary; sitting by Lily all those nights talking away the threat of sleep until she could hold it no longer, remembering the sound of her own voice, its loudness, its power next to Lily.

There was Lily; quiet.

By the time Mary turned thirteen, Lily’s nightmares had stopped. A soft unnatural hush fell across Lily’s bed. Every morning, Mary got up on time, arriving early outside their classroom to find Lily already waiting there, eyes rimmed with purple.

~~~

Mary stands on the edge of a precipice, knowing that any small thing Lily says to her might tip them both over. She tries her best to stay standing. She tries her best to forget school, Lily, the whole mess of her head. It’s an impossibility, she knows; forgetting with all these images of Lily haunting her through the holidays, caught in her brain, her words like a skipping record.

Just the usual. You don’t have to call me.

Mary doesn’t ask, not about the things she really wants to know.

Just the usual.

Mary understands the harshness of others’ gaze on her, the way questions can strip you down and leave you shivering, naked, ruined. 

She wears hoop earrings and blue eyeshadow which smears across her palms as she’s putting in on. She loves the way she sticks out, something bright and shiny in the grey stone of the school halls. She loves it all about herself until someone points it out, points it out and holds her up like she’s something else, something exotic for them to reach out to like a baby to a toy. She’s not strange.

It happens at home too, in another way - all the questions and the nattering about her fancy school that her parents are so proud of her for getting into. She’s such a special girl.  

She can always fall reliably back into the wide mouth of London, with its thousand immigrant workers; all these people who’ve actually heard of Steve Biko. It’s nice. It’s safe, she thinks, until it isn’t and the reminders of Hogwarts eclipse her focus, pull her backward and away from everything she wants to be remembering.

It’s worse this year, with everything happening with Lily.

But she can’t poke, can’t do that to Lily when she knows this feeling. She spends her nights and days only imagining the answers Lily would give if she ever asked anything. 

Like a good friend would.

In the meantime, Mary maps a route through South London, wandering down the same streets as last year, seeing a new Chinese place or dress shop where the old corner shop, newsagents, ice cream parlour used to be. She tries to bury herself in it; the grand buzzing white noise of the muggle world she has become a tourist in. She walks the streets and wishes she had money for flowers as she passes the old man on the corner, stooped over a milk crate of chrysanthemums from his garden.

Her savings though, are scraped clear, spent on second hand spellbooks for Hogwarts that she never ends up reading, instead copying off Marlene under Lily’s unsubtle glare.

~~~

20 August 1976

Mum told me she didn’t recognise me when I got back from school this time, in that way she does, and I don’t know how much longer I can deal with this for. One day, I want to come back home with green hair or something and just watch her little world implode. God...

M, I wanted to call you back, I swear I did, but I can’t keep doing this to myself. You say stuff like that, like ‘I always want to talk to you’ and what am I meant to do with that? It just hurts when I feel this much, this way about you. When you say stuff like that it makes it so much harder for me to just… to be around you - don’t you understand?

It feels mean, even when I know you mean every word. You care about me so much I know I get it, M. But it's somehow still not enough for me.

Let me be worthy of these feelings...I just need your permission. I really need it from you, god. I can't be okay around you, with your eyes looking straight into my soul, that way they do. It's a wonder I've managed to keep this secret at all.

~~~

One night, Julian takes her out with the money he’s made from working afternoons at the corner shop with Mr Jabavu. Mary lets him pay for her and folds herself into the safety of her older brother, a person who is a million childhood memories. 

Her, a giggling, chatty, too loud girl that could always make utata’s ears turn bright lollipop orange by some miracle. Her brother, a boy cracking his knuckles against her spine as they wrestled each other, until her chest started to grow, aching at being ground into the carpet, and she left the old world. 

Her brother understands the worlds she’s been taken from, even the ones she left by her own choice. It’s starting to feel to Mary like even if she stayed - and maybe she should have - she would still have this feeling of unbelonging attached to her like a scent. She’s not sure how to separate herself from it, not sure she’d be herself without it.

‘Mare, c’mere,’ Julian says, flicking his hand over his shoulder. ‘This is Daniel, Sam, Terri, Angie.’ 

She smiles and nods and Jules’ friends all smile and nod back, kind. She feels a warmth and an ache bubbling in her chest, a filthy type of cocktail. 

Julian and his friends, they’ve all known each other since Year 6. They go out every week. Sam’s dad hired Terri in his catering business after he didn’t scrounge up enough for an apprenticeship. Julian gets his hair ruffled by Dan as he talks at them about Mary. Slow down, boet, they all keep saying.

Her brother takes a small white pill and puts it in his mouth, grinding his jaw and telling her, ‘Don’t look now.’ She rolls her eyes and his friends all grin manically around her.

‘He’s always talking about you,’ says Angie, smiling broadly.

Mary laughs, ‘haha, really?’ a cold kind of realisation leaking out of her. Unexpected, is it?

They go to a club where a DJ stands on a platform facing the bar, wearing a cowboy hat with a sparkling flared pantsuit. Her brother gives her an ID she doesn’t recognise and the bouncer holds it up to the light, runs his fingers over it. 

They’re let in.

She hangs back with Angie while the boys order drinks. She’s trying not to look too much like a younger sibling following Julian around.

‘You don’t look alike, you know?’

‘No?’

‘No, I don’t see it.’

‘You go out much?’

‘Yeah, for sure, all over these parts. Only funk though, can’t stand disco.’

‘Not even ABBA?’ Mary gawks, incredulous.

‘Especially not ABBA. That guy, Dan though, he’s into all that shit. You should talk to him.’

Angie’s pretty, in the kind of way Mary would like to be; afro framing her round face, her eyes sparking at Mary in a thoughtful way that makes Mary’s stomach plummet. She doesn’t know why. Okay, maybe she has an idea. Maybe she gets it now, a little. 

The boys come back to them, passing around drinks. Mary sees Julian grimace as he sips his beer, still not used to the taste after months of nights out in London. She ends up spluttering with laughter into her own.

Terri keeps asking her: hey, you having a good time? What out of ten? as if she’s never been out before. He has to shout it into her ear for her to hear him over the music but after the fifth time she just nods her head when he comes ambling over. 

‘Yep, good time.’ Better without you constantly fucking asking me about it.

‘I can never tell if you’re fucking with me.’

‘Ha, why not?’

‘You’re very mysterious, Mary.’

She hums thoughtfully and decides not to dignify that with a response, twisting her arms in circles above her head.

Eventually, happily, Mary loses herself in the hum and the buzz of the bass through the speakers. She tilts her head back into the light, feeling emptied of all the thoughts that have been tormenting her all holidays. Here, under the glowing lights, she can just…ignore it all. It's nice.

She drinks down whatever Julian puts in front of her, and argues with his friends about the new Spielberg movie. She ends up laughing without breath in a booth in the back corner with them, feeling at ease, uncomfortable with the knowledge of how little she really feels this way. Even at parties at school, even surrounded by her friends, it never really feels so easy. She always works hard to have her fun.

Minnie Riperton’s voice stings Mary through the speakers and she gets up to dance. 

‘The reasons for my life are in a million faces…’

‘Julian,’ Mary yells over at the group, ‘dance with me!’

‘Slipping through my fingers to dance upon the road. The reasons for my life are more than I can hold…’

‘Coming, Mare!’ Julian screams back, and Mary sinks deeper into the crowded dance floor.

‘But oh, the sweet delight, to sing with all my might…’

There they are; two siblings in the midst of it all, the hazy crowd pulsing with life, moving to the soul. Mary grins at her brother, watching him dance, all sharp arms and sudden movement, like he was made for it. Dance as human instinct.

‘The reasons for my life are buried in deep places.. .’

 The lights flash across Julian’s face.

‘ …cannot be bought or sold…’

Mary throws her arms up and her legs out and moves like a threat. 

‘To spark the inner light of wonder burning bright. You’re not alone, you’re not alone.’

In the hazy giddiness of the club, her brother tugs her from one end of the floor to the other and Mary closes her eyes, laughing giddily. She never wants to forget this - the glassy eyes and yellow teeth glowing white under the light, girls' hands crawling up chests of whichever guy they're seeing this week, the burbling kind of freedom of the drink, taking away the sharp edges of her vision and blending everything into...into...green fading into grey fading into black pupils, flecks of emerald everywhere.

The next morning, the comedown is a bitch.

~~~

31 August 1976

It happened again.

The door was shaking behind me.

~~~

It is the Autumn of 1976 and Marlene comes back to school with a bruise on her face that she says she’s proud of. 

She’s wearing heavy eyeliner and boots with huge rusting buckles and black rosary beads around her neck. 

Sirius looks at her like she’s stolen something from him.

‘You’re not punk ,’ she tells him, waving her fingers across his face, ‘you’ve got a fucking inheritance for christ sake.’

Sirius looks affronted. He’s not sitting with the other boys today.

‘Now who says, you’re punk , you-’

‘I don’t think I’m very punk, now. I’m just a person, see,’ Marls spreads her hands, like a salesman showing off their wares, ‘an individual. I don't claim to be anything.’ She looks so smug that Mary can almost forget the bruise.

Lily sits across from her in the train car, hands folded in her lap, hair grown out, grown longer. Mary doesn’t look at her.

On the way up to the castle it starts raining. The rain patters off the blackened wood of the carriages in a steady beat and Mary almost closes her eyes, almost sways into the stormcloud like it's a reprieve, an escape into memory.

Lily conjures an umbrella, her wand tip exploding into a shield of liquid. Marlene pulls her robes up over her head, while Sirius just sits and looks up as the rain fills his hair with stars. 

They pass through the gates and Mary looks, finally looks, at Lily and finds no bruise on her face. Lily is dry and silent under her shelter.

Mary finds herself shuddering in the rain and Marlene wraps an arm across her back. She presses her ear into Mary’s shoulder, looking up as if the clouds will pull back like stage curtains, as if then she’ll see who’s crying up there. Who needs help? Tell me, Lily. Just tell me what’s wrong. I’m sorry I didn't ask.

Mary turns, her chin on Marlene’s head and sees Sirius watching her. He’s squinting curiously, prim features rumpled. He smiles at her like he’s overcoming an urge, a half crooked imitation of Remus.

‘Macdonald,’ is all he says, a nothing, an acknowledgment, maybe, and Mary wants to crack open his brain and see inside.

‘Black,’ Mary says.

‘Your hair’s getting wet.’

She stretches her neck towards him. ‘Yours too.’

He winks. 

‘Sirius, I swear to god-’

He shakes his head fiercely, smiling like he could get away with anything, because he probably could. His soaked hair, heavy, like the fur of a wet dog, spins droplets into the air, catching the grey light. It cascades across them all, making a mess, even under Lily’s umbrella, on Lily’s lap, across her face, soaking her collar.

Lily splutters. Sirius laughs, something wolfish that echoes up to the castle, through the gates. Lily shivers. Marlene, peels herself away from Mary, tackling Sirius against the carriage door. Lily sits, eyes wide, a raindrop sliding down her nose, falling onto her chin, hanging, holding. 

She’s beautiful.

Mary pushes off her seat, crouching in front of her friend. Mary's pulse is loud in her ears.

‘You okay?’

Lily shrinks her umbrella back into her wand, languid and smooth as she meets Mary's eyes.

‘It’s rain,’ Lily laughs weakly. ‘It’s just rain. It can’t hurt me.’ A slow, dangerous smile spreads across her face.

~~~

2 September 1976

…You don’t see yourself, the warm pull of your universe, your family, the way you dress, the bedroom you grew up in. It’s like shiny things to a magpie, M. You’re kind and everyone wants to be close to you- just warming their hands over a fire. I can’t fathom how you live like that, with all the light and the warmth and unwavering heart. I can't stop myself from being exactly like the rest of them, crowding around to flex my fingers and shuck off the cold. Vultures, they are, and I'm one of them…

~~~

Later, that night, Lily brushes open Mary’s curtain and climbs into her bed. She’s never done this before, Mary thinks. It was always Mary in Lily’s bed, it was always Mary talking, it was always-

Lily mutters a silencing spell like it’s habit, like this isn’t unusual at all. Mary doesn’t say anything, just draws her knees up to her chest, feeling like she’s twelve again.

‘Mary?’ Lily is whispering, so quiet she might well have not used the silencing spell at all.

‘Yeah?’

‘I…’ she shakes her head, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m just…going to go, I’ll go.’

Lily stays perfectly still, sitting hunched on the other side of the bed. Mary blinks the sleep out of her eyes and looks up. Eventually Lily looks back, and sighs. Eventually.

‘I need you to stop looking at me like that. For fucks sake, Mary.’

‘What are you on about?’

‘You’re just always,’ Lily’s eyes flash, her voice rising. ‘Jesus, you’re always staring at me and it’s like…what, what, do you want me to do a trick?’

‘I’m,’ Mary swallows, unsure. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just worried about you…I think.’ Why is it so hard to say that?

Lily shakes her head again, vigorously. ‘It’s fucking …distracting.’ She reaches across and places a hand on Mary’s shoulder. ‘What are we doing?’ she says under her breath, lips turned down and trembling.

Mary can’t take it. ‘Lily, do you need help?’

Lily huffs out a laugh. ‘What do you want to help me with?’

‘I- I don’t know, I just-’

‘Mary-’

‘-I just need you to be okay-’

‘-I feel like I haven’t-’

‘-Lily, tell me if you’re-’

‘-had a real conversation with you in-’

‘Lily, I’m sorry.’

‘What are you sorry for?’ Lily sounds almost angry.

Mary crawls forward in the darkness, can’t stand having just the faint touch of Lily’s hand on her shoulder. ‘I missed you,’ she says, and tastes regret as Lily pulls back. 

Mary shrugs and tries to pretend like her chest doesn’t feel like it’s been kicked in as she says: 

‘I missed you so much, and I- I don’t think it’s normal. And you- your sister, she- you said she made stuff worse and I don’t want to know I just, it’s not my business, I just care about you, I think...I do.’

‘Pet?’ says Lily deflating a little and shaking her head.

‘Is she- I mean, are you- are you okay?’ God, Mary hopes she’s doing this right. Again; it's always the same and she never really gains any skill from practice.

Lily crawls forward and places a hand on the outside of Mary’s bare thigh. She holds herself up and whispers into Mary’s ear, barely breathing: ‘Sometimes, I want to kill her, Mary. Sometimes it hurts so much and…and I want to kill her .’

Mary turns to look at Lily but she won’t look back at her. She’s so close, strands of her hair curled in ringlets that Mary could reach out and tuck behind her ear. 

‘I swear I’m not, I can’t be, I’m not bad , I’m not violent like that, but I just…sometimes I’ve felt it. Like so, so badly I’ve wanted it and I’ve been afraid I might just,’ Lily’s arm holding her up gives out and she slumps against Mary. ‘I might just crack.’ 

Finally, Lily turns her head, staring up at Mary with eyes startling wide as if Mary can absolve her of her guilt, as if she is the hand of God. 

Mary only stammers. ‘I- I’ve felt it too.’

‘No,’ Lily says. She turns from Mary.

‘I’ve had dreams about like…hurting…people…we all have,’ Mary says to Lily’s silhouette, moving further away.

‘No, not like me. Not like I have,’ Lily’s voice cracks.

Mary feels a perverse pull in her gut, some kind of anger, maybe. ‘That’s bullshit, Lily.’

‘You don’t, you can’t,’ Lily looks back at Mary. ‘You don’t get it; it’s fucking terrifying to feel like that, it’s- it- it-’

‘It’s normal.’ 

‘What does it make me?’ Lily’s voice is quiet in the dark.

Mary wants to show Lily comfort. Mary wants to draw Lily into her lap and, and, fuck, maybe she can’t help it if she wants to have her straddled across her waist, if she wants to kiss Lily’s brow and stroke her hair and kiss her and kiss her and kiss her anywhere until she sees that she is alive alive alive awake awake awake and capable of hurting but capable of holding joy in her fists too. Lily, you’re okay. Help me out here.

Lily shudders, almost pleading as she says: ‘It’s just, I don’t, sometimes I hear her voice in my head, Pet, and all she says is just What are you doing, Lily? Stop being a freak, Lily, piece of shit, Lily. Stop looking at her, she’s your friend , she’s a girl -’

Lily stops. She eyes the curtains like she’s burning a hole in them. 

Help me out, Lily.

‘Lily,’ Mary is frightened.

Mary sits forward, runs her hands up Lily’s spine and Lily shivers at the touch, the gentleness of it. 

‘Lily, Lily, look at me,’ Mary is frightened by the way Lily is frozen like this.

‘Okay,’ Lily says, and only looks down, her tears spattering across her knees.

‘Come here,’ Mary says, even as her voice shakes, and she wraps her palm around the back of Lily’s neck.

Lily caves, face wet against Mary’s shoulder, sobbing again, like last time. The only times they’re allowed to be this close.

When she turns and looks at Mary, Mary thinks she might see the whole universe in Lily’s eyes. Lily’s eyes, getting closer and wider and, and, and,

Lily’s lips brush across Mary’s, the faintest touch, an echo of want, barely there. Mary parts her lips, a hot surprised breath ghosting across Lily’s chin as Lily tips her head and falls backward onto the bed, coming to rest on her elbows. She’s shaking, and Mary thinks she might be too, because this might be too much, too much for them. Their friendship is only so strong to begin with. Isn't it? Isn't...

‘Lily,’ Mary whispers. ‘Lily,’ and it’s a question, ‘Lily,’ and it’s a challenge, urging her to say something, to explain. Help me out here.

Lily tears her gaze away and pushes off the bed, shadow ripping itself from its owner. Mary wants to reach for her, wants to hold her down and demand answers. She wants to have her, here, lying next to her in bed. 

She watches Lily bunch her hands in her pyjama shirt, and shake her head silently.

Mary burns. 

‘Goodnight, Mary,’ Lily says in a voice thick with tears, and Mary’s throat goes dry. 

Lily leaves the curtains billowing behind her, feet quiet on the floorboards, and Mary knits her fingers together, gripping them till they feel bruised. Even still, she can't stop her hands from shaking.

~~~

15 September 1976

I hate the way I feel when we make eye contact. It’s like it triggers something, like pressing on a wound and watching the blood and pus trickle out. 

I hate how self involved you are and how simultaneously you care so much about people. Somehow that love that you have seems selfish to me, because you’re able to love so openly and it still feels like it’s all for your benefit. You're so bright, Mary, so bright.

It's just - when it comes to me your love is finite.

I know it’s not fair for me to want this.

It’s infuriating the way you are avoiding me now, the way I'm avoiding you too because of course I’m going to choose the easy route every single time, just letting it go, getting out of there so I can take another breath, keep living maybe.

Even writing this feels selfish of me because I might be hurting you and you don’t deserve to be hurt, you come from a world where hurt touches only the edges of your fingertips, bleeding out for only a second before the scab closes over. For me it festers, M. You understand?

~~~

The month passes, and Mary thinks she might have imagined that first night back. She thinks it might all have been in her head, and she might have been able to convince herself of that if Lily wasn’t circling her like a shark.

Her lips on mine, my breath on her neck, just one motion, one moment. It’s only something small, it can’t be too bad, it was barely there, it barely happened . None of this absolves Mary of the sinking guilt that turns her stomach in any moment of quiet.

What are we doing? Mary thinks and thinks again as she sits down next to Marlene at the Gryffindor table, and across the table Lily drops her spoon into her porridge.

Why the fuck did we…? Mary stands outside the bathroom, waiting for Lily to get out of the shower, chewing on the inside of her cheek, trying to slow her thoughts.

Did I even want this? Mary shows up to Transfiguration early, to find Lily standing there, not raising her eyes as Mary comes to stand beside her, only opening her book and paging through it like she’s got a half remembered quote buzzing through her mind.

Was it my fault? Was it...worth it? 

They’re both trying, you see, to pretend. Still, the (and Mary can barely bring herself to think about this) almost kiss hangs there between them. It’s a game for two they’re playing, trying not to let any of the others notice. Lily; she’s laughing at Marlene's jabs at the boys, almost cruelly. She’s burying herself in the routines of school she loves so dearly, a girl submerging into the earth. She’s staying back after class to talk to professors and making a home for herself in the library. Lily; she’s just the same, except for all the times when Mary gets too close. 

These days, Mary feels like her hands will burn Lily if she reaches out for her. 

Late at night, the times when she used to go to Lily, when they were younger and dumber, she stretches out her limbs and slips out into the common room. 

More often than not, Remus is there.

They don’t say much to each other, just nod tiredly in acknowledgment. They might share a blunt or a cigarette and Mary learns to suck down the smoke and keep it there in her lungs for a long while, getting higher and sicker and colder as the nights pass on and on. 

Remus smiles wryly when she asks what he’s doing, always down here.

‘Fucking bollox, Mary. You know, everyone already fucking knows,’ his welsh accent is stronger now, in the night, away from his friends.

‘Well… no, I don’t know,’ Mary blinks at him, the self pitying prick.

He sighs, lifting his spliff up to his lips. ‘Why’d you reckon Sirius is always hanging around you lot?’

‘Our natural charm and witty conversations,’ Mary quips.

Remus blows out a breath and glances across at Mary. 

‘Yeah,’ Remus’ voice drips with sarcasm, but there’s no humour there. It’s brittle, sharp. ‘Yeah,’ once more, with feeling. Defeated. 

Sirius? she thinks, rubbing at her eyes blearily.

Remus looks rough, bags under his eyes, new scars climbing his face. Is he okay? Is he ever? She supposes he’s a mirror of sorts. 

Sirius and Remus? She can’t ever bring herself to ask.

Remus never asks her why she’s down here with him. Not even when he runs out of spliffs and approaches her for cash since she’s ‘smoking as much as he is now.’

With Lily, it’s like this time something clicked, a bone slipping out of place, digging into muscle, too much pain, finally too much to handle. Lily said and did too much and still not enough for Mary because Mary needs to know more. She wants, she’s hungry, only she feels like her hands will burn Lily if she reaches out for her.

Mary misses her.

She lives with her. She learns to live on two hours of sleep every night.

Lily is a column of light, caught aflame and too bright to look at directly. Mary walks into a room, she feels the warmth on her face. And she moves closer, she tries, always, only to find the light dimming and failing.

In reality, it goes like this: Mary walks into a room and sees the girl she misses, the girl her thoughts turn to every night; she sees her cringe into a corner and dart around the edges of the room and leave Mary alone again. 

When Lily finally, accidentally meets her eyes and looks at her, there's this searing panic rising to her face. Mary feels guilt cannibalising her, something she’s not sure is fair. I didn't do anything. Lily please just fucking talk to me. The guilt sticks around even so.

She just can’t shake the feeling that she’s done something bad: pulled back the curtain, fucked up the pretence.

Stop looking at her, Lily had said, Petunia’s voice had said, a type of prayer, maybe. Mary decides to take it to heart, to stop looking at her friend, to stop taking things and prying at them until her nails begin to break.

I’ll be okay. She’ll be okay. Mary feels sure until she doesn’t anymore. Maybe one day, we’ll be okay.

I’ll let you be now, Lily, Mary never says, not out loud. She just lets herself drift backward into clouds of smoke.

One day, waiting outside Astronomy, Sirius pulls her aside. ‘Hey Macdonald.’

Lily, I’ll leave you alone now.

‘I need to talk to you about something.’

Lily, I’m sorry.

~~~

21 September 1976

M, I’m up waiting for you again. You’ve ruined my sleep schedule, you know that? 

Do you even know? 

~~~

When Sirius tries to kiss her, Mary laughs. His hands are plastered to her cheeks, all sweaty and grasping compulsively. She laughs full in his face, pushing away from him, probably too threatening for a girl alone in a room with a boy becoming a man.

Sirius just goes red.

‘We’re not thirteen anymore, Black!’ Mary almost shrieks, she can’t help herself. ‘What the actual fuck are you playing at?’

‘I- I just-’ Sirius stutters, ‘fuck, Macdonald, I just wanted something …I…maybe…’

He moves away from her, not looking at her directly. Sirius sits on his bed, face hung like a guilty dog; his bed where the curtains are torn and blackened and the beams are splintered, probably from some botched prank idea; his bed where the covers are tucked in so tight Mary wants to wince.

‘...Sirius, look at me,’ Mary says, quiet now, horrified when her voice shakes. She thinks the yelling helped. Maybe she should keep on yelling. ‘Why did you try that?’

He flinches at her voice.

‘I don’t know, I just, I said, I- I wanted something, you know. I wanted to see…’ he looks out the window at the grey sky that seems, now, to be pressing in on them.

Mary sits down on the bed behind her, facing Sirius’ slumped shoulders. Jesus, Black. She didn’t know he could show shame like this, this posh, slouching prick of a boy sitting at the back of the classroom folding paper aeroplanes. She didn’t know he could feel shame this way.  

‘Why didn’t you just ask me for fucks sake?’

Sirius runs a hand through his hair. ‘I thought…I don’t know, maybe you’d get it, I thought you’d want to, I thought because…’

‘Go on.’

‘I thought…because, I don’t know, because it’s not supposed to be like this. I’m not supposed to be like this. I can’t - you know - I,’ he lifts his head and finally looks across at her, grimacing as he says, ‘don’t make me say it, Mary, please.’

Mary swallows, and runs her fingers over the bedsheets behind her. They don’t look like they’ve been slept in in weeks. Sirius cowers and Mary really doesn’t get what’s going on now. Sirius doesn’t get like this. Sirius can barely look at her for shame, all because of a fucking snog ?

Mary falls back onto the bed, now, hair splayed out across the mildewing sheets. On the table by her head is a silver prefect’s pin, glinting in the afternoon light.

Remus. 

Remus. Remus…and Sirius? She sits up onto her elbows, blowing out a breath. 

‘Is…’ fuck, how does she put this? ‘Is this about Remus?’

Sirius’ head shoots up, eyes wide and bloodshot.

‘What, what did he tell you?!’

‘Nothing!’

‘Mary, fuck, I just, I thought you would get it , I thought you would understand. Merlin, I-’

‘Were you two…’ she doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t have the words or the bravery to speak it, just widens her eyes.

Sirius cringes, then straightens, all sharp eyes and curdling hatred like a hound snarling as it bites through its leash.

‘Were you and Lily?’

Mary’s heart stops.

What.

She feels the blood drain from her face. 

He saw me, he saw the way I looked at her, he saw, who else saw, I-

‘Sirius,’ she says, soft, following an instinct to appease something bigger than her, something that could swallow her whole.

-can’t tell people, I just can’t, I’m not ready, please just stop, stop, stop, stop.

He looks at her, eyes burning. 

‘Mary,’ he says, like it’s a threat, eyebrow raised in the image of the princely aristocrat he was raised to be.

She bites down on her cheek hard, feels her eyes water. Why? Why? Keep it together… you’re okay, you’re always okay, you’re fine . The first tear falls and Mary shakes with rage and utter disbelief at herself. Mary Macdonald does not allow herself to be bullied. She will not live as a victim.

She crumples, fails, cheeks stained with shame. 

She does understand, is the thing. Sirius was right.

‘Mary, hey, hey, listen Mary, I’m sorry,’ Sirius’ voice comes, undercut by her rushing heartbeat. He’s crouching down beside her now, reaching for her with a kind of new panic in his voice, a new kind of love. ‘Mary, Mary, just, please…I didn’t mean it, I wouldn’t, you’re okay, you’re-’

Mary looks down at him, crouched in front of her now, and wants to spit at him. It’s easier, you see, being angry.

I can’t, I don’t want to deal with this right now.

‘Look at me Mary, I didn’t mean it, I swear, I’m sorry, please,’ Sirius says, louder now. 

She lets out a shaky breath and pulls him forward, giving in to the relief of having him here, this way . Sirius holds her, burying his face in her shoulder, while her chest heaves and he trembles with something akin to sobs.

Fuck. We’re both so- Fuck.

‘I’m sorry, Mary, I’m so-’

‘Listen, Sirius, I-’

‘I didn’t mean it-’

‘Sorry, sorry. It’s okay, it’s okay, shh, please, it’s okay.’

They fold their grief between each other, learning to hold the weight of their secrets.

I ’ll carry them if you will.

‘I do love you, you know,’ Mary says into Sirius’ ear, when she feels finally like she can breathe well enough again. 

‘Yeah,’ he says, voice thick, ‘yeah.’

‘Just, please don’t kiss me again, yeah?’

He pulls back, looking at her and shaking his stupid head, smirking slightly.

‘Love you too, Macdonald,’ Sirius says, and Mary smiles back. He can be sweet, this boy. Sirius jumps up, shaking out his limbs. ‘Now don’t make a big deal of it or anything.’

‘Oh, of course not, love,’ she blows him a kiss.

Sirius dives across the room to catch it, throwing his body across the bed Mary was sitting on. He’s shaking with laughter now, hunched over, eyes sparkling with mirth, and Mary feels something like relief. He falls forward now, burying his face in the mattress. 

Then his body goes painfully stiff. 

He picks himself up, moving like he’s been burned. Then turning, Sirius surveys the damage. Remus’ bed looks a right mess, sheets tangled and blankets falling on the floor. 

Sirius looks on the verge of tears. ‘I- fuck, Mary-’ he starts to say.

‘Hey, hey, Sirius, hey, look, I won’t tell anyone.’

‘I know you won’t.’

‘And you,’ she swallows, feeling raw, ‘you won’t tell anyone?’

‘Fuck, Mary. You know I won’t,’ he's choking on the words.

She nods, breathing out. ‘Okay, okay, cool.’ Mutually assured destruction, some cynical part of her says.

It’s okay, for now. She’ll make it be.

It’s almost nice when she can catch Sirius’ eye as Lily leaves the dinner table without a word. It’s almost good when she nudges Sirius’ shoulder to stop his mooning after Lupin, limping up the stairs ahead of them. It’s almost nice, the two of them righting the blankets on Remus’ bed, cleaning up after their messes.

It’s almost nice.

~~~

2 October 1976

Do you never speak to me first because you don’t think I want to hear from you? God M, I’m waiting for you to just talk to me everyday from the second I wake up. I’m so fucking tired of it.

I want to be wanted. But you make me feel weak. I’m trembling at your door and  I’m so fucking afraid to knock. I want to be wanted by you. There, I said it. Is that so terrible?

I’m so tired of this and I want to come to a point where my exhaustion outweighs my fear. So I can do something other than this. So I can act .

I just miss you, M. Is that so terrible?

I miss you, but that’s an unfortunate plea to receive for someone who doesn’t feel that same intensity and ache. You might feel like the worst person in the world, with me hanging off you, with you having to shake me off to get free. 

I just need the confirmation that I’m alone in this. Am I alone in this? I can’t keep this doubt alive. It’s killing me. (You too?)

~~~

Mary walks back to her dorm, feeling like the world is something perpetually out of her grasp. Cracked open and drawn apart, lines ruled on a map that declare something placed out of reach. Taken, broken apart. Just another one for the history books.

She shrugs back her shoulders and thinks of Sirius smiling like a fiend through tears.

When she opens the door, Lily is standing by the window, afternoon light playing off her hair. Mary inhales, prepares to mumble an excuse, grab her things, bolt to the fucking library or somewhere, anywhere.

Lily turns, looks at her, jaw moving. When Lily doesn’t move away, Mary forces herself to be brave, to look up and return Lily’s gaze.

‘Alright?’ Mary says, tone too loud and too defensive for it to be any type of an opening.

‘Marlene needs your help,’ Lily says, and looks at her shoes.

‘Okay.’

Silence.

‘With what?’

Lily brushes her hair over her shoulder and looks back at Mary in a way that makes her lightheaded.

‘Do you have a razor?’

~~~

They shave Marlene’s head with an electric razor, the muggle type charmed to work here at school, taken from a boy in Hufflepuff who Mary knows. She didn’t ask him for it, just wordlessly stomped into his dorm and grabbed it, leaving a pack of boys guffawing in her wake.

Anything for you. Anything for Marls.

Marlene looks angry, that way teenage girls do, like at that moment you realise the world isn’t holding you the way it used to. 

Golden blonde hair falls in tufts into the bathtub of their dorm and Mary has this shaky feeling, like her body can barely hold down her bones. 

Marlene looks angry, looks calm.

Mary isn’t exactly sure why Marlene wants to do this, but she’s not sure she needs to be. She just takes the razor from Lily’s hands, then hands it back and takes it again. They take turns, running the blades across Marlene’s scalp. Mary tries to be soft.

They don’t really speak, is the thing; Marlene sits, gripping the edges of the bath, breathing sharply like she’s been awoken from a nightmare. 

Mary holds the razor an inch from Marls’ ear, holding her hair up, careful. Marlene stops her, wraps her fingers around Mary’s wrist and takes the razor. Mary lets go and grins at the back of her friend’s head. 

Marlene sits cross legged in a pool of golden down, like Icarus surviving the fall, feathers scattered around him. She drags the razor across her scalp, shredding her wings so that she might build new ones.

Mary glances up, sees Lily on the other side of the tub, quiet. Lily is watching Marlene with her lips hanging open. Mary wants to run her thumb over those lips, she realises, gentle and prying. Lily watches Marlene with a kind of wonder, barely breathing, reverent, a pre-raphaelite model inhaling the scent of a rose for the first time. For a long time, Mary can’t tear her eyes away, can’t bring herself to breathe.

The air in the tiny bathroom seems to have been sucked away through the open window, three girls holding very still, no sound but for the buzz of the razor, snarling against Marlene’s skin. A careful peace. Mary and Lily are silent witnesses, something like disciples kneeling before their leader.

When Marlene finishes, she runs her hands over her scalp, almost frantic, dusting off the stray feathers. She looks up, blinking into the bathroom light, like she can’t believe she’s alive, like a rebirth. She rolls her shoulders back and blinks and blinks and presses her hands over her ears, runs them over her bare head.

Mary stands at the edge of the tub and catches Lily glancing at her. She feels sort of sea-sick, unmoored. She feels like she’s spent the better part of 4 years hunched over herself; she feels it all unravelling.

For a while, they stay like that, just…quiet, not wanting to break a moment when it feels finally like the world is something that they could cradle in their hands, only just between the three of them.

Marlene climbs out of the tub and pulls Mary and Lily forward. She wraps her hands around the backs of their necks, like she’s smearing paint there, and then knocks their heads together. It hurts.

Mary blinks and the room seems less like the scene of a hero's demise and more like a home for the three of them.

It’s absurd, it’s so stupid , Mary is thinking. She blinks and she’s laughing and Marlene is sitting on the closed toilet, pulling on thick orange socks, and Lily is laughing too, rubbing her palm across her forehead, because that fucking hurt, Marls.

Mary catches the spark in Lily’s eyes and wants to try forever to drag that out of her, that kind of exuberance.

We’ve been so stupid, she thinks, as Lily’s bubbling laugh fills the bathroom, and Marlene tells them as much, just not in so many words.

~~~

Things are better with Lily after that. Mary still feels like she might suffocate when Lily edges away from her, eyes downcast. She still has nights where she creeps down to the common room, watching Remus fall into sleep on the burgundy couches, taking burning cigarettes from between his fingers. She needs the relief, the space that this habit gives her.

Still, Lily and Mary reach a kind of agreement, glancing hesitantly at each other as Marlene stomps through the halls ahead of them.

We might be okay , Mary thinks, making a habit of getting up early to make breakfast in time to meet Lily at the table. To trade glances, to brush elbows, to laugh too loud too much at something shrewd Lily says. 

Marlene’s new haircut brings sniggering in the halls, dirty looks, muttered slurs. Mary offers to plan a crucifixion for a few of the worst people but Marlene just shrugs. 

‘I’m used to it by now. It’s worse at home, people aren’t as polite about it,’ she leans in. ‘It’s almost better when they’re not.’

Mary smiles, wincing.

At the end of October, on the eve of Halloween, the quidditch final is held. 

Mary feels the pull of vertigo grabbing at her as she staggers upward in the stands, and Sirius is there behind her, pushing her back up. Lily runs up ahead, barking at people to get off the stairs and Mary can’t fathom the kick of fondness that takes hold of her.

When the game begins, Marlene swoops down towards them, beater’s bat looking like a burnt out matchstick in her fist. With her shaven head, her eyes seem bigger, her cheeks more full. She looks like she’s had a new hardness, a determination to win solidified inside of her. Everyone can see it. 

Mary watches from Lily’s side as Marlene hits and hits the bludgers again and again, over and over like it's a tennis game. 

She can’t help the way her eyes flicker over to Lily; how they get caught on the curls of Lily’s hair spilling out over her scarf; can’t help this feeling in her chest like her heart is glowing , bright white, like it’s been sitting in the belly of a coal fire.

The crowd cheers and Mary is slower than the rest of them, a second late, watching Lily jump to her feet.

Marlene spins wildly on her broom, clobbering a bludger back towards the Ravenclaw team’s defence, stopping it from sailing towards Gryffindor’s keeper.

Unfortunately, Mary does know all the rules to quidditch, the ins-and-outs - she learnt them during the Christmas break of first year, needing to impress the wizard boys at school, earn her place as a muggleborn, and have something to tell her brothers back at home. 

‘It’s like football on brooms,’ she explained, even though it wasn’t, it isn’t.

‘Mum, when I go to Hogwarts, I’m gonna kick all the goals. I’m the best at football out of Jeremy and Oscar and me.’ Marcus had started calling their mother ‘Mum’ like his friends from school did their mothers. Even though Mary’s Umama bristled at the sound, she allowed it.

‘Sure, sithandwa, sure,’ their mother would say, balancing bowls of umfino on her forearms.

Lily still pretends not to be interested in the game, not deigning it interesting enough for her to know what a Wronski Feint is, or a Transylvanian Tackle. But Mary sees her eyes latched onto the ball, straying only to watch Marlene changing direction, mapping out a path of hairpin bends in the air. Mary sees Lily huff distractedly as she watches James Potter riling up the Ravenclaw keeper, and finds herself smiling. 

‘Come on, McKinnon, you fucking champion!’ Mary shouts, gesturing wildly, just to feel Lily’s fingers on her arm, pulling her back down, just to hear her exasperated breath. Just to meet Lily’s eyes and look at her flushed cheeks and the constellations among the freckles there. 

‘You’re showing off,’ Lily mumbles, and Mary bites her lip, because that’s exactly what she’s doing. ‘You’re not even on the team.’

‘You sure about that, then? Oi, Sirius, your old spot’s still up for grabs, yeah?’

Sirius doesn’t even turn around, just gives her the finger over his shoulder. Mary sniggers, a mess, as she hiccups with laughter.

Lily just stares at her, incredulous, but Mary can feel the warmth under her gaze, and wants to be closer, wants a reason, wants something - maybe for Lily to never look away.

But something does pull Lily’s gaze away, something that drains the colour from her cheeks and turns her gaze into something hard, something desperate and afraid. Mary looks.

Marlene is spinning rapidly, like a child stomach-down on a swing, the tail end of her broom smashed and…smoking somehow? Tilted downward, spiralling towards the grass below, something that doesn’t look soft from here, not from this height. 

Mary is on her feet, with Lily, with Sirius and Peter, and James speeding across the pitch towards the falling broom. Marlene’s hands are clamped down on her broom, which seems now little more than a branch shaken from a tree, a stray twig trapped in the thundering vortex of a cyclone. 

‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,’ Sirius chants below them, and Marlene loses her grip.

She freefalls into the green, enclosed by a thousand cheering, screaming, angry kids, gasping for her life.

By the time she hits the ground, Mary is following Lily down the steps, being pulled down, hand crushed in Lily’s own. They hurtle down to the patch of grass where Marlene is sprawled, coughing up blood. She can barely hear Lily screaming anymore.

‘Help her, help her, you useless pricks!’

Mary feels like her throat has closed up, as she kneels next to Marlene. Marlene, who is curled on her side, breathing harshly through nostrils clogged with blood. 

She shouldn’t have hit the ground at all, she’s Marls, she’s perfect on a broom, she’s perfect anywhere, how could she let this happen? How could you let this happen, Marlene, how could you?

‘Cushioning charm,’ Marlene gives a weak smile. ‘I’m alright.’

Mary wants to punch her. She forces herself back, trying to control this thing inside her, emotions fraying as she watches Lily helping Marlene up.

They begin to stagger towards the hospital wing, McGonagall swooping in to help. Mary can see Lily arguing with the professor, shouting with a fury that sets her eyes on fire. She’s screaming now, and Mary just stands there, staring and trying to get her breathing under control. Lily screams at the professor like she’s ready to rip apart the school brick by brick, slicing apart this image she’s made for herself; responsible, compliant, the perfect candidate for Head Girl. 

Mary watches Marlene tilt her head to the sky, a defeated grimace spreading across her face as she scans the darkening clouds, like she’s looking for a reason, for some kind of fucked up justice. As Marls limps off the pitch, it’s Lily’s shoulder that she clings too. 

Mary stands there, amongst the remnants of Marls’ broom, all broken pieces spanning around her like a pyre for her burning. She stands, guilty, as Lily stumbles under Marls’ weight. Lily shakes her head at something McGonagall has said, cheeks blazing as her mouth moves rapidly, as she demands all that she needs.

Now, Mary sees Dumbledore step down the stairs, slowly, slow like a real passionate educator. 

Now, Mary is still standing there, feeling a thousand phantom eyes on her. 

She’s okay, she’s here, she’s alive, we’re alive, we’re alive.

Wake up.

Mary’s eyes burn and she presses the heels of her hands into her eyes to stop any tears or other nonsense. 

She stoops to gather the pieces of her friend’s broom, splinters breaking off in her hands, fucking hell. Marls saved up for months for this broom, in fourth year, when she finally made the team. She was scrubbing toilets all through the Christmas holidays.

Mary straightens, breathes, breathes, and refuses to look up at the stands. She begins to walk away. Not following Lily, not Marlene, who needs her. Mary walks away from the castle, from the crowd, and all the eyes. 

Behind the stands, Mary retches, emptying her guts where she is sure no one can see.

~~~

Gryffindor wins the game.

It’s all anyone will talk about, back in the common room, even as Marlene lies unconscious in the hospital wing. Shacklebolt caught the snitch! Marlene was tumbling to the ground, preparing for a blackened eye and broken bones and Shacklebolt caught the snitch!

Mary would like to burn down the quidditch stands.

Mary makes it to the hospital wing, just before curfew, standing with Lily by Marls’ bedside. Marlene lies asleep, her body just a mound beneath the sheets, her breathing shallow.

She feels Lily staring at her, brazen and unabashed, with something like hatred that makes Mary feel unzipped and so, so sorry, though not sure what she could have done wrong. 

She doesn’t look at Lily. There’s this bone-deep exhaustion needling at her now, like she could lie down in one of the hospital beds and just die right there. They’re silent, and Mary is grateful. The whole great big room seems to be alive only with dust mites and fading light through the windows - nothing really moving.

The illusion breaks when Madame Pomfrey comes out of her office and tries to kick them out. She mutters profusely at them, brandishing a literal mop when Lily tries to argue. 

Lily turns to Mary then, eyeing her like she wants to gut her.

‘Well,’ Lily says, ‘are you coming?’

Mary really looks at Lily for the first time then, aching under Lily’s glare. What did I do Lily? Come on…

‘Don’t I have to?’ Mary mumbles, and Lily turns on her heel, robes flying behind her as she strides away, heels clacking on the stone.

Mary follows, feeling cold. They couldn’t even weather a single storm. She thought…she thought, well, they were doing so well.

It's terrible, Mary decides, to be thinking about this stuff, about her and Lily now; it might as well be meaningless when Marlene is lying in the bed over there with cracked bones and scabs forming across her wounds.

A hacking cough comes from Mary’s left, and she stops, pulled out her head by memories of so many nights curled in red armchairs, passing a spliff back and forth. Dry coughs puncturing the night air.

In the half-light of the hospital wing, Remus Lupin sits in a bed, with curtains half-drawn around it, like privacy will do him any good. 

Shit, she’s started thinking like Remus.

He looks worse than Mary’s ever seen him, eyeing her with contempt as she takes in the open, red scratches, not yet scars, curling around his arms. 

She makes an effort not to stare, reaches for something to say.

He locks her gaze like a challenge.

‘Go on, Macdonald.’

‘Remus.’

‘Go on, piss off, I said.’

She huffs. ‘Fuck off,’ and moves towards his bed, ready to make him listen. ‘You oka-’

‘No, no, Ms Macdonald!’ Pomfrey's voice rings out from behind her, strained, ‘I told you, you should be out of here and what are you doing now?’

Remus cocks his head to the side, watching Mary with tired eyes.

‘Leave,’ he says again, shoulders slumping while she hesitates, leaning against the end of his bed.

Mary looks across at the door, slammed shut behind Lily. She hates it. She hates having all of this filling up her head, always, even now.

Sighing as she turns back to Remus, she nods. ‘Get better than.’

Remus just huffs, like she’s said something stupid.

‘Okay, don’t then, I’ll be buggered if I care.’

She leaves the hospital wing, rolling her eyes at the sound of Remus’ laughter, hacked out amidst his coughs, filling up the air with a heady warmth like fire smoke; helping her not to gag on the chemicals on her way out.

She can’t remember the last time she heard Remus laugh like that.

~~~

30 October 1976

Where were you, M? Where the fuck did you go?

I thought…I don’t know what I thought - just,

Maybe it’s stupid of me but I just thought you would follow me. 

I didn’t even realise you’d walked away. I thought you were right behind me the whole time and then I turned around. I fucking turned around…

I was so scared, M. 

Marlene - I can barely write about it, I can barely think .

I’ve only ever felt that scared once before. With Pet. With Dad. With the door shaking like it always used to when he came home.

Why - where did you go? 

Are you okay? I need you to be okay too. Marlene - she needs us to be okay? Don’t you get it? Don’t you get it, Mary?

~~~

When Mary gets back to the common room, Lily is nowhere in sight. Mary feels scraped clean, tired of remembering the moment when everything broke, when she looked up from her daydream in Lily’s eyes and saw Marlene crashing into a tailspin.

She still doesn’t know how it happened.

When Violet from fifth year presses a drink into Mary’s hand with a leery, sympathetic smile, Mary scoffs at her, but downs the drink in a matter of seconds. She thinks she wants oblivion tonight. 

It’s a hard thing to do - surrounded by the people she’s grown up with, spent years arguing with in this teenage cesspool, away from her family, another split.

The common room thrums under a haze of smoke. People dance and writhe, pushing up against each other like the room can’t hold them. Gryffindor won! Kingsley caught the snitch!

Mary sees Sirius, sitting dejected on a couch in the far corner. She walks towards him but he doesn’t look at her, not now.

‘Potter left you Black?' She nudges his shoulder, 'My condolences but hey - I know a good solicitor if you guys are finally separating.’ 

‘Mm,’ he says, ‘fucking idiot is blaming himself for Marlene.’

‘Of course he is.’

‘Of course he is,’ Sirius shakes his head, ‘We- we were all just getting back to normal. And now it’s just…Mary, it’s fucked.’

‘And that’s Marls’ fault is it?’ Mary leans her body weight onto him. ‘Hey, look at Boyle over there - jesus he’s really going at it-’

‘I just wish Remus didn’t have to be away now,' Sirius is whining.

‘Sirius, Sirius, Marls is in the hospital wing too.’

‘Not like Remus is.’

‘Oh grow up, we all get sick sometimes.’ She watches Samantha Stelworth throw a glass of firewhiskey onto a Ravenclaw she does Astronomy with. Mary laughs like it's a reflex.

What am I even talking about? Why-

‘Shut it, Macdonald, you, you don’t know the half of it.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

Sirius pushes her off him, keeling forward now, like he might be sick. ‘It’s every fucking month and it’s been so much fucking worse since, since-’

Every month. Mary blinks.

‘-since, since, last year and I can’t believe, I hate that I-’

‘Sirius-’

‘Fuck, fuck , it’s all my fault.’

‘Sirius-’

‘Mary, please just leave me-’

‘Sirius,’ she leans in to whisper in his ear, an imitation of a flirt maybe, ‘Is Remus a werewolf ?’

He turns to her, pushing away, eyes wild.

Wow, she thinks and nods. Wow, too tired to think too hard, whiskey stained mouth twisted almost to a smile.

‘Stop talking, Mary,’ Sirius runs a hand through his hair. ‘I can’t do this. Not again.’

‘Okay-’

‘Stop,’ his voice is harsh as he leans forward. ‘Don’t say that word in here.’

She glares at him.

‘Okay, I get it.’

‘I don’t think you do.’

‘No because of course, no one fucking understands Remus like you do,’ she spits, sick of this. ‘Grand old Sirius Black, heir to a fucking fortune, knows dear old Moony better than us all.’

He's shaking his head, already standing, already walking away.

‘I can’t fucking do this, Mary,’ he says. ‘Not again,’ he says, like he doesn’t know how to be alive right now.

‘Fuck you, then!’ she calls after him, slouching back against the cushions and feeling her insides burn with whiskey.

Mary doesn’t know why she’s yelling, why she’s angry at Sirius. She thinks she just needs someone to say it too. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you-

She peels herself off the couch, takes another drink from someone’s hands, gets up to dance. 

This is what she does. She can always make herself the centre of a party; she can always create a whirlpool of people around her, an enchantress swirling her hands above the storm.

She tries not to think too hard about what this party is celebrating. No mourners for Marlene, for Remus, except maybe Sirius Black, and Lily Evans. Isn’t it selfish to mourn the way they do? When there’s this, when there’s life to move onto? They’re not dead. They’re not. 

Mary tips her head back and watches the lights flash across the ceiling. She’s dancing like it's her last day on earth, the noise around her echoing in her bones. She peddles her hands in a wild imitation of Agnetha Faltskog, watches the girls around her start to copy it. Grinning, happy, she can be so happy here. So happy.

She thinks she might need to lie down. Later, she throws her hands up, Later.

Charlie Bingley from seventh year grabs her by the shoulders, turns her around.

‘Hey,’ she screams in his face, too drunk to be self-conscious, too bold to be intimidated. How many drinks has she actually had?

‘Woah, hey there, cowboy,’ he says.

She wrinkles her nose, and he moves forward, pressing up against her, elbows knocking into her chest.

Okay, so she knows this routine.

‘Okay, okay, who’s your family, what music do you like, what do you dream about at night, oh - I mean other than me.’ 

She presses herself into his chest and he makes a noise like snarl, indignant, leans down to knock his nose against hers. She flashes a smile, all shark teeth.

‘There’s plenty other than just your tits to dream ‘bout.’

‘Mm,’ is all she says, half-dazed and enjoying the flow of the music.

‘Kiss me,’ he says, like it's an order.

Mary does, wants the taste of his menthol breath, wants the satisfaction of a boy following through, desiring her, even if she’s being used. Mary wants oblivion, she wants to feel it burn down her throat.

The kiss is…something. Leaves her gasping for air, weakened but smiling, because she knows how it will go on nights like this. This is all just habit, really. 

Then Charlie pulls away.

‘Oi, Macdonald - meet me, seventh floor, behind the old dryad statue, yeah?’

She winces, nodding drowsily, and he disappears off to his friends.

Mary turns around, and the room seems to be spinning, and she’s dancing and the lights are making new patterns across the walls and someone’s started chanting Kingsley’s name, and there is Lily, standing still in the chaos, anchoring the whole world. 

Mary groans and rocks unsteadily towards her.

‘You could do better, babe,’ Lily looks livid, looks hurt. 

Oh boo hoo; leave me to have some fun.

That’s not what Mary says. Mary says: ‘Show me.’

‘Kill me,’ Lily mutters, looking away, and Mary shakes her head vehemently.

She grabs Lily’s chin between her pointer and thumb, stares into her eyes, wisps of red hair floating across green.

‘Show me,’ Mary says, letting go, ‘Jesus Christ, Lily.’

Lily narrows her eyes, pushing out her jaw. She latches onto Mary’s hands, pulls her through the current of the crowd, emerging out the other side with flushed cheeks, breathing heavily.

‘Come on, Mary!’

They stumble up the stairs and the door swings back and shuts with a bang that has Mary yelling.

‘Hey there, cowboy,’ Mary says, cocking her head to one side and she sees Lily’s eyes smart. Then Lily is laughing, bubbling and giddy and Mary feels herself soften, letting herself be led to her bed. Lily laughed. I made Lily laugh.

‘Good night Mary,’ Lily pushes her onto the mattress, and Mary gets the strangest sense of deja vu.

‘Wait, wait, no,’ Mary’s voice is pitiful. She’s going to be so embarrassed about this tomorrow.

‘Mary, you’re- you’re fucked,’ Lily says and Mary stares at her with wide eyes. ‘Just go to bed; we can’t do this tonight, yeah?’

‘Do what? Have fun?'

‘God, Mary, just- stop. Please, I can’t, I just want tonight to stop. I already had to watch one friend get hurt.’

‘Oh, oh, that’s what this is,’ Mary grabs Lily’s shoulder.

‘Mary, could you just- for once, could you just stop.’ Lily is so close.

‘I’m not scared, Lily.’

‘What?’

‘I’m not.’

‘Mary, what-’

Mary kisses her. She brings her hands up to Lily’s neck, pulling her in, tasting more than just the filth she’s been drinking tonight.

This is it. Mary feels like she’s been floating away all night, oh but this. This is better.

She’s beautiful.

Lily deepens the kiss, leaning into it, opening her mouth and Mary whines. This is feet planted on the ground, the world narrowing down to a point, growing into a place where Mary feels she might actually be able to stand, no longer walking on the edge of a knife all the time.

Why weren’t we doing this before? 

Mary gasps, wishing away her breath, and leans back in. More, more, more.

Then Lily pulls away, scrambling backward.

‘You’re drunk,’ Lily says, voice shaking. She won’t look at Mary. Why won’t she look?

‘Look at me.’

‘No, Mary, just-’

‘Look at me, Lily.’

Lily does, and Mary sees her eyes brim with tears and wants to catch them on her thumb. 

Don’t cry. You’re always crying when we do this.

‘I’m sorry, Mary, I know it’s been a shit day, I know you’re feeling lonely, but you just can’t come up here, kiss me like that, and expect that to make everything alright. It doesn’t work that way.’

‘Well, how does it work?’ Mary feels like everything she’s ever been called; hysterical, emotional, too loud, too much.

‘I don’t know,’ Lily says, and pushes Mary back by her shoulders, knocking the breath out of her. ‘Just…go to sleep, Mary,’ she says, like she’s exhausted with her. Lily turns, drawing the curtain around her own bed, as she mutters a silencing charm and god knows whatever else.

Mary burns with anger, with humiliation. She smears her makeup across her pillow as she presses her face into it and refuses to cry. She doesn’t go back downstairs, doesn’t meet Charlie for his plans with her. She just falls down, sleeping as she trembles with cold on top of her blankets, curtains left wide open.

~~~

31 October 1976

It works like this:

You’ll go back to your bed and go to sleep and wake up barely remembering this. Barely remembering the way you wanted me, barely thinking about anything except your hangover headache.

And me, I’ll sit and try to push down this fucking urge to just reach forward and pull you back against me and press my face into your neck.

God, M. Is this so hard to understand? 

I feel ugly here, alone, but I feel like I’ll survive tonight and see the sunrise. With you, M, it’s always the edge of a catastrophe, and I might die if we get too close. It gets too hard to pretend and if I stop pretending how can I ever be around you again?

I just might love you forever, M. I hate that.

~~~

Marlene looks small under the blue and white hospital bedsheets. 

Mary feels almost sick being there, in the daylight, the sterile coldness of everything turning her stomach and stirring up buried memories. She hates herself for feeling like that, for not being able to kneel next to the bed for however long Marls needs her to. 

She hates herself for that and she hates herself for how shit of a friend she’s been, the type of friend she always is. This hatred is a selfish thing too; festering on the edges of her mind and turning any conversation defunct - putting more and more layers between her and everyone she cares about.

After the Halloween feast, Mary brings Marlene a bowl of sweets and finds a pile already stacked next to her bed.

‘Hi,’ Mary says, blowing out a breath as she sits on the end of Marls’ bed.

‘Hi,’ Marlene says, and grins, all teeth still, even after the fall. ‘Tell her to let me out of here, would you?’

Mary leans forward, running her hands over the rough fabric of the hospital blanket.

‘Do you really want to go?’ she whispers, meeting Marlene's eyes, like Orpheus tugging earnestly at Eurydice’s hand, like she’s finally realised, like she’s trying to split herself open to make room for all the people she needs this way.

Marlene huffs. ‘Was a joke, Mary. Joking.’

‘Joking…’

‘Stop worrying about me, yeah?’ Marlene leans back into her pillow. ‘I’ll be okay. I’ve already had Lily in here, being all fussy. I mean, Merlin, Mary, she was so worked up about it, I don’t know what I was…’

Mary doesn’t realise she’s zoned out, until later, walking back to the dorm, when she can’t recall a single thing Marlene really said. 

And she hates herself for it but this is getting old, and when she falls face down onto her bed, she can only remember Lily’s mouth on hers and the thrum of her heart beating under Mary’s hands and how good it felt before it didn’t. She liked it, she wanted it and she can’t keep from wanting it, even now, after Lily has drawn that line in the sand, firm and clear so there’s no mistaking it.

Mary has been terrible, horrible, a bad friend. The worst. 

But she can’t make herself feel bad about this. Not really. Not when it felt that way. Not when for a second Lily was folding into her and kissing her back.

She wakes up when Lily opens the bathroom door and yellow light burns into her eyes, and Mary realises she’s left her curtains open again.

They don’t speak.

After Marlene gets out, it should be easier, but it isn’t, really. Mary still looks over at Lily and sees this hurt burning her eyes like a curse and she is sorry. She’s sorry that she hurt Lily, and she’s sorry Lily turns away from her whenever she walks into a room, and she’s sorry that Lily didn’t want this, and she’s sorry she’s been a bad friend, but that doesn’t make all her own wanting go away.

Lily cradles her hurt like it’s the only thing that matters and Mary burns with desire and bends to Lily’s wishes. She turns, and crosses the room, and finds someone else to stick around.

Still, Mary finds she’s always looking over her shoulder, searching, watching:

Lily leaning into Marlene, Lily, laughing, looking at nothing at all. It’s Lily and Lily’s lightning smile, her muttered, thundering words, her sharp edged cackle. Mary turns and everywhere she looks she sees the deep grey-green of Lily’s eyes and the speckled peach of her skin. Her hesitant curled smile, freckles hidden underneath lipstick, a pink tube in their bathroom cabinet that Mary takes out sometimes, before bed, just to look at, just to get her fingerprints on something, anything of Lily's, again.

When a younger boy, made a prefect just this year, starts sitting with Lily and Marlene at lunch, Mary thinks she sort of wants to die. 

She wakes in the middle of the night and finds the common room empty even though Remus got out of the hospital wing weeks ago. She falls asleep on the couch down there, wakes again, when James shakes her shoulder on his way to quidditch practice; 7:30, concerned furrow in his brow, sun risen through the window. 

Mary follows him down the quidditch stands, and finds the spot she and Lily sat in for that last game, all fizzing teenage anger, sitting there in her pyjama pants under the cold.

~~~

14 November 1976

Why am I still writing to you in here? It hurts, all these letters I'll never send. It hurts, never speaking a word to your face for fear of my caving in; for fear of me not being able to help myself and letting you do anything. Anything you want, M. I'd let you.

It's pathetic of me and I don't like the feeling; so this is the only way we speak now. Not much for conversation, are you? Ha.

It hurts to keeping writing to you, and yet. And yet, it's a habit I'm too tired to break...maybe. Something else I can't stop myself from craving;

I never could say much of anything to anyone but you. 

~~~

As November grows tired, Mary does her best to keep out of the dorm. She doesn’t miss Marlene’s wounded looks as she crawls in just before curfew, skulking towards her bed and drawing the curtains without a word. When she puts up a silencing charm, it starts to feel like a coffin to her, a luxury one lined with red velvet, the type her family could never afford.

Once, Mary sleeps with a boy; more as a way to get out of the dorm than anything else.

She lies back and doesn’t say much and smiles into his kisses. She likes the anonymity of it, at least as it's happening - an act that reduces their identities down to just a girl and a boy in a bed. This is love, a teenage rebellion, a girl led astray, a momentary pain. Tale as old as time. 

She presses herself into his mattress, arms wrapped around his neck, and feels something akin to a calmness. Cold, weary. When he’s done, he looks into her emptied eyes and tells her, ‘You look so pretty right now.’ And she smiles up at him, amused.

When Mary makes it back to the dorm, the door creaks loud, too loud and she tries not to wince.

Marlene looks up from an essay she is finishing in the damp November light. She’ll ruin her eyes, Mary thinks distantly, hearing the shower running, the type of droning background noise that announces Lily’s distance.

‘Oh,’ Marlene says, ‘Hello!’ overly friendly, deafening. 

Mary is losing another friend, she registers distantly. Something in her chest implodes as she pulls her boots off.

‘Where’d you go?’

‘Detention,’ she says, the false lightness of her tone coating her gums.

‘Bugger, McGonagall giving you trouble again?’

‘Mm,’ Mary shrugs non-committedly. 

Marls rolls onto her side, dark eyes watching Mary cross the room.

‘Mary, you know, you can… talk to me.’ 

Mary straightens her bedsheets, picks up her quilt from home from where she had been thrown it on the floor this morning.

‘Mm,’ Mary tries again. 

Marlene stands, leaving her parchment on the bed. Her footsteps are soft and threatening and Mary might hurt her if she comes too close.

‘Mary.’

‘Yep.’

‘Mary, can you just, listen, can’t you just -’

Marlene is too close for comfort now.

‘Can I what? Can I what , Marlene? What?’ Why am I so angry all the time? What is this, Mary?

‘I think, I just,’ Marlene says slowly, like she’s speaking to a wounded animal, and Mary wants to throw something. ‘If you would just talk to…’ it comes out in a rush, ‘if you’d talk to Lily, okay? You need to talk to her, she needs to know that-’

‘She’s fine.’ Mary flinches away from Marlene’s hand reaching for her. 

She gets into bed, ducks for cover, waits for the bomb to blow. She brings her quilt up to her chin. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, not now, just five more seconds, five more seconds, please.

‘She’s hurting, Mary,’ Marlene says and Mary's eyes burn. 

Like I'm not too?

Marlene is twisting the rosary beads at her throat, black beads lying stark against bandages. ‘Listen, I think I can help, just please talk to her, Mary.’

Marlene takes a step backward and Mary exhales. She looks young, Mary thinks through a haze, scared . Marlene has never really looked scared for as long as Mary has known her.

‘She won’t talk to me,’ Mary’s voice comes out small, painfully shattered. She didn’t mean to do that. She didn’t mean to sound that way.

Five more seconds, Mary, please. Don’t cry, don’t-

‘You know Lily. She, she needs you. She doesn’t just talk to people about her shit.’

‘She talks to you,’ and Mary thinks she’s stopped breathing. ‘She talks to you,’ she says again, less like an accusation this time. Marlene just looks at Mary as if she knows and Mary hates herself hates herself hates-

Marlene reaches out for Mary’s shoulder again and Mary can’t do this right now, not here, not with Lily just over in the other room. She can’t and so she scrambles back, a frenzied animal in a trap, ripping the curtains of her bed from their tie-backs. She closes herself in, as she’s done so many nights before, sitting in this coffin of red, enshrined in a heart.

‘Mary, Mary, please. She misses you. I- ’ Marlene’s voice cracks, ‘I miss you.’ 

Come on, Mary, five more seconds, please don’t cry. She’s sick of all this bargaining she does with herself.

Mary turns to reach across to the final curtain and draw it across her bed. She doesn’t mean to but she can’t help it, a moth to a flame; she meets Marlene’s gaze. She feels like she might be sick.

‘She chose this,’ Mary holds the final curtain taught on its rings, knuckles white. ‘Don’t you get it, Marls, don’t you, can’t you just leave it alone, just-’

The shower door slams in the next room and Marlene flinches. Like she’s been caught doing something wrong.

It’s at that second that Mary loses her grip. It’s at that second that Mary feels the humiliation of hot, salty tears streaming down her face. A great, shuddering sob spills out into the room, from her, Mary, and seeps through the cracks in the floorboards, looking for some place to go.

‘Mary,’ Marlene’s voice is thick with sympathy and Mary can’t take that. Not now.

She pulls the last curtain across her bed and Marlene becomes a phantom on the other side, nothing but air, nothing but air. The bathroom door creaks open as Mary forces herself face down on a mattress for the second time in a matter of hours, using her pillow to muffle her sobs, trying not to hear Lily’s quiet footsteps on the other side of the curtain.

~~~

22 December 1976

The time's getting away from us, isn't it, M? 

Marlene hates me more everyday, watching us disintegrate. 

I'm sorry for that. I'm sorry I can't do this anymore. I thought I was stronger. I'd lasted so long.

~~~

When Mary gets off at Kings Cross for the Christmas holidays, she falls into her brother’s arms, carrying this strange reluctance they’ve built between them.

Still, Julian smiles at her, and it’s something broad and undying.

They get on the tube and then get back off again. She shivers as she shoulders her bags, somehow feeling the milder London cold more than the Scottish.

‘So what you been up to? I feel like I never hear from you these days?’

‘What, d’you want to go buy an owl?’

Julian tilts his head back, squints like he’s trying to see the sun under all those clouds. ‘Witches are scary, man. What you doing keeping fucking birds around?’

‘Fuck off,’ she shakes her head barely holding back a smile. Mary breathes in the smoggy London air, yellowed under the streetlights. I can breathe now, she thinks, for the time being.

‘Don’t they shit in your bed at night?’ Julian says, forcing her out of her head.

‘No, cockface, you keep them in cages.’

‘Ah, ah, ahh, now who’s cleaning out the cages? You got your boyfriends out doing that? Hm?’

She turns to him, shaking her head and muttering. ‘Julian, Jules, Julie boy, did you miss the part where I don’t have a fucking owl? And you wouldn’t know the first thing about my fucking boyfriends, fucking fundi .’

‘Oh yeah, what about your china with the fucking painted nails and long hair, aye?’

‘Oh…Sirius…yeah.’ Something must have slipped on her face because he goes quiet then. She sees him side-eyeing her, decides to ignore it. 

They’re almost home now anyway. She kicks a stone down the street. It skims like a stone on a river, making a crrk, crrk, crrk sound that echoes off the buildings.

‘Alright, Mare, what’s up?’

Mary shrugs. ‘Nothing’s up, Jules. Just the sky.’

‘Aikhona, Mary. Come on.’

Mary stays silent. She feels a bit sick, actually.

‘Mare,’ he nudges her shoulder. She’s not ready for it and goes stumbling into the brick wall at her right.

‘Mary,’ Jules says, sing-song.

‘Jesus, you a fucking bully now or something?’

He blinks at her. Christ.

‘Okay, fuck, there’s, there’s this girl, my friend.’

‘Mmm,’ he nods over at her, after they’ve turn down another street and Mary hasn’t carried on talking.

‘Jules, christ , okay,’ she shakes her head, as if it will clear it all out. ‘She- She won’t talk to me.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I think she…’ Mary can barely get the words out, ‘I think I might've done something bad.’

Julian doesn’t say anything at that. He just pries Mary’s bag out her grip and wraps an arm around her shoulder. Mary slows as Julian tilts his head onto her shoulder, swaying them both slightly.

‘We’re almost home, yeah?’ he says.

‘Yeah…’

~~~

It’s the night before Christmas and Mary’s parents want them to be in bed before ten. It’s the night before Christmas and Mary gets home with Marcus after kicking a ball with him at the park. It’s the night before Christmas and Mary hasn’t talked to Lily since Halloween. 

She gets home, and yells down the hall to her parents, brushing past a package on the table.

‘It’s for you, Mary,’ her Umama leans in and kisses her forehead, brushing her hair back off her face. Mary smiles, all teeth and starry eyes, her six year old self again.

The package is wrapped in a crinkled plastic grocery bag, orange letters stamped across it. Mary feels the ridiculous urge to ask, Did it come by owl? but pushes it down. She always feels a little alien at home, all too aware of all the stuff she’s had that her siblings haven’t.

She kicks the door to her room closed, shoving past Julian to roll onto her bed. 

Inside the plastic is a small rectangular package, wrapped, so very neatly, in Christmas wrapping paper, cartoon snowmen smiling at her on a red background. There’s no card, nothing to indicate the sender.

Julian leans in. ‘Shouldn’t you wait for tomorrow with that?’

She raises her eyebrows at him and tears her nails into the paper.

Underneath, is a book. A notebook with a blue cover, a pink butterfly embossed into it. It looks like something childhood; something mothers would buy their daughters as compensation for sending them off to Year 1 at school.

Mary looks back at Julian, cautious, and flips the book open.

Inside the first page, there’s only scribbles like someone trying to get a pen to work. What is this?

Mary turns the page, and runs her fingers across the blue ink scrawled in Lily’s handwriting. 

For M,

~~~

It’s the night before Christmas and Mary is missing dinner at her parent’s house. 

She left, out the front door, screaming at her Umama. Leave me alone. Let me go. Marcus was crying. 

Mary can’t focus. 

She gets on the tube, breathing loudly as she catches her breath from running to the station. She gets some funny looks from the pair of women next to her and finds herself flinching at their laughter, hands shaking, twisting her bracelets into knots. 

Mary rides the train further out, then changes lines. When she finally walks back out onto the streets in the dark, her coat billows around her making her feel like she’s braver than really is. She was never really brave, not when it came to Lily. God, she was such a coward.

She can hear Christmas carols a few streets over. 

Beautiful.

She’s trying not to cry again, feeling a burn in her throat when she swallows.

The world can be so beautiful.

Mary stumbles when she sees the warped wooden door of the house she knows to be Lily’s. There’s no wreath hanging there. She gulps down air and holds her hands out in the cold air, tries to make them still.

Help me, Lily .

As she walks to the door, she sees the curtain move and a girl with golden hair look out. When Petunia sees Mary, she lets go of the curtain, leaving it swaying white under the porchlight. It’s a disappearing act that stirs up a kind of fear of this place, of all it represents. 

Lily, Lily, I need to talk to you.

Mary brings her fist up to the door and knocks, her stomach curdling.

It’s Lily who answers the door, and Mary isn’t ready, wasn’t ready for that. She can’t focus on anything but the green in Lily’s eyes.

‘I- Mary, what are you doing here?’

Mary falls forward and wraps her arms around Lily, too overwhelmed to speak.

‘Mary, what?’

‘I’m so sorry, Lily, please, I wish I just-’

‘Woah, woahh, Mary, are you,’ Lily cranes her neck to see back into the house, ‘are you drunk?’

Mary’s head throbs.

‘M’not drunk,’ she says into Lily’s shoulder. ‘Look at me, Lily, look, I, I read what you sent and I just- I, fuck, Lily, I never wanted you to feel-’

‘What I sent?’

‘I never wanted to you to feel like-’

‘Mary, what did I send?’ Lily’s voice is clipped, impatient. Mary hates it. She still wants it. She never wants to stop hearing Lily’s voice this way, any way; any way Lily will have her. ‘What did I send?’

‘The notebook?’ Mary pulls back and squints at Lily, ‘The letters?’

Lily shakes her head. ‘No.’ It’s quiet and definitive and angry, so so angry.

‘The one with the pink butterfly on the-’

‘No, Mary, I, no, Mary I need you to leave, I didn’t, I can’t-’

‘Lily, Lily, breathe, please, what-’ Mary hears her voice come out ragged and hoarse. Stop, Lily. Lily, help me.

‘I didn’t send that fucking book, Mary!’ Lily’s eyes, now an oil spill, a gaping wound, a spreading stain. ‘I didn’t send the letters, I didn’t do that, fuck-’

Lily runs outside, pain etched onto her face. She kicks a flowerpot, only managing to stub her toe on a crack in the concrete.

‘Fuck, Lily, Lily, stop.’

Lily turns to Mary, and there are tears streaming down her cheeks, catching the light. Always the same story with them two.

‘Go home, Mary.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No, Lily, what the fuck do you mean you didn’t send the letters? I got the fucking letters, Lily, I miss you, you can’t just turn around after this, I-’

'Mary, stop, leave, please just leave me alone.'

'You, you...' Mary can't breathe, 'You love me!' She's clinging to herself, hands on her elbows all bent over as she says, 'You wrote that, Lily. You sent that. Fuck, I hate...I, please don't take it back.' Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic, Mary, reaching too far.

Lily stumbles, voice quiet. ‘Mary, I didn't send that. I-' Mary looks up and Lily's crying again, never looked so beautiful. 'I wrote...I, it was mine. I wrote it but it...it was Petunia. She, she must have sent it...because it wasn't me.’

What. Mary can’t breathe. The. Fuck.

'I know it was. She was, listen, she was rooting around in my stuff and I just thought oh, not this again,’ Lily’s words come out in a rush, raving, ‘and I- I just yelled at her and kicked her out of my room oh god oh god, I can’t-’ Lily sways under the streetlamp.

‘I’ll kill her,’ Mary can’t feel her hands shake anymore. ‘I’ll fucking kill-’

‘Mary-’

Mary smashes a flowerpot on the concrete, yellow blossoms fractured, lying almost the shards of terracotta.

A neighbour opens their door.

‘Everything okay out there, Lily?’

Lily freezes, then ducks out of the puddle of light coming from the open door. 

‘Yeah, uh, yeah all good, Phil.’

‘Don’t need me to do anything?’

Lily’s voice doesn’t betray her, not the smallest inflection of something off; ‘Nothing, nothing, don’t worry.’

The man doesn’t go back inside, just stands by his railing overlooking the two shadows hiding in the dark. Mary’s skin crawls.

Lily shivers, then reaches forward and grabs Mary by the arm, pulling her inside and double locking the door. Mary burns .

‘Lily, I-’

‘I know,’ Lily says, like she doesn’t. She looks wretched and tear-stained and gorgeous.

Mary doesn’t stop herself this time, holds Lily’s face in her hands, runs her thumbs over the tears on her cheeks.

‘I’m sorry, Lily, I’m so sorry.’

‘Shhh,’ Lily says, new tears falling over Mary’s fingers.

‘I love y-’

Lily presses her palm over Mary’s mouth, shakes her head, the smallest movement, barely there.

‘Lily, darling, what was all that noise?’ a voice drifts out from the living room.

Lily swallows. ‘Ah, um, nothing, Mum, just knocked over one of the bins,’ her voice is impossibly clean, bright in a way that’s wiped clean of any real emotion.

‘Lily, really, you can’t keep this up, you know that don’t you?’

‘Yeah, Mum, yeah, yeah, I know.’

‘Yes, Lily. Petunia’s had such a time of it, and now with, with your…it’s hard enough on her, really, Lily.’

‘Yes, Mum, yes, I know, I’m sorry.’

Lily squeezes her eyes shut and takes her hand off Mary’s mouth, clamping down on her shoulder instead. It hurts a little, the way Lily is gripping onto her. I love you.

‘Darling, we want you at home, you know that, it’s just making everything a little more difficult. We all have to be mindful of Pet’s plans for a quiet Christmas, you know this Lily. Darling, we’ve fought so hard to stay here, don’t ruin it now.’

There’s a genuine pain to Lily’s mother’s voice that makes Mary want to hide. I love you. She feels like she’s standing in the wings of a theatre, holding Lily down before she has to go on and dance the eleventh hour; the final swansong, Victoria’s final fall in her beloved red shoes. It's the penultimate act before tragedy strikes, for real this time.

‘I’m sorry, Mum, I could have stayed at sch-’

‘Oh darling, honestly, we hardly see you. And it’s just such a big day for your sister. She needs you home. Especially now, your dad- he’s-’

‘It’s Christmas, Mum,’ Lily’s voice is sharper than before, ‘if he wanted to be here he would’ve been.’ Her hand grows lighter on Mary’s shoulder and she looks up now, past Mary, as if praying to the yellowing cornice above the doorway. I love you, Mary wills it to reach her.

‘I know, I know, Lily…’ the voice from the room trails off, and it’s stifling in here - for Mary to just stand and pretend she isn’t here and listen to the rattling breath of someone holding in sobs. Mary isn’t sure how much longer she’ll last.

Eventually, there’s a sniffling sound from the other room and the voice begins again. ‘Vernon was very generous to come over, don’t you agree? Away from his own lot. So lovely of him.’ 

Lily shivers in the December air. Come in from the cold. I love you.

‘Soon enough, you’ll be meeting your own lad, yes?’

Mary feels sick. She presses her palms into her eyes, rubbing starbursts into her vision like it could make all this go away.

Lily’s shadow straightens.

‘Yep, yes Mum, I’m going to bed, okay?’

Lily’s mother sighs and it’s like the walls are sagging with all this hurt stored between them. ‘Okay, darling.’

‘Erm, yep, Mum, good night!’ Lily yells out, a sickening smile in her voice.

‘Lily, what are you doing standing around out there? Come and kiss me goodnight for heaven’s sake.’

‘Okay, okay, Mum,’ Lily’s voice cracks a little, and Mary almost feels relieved after all this; watching Lily wilt with the effort to push brightness into her voice.

Lily pulls away from Mary and walks through the open doorway. Mary flexes her fingers and almost doesn’t want to look. 

Run away, Lily. I love you, you know.

Through the doorway, Mary glimpses an older woman with thinning hair sitting on the couch, staring blankly at an unplugged TV. There is plastic on the couch and a large towering shelf filled with trophies and awards of some sort. There’s not much else.

Lily kisses her mother on the cheek, and her mother sits, perfectly still, like this is rehearsed. Mary supposes it is.

‘Happy Christmas!’ Lily calls out to her mother, to the house at large, as she leaves the room. She gets no response.

Mary follows her down the hall like a ghost, passing framed photographs in a blur, not looking too hard at anything. She’s terrified that if she looks at all, this will all become a little more real.

They get to a room at the end of the hall and Lily closes the door carefully, like if it bangs too hard it could shake the foundations of the house.

Mary turns. ‘Why did you come back here?’ She doesn’t mean for it to sound like an accusation.

Lily shrugs, turns on the salt lamp in the corner and crosses the room to pick up an empty glass, crosses the room again to put it back down on a different shelf. Light from the street lamp outside bleeds through the window and the house is quiet but for Lily’s footsteps. Back and forth and back and forth and back-

‘Lily…just…just stop,’ Mary says.

Lily turns to Mary, arms flying out behind her like she wants to rip herself open.

‘Stop what? What exactly do you want me to do? What did you want me to say when you got here? Oh great - now you know every thought that’s been running through my head the last 6 months, hallelujah! Thanks for coming to see me and my trainwreck life in my trainwreck house. Kiss me, Mary, I’ll lasso the moon for you! Merry fucking Christmas, baby!’

‘Lily…I-’

‘Go on, Mary! What do you actually want?’ Mary doesn’t know how Lily can take so much care closing a door just to start screaming like this. ‘Tell me, Mary, tell me!’

Mary shakes her head slowly. ‘I don’t know what you want me to say, Lily.’

‘Ah, of course, of course you don’t know.’

‘Oh, fuck off, Lily-’

‘There it is!’

‘Lily, for fucks sake okay, maybe I just want you to be okay. Maybe I want you to never have to come back to this fucking house again. Maybe, I want to be able to talk to you like we fucking used to, and, and more, and then, I want to be able to tell you that I love-’

‘Mary, you-’

‘No, no, you asked for this, Lily. I love that you get mean to people you’re scared of. I love that you think you’re so good at hiding what you’re thinking but it’s always always written all over your face. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you’re looking at me like I’m insane. I love that you are the only person that I’ve ever, that I’ve ever felt safe to fall asleep next to at night. I love it when you, when you take me up on dares and really look at me and stop pretending all the time. I love- I love-’

Mary is fucked now. She goes on:

‘I just- It’s not because I’m lonely and it’s not because of the fucking diary , okay? It’s because when you realise you want someone in your life, for a long time, forever, maybe, whatever that means…you have to let them know. Okay, I need you to know.’

Lily grimaces, unstuck like the moment before a sob. ‘Mary, fuck, you just- you can’t fucking say stuff like that. You say stuff like that and it makes it impossible for me to hate you.’ Lily shakes her head, wipes her forearm across her eyes. ‘And, and I hate you, Mary. I really fucking hate you.’

Mary sits down on the bed, puts her head in her hands, a perfect cliché, the picture of a jilted lover.

‘I’m-’ Mary realises she’s crying. ‘I’m sorry Lily, I really am. It hurts for me too.’

Mary feels Lily’s fingers, gentle around her wrists, pulling her hands down from her eyes. It’s the sight of Lily kneeling on the carpet in front of her, eyes burning in the orange light. She’s beautiful , Mary thinks and sobs.

‘Shh,’ Lily’s breath blows across Mary’s face, as Lily leans up to cup the back of Mary’s neck. ‘Mary, please, just, listen to me?’

Mary shakes her head. They’re too close. It’s too much now, after everything.

‘Mary, I missed you...so much. Mary, please,’ Lily is crying now too, ‘I’ve got to just…I need to…Mary, did you really…do you actually want this?’

Mary meets Lily’s eyes and can’t breathe at how nervous she looks. 

‘You’re my best friend,’ Mary says, and leans forward to kiss Lily.

It’s better than before. It’s Lily’s skin on hers and Mary’s hand tangled in her hair and them both wanting with a hunger that sings on their tongues. It’s the salt of their tears mixing on their lips and it’s like a storm breaking after a century of drought, a storm to crack through the whole world and reshape it. 

It’s quiet and it's warm.

It’s the weight of Lily’s hand at her collar, pulling her forward. It’s Lily.

It’s this; gasping for breath and laughing through tears and moving with each other in the dim light; carving out a space for themselves even as they tear up their hands, holding each other with torn, bloody fingernails.

Lily laughs into Mary’s mouth and Mary feels like the best person in the world, like she’s swallowed the sky in all its parts.

The whole world comes from the salt lamp on Lily’s shelf. Its reddish glow fills up the spaces, an illustrator’s pen carving out the shadows.

Mary finds Lily’s mouth on her neck, her hands snaking up underneath her shirt, unhooking her bra, and she doesn’t try to stop herself from gasping. 

Mary finds Lily’s tongue tracing her throat, splitting a line across her blood vessels, and she leans into the cut. 

Mary finds Lily under her hands and it doesn’t feel inconceivable; it doesn’t feel like how she used to think it would: rushed and wrong and a kind of hazy dream, a fantasy that isn’t worthy of Lily. It feels sharp and piercing and perfect, when Lily’s hands card through the hair at the back of Mary’s neck, when Lily groans into Mary’s mouth and Mary feels like this house, this world has been emptied but for them.

Mary pulls Lily to her, gasping and rolling back her neck and feeling, body pulsing under Lily and her hands.

The whole world comes from a salt lamp, and Lily’s hair glows in the light, gets in Mary’s eyes.

Lily arcs as Mary’s hands creep downward. Mary wants.

What are they? Dying stars? Tripping across the night like drunkards laughing on the way home. Colliding in the dark, hands fumbling. They’re a teenage wreck, a supernova bursting with colour, a blinding disaster.

The world comes from the salt lamp. It is blinking in Mary’s vision as Lily moves across it.

Lily empties the world for Mary, lying on her front, making a spinning, hazy vision of something new.

Pressed into each other, hands everywhere; Mary learns to cry without shame.

~~~

24 December 1976

It was 3am at 8pm tonight.

~~~

‘Psst, Mary. Get up.’

Mary squats at Lily, groaning into the pillow.

‘Mary, come on, we need to go now.’

Mary opens one eye. 

The window is fogged from the inside. It’s so cold.

Mary pulls the blankets tighter around her. ‘Lily?’

‘Mm?’

‘Where are we going?’

Lily grins.

~~~

Mary stumbles along rubbing sleep from her eyes over and over, trying to see Lily as clearly as possible. It can’t be long after midnight; they meet no one, ambling along the cracked grey of the footpath. They walk and run in intervals, laughter spiking in the cold night scene, the moon bursting through the clouds above them.

It’s Christmas, Mary registers dimly, Umama’s going to be so mad at me.

Lily is electric, walking through her village in the dark, flashing Mary smiles and tangling together their fingers, trailing her along. At the ballet school where Lily grew up doing wobbly pirouettes, Lily pulls Mary under the awning and just kisses her.

Mary’s knees feel like they could give out at any moment.

She doesn’t know how to contain this between them; when it's alive like this, kindling caught aflame in the smoking wind, stirring something behind Mary’s ribs. Calling it romance feels sensationalised; the ‘baby’ing and the glancing around, checking someone’s watching. 

We’re just us, aren’t we? 

Us.

Lily finally stops in front of a tall wooden fence that splinters when Mary touches it.

‘Alright come on,’ Lily nods towards it.

Mary blinks.

Lily nudges her. ‘Come on, d’you want a leg-up?’ 

Mary laughs then. ‘What the fuck is on the other side, Lily?’

‘Mary, come on. ’

Mary shakes her head, smiling. ‘You’re not like this at school.’

‘Yeah, well…’ Lily looks at Mary, unimpressed. ‘I’m not at school. Thought you’d get that by now.’

She reaches out and grabs Mary’s hand again, and Mary feels a warmth spark through her fingers. Mary smiles down at their hands, watching Lily’s thumb tracing the grooves in her knuckles. 

It could be easy, this way. Just easy. Mary laughs at herself.

‘Nah, you’re fucking crazy. Tell me what’s over there.’

‘Mary,’ the way Lily says her name is like a prayer, whispered in the night. It makes Mary unsteady. Lily pulls away. ‘You’ll see.’

Mary whistles, exaggerated, as Lily jumps up to grab the top of the fence, dragging her trainers up and across the wood. She drops down on the other side, leaving Mary shivering alone. 

‘Come on, Macdonald.’ A sing-song voice.

‘Fuck you, Evans.’ 

Mary glances behind her, then backs up, taking a deep breath.

‘Lily, I’m gonna kill you, I swear to god.’

‘Hurry up-’

Mary leaps up, grabbing hold of the fence and digging about five splinters into her hand.

‘Fuck,’ Mary grimaces, arms shaking. ‘I can’t do this Lily, I- please, I can’t-’

‘Just kick your leg over, Mary. I’ve got you.’

Mary heaves, eyes closed, shaking with the weight of herself.

‘Come on, come on, I’ve got you,’ Lily’s voice is close, so close.

Mary kicks over one leg, then the other. She feels Lily wrap her arms around her waist and help her down. Mary almost collapses in relief.

‘Shit, Mary, are you okay? I thought, I thought, I don’t know, I thought it would be fine-’

‘I’m not doing that again, Lil.’

‘Okay, okay, okay, look at me,’ Mary brings her hands up to cup Mary’s jaw. ‘You're okay, yeah?’

Mary folds. ‘I’m…yeah, I’m okay.’

‘Okay,’ Lily seems genuinely shaken, ‘Okay! Okay, um, okay-’

‘Stop saying that.’

‘Okay. I- Alright.’

Mary presses her forehead into Lily’s chest, shaking with laughter, and everything, months of emotions that are finally catching up with her. Lily looks up at the sky and holds her.

After a moment Mary asks, not moving to look, ‘Where are we?’

‘Um…Lily shakes her head, ‘stupid idea, actually. We’re um, we’re at the pool.’

Mary laughs, ‘You nutter.’ She has Lily under her hands here, only them and only the moon and the greenish water of this grubby Olympic pool, which obviously hasn’t been cleaned since Summer. ‘Are we swimming?’

Lily wrinkles her nose. ‘That was the plan…but um…it’s cold and I-’

‘Come on, Evans, don’t bail on me, now,’ Mary starts unbuttoning her shirt. 

‘Mary, you’re not actually-’

‘Come on, Evans,’ and it’s a challenge, because this is what they do. Talk and touch and tease until both of them are pulled into doing something stupid. Mary wants to live now, let in a little recklessness to make all the cold grey of it all more bearable. For Lily.

Mary rests her cold hands on Lily’s now bare shoulders and leans in. ‘Just so you know…I can’t swim.’

‘Mary, what the fuck?!’ Lily catches her wrists. ‘Okay, okay, we won’t swim then.’

‘Evans,’ Mary pulls her hands up, stretching their arms between them, ‘we’re gonna fucking swim.’

‘Mary-’

‘Teach me, Lily.’

‘Oh my god.’

‘This was your idea.’

Mary pulls away, kicking off her shoes, and shaking her head at Lily’s protests, grinning stupidly. 

Her Umama used to tell her stories of Christmas in South Africa when she was a child. Swimming on Christmas Day under the Summer sun, the scar she has from dripping wax onto her fingers after being careless with a candle, Christmas carols and jazz music humming all around.

Here, in the deathly cold, it almost seems cruel that the pool isn’t iced over. 

‘Fucking hell, come on then,’ Lily grabs Mary’s hand. ‘Come on, don’t be precious about it.’

Mary scoffs and presses her lips to Lily’s cheek, giddy in the thick of the night.

‘Ikrismesi emnandi,’ Lily says with a hopelessly thick English accent, just smiling at Mary in that way she does.

‘Happy Christmas,’ Mary says, softly, then shrieks as Lily pulls her into the pool.

Mary gasps, coughing up a mouthful of water and kicking up a storm as she splashes and screams for Lily.

Lily surfaces, teeth chattering as she’s saying, ‘I’ve got you, I’ve got you, Mare? I’m here.’

Mary grasps Lily’s shoulders, pushing her weight down onto them and almost keels over as Lily goes back under.

She shrieks Lily’s name, pulse jumping, kicking her feet as hard as she can, and lets go. She’s dimly aware of her own arms waving wildly in her peripheral vision, like the wings of a chicken in flight.

Lily surfaces. ‘Hey, you’re doing it! You’re swimming!’ She says it like it's a miracle and Mary tries not to act affronted.

‘I don’t think...this is how...you’re s'posed to teach people,’ she coughs out.

‘Mm, well,’ Lily shrugs, ‘worked for you, didn’t it?’

‘Shut up,’ Mary struggles to get the words out, windmilling her arms as Lily swims backward, out of reach. ‘Fuck.’

‘You wanted to do this, Macdonald.’

‘Fuck you, Evans.'

And there’s that cackle again, Lily’s vocal chords gone all sharp and cruel in the dark. Mary loves it, wants to swallow it like a bad drink that scalds her innards as it goes down.

‘Love you, Macdonald,’ Lily is closer now, curling her hand around Mary’s thigh and Mary stills her arms. Suddenly drowning here in the dark doesn’t seem so terrible. 

‘Call me Mary.’

‘I love you,’ says Lily, and she’s something mythical in this light. ‘Mary, I really do.’ Lily pulls her to her and the illusion breaks, Lily no longer a siren or a mer-creature, just the same bright, calculating eyes and freckled, burning cheeks and steady hands roving across Mary’s body, teeth scraping along the skin at Mary’s collarbone.

‘Let me say it, Lily,’ Mary gasps into the night.

‘What?’ 

‘I think I…’ Mary kicks her legs under the surface, and the dark water punctures with streams of bubbles, like stars, like constellations, new maps of a new night sky, like they punched a hole in this one and ripped it up, made the world new just for them, just for this night. ‘Lily, I think I…’ Mary is swimming upward, dizzy and drunk on Lily’s touch, and she could be anywhere, now, here, without horizons in the darkness, water and air as one element, swimming out into elysium. 

Mary splutters on swallowed water and Lily is there, holding her in the great expansive oblivion. Mary leans in.

‘I love…you.’

The day will break and the world will crowd back in with the lightening sky, the returning horizons. But this moment in the darkness is theirs to have, to ingest until they can feel it pumping blood, keeping their pulses steady and their bodies afloat for a long, long while. 

Mary only hopes it will be enough.

~~~

30 January 1977

You're sleeping in my bed tonight, M; all peaceful like.

We do this now, and I hear things I didn't used to. You were panting all night one time, and woke up telling me about running through the forest, mumbling about Remus like I don't know already.

Y ou talk - you tell me to move when you need space. Sometimes you just shove me instead. And I go sleep in your bed. Sorry to bother you. You're always there in the morning, rubbing your temples and saying 'why'd you go?' Like you're not to blame with your stupidly long limbs and your stupidly lovely face, always kicking me in the middle of the night.

I like to watch you falling asleep and you like to watch me waking up. We'll be damned if we have to miss this one day - night I should say. When I look at you under the covers, I think I might be damned anyway - helpless. I'm so fucked around you - especially like this. I do so much thinking during nights like this; I can't fathom what to feel, when you look like that, curled and squinting, your hair spilling out of your scarf across the pillow.

You're cute, M. It's exhausting. Beautiful.

Now, your nose is all wrinkled - cute, again - your brow furrowed like you're in Transfiguration or something. I hope not. I hope you wake up and tell me all about it and I hope that's it's somewhere nice, a field somewhere, somewhere beautiful. Somewhere beautiful with you. It doesn't really matter...so long as you tell me about it.

You always do. And I love knowing your dreams. 

I love this - you like this.

I always seem to love you.