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"Would you give it a rest already?" Ginny hissed as she yanked her bedclothes in place. It was the day before Yule, and Molly had wanted them to clean the house, top to bottom. It involved a lot of dusting, scrubbing the floors, and changing the sheets, and Fred and George generally getting in the way instead of actually helping. "I'm not going to date Harry."
"Why not? Don't you like Harry?" Ron asked, his voice low and almost getting lost in the general noise of the house; it sounded like Fred and George had charmed their sheets again. Ron was leaning against the doorjamb of her room, framed in the light from downstairs. He was fiddling restlessly with the frayed sleeve of his jumper. "And he'd be better than Michael, right?"
Ginny clenched her jaw, her mouth pressed thin. She wanted to snap, "Why don't you date him then?" but didn't. She tried to pretend she didn't hear the almost pleading note in Ron's voice. She tried to pretend they were having a perfectly normal conversation between a concerned big brother and an annoyed little sister.
"I liked Harry when I was eleven," Ginny said, her voice rigid and fraught with irritation she didn't want to examine too closely.
And even back then, it'd had less to do with Harry Potter and more to do with the Boy Who Lived, the exciting, strange boy in Ron's letters that he used to send her during his first year. She still had them, carefully tucked away in her drawer.
Never mind that when Ginny was eleven, she'd also liked Tom Riddle.
"Right?" Ron said, a tentative hope in his voice. "And you're friends. You're both in Gryffindor, and you like Quidditch. You'd be a good match."
Ginny didn't know whether she wanted to scream or laugh.
Of course Harry was a friend, but she didn't... She thought of the way she was excluded, or the way Harry barely seemed to notice her, or the way he seemed to make everything about himself — like when he'd shut himself out after her dad had been attacked instead of celebrating his recovery with the rest of them. She thought of the way he'd looked right at her and said, without a hint of embarrassment or apology, that he'd forgotten what'd happened to her in her first year, even though he was the one who'd come to get her from the Chamber. What Tom — Voldemort — had done to her.
Harry was a friend, but sometimes Ginny wasn't sure she even liked him all that much.
She thought about the way Tom had been, in the beginning. Older, mature, patient. He'd really seemed to listen to her without ridicule, all her silly worries and deepest secrets, so kind and attentive. She'd never told anyone because she didn't think it was anything others needed to hear, not after Tom had turned out to be Voldemort and he'd tried to drain her life.
She'd never told anyone how Tom had got in, to begin with. How he'd reminded her of —
Very carefully, Ginny avoided looking at Ron, holding the pillow tightly in her hands.
"It's not Harry I want to date," she said, her voice barely above a whisper, wavering.
Her heart was beating painfully as if her chest were too tight. The noises from downstairs seemed suddenly dimmer — indistinct, meaningless — and it was so quiet in her room that she could hear when Ron exhaled, his breath catching on the ghost of her name.
Then they both flinched when there was a loud series of bangs downstairs, and their mum bellowed, "Fred! George! You fix that right now or else!"
Ron straightened up from his slouch against the door and cleared his throat, running his hand discomfitedly through his hair. "I'm gonna — go look what happened," he muttered.
Ginny inhaled an unsteady breath after he was gone, hugging her pillow, and pressed her face into it. It smelled like the wildflower detergent her mum used and the drying charm.
She still wanted to scream.