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No, Lily Evans isn’t having a cry in the fourth floor girls’ bathroom. She’s having a meltdown. Lily Evans, not quite top of the class, only just a prefect, is up here clutching the grotty edge of the sink, staring at a single blonde hair caught in the drain, which is making her feel considerably more nauseous than necessary.
She can’t quite breathe properly, and there’s a knot in her stomach so tight it’s almost making her retch.
Lily can taste her gums, and that’s a new experience. They taste like metallic tap water and blood –the taste of her own veins is leaching from under her skin to her tongue. She’s sweating, too, can feel her armpits dampening with the pressure on her chest.
Get a load of this.
She’s gasping for breath. She’s hung the out of order sign on the door, so no one’ll be coming in here, because she can’t exactly have a good cry up in the library, or in the dormitory, because Emmeline doesn’t get it at all and Hestia understands a little more, but Hogwarts to Emmeline is a birthright and to Hestia it’s a gift but to Lily? Her sister has been traded in for this school – Hogwarts, for Petunia’s letters, her laughter, her friendship.
And if she’s going to fail her classes… she’s traded her sister in for falling grades and every hour of sleep she’s lost to Petunia will have been for nothing.
Lily’s got to claw her way up like Hestia with all the social renown of Emmeline, she’s got to prove her right, stupid as it is, to hold the wand.
Slughorn might consider funding her education and finding her connections at the Ministry. But only if she’s smart enough.
There’s an E in Potions stuffed at the bottom of her bag. It’s not bad. But it’s only that… she’s supposed to be good at Potions. She’s supposed to get straight O’s. And Sirius Black got an O, and Sev got an O, and even Olivia Fawcett got an O, and how do they get away with it? Her chest so tight it hurts. Black barely even studies. And she glances into the spotted mirror and her dark circles are consuming her face (her cheeks are sagging off her bones like raw meat) and she’s got foul little bumps and shining patches of oil all over her face, and her hair’s greasy and limp (she hasn’t showered in three days). And then the vicious, stinging urge to rip her skin off with her teeth, peel herself red and raw and clean from her wrists to her lips in swathes of translucent skin, pull on a shiny new face and mind. She pinches the fat under her jaw.
How is it fair? To be someone like Black, who had enough family history to give him a leg up in any industry he wants, to get perfect grades without batting an eye, to be good at Defence and Quidditch and Potions and Charms, to always look put-together even with his uniform in utter disarray, and to not even care?
She loosens her tie. It’s choking her, a shining scarlet rope tightening about her neck. She’s supposed to be a Gryffindor. She’s supposed to be brave. Her fingers feel red and swollen, too clumsy and greasy to undo her tie properly. And there are revolting flakes of dead skin and oil and dandruff speckled all over her pullover like flies on a windowsill, caught in the grey wool…
Her stomach twists. And she’s going to throw up in the sink, because that would be the perfect bloody way to finish today… except then she would have to watch the chunks of spit-sodden bread and porridge cling to the long pale hair in the drain and slide slowly down in great globules of mucus and bile, and watch the yellow-green clumps sway in the pipe… and that would only make the nausea worse.
Lily can taste the sink in her mouth, without trying, cold porcelain and a sickly undertone of germs crawling down her throat, the texture of the unidentified brown specks and the yellowed skein in the cracks of the soap dispenser, crackling on her tongue, scraping over it like sandpaper. The spit and fingers of anyone who’s ever touched the basin cram into her mouth.
She spits into the sink. Rinses her mouth out. The tap water tastes like her gums. She can’t escape it. She looks away from the basin. The wall, the floor, the bin liner are all rising up and mixing with her saliva, spilling the miscellaneous black grit and dirt and flakes of paint down her throat…
She gags. Lily tries to ground herself with the wall, but all she can manage is two steps away from the mirror before the strange sticky brown stain in the junction between the glass and the wall leaps out at her (probably coffee – long-expired, spoilt coffee, sour milk and curdled with the thick dried skin forming on top).
Lily shuts her eyes, tries to avoid thinking of the taste that springs to mind. She can’t go outside and face the world. If she cries out there, it’s over. Lily can hear Emmeline and Hestia and Remus (her chest seizes up) – an E in Potions isn’t bad, it’s good, really good, but it’s not an O… and that’s with Slughorn’s favouritism, probably boosting her a couple grades up… Merlin, what if she’s really been a T student the whole time? What if the external examinations come around and the impartial assessor takes one look at her and knows she’s a fraud… what if without Slughorn’s favouritism, she’s nothing…
She’s being ungrateful, really. An ungrateful disgusting hag (she’d have to be, to think about licking bathroom floors). And Hestia will be there with some shallow comfort phrase Lily could whisper to herself and pretend to believe anyway, so what’s the point confiding in her?
Lily’s grades don’t define you, an E is still good, Lily tried her best… and she can whisper it to herself right now, so why go out there and risk breaking into tears?
Her best wasn’t good enough. She took too many breaks, spent too much time half-focused, talking to Emmeline, not enough time memorising ingredients and properties.
She’s gasping, she can distantly hear it, dragging in the foul toilet air like she’s dying, and she’s flushing red with embarrassment even here… she sounds like a beached whale (filthy, fat, mudblood), greasy and bloated and spilling out at the edges and too large and too small all at once. She should have worked harder, worked smarter, but would it even have helped? Who is she kidding? She’d never have made it this far without Slughorn’s doting…
Hot tears finally spill over her face, and it’s cathartic for a moment before the snot comes with them, running down into her lip. She has to swipe at it with a great wad of itchy paper towel that leaves dust and specks of tissue rolling over her skin…
Lily can’t sit down because the floor is covered in unidentified water or possibly urine or expired Sleakeasy’s hair potion, so her bag is slung over her shoulder (it’s slipping down, any second now it’ll land in the liquid and smell like bathroom for the rest of the week), and the Potions essay is dragging her shoulder down, probably crumpling under the textbooks… she tries not to imagine the mildewed pages of the books, rubbing against the fabric, paper crinkling and shedding into the fibre of her bag, filled with the smell of the black specks of mould (rotten and sickly sweet).
This idiotic boarding school has no privacy, that’s why she’s here. She misses when she used to sneak under the trees outside the castle, but now Potter studies outside, sits there doing his homework instead of using the library like any normal Hogwarts student, so Lily’s stuck in the fourth floor bathroom with an out of order sign and colloportus on the door. Until some first year manages to wander in looking for Professor McGonagall and finds her, this red creature straining out of her robes with sweat dribbling down her side and snot running into her mouth and down her hands… The thought of that shame is enough to send her flying back to the mirror, siphoning the mucus off her face with excessive paper towel and her wand, dug out of her back pocket.
Her chest is still unbearable tight, and she’s still gasping for air, red and swollen and heaving, like some massive burgundy slug is staring at her from the mirror, but she swipes a crescent circle of cold water under each eye, presses down the swelling, tries to stop the gasping. She clamps her cheek between her teeth and ignores the taste of her gums.
A simple tap of her wand fixes the redness. She parts her hair the other way and manages not to throw up at the tiny flakes of dandruff that drift onto her pullover. She picks them off, picks off the lint and the dust with a swipe of her wand. Lily tries not to look at the hair in the sink. She imagines her spit sliding down it, imagines it curling in her mouth and catching on her throat and teeth. It tastes rotten blonde, tastes like the smell of stale bedsheets, sour and curdled, thick like straw, squeaking around her teeth like nails on a chalkboard.
She forces herself to swallow her spit, and turns away from the sink to breathe.
The smell of broken plumbing. She combs out her hair again with her fingers (spreading sweat through it, catching in all the knots…) she forces herself to gulp great mouthfuls of putrid air down. She does not look at the strands that fall to the ground, brittle and dark red, blending with the smears of dirt, trailing in the glistening liquids…
One last glance to the mirror. Presentable. If she still feels tender and raw and bloated when she steps into the corridor, no one will be able to tell, as long as she keeps her breathing normal.
She lifts her bag up over her shoulder and slips back into the corridor.