“Thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”
Usually I’m whispers and sepia and boring and bland, a pressed flower fading between the binding of someone else’s story. Just waiting.
So this time I was braver. She caught me staring, I didn’t have much of a choice.
We had taken shelter in the lower common room, traipsing through the rain-sodden masses to drip dry by the fire, the cuffs of our jeans soiled from puddle stomping and my text books soggy from being caught with out an umbrella in the downpour.
“American,” she mocked. lmno folded herself into a chair, shaking out the sleeves of her sweater like a wet dog. I shrugged my messenger bag to the floor beside an empty footstool and perched awkwardly on the edge. The little-used common room was packed today, construction on the grounds had made a voyage to our regular dorms nearly impossible unless one owned a boat. I scanned the other refugees, noticing how they were all better prepared for the rain than I.
“Goonie hunting?”
I stared dumbly, “I’m what?”
“You’re staring at the goons.”
“The who?”
“Charles Goss, Rupert Randolf Moze.” She pantomimed filed her nails with a pencil, “Characters, the lot of them.”
Recognition, “Cook.”
“He’s the red one on the left, yeah. Rupe’s the big one, we call him Buster. Not sure why really except his full name’s bloody fucking insane but no one wants to tease him on it because—oh.” She followed my eyes, pursing her lips in an amused but definitive oh no.
elle m. arched her eyebrows so high they got tangled in the mass of Spanish curls piled haphazardly onto her skull. She had adorned her coils with crimson posies from the common yard, much to the disdain of the grounds keepers, and in our dash from class to the common room the rain had drowned her flowers and sent a flurry of wet curls spilling into her eyes. With a smeared raccoon rim of mascara under her warning eyes she looked very Helena Bonham Carter. Impossibly gorgeous in the circumstances but frightening nonetheless.
“It gets worse!” She feigned disgust, a prominent yuck echoing from the swallows of her throat. She leaned in close, folding her arms at the elbows but letting them dangle of the side of her chair, a single eye brow arching dangerously towards disappearing in her curls again. “Malfoy.” Head tilt, raised chin, American for “owned.”
“Oh stop.”
A shrug, “might as well be, the fair hair and sinister green eyes an’ all. The smirk, sneer, perpetual-look-of-contempt—” she went on to describe the resemblance. “Awful little prick, sumbitch, nasty bothersome—”
“Okay, I get it. I’m not looking anymore!” I shrugged my shoulder, cheating my torso towards the fire so if I looked straight ahead my gaze fell just past her. From my peripheral vision I watched anxiously, all thoughts of bravely asking for what I wanted aside.
She tugged her lips to the side, contemplating my downcast eyes. I continued my shrewd avoidance, focusing instead on removing a hangnail, hunching over my thumb to gingerly inspect my wounded skin.
“Well his name’s Tom.”
