Short One

He was nothing like what she’d expected.

Granted, she’d eventually understood that the “Harry Potter stories” were pure fiction, and not the exaggerated biography she’d thought as a naive 11 year old muggle born, excited beyond words to enter the magical world. But still, she’d thought he’d be outstanding in some obvious way, a brave Gryffindor who’d distinguish himself through some inexplicable ‘hero’ mechanism, and not a studious, shy, and reclusive Ravenclaw.

She didn’t feel too badly about her mistake, since she was hardly the only one. I mean, he’d fooled Dumbledore, for Merlin’s sake! And Snape, who was surely the most suspicious and untrusting wizard alive.

For a time, she had thought they might be friends. By Christmas of her first year, she’d realized that Gryffindor had been a mistake. A swot, even a reformed swot, didn’t belong in Gryffindor. And she had reformed. Crying in the bathroom after being insulted for being an obnoxious know-it-all had led to nearly being nearly killed by an inexplicably rogue troll. She no longer tried to answer every question in class; she no longer wrote essays too long for her professors to read; and she now kept her stunning grades to herself.

Well, mostly. Eventually, she’d worked out a rather mercenary set of friendships, in exchange for extensive help with homework. It wasn’t great, but it was better than being alone, and tormented.

But she still studied. And so did Harry, often in the library.

She’d thought that might lead to a real friendship. Not only with Harry, but also with the small group of girls who studied with him, and no one else. And briefly, in her first year, it had appeared that might happen. But then she’d been shut out, suddenly and totally, if very kindly and politely. There’d been a series of excuses that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, but in retrospect were complete, well, bullshit.

It had taken years, but she knew, or was at least pretty sure that she knew, both the why and the how.

The ‘why’ was mostly about something she’d said. They’d been reading about magical history and culture -- after all, she could now admit,and even then could almost admit, that Professor Binns was utterly useless -- and the topic of sex and marriage had arisen. It had been shocking to her to learn that, for all the Edwardian and Victorian attire embraced by the magical world, their view of sex and marriage was not Victorian at all. Nor was it modern. Rather it was almost alien, shaped as she understood now, by the relationship of magic to sex. To learn that Merlin really was a cambion, half magical humanoid, and half sex-demon had been beyond shocking. Her British middle-class emerging feminist self-righteousness had erupted, and she reviled Merlin for his sexual profligacy, and the magical world for its acceptance of both Merlin, and a variety of ‘magico-sexual’ practices including polygamy and male-led covens.

She did not know how long she ranted -- surely it had only been a few minutes -- before she finally stopped, and noticed that a veil had dropped across Harry’s face, and that of his girls, as they smiled and nodded blankly at her. Much to her regret, that veil never really lifted.

Oh, they were polite, and almost friendly. Almost. She now suspected that they had been considering inviting her ‘inside’. But after the veil dropped, they had never included her again.

It was odd, then. She knew that they regularly studied in the library. But she could almost never find them, and in any case, rarely thought about looking for them when she was actually in the library. Of course, she understood now: mind magics were a horrifying and ubiquitous presence in the magical world, but always just under the surface.

But there was a second bit to the ‘why’.

She’d always been very trusting of established authorities. With so few, well with no friends, her parents, and then her teachers had been her protectors and her ‘friends’ such as they were. And a few days before her rant about sex and marriage in the magical world, she’d expressed her views on how important it was to let the authorities -- McGonagell and Dumbledore in this case -- know what was going on in the school. None of them had responded, except for Su Li’s quiet question, “Are you sure that’s always a good idea?”. And at that time, she thought it was.

Now? Not so much.

Her blind trust of authorities had been eroded by the recurrent nightmarish dangers of Hogwarts, beginning with the troll, but not ending there by any means. When she’d been petrified by a basilisk and lay untended in a coma-like state for weeks, her parents hadn’t even been notified.