Chapter Text
At the end of the marble countertop, next to the wire mesh bowl of small, mealy red apples and bananas that consistently go brown before they’re thrown out, Pansy Parkinson finds two standard white envelopes and one heavy nine by twelve packet addressed to her over the course of three weeks.
She understands, of course, the steady stream of choices she's made day in and out over years that eroded the solid ground between what she would have liked and what she gets until the fissure that separates them is as large as the kind of vast oxide red canyon you ride through on a mule.
She knows how she got here. But it doesn’t make it any easier to accept the only offer she’s given.
“It’s an excellent school.” Her father adjusts the strap of his Rolex, then peels back the skin on a freckled banana from the basket on the counter. The state university turned him into the kind of lawyer that cooks Kraft macaroni and cheese on a gleaming brass Viking range and pulls his milk out of a SubZero fridge.
It’s good.
It’s good enough.
Once she’s accepted—and it isn’t even a grudging acceptance, it’s passive and resigned—Pansy goes through the motions of finishing her Senior year.
She drives the getaway car for the theft of the wooden viking mascot from its creosote-soaked plinth in the middle of the quad at the high school down the hill. Two weeks later, she conducts intelligence that traces her own school’s chipped and grimacing plaster bear to an alcove behind a rival gym. At the end of May she stands still while her mother’s seamstress pins her blue satin prom dress at the bust and waist and hips, and complies with Pansy’s request to shorten it to the middle of her thighs. The slogans she smears over the windows of her friends’ cars in white shoe polish two days before graduation are forward-looking. Aggressively cheerful.
It’s a final burst of controlled chaos meant to sweep them all over the finish line of childhood like a conquering swell, and Pansy knows, intellectually, that it’s fun.
It’s all so fucking fun.
“I should have studied for my SATs.”
The sun bakes the backs of her legs where she lies prone on the carpet next to the massive arched window set in the south wall of her bedroom. It feels warm and nappish and familiar. So does the phone tucked between her shoulder and her ear and the wad of Bubble Yum she’s molding against the backs of her front teeth with her tongue.
“You did fine. The U is a great school.” Tracey offers a sympathetic but unsatisfying ear. She cared a little bit more, tried a little bit harder, and came home to not one but three weighty envelopes on her kitchen counter offering to carry her someplace new.
“I could have tried , though.”
She could have. But there’s a difference between “I tried and then I failed,” and “I failed because I didn’t try," and when offered a choice, Pansy's always taken the latter.
“I’m going to miss you.” Pansy blows a bubble—a bit of a dud—and pops it. The summer has been deeply weird already and her own honesty keeps catching her off guard.
“I’ll miss you, too," Tracey says. "Terry Boot’s going to Boston, but I can’t make fun of his pleated chinos without you.”
“I’ll be so pissed if you do.”
“You packed for camp?”
Pansy pushes at the corner of the suitcase lying open next to her bed with the tip of her big toe. “No. Sort of.”
“Are you excited?”
“To sleep on a plywood bunk bed for another summer so my dad can relive his boyhood vicariously through me?” Pansy can already smell the Pine Sol and vinyl undertones of the mess hall. “No.”
“But you’re a counselor. All that power.”
“I do get a whistle.”
“Make sure you bring bug spray.”
Pansy closes her eyes and imagines Tracey on the other end of the phone. She’s almost certainly lying on her stomach across her canopied bed, ankles crossed, flipping through a copy of Elle or Vogue , and Pansy is aware that they might never talk in exactly this way—with patch-of-sunlight idleness and big, comfortable stretches of silence—again.
She draws air down to the bottom of her lungs.
She shoves it all out.
“That’s like the first thing on the list.”
“I think I might fuck Neville.” Lavender waves a gust of smoke from the bonfire out of her face and knocks back a swig of her fourth strawberry daiquiri wine cooler.
“What?” Pansy nearly drops her own bottle, fished out of the bottom of a trash bag full of ice forty minutes earlier and still full to the neck. “What do you mean, you 'might fuck Neville'?”
“Don't you think?” Lavender tilts her head to the side and contemplates. “I mean, look at him.”
From her seat on the opposite side of the fire, Pansy has been watching Neville off and on, because of his relationship with the mosquitoes.
He sits with careless posture at the end of a half log bench, making his way through a warm can of Sprite, periodically wincing and slapping himself in the neck. The single-minded desire mosquitoes have for his body is one of the enduring traditions of summer at Camp Pigwidgeon. It’s as necessary as telling the seven year-olds there’s a giant squid in the lake and writing your name and the year on the wall next to your bunk in Sharpie.
“I’m looking at him.” Pansy’s not sure what she’s supposed to see beyond his annual battle against contracting a tropical virus. She blows across the top of her bottle and it makes the shrill whistle of an oncoming train. “I give up.”
“Oh, come on. He’s always been super cute. And he’s, like, six foot two now. His t-shirt rode up while he was stretching during orientation and he’s got an adorable little four pack.” Lavender rubs an appreciative circle on her own abdomen. “If you don’t want him, I’m going for it.”
Pansy jolts and turns to stare at her. “Why the fuck would I want him?”
“I don’t know. I thought that since he's . . . you know."
“No. I don’t know whatever it is you think you know.”
Lavender drains her wine cooler and grinds the bottle into the litter of pine needles under the bench. “Well, if you do want him, I won’t—”
“Go for whoever you want,” Pansy says, standing up. “The smoke’s blowing over here. I’m moving.”
She walks around the fire, holding on to the neck of the bottle she’s never going to finish.
By the open tailgate of a rusted out truck, Draco’s staring at the nipples of a random skeeve named Scab or Rabies in cutoff jean shorts who doesn’t seem to own a shirt.
It’s only slightly less of a shock than the sight of steady, reliable Cho leaning against the trunk of a tree with her eyes half-lidded, letting the new counselor, Cormac—some Pi Kappa Alpha golden god who looks like he’s a shoo-in for a beer pong scholarship—drag his undoubtedly sweaty hand over the bare stretch of skin between her waistband and the knotted front of her shirt.
Counselor hookups are as inevitable as the mosquitoes, but what the fuck?
Pansy makes her way over to the half log bench and sits on the ground next to Neville’s knee.
“Hey, Pans. How’s your summer so far?”
“Fucking perfect.”
“Nice." Neville scratches his shin. "Did you bring any OFF?”
She looks up at him. “Did I bring any what off?”
“Oh.” He clears his throat. “I mean did you bring any bug spray out here?”
“Do I look like I have any bug spray with me?”
Neville slaps his thigh. When he lifts his hand, there’s a splatter of bright red blood. “I guess not.”
Pansy leans her head back against the bench and flicks her tongue over the opening of the bottle. Wine coolers taste like the game Candy Land looks and are exactly half as fun. She has no intention of actually drinking this one.
Cormac leans into Cho and tucks his fingertips into the front of her waistband. He says something at her ear that makes her take his hand, then he stumbles after her on the track leading from the bonfire down to the moldering buildings at the shore.
“What the fuck?” Pansy says.
“He seems nice.”
“He’s not nice, he’s the Ghost of Paternity Suits Yet to Come.” She sets her bottle down, unconcerned when it tips and empties into the pine needles.
“Ready to be on lifeguard duty with me again?” He smiles, lopsided and sincere. She has no idea what Lavender’s talking about. He’s precisely the sort of predictable, good-natured Neville she’s gone to camp with each year from the time she was ten. But when he knocks his knee lightly into her shoulder, she’s forced to concede that she feels smaller sitting next to him than she did last year.
He’s grown. People grow. It doesn’t mean you need to fuck them.
“I'm ready for my whistle.” She claps a mosquito out of the air next to his ankle.
“Hermione said you’re going to the U?” He’s wearing a hooded state college sweatshirt, navy blue with bright white block letters, like it's something he actually wants. The interrogative lilt at the end of his sentence makes Pansy want to slap his neck.
“Yeah. I’m going to the U.”
“You’re not excited about it?"
She knows she's supposed to be.
It’s a great school.
Not too close to home.
Not too far.
“No. I’m not.” Pansy stands up. She doesn’t feel like talking about it. At all. “Shit. My foot fell asleep.” She hobbles away on her pinpricking sole.
“Where are you going?” Neville asks.
“I’m swimming to the Island.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
The strip of dirt that switchbacks from the woods down to the lake goes to the trouble of skirting a patch of stinging nettles, but is otherwise overgrown and almost useless. By the time Neville catches up to her at the bottom, her shins are cross hatched in pale red lines.
“How much have you had to drink?” he asks.
"Is your name Scott Parkinson?"
"No."
“Then you’re not my dad, Neville.”
He doesn’t say anything else.
It’s well past midnight, and slightly more than half a moon hangs over the lake. The water is completely still except for the periodic blip and ripple of a trout and the dry rustle of bats glutting themselves on Neville’s mosquitoes. In the eastern half of the lake, the Island squats in the dark, a low black silhouette studded with evergreen spires and a single old growth hemlock rising over their heads.
A laugh, amplified by Natty Light, rolls down the hill and out across the water, pings against the trees hugging the opposite shore and comes back again.
Somewhere along the near shoreline there’s the unmistakable sound of a moan.
Pansy tears her shirt off over her head.
“What are you—”
She's slipped off her Keds and kicked her shorts over her feet before Neville finishes his question.
Stripped down to her bra and underwear—the cotton kind, practical for camp, in pale grey and white stripes—she wades out to her knees and dives in.
Briefly, her muscles seize and her lungs give up their air in the transition from the thick summer heat to the slick cool body of the lake, but before the shock has really begun she's passed through it. She turns her face to breathe and watches a sheet of water trail off her arm.
It’s almost exactly 400 meters from the end of the dock at Camp Pigwidgeon to the crescent of bare dirt beach marking the mouth of the trail that loops around the Island. From where she jumped in on the opposite side of the lake, it’s slightly farther, but distance is good. It’s exactly what she wants.
Alone in the dark, her feet sweep through the water above the twisting bodies of the trout and below the glowing bisected coin of the moon. Her body in motion is a verb, not to try, or to fail, but to be , and when she is —alone, afloat—the knot that’s tightened inside of her chest for months falls loose.
It's peaceful—a real John Denver Rocky Mountain High sort of experience—right up to the second she feels something that isn't a trout moving in the water behind her.
She coughs on a mouthful of lake, and turning around, half expects to see death come to call in the form of some B movie waterborne machete horror. It’s only Neville. He’s in the lake with her for reasons known only to him.
“What the fuck, Neville?”
He doesn’t give her an answer and she doesn’t wait for one, kicking her legs to start again. She swims hard enough that her lungs start to burn, but she's too late. By the time she skirts the algae-slicked sides of the fallen, half-submerged trees lurking like naval mines around the perimeter of the Island, he’s already sitting on the shore, watching her.
She crests the steep drop-off from the shallows at the landing and drags herself to her feet. “You scared the shit out of me.”
Neville sits with his hands hooked around his knees, breathing easily. He shakes his head once, throwing a spray of water around himself, and the hair pasted to his forehead springs into waves. Droplets plip from the ends onto his nose and his bare chest and shoulders. He looks strangely content.
“Why did you follow me?” she asks.
“You shouldn’t swim by yourself.”
Pansy rolls her eyes. “Whatever. Now you’re wet.”
"It's alright."
He's stripped down to his blue cotton shorts. His skin is pale this early in summer, and in the blue white light reflecting off the lake, he looks soft and spectral, watching her with his head tilted to one side.
She wants to yell at him to leave her alone, but he’s a difficult person to stay angry with. Not that Pansy hasn’t tried.
Good old Neville. Good, considerate, safety-minded . . .
Pansy’s halfway through that thought, still standing in the shallows with water dripping off her elbows and coursing down her legs when the disaster happens.
She's certain that while they all unpacked their bags in their cabins that morning and pulled on their new camp shirts, he was the same Neville that he’d always been.
Maybe he was a few inches taller. Maybe he'd lost the last of his baby fat, and his skin had finished clearing up, but he was still himself—quiet and hesitant, the sort of person who kisses his grandmother goodbye through the driver's side window of her gold Nissan. She expects him to accidentally hit himself in the face while twirling his guard whistle again this year, and won’t be surprised if he falls into the space between the dock and a canoe. He’s still more enthusiastic than a person should be about bagel sandwiches, mild and harmless and as fascinating as a room temperature can of Sprite.
It happens just like a Magic Eye picture.
One moment the boy sitting on the shore in front of her is the abstract pointillist cluster of desaturated dots—the loose collection of minor disappointments—that is Neville Longbottom, and the next they've resolved into the clear image of a young man.
He’s truly tall now, and his face is angular and adult. His eyes are still wide set and downturned, thoughtful and kind, but most of the uncertainty and all of the worry has been chased out of them.
She wouldn’t have thought twice about standing in front of the correct Neville Longbottom in her underwear. She’s done it before, during other summers, under similar circumstances.
Standing in front of this Neville in a soaked and translucent bra—with his curling hair and white marble body, a Greek demigod in blue cotton shorts—is a catastrophe.
He's still looking at her.
She shivers and wraps her arms around her waist. Her skin is studded with goosebumps.
“What?” She sounds sharp and defensive.
“You're shivering. You should get out of the water.”
She’s been ready with a rejoinder for every should since she first learned to talk, but this time she comes up empty-handed. She slogs through the shallows and sits next to him, leaning back on her elbows in the dirt.
“Happy now?” The Magic Eye won't unresolve, and she can’t bring herself to look at him.
“Are you warm?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’m happy.”
The light from the bonfire seeps through the trees, but Camp Pigwidgeon, sprawling along the southern shoreline, is dark. So are the windows of the few private cabins and lake houses. Above the lake, more stars make themselves visible than seems strictly necessary, and the static cloud of the Milky Way arches over the southern half of the sky, dull and electric. Pansy has the brief, troubling sensation that she’s going to fall off the Earth and go rolling like a tumbleweed into the dark desert of space. She presses her fingertips hard into the dirt to hold on.
The sky is motionless, vast and awful, but then a line appears, like the casual stroke of a bright white pen.
“Meteor!” She turns to Neville, flush with victory, as though stargazing were a winner-take-all contact sport.
He’s so close she can see the beads of water dewed in his eyelashes.
“We should come back out in August.” He’s still the wrong Neville, and he’s looking at her, tracing along the lines of her face. Water keeps dripping off of his hair onto his torso; fascinated, she watches a drop course down the middle of his abdomen and disappear into his navel.
“What are you looking at?” She wants to sound annoyed, but she doesn’t, and she isn’t.
He brushes a strand of hair back from her forehead with his thumb. “You.”
“Why would we come out here in August?” Her shoulder wants to settle against his, so she lets it.
“For the meteor showers.”
He tilts his head, and her eyes drop closed.
She wonders how the old Neville kissed.
This one does it so softly that she forgets to hold on, and falls into the sky.
His fingers land against her cheek, his touch tentative and maddeningly reserved, and she thinks someone should tell him that his gentleness makes her ache.
But her mouth belongs to this damp Perseus on the lake shore, and he's using it, very sweetly, so she doesn't say anything at all.
She considers whether or not he can feel her pulse, knocking hard at the surface of her skin.
Her mouth does what it wants, without asking her for permission, and opens to him. His fingers twitch against her cheek.
“Fuck!” A shout, with a burst of laughter close on its heels, sounds out from the northern shore and echoes around the lake. Startled, Pansy turns to look.
Blaise, in a fresh white camp t-shirt, stumbles down the path from the bonfire. Behind him, someone with long pale hair trips and falls, and once they're on their knees, starts laughing. Lavender. They’re both drunk.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Perseus's belly lift and fall as he breathes.
"Pansy?" His voice, quiet and urgent, stirs the fine hairs at her nape.
She should give her mouth back to him, since it's his.
She turns toward him.
Toward Neville.
A mosquito whines in her ear.
She blinks a drip of water from her eyes.
She shivers in her underwear.
On the Island.
In the dark.
Oh my fucking God, she thinks.
Neville Longbottom is a beautiful man, and she’s been kissing him on his mouth.
For a while.
She jumps to her feet.
Fuck this summer. Fuck camp. Fuck the U. Fuck Candy Land. Fuck puberty. Fuck every single second of high school she spent listening to her mother's copy of Patti Smith’s Horses on vinyl and copying eye make-up looks out of Cosmo instead of doing her Trigonometry homework.
“Pansy?”
Fuck.
She’s not going to turn around.
“They’re going to jump in the lake. Idiots.” There's a soup of novel and distressingly vivid feelings boiling away in Pansy's belly, and she wants nothing to do with any of them. She walks down to the lake and trudges through the shallows, then without looking back at Neville, pushes off as hard as she can into a dive at the drop-off.
She doesn't hear him dive in behind her, and he certainly doesn't pass her in the water. She's alone this time on her way across the lake, and with every stroke she feels more certain than she has in months. Because as vague as the rest of her future seems, she’s decided that she’s not going to look at Neville Longbottom again for the rest of her life.
It’s not that she ignores anyone.
She’s not fucking rude, unlike some people who go around surprising you by getting their suddenly adult male bodies soaking wet.
It’s just that she lets a Neville-shaped hole open up in her awareness.
She carefully fails to notice that he's in shorts and a t-shirt and white Vans slip on sneakers and that he has calf muscles as she’s walking behind him and Oliver Wood on the way to the mess hall for breakfast the following morning. She certainly doesn’t pay any attention to the fact that the fine hairs on her arms rise when, after he uses up the last of the half and half, he reaches around her to set the refilled jug on the counter where she’s pouring herself a cup of over-brewed, stale Folgers.
Because what even is a Neville Longbottom, when you really think about it? No one asked for one. No one wanted to know, and you go eight summers without any problems with one before he goes ambushing you with his stupid gentle mouth when you’re almost naked.
Fucking rude.
“Have you seen his little red shorts?” Sitting on the floor next to her bunk in the girls’ counselor cabin, tying off the end of one long, heavy braid in her profligate mass of dark blonde hair, Lavender’s eyes flash open wide. “I don’t even care. He can take me up against a wall.”
The image appears in Pansy’s mind of Lavender’s thighs wrapped around Neville’s hips, in the dark, against the brown plank siding at the back of the boys’ counselor cabin. If an idea like that made someone’s insides sear and cramp up with nausea, that would be unexpected and uncalled for. Pansy is thankful that it doesn’t happen to her.
"Sure." Ginny lies propped on her elbows across Hermione's bed, sucking on a Tootsie Pop. "But tell me about Blaise. I've heard he has an enormous—"
Pansy tunes them out. Lavender weaves a second braid and discusses the known properties of Blaise's junk with enthusiasm until, without any warning, Hermione stops folding and refolding her cotton underwear.
“You know what?” she begins.
Oh, thinks Pansy. This should be good.
Hermione explodes into a speech about female support, cherishing friendships, community, something something memories and how camp is not about having sex with boys who are mostly bad at it. Pansy hears approximately half of what she says and agrees with a quarter of it.
Camp is not about sex. It’s about getting through seven weeks of a summer job and keeping your appealing lopsided mouth to yourself.
Pansy twists a hank of her own dark French bob then lets it go. Lavender paints stripes of glossy lilac polish over her toenails, and Pansy thinks idly, generally, about whether boys with blond hair would tend to prefer blondes, or not.
Not that it matters.
Not that she cares.
Pansy is a focused water safety professional. She communicates as needed. She does her job.
She's not trying to get into anyone's shorts.
Late on a Monday afternoon two weeks into camp, she stands at the edge of the cordoned swim area, her body sun-browned, shining and coconut-scented with Banana Boat SPF 30, mentally counting off the last round of swimmers as they leave the water.
She blows a massive bubble, pops it, and draws the gum back into her mouth while Neville climbs down from the guard stand.
Pansy's all-time least favorite camper—a smarmy little twelve year-old creep who keeps "accidentally" dropping his oars in the middle of the lake and needing a boat rescue—walks by, playing with his drawstring.
“Is your suit bugging you, Josh?” asks Neville.
Josh sniffs, lake water dribbling off the hem of his shorts. “Yeah, it keeps coming undone.”
“Can I help?”
Josh shows Neville his drawstring. It’s a continuous loop without cut ends, and the tie Josh has in it looks loose.
“There’s a way to knot this kind, bud.” Neville spends five minutes talking Josh through a complicated series of loops that results in a neat and sturdy-looking bow. “Come see me tomorrow before you get in the water and I’ll show you again.” He slaps Josh lightly on the back as he walks away. Pansy watches Josh trudge up the hill, and observes with shock and awe that he doesn’t fiddle with his drawstring once.
“Help me with the boats?” Neville asks once the kids have trailed up to the showers. Pansy nods, her eyes hidden behind her black plastic Ray-Ban aviators.
They’re settling the final canoe into the rack in the boat shed when Lavender bounces down the slope from the Lodge, her braids swinging against her back.
Pansy takes off her sunglasses and busies herself taking inventory of the First Aid kit. If Lavender wants to come and put her hands all over Neville's shorts and test the hardness of the walls of the boat shed, she’s perfectly welcome to.
Pansy is making a mental note to ask Percy to bring down more Band-Aids when Lavender leans in the doorway, fiddling with the pastel pink hair tie at the end of one braid.
“Hey,” she says, drawing the word out.
“Hey.” Neville looks at Lavender expectantly.
“Hermione said you have tonight off." She’s speaking to Pansy and Neville, but mostly to Neville. "A couple of us are going to walk into town later. Maybe get burgers?” She has the personal aura of a large funfair bag of blue and pink cotton candy.
Pansy trains her focus on rearranging the sterile alcohol prep pads so that the print is all oriented the same direction.
“That sounds great.” Neville crosses his arms and leans against the wall.
He leans. Lavender leans. They're both such great leaners.
“Awesome!" Lavender boings slightly on the balls of her feet. "I’ll come by the cabin later?”
“Sure, yeah.”
Lavender pops back up the hill, her braids dangling like a loose set of reins.
Pansy pulls out a pair of tweezers to inspect them.
Neville moves close and brushes up on his leaning skills against the wall next to the First Aid kit. “Will you come?”
“To what?” She clacks the tweezers twice, then tucks them back into place.
“Into town?”
She glances at him.
He’s been out in the sun for two weeks, and everything about him is golden.
“You’re going with Lavender.”
He shakes his head. “I think it’s a few—”
“You should go with Lavender.”
“I don’t—”
“She’s very blonde, if you're into that.” Pansy flips through a stack of plastic thermometer sleeves. “You're blond, I can’t imagine you don't like blondeness.”
“Pansy, what’s—”
“She has little shorts. You have little shorts.”
Neville looks down. “My shorts are little?”
Pansy slams the metal door of the First Aid kit shut and latches it.
“They’re tiny!”
“They are?”
Neville has been walking around the swim area in too-small red shorts since camp started. Pansy can only assume they’re the same shorts he was issued last year, but he’s grown at least three inches between that summer and this, and the hem stops at the top of his thighs. There are no secrets remaining about the shape of his backside.
The shorts are small, and he isn’t, and sometimes he strips off his white uniform t-shirt—which is also slightly too small—just as they reach the shower block after guard duty.
All Pansy wants in life is for people to wear clothes that fit them.
“Look." She turns and jabs a finger against his thigh. “This is the tan line from your other shorts, and this”—she slides her finger upward, to the hem of his little lifeguard shorts at the top of his thigh—"is where these shorts end, and . . .”
She looks up and trails off, because Neville’s eyes are open wide.
“Pansy.” His voice is helpless. “I’m sorry I kissed you.”
“What?” Pansy pulls her hand back.
“If you’re mad at me because of what happened on the Island, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”
“I’m not mad at you.” Pansy crosses her arms over her stomach. She opted for a red two-piece suit for lifeguard duty this year, because they’re easier to deal with when you need to pee, but she’s suddenly struck by a profound feeling of exposure.
“You seem mad.” He’s being plaintive again, and she hates it.
Pansy shakes her head. “I’m not mad.”
“Okay.”
“We’re friends, Neville.”
“I know. I want to be friends.”
He’s been standing in the sun for hours today. He smells good, like line-dried laundry. She badly wants to touch his shirt.
And she supposes that if they're friends, maybe she can, so she reaches out and lays her palm over his belly. His abdomen tightens under her hand.
“You’re warm,” she says. And he is. She puts her other hand against him, too.
She’s never felt more naked in her bathing suit than she does when he lays his hands on her hips.
“You're really tall,” she says, like he should apologize for it. The top of her head falls short of his chin.
“Yeah.” He looks down at himself. “I guess.”
"I'm not kissing you again."
He does nothing at all to curb the disappointment on his face. "Okay."
She lifts up on her toes.
With her chest pressed against his warm ribs and her fists bunched in the front of his sun-white shirt, she’s acutely aware of the shape of him.
She’s always so completely aware of him, now.
He's briefly still, then bends his mouth down to hers.
It’s soft like it was before, for a long time, but then his tongue flicks lightly against her lip like it’s asking permission, and—yes, obviously.
Yes.
She parts her lips, and they both make absurd, small, pleased, pleading sounds while they kiss each other’s open mouths. Pansy’s always thought that licking another person’s tongue should be awkward and repellent, and sometimes, with other boys, it has been. With Neville, it's secretive and shy and completely wonderful and fills her with the urge to take her own and other people’s very small shorts off. Pansy slips her hands up and around his back, hunched over so he can reach her, and pulls herself into him.
His palms run up her sides and he spreads his fingers out across her back, one hand between her shoulder blades, and one just below, and all she can think is: he’s so warm.
Not that she cares, particularly. He can be as warm as he wants, and if Lavender wants to wrap her legs around him after burgers, that’s fine. He’s not Pansy’s. She doesn’t want to keep him. She's not applying to attend Neville in the fall. They’re just doing open-mouthed kissing in the boat shed today.
He’s so warm.
Pansy pushes her belly against him. She knows she shouldn’t be surprised, but when he makes a different sort of sound and his hips jerk forward, she breathes in sharply and steps back.
He looks like he’s three quarters of the way through running a marathon, pink and sweaty and mildly traumatized.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to.”
She’s flushed and warm, too, with sweat gathering at the base of her spine. “We need more Band-Aids." She sounds angry. And maybe she is.
Band-Aids are an essential.
Neville lets a hand fall casually, covering his shorts. “We do?”
"Yes." She clenches one hand around her whistle like she's about to blow it. "I'm not kissing you anymore."
"Oh."
"I'm going to go tell Percy."
A look of terror sweeps over Neville's face. "That we've been kissing?"
"That we're out of Band-Aids."
"Oh." Neville looks shell-shocked. "Right now?"
"Yes."
“Okay.”
Pansy turns to leave, then stops in the doorway and turns back. "You should go get a burger."
"Should I?"
"Yes."
"I don't think I want a burger."
Pansy's shoulders untense. "You don't?"
Neville shakes his head. "No."
"Well, you should." He should, and he probably will. Who isn't eventually going to eat a burger when it’s prancing around in front of them every day? People get hungry. "Everyone likes burgers. They're delicious."
She heads up the hill, walking too fast, to find Percy Weasley and tell him about the Band-Aids.
But not the kissing.
Anyway, they're not going to kiss anymore.
She reminds him when they're tucked into the shrouded space behind the maple tree at the fork in the trail leading to the boys’ cabins. She’s pushed up onto her toes, with her arms tight around his middle and her flashlight dangling from a strap around her wrist.
“We’re friends,” she says, coming up for air.
“I know.” His hair is wet. He smells like Irish Spring and tastes like peppermint toothpaste.
Lavender’s toenails alternate aquamarine and cautionary yellow the next week, her braids wound up around her head like a Dutch milkmaid and gleaming in the amber last light of the evening.
“Do you think he’s had sex before?” She narrows her eyes like the possibility has just occurred to her that he hasn't.
It’s a Friday, and Pansy sits cross-legged at the edge of the playing field next to Millie Bulstrode and her ubiquitous sketchbook.
"Neville?" asks Ginny from the middle of a hamstring stretch. "I seriously doubt it. How’s the seduction going?"
Lavender leans back on her elbows and closes her eyes against the sun. "Slow. I think he likes me, I just wonder if he's inexperienced."
Pansy’s silent behind her Ray-Bans, chewing her gum and staring out at the middle of the close-mowed lawn where Neville and Oliver are tossing a Frisbee back and forth.
“You were sitting together forever at the campfire last night.” Ginny switches legs. “Then you left at the same time. I thought maybe something happened.”
“No. He said good night at the top of the trail and took off." Lavender stretches both legs in front of her and bends herself improbably in half, wrapping her hands around the soles of her feet. “Maybe he’s gay?”
Millie smirks. “Maybe he likes brunettes.”
It’s a movie night, and all the kids are tucked away in the Lodge with popcorn, M&Ms, and 2-liters of off-brand root beer under Hermione and Percy’s watch.
Pansy’s disinterest in Ultimate Frisbee is aggressive and immutable, but it feels good to sit in the grass and do nothing.
Neville isn’t a natural athlete, not to the degree of Oliver or Cedric on his team, or Ginny, Charlie, Cormac, and Cho on the other, but he’s holding his own.
Pansy allows herself to look at him.
He’s wearing a rolled bandana around his forehead like Charlie does, his little shorts, and a t-shirt that seems to fit.
Sometimes he’s himself, all gangles and knees and a profound lack of competitive edge, catching the disc against his chest on an awkward jump and falling back on one foot. But then he snaps the disc out of the air with his arm extended and his shirt rising up, smiles, and makes a perfect return. He’s Perseus then, his hair shaggy and gilded, stripped pale by the sun and tangled from the lake and the hard, sulphurous well water that runs in the showers.
Lavender's on his team.
“Like this.” He’s showing her how to snap her wrist while she throws.
She does seem to be trying, and she’s probably legitimately awful, but Neville stands behind her and puts his hand over hers to show her what it should feel like when she does it right.
Pansy jumps up. “I’m going to take a shower.”
"You okay? Millie spreads her hand out over whatever she's working on in her sketchbook and looks up.
"I'm fine."
She's so fine that as she’s walking across the field toward the cabins, Pansy doesn’t turn around to see why Lavender and Neville are both laughing.
He finds her an hour later, her hair wet and smelling like green apple, sitting on an aging split rail fence and looking out over the lake.
The sun settles behind the trees on the western shoreline. Emptied of swimmers and boats, the lake mirrors the dilute blue sky and a field of clouds saturated in cadmium pigments of orange and yellow.
She thinks about disappointment—about the gap that can grow between what a person actually wants and what they end up getting, and she thinks that sometimes she doesn't know the difference between the two until it's too late.
To fail to try is to try to fail, she thinks, like a motivational speaker in a junior high gym.
“You left,” he says.
She swings one leg and then the other over the fence until she sits with her back to the lake.
“I’m not into Frisbee.”
"I get that.” His smile lifts slightly higher on the left side than the right.
“Who won?” She takes her sunglasses off and hangs them from the neck of her t-shirt.
"We did. We had Oliver."
She ignores her first impulse.
Her second impulse is to hop down off the fence and carefully walk around him. To go back to her cabin, lie down across her bed and file the uneven nail on the ring finger of her left hand, or finally crack the spine of the single novel she brought with her.
The first impulse comes roaring back, and she opens her legs.
He steps between her thighs, then wraps his arms around her waist like he's certain of something.
His shirt is damp. He smells like sweat and sunscreen and men’s deodorant.
They’re friends, so they kiss.
Then they kiss some more.
He’s careful, she knows, to not press himself too close. He keeps his angles polite, his hips canted away, even while she’s brushing at his lower lip with the tip of her tongue and digging her heels into the backs of his thighs.
Her hands steal under the hem of his shirt to sweep her fingers, with bare and hesitant contact, over the small of his back. His skin is sticky and gritty with the salt of his drying sweat. It’s gross and intimate and she likes it immensely.
We're friends, she’s supposed to remind him, but what she whispers against his mouth instead is, "You're warm." She strokes the pads of her fingers over the ridges of his shoulder blades. "Why do you get so warm?"
His hands press into her back.
"I don't know."
She allows herself to look at him, and then she can't stop.
He shines in the midday heat of a Thursday at the end of July, coming out of the water after swimming laps with the kids.
“You should do the Island swim this year, Josh.” Neville offers a high five as the boy hoists himself onto the dock. “You just did twelve laps. You can totally do it.”
“Yeah?”
“Definitely,” Neville says.
Pansy has become convinced that Josh can only smirk, but the smile he gives to Neville is wide and real.
It's nothing, only kindness, which is easy for Neville. It’s not a feat.
Behind her Ray-Bans, Pansy is livid with want.
In the boat shed, she leans into his body.
“We’re friends,” she tells his lips and his hands, and his soft, downturned eyes.
“I know.”
“Why do you taste so good?”
“I don’t know.”
Pansy snaps her Bubble Yum and looks at the face of her watch.
It's eleven o'clock on a Friday night, which means nothing. There's nothing to do, and no place to go. There's no reason she should care.
She's resigned herself to lying in her bunk most nights, flipping through yellowed Peanuts comics anthologies and the collection of musty 1960s MAD Magazine paperback books jumbled in a wooden crate behind the door of the cabin.
Fleur leans on one elbow and stares into space, a serious, important novel open to its title page on her bed. Daphne and Padma sit hip to hip on Padma's bunk, sharing a set of headphones, each with a faded issue of National Geographic spread out across her thighs.
Pansy sits up. Then she flips her legs over the side of the bed, slips her bare feet into her Keds, hooks her flashlight around her wrist, and walks out the door without a word.
She gets her fill of wood smoke every night helping kids smash blackened marshmallows between graham crackers at the fire pit next to the lake. The appeal of doing it again in the clandestine woods with booze and weed has escaped her until now.
She walks with her flashlight off past the last set of cabins, takes the path around the lake to the east, then leaves it to pick her way along a deer trail, following the sound of an acoustic guitar.
In the center of a clearing, a fire pops and whines, circled by people half lit with orange light and half hidden in the dark. The unlit spaces are punctuated by the gleam of firelight on red plastic cups and beer cans, pinpoints of lit cigarette ends, and the sustained flare of a joint.
The shadows are heavy, and it takes a moment for Pansy to figure out who’s there. When she does, there’s evidence of the folly of Hermione’s abstinence speech everywhere.
Camp may be about memories, but being young is clearly about sex.
There’s Cho, sitting across Cormac’s thighs with his head resting against her shoulder and his fingertips stroking the inside of her calf, and Ginny, on the ground between Blaise’s open legs, her elbows draped over his knees.
Hermione herself sits with her back against a fallen tree, watching Charlie Weasley play his guitar, and the look on her face is not about scrapbook memories and whittling roasting sticks.
There’s Neville, too, in a folding aluminum beach chair, a can of Coke resting on his knee, and Lavender in a matching chair beside him, leaning against his arm.
Pansy walks up to the fire with the sleeves of her cardigan drawn over her hands.
“Hey!” Charlie’s finished one song and fiddles between chords, thinking about his next. There’s something amiable and comfortable about him, like you’d tell him all your secrets if you spent too much time with him, or start dressing like him. “Come have a seat.”
Pansy shoves her fists, still inside her sleeves, in her pockets. “Thanks.”
Neville sits up taller in his chair. “Hey, Pans.” The expression on his face is unreadable in the dark.
“Hey.” She sits on a stump stool and crosses her sweater tight over her body. She declines the beer she’s offered, and then the joint.
The conversation flows around the edges of Charlie’s guitar, quiet and indistinct, and Pansy follows it idly, watching a new log catch and burn.
Charlie twists a tuning peg, strums through a few chords, then starts playing "Hallelujah." It’s a pretty song, and Pansy means to stay for it, but Lavender gets up to get another beer. When she comes back, she settles in Neville’s lap.
“Hey—” he says.
Pansy stands. “I’m going to go down to the lake,” she tells no one in particular. “Goodnight.” She waves a hand over her shoulder as she leaves, and it doesn’t matter at all that Lavender’s is the loudest and friendliest reply.
“Goodnight!” Maybe it’s the beer, maybe it’s trying for and getting what you want, but she sounds content.
It’s a full moon. Pansy makes her way along the deer trail with her flashlight turned off and dangling from her wrist.
She hasn't been this angry with herself since March and the rejection letters. She's angry, and angry for being angry, and she feels like an idiot, which makes her angry, too.
It's what she gets for kissing Perseus in the boat shed.
Before she rejoins the path around the lake, she hears the dry snap of a broken twig behind her.
“Pans?”
It’s Neville.
She slows down, and lets him fall in beside her.
They reach the lake trail without talking, and instead of following it west back to camp, Pansy turns right and goes east. The woods open up as they approach the lake, and the moonlight streaming through the branches of the pines illuminates the striations of their bark in complete detail. She can see the silver surface of the water shining through the gaps in the shrubs.
Pansy follows another path when it branches toward a postage stamp stretch of beach. It’s crowded by reeds and studded with rocks, but a section of log sits at its edge to act as a bench. From here, the view stretches west down the length of the lake. The feathered branches of the great hemlock on the Island dip and sway in silhouette against the moon.
She sits, and Neville sits down beside her.
“Hey.” He rubs his fingers in the fabric at the elbow of Pansy’s sweater.
She breathes in deep, and pushes it back out. “Hey.”
He doesn’t say anything else, and Pansy starts to think that he won’t.
“Are you upset?” he asks finally.
Pansy stiffens. “No. Why would I be upset?”
“I thought that—”
“Have you been going out to the campfire every night?” She keeps it light and easy. She's making conversation.
He sighs, leans forward, and picks up a stone, then draws back his arm and sends it skimming over the surface of the lake. Pansy counts five jumps before it skitters and then sinks.
“Not every night. But I like to listen to Charlie play guitar. He's really great. Just, in general.” He picks up another stone, and holds it in his fist. “And I’ve been having a hard time sleeping.”
“Why?”
He doesn't answer her. He looks down at the stone in his fist, and then up again. “I didn’t want Lavender to do that. And she doesn't. I don't let her do things like that."
Pansy finds a rock of her own, small and oval, thicker on one end than it is on the other. “You can let her do whatever you want. We’re just friends.”
He’s still and silent for a while, then says, “I know.”
“You could sleep with her if you wanted to.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“It’s fine if you already have.” Pansy rolls the stone in her fingers. “It’s none of my business.” She pulls back her arm and throws her rock. It cuts into the water at an angle and sinks.
“I haven’t done anything with Lavender.” Neville reaches over and tucks Pansy’s hair behind her ear. “I don’t want to do anything with anyone else.”
“Why not?" Pansy picks up a stone and throws it straight into the lake. "She wears birthday cake flavored lip balm."
Neville looks confused.
"She probably tastes like cake," Pansy explains. "And maybe you don't know this, but she can actually put her ankles behind her—”
Before she can finish, Neville leans forward. His kiss lands on the corner of her mouth, but it’s warm and deliberate.
"I love the way you taste," he says, and then he shows her that he means it.
Pansy tries to wrap her arms around him, but they’re sitting side by side and the contact between them is incomplete and unsatisfying. She swings her knee over his thighs and settles in his lap.
She's used to tipping up on her toes and looping her arms around his waist, but now she cradles his head in her arms and kisses him, clutching handfuls of his hair.
They both gasp, sharp and surprised, when she shifts forward and her body connects decisively with his through layers of fabric.
The first time she rolls her hips against him is an accident, but the counterpressure feels so urgent and inevitable that she does it again on purpose. After that, she doesn’t want to stop.
“Pansy . . .”
She pushes down a little more. It feels good, and she does it again.
“Please." He grips his fingers into her hips. "You're—” He cuts himself off with an involuntary begging sound in the back of his throat. His fingers relax, and he kisses her again.
She repeats the rolling motion against him, over and over again, tugging at his hair.
“Pansy, please. ” His hands run over her body like he doesn’t know what to do with them, smoothing over her back and hovering at the sides of her ribs. “If you don’t stop, I’m going to—"
"Do you want me to stop?"
He shivers, and half a minute stretches out where she slows and finally stalls before he says, "No."
His hands stroke at her hair, then his thumbs press softly at her jaw. She moves, and keeps moving. When he kisses her it feels like he's never thought of kissing anyone else in the whole of his life.
Good, kind, lovely . . .
“Neville.” Her eyes open wide.
It's the strong punctuation at the end of a phrase.
She pulls his hair and whines quietly into his open mouth, and he gasps like something's been broken that can’t be fixed. His hands fall to her hips and he drags her hard to himself, arcing up against her with a groan.
There's a sense of suspended animation between them, just pressure and fulfillment, then his unfocused mouth lands kisses blindly, lazily, on her jaw. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that he’s warm, and his warmth is perfect. She shifts against him, slack and lethargic, while his hands wander under her t-shirt, over the bare skin of her back.
“Pansy?” he whispers.
“Mmmm.”
"I'm sorry."
She doesn't know what he's apologizing for.
“Are we still friends?”
“Mmm hmm.”
His palms flow one after the other over the ridges of her backbone. “Just friends?”
She draws her hands through his hair. “Just friends.”
She kisses him for a long time, and he kisses her back. The mosquitoes hum to the thin and far-off accompaniment of Charlie's guitar.