Chapter Text
1.
In the almost five years I went to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, I had spoken to James Potter exactly six times. Each of these conversations had been a reason for me to dislike him.
The first time was at Kings Cross station. I had plucked up all my courage and run as fast as I could towards the stone wall. My knees had trembled with nervousness and when the hard impact didn't come and instead I slid gently through the wall onto the magical platform filled with all sorts of people and a beautiful, bright red steam train, it was like a dream come true for me. Impressed, I slowed down and stopped to take a closer look around. But I couldn't stand still for very long as James Potter crashed into me from behind with his cart at full speed. A bad first impression and an even worse first conversation.
“Hey, get out of the way!” came from behind me, then I was knocked over roughly and the boy who had just knocked me over looked down at me angrily. “You can't just stand in front of the gate like that!” I wanted to say something back, but my mind went blank. He was right, but I was still annoyed that he hadn't even asked if I had hurt myself.
The second time was just before the division ceremony. We were standing in the entrance hall, waiting for Professor McGonagall to pick us up. There were excited whispers everywhere and Marleen, who I had made friends with on the train, asked me, “Which house do you want to go to?”
I just shrugged my shoulders. "I don't know, I don't really care as long as I'm accepted at all. Which house do you want to go to?"
“To Gryffindor!” she said firmly and I thought hard about what qualities that house represented again.
“Which one was that again?” I asked and Marleen called out in amusement, “I just explained it to you again in the boat, how can you have forgotten again?”
Embarrassed, I looked down and rummaged through my memory. “Was it that house with the snake and the aspirations of greatness?”
“No, that was Slytherin,” Marleen said, shaking her head, “Gryffindor is the house with the lion and the brave exploits.”
“It's almost the same anyway.” I said half jokingly and Marleen returned my little grin but behind us someone gasped indignantly.
We turned around and there stood James, I recognized him from the station and was about to tell Marleen about him but he got ahead of me by standing in front of us and proclaiming, "Gryffindor is nothing like Slytherin! Slytherins achieve their goals through cunning and lies and Gryffindors are brave and honorable! That's completely different!" he said in an incredibly know-it-all way. As if he was explaining something completely logical to a toddler.
“Yes, but at the end of the day, they want the same thing, don't they?” I asked him and he gave me a dirty look. He seemed seriously offended by my statement and started to say something else, but then Professor McGonagall came and led us into the hall. It was then that I decided I didn't like him and when we both ended up at the Gryffindor table, I ignored him for the whole dinner. Fortunately, he ignored me too. I decided to avoid him as much as I could, but that proved to be more difficult than I thought as we were in the same house.
The third time was in our first magic exam. We were supposed to levitate a feather and I was so excited that I did the movement with the wand completely wrong and the feather burst into flames with a loud bang. James and his best friend Sirius had made loud jokes about it. I had turned bright red but then the red-haired girl next to me had turned to them angrily.
"Shut up, both of you! You can't do any better!"
“Exactly.” Marleen added comfortingly. "At least something happened with you. Pettigrew back there didn't even get his to wag."
I was grateful that the two of them stood up for me, but the laughter had burned itself into my head. After that, I had some peace from him for a while. Although he and his friends, the marauders, were always up to mischief, at least I wasn't the victim of their pranks. I made friends with Marleen and Lilly more and more, especially Lilly. She was incredibly pretty and smart and every time she complimented me on my form or a clever answer, I turned bright red and I couldn't stop smiling all day.
The fourth time, was in our first period Muggle Studies. James had only chosen the subject because Sirius had chosen it and he had only chosen it to annoy his parents and not because he was really interested in it. When our teacher, Madame Trix, asked who could explain what a subway was and how to use it, I enthusiastically volunteered. But in the middle of my explanation, I was interrupted by a noise behind me. Angrily, I wheeled around to the two boys in the back row who were making fun of the awkwardness of the Muggle world. As both my parents were Muggles, I felt strongly that I had to defend them and the world I had grown up in and so a heated discussion broke out between James and I about whether the Muggles were superior to us in some ways.
The fifth time was during a Quidditch match in 4th grade. I was standing on the outside rail watching the game between Hufflepuff and Gryffindor. We were 30 points in the lead and I was just about to turn to Lilly when she suddenly screamed and pulled me aside. James Potter had flown across the stands to avoid a Bludger and almost hit me with his broom. It could have been dismissed as an accident and I suppose it probably looked like one to the bystanders because he immediately turned to me and mumbled a quick
“Sorry, didn't see you.”
But the way he grinned at me and then left immediately afterwards to go and high-five Sirius Black who also looked at me with such a weird grin that the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I was sure that since that day at the latest, the dislike I had for James Potter was no longer one-sided.
The sixth time was just before Halloween. The marauders had placed a bag full of snail slime over the entrance to the dungeons. Remus must have assured me a hundred times later that it had only been for the Slytherins. But the prank hadn't worked because I had gone back that very day to ask Professor Slughorn something and had ended up with the whole bag over my head. I believed Remus, but that didn't change the fact that Potter burst out laughing at the sight of me, which echoed throughout the dungeons and didn't stop for several minutes, not even when Slughorn came out of his office to look for the cause of the noise and sentenced the four of them to two weeks' detention. It took me three whole showers to get the slime completely off and the stench lingered in my hair for multiple days. It was awful! But the worst had happened today.
Potter and his friends had caused a big scene down by the lake and apparently started a fight with Snape. I wasn't a fan of bullying or the stupid pranks of the marauder, but no one could really stand Snape, least of all me, because he had whispered some nasty things about my parentage to me several times. I thought it was absurd, what difference did it make whether you had Muggle parents or not, especially as his best friend , Lilly, also had Muggle ancestry, but for Lilly's sake I had always held back from him. Especially when I had realized at the end of 4th year that my reactions to her compliments and touches were not because I was so happy about our friendship, but because I had a crush Lilly Evans and today James Potter had dared to publicly expose her childhood friend and then demand that she go out with him so that he would leave him alone. Of course she had rejected him but only a few minutes later he had predicted in front of everyone that he would get her to change her mind even if he had to ask her a thousand times...