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“So, is it okay if I ask,” the woman paused, shifting just slightly in the stiff chair, “why are you making a documentary about a paper company? There’s nothing special about us…”
-
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“I’m in sales. It’s not the most exciting thing but,” one James Potter shrugged and brought a hand up to his hair for the third (the video would later reveal fourth) time in the few minutes he had been sitting in the sequestered office space designated for the interviews. His leg was bouncing rather restlessly and his shirt was untucked from his trousers- just slightly too short for his long legs. “It’s a job. I can’t exactly complain can I?” He leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees (hair ruffled once more). “Plus!” His face brightened, “I work with my best mates, how many other people can say that?”
The camera operator moved towards the blinds, focusing in on two men sitting at a nearby desk, one spinning lazily in the chair, the other sitting on the desk, attempting to drop small candies into the spinning man’s mouth. The camera panned back over towards James, a grin still splitting across his face. The crew would find, in their time with the company, that James was, more often than not, smiling.
Before another question could be asked, a rather large commotion drew the attention of both the film crew and the interviewee himself, sending him rushing out the door to find the source of the mishap. The crew would find this to be another common occurrence during the time spent shooting at Hogwarts Paper.
The crew emerged from the office to catch a shot of James and one of the men from the previous shot (the chair spinner) trying and failing to restrain another man from stabbing the absurdly handsome man sitting on the desk, a bowl of chocolate candies on his lap. There was yelling, quite a bit of yelling. The scuffle continued for a few more seconds, James attempting to sit on the man brandishing a letter opener while the second man who attempted to stop the bloodshed yelled at the one perched on the desk.
Everything fell into uncomfortable silence when the door to the manager’s office swung open and Albus Dumbledore stepped out, his grey beard plaited, his suit appearing to be made of velvet. The camera lingered on him for a few moments, as if having a hard time processing the image. The employees seemed rather used to his attire. It was unquestionably a woman’s suit.
“May I ask what is going on here?” He spoke crisply, his voice filling the unpleasant silence that had overtaken the bullpen. No one attempted to speak up, and so the camera panned around on the gathering of workers. Finally, the man doing the scolding, (he would later be placed as Remus Lupin), cleared his throat. He straightened up and ran his long hands over his (admittedly hideous) jumper.
“Sirius,” the camera focused on the handsome man as he winked in its direction, “riled up Sni-Severus,” the camera dropped down to the man pinned underneath James’ ass, “by asking if,” Remus sighed heavily and looked down at his feet, “if he could ring out his hair and use the grease to cook with, as he forgot his lunch at home.” Remus cleared his throat once more and looked back up at Dumbledore, his lips drawn out into a tight line.
Dumbledore glanced between the two men before sighing and clapping his hands together. “Well, gentlemen, if you would mind joining me in my office for a brief chat?” He seemed perfectly cheerful, and yet this sort of disposition seemed to cause the most wariness amongst the employees. Without much dawdling, both Sirius and Severus followed Dumbledore into his office, bodies tense as the door swung shut behind them.
The camera then moved back over to James who, while still sitting on the floor, was staring over at the receptionist’s desk, mouth ever so slightly slack jawed, glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose. (The crew would find that this was another one of those frequent events).
-
It was on the third day of the first week of filming that the documentary crew made their way to the back section of the office, into the human resources corner. Only one person worked in HR and no one ever bothered to make their way back to the desk. Dumbledore had a certain lack of fondness for the aforementioned employee, one Gilderoy Lockhart. In Dumbledore’s own words, he was two eighths fool, one third annoyance, and three fifths bother. No one knew what fraction Dumbledore was using, and no one made any attempts to correct him.
When the crew approached Lockhart, he was staring at his own visage in the faintly reflective surface of a laminated file. He had a certain love of his own appearance.
“I’m working here until my novel takes off,” he spoke breezily, his voice pompous, but quite forced in its poshness, “and it will. My agent,” he paused and pointed towards himself, “ moi, has the utmost faith in its contents. It’s a thrilling tale of a man overcoming nature and all odds. An incredibly handsome man, at that!” Gilderoy continued to speak, despite the fact that the crew had begun backing away, leaving him to reenact scenes from his novel to the empty space surrounding him.
-
“There are a few things you have to know about Sirius,” Remus Lupin began, his hands wrapped around a mug of coffee so dark it looked black. There was hardly a shot of him without a mug of similar contents in hand. The camera, blurry to start, focused at a point behind Lupin’s head, centered on the man in question as he lazed back in his chair, feet kicked up on the desk, phone pressed between his shoulder and ear, one arm propped behind his head. Remus took a sip of his coffee as the camera turned back to him once more.
“He’s the most insufferable git I have ever met,” there was some undercurrent of fondness in his voice, which rather undermined the way he insulted him, “but he’s a good person.” He seemed uncertain as to whether or not “person” was the proper term. “He and James have known each other since they were children, not that they aren’t children now,” Remus amended with a slight smile. He had a wry sort of smile, one corner of his mouth quirking up at a time.
At the next question, one of his brows quirked. “James and Lily? No, they aren’t involved. Not that James doesn’t wish for that, but you didn’t hear that from me.” And with that, Remus noticed his mug was empty, and without a goodbye, stood and left the room to fill up once more.
-
Lily was secluded to a sort of island, or rather, that was how she began to explain her position as receptionist. “I’m not quite part of the group, but I’m still part of the group, you know?” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear before letting her hand fall back into her lap, eyes bright as she looked up at the cameraman, lips parting slightly at the next asked question. “I grew up in a small town, I doubt you’ve heard of it. Cokeworth?” She phrased it like a question and waited for some sort of sign of recognition, only to receive none, and so she continued on. “So, this job, well, it’s not what I dreamed of, what little girl dreams of being a receptionist at a sales company? But it’s alright. I have friends here.” She offered a smile, less enthusiastic than before, and glanced down at her lap, as though trying to hold back thoughts.
“I should get back to manning the phone,” and with that, Lily stood up and left, sharing a look with James as she made her way back into her island.
-
The office olympics, as announced loudly by James, would be commencing soon. Made up of made up games played by the bored employees when they were supposed to be working, the time wasting event was the brainchild of both James and Lily, though happily backed by Sirius. Everyone appeared to be in high spirits, as Snape was out of the office, helping Dumbledore lease out a castle. No one knew why he wanted a castle, no one knew how he could afford a castle, no one asked.
A medal made of yogurt lids and paper clips strung around her neck, Lily made her way over to the annex, the small corner of the office where Accounting was situated, cup of coffee in her hand. In the background, the sounds of paper box snow shoe shuffling, or, Flunkerton, could be heard.
“Mary, are you sure you don’t want to play?” Lily questioned, a slight smile on her face as she tried to coax one of the less enthused workers into the games. “I’m sure you have a game we could play,” she added, trying to warm the severe-looking blonde to the idea.
Mary looked over at Lily, lips drawn into a line. “Yes, I have a game. I call it Lily-Pong. I count how many times James gets up to talk to you.” Lily’s face flushed, and without another word, she turned on her heel and hurried back towards the conference room, where James was busy crowning Remus the Flunkerton champion.
The cameras picked up on Mary, adding a tally to a piece of paper later that day, as James made his way over to the receptionist desk, a goofy grin on his face.
-
James was grinning, manically, which was quite a terrifying sight to one Severus Snape, who happened to be desk neighbors with Potter. James grinning meant one of two things, he had either done something amusingly annoying at Snape’s behest, or Lily had said spoken to him. Though based on the manickness of the look, it was very likely to be the first.
“Stop looking at me, Potter,” Snape said, looking up from his keyboard. He dawdled strangely on syllables, as if pausing midway through for some sort of emphasis no one else heard. He dressed very much the same each day (causing many problems for the documentarians in post production as they tried to date clips), a mustard shirt, brown tie, a pair of scuffed loafers, his limp hair brushing the top of his collar.
James simply continued to smile in his direction, though he did continue to work. His fingers darting across the keys of his desktop without much attention being thrown in their direction. There was something inherently unnerving in the way he kept smiling, causing the camera operator to pan away from his face and onto someone else. That someone happened to be Moody.
No one knew much about Moody, or if they did, they had not felt inclined to share. In fact, the most that had been revealed about Moody in the three months of filming was his fondness for a certain phrase. Jumping out from corners, from under desks, behind doors, and on one terrifying occasion, from the ceiling, he would scream the words “constant vigilance.” It had yet to have revealed as to what the vigilance was for, if anything other than his surprise attacks.
At the moment, Moody was shoeless, his cane propped up against the edge of his desk, as he groped at the milky looking false eye he refused to cover with a patch. The camera did not linger on Moody for any longer.
Instead, it fell onto Peter Pettigrew, a rather rotund man with close set eyes and a wobbling jaw. He was a good worker, if not wholeheartedly average, and at the constant beck of Sirius. On his desk he had no less than six framed pictures of his pet rat, Wormtail. This was no less unsettling than Moody and his fake eye or James and his unrelenting smile, but the camera returned to James anyway.
He was still smiling.
“I don’t know why he’s smiling,” were the first words from Lily’s mouth when she sat down in the hot seat. For some reason, this statement caused her to let out a strange cross between a laugh and a stammer. “Really, I don’t. But he’s probably doing something to Severus.” The look that crossed her face as she said his name seemed to hint at some unspoken history. Her eyes fell towards her lap again.
There were no fewer than eleven further outbursts by Snape at James’ admittedly alarming smiling. By the end of the shift at 5 o’clock, Snape had turned a curious shade of red and had sputtered out six threats, none of which made sense, all of which, oddly enough, involved beets. After Snape stormed from the office, throwing one last glare at the back of James’ messy head, James dropped his head onto the desk with a loud thud and a louder groan.
When the camera next centered on James, he was in the interviewing room, rubbing vigorously at his face with both hands, making odd noises as he did so. When he stopped (the noises sounding suspiciously similar to whale songs), he managed a feeble smile, followed by a feeble “ouch, shit, ouch.” He then pushed up his glasses and ruffled his hair.
“I had no real reason for smiling at Snape, other than suspecting that human joy brought him great pain. I think I might have been right?” He managed a cheeky grin, and then the word fuck three times (which was bleeped in editing).
-
The whiteboard behind Dumbledore’s head bore the words “nitwit, blubber, oddment, tweak!,” followed by a dash and the name “J.K. Rowling” and then another dash with his own name. It appeared he was quoting a quote and attributing it to himself. Like the rest of Dumbledore’s eccentric habits, this went on without address.
He stood at the front of the conference room, stroking his beard with one hand, the other held behind his back. He had not given a reason as to why he had called a meeting, but no one was paying much attention to him anyway. Instead, they watched the tv screen that was situated behind him and ever so slightly to the left. On the television, the logo for the DVD player bounced across the screen. Each time it neared the corner, so close to sliding in place perfectly, there was an intake of breath around the room, the listless employees inching forwards onto their seats, only to slump back with resigned groans.
When the emblem finally secured itself in the niche, Dumbledore assumed the cheers were at his benefit, and promptly ended the meeting, a pleased smile on his face as he made his way back into his office. Snape did his best to act as “assistant to the regional manager” by scolding the group and trying to resume a seemingly productive meeting. James looked over into the camera, lips pressing into an amused looking thin line.
-
The morning opened with Severus bludgeoning himself in the face with his desk phone. If anyone in the office had liked Severus, they might have attempted to help. But no one in the office liked Severus. Any friends he might have had vanished after the fire alarm incident.
There was smoke filling the office, pouring in from under the doors. The alarms had been blaring for over two minutes and Sirius had been screaming at an ungodly pitch for three. Lily was standing atop her desk while trying to hit the alarm into silence with one of her heels. James was holding onto her legs and trying very hard to keep his eyes on the ground. Peter was cradling something to his chest, running while in a panic.
“Someone save Wormtail!” He hollered, throwing his alarmingly large pet rat up towards the busted ceiling tile that Cardoc had broken while climbing into the ceiling in hopes of escape. Dumbledore burst from his office, a sleeping cap on his head, which might have garnered a question or two, if not for the fact that it appeared that they were all facing imminent death.
Remus, logical Remus, was wrapping Sirius’s shirt around his hand in an attempt to grab the scalding doorknob to find a way out.
It was at that point that the door burst open, knocking back a swearing Remus and a preening, shirtless Sirius, and a pleased Severus marched in with an air horn blaring.
“And you’re dead, and you’re dead, and you’re all dead!” He hollered, seeming far too pleased with himself. Or rather, he would have been, if he hadn’t been tackled by Moody as he screamed “constant vigilance.”
It was easy to see why no one rushed to Severus’s aid after punching himself with his phone. James looked far too pleased to have been innocent.
“Everyday after Snivellus left for work, I would add a few nickels to the inside of his phone for the past two months. Then last night, I emptied out all the nickels and I bought, like, six sodas.” To prove this point, he offered one to each of the members of the documentary crew, seeming pleased with himself. He glanced over his shoulder, smiling as he watched Severus pick up his phone, as if suspecting it of something. The camera panned back over to James. Far too pleased.
-
Lily was sitting in the stairwell, her knees pulled up to her chest as she shook gently. She seemed unaware of the camera. She glanced up, the tip of her nose reddened, her cheeks stained with her mascara. There wasn’t much audio from where the camera was positioned, and the crew members had the decency not to come any closer. They would have left, had it not been for the fact that James folded himself down to sit next to her, his long legs sprawled out down another few steps, one of his arms wrapping around her shoulders. She leaned into his touch, her face soon buried into his shoulder. His hand moved in slow circles against her back and she clung to him like a buoy.
-
“I...he said come in!” Lily stuttered out the words, her face twisted up as she rubbed at her eyes, making a groaning sort of sound. “He said come in!” She repeated, finally looking up at the camera, a shade paler than usual, her eyes widened with the unspeakable horrors she had seen. “He wasn’t wearing underwear,” she whispered the words, eyes going a bit unfocused as her face scrunched once more.
She had just been attempting to deliver a stack of files to Dumbledore for his signature. She had been sure to knock, to follow all proper forms of etiquette. He had said come in. She would go to her grave standing by that point. And so, Lily had opened the door to a trouserless Dumbledore, one leg propped onto a chair, very Captain Morgan-esque, with a pair of manicuring scissors.
Lily shuddered, going just a bit green. “I think I might be sick.” And with that, she bolted from the room. No one could blame her.
-
From the time that the documentary crew had started their filming at Hogwarts Paper, there had been a few undeniable facts that had remained constant. Snape would come into work exactly thirty minutes early, sit at his desk, and drink putrid smelling coffee. On casual Fridays, Sirius would try to get away without wearing any underwear. Peter would fall asleep against his keyboard and send out emails of one letter that spanned seven pages. (An excerpt from one of his most compelling group wide emails- “FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF…”) And the fact that James Potter was irrevocably in love with Lily Evans. It only took him seven months of filming (and five years of working) for him to admit this.
It hadn’t happened on purpose, or with any sort of plan. He had been sitting in the interview room, staring off, hands pushed through his hair. “I think I love her.” No one was surprised, except, of course, James. He continued to muse his hair, his leg bouncing restlessly. For one of the first times in his life, or at least the time spent filming, James fell silent, seeming to sink into his thoughts as the concept wrapped itself around him. He was in love with Lily Evans. Everyone already knew.
-
The pair didn’t have to look up from their respective computer screens to engage in an “across the aisle high five,” something they were currently engaging in as Snape looked up from one of his files, eyes wide.
He lurched from his desk at the sight of Remus walking by with his ninth cup of coffee that morning and proceeded to tackle him. “Don’t drink that coffee!” The following clip had to be deleted from the record, as there was no possible way to edit out the stream of profanity taht slid from Remus’s mouth.
James and Lily were seated next to each other in the interview room, wearing matching smug grins. “We stole some of Snape’s stationary and have been sending him messages from his future self. That one was a warning against drinking the coffee.” They both jolted and jerked around to face the window when a loud “thud” came from the outside. Through the blinds, a very damp, very angry Remus stood on the other side. Sheepishly, James turned back to face the camera, rubbing the back of his neck.
“We probably should have warned Remus.”
-
“So,” Lily began, clapping her hands together, as though she needed preparation to continue her statement, “for the past, god knows how ever long, Dumbledore has been working on his….” She trailed off and glanced over towards James, Sirius, and Remus, hoping for one of them to continue.
James picked up the baton with a grin. “Passion project of sorts. He’s been writing this movie, and, well, we’re all in it. For as long as any of us have been working here, he’s been filming it and writing. And today, we’re going to watch it.”
Sirius let out a happy laugh and Remus somehow managed to look positively wolfish. “I always knew I was made for the big screen,” Sirius announced, leaning back in his seat- a bit too far, as Remus easily knocked him over.
The camera panned back over to Lily, her face still bright. “I hate how excited I am.” Her smile only faltered when she was asked the plot. “Well, um, Dumbledore is a wizard. I think. Really, it’s hard to tell. And James is his enemy, right?” She looked over at him, one eyebrow raised.
“I think so, yeah. I’m Lord Voldemort. And it’s as bad as it sounds.”
-
“I might have done the movie because of someone else.” He looked through the blinds towards where Lily was throwing popcorn into Peter’s open mouth as he slept at his desk, laughing as she threw her head back, curtain of hair swinging over her shoulder. James looked back at the camera, his face slightly flushed. “Maybe.”
-
That night, the camera crew found James and Lily on the roof, a pair of lawn chairs facing the parking lot where Snape angrily lit off the fireworks he had stored in his car, for some unknown reason. This came as a direct result of a typo in Dumbledore’s script, revealing that Snape was the original name of a bumbling potions’ professor who tormented children.
The pair were passing a can of coke between them, each with a blanket spread across their legs. James was watching Lily, not the fireworks.
-
When James came into the office in a hideous mustard shirt, an ugly brown tie, and equally unattractive brown pants, Lily had to throw her hand over her mouth to try and stifle her laughter. This seemed to be a common reaction to James’ costume as Snape. Sirius employed less tact and broke out into a very aristocratic guffaw.
When Snape came into the office in a hideous mustard shirt, an ugly brown tie, and equally unattractive brown pants, only to see James in the same thing, he threw his briefcase down and waved his finger like some type of weapon, voice raised to a shrieking type of level. “Identity theft is a crime, James!”
-
“I want the teapot.” And with that, James’ entire world appeared to have collapsed around him, shoulders slumping. Snape had traded his gift in the Yankee Swap. The camera drew in closer on his face, seeming to center on the heartbroken look in his eye, or maybe it was the way he clenched his jaw as Severus put his noticeably greasy hands all over the teapot.
Lily did not appear that distraught, as she had traded the teapot for the iPhone (Sirius had entirely disregarded the price cap in lieu of causing a bit of chaos). James looked down at the gift in his lap before trading it for Snape’s teapot. Remus’s present be damned.
After the terrible game ended, though, it was really only terrible by James’ standards, as he made very clear to the cameras, he made his way up to Lily’s island, the teapot behind his back, the cameras on him. It seemed he was trying very hard not to notice.
“So,” he began, setting the teapot onto her desk as she looked up from the iPhone, her thumbs stilling in their tapping, blinking owlishly at him, “I was your Secret Santa,” he announced, giving some absurd little gesture with his hands, dipping down into a bow. Lily’s brow furrowed, lips parting just slightly, as she set her new phone down.
“James, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize-” He held up his hand, smiling down at her, eyes crinkling.
“Don’t worry about it. I just didn’t want Snape to have your gift, so…” He pushed the teapot towards her with the tips of his fingers, all but beaming down at her as she carefully untaped the lid, beginning to pull out little baubles and knick knacks, occasionally letting out little laughs. The look on his face seemed to communicate that it had very much been worth giving up his gift.
-
“He said to pack, and I am quoting this here, a ski mask,” Lily started, James next to her, nodding along, “a swimsuit, rubber, no slip shoes, and a toothbrush.” She looked utterly confused and entirely amused. James was grinning next to her, hand in his hair.
“It’s the first company retreat in...ever. And that was our packing list,” he explained, though, the list still did bear quite a bit of explanation. “I think he’s planning a heist.”
Lily shook her head and looked over at him. “No, no, I think he is planning on having us work as scantily clad waiters. Who else wears no slip shoes?” She gestured as she spoke, acting as though her explanation made perfect sense.
He let out a laugh and shook his head, dropping it down into one of his hands, as though at a loss for words. “You win, Evans. You win.”
As it turned out, the retreat was a booze cruise. The employees of Hogwarts Paper all gathered onto the deck of a little steam boat as it made it’s way down the river, the camera capturing lovely shots of fairy lights draped across the deck and Peter crooning to the oldies while heavily, heavily intoxicated.
The booze had run out approximately one hour and three minutes into the five hour cruise, which meant that patience wore quite too thin. Unluckily for Remus, one Sirius Black had subjected himself to a grueling pre-drink routine, which meant that despite the booze cruise’s evident lack of booze, he was rather tipsy, which also meant he was rather handsy.
At the end of the cruise, the hazy silhouettes of James and Lily, leaning up against the railing of the boat, side by side, was visible in the dimming light, and it was almost romantic, almost serene, if not for Gilderoy terrified screams in the back ground as he fell into the river. Almost.
-
No one was certain as to how Dumbledore came up with the idea for the charity casino, and no one was certain on whether or not the idea was entirely legal, but once again, no one questioned anything about it. Albus Dumbledore was simply not the type of man anyone questioned.
Somehow, surprising to everyone, from the employees to the documentarians, the paper warehouse had been transformed from, well, a paper warehouse to a decent looking casino in only a few hours time. Some would be led to argue the case that Dumbledore was magic, but that would have been absurd.
Throughout the night, the camera picked up Snape skulking around the warehouse in his usual fashion, dressed as he was always dressed, despite the insistence that everyone class themselves up for the occasion. No one was certain as to what he was doing, but, as with all of Dumbledore’s habits, no one asked and no one questioned, though, it was mostly because no one wanted to know.
When Lily walked into the warehouse, her dress (a fair shade of blue) clinging to her softly, the camera crew got a lovely shot of the look on James’ face, his eyes going wide behind his glasses. He promptly shot back his drink, plucked the glass from Sirius’s hand, and drank that one as well. He then darted off, presumably to try and gain the courage to talk to Lily.
The audio just barely picked up the mutterings of Sirius Black as his best mate ran off, and those mutterings greatly centered around the word “prat.”
-
Later that night, the camera crew happened to stumble upon James’ and Lily in the main office, his hand on her back and tangled into her hair instead of his for once, her hands holding his face, glasses askew on his nose.
-
The cameras weren’t there when he proposed. And maybe it had been better that way. No one aside from the crew knew why James had reached into his pocket that day in the parking lot, nor why he quickly pulled his hand free when Sirius dropped to his knee in front of Remus in a typically grandiose sort of fashion, fireworks shooting off in the background.
Later in an interview, James would have admitted to wanting to murder his best friend, opposed to wanting to celebrate with him. But that had been deleted from the final product the documentarians put forth.
No, no cameras had been present, but everyone in the office certainly knew, as the shrieks of joy could undoubtedly be heard all the way in America when she said yes. The shrieks from James, that was. The next morning, when the pair returned to work, sickeningly close to one another, arms intertwined with the general looks of love sickness on their faces, Snape had scowled and tried to throw himself from his chair, only to find it was stuck to his heinous brown pants.
James made eye contact with the camera, a grin quirking at his lips at the way Snape struggled to remove himself from his superglued chair.
-
There seemed to be something living beneath James’ skin as he sat in the interview room for the hundredth, thousandth, time or so, buzzing with a sort of nervous energy. He glanced up at the camera and held up a tiny box, black and velvet, not even bothering to flip it open, as it was now sitting empty, the ring snugly on Lily’s finger.
“Please don’t let Sirius know, but,” he laughed breathlessly, rubbing at his face with one hand, “I bought this the week after we first kissed.” James slid the box back into the pocket of his trousers. “Am I lovesick or pathetic?” He didn’t wait for anyone to answer before shrugging his shoulders and giving a nod.
Lily poked her head into the room, face cracking into a lovely smile. “There you are. We’re going out for drinks with Remus and Sirius and Peter, you coming?” James pushed himself up from the chair, the adoration apparent on his face as he looked at her and reached out to take her hand.
-
-
“I’m not complaining, it might be sort of fun, having a documentary made about us,” the would be Lily Potter continued, still seeming ever so slightly camera shy. “But I just can’t see where the story is. There really isn’t anything special here.” She flinched as there was a rap on the glass and a bespeckled man with unruly hair peeked in, breaking out into a smile at the sight of her.
When Lily looked back towards the camera, there were high spots of color in her freckled cheeks. “Nothing special,” she repeated the words for the third time, though, by the way she looked at her lap and smoothed her skirt, the way she tried just slightly to hide behind her hair, the way she tried and failed to hide a smile, it was evident it was far from the truth.