Chapter Text
December 1990
"You're an idiot."
"You're so nice to me, thanks."
"It's not funny, alright?" Lily swings around to face him on the bench and her left knee bashes into his right, perhaps accidentally, perhaps not. It doesn't hurt enough to merit his outward attention. "You're going to get in so much trouble."
James has been staring dead ahead since they sat down a minute ago, his eyes fixed on the door to the head's office, which will shortly swing open and beckon him to his fate. He continues to do so now. "I don't care."
"They're going to suspend you, you know they will."
He really doesn't care, though there's a slender sprite named awareness lurking somewhere in the distance, in that place beyond the bubbled-over aftermath of the fracas which brought them here, who is waiting for the last wisps of red mist to clear his field of vision, and he'll care once the chips have fallen, which will likely be when James arrives home and is forced to contend with his mother.
Until that fateful moment, he has the twin forces of bravado and moral righteousness in his corner, a duo of Mickey Goldmills to his twelve-year-old Rocky Balboa (thirteen in just over three months) so he shrugs to show Lily how little he cares about getting suspended.
"You won't be able to take part in the show next week," she reminds him.
"You can sing with Sirius instead, it doesn't matter."
"But I don't want to sing with Sirius."
"Why not? He's a really good singer."
"James, he doesn't even like me!" Lily retorts in a terse whisper, hissing like an angry baby goose. Motor Mouth Jorkins, McGonagall's perennially gossiping secretary, is sitting at her desk outside the office reading Bella magazine, and she likes Lily as much as the rest of the staff do, but she'll still tell her to leave if she makes too much noise.
James would very much like to bristle at his best friend's slander of his other best friend, but he can't do it wholeheartedly.
It's not that Sirius dislikes Lily, exactly, it's just kind of obvious that he prefers it when she's not around, but he never says anything nasty about her. James would never let that happen on his honour.
Besides, she prefers it when Sirius isn't around too.
"That's just not true," he replies, only a smidge dishonest.
"Yes, it is, I'm not thick," she snaps. "And he's not as good at singing as you are, and that's not even the point, the point is you shouldn't have done anything!"
"I think I should have."
"Well, you're wrong, okay? I can take care of myself all on my own."
"I never said you couldn't."
"You didn't say it, but you must think it," she reproaches, her voice taking on an injured tone. "Otherwise, we wouldn't be here right now."
His apathy has been very carefully arranged to marry with his ocean-floor deep belief that he took the right course of action, but he's still so angry on the inside, and Lily shatters the façade in an instant. He tears his eyes from McGonagall's wood panelled office door and gapes at her. "That's not fair!"
"Volume down, please!" Motor Mouth calls out, rising from her desk with Bella in one hand and a Nestlé Smarties coffee mug in the other, and flounces past the naughty bench so breezily that she might as well be singing tralalalala to birds and chipmunks as she goes. "Just popping away to make a cuppa, stay exactly where you are until you're called!"
Lily buttons her lip until Jorkins vanishes down the corridor and disappears into the staff room, then she levels James with one of what he likes to call her "grown up" looks, as if the eight weeks which separate the day of her birth from the day of his can expand in size to anything between eight months and eighty-eight years, depending on how she's feeling.
"So why did you do it, if that's not what you think?" she asks, eyes rueful and bright, bright green, cheeks freckled, hair as red as the oak leaf that floated down from above and grazed the tip of her nose on the day his dad took them both to Fulbourn Fen to teach them about autumn fungi. One of the sparkly blue barrettes behind her ear has wriggled loose. "Unless you were just showing off?"
The injustice of these accusations is a wound. To his soul. Administered by a dagger dipped in poison. James has never thought that she couldn't take care of herself, and Lily knows that. He's never had the opportunity to think it. She's been taking care of him his entire life, whether he wanted her to or not. If he tries to reciprocate at all she gets into a big bloody snit about it.
He wasn't showing off either—though he does like showing off—and he knows she knows that too.
"If you think I'm so awful, don't wait here with me then," he grumbles, turning away from her again, and folds his arms across his chest. "Nobody said you had to."
Lily makes a big show of scoffing and rolling her eyes—James isn't looking at her, but he doesn't need to look to know what her face is doing—and stays precisely where she is.
He's so mad at her for being mad at him, but can't help but feel a little smug, all the same.
She doesn't have to wait with him.
Sirius didn't wait, although that's because Sirius wasn't allowed to. The teachers' collective vendetta against James and Sirius's friendship is a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, with every member of staff seemingly dedicated to keeping them apart as much as possible so as not to "disrupt their classmates," but they have no such qualms about Lily. She never gets in trouble at school because she's a bloody goody-two-shoes, though only James is allowed to call her that. Anyone else who said it would mean it in a nasty way, not in the way he means it, and that would make them his enemy. Even Sirius would face his scorn if he dared.
She's probably right, and he will get suspended.
He really has been looking forward to the Christmas show, too. He and Lily were given Somewhere Out There to sing as a duet, and they've been keeping it a secret from their parents to surprise them (except for James's dad, who has been sworn to secrecy) and now James won't be there to see the look on his mum's face.
Speaking of his mother, she's going to hit the roof when she learns that he's been fighting. He can't get so much as a scratch on his knee without her dooming him to sepsis and an untimely, bouquet-laden grave.
With a heavy sigh, he drops his head onto Lily's shoulder, and she makes a big, exaggerated sound of disgust, but doesn't shake him off.
She never does.
Why would she? That's just the place where his head is supposed to go.
"Your hair smells like a Bounty," he tells her.
"Shut up," she murmurs back.
They sit there in silence for another minute or two, then the office door swings inwards and the headmistress steps out.
McGonagall's emergence from that particular portal is a sight that James has become familiar with over the years, particularly since he moved up from Royal Academy's primary school to the secondary, though ordinarily he is accompanied by Sirius, and the situation is not quite as dire as it appears to be right now.
"I'll see you now, come in," she instructs him, her expression as inscrutable and her bun as severely slicked back as usual. James hauls himself up to his feet and beside him, Lily stands up too. "Just you, Potter," the headmistress adds. "Evans, you can wait where you are if you like, though what I'd advise you to do is finish your lunch hour elsewhere."
"I'll wait," Lily quietly assents, dropping back down on the bench.
James follows McGonagall into her office, which always holds the vague scent of ginger biscuits, and doesn't wait to be invited to sit before he takes one of two torturously stiff chairs that face her desk, familiar as he is with the structure of a raking down from the headmistress.
McGonagall takes her own, more comfortable seat on the other side of the desk.
"So," she says, above her steepled fingers, offering the word like a proclamation.
So, you've broken the rules again. So, you're here to be punished. So, your best friend has turned on you and is hating you with all her might and main, ten feet away outside this office. So, you may as well burn the whole world down.
"So," he repeats.
McGonagall lifts the discipline slip, which had been delivered to her via Motor Mouth when Kettleburn dropped him off at the office, and adjusts her oval spectacles to examine it.
"According to what Mr Kettleburn has written here," she recounts, "you attacked Rexford Avery in the Year 8 locker room."
She looks at him expectantly.
James stares sullenly back.
"To be more specific…" She consults the slip again, and James watches her eyes flit back and forth as she rereads Kettleburn's chicken scratch handwriting. The slips are made from a thick, sturdy cardstock, bordered in shiny scarlet with the school crest embossed on the back—Lily said once that the Royal is so posh, it uses fancy wedding invitations to dole out detentions. "As Mr Kettleburn was walking into the locker room, he saw you run up to Mr Avery and strike him across the face."
It is a prosaic description of a moment of fury in his life that James can still feel pulsing, unsatiated and unwilling to quell completely, through his blood right this minute, smarting at the back of his knuckles.
He'd hit that wanker so hard that he'd bloodied his nose up.
"Is this true?" presses McGonagall.
"Yep." He places a firm, emphatic pop on the p. Let there be no doubt as to his actions today.
"You're not attempting to deny it?"
"Nope."
"I see." The inscrutability slips from the headmistress's face for the moment, replaced by the crease of a frown between her brows. Normally he and Sirius would be spinning a cock and bull story, largely for their own amusement, at this point in the proceedings. "Do you have any explanation to offer for your behaviour?"
"Nope."
"I also see that you have refused to apologise to Mr Avery." With the full extent of his wrongdoing recounted, McGonagall sets the card down and folds her hands above it, one atop the other. "Can I ask why this is?"
James used to be able to swing his legs back and forth whenever he sat in one of these chairs to account for his sillier crimes, but now his feet are planted firmly on the ground, and he doesn't feel like accounting for shit.
They can go ahead and suspend him, for all he cares.
That'll show her.
Sitting outside with her nose in the air, being mad at him for what? For what exactly?
James isn't bothered. He did it for her and he'd do it again. There's nothing that he wouldn't do for one of his friends, and that goes double for Lily, the queen in his life's little castle. One day she'll just have to accept that.
He says nothing.
"Are you willing to apologise to Mr Avery now?"
He slowly shakes his head.
"I can't begin to express how disappointed I am to learn of this, James," says McGonagall, and even gives him the credit of looking disappointed. For all her cool professionalism, she has been friends with his mother since before he was born, and always held a special fondness for him. "Class disruptions and silly pranks, I have come to expect from you, but violence?" Her eyes widen slightly behind her specs. "This is an extremely serious issue. We have a zero-tolerance policy towards violence in this school. I assume you understand what that means?"
His shoulders twitch, a half-hearted shrug that his body doesn't quite have the will to follow through with. "Does it mean I get a present?"
"This is not a laughing matter," McGonagall swiftly responds. "You attacked another student unprovoked and offer no explanation for your actions, moreover you refuse to apologise, and now find it pertinent to make jokes—"
The door to her office is thrown open from the outside and Lily Evans bursts into the room.
"It wasn't unprovoked!" she shouts at the headmistress.
*
Two truths can be diametrically opposed, yet coexist within the same moment, within the same person.
Yeah, Lily knows what "diametrically opposed" means, despite only being twelve—only being her sister's favourite word in that sentence—though "thirteen next month" sounds a lot more grown up. She read it in a book and looked it up once, during one of many afternoons she spends haunting the school library while she waits for James to finish whatever detention he happened to get that day. His commitment to frivolous misconduct has worked in her favour somewhat.
Truth one: the headmistress won't suffer fools, and Lily is too smart to risk her good standing in a school that she is lucky to be attending, given what her parents do and the shape of their finances, by disobeying a direct instruction.
Truth two: she will fall upon her own sword for James Potter, whether or not he deserves it, again and again and again.
Though it must be noted that barging into McGonagall's office—even eavesdropping through the door, as she had been doing—is less a fall upon one's sword, more like a thrust of the blade into her own stomach.
And yet.
Here she is, making the incision. Trying to save him, resenting him, so mad at him, but being his best friend above all else, because that's who she's been her whole life and it's part of her wiring. Not the cogs in the clockwork, but the steel that they're comprised of. She exists, and so she is his friend and this is not questioned; such is the third truth which ties the first two together, visceral and vital and central to how she functions. Like a salamander's tail. Like a human liver. Cut it out and it will just grow back again.
She learned most of that in the library too.
"Miss Evans!" McGonagall very nearly gasps, so surprised is she, in response to Lily's sudden and unwelcome appearance in the gingerbread house, which is how Remus refers to her office. "Did I or did I not tell you to wait outside?"
"You did, but it wasn't unprovoked!" Lily cries, and looks at James, who has twisted around in his chair to regard her with saucer-wide eyes, and stamps her demand into the floorboards with the sole of her patent leather shoe, her hands clenched into fists. "Tell her!"
But James only stares at her with a mouth that could catch flies.
"Get out, Miss Evans," McGonagall warns.
"He's not telling you the truth because he's being an idiot!" This she spits in his direction with as much vehemence as she can muster up within her. "But it wasn't unprovoked, James didn't attack him for no reason, he did it because of me, because Avery snuck up behind me in the locker room and yanked up my skirt!"
Even saying it makes her eyes begin to prickle.
Inconvenient. Childish. No.
Lily has to pitch a battle with her own body, staged entirely inside her head, to keep the tears from welling up. She can't be pathetic about this. She can't be the baby who cries to teacher because a boy teased her. That's almost certainly how Petunia will frame it if she does, with one of her scowls and that awful voice she reserves especially for her sister. "I can't believe you're getting all upset just because a boy likes you," she'll crow, since that's how boys act when they like girls, such is the social norm which has been explained to Lily before, though it clashes rather spectacularly with the stubborn little voice in her head which keeps repeating but it didn't feel very much like he LIKED you, did it?
James teases her all the time, in his very James way, harmless and affectionate all over.
She's never been scared of him before.
As for McGonagall, her eyebrows have risen to a not insignificant height.
"I beg your pardon?" she says, in an eerily still way that's sort of chilling.
"He was laughing and saying he wanted to know if the carpet matched the curtains," she explains, speaking very fast to get the whole story out of her body, then maybe it can do her a favour and stay out, "so I shouted at him get off but he wouldn't let go of my skirt, he just kept laughing and laughing, and I managed to shove him away but James was already running over, and that's what happened. It wasn't unprovoked."
These are the facts, presented as best she can manage.
The actual terror that Lily had felt, the humiliation and skittering panic which came with the complete loss of control, and her absolute certainty that one of Avery's loitering, guffawing mates would have tried to divest her of her knickers if she hadn't managed to pull herself free, are not facts, they're feelings, though maybe she'd talk about them too, if she didn't feel so positive that they'd make her cry.
As she has been speaking, the headmistress's lips have been pressing themselves into a line that is tight and ruler thin, and now that Lily is done, she turns her sharp, discerning gaze upon James again.
"This is why you hit him?" she asks.
He's been looking up at Lily this whole time, but turns back around. "Yeah."
"Instead of fetching a teacher?"
"There weren't any other teachers around," Lily eagerly answers on his behalf. "Mr Kettleburn only walked in when James was going for Avery, he didn't see what happened before that and Avery's gang all swore he did nothing, so he believed them. Beatrice and Emily and a whole bunch of the other girls all saw it too, but he wouldn't even listen when they tried to tell him, he just told them to quiet down."
And she sees it.
In McGonagall's eyes.
She might only be twelve years old, but she is a clever twelve, an observant twelve. Her mum claims that Lily can read minds, which she can't, but sometimes she looks at a person and sees something there and knows in her gut that her vision is clear. In her headmistress she sees it in that moment, that thing that only women feel, the thing she observes in her mother's face when June or Susan or another of her friends is ensconced in the kitchen with mascara tracks imprinted on their cheeks, clutching their mugs of tea in quaking fingers and whispering words like he says he's really sorry or he's promised that he'll never do it again, the thing which had been missing from Kettleburn's eyes when Lily and her friends frantically tried to explain what Avery had just done to her.
The anger.
It's anger, but it's not for Lily. It isn't even anger for James.
"Then I will speak to Mr Kettleburn." The woman's voice is enviably composed, likely because she is the headmistress, and not an almost thirteen-year-old girl. "And rest assured, I will be taking up this matter with Mr Avery as soon as possible, but you, Potter, still resorted to violence in the very first instance, and that's not the way a young man should handle such problems."
"Then what exactly should he have done?" Lily fires in her face, a weapon forged by panic, launched as if with intention to do harm. She doesn't want James to get suspended. She can't let him be suspended. She can't not see him in school tomorrow. "Just stood there laughing like all the other boys?"
McGonagall does not waver, but plucks a pen and a stack of post it notes from her stationery box. "Which other boys?"
"Evan Rosier," Lily starts to recount, her mind travelling from one grinning, self-satisfied, repulsive face to another, and McGonagall promptly writes them all down. "Hephaestus Mulciber, Julian Wilkes, Walden Macnair…"
"Yaxley and Dolohov were there too," James chimes in, then quietly adds, "and Snape."
"Severus didn't laugh. He wouldn't have laughed," says Lily, certain of this despite the fact that she couldn't see his face from where she'd been standing. She and Sev have become good friends through their piano lessons, and Lily feels sort of responsible for him, but he and James took an instant dislike for one another. "But the rest of them did. They were all standing around me in a circle, but Sev was at his locker. He wasn't part of any of it."
"I see," says McGonagall, though Lily notes that she writes his name anyway. "Anyone else?"
"That was it, I think."
"And no doubt there are plenty of students who can corroborate your version of events?"
Lily nods.
"Fair enough." The headmistress taps the bottom of her pen on the table, but does not set it down. To James, she issues her verdict. "I'll need to investigate this matter further and you will hear from me again, but given that you appear to have been coming to a classmate's defence, I'm not going to issue a suspension for the moment."
The relief that envelops Lily's entire body is bordering on embarrassing.
"If, however," McGonagall continues, "I hear of you behaving violently towards another student, irrespective of what terrible thing they may have done or what act of gallantry you may feel the need to perform, that decision will be immediately reversed, and I will also remind you that in the future, your responsibility in situations like this is to find a teacher instead of taking matters into your own hands. Do I make myself clear?"
"Yes, Miss," says James.
"Good." She nudges the post its aside and scribbles something on James's discipline slip. "I'm giving you a week's worth of detentions. You can start with your first this afternoon."
The convicted defendant shrugs. A week of detentions means nothing to him, Lily knows. Chances are, Sirius will have earned himself something similar before the school day is out by doing something stupid, like launching a frog at the choir, and he won't have to serve it alone. "Alright."
"Miss Evans, I'm giving you one detention, but you've had enough upset for one day, so I'll let you wait until tomorrow to attend it."
"What?" Successfully shaken out of an apathy that Lily knows in her bones is all an act, because he's mad at her for being mad at him, James is out of his chair and bouncing to his feet in an instant. "But she didn't do anything wrong!"
"On the contrary, she came bursting into a private meeting when she had received explicit instruction to wait outside," McGonagall points out, meeting James's furious glower with the full force of her indelible, grown-up, headmistressy calm. "It was your responsibility to explain your actions, Potter, not hers."
"Then can't I just take it for her? It was my fault, you can add it on to mine."
"You've helped her quite enough for her for one day, thank you very much," says McGonagall, a neat slice through his red-faced disbelief. The look she gives Lily is significantly softer. "Noble as your intentions were, I trust you understand that no one at this school is above the rules?"
Lily nods. She's never had a detention before and had hoped to go her entire school career without one. Her sister, who has never had one either, will be positively gleeful. But it's better than any alternative that she can think of. "I understand."
"In that case, there are twenty minutes left in the lunch hour, so I suggest you both go straight to the canteen and put something solid in your stomachs."
She lifts her hand to indicate that the door is behind them both and their conversation has concluded, so Lily turns and leaves with a quiet, "Yes, Miss."
James follows without another word for the headmistress, though he shuts her door with a bit more force than is necessary.
"I can't believe she gave you a detention," he hotly complains, stomping behind Lily to the naughty bench, where their schoolbags are waiting patiently to be reclaimed, once he's far enough away from McGonagall's door to be certain that she won't call him back in. "When you didn't even do anything! That was so unfair!"
Lily is poised to bend and scoop her bag up off the floor, all the better to get the hell out of there and indulge in her tears in the privacy of the girls' toilet, but abandons this intention to round on him instead.
"Why was it unfair?" she snaps, glaring daggers at his stupid, gormless, familiar, well-intentioned face, her own blade sticking in her gullet. "I deserved it, and you got off easy with yours, so I don't even want to hear your complaining!"
Her reproach stuns him completely, judging by the look he gives her.
He must have thought things were put right between them. He must have assumed that her impassioned defence of his honour was forgiveness for an infraction that he can't understand he committed, and which Lily can't assist him in comprehending, since she barely understands it herself. All she knows is that this is James, who loves Superman and Batman and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and has always cherished ambitions to be the adulated hero who swoops in and saves the day. This afternoon, she and Rexford Avery finally gave him that chance, his golden opportunity to achieve that ultimate goal, and Lily can't find the words in her head to explain why that hurts her so much, only that it does, and that James would never intentionally hurt her, but that just makes it hurt all the more.
Does it make him happy that he got to be Superman today, even if she's the one who had to play helpless victim?
"Are you really still angry with me?" he questions her with his eyes narrowed to slits, in a tone that's half-disgust, half-something different. His own share of hurt, perhaps.
"Of course I'm still angry!"
"So why did you come running in there to defend me?"
"Do you honestly think I'd ever want you suspended?"
"It bloody seems like you do right now!"
"Well, I don't!" she cries, swooping down to grab her schoolbag. Her face has gone all hot and her eyes are still stinging and they're being so bloody loud. Any second now, one of the teachers will come marching out of the staff room and pack them both back to McGonagall for disrupting this hallowed corridor, and the many pretentious oil portraits of 17th Century alumni which line the walls. "But you would have deserved it if you had been!"
She shoulders her bag and storms off down the corridor, as fast as she can go without actually breaking into a sprint.
"You're not making any sense!" James calls after her.
A moment later, she hears his footsteps pounding on the floor, rapidly closing the distance she's left between them, and concedes that running away would be pointless. She's never been able to best him in a race, and she sort of wants him to follow anyway.
"Lily?" he pesters her, tugging at her blazer sleeve. "Lily? Lily? Lily, would you just stop and let me talk to you?" He's past level with her now, keeping pace with ease, jogging sideways and a little bit ahead, just so he can keep his eyes on her face. "It's not like I beat somebody up for no reason, I couldn't just stand there and let him do what he did!"
He wins. She stops walking.
James's momentum is ongoing, so he almost trips backwards before he, too, halts in his tracks.
"I was handling it by myself," she coldly reminds him, watching him right himself.
He lets out an exasperated sigh. "I never said you couldn't!"
"And I don't care what he did, I didn't like watching you hit someone like that, okay? It didn't make me feel any better!"
"But I wasn't trying to make you feel better!" he argues, so amped up with frustration that he's rocking back and forwards on his heels. "I was trying to teach Avery a lesson!"
Silence crashes into them both like a slap across the face.
He isn't rocking on his heels anymore.
Sometimes, though she most certainly cannot read minds, Lily thinks she can look at a person and see something there and know in her gut that her vision is clear.
With James, she always knows, because she knows him, so she watches the dawn of shame and comprehension on his face—which really isn't stupid or gormless, but is in fact quite nice to look at, and it was unkind of her to think otherwise—in real time, in a matter of seconds, and bears witness as all of his arguments and righteous indignation crumple into dust about his ears.
Then his bag drops to the floor with an almighty thwack, and he pulls her into his arms.
"I'm sorry," he tells her, squeezing her tight, like he can force his repentance to soak into her skin if he can only hold her close enough, tucking his chin into her shoulder, and a silly little sob rears up in Lily's throat, but she is prepared for it, so she forces it back down, then hugs him back. "I'm really, really sorry."
"It's fine," Lily murmurs, her arms banding around his middle, furiously blinking the burn of unshed tears away, now that he cannot see her face. "I'm sorry too."
"No, it's not fine, I've upset you, you don't need to be sorry."
"I'm not upset, I'm just—" She just can't admit that she's upset, or that someone like Rex Avery could get to her, or that she wishes James had done this exact thing earlier. That she would have felt better of it then. She sighs. "I was going to sort it out myself, is all."
"I know."
"And I really am glad you're not suspended."
"I know that too," he says, a fraction of his usual pep returning to his voice. "Lucky for you, right? Sirius really isn't as good a singer as I am."
She coughs out some pathetic imitation of a laugh and lightly shoves him away.
He's almost exactly of a height with her now. Lily spent their childhoods being the taller of them both, but Euphemia says he'll have overtaken her by the time they've both turned thirteen, not even counting his whirlwind of jet black hair, which already gives him an extra inch.
"Are you okay now?" he asks her, half-smiling, but carefully searching her face for a sign that she is not.
She allows herself the barest of inward sniffles. "Yeah, I'm fine."
"Thanks for sticking up for me with McGonagall."
"Thanks for not laughing with the rest of those idiots."
"I only laugh at things that are funny," he loftily asserts, but his attention is caught by something to the left of Lily's face, and his body starts to list in that direction. "Wait, hold still for a second."
He lifts his hand towards her cheek, and for a second, Lily wonders, with an odd, swooping feeling in her tummy, why on earth he's suddenly trying to hold her face, but there comes a slight tug in her hair and a flash of glittery blue in the corner of her eye, followed by the telltale click of the barrette he re-fastens behind her ear.
"Your little clippy thing had come out," he says.
It's on the tip of her tongue to tell him that she could have just fixed it herself, but she can't quite find the heart to say it—perhaps because a fundamentally horrible thing has happened to her today, or because trying not to cry has worn her out—so she simply says thank you instead, and they split a bowl of chips in the canteen.
The detention is not too bad, in the end.
Rex Avery is given a week's suspension.
His parents kick up a stink, a meeting takes place, with Fleamont and Euphemia Potter in attendance, and McGonagall's original decision goes unchanged.
His mates all get a week's worth of detentions. Except for Severus. Who wouldn't have laughed.
Rumour has it—thanks to Jorkins, who tells her friend Karen, who tells her friend Chloé, who tells her little sister Yvonne, who tells her best friend, Petunia—that Kettleburn got a bollocking from the headmistress in her office, though only James and Lily know the truth about why.
From then on and in perpetuity, she thinks about James fixing her barrette whenever she clips one into her hair.
It's the only reminder of that day that doesn't sting a little bit to remember, but actually feels quite pleasant.
Memories work in very odd ways sometimes.
That's something else for her to look up.