Dirty Little Game ♠ Professor Lupin

Twenty one: Does It Pass

After that night, it was hard to get back to my life before Remus Lupin.

I couldn't help but sneak a glance in his direction during meals in the Great Hall. As we passed each other in the corridor, I wanted to smile at him. During the Defence Against the Dark Arts lessons, I had to pretend to be extremely uninterested in whatever it was about, knowing Brook was in the perfect position to watch me.

I was lame. My parents controlled me at home, Brook at school. When it seemed that I ran away from one, I stuck myself right into the hands of the other. I didn't like that at all, but I wasn't in any position to do anything about it.

So I was trying to regain at least some control over my own life. I was back to being the social hotspot of Slytherin, there was a lot of me everywhere. I put a well-known fake smile on my face and pretended to be an energetic, flashy girl. A student asked me if I had been sick for the last semester because she had seen me so rarely.

I let Wilton draw me into his circle of friends, which actually had quite a few Ravenclaws. I didn't necessarily like them, but they were a distraction from my troubling thoughts. This was what I needed - to kill time and interact with other people.

His friends had one trait that turned out to be very useful to me. They spent a lot of time studying. Brook has always been my study buddy but since she was gone I felt weird sitting alone in the library. Now I was going there with three other people who kept me from looking and feeling isolated.

Jaylee tried to come back. That is, she was trying to eat a cookie and have a cookie at the same time. She hadn't given up on Brook for me, just wanted to be able to talk to me as before, still sticking to Brook. Each time I ignored her presence and chatter, knowing that sooner or later she would go away.

"Why are you mad at her for something that Brook did?" Wilton asked during breakfast, a moment after Jaylee gave up and walked away to sit elsewhere.

"I'm not mad at her for what Brook did." Carelessly, I put scrambled eggs on my plate, totally unmoved by the monologue I just heard from the girl. "Just for choosing her over me."

He snorted. "Good thing I didn't make the same mistake."

"Why exactly did you stay with me?" I was genuinely curious of his answer.

He shrugged and shoved a fork full of food into his mouth. It wasn't his stalling style, it was just his manner. "I don't know. I became friends with you first, so I can also be the last one with you."

Loyalty wasn't a Slytherin trait, but that wasn't the reason I didn't believe him. It seemed that Wilton just didn't care who he was hanging out with. He wasn't very close to any of us girls, he was just hanging out with us for entertainment. That's why he didn't do anything when Brook got pissed off at me - he didn't really care about that, not enough to do anything about it, to go after her like Jaylee and try to reason with her. It was easier for him to stay with me, so he did.

It didn't bother me. The most important thing was that I had someone to sit down with during lessons and someone to chat with in between, I didn't expect anything more from him. I wouldn't be able to trust him enough to confide in him about my problems anyway. Slytherins don't become attached to each other. It's just when I had him around me, I didn't look as lonely as I really felt.

Brook's hostile attitude towards me didn't seem to wane over time - on the contrary, the more time passed, the more she appeared to be against me. I knew she could do a lot, but I wouldn't have thought she would go so low.

In the DADA lesson we were grouped in pairs, I was with some girl from Hufflepuff. We were practicing nonverbal spells and the whole room was silent except for the clatter of shoes on the floor and sometimes Lupin's comments. No one spoke spells aloud, so when one of them hit my chest, nobody knew who did it. Except me.