Presented as the contents of an old shoebox under Remus Lupin's bed, The Shoebox Project tells the story of Marauders-era Hogwarts through letters, photographs, and diary entries.
"This story will lift you up and make your life a little better, and...
Йой! Нажаль, це зображення не відповідає нашим правилам. Щоб продовжити публікацію, будь ласка, видаліть його або завантажте інше.
James can't find his trousers.
It is, it seems to him, pretty absurd to be looking for your trousers in the middle of a funeral, but Great-Aunt Aramina is drunk (when isn't she drunk?) and, in a wine-soaked tender moment, has poured half a tray of canapés on the ones he was wearing. He knows he brought another pair, because he tried them on before the service, and they were too short. His mother, he thinks in a flash of irritation, has probably picked them up, the way she is always doing, and put them somewhere no human would think of looking, like the closet.
He almost yells, "Mu-um!" and then he doesn't. He says, "oh," to his socks, and sits down on the bed. It is lower than he remembers for some reason, or else he feels bigger.
That's it exactly, the subtle wrongness, the strange sensation of not quite fitting his own space in the world anymore. What he feels is not grief (he thinks, distantly, analytically) but confusion, as if walking down a familiar staircase to find that it has suddenly lost its bottom step. He's grown suddenly, and what used to fit into the air around him isn't there at all anymore. Now it's up to him, just him, to fill that emptiness. It would be much worse if it felt real, but he still harbors a human disbelief that traps him in moments such as these: where he opens his mouth to say something familiar, and finds that the natural words are no longer relevant.
James Potter doesn't want to rebuild what is natural around what is relevant. He doesn't want to fill in the strange cold space of air that presses around him. He wants his mum to get him trousers that fit and don't have canapés smudged down the left leg.
James stands up and pulls the covers off the bed. Maybe he threw them under--but he didn't. He rips off the sheets, and then the undersheets, and then he hurls the mattress off the bedframe. It knocks over a lamp, which splinters. James wonders at the fact that he has been sleeping on a flowered mattress, all this time, and no one has told him. No wonder he has such trouble with girls. It seems like the sort of thing a bloke ought to be told.
Someone knocks on his door, and a tentative voice says, "James?" "Um, yes," says James, and Lily opens the door. Her hair is pulled sharply back and she looks whiter than usual. She looks at the mattress and then at James, and then says "You realize you're not wearing any trousers, don't you?" "I was looking for them," James says.
"Some people," says Lily, tapping the side of her nose, "would call that inappropriate." She walks past him, tangles her fingers briefly in his hair, and then leans down to drag the mattress up off the floor.
"Aunt Aramina spilled," James attempts, "she spilled on them. I thought walking about with, you know, all over my knee would be more inappropriate. But I can't find my other pants, and I know I brought them with me, because I tried them on earlier and they were too short and I was glad I'd two pairs, else I couldn't sit down without showing too much ankle and that, that," he fumbles for the words, "that is also inappropriate, that."
