Paisley Higgs | (Sirius Black)

Chapter 8- Are We... Good?

Someone rang the doorbell.

Actually... someone rang the doorbell three times, quickly and all in a row but it was clearly meant to be understood as one aggressive ding dong.

Groaning, I drug myself out of my messy bed and turned down the Willy Nelson album I'd been wallowing to. I was the only one home which meant I had to at least see who it was. I caught a quick peek in the mirror on my way to the door. Not cute.

It had been about half an hour since my escape from that British jerk face, Sirius, and I had miraculously managed to calm myself down, yet my face still looked like I'd just cried my eyes out (which, considering I had just cried my eyes out, made perfect sense... but still).

My copper hair was all messy and tangled, my freckled face was blotchy, nose red, my not quite blue, not quite green eyes were puffy and swollen, mascara smeared.

Ugh.

Again, not cute.

There were probably spells to fix the damage, but even if I was allowed to do magic, I wouldn't have known what they were nor how to do them.

But Clemy would.

It may have been a strange thing given that a mysterious person anxiously awaited my presence downstairs—but as I stared back the pathetically melancholy mirror girl, I searched for a trace of Clementine Higgs; searched for some sign that we were actually related.

I don't know why it mattered at that moment, but it did. Maybe if I could find something of hers in that mirror... maybe it would make things better...

I think we had the same nose.

It was a nice nose, as far as noses went—fairly standard, if you ask me—and I guess our ears were similar as well... and we both had Dad's teeth—only they looked nice in Clemy's mouth. They made me look more akin to a chipmunk... or so I'd been told—not by Clemy, but by plenty of people at school.

However, I think the thing that stood out most, even through the horrible crying mess, was our eyes.

If I had to pick something on my face that I liked—something that was the most Clemy—it would be my eyes. They didn't twinkle like hers or draw people into them like a fathomless ocean blue whirlpool—but they were big and unique. I took a weird sense of pride in the fact that I'd never met anyone with my color eyes. Not quite blue, not quite green.

Granted, they weren't much to be proud of at that moment.

On that note, I tip-toed down the stairs to the front door (taking care to avoid the squeaky steps). Mom still wasn't around, or at least she wasn't when I ran through the house crying my eyes out like a damsel in distress or when I'd come down fifteen minutes after looking for some tortilla chips to snack on. I guessed she had gone out to run errands, which wouldn't have been such a bad thing... except that it meant I would have to be the one to greet the visitor instead of her.

I hated answering the door, as a rule.

The further I climbed down those stairs the less I wanted to open the door... if I opened it I'd almost certainly have to talk to someone which was almost certainly the type of torture outlawed by the eighth amendment back in the States (Did the British have a law against cruel and unusual punishment too?)

After making a mental note to look up some info on Britain's basic human rights laws, I found myself sidestepping some yellow boots in the front room, eye to eye with the peephole.

My anxiety was kicking in at full capacity by this point, so not answering the door seemed like a pretty solid course of action. But I still needed to know who I was rejecting.