The Years We Were Alive: Year 2

Dread

May 12, 1973

Lizzie and Sirius were alone in the dorm. Everyone else was off doing something. They didn't know what everyone else was doing either. James had taken the map. He said he wanted to explore and find more secret things to put on it.

"If there's that tunnel to Honeyduke's just imagine what else is out there!"

Lizzie had her head in Sirius' lap, he was learning how to braid her hair. He had finally let her braid his, so he had two short Dutch braid pigtails. He had long hair for a boy, probably the longest in the year (a lot of boys had long hair though, Will would always say that it was the way of the '70s) but it was no match for Lizzie's. She wasn't going to try to show him a French or Dutch braid yet, that was the advanced stuff.

Sirius had taken various chunks of Lizzie's hair to plait. That's what he called it. Lizzie had never heard that before she came to Hogwarts. It sounded French, which would make sense for a French braid, but she was pretty sure that people all around the world developed braiding.

"I don't know what happened," Sirius held a long strand in front of Lizzie's face, she squinted at it to see what he did wrong. He was near the end of the hair, so Lizzie could see it without getting up and looking in a mirror.

"I think you switched, you have to always go over or always go under," she pulled out the last stitch, "do you remember how you were braiding it?"

"I think I was going under," Lizzie handed the hair back to him with the three strands.

"Start with the right strand,"

"Which one is the right one?" Sirius' voice seemed concerned that he didn't know which was the right one. Lizzie started to laugh.

"The one on the right side," Lizzie kept laughing.

"Which is the right side?" Sirius seemed like he was getting annoyed.

"Sirius," Lizzie was trying to find a break in her laughs, "the right-hand side,"

"Oh," Sirius said shortly, and then Lizzie could feel that he was braiding the hair again.

"You are so funny," she smiled. He was sitting on his bed with his feet on the floor, Lizzie's head was facing out into the room, and she was laying on her side next to him. This was very reminiscent of how Lizzie would sometimes lay with her friends back home. In the boys' minds, she was just one of the guys, but in her mind, Sirius was just one of the girls. She would never say that out loud though. He would be offended that she was implying he was gay, which she would never do. She thought back to the teasing her friend went through before coming out to their small circle.

"So, are you still going to help me move my stuff out of my house?" Sirius' tone became somber.

"Yes, of course, when are you doing that?" Lizzie bit her lip. She still didn't want to, but she was going to.

"I was thinking, we go and drop our stuff at James', then go to my house, and when we get back you can get to Will's house,"

"That works perfectly," Lizzie smiled, "and you're sure that it's okay for me to go?"

"Yeah," he didn't sound sure. Lizzie was just going to accept that; he would never put her in physical danger. In fact, the boys were always reluctant to let Lizzie walk anywhere in the castle alone. In the past month, there were three separate occasions where Sirius walked right into the public bathroom with her, only to be greeted by shouts from other girls telling him to leave.