Ecdysis

Chapter 2 - Second Year: Rise

I would like to stress again that there are heavy themes of bullying in this story!

---

I can pinpoint the day my behaviour at school changed. Looking back now, it lights a fire under my skin, remembering the eleven and then twelve-year-old girl I was, swallowing Draco's loud, public jabs at my filthy heritage. Letting Pansy get away with stealing my homework and passing it around for the rest of our classmates to copy. Constantly allowing myself to play the victim. I'd had enough.

Perhaps I'd always had a kernel of rebellion in me. Thinking of Thomas Crawford, whose tailbone I bruised thrusting him into the bin when I was a child, suggests that Slytherin darkness appeared early. My parents gave me a thorough scolding for that, drilling into me that we used our words when we were angry, not the physical force of our bodies. The beautiful thing about magic was that words were power personified. There was only so much I could take before heeding my parents' lesson was no longer a viable option.

In second year, my housemates returned with a venomous cruelty that ran as deep and foul as their inbred blood. It wasn't just child's play—plugging noses when I entered the room, giving me a wide berth at the dinner table, refusing to use any silverware my fingers touched. In second year, they became cunning.

I returned to the common room late one evening after an exceptionally tedious day. That Thursday over double Potions, Blaise thought it funny to toss a mystery ingredient into my cauldron—I suspected it was lacewing flies, though I couldn't be sure—sparking a Seamus-Finnigan-sized explosion that singed the ends of my hair, burnt holes in the toes of my shoes and cost me two toenails. Snape reluctantly deducted five points from Slytherin, and naturally, everyone blamed me for it. Never mind that I'd already earned the house thirty points since the start of the school year. Nobody ever cared about my achievements.

I spent the rest of class in the hospital wing, then returned to the dungeons after dinner, where Snape let me retake the lab.

"Pure-blood," I scoffed the silly password, exhausted and sweaty after long hours crouching over a steaming cauldron. Blaise had tampered with my draught right near the end of the period, so I'd spent nearly double the time I normally would brewing in one day.

The stone door concealed in the wall slid open, allowing me entrance into our green-tinged common room. I headed straight to the dorms, avoiding eye-contact with the upper years playing Exploding Snap at the sofas. Behind the glass wall, a child mermaid waved at me from the Black Lake. I stopped to wave back, drinking in the delight in her yellow eyes, her green hair rippling behind her like a ribbon in the wind.

I pressed my hands over my cheeks, always cold underground, and felt them at full height, the edges of my palms grazing the tall corners of my mouth. When was the last time I'd smiled? At something I'd read in a book perhaps, or when Snape made a scathing remark at Potter for chopping rat tails like a blind house-elf. Just the act of smiling lifted my mood, trickling in joy I didn't know I had in me. I made a note to smile more often. Putting my happiness in the hands of other people was a foolish thing. Just like everything else in this world, the responsibility to feel good was my own.

My newfound joy lasted all of two minutes.

The Stiletto Snakes were up when I returned—a name I'd coined for Pansy, Millicent, Daphne, and Tracey—amidst a foul compost scent none of them seemed to notice. It was common for me to enter the room and hear them go silent as if they'd just been speaking about me. I knew it was a manipulation tactic and the likelihood of them gossiping about me every time I was about to enter a room was implausible. Still, it made my mind wander. If they had been talking about me, what were they saying? Was it my hair or my teeth? Two attributes that never failed to come up in the discourse of my flaws. Or perhaps they'd been stifling through my trunk again, laughing at my Muggle-brand underwear. For kids who refused to touch the same jug of juice, the boys had no issues playing catch with my Marks & Spencer's cotton knickers. At least a prefect had called them out on that, a half-blood girl who looked out for me now and again, but wasn't keen on engaging for too long, lest my Mudblood disparities affect her popularity.