Paper Confines

xxxvi. Cassowary

PAPER CONFINES.
36. / Cassowary

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       Colette's hair was waist-long and brittle the summer she turned fifteen. It was three hundred and seventy-nine days since the bomb, her cake was blue and plummy, and the yard was infested with gnomes again. Evangeline and Ephriam, who Colette never called aunt and uncle, brought the cake out from the kitchen and served it to her in bed. She ate it and felt nothing.

That September she would go back to school, half-learned in English and two years forsaken.

Evangeline did Colette's hair in ribboned plaits that last morning, lightened by lemon juice and many afternoons in the yard. Her stomach felt equally knotted. She was perched on the velveteen edge of her great aunt's ottoman, variegated in the light and kaleidoscopes of a dozen rainbow suncatchers dangling from the curtain rod. The wallpaper, verdant and floral like most of the furniture, clung in a strange way, peeling where a plaster wall met a stone one. Names and heights were smudged at the archway. This was the bedroom Evangeline and Colette's mother grew up in, and remnants of better childhoods were ample.

She asked to take the Floo to London alone. Evangeline and Ephriam's reluctance flickered away in a green blink.

Colette didn't think she was ready to return to school, but she did think, with enduring emptiness, that she would never live again if she didn't try now.

Alone for the first thirty minutes of the train ride, she was eventually joined by wandering first years who appeared even more lost than she must have. They differed from her by chittering in excitement and pointing at the rolling plains and mountains of Scotland, gargantuan storm clouds forming in the peaks.

The gamekeeper at the train station seemed unsure of where to put her—fifteen and antithetically new—but decided on the carriages rather than the boats, and Colette remarked after a strained conversation drowned in rain, with invisible horses clopping in the mud, that Hogwarts was different from Beauxbatons in many more regards than she had once thought. It was beautiful, she would relent that; the castle's architecture spanned an array of towers that varied curiously in height and width, dusted in a fine glow that couldn't be attributed to the orange slots of candlelit windows. Flowers spattered the grounds, water cupped in the petals. It appeared, in the distance, a beacon of warmth in a foreign cold.

But Colette felt unchanged even inside. People whispered as she was sorted. Beads of rain clung to her hair and uniform. The walls were an old stone like her father's wine cellar or the house in Ottery St Catchpole.

She had expected the dull sting of the last two years would not unfurl at once—in truth, she expected it never would. The honest kindness of her new house, she had not, but even that was double-edged.

Bellefeuille had been a second home at Beauxbatons. It was Nathalie's house, it was Colette's music and jewellery and three years of Halloweens, it was where Faustine had taught her useless charms and shades of lipstick. She didn't want to learn anew. She didn't want to abandon anything else.

Her one soupçon of solace was the quidditch pitch. Smaller than the open arena that was the grounds of Beauxbatons, but space enough to fly and forget as she often had the last two summers, she took to it within a week of arriving. A boy named Alex told her that it was empty on Thursday afternoons, just after Defence Against the Dark Arts, and so she'd lugged her broomstick between classes to bring it down the hill as soon as the bell rang. It reminded her of nothing, flying; the only guilt was in the come down, when her feet touched solid ground and she was reminded again of who she walked without.