joelle | d.m

68 | roaring green

May, 1995.

Joey needed to do this.

It had been the one thing she'd been putting off since the breakup, but it was causing clutter. She was in the midst of cleaning the dorm when she realized she had to do it.

She still had Draco's things in her dorm and she needed to get rid of them. She wasn't going to burn it or trash it. She was simply going to gather them in a box and give them back to him.

It was much more civil that way. Hopefully he would give her stuff back to her as well. Two of his drawers were filled with her clothes. She had some books, journals, and other small things in there too.

Joey found an old box under her bed—a box she'd used for her books when she brought them back and forth between the flat and Hogwarts. She decided to use the box for this.

Alone in her dorm, she placed the box upon her made bed and began to dart around the room to grab his things. His Quidditch jersey and T-shirts. His sweatpants and sweatshirts. The couple of books he'd left.

They never spent the night over at her dorm, so he really didn't have much there. It was just stuff she stole from him and stuff he let her keep.

After the fight with the three girls, Joey had gone to Dumbledore's office. There was actually nothing for her to do as a consequence since she'd been doing all sorts of tasks around the castle. And thanks to her Gryffindor card, she got off with a warning.

Word flew around school about the fight within the hour it happened. No one dared to even pick on Joey anymore after the fight. "Three on one and she was the last one standing. Don't cross her, eh?" someone had said when they thought Joey couldn't hear them.

She felt oddly validated.

Placing the last T-shirt in the box, Joey faltered. The cotton felt like heaven on her fingers. She just stared at it. The faded green colour and the worn block letters of Slytherin written across the chest. She fought the urge to bring it up to her nose and breathe it in.

If she did that, she'd break. She didn't want to break. She didn't want to think about the breakup. She didn't want to think about anything. She just needed to do stuff. This and that and this and that.

She shook her head to herself and dropped the T-shirt in the box. Her body turned and her eyes fixed on a stuffed bear sitting against the rod of her lamp that sat on her nightstand.

Dallas. Dallas and his button eyes and pink nose.

Would Dallas be hers or his? She'd won it on a date he took her on. A date he claimed was not for the game, but for his true feelings for her. That was probably a lie too.

She ignored those thoughts about her time with Draco and grabbed Dallas from the nightstand. She padded toward the desk and tossed the teddy bear in the garbage bin they had underneath. Out of sight, out of mind. Right?

Finally, Joey grabbed the box and left the dorm to drop it off at Draco's dorm.

Little did she know that Nayun came back to the dorm after she left. She sat down at the desk to continue with her scrapbooking and that was when she saw Dallas lying hopelessly in the bin.

Nayun took it out of the bin with a frown. Then she stood from the desk, walked to the closet, and hid it at the bottom of a storage box.

_____

Joey was relieved to see that the Slytherin common room was empty when she arrived.

She headed straight for the boys' dormitories and ignored the erratic pace of her hammering heart. She could do this. She didn't have to look him in the eye or speak to him or even breathe the air around him. She just had to give him the box and that was it.