In My Dreams [Draco Malfoy]

chapter seventeen: back again

A/N

Bit of a filler chapter, but update coming soon! :)

INDIGO

Kelly returned to school the following week and our sessions started going from 4 to 6p.m.. She came home with her homework and I sat with her through it, but she was improving, and I went from filling a teacher capacity to merely helping. I was happy to see this because I was only with Kelly for two weeks more before I too went back to school.

Kelly was in the fifth grade now. She went to a local school, where she wore a cute little red and white uniform and played with other little girls her age. She stood out though, just like I had, and maybe this led me to wonder if we really would be at the same school one day...

On our last day together, Kelly started crying because she didn't want me to go. I may have been a lot older than her, but I was one of the closest friends she had and her admission of this fact made me cry too. Then the nanny, then her mother, and soon we were all just standing there sobbing and hugging. She had been in my life for less than a month and I would miss her so much. When I left that evening, her mother gave me even more money than my previously agreed amount for the week. It was a lot of money and I insisted that it was way too much for the ten hours I had worked that week, but she just smiled and looked at Kelly, like I had done a lot more than helped her daughter with her French.

I promised Kelly I would write to her (and I would keep this promise if it killed me), then gave her another hug, and cried the entire bike ride home.

On September 1st, it was nearly 10:15 a.m. when I finally finished going over my packing list one last time, and secured the latch on my trunk.

I knew I wasn't forgetting anything. Being the meticulous maniac that I am, I had gone over the list once two days ago, twice yesterday and twice earlier that morning. But I still felt the need to give my room another once-over.

It looked almost exactly as it had when I had come home at the end of June: clean, organized, and both welcoming and strange to me. Where most kids' bedrooms were almost constantly changing to coincide with whatever they were interested in as they grew up, going to a boarding school meant that I was only eleven the last time I had actually lived in mine. But this was where Mum was and I was sad to leave it, even if I was comforted to know all the familiarity that I was longing to feel again was just hours away.

Truth be told, I was only letting myself be occupied at the thought of forgetting something to combat the part of me that didn't know what to expect. Normally, Mum and I would arrive in London on August 31st, the day before I would have to board the train for Hogwarts, therefore giving ourselves plenty of time to sightsee and enjoy the city at our own pace. This year, however, I hadn't had it in me, so, for the first time in all my years of attending the school, we broke tradition and planned to arrive on the day of.

The naturally anxious side of me was internally reeling at the idea of working our way through traffic, through the train station, and whatever other mild inconvenience we would have to endure showing up at the same time as everyone else. Yet, where this would normally leave me fidgeting like a restless mother hen, I found myself unnervingly calm.

I had been like this lately, so unlike myself, and it was precisely because of this that I had been on another train only weeks ago.

Three weeks, to be precise.

But I remembered it like it had been days.

Unlike the Hogwarts Express, it had been a modern train, built without those charming little compartments and neutral color palette. There were merely two parallel rows of chairs with an aisle along the center, upholstered in the ugliest scatter-print fabric I had ever seen. Overhead, strips of fluorescent lights had been run from one end of the car to the other, illuminating the space in a cool blue light.