She Said What?

Chapter 28: I Do Some More Growing Up

A/N: Sorry again for the wait here. My muse is a little sporadic right now. It's being an obnoxious prat, actually, surprising me and then abandoning me, and I'm trying to get it back on track. Of course, it's not going well. I've attempted one-shots to revive it, but alas, the stupid thing remains elusive. So I'm trying, but Spider Solitaire has suddenly become too appealing to give up. Ugh.

Otherwise...erm...I promised you nostalgia now (plus drama), so nostalgia (plus drama) you shall receive. Do your best to enjoy it.

December 24

8:20 AM
Status: Brooding

Well...first off, before I go off into my brooding rants and emotional traumas from yesterday...Merry Christmas Eve!

The holidays always seem to sneak up on me this way. I mean, at school, I'm so busy with my classes that December glides by like a very vivid dream, as does the rest of the year; and then I come home and all of a sudden, as I'm settling in, it's Christmas. It's slightly disconcerting, to say the very least.

But anyway – it's morning and the only reason I'm awake before noon is because my mum was downstairs making breakfast when she dropped something and shattered the glass. It woke me up like an electric shock of something (information I might have to give to Alice and Livvy for future reference) and Mum, thinking I was functional, called me down to clean it up with my wand.

If there's anyone in the world that loves the fact that I am of age more than me, it would be Mum. She adores having a witch in the family. She thinks everything can be solved by magic.

So, there's the start to my morning. I'm already dressed and ready (oh, the horror...) but Alice and Livvy are still asleep on my floor, Alice snoring gently from beneath her covers. My friends are always funny to watch when they're sleeping, because Livvy sleeps restfully on her back, staying still the whole night, while Alice flips and flops like a fish out of water. I'm sure I'm some kind of mixture of the two.

We had quite a day yesterday – and that's kind of why I'm writing. When I left off two days ago, Alice and I were planning on telling Livvy about Frank. Well...yesterday morning, I set three different alarms for myself around my room, and got up at nine o'clock in the morning to call my friends over.

When I got on the phone with Alice, she whined about being out of Floo powder, so I told her to Apparate, which triggered further whining – Alice hates Apparition because she finds it awfully uncomfortable, despite the fact that she passed her test and everything. But I find that I can be very persuasive at the best of times, so I convinced her to Apparate over in the next twenty minutes, when I was done getting ready.

I made the same call to Livvy, who was already dressed – she offered to be over immediately, but I told her twenty minutes. Alice was coming too. She was quite pleased about the idea and said she'd be over in exactly twenty minutes. The moment I put the phone down on her, I sprinted to my bathroom for a record-short shower – because in Livvy-land, she says twenty minutes and comes in ten.

And sure enough, the moment I stepped out of the shower and slipped on my jeans and a sweater, I heard the Crack! noise of someone who has just Apparated into the room. Mum's shriek of surprise confirmed it, but she's so used to my friends coming and going through the holidays that she didn't really say anything. I heard her offer Livvy some cereal as I was coming down the stairs.

"Hey, Livs," I said. "You're a little early."

"I was bored," she replied. "My only entertainment at home was Mum arguing with Dad for being late from work again. They're always fighting over that."