unknown quantities

 

Vacantly, she registers: the searing pain in her right wrist, where two serpents twine around each other in an unending loop (is there one serpent? Or two? her mind whispers); the cold around her; the utter emptiness she feels in the husk of her body.

 

Geneva? asks her other half. Are you all right? And it does not even seem strange to them to be joined in such a way.

 

Yes, she lies. Because she is always the silent fighter, in the end; how ironic that only Julia, a Slytherin, would have the unshakeable self-confidence typically bequeathed to the most courageous and utterly mad Gryffindors.

 

She closes her eyes. Your battle now, a kiss, she thinks across the room to her beloved.

 

The night sky behind her eyelids is another world, and she slips into memories...

 

(is there one serpent? or two?)

...she fastens her mouth to Julia’s, desperate, as she had not expected to be. “My mother died yesterday,” she says, when she pulls away. “She left the house – for the first time in ten years – and she never came back. My father didn’t come home until late. He found her hanging in the grove behind the house, wearing a white shift. She had hung herself from a tree with a seventy-year-old Slytherin tie. No one knows where it came from...” and Julia responds, “It wasn’t you, don’t think that, I can hear you-” and she begins to weep then, because with Julia she is always, always safe...

 

...there’s a Potter girl in your year, Julia?” asks her mother. She nods. “Geneva?” “Yes, Maman.” “Ah. Well. I have a laboratory sample that needs running, and I’ll be home late. There’s a frozen dinner in the refrigerator.” “Shall I wait up?” “If you’re not done studying your Latin by then, I’ll see you.” Her mother gives her a nod, and leaves out the front door. When at last she hears the key in the lock, she sighs, and wonders how her mother survives when she’s so clearly dying to escape...

 

...“What?” Julia holds the high-heels in her hands, mystified. “Shoes?” “I’m taking you to the ball...” Julia laughs. “No, seriously!” “You, my dear, are out of your mind...

 

And sometime later she is aware of Julia, holding her hand.

 

“What are you dreaming of?” asks her beloved.

 

“You.”