Week In, Week Out

An Abundance of Treacle

"Are you ok?" he asked, holding her arms to steady her. "You look awful."

"Thanks a lot. I'm fine," she answered in her most stable and not at all unsteady voice.

Neville stared at her for a moment realising that they were in the door and in the path of anyone going past, "Come on," he said. "Let's go somewhere quieter."

Together, they went out of the library lobby and away from all the noise.

"I'm really ok, I promise," she told him as they went along. "Someone was just a little rude."

"Addie, people are rude to you all the time. People are just rude in general, but you have never looked as though you wanted to cry."

"I don't look like I'm about to cry!" Addie said incredulously. "That's just my face."

"Oh, no," Neville insisted. "Your face is completely different normally. And you don't look like your about to cry, you're too much like Harry- completely emotionally constipated to..."

With that, Addie felt as though she couldn't stop it. She had been doing so well. She had prevented herself from crying while she was being humiliated, which was something she had decided to not bring with her from Primary School, but then he had to go and bring up Harry.

"Oh Addie, I didn't mean to make you cry," Neville said softly. He sat down on a vacant bench in a quieter area and encouraged her to do the same.

"Oh no. It's nothing you've done. You're always kind to me. It's just when you mentioned Harry..." she looked down at the chapped skin on her hands. It was colder than she was used to in Scotland. "I always thought we were in this together, a team, but when they told me that I wasn't invited to the picnic and he just sat there looking awkward and not saying anything..."

"You weren't invited to the picnic," Neville breathed. "Everyone was invited to the picnic. I was invited to the picnic."

"He wants nothing to do with me anymore. I don't even know what I did. He just abandoned me on the train and then didn't try to talk to me after. Fred and George told me that I had abandoned him, but I didn't. I stood there, next to him and Ron, and tried to talk to him about the sorting and he was..."

"He was what?"

"...different. The brother who I grew up with would never have done that. He would have introduced me to his new friend, told me about the fact that he wanted to go to Gryffindor to be with his new friend, but I was sorted before either of them and that's not a connection I was able to make."

"Have you ever thought..." Neville started the uncomfortable question that she had asked herself so much since she had been at Hogwarts.

"...that he heard me be sorted into Hufflepuff and decided that he would go anywhere except Hufflepuff? Yes. Of course I have thought that. But why didn't he tell me that he wanted us to be more independent? Hufflepuff was the one that I liked the sound of most when I heard of it and clearly Gryffindor is something he has connected to as well. I wouldn't have held it against him. Really, I wouldn't have."

"I'm not going to the picnic," Neville decided. "You and me and the others are going to have a nice day to ourselves, and we are going to do whatever we want."

"Neville, I can't ask you to..."

"Well it's a good thing that you're not asking then. I'm offering. Wait here a second, I'll go and get the others."

Addie sat there alone for a few minutes, pondering what had just happened. Someone actually wanted to spend time with her unprompted? This was truly a novel experience for her, and she would try her best to appreciate it while it lasted. Neville came back very soon after that with Cho and Adrian in tow.