Safe Words

Part I: Crossed

I made it.

My arms are crossed over my chest, just as they were when I left my original reality, but there, I was surrounded by the chipped gray paint and white pillows of my bedroom, while here...

I can't believe I made it.

The Slytherin Dormitory is just as I pictured it. Of course it is. I wrote it all into existence. It was me who gave it the floor to ceiling windows on the side that looks into the depths of the lake, although I didn't anticipate the sheer sense of vertigo it would give me. I wrote dim torches, stone on every side, gauzy emerald curtains around four poster beds.

A huge smile captures my face. I have to stop. My housemates will think I'm weird, although they don't know I'm from another reality. Of course they don't. The only person who knows I'm different is me.

I throw off the heavy gray-green quilt with its silver stitching, and a draft of cold dungeon air washes over me. I kneel before the musty wooden trunk at the foot of my bed, take a deep breath, and open it.

This time, I have to clap my hand over my mouth to keep myself from smiling. Real Hogwarts robes. It's all here. The letters from my parents, broken quills and scraps of parchment pushed off to the side, a silk cloak for winter, leftover sweets from Honeyduke's, and there--tucked along the edge--my wand.

I draw the pale, slender wood with a gentle touch, afraid it will break if I hope too hard. A faint warmth blushes from the wand tip, running up the length of my arm and spreading throughout my body. A few silver sparks trickle out the end like stars.

"Winter, you look stoned. Never seen a wand before?"

I nearly jump out of my skin. A tall African girl, Maia Sykkune, is sitting on the edge of her bed with her long legs crossed, smirking at me. Her countless tiny braids are all over the place, and she looks like she just's been awake for hours, though I'm sure she woke up twenty seconds ago and is acting just to spite me.

"Tired is more like it," I reply, though nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I feel like I've just been electrocuted, run through a washing machine, and zapped with a defibrillator, probably all at once. Everything is so vivid. This is no dream. This is the real thing.

And because it's the real thing, there's an innate part of me that's whispering for me to go back to bed, that I can sleep ten more minutes if I take the shortcut behind the statue of the legless knight to get to breakfast. It knows all the things I know here. That part of me belongs here, and the longer I stay, the stronger it will get.

"Did you do my Transfiguration essay yet?" Maia asks, stretching onto her bed.

I roll my eyes, pulling on my robes over my leggings and cropped T-shirt. "You know I would never do an essay."

She flashes me a grin. "You'll come around. Once Adwin stops infecting you with his bloody 'yes sir' attitude, you'll embrace your inner Slytherin."

"I thought my inner Slytherin is what landed me with all of you," I say, chucking a pillow at her.

She mumbles something muffled that sounds like, "You bully."

She wouldn't be vertical or fit for public eyes for at least another thirty minutes, so I grab my wand, pack my bag with textbooks I've enchanted with the Featherweight Charm, and leave the dormitory.

The Common Room takes my breath away. The dormitory was nothing compared to the enormous, vaulted ceiling and entire wall of glass panes looking into the lake. Behind the window, long tendrils of drifting seaweed ripple as if in slow motion. The squid, easily as long as three school buses, drifts past with an eerie, keening moan. Tapestries with our House crest are rolled down on the eclectic stone walls, and the room is filled with clusters of armchairs, sleek sofas, or miniature study areas with fireplaces and bookshelves.

"Now that's cool," I breath. I feel like a princess entering a ball as I descend the curved marble staircase from the girls' dorm. Slytherins are everywhere. Some of them I know. I wave to Blaise Zabini across the room, and he watches me approach with a critical gleam in his dark eyes. I keep walking until there's only a foot of space between us.

"I was beginning to think you'd left." His voice to anyone else would seem cold and haughty, but I know better.

"Would you miss me if I had?" I tease, standing on tiptoe to look directly into his eyes.

He catches his breath and looks away a little too fast to be casual. "No."

I laugh, an exhilarated sound, and grab his hand, lacing his coffee-brown fingers with my own, pale as glass. "Let's go to breakfast. I have a feeling it's going to be interesting."

He brushes a strand of my raven-black hair out of my eyes, as if he did it subconsciously. "What makes you think that?"

I give him a superior look I know drives him crazy. "I have a feeling."

Blaise pretends to be annoyed as I drag him down the shadowy hallway and up those endless flights of stairs. Throughout breakfast, he makes idle conversation with me, occasionally glancing at me when he thinks I'm not looking. Later, Maia and Adwin, a scruffy looking boy with rectangular glasses and hair like a rooster's, join our table.

A food fight breaks out further down the table, closer to where the staff are speaking with each other in bored, professional tones. It gets so crazy after Gryffindor launches an offensive of bacon and omelets that Professor McGonagall has to descend from the dais and quiet us all with a few clipped commands and threats to dock House points.

The whole time as I laugh and tease and mess with Blaise, I'm overwhelmed by the aching, encompassing sense of being home. Of belonging.

That day, everything was perfect.

Because that's how I wrote it would be.