Bad Decisions | Fred Weasley

Thirty-Three: The B-Sides

"Film. Maybe a minor in English, I'm not sure yet."

Sylvie wanted to keep walking with Drew, and felt her stomach sink when they got to her building. She swallowed and turned to her outside the door.

"Can I kiss you?" She asked, surprised at her own directness.

Drew laughed and shook her head.

"I don't know if that's such a good idea."

"Why not?"

"Because you can hardly stand and you were projectile vomiting ten minutes ago."

"So you'd kiss me if I was sober?"

Drew opened her mouth but hesitated, the corners of her lips turning up as she let out an awkward laugh of descent.

"You can tell me you don't want to kiss me, it's okay."

"It's not that," Drew flushed violently and grinned shyly, her eyes shifting away to look down the street and back. She cleared her throat, "I just—"

She closed her eyes for a moment and Sylvie felt a wave of nausea return, provoked not only by the alcohol, but by Drew's sudden preparation for candor. When her eyes opened, Sylvia swallowed.

"Look. I know when someone's just experimenting with me."

"I'm not experimenting with you." Sylvie retorted, a little hurt by the assumption, "I like you." She let out a sad laugh and motioned to her costume, "I thought it couldn't be more obvious I like girls."

"Okay," Drew's voice went thin and her eyebrows raised in surrender, "Okay. Sorry. I'm just saying that I've been around the block a few times. There have been lots of girls who, you know, even if they like girls too, they..." she choked a little, searching for the words, "see me as a distraction. From boys."

It hit her like a bulldozer hits a wall of brick, straight through the middle, leaving a big gaping hole where her stomach was.

"Drew," Sylvia croaked. Her mouth felt dry and she wanted to get down on her knees and swear on her father's grave that her intentions weren't in the wrong place. Drew's eyes locked with hers like magnets. The air cleared and cooled around them with a bittersweet understanding.

"It's okay," she said, a wry smile at her lips.

"It's more complicated than that." Sylvia could hear her voice beginning to tremble and she hugged her arms around herself, playing it off as the cold.

"Is it?" Drew asked quietly, wincing as she inched into the tender subject.

"I don't want to use you."

"Then don't."

Sylvia cried in the shared shower on her floor, at one point hearing someone come in and immediately leave. She cried still as she sat at her desk and wrote out two notes, one to Drew, and one to Fred. She tore them both up and threw them in the trash bin before fishing them back out and cutting them into little pieces of confetti over an empty jar. She had an assignment for a book-making class due in a week, and figured she could make recycled paper from it. But then that felt stupid and she emptied it back into the bin. 

She sat with her head on her desk for an entire hour before writing Fred another letter. It covered the front and back of two sheets of 11x8 legal pad paper and was so feverishly written, she couldn't understand it when she went to re-read it. She couldn't remember the specifics of what she had written, only that it was angry and mean and probably much more honest than she'd like to admit. She put it in an envelope and kept it in her bag for the rest of the semester. It stayed there until she saw him in the shop that winter, when she got dressed at 8 in the morning and spent the rest of the day sitting on her bed in The Leaky Cauldron bouncing her leg and scratching at the tiny blisters that always seemed to form on her fingers when she was stressed. The letter was still in her bag when she asked him to come up to her room and he invited her to his place instead. And it was still there on New Year's Eve when he asked her to be his girlfriend and she said she'd never wanted anything more in her entire life.