folie à deux

Eleven.

It wasn't too difficult for Amana Tesfaye to forgive Elspeth for what she'd said as the week went on. The girls were all perfectly fine by the time the weekend hit, which meant that they all could look forward to going to the Valentine's Day party together.
  "Hey Sel, do you like this top on me?" Amana sighed, exhausting all of her options for the long-awaited Valentine's Day party.
  "I think it looks perfect, babe," Selina assured her as she put on her makeup. "A darker red is perfect for you. Very moody."
  "Good, that's exactly what I was going for," the girl sighed as she examined and evaluated her outfit in the mirror.

Amana was the only one out of the three girls who had decided against wearing a dress. She had decided she'd go with her elegant, one-sleeved red top and matching skirt. Each of the girls ended up in completely different romantic situations for Valentine's Day; Amana was obviously completely single, while Selina was very much established as dating Jasper Carroll, while Elspeth wasn't necessarily dating anyone, but she and Evan Howerton, a fourth-year Ravenclaw, had been spending a decent amount of time together and would be meeting up at the party, which was being held in the Slytherin common room as usual, while Fred and George Weasley, on behalf of the Gryffindor students as their contribution to the school-wide event, distracted Mr. Filch with outlandish and slightly dangerous pranks that could also be considered crimes depending on who you asked. Kelly Cross, with Selina's approval, had made the RSVP for this year's Valentine's Day party mandatory, simply so that Selina could find out as soon as possible whether she had the satisfaction of knowing if Draco Malfoy would be showing up to the party without his own girlfriend, who of course was intentionally as well as spitefully not invited. Evidently, the day after the invitations were distributed amongst Hogwarts students, Kelly had received an owl from Draco, which showed that he'd checked 'yes' on the invitation.

Although Pansy Parkinson's audaciously disrespectful tendencies were very far down Selina Romanov's list of worries that night, she of course allowed herself to cautiously revel in the fact that, this time, she'd won. Selina thought about nothing but the fun party she would be hosting tonight alongside Jasper, her loving boyfriend who she couldn't stop thinking about every time she thought of Valentine's Day. Jasper was the one person who she felt truly happy with, which was a sort of debt that she had no idea how to repay. When it came to Jasper Carroll, she did in fact feel guilty about many things, whether it was the way he always carried her things when they were together, or the way he always waited on her to put on her makeup in the mornings, or the way he intentionally spoke less in conversations just so he could hear her speak, or the way she knew most people would be asking to take photos of her and Draco tonight instead of her and Jasper. She knew that while he put up with all of these things simply because he cared about her, she still felt, sometimes, that he deserved better. Selina couldn't help but feel a bit like Jasper deserved a better girlfriend than her, and it was all the more frustrating to her when people would just shake their heads and tell her there's no such thing. She was in love with Jasper, and sometimes, she tortured herself with it, the same way her mother had being married to her father.

Adeline Romanov wrote in one of her journals that loving a man was like gripping a glass so hard in your hands that it breaks, and her daughter grew to think she was a genius. Selina felt that she was also a genius like her mother because, at times, she found herself suicidal like her mother had been on occasion. Selina wasn't suicidal in that she felt the obstacles in her life that she faced were too insurmountable to tolerate, but she was more suicidal because she felt that the brain she'd been given wasn't optimal for the human existence. She felt she was born defective, and needed to be euthanized before any further damage was done to herself or others. Selina didn't see herself as a person at all because she had come to realize that it wasn't normal the way she was incredibly aware of every single one of her emotions, whims, and desires, as well as their origin at any given movement, and that she had grown so accustomed to mimicking others in every possible aspect that she realized that no matter which face she chose to put on, at the end of the day, none of them were real, which meant that everyone who got to know her would ultimately end up disappointed, no matter who they were. Selina was the kind of person who grew up mirroring and adapting to the qualities of others to survive, and she found she had grown into the kind of person who just didn't know how to stop. And it was something she knew that her mother would've been able to relate to, had she still been alive.