Extreme Remedies ( Tom Riddle Era )

Chapter 12

When minutes later the door opened again, she tried to hide under the blanket but seeing Roland's worried face made her throw her arms around him for a hug.
"Holy hell, Evy, what happened?" He asked hugging her tight and letting her sob on his shoulder "Can you tell me now what happened?".
"She wanted to date Riddle" Emma explained bluntly "But she told him to date Gallows instead".
"Lucinda Gallows?" Roland swallowed hard.
"Yeah, who else? Would you take some Polyjuice Potion to comfort her?".
"Emma!" Evelyn cried.
"I'm just trying to help" Emma rolled her eyes "Maybe you needed more than food".
"I'll take care of her" Roland intervened "You are already late for dinner".
Emma sighed heavily and left.

"Thinking about eating instead of anything else" Roland sat next to Evelyn and took out some sweets from his pockets.
Evelyn accepted them in her hands, watching the colorful wrap, when her life seemed suddenly colorless.
"I'm selfish, am I not?" She murmured "I should be happy for him. Surely she is better than me. But I feel guilty for wasting my chance, if I ever had one".
Roland wrapped an arm around her shoulders as she started to cry again "I'm not an expert, but there's not guilt in love. It's just a mess, that's all. You can get broken hearted many times before finding finally your match. You have this were obsession for him, but maybe you'll meet someone else who will lit your life up and only then you'll understand the meaning of all the sorrow you had taken before".
Evelyn closed her eyes, letting those words slip away from her "I just want to run away. To run until I'm can't breath anymore".
"I can't let you run away" he said sighing "Surely there can be something else that can distract you, something that can push all your pain out of you".
Evelyn stood silent, thinking.
"I need music" she whispered in the end.

Somehow Evelyn survived.
In the next days she numbly moved on, when necessary acting like nothing happened and stubbornly ignoring the new popular couple that ruled the gossip in the school.
Instead of the library, Evelyn went regularly to the music classroom.
Kettleburn gave her carte blanche and she agreed to sing in the Great Hall in the weekend before Halloween.
"You can pick any song you prefer" Terry Bellchant scattered some papers in front of Evelyn "Then we van make the arrangements together".
Bellchant was a Hufflepuff girl who loved playing piano.
Evelyn scanned the songs, throwing away the romantic ones. She wanted some tragic or sad song.
Finally something caught her attention.
She checked the lyrics. She felt related to the main theme but she didn't understand many details.
"What does phone mean?" She asked.
Bellchant shrugged "I think the writer was some muggle born".
Perfect, Evelyn thought. Something that made it more related her situation and the addressee of her message.

Throwing cold water to her face was a good remedy whenever Evelyn felt on the verge of surrendering to her sorrow again.
Evelyn gasped and raised her head, staring at her reflection on the mirror. She looked sick, with dark bags under her unexpressive eyes. She felt like a loser compared to the Gallows girl. Lucinda Gallows spent all her efforts to be that stunningly beautiful, while Evelyn barely took care of her aspect and the results were evident.
She had no chance to win against the queen of beauty.

With anger Evelyn threw water to the mirror, shattering the image of herself, when she saw Tom's figure standing behind her.
She turned, ashamed of being seen in that way, but nobody else was there in the bathroom.
Confused, Evelyn looked back at the mirror but there were only drops of water falling. Still she was sure of seeing Tom looking at her with a hard gaze from above her shoulder.
Evelyn cursed her mind for that prank.
But if in real life Tom became unreachable, she decided to distract herself with her imagination. Nothing could rip her Tom from her mind and in her mind things couldn't slip out of her control.

On Saturday afternoon the Great Hall was quite chaotic, but not too crowded.
Evelyn was shaking like a leaf in the wind as she waited for her turn to sing her song as a vocalist.
She lowered her head to repeat again all the lyrics, fearing that her mind panick and could black out.
She kept thinking that the lyrics didn't make much sense, still she needed to canalize her feelings through music.
Sooner than she wanted, Kettleburn announced her.
Evelyn couldn't run away, not when she needed to do something to express her feelings. If she had proved that could never say openly certain things, she hoped that music could help her.
She imagined that Tom was busy somewhere else, so she persuaded herself that she had nothing to fear.