"Mammy come on! I told Lily I would be there at midday and it's almost one!"
Aisling tugged on her mother's arm and pulled her towards the large fireplace which stood in the middle of their living room.
"I'm sorry sweet pea but it would have been a lot easier if you had just let me apparate you there!" Her mum said, looking flustered. "The only reason we're running late is because I had to order more Floo Powder."
"Ugh, I hate side along apparition mammy."
"Yeah, I know you do. Right, are you sure you have everything?"
"Yep."
"Okay," Shauna sighed and ruffled Aisling's mop of brown curls. "Have a lovely first term, sweet pea. Remember to work hard, but don't put yourself under too much pressure. I love you!"
"Love you too mammy."
Aisling gave her mum a hug before picking up a handful of Floo Powder and throwing it into the fire, making the flames turn emerald green. She stepped into them and shouted out Lily's address and then she was spinning. She felt her elbows hitting grates as she spun and tucked in her arms, which seemed to have gotten even longer over summer. Finally, the spinning stopped and she blinked a couple of times before the flame red hair of Lily came into focus. She was standing in front of the fireplace, beaming.
"Ash!" She pulled her friend out of the fireplace and enveloped her in a huge hug. "How are you? Alice is in the kitchen."
"Alice is here? She never said she was coming." Aisling grinned.
"Yeah well, it was all a bit last minute, she lives closer than you so it was easier to arrange. How was your mum when you left?"
"She's getting better actually." Aisling said, her smile faltering slightly. "She waits until I've left to start crying now, so that's a big improvement."
Aisling's mother had always been spectacularly bad at saying goodbye; not only to Aisling but to anyone. Hence the fact that they still lived within ten minutes of Aisling's grandparents.
As soon as she stepped through the kitchen door, she was almost knocked over by something that came hurtling towards her at breakneck speed and wrapped its arms around her waist.
"Hey Alice,"
Aisling greeted her friend, struggling to stifle a laugh. Alice looked up at her, smiling from ear to ear. Unlike Aisling, she had not grown any over the summer and still stood firmly at five foot one. Everything about Alice screamed cute, from her below average height to her rosy cheeks and short blonde hair which had a habit of flicking out in all directions and could never be tamed without using an excessive amount of Sleekeazy's Hair Potion.
"Merlin's beard, Ash I feel like it's been years. We have so much to tell you!"
Alice picked up the ice cream she'd been spooning out of the tub and put it back in the freezer before handing a bowl each to Aisling and Lily and leading the way back into the living room. Aisling settled on a very large, plush armchair and crossed her legs.
"Have you grown even more Ash?" Lily asked, as if she was only properly looking at her for the first time since she had arrived.
"I think so." Aisling said, miserably. "I hope I stop soon, or I'll be taller than Remus Lupin!"
"It's all da' country air yer gettin' up in potato land!" Lily said, doing a very poor Irish accent.
"Lil, I have asked you not to do that. It's xenophobic." Aisling deadpanned, trying to keep her face straight. But her lips twitched and Lily laughed.
"Well I wish I would grow. Not a lot or anything, just a couple of inches. Is that too much to ask?" Alice asked, looking pained.
"Yeah, I mean what would really be ideal is if Ash could take a few inches off and give them to you." Lily was grinning.
"Oh yeah it's hilarious Lil, must be nice to be a lovely average five foot five like you." Aisling raised one eyebrow and pointed an ice cream covered spoon at her friend, who laughed.
"Yeah but she's..." Alice lowered her voice so that she was speaking in a dramatic stage whisper. "Ginger!"
All three girls laughed, but stopped almost immediately when a woman came into the living room. She was very thin and blonde with an extremely long neck.
"Lily, could you and your friends." She turned to look at Alice and Aisling disdainfully. "Keep it down, or move to another room? Vernon and I are trying to plan a holiday in the study and you're making it very difficult with your infernal cackling."
"Tuney it's my house too. You can't just tell me to move." Lily looked at her sister with deep green eyes which were so different from her sister's cold, pale blue ones.
"Well it's not their house." Petunia jerked her head once more towards Aisling and Alice.
"Hi Petunia, always a pleasure to see you too." Aisling smiled sweetly at the blonde woman; who then gave a snort which reminded Aisling irresistibly of the sound an unhappy horse would make.
"Go upstairs." She said sharply to Lily, who Aisling could see was struggling to keep a straight face. "Or I'll tell mum what you've been up to."
"Been up to?" Lily asked, outraged. "We're just sitting here!"
"Go upstairs!" Petunia demanded, raising her voice.
"Fine!!!" Lily shouted, making Aisling and Alice jump. "I'd rather be in my room anyway! And by the way, we can hear you and old Verny from in here. I don't know what kind of holiday you're planning but you may want to pack sick bags if it's going to involve that much cooing and giggling!"
Petunia gave another haughty snort and flounced out of the room.
"She really grows on you, does old Tuney." Aisling said, looking amusedly at Alice.
"Yeah, Tuney and Verny seem like they make quite the pair."
"Come on." Lily huffed. "Let's go upstairs."
All three girls stood up to leave the living room. But as Aisling rose, her partially melted ice cream spilled out of her bowl and onto her jeans. She let out an exclamation which, had Shauna been present, would have earned her a smack around the head with the wooden spoon.
"It's fine Ash, you can borrow something of mine."
When the girls got into Lily's room she flopped down onto the flowery bedsheets and sighed. Aisling looked around Lily's bedroom and smiled. The place had a sort of shabby chic look that was so classically Lily. The walls were a mauvey-purple colour which was barely visible due to all the posters and photos which had been neatly stuck to it. Some were posters of muggle bands, others held moving images of guitarists strumming their guitars enthusiastically and only pausing to look questioningly at the muggle posters which stood stock still in their frames.
Aisling's eyes travelled over to the photos, she featured in quite a few of them. There was the one from their Christmas ball in second year, and another from last summer when the three girls had gone to the funfair in Aisling's hometown. There was another very recent one that had been taken in the Gryffindor common room. Aisling was in it, along with Alice, Lily, Remus and Sirius. Aisling's stomach flipped over as she saw that they were all dancing and smiling, and Sirius had his arms around her waist. It must have been taken at the end of exams party, she'd been too trashed to remember. Aisling also noticed, with some satisfaction, that all photos with Severus Snape in them had been removed from the wall.
The rest of the room was decorated with what Lily liked to call 'decorative clutter.' There were stacks of books here and piles of clothes there, all illuminated by the purplish light given off by the lava lamp in the corner.
"She's been like that all summer. It's been an absolute nightmare." Lily groaned from the bed. "Oh, there's some shorts in the top drawer Ash."
Aisling rummaged through the drawer, looking for a pair of shorts, and instead came across something much more interesting. At the bottom of the drawer there was a stack of letters, tied together with a green ribbon which Aisling had seen Lily occasionally use to tie her hair up. There must have been about fifteen letters there. And when she looked at the front of each envelope she noticed that they were all written in the same loopy handwriting.
"Who are these from?" She asked Lily, thrusting the letters under her nose.
"What? Oh! Oh they're nothing, it's not important."
"Lily?"
Alice had stopped curiously examining the lifeless muggle posters on the wall and turned towards her two friends, who were now running round the room. Aisling was holding the letters high above her head and Lily was leaping with every step in an attempt to grab them. As Aisling ran past her, Alice caught sight of the letters.
"I know that handwriting!" She exclaimed. "They're from James Potter!"
Aisling stopped in her tracks, mouth agape.
"I don't reply to them." Lily said quickly, blushing almost as red as her hair.
"But you keep them!" Aisling screeched, jumping behind a chair to avoid Lily's frantic swipes at her.
"Lil, you don't fancy him do you?" Alice asked,
"No!" Lily almost shouted in her desperation to get the word out of her mouth. "And even if I did, it's not like I could do anything about it! We're- we're way too young to have boyfriends!"
"No we're not." Alice said quietly. "I've got one."
"What?!" The redhead and the brunette exclaimed in unison, turning to face Alice with almost identical awe-struck expressions on their faces.
"Yeah, he's in the year above. We got together at the end of exams party."
"Who is it?" Aisling asked eagerly. Lily took advantage of her momentary distraction and snatched the letters out of Aisling's hand; stowing them carefully away in the pocket of her jeans.
"Frank Longbottom." It was Alice's turn to blush now. "We've been sort of talking for a while, we're both in the slug club y'know? And then at the end of exams party we kissed. I think we'd both had a bit too much of that ButterWhiskey stuff that Sirius Black was giving everyone. And I've been hanging out with him a lot this summer. Anyway yesterday he asked me to be his girlfriend, so I guess I have a boyfriend now."
Aisling looked down guiltily at her hands. She had kissed someone at the end of exams party too, but up until this moment she hadn't had any intention of telling her friends. She could hear Lily congratulating Alice somewhere in the distance but she was too lost in her own thoughts to zone in completely on what she was saying. Should she tell Alice and Lily about Sirius? It seemed weird to her; it wasn't like Sirius was her boyfriend like Frank and Alice.
But you want him to be. She thought to herself.
"Hey, speaking of the end of exams party, where did you disappear off to?" Lily was looking at her again now.
"Oh- I erm, I went to get some fresh air." She said.
She sat down on the bed and crossed her legs. She saw that Lily and Alice were giving her questioning looks.
"It was hot in the common room." She added lamely.
"Sure was, hey Alice?" Lily wiggled her eyebrows. "But everyone was snogging at that party. Looks like we're the only ones who didn't defile ourselves Ash!"
Aisling sighed. Not telling her friends was one thing, but outright lying was completely different.
"Actually," she hesitated, and then spoke so fast that she was slightly out of breath by the end of the sentence. "I-kissed-Sirius-Black-down-by-the-lake."
"Oh." Lily seemed unsure of what to say. "Are you- a thing now then?"
"No." Aisling said quickly. "We haven't really spoken. Well he sent me a letter and I replied, but that's it."
"Right. And do you like him?"
Yes.
"No."
"That's a shame, because James said in one of his letters that Sirius really likes you." Lily said very matter-of-factly.
She laughed when Aisling's head jerked towards her, eyes wide.
"See I knew you did. It's not a bit deal Ash, he's just a boy."
Aisling shrugged.
"Whatever, I don't know. Can we talk about something else?"
And just like that the three girls slipped back into more comfortable territory. It wasn't that they hadn't talked about boys before; of course they had, they were teenage girls. But it had never been anything 'real.' One of the girls couldn't help feeling she was being left behind as her two friends grew up far too fast for her liking.