protect Luna and Ginny at all costs

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It's the last shred of summer before second year, firecrackers are scraping up the edges of the evening, and Ginny can't take her brothers anymore. Fred and George are pissing off their mother with a kind of religious dedication that suggests they're trying to go deaf via shouting before the new term. Percy has just accused Ginny of stamping up the steps, whereas she's certain that if anyone looked twice they would find her hovering, ghostlike, several inches above the old wood. She's felt that way all summer, halfway out the door of the world.

Ron, meanwhile, is poring over the newest Prophet article on Sirius Black's escape with a morbidly awestruck look. This would be fine, except that he keeps mentioning You-Know-Who, apparently forgetting how much Ginny does know.

Ginny thinks they all have a skewed perception of what happened. Her family is treating the previous year like a near miss, thank God it was averted, a thrown knife that whizzed an inch above her skull to impale something terrifyingly close. They don't seem to understand that nothing missed. She was run through and she's still on the blade, and whenever she stirs or steps or breathes, she feels the past year move inside her.

A bang outside the window, and another enraged howl from her mother. That's it, that's enough, no more. Ginny escapes through the back garden, dodging gnomes. She nicks one of the old Shooting Stars from the shed and goes bobbing unsteadily over the countryside. The broom lists determinedly to the left—she has to course-correct the wayward thing every ten seconds—and honestly, walking might be faster, but she likes the feeling of directional control.

Ottery St. Catchpole passes on her right, far enough away that she isn't worried about the townspeople seeing her. She glides low to the ground over cloud shadows that dye the grass gray. Hills swoop in every direction, bearing cows and horses and the occasional farm upon their swells. Everything is an audible hush: the wind in the grass, the air in her ears, the shifting of fabric as she adjusts the broom, again, to the right. It feels good. It feels simple.

There's a vertex ahead, a place all the landscape's decorations converge. A hill slopes into a rocky outcropping that borders a stream, which in turn cordons off a patch of woodland. At that point of intersection glitters a head of blonde hair. A girl is crouched and staring into the water. It's like all the world's component parts have come together to create her.

After a moment's hesitation, Ginny steers so that a boulder lies between herself and the girl, then flies downhill toward the outcropping. She lands and stashes her broom behind the rock, but when she comes out beside the stream, she realizes she needn't have bothered. The girl isn't a Muggle. She's in Ginny's year at Hogwarts, a Ravenclaw. Ginny forgets the name, but she knows her parents have mentioned the girl's family before. There aren't so many wizarding families around Ottery St. Catchpole.

"Hi," Ginny says, hopping two stones to cross the river.

The girl looks up. "Oh, hello." She speaks with a placid calm, as if she was expecting Ginny. Her eyes are pale gray.

"I'm Ginny."

"Yes," says the girl. "Ginny Weasley. You have six brothers. They're very well-known."

Ginny sighs.

"Have I upset you?" the girl asks mildly.

"No. They're driving me mad, that's all. My brothers."

"I see." The girl considers. "I haven't got any brothers, but I think if I had six, I would get tired of them sometimes, too."

"I've been tired of them all summer."

"Why?"

Ginny pulls her lips to one side. "It's nothing. It's not even about them, really."

"Is it about the Chamber of Secrets?"

Ginny stares at the girl, who seems completely unfazed.

The girl goes on, "Everyone was talking about it at the end of year feast. It sounded quite frightening."

The sound that comes from Ginny's mouth is something like a startled laugh. "Yes," she says, "it was. Hang on, sorry, who are you?"

A smile spreads the girl's features. "I'm Luna Lovegood. My father and I live ten minutes' walk that way. I come down here sometimes to look for Crossriver Wishers."

"To look for—what?"

"Well, sometimes, at the place a wood meets a river, you can see them." She points into the water, peers more closely. Ginny sits on the grass and follows suit. "They're all born with symbols on their backs," Luna murmurs, "and if you trace your wand in the shape of the symbol, they'll come out from the river and grant you a wish."

Ginny wonders if Luna's having a go. She glances over. Years later, she'll remember two things about what she sees. Firstly, the river is sending minuscule scales of light over Luna's forehead and cheeks, there and then gone, turning her skin into soft sunbeamed chainmail. Secondly, there's not an ounce of mischief or irony on Luna's face, only serene determination. It's as smooth as glass, that look, when Ginny has felt only spikes for months; it stuns Ginny, it's so unWeasleyish. She watches for a few eternal seconds and marvels that someone can be this much of one thing. Of course this girl is an only child with an only parent. There is nothing in her that is a reaction or a defense. She is purely formed and singular, elemental, this girl who has glimmered into Ginny's life like a mirage at the edge of reality.

Ginny Weasley is a frequency illusion. Luna is almost certain she didn't see her so often the previous year, but of course everyone is still talking about the Chamber of Secrets at the start of second year. Maybe it's because of this that Luna sees the long red hair everywhere now.

Luna wonders if she could talk to her, but house loyalty seems very important to the Weasleys, and Ginny is clearly trying to leave behind what happened with the Chamber and lodge herself in the Gryffindor ranks. So Luna doesn't say anything. She isn't certain it would be normal to speak to Ginny here, as they only spoke once in the summer. It was a nice conversation, but Luna isn't sure it has the inertia to survive here. Something about it feels like a snowflake caught on a glove, like it could dissolve under breath if examined too closely.

There's one moment she nearly does it. It's the first of the really warm days in spring and the cold of the Dementors guarding the castle feels, for the first time since autumn, completely dispelled. Luna is glad. She's tired of seeing her mother broken apart in front of her in flashes, again and again.

Luna is walking down to study by the lake and sees the red hair. Ginny is sitting alone. Luna considers going over to her.

As if Ginny has felt her, she looks up and over. Before Luna can raise a hand, though, or smile, or do anything really, Fred and George Weasley bounce down the slope toward their sister, calling something.

Before Ginny looks away from Luna, she hesitates.

Luna continues along her previous path, but she holds onto that hesitation. She knows then that she and Ginny will see each other again in the coming summer, at the same bend in the river as before. She doesn't know why she's so certain, but she is. Luna prides herself on being a very certain person. Maybe she's this way because she watched her mother die so painfully and suddenly. Many things become clear in the wake of such events. Such as: her father is good and kind, and his grief is sad, and the work he does important to people, so it is important inherently. Such as: she will hold some images in her heart forever, until she dies, which she will someday do. Such as: the hesitation before Ginny looks away means that Luna means something in Ginny's mind. Such as: whenever anything happens, the world will never be the same.

Ginny meets Luna by the stream twice in the first month of summer. In the second month, they meet half a dozen times. By the end, they're lying back on the grass two or three times a week and looking at the sky as they speak. They talk often about Ginny's brothers. Ginny profiles them all with a blunt honesty that she knows would injure every one of their feelings, but Luna would never repeat any of it, she's sure of that.

One afternoon, Luna tells Ginny about her mother's death, and for a second Ginny's body mimics surprise, the beginnings of I can't believe that happened, but when she thinks about it for more than an instant, of course she can believe it. She looks at Luna seriously and thinks, I believe it happened, but I wish it hadn't. All that comes out is, "I'm sorry."

She often apologizes to Luna, which seems to make no impact. Ginny's laughter makes curiously little impact, too. Everything slips into Luna with no visible effect, like she is a very dark color and the world is made for her total absorption. Ginny finds this relaxing. Home is so reactive, everyone a live nerve ending one hundred percent of the time.

"I can't wait for the World Cup," Ginny says near the end of summer. She glances over at Luna, whose eyes are reflecting the entire sky. "Are you going?"

"I don't think so," says Luna. "My father doesn't enjoy Quidditch the way I do."

Ginny blinks, surprised. "Oh, do you enjoy Quidditch?"

"I go to every match at school."

"Well, you've really got to hate it not to turn out at school."

There's a pause. They don't speak about Hogwarts very much. Ginny wonders if it would be nosy to ask why Luna never spoke to her last year. She supposes she never sought Luna out, either, but she wouldn't have minded if Luna had spoken to her. It's not as if she's drowning in friends. Neither of them seems to be drowning in friends.

In fact, now that she thinks about it, there seems to be something mulish in their mutual silence, like each is determined to prove to herself that they can forge a life in that school, despite Ginny's lingering reputation as The Girl In The Chamber and Luna's lingering reputation as Luna.

Ginny feels a guilty squirming feeling. Maybe she didn't talk to Luna precisely because of the way people talk about her. Even in Ravenclaw, a house full of oddities, Luna is unique. With her straggly hair and her mystic voice she is like a wild thing. People joke that she wandered out of the Forbidden Forest and Hogwarts had to let her in because she had birthright access. But here they are, lounging in the sun, talking about Quidditch.

"I think it might rain," Luna says absently. "That's funny. It's never rained before when you've come to see me."

Ginny laughs. "That's because I don't come when I see clouds."

"Oh."

"What, have you been here through thunderstorms waiting for me to show up?" Ginny teases.

"Yes, every afternoon," Luna says.

Ginny's hands feel very warm, then. She picks at the edge of her shirt and doesn't look at Luna. She will talk to Luna at school this fall, she decides. There's no reason she shouldn't.

Then the Quidditch World Cup crashes through the wizarding community, and when they arrive at school, Dumbledore announces the Triwizard Tournament. It's a month into school already before Ginny makes eye contact with Luna in a hallway, at which point she remembers her resolution to speak to her, but by that point Luna's through a door already, or around a corner, maybe. Out of reach. Luna didn't even hesitate.

This happens again two weeks later, and there's something to Luna's instantaneous eye contact and easy disappearance that makes Ginny wonder if Luna is avoiding her. Has she done something? What could she have done, really?

Maybe it's a thin basis for worry, but Ginny returns to it every so often, when she's seated so she can see the Ravenclaw table and a disheveled blonde head is in sight. Maybe it's just that Ginny wishes Luna would stop when she sees her, and Luna never does. Something about that seems almost defiant. Ginny looks at her friends, says hello to them. Luna floats away as if Ginny's attention is nothing to her.

The year rolls on. Between the Tournament and the commotion at the World Cup and last year's Sirius Black scare, Ginny feels like her first year is finally, measurably behind her. She begins to hold up her end of conversations without feeling like she's pleading for clemency. "Ginny," says George with a pleased smile, "you actually sound like yourself, doesn't she, Fred?"

"It's the Tournament," says Fred knowingly. "It's all this extra opportunity to watch Harry in public that's doing it."

She shoves him and tells him to shut up, but she's starting to appreciate these repeated jibes, because she can feel the way she's becoming inured to them. The fact of her attraction to Harry is less humiliating than it always was. It's almost a joke even in her own head by this point. What girl in their year isn't a bit awestruck by him, the slightly older boy who killed a Basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets to save her life?

By the end of the year Ginny's grown several inches, in the usual Weasley way, and she's practicing her smile in the mirror, and she likes what she sees, actually. She's liked by many people, and by being liked, she is participating in something she didn't realize was previously inaccessible to her. She begins to feel that everything is already just where it should be, and when Luna floats by in the halls, Ginny doesn't feel guilty about a promise to herself that she failed to keep, and she doesn't wonder about Luna's motives or inner life. She feels a secretive happiness that she can have not one but two good lives, the one in the halls and the one in the sunlight.

In the first few days of summer before fourth year, Luna worries that Ginny will stop coming to the river. Ginny is her only friend, after all, but there was no indication in third year that Ginny was thinking of her. She worries that Ginny is her friend, but she isn't Ginny's friend. She always thought of friendship as something reciprocal, but maybe she's misunderstood its fundamental nature. Maybe it can be given but not accepted, unidirectional, like the stream she observes alone under the drizzle.

But the first sunny day of summer, there she is, bobbing down the grass slope. She's taller than Luna now and her smile is slightly crooked in the way of confident people.

The instant she appears at the top of the hill, something uncurls inside Luna like a newborn animal. She lets a long breath go through her nose and acts as if she wasn't frightened at all.

For most of the summer they talk about Cedric Diggory, and about Harry Potter's story of You-Know-Who's return, and about the way things could change. Halfway through summer, Ginny says apologetically that the Weasleys are staying in London for the rest of the holidays.

"Well, that's all right," Luna says. "I didn't know whether we would see each other this summer at all."

"What? Why not?"

"I didn't know," Luna says again.

There's a long pause. Then Ginny says, "Sorry, I'm sorry if I made you feel like I wouldn't be here."

"I'm not sure what you mean."

Ginny looks confused and guilty. She can't seem to look at Luna. "I'm just sorry. I thought we both thought this was better."

Luna genuinely doesn't know what Ginny means, but she feels that to express confusion again would upset Ginny further. "I hope London is nice," she says.

They leave on those terms. Luna is surprised by how often she thinks about this, and how, when she thinks about it, her stomach feels like it's being pulled downward.

Over fourth year, they exist in closer proximity than they ever have. Luna collides with Harry and Ron and Hermione, and she joins the D.A., and the world seems illuminated. Luna checks her coin every day before she goes to sleep and when she wakes up in the morning. She touches it absently during classes sometimes, hoping it will turn hot.

Sometimes Luna feels selfish, because while she does loathe Umbridge and the Ministry's sinister doings, she feels perversely grateful to them for what they've given her.

At the same time, having friends has forced Luna to confront that her first three and a half years of school were defined by the absence of friendship. She didn't realize how different things were on the other side, and now that she's taken one step into friendship, she can see how other people are much further into it, how other people have closer friends who share more with each other.

During D.A. meetings, the first thing she looks for when she walks in is Ginny. Sometimes Ginny is looking at her, but then she will look away quickly, as if she's afraid of making a mistake. She will look away and return to talking with her other friends.

Luna is beginning to map out the geography of Ginny's other friendships. Thinking about this upsets her, but for some reason she can't stop herself, it's compulsive. Luna wonders all sorts of things about Ginny's friends. Do they know about the many hierarchies that exist in the Weasley family, which Ginny has revealed to Luna over hours and hours? Do they know the precise way in which Ginny adores Bill, in which she idolizes and yet is frightened by the twins? Do they know all of the facial expressions Ginny makes when she's speaking about her own future? Sometimes they touch Ginny's shoulder or hair and it's like they don't even think about it at all. That's how easily they move. Luna thinks about the impossible effort it would take for her to interact with another person's space in that way, and she wonders if this is why Ginny doesn't talk to her. Sometimes she thinks about walking right up to Ginny and this makes her feel dizzy. If they spoke to each other, surely everyone would be able to look at the space between them and see that there is matter there, and then they'd have to explain something, and that makes the weight pull down at Luna's stomach again.

She thinks of all these things, absurdly, in the Department of Mysteries that spring, as they're running from the Death Eaters. She hears a cry, looks back with a feeling of her whole body unraveling, and sees a Death Eater's hand around Ginny's ankle. "Reducto!" the word blasts out of her with the force of terror. A model of Pluto explodes in the Death Eater's face. Ginny yells as her ankle cracks.

Luna runs forward and catches her. Suddenly the whole weight of Ginny's body is in her arms. She is holding Ginny's whole self, and if she does anything else incorrectly then Ginny could be dashed to nothing, she could be ribboned just like Luna's mother, reduced to images that will replay forever into the future, and the idea is so overwhelming that everything seems to go black around her. The thing that Luna will remember most clearly from that night is Ginny's face, drawn with pain from her broken ankle, hovering in the dark like a prophecy.

The first day of summer, it rains. She comes to the bend in the river. Ginny is sitting on one of the rocks there with a tattered umbrella held over her head.

"Hey," Ginny says.

"Hello." Luna glances at her ankle. "It looks better."

"It is, yeah."

They're silent for a while.

"I've been thinking about the Ministry a lot," Ginny says.

"Me, too."

"I was stupid last summer. It was really stupid that I left without saying more. I wanted to ask if you wanted to talk in school. Because I thought you were happy not talking, but then you've seemed a lot happier this year, so I guess I was wrong, and I should have asked."

"It's all right if you don't want to speak to me in school," Luna says. As the words come out, she feels that downward pull again and realizes it is deep shame. She holds herself very still. She wants the words to be true, she doesn't want to place any pressure on Ginny to do anything, because if she did anything that made Ginny feel pressured, Ginny would disappear and never reappear in Luna's life. Ginny is glowing in the greyish air and it's impossible that she's here at all.

"Why wouldn't I want to speak to you," Ginny says.

"Other people think I'm too strange to be worth knowing."

Ginny pauses before saying quietly, "How do you know that?" She doesn't say it like Luna is wrong. She says it like she's sad that Luna is aware of it.

Luna doesn't know how to explain it to Ginny. She could tell Ginny that she has slowly realized she doesn't feel normal, that she has come to know she isn't normal, which is true, but that carries a connotation of woundedness or alienation that isn't quite right.

It's just separation. A slight feeling of anthropology whenever surveying groups of other people. It's just that there's a look everyone wears around her, and she recognizes it now. It's partly made up of encouraging interest, the kind you'd put on for a child: please go on, please tell me more, your perspective is so interesting and so unusual. There's always a measure of light irony behind the look, too: all right, I'll roll the dice, I'll give it a go; what will she say this time?

These people aren't bullies. Whoever's wearing the look is usually well meaning and compassionate, but even they think, it's Luna Lovegood, you have to take Luna Lovegood with a spoon of something strong to fortify yourself.

Luna doesn't like knowing what they think, and yet there's something reassuring in being known that way, as an archetype that does contain a part of you.

Luna decides this is what she'll focus on. She wants to show Ginny that she enjoys being herself. She doesn't want to misrepresent herself to Ginny as an object of sympathy, which would feel profoundly disempowering.

"It's nice to be expected, I suppose," Luna says mildly. "It's nice that people know me well enough to expect something specific out of me."

But Ginny knows this isn't what she wanted to say. Ginny's looking hard at her, green-gray eyes slicing into her like a paring knife.

"What," she says, "do you think people expect out of you?"

Luna thinks about this for a long time. It feels like a riddle for the Ravenclaw portrait hole. If she says something too true, something will open. She must decide whether she wants it to stay shut.

She opens it. "There's a look people have when they're expecting me to say something so unusual that it somersaults into being profound."

Ginny doesn't answer. Pink tinges her cheeks behind her freckles, and Luna knows this is confirmation.

Luna lifts her shoulders and can't help a faint smile. "I am a bit tired of it, I suppose. They look at me like I'm a ceremony in a language they don't speak. At best I amuse them or educate them or remind them of the differences between all people. Either way, in their eyes, everything I say or do has nothing to do with me at all. There is no interest in actually understanding the incomprehensible. Though I should be used to that."

She touches the spectrespecs on the string around her neck. Her smile fades. She looks Ginny in the face, and some of the layers of thought shear away from her voice. She rarely lets herself speak this way. "I am not the cypher that solves other people. I am myself for myself."

Ginny looks at Luna's mouth, then, for some reason. "I know you are," she says after a while. "I hope I never look at you that way. Like a ceremony in another language."

"You never have," Luna says. "You know the language."

Something shifts in the clouds thousands of feet above and the rain is lit up all around them like white fire. Luna is suddenly consumed by the fact that Ginny is looking at her, thinking about her, that right now they command each other's complete focus. She is very aware of Ginny's eyes, then, and of the way her hair looks heavy, like molten metal. Once, in Charms class, someone miscast a hover charm on Luna's arm, which floated up to hang in the air. There was a tremendous feeling of freedom in it, this thing she had no control over, something she could smile at with the rest of the class. Luna feels something like that in her hand now, something that if uncontested would lift her fingers unavoidably to Ginny's face or hair. She has to hold it back. She isn't used to holding herself back, but she knows somehow that if she didn't, something in Ginny would startle, maybe even be afraid. So this time she exercises restraint. She holds something inside and it makes her feel normal.

Two months later, Ginny opens Luna's compartment door on the train.

"Is that seat taken?" she says.

Luna smiles.

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