Amelia’s eyes lingered on the table, rather than look up at Peter to see his reaction to her words. She would have liked to believe that it was the same lopsided grin he gave to just about everything else she said, as though he were sharing in some kind of private joke with her, but she was too rational to hope that was possible. Clearly, Peter had noticed someone a little bit off about Amelia, and the only surprising thing about it was that it had taken him this long to realize it.
She heard the sigh first, and was forced to wonder for a few seconds if Peter was going to bother following it up with actual words. Amelia was throwing up her walls full force now, pushing Peter away harder than she did most people because he was actually getting to her. What he was saying about the time they had spent together, about them getting along… he wasn’t wrong. She would never have admitted to being genuinely happy in the situations she had spent with Peter, but she hadn’t been unhappy either. She hadn’t wanted to crawl inside herself or felt the need to run away during every moment in his presence. That had to count for something, right?
And maybe it did, but in the realm of relationships, Amelia didn’t know how the points added up. How many points did someone have to gain to overcome a series of disappointments that had made the Ravenclaw girl as reclusive as she was? How many tickets did you have to trade in for a smile, how many tokens did it cost not to have to ask twice in order to get to spend time with her? Amelia’s mind was thinking about it like algebra, but in trying to fit the variables, she realized, as she always did, that nothing about relationships was so straightforward.
Peter seemed to be struggling for words now, as though he were going to say something really poignant, and Amelia finally looked up at him, trying to read what he was thinking before he could say it so it wouldn’t come as a surprise. Before either of them could arrive at a conclusion, however, a voice from across the hall broke Peter’s train of thought and sent his head swiveling on his neck to see who had shouted.
Amelia made to lean around to see past Peter to find out who it was too, but as soon as she did, she immediately wished she hadn’t. Coming toward Peter was a gaggle of Peter’s friends, each more gorgeous than the next. All of them could have been off-duty supermodels, walking together and hanging on each other’s arms as though they were even now filming a commercial for high-end merchandise. The high pitched laughter of one of the girls reached Amelia’s ears at a deafening frequency, and the Ravenclaw girl cringed automatically at the sound, raising a hand to her ear as if anything in the world could block out that noise.
If his friends noticed Amelia’s discomfort, though, they didn’t do anything about it, instead exasperating the situation – and Amelia – by joining Peter and herself at the table as though this were a natural occurrence. Amelia was jostled as a tall, skeletally thin girl with stick straight black hair sat down next to her, reeking of cherry lip gloss and too much perfume, and a boy who must have been her relation sat down on Amelia’s other side, caging her in at the table. The boy’s dark black hair was wavy and tucked behind his ears, and he had dark green eyes that might have been brown, but Amelia didn’t look up long enough to investigate. She would liked to have fled the scene immediately upon sight of Peter’s posse, but now sitting shoulder to shoulder with the most popular students in Hogwarts, it didn’t seem likely she was going to escape.
Feeling overwhelmed, Amelia closed her shoulders in, trying to make herself as small as possible. One couple sitting next to Peter were sucking each other’s faces off, which was only adding to Amelia’s discomfort. Two other girls had sat down next to Peter, both of them looking like they could have been the Olson twins, though much, much too tan to pass as either Mary-Kate or Ashley. They were speaking a mile a minute, and although Amelia tried to tune out their high-pitched squeels of delight, she unfortunately caught enough to realize they were talking about highlighting their hair, and trying to get Peter’s opinion about it. At 20,000 hz and 100 decibels.
Amelia might have been able to handle this situation – maybe – if all of it had been happening only around her, and not to her. Although Peter’s group of friends had descended on her, most of the girls hadn’t taken more than a few seconds to look at her and, Amelia assumed, decide that she wasn’t of much interest. The kissing couple hadn’t even looked up. But the boys standing behind Peter weren’t oblivious to her presence; not at all. They had been watching her ever since they arrived, whispering back and forth to one another in French, so Amelia could neither hear nor understand them. Perhaps it was her paranoia at being surrounded by so many people, or just her general annoyance with the company Peter kept, or the confirmation that was all but obvious now that she and Peter came from completely different worlds, but whatever it was, she squirmed under the looks of the taller, muscular boys whose eyebrows had raised upon seeing her and hadn’t lowered since.
Trying to breathe, Amelia looked down and away from the boys behind Peter, trying to close off her mind to what was going on. But it was too difficult; it was sensory overload, between the perfume, the smell of self-tanner, the pheromones wafting off of the hormonal pygmies, the screeching from Mary-Kate and Ashley, and the movement of the table that hadn’t stopped since they all sat down, Amelia couldn’t seem to shut the world out.
Peter, at least, seemed to sense that Amelia was getting overwhelmed, and his voice cut through the noise to give a quick fire round of introductions, pointing to each of his friends in turn and giving their name. Amelia had an exceptional memory in most cases, and it was even likely that under this much stress she could have remembered all their names, but she couldn’t get it out of her head that they were all more or less carbon copies of one another. That combined with the fact that she had never met any of them before made it nearly impossible to recall any of the names a mere 15 seconds after Peter had said them.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” one of the boys behind Peter said – Richard or Gabriel, she couldn’t remember which was which – placing special emphasis on the word ‘pleasure’, and raising his eyebrows suggestively as he did so.
“Yes, it’s a pity we haven’t met before,” the other one said, nudging the boy who had spoken first, “You’ve been keeping secrets from us, Bellard,” he added, squeezing Peter’s shoulder and giving him a playful shake, though keeping his eyes on Amelia the whole time.
“It’s not as if we’ve missed much,” the girl Peter had introduced as Collette chimed in, her voice not without sarcasm. Her eyes rested heavily on Amelia’s mess of curls that were still half-damp from Peeves, not bothering to hide the judgment in her eyes or her words.
“Like hell we haven’t,” one of the boys muttered, smirking as he returned the nudge his partner in crime had given him earlier.
“She doesn’t even speak,” Nicole added, as though continuing the thought Collette had said earlier, as if they each were housing one half of a whole brain.
That would explain a lot…
Sensing that there was a spectacle being made, even the kissing couple laid off, turning to stare at Amelia to see what she would have to say to that remark. In all honesty, Amelia had never wished more that apparition was possible within Hogwarts, if only to get herself out of this situation, but she couldn’t see how right now. She’d have to say something. Anything. Think of something.
“I ap- I apologize,” Amelia stuttered, her eyes darting between the other students sitting at their table, frequently going back to meet Peter’s eyes, as though he could save her from all this. Her social ineptitude was even more glaringly apparent among all these young socialites, “It is… nice to meet all of you as well,” Amelia managed, though not with the amount of conviction necessary to be entirely believable.
Get me out of here…