by Meriadoc
 
 
 

If you looked into my eyes, you would see how miserable I am.

Isn’t it strange, that when you decide to do or not do something, later, you’re always thinking about what you should have
done?

That’s what I’m doing.

At my old school, there was something about being boys or girls. There, everyone walked around in packs of their own sex,
because it was ‘against human nature’ for boys to hang out with girls. And it got awkward. It has something to do with puberty
and insecurity and peer pressure, I think. Even I belonged to one, but it wasn’t really my decision. Everyone just strayed into a
certain group of people. In a group, you had to be something to fit in with the ‘members’, which are never really called that, but
are subconsciously considered that way. In this one, you had to be shrewd and a girl. I don’t know if I was the former, but at
the time it was alright to be there.

Snow falls to the ground and covers the crevices of my large window. When I look closely at the falling slivers of white, I can
see their intricate little patterns. I want to open my window and touch them and admire them up close, but know that they will
melt away anyway if I did.

Just like someone I knew.

I remember a particular snow fight outside, under the same sky I am looking on, and I smile wryly to myself at the recollection
of how mischievous and funny and confident and… friendly he’d been on that day. Or how little perturbed he’d been by my
being a girl. Wrapped in our scarves and muffs and jackets, everyone in class let ourselves mingle with those that, at other times,
everyone would be too shy and self-conscious to be with. Or at least I would.

I remember my ‘friends’.  Those girls were always so confident and never insecure, and, as I look back on those times, they
had had good reason not to be. They were all very beautiful and admired. That day, as I hung back to watch them erect snow
forts with those boys, I wondered why I couldn’t be like them, why I couldn’t be outgoing and beautiful and be so careless as
to be like that with the opposite sex.

Suddenly, a snowball hit  the back of my neck.

I fall forward, more from surprise than the force of what was thrown. I get to my feet, dust my person off, shiver, and look
behind me.

I shouldn’t have.

My heart fluttered to my throat at the sight of him. He was standing there, a few yards away, a snowball jumping up and down
in his gloved hand. His posture is self-satisfied, a hand on a hip, legs apart, a smirk on his rather handsome face. I stand
stock-still, the fact that he was there, and that he’d just thrown a snowball at me, and that he was actually smiling at me, took a
few minutes to process.

I never knew how to act around him, so I always behaved defensively when he teased me, and a plain smug little wench. I was
nervous and I prayed every moment that I tried to act the opposite that he didn’t notice.

But later, as always, I would realize that I acted like a sorry little git and I beg the Sages that he knew how I am really feeling.

I blink  few bits of snow out of my eyes – I had gotten some on my eyelashes when I fell down. He is still smirking. I get
to my senses and drop to the ground to make a snowball of my own. He obviously expects me to retaliate.

I find I couldn’t speak. I try to, try to make a sarcastic remark or a small ‘Jerk’,  but I feel as though if I opened my
mouth all that would come out was a declaration of love.

I also find that I couldn’t contort my face into a smug smirk, like the ones I always put on for him. I couldn’t smile,
either. I tell myself it’s from the cold, and keep rolling my snowball in my hand. I could feel his eyes boring into my bent
head and I keep it down to hide my spreading blush. I tried to concentrate on balling the snow.  I didn’t have any
mittens on, and my palms turned blue from the cold, but I had to throw this one, lest he notice I’m acting strange and
get ideas.

I straighten up. I had been bent over the snow so long, distractedly rolling some, that my ball had gotten as big as more
than half my head. I look up at him. He’s still there, but he’s staring at me as if thinking, ‘what’s wrong with her?’ I
look the other way around, behind me, and I am relieved to see that our other friends are still firing snow at one
another.

I turn back to him. He is in a throwing posture. I think fast, and just as his snow ball meets the air mine does too. The
two are headed to a collision –

SPLAT.

The snow balls have collided, both breaking the other into small piles of ice debris. I look at him, he looks at me, and
the corners of both our mouths are noticeably twitching. I manage an impish grin, and he laughs and crosses the
distance between each other. He takes my hands.

‘Your hands are blue,’ he observes. I nod and try to pull away, but he won’t let go. Then he drops my hands and takes
the green, knitted mittens off his own. He takes my hands again and slips them in. My hands are warm, both from his
touch and the green crocheted fabric. I smile involuntarily at him, he grins back, and drops to the snow. Before I know
what is happening, he has thrown a snow ball at me. This time I laugh as well, and when he is  trying to run away from
my ‘wrath’, I throw quite a good one at him. It hits him square on the chest, because he was trying to face me while
running. He falls to the snow.

I run over and help him up. He smiles again and shows those brilliant teeth. I close my own mouth, as my teeth are a bit
crooked. Now his hands are slightly blue. I take off one of the mittens and place it in his left hand.

Suddenly, the air around us grows colder. I shudder, and look back out our friends to realize they were going. I run
towards them, leaving him behind and knowing he wouldn’t mind, as he lived in the opposite direction of where I was
going anyway. Then I remember the mitten and try to throw it back at him, but we are already too far apart. He has
already started walking home. I call his name, and he says over his shoulder: ‘Just give it back to me some other time.’

I nod, wave, and hurry off.
 
 

Why don’t we ever know what we’ve got with us and appreciate it, until it’s gone and we realize we can’t ever be with it ever
again?

How was I to know that I would look back on that day, like I’m doing right now, and say it was one of my best memories?
That I wouldn’t have another chance to make another one better with his help? How was I to know that after that, I would
never talk to him again, all because of one trivial little piece of news that had unfortunately reached his ears? How was I to
know I would be leaving him so soon?

After our snow escapade, we were still in the same school, same classes, with the same people. But for some very odd, very
heart-breaking reason (at least for me) we avoided each other like the plague. It was nearly impossible not to speak to a person
in this school, but we kept it up. When we would pass each other in the hallways, we would look at our feet, at the wall, or
ahead, anything but each other. I still don’t know why.

I guess it’s because he found out I had a crush on him. I curse myself now for ever letting the news spread. It was humiliating
how I was the only one he wouldn’t talk to, not even through a messenger. And it was degrading how spare lunch times spent
talking about our favourite shows, and swift seconds, when the teacher wasn’t looking, of giving each other clues to answers of
every exam, and lovely hours of boring lectures and note-passing under the table had to fade away into a cold nothingness. We
weren’t close friends, but he was, to me, someone to ask about current events, as he always listened to the news on the radio,
or watch on the telly. He was someone to ask for a pencil when mine broke. He was someone who could make you feel like
the most important person in the world just by looking at you. He was also someone like a kitchen tester, because when I made
cookies he would taste it and say what he thought. And I like to think that I was someone, to him, to ask for the right spellings
and pronunciations of words, because when he wrote an essay for school or even a love note to my friend, he would come to
me to correct his errors. I was someone always ready to listen; I don’t flatter myself by saying that, but I was in love with him so
much that I would listen to anything he had to say and give him the advice he needed. He could have called me at midnight to
say he had a toothache and I wouldn’t have minded. I was also someone to waste hours of Sports lectures on, as I wasn’t very
interested in sports but needed the information for Physical Educations class. All that was gone. Now each other was just a
person to avoid. It made me miserable to think about how many chances I had of talking to him again, and saying sorry for
whatever it was I did, and how I missed every single one.

I’m still pondering, after ten long years, why it was that he ignored me. I had good reason to avoid him, as everyone knew I
was infatuated, but hallways wouldn’t erupt in whistles and catcalls if he’d started the conversations. My best friends used to
joke that maybe he liked me, but as I laughed along with them, I degraded my self subconsciously. How could he like you
when you’re a nosy stuck-up little nerd? Not only that, but you’re ugly. Why would he want you when he could have
anyone else?

And it hurt to say that the little voice in my head was right. I act nosy and stuck-up around him, and I was something that isn’t
much appreciated in teen years – a bookworm, an automatic synonym for ‘nerd’ at the time. And I was ugly, with my ugly hair
and the circles under my eyes and my crooked teeth and my boyish build. I was pimply and a bit fat and once I had to wear
glasses because of my eyes. As everyone thinks when they’re in love, the person I liked was almost sacred; and I was
something even lower than the dregs of the world, something unworthy to even touch him.

On the eleventh month of our silence, which was already the first term of the next year, I received news. News which, even
now, I don’t know how to describe – wonderful, or utterly dreadful.

I was moving away from him, from everyone. To a girls’ school in the north. Right in the middle of the year.

My last memory of him was in the same place as my best – in the winter snow. I was walking outside of the school building,
staring off into space as my boots squashed white snow under my feet. In the distance, I see a figure wrapped in a jacket.
Thinking it was perhaps the groundskeeper or someone just strolling by, I kept moving.

When I saw who it was my heart dropped to my feet. It was him, all alone, building a snowman.

If it had happened perhaps a year ago, I would have come over to him and ask if he needed help. He would grin and let me,
and tease me while I made a snowball for the head. And when the snowman was completed, I would run upstairs for my
camera, which I always brought to school, and take pictures of each other with the snowman.

But it didn’t. Instead, when he saw me, he dropped a clump of snow on the ground in what I registered as faint surprise We
caught each other’s gaze and couldn’t look away. We stood there, still looking, for a few seconds.

But I knew it had to stop and I allowed myself to colour, look away, break the spell. I ran to the school as fast as I could, tears
of, perhaps, misery, or anger at myself or at him, or maybe they were just part of the cold that I had accumulated hours before,
streaming down my scrunched-up face. I thought I heard him calling my name, but knew it was all my imagination.

People don’t quite believe me when I say I was subjected to unrequited love and heartbreak, the worst pains one could receive
in his life, at such a tender age. They think it’s a schoolgirl crush. But then I ask them, would your heart still be eating away after
ten long years because of a childhood infatuation?

They don’t answer.

I look down at my right hand. On it is a faded green mitten. I wonder if he’s missing it, and think that maybe he was calling my
name that day to ask for the mitten.

And one day, if I ever see him, I might just give it back.
 
 
 

I was crying when I wrote this. It isn’t really Harry Potter, but if you slip in names it could be. It was actually from personal
experience, but not so that _everything_ that happened in the story happened to me. First off, there’s no snow here! Though
most parts were true. ~This isn’t Hermione/ Ron or Harry because they wouldn’t ignore each other because of a little crush. So
it’s not Herm I was talking about in the ‘I-was-someone-to’ part. I really am like that, someone to ask for grammatical
corrections and whatnot. (If there are any here, like I said, I was crying and wasn’t thinking very clearly when I typed this
down.) And the teeth. Mine are really like that. I’m a lot like Hermione then, no? ::throws up at the thought:: …And it isn’t
Harry with the sports thing, _he_ really is like that, and the guy did give me lectures on sports.  Probably Ginny/someone. Or
Draco/someone. Or maybe even L/MWPP. I don’t know… ::bursts into tears again and runs away::

And I don’t care if someone didn’t like this. I was only typing it to get some things off my chest. Don’t review if you’re only
going to flame, and right now I’m also a bit sensitive to Constructive Criticism as well.
 

Learn the Hard Way (companion fic to Never Took a Chance)