worn from winter wind • • a r i

JANUARY 2002

Places were made up of many things.

For Dennis Creevey, most of the places he'd been in the past few years were more than places to him; they were made up of feelings and memories and hope and hurt as much as they were made up of stone and wood. Diagon Alley was one such place; it's threadbare structures against newer brick walls a map of emotional geometry as much as physical architecture. So many versions of himself had been in here, muddy-green eyes searching for very different things over the years. At eleven, he'd looked around with wonder. At fifteen; desperation. Today he was just tired, and his weary eyes were only searching for a new set of dark robes and a few new quills. The winter break was short and soon he'd be back at school.

Dennis' once-white grey sneakers squeaked a little against the wet ground, but he couldn't hear the sound over the chatter. He wasn't the only student here today buying new school supplies, after all - though he imagined there was a slight chance that he was one of the only ones here alone. Dennis walked past Gringotts, making his way down into the depths of the alley. He paused momentarily by the Quidditch supplies shop as a Puddlemere United t-shirt through the window caught him off guard, but the moment passed and soon he was on his way. The teenager only had a moment of reprieve, however, before something else caught him off guard. or, more accurately; someone else. He didn't know her very well. The chance to know her had come and gone years ago, but he'd have recognised her features anywhere. He'd been thinking about her on and off since summer had graced their grey city with its warmth, the image of her face firmly hand in hand with undecipherable guilt. She was looking through a shop window, slight frown etched into her brow, but he'd stopped walking and was simply looking at her.

For a moment, Dennis wasn't in a sleet-covered, cobbled alleyway, surrounded by chirping children and bustling folk in long robes. He was sitting at a table with an empty wine glass on one side and a laminated menu on the other. A red spot of blood bloomed from under one of his fingernails; he'd pricked himself with a toothpick when he'd been cleaning dirt out from under them and had been distracted talking to her. It was so easy, in retrospect, to see the expressions on her face; her pain. At the time, Dennis had been far more involved with himself. He'd been helpless in an angry sort of way, caught up inside his own contorted grief and unexpected, inwardly directed fury. He'd torn her trauma out from her with hungry hands, digging for something he should have known he wouldn't have found there. Dennis had been jealous that she'd seen what she had. So angry that he'd missed the way her thumb had traced anxious circles around the lip of her drink. So hurt that he'd lashed out at her even as she'd been frozen to her chair, reduced to whispering replies under the weight of his pain. Retrospectively, it was pretty fucked up.

Seeing her now laid everything out in front of him, like he was seeing double, only the second vision was made up of memories. Dropping the false coin because it had been burning hot; feeling dejected because Colin was driving away right in front of him and hadn't thought to bring him on this particular adventure; the crease in between Ari's brows as he'd demanded more from her - even after she'd relived her trauma right in front of him. A red bloom of blood under a bitten fingernail. This collection of images invoked something - some kind of reality - that only made sense when placed here against each other, out of context. It reminded him of a scrapbook, or perhaps it was more like a memorial beside a highway. A white-painted cross, some flowers and a bike bell, he thought distantly. You didn't have to have seen the car or the bike that it hit to know what those things meant.

And then it all melted away and he was back here again, brushing shoulders with strangers in a cold, crowded space, with eyes for only one of them.

And she was a stranger. Or might as well have been. He knew her name and house; knew her occupation; knew that she'd suffered. These were all things he could learn from a piece of paper. Though, he supposed, he didn't usually feel this sort of dead guilt in the pit of his stomach when standing metres away from most strangers. He didn't feel a shameful yearning sort of feeling to absolve that guilt, and even more shameful wish to be close to those feelings again; the ones he felt when he remembered that this girl had seen his brother die. Those things were all intertwined for him. Inextricably so. As the brunette turned away from whatever she'd been looking at, and as her profile shifted away and was replaced with the picture of the back of her head, Dennis felt a sharp pang of panic. It leapt up through his body from the soles of his feet to the clenching feeling in his chest. He blinked as she disappeared into the crowd, knowing he was missing an opportunity that he didn't want to miss. Something pulled him forward.

"Ari, hey." It only took a few panicked moments to step through the crowd and reach for her arm. As soon as he had her attention, he withdrew his hand quickly, still unable to break over-polite habits even now, after all this time. For a moment the two of them stood there, eyes locked, and to Dennis it seemed like the world was moving slowly on without them. For a moment, they were just two anonymous kids with the smallest, briefest overlap in histories. Just past wounds and permanent scars. "Hey," he said again, quietly. "Are you busy? Could we talk for a sec?"

Already six months removed from the rhythms of the school year, Ariana was caught off guard by the throng of students doing their winter shopping in Diagon Alley before returning to Hogwarts. The nineteen-year-old was here to visit Gringotts and remove a little money from her vault, but such visits often turned into half-day ordeals as she remembered various Wizarding goods she was short on. Food for Titius; ink, quills, and parchment; broom servicing supplies; replacements for worn-out equipment. She always wanted more than she could afford, nowadays, so her Cleansweep had fallen into a worse state of repair and she had to correct for a systematic bias towards the left dish in her brass scales. Ari tried to do antidote practise brewing at the Ministry so she could use their vast stores of ingredients, trying not to think about the exorbitant fines that had likely largely financed their purchase. It was nice, though, to see students, in a way. Ari had waved at more younger Hufflepuffs than she could count in the last hour, and it was gratifying to see some of them wave back. It made her feel like she had made some kind of difference during her time there; that atoning accomplishment was not confined solely to the future.

Still, some things made her question everything. Ari paused in front of Flourish and Blotts, eyes drawn to the Rita Skeeter book still prominently displayed in the store window. Hearing the topic bandied about for the entirety of November had exhausted her; at times she had wanted to shake her fist in people's faces, ask them point blank if any of them had been there, instead of her mild but firm denial of its contents whenever anyone mentioned it directly to her. With the average lifespan well beyond 130 now and her class being the first of the seven who had lived through it to graduate, she felt horribly outnumbered against the rumors that spread at work, the same place which often applied a fine corrective touch to the slant of the Prophet that had for so long been such an outlet for the woman's libel. Now nearly two months since its release, there was thankfully a stockpile of them rather than a notice informing passersby of the arrival of the next shipment, but she thought dully that that probably meant everyone had already purchased a copy.

Ari took a breath and turned away, not wanting to think about it any longer, or worse, have someone assume she was considering giving up her hard-earned Galleons on the rag. She jerked around as someone laid a hand on her arm, her wand slipping into a comfortable grip in her hand, before her eyes met the green-brown of Dennis Creevey's.

Ari, hey, he said. It was almost the exact same way he'd greeted her the last time they'd met. Ari, hi, he'd said then, just as casually and quietly. Ari closed her mouth and slipped her wand back away into a pocket as she continued to stare at his eyes for a second. There was something about Dennis's eyes that was magnetic; she thought it was the familiarity, the feeling that in all the mess of people he was one of the only few that knew somehow the extent of everything she'd been through. She was surprised to find them looking at her again; she'd thought privately, after the way their last meeting had gone, how powerless she had felt, that he would never speak to her again. Ariana swallowed her surprise and nodded. "Hey," she returned, gently. "No, I was just looking at...that," she said, waving her arm vaguely towards the window of the bookstore and the giant poster of the cover, with a shadowy figure seeming to emerge menacingly from a sparkling dome over and over again. They hadn't even gotten how it had looked right. "Yeah, uh, yeah, we can. D'you...want to go sit somewhere?" She gestured automatically at a nearby shop with a few chairs and tables arranged around heating columns, before realizing with a closer look, her face dropping, that it occupied what had once been Florean Fortescue's parlour. Someone else who had paid the ultimate price. "Maybe...not there."

The world around him started moving again, like a bad special effect in a movie. Dennis did his best to look relaxed, but there was an intensity to the way their eyes met that he knew was not one-sided. He felt another tug of guilt in the region of his stomach; somewhere in his head he was still replaying the last thing he'd said to her, and it hurt. It was a little much. Looking away from her for a moment was a mild reprieve.

Dennis' mottled green gaze followed the path of her gesture, coming to settle on the large rectangular poster. "Oh," he said simply, ignoring the flashy graphics and looking straight from the title to the familiar name underneath it that had caught his eye. Dennis clearly remembered the afternoon that Colin had skipped up to the first year boys' dorms to sit on the end of his bed and tell him about the interview he'd given for the Daily Prophet. He'd been so pleased to be able to speak at length about his friendship with Harry Potter, and how amazing and incredible the older boy was. Dennis had been excited then too; his brother's moods had always been incredibly infectious, and even if they weren't - it was his first year at magic school. Every moment spent breathing was an exciting moment.

Perhaps the fact that a student under the protection of the school had been murdered in his very first year there should have indicated something to him. Dennis shifted uncomfortably, looking back at Ari with a bit of a grimace to show his feelings on the poster and what it represented. "Sitting sounds good," he agreed, a slight crease marring his brow in a serious but comfortable frown. The Gryffindor adjusted his backpack over one shoulder as he fell into step beside her, still jostled occasionally by the odd stranger. "How about there?" He asked lightly, pointing to a place a little further down. Diagon Alley would never be a place untouched by its history, but they could at least drink a coffee somewhere that didn't stand on the ruins of a place destroyed by the same thing that had taken so much from both of them.

Dennis didn't speak as they walked. Similar to the last time he'd met with her, Dennis had imagined this scene for months. He'd written and rewritten the potential script should he ever see her again. Now that he was here, of course, he was more nervous. Aside from shared, troubled glances, it seemed impossible to guess how she felt or how she might react to what he was thinking or what he might say. Dennis was a little nervous that he might do or say something he'd regret, like he had last time. He was just thankful that she'd agreed to talk to him again. The pair made their way to the place he'd pointed out and were seated in a small booth with a view out to the busy street. He took his seat across from her, feeling an eerie sense of deja vu.

As he slid the drinks menu over to himself, Dennis' eyes went immediately to the alcohol section. Cheap wines, specifically. He swallowed. Maybe it wasn't a good idea to be drinking. Dennis knew that the alcohol hadn't been what had fuelled his immature display last time they'd met, but it couldn't have helped, could it? He stared at the menu without really reading it for a moment, nervous about talking to the girl in front of him. Dennis was surprised that she'd so readily agreed to talk to him again, after how he'd behaved last time. After a moment collecting his thoughts, Dennis slid his backpack from his shoulder onto the seat beside him and turned to her.

"Listen, I just..." Dennis flicked his eyes back up to hers and felt that feeling again. Uncomfortable familiarity. Guilt. "I mostly wanted to apologise," he finished lamely. Dennis wet his lips with the tip of his tongue, his mouth suddenly dry. He ran a hand through his hair, pushing strands off his face. He exhaled a reluctant sigh, unused to and uncomfortable with being this particular kind of honest. In their brief meeting months ago, she'd seen parts of him that almost no one ever had. Things that beat through him like a pulse that he worked to keep hidden away. "I was a real asshole to you, Ariana, I'm sorry."

Ari nodded at Dennis, understanding what lay beneath the simplicity of his response, the small grimace. She glanced slightly down towards him, matching his stride although his legs were a little longer than hers. Ariana had never been to the place he had suggested, but she wondered if it would become graven in her memory like the last place they'd been, or whether it would become a fixture in her life, memories layering down like sediments with these ones as the anchor.

They slipped into their booth in silence, like an echo hanging over from how they'd left their last meeting. The menu was bordered in black this time. Ari glanced up at Dennis to take her cue from him, then busied herself with her menu, scanning the columns as if she might discover something new in them. The shallowness of her attention, her springloaded reactions were revealed as her eyes quickly snapped back up to his the second he began to speak. Ari opened her mouth, and then closed it again, taken aback by a genuine, pure apology from someone she felt as though she'd tortured slowly the last time they'd met. She'd let blood repeatedly at a glacial pace, and here he was apologizing to her. Her heart twisted in her chest. Here was someone who after everything was still simply a good man. "Dennis, you don't--" She started to say, but cut off as he continued.

Ariana took a deep breath. "You don't need to apologize for anything," she repeated, shaking her head once as she looked down at her hands, which grasped at one another. She met his eyes again, tucking a strand of hair that had fallen out of her ponytail behind her ear, her small smile gentle and resigned and remorseful and vulnerable all at once. "I shouldn't have...assumed things, or tried to defend things that...aren't defensible." They simply were; decisions that they'd made, for reasons they'd had. Ari let out a breath of a laugh. "I thought maybe you'd never want to speak to me again," she confessed. "But I...it's nice to see you." There was a distant feeling of loss behind the idea of going through the rest of her life without speaking to Dennis Creevey again. Not because of what they had ever been; they'd only been casual school friends at their closest. It was more a sense that Dennis had a rare connection to a fragment of her, and without him it could be lost forever, never to be reassembled. The picture it might make, if there were other connections to be found, was still uncertain.

The waiter came by just then, and Ari looked up. "Just a hot chocolate, please," she smiled, then looked to Dennis. December was cold, and she wanted to wrap her fingers around something for this, but didn't think she could take any kind of bitterness now.

You don't need to apologise for anything, she said and Dennis' mind flickered backward like an old film.

I'm sorry I'm here instead, memory-Ari whispered to him, pinned to the chair under the anger and hurt he shouldn't have been directing at her. He was standing, hands flat on the table between them. People had stopped talking. People were staring. Me too, he replied, in a rare stroke of cruelty. And it was cruel. He was cruel; he'd turned himself inside out with feelings he couldn't break down and he'd let it all spill out in a rash and unusual display of aggression. Dennis Creevey wasn't an aggressive person. He never had been. His anger was almost always turned inward; he imploded rather than exploded. He didn't turn it into fuel to pour on others. He didn't throw lit matches.

He had, though; me too was a struck match. He'd been so careless with his words that day. And then he'd walked.

Dennis almost laughed. He settled for a soft smile instead. "No, Ari, don't," he said, using her nickname again automatically as he shook his head. Ari, Ariana, whatever, it was the same. She wasn't the kind of person people called by her surname and she wasn't the kind of person for whom nicknames were reserved for friends. He wondered if that meant something. Dennis rested his arms on the table, palms down. "It's not your fault my brother was killed," he said, his tone miles away from the levity he'd been aiming for. Dennis swallowed, eyes flicking back down at the menu in between his hands. He'd said killed rather than murdered because apparently it wasn't murder if it happened in war. An arbitrary distinction, if you asked him. Dennis had also said was killed rather than died because died was too passive for what he was trying to communicate. Colin hadn't simply died, after all, of his own free will or by some unhappy accident; he hadn't just slipped away in his sleep or had an aneurism at the breakfast table. He'd been killed by the hands of a person - many people, if you asked Dennis. He'd been killed. But it hadn't been Ariana Laurier who'd killed him.

"I'm sorry," he said again. His voice was quiet, but not sad. More contemplative. "It's been years but I still can't say it lightly." How many times had he said brother? How many times had he said killed? The count would be too small for something that deserved so much more. It felt like spitting razors; he just couldn't do it, and somehow the words were steel-edged and his mouth fumbled around the shape of them. "I didn't want to talk about Colin though," Dennis said. Colin was another razor, he thought. "I just saw you and I wanted to see how you are, I guess. I've thought about that afternoon a lot in the past few months." In all of a minute, despite his pauses and the slower way he said things, he'd probably said more words all in one go than he had for some time. He didn't know why. There was already a thread connecting them that he didn't feel like he had with anyone else. He had to do a little less work to let his words flow freely to her. And she clearly didn't hate him, as much as his more paranoid thoughts might have had him thinking until now.

He'd considered ordering a coffee - not that he liked the taste, but he was trying to get used to it - but he chickened out at the last moment. "White wine, please," he said, giving the waiter a polite smile before turning back to his... friend. Wine wasn't better, honestly, for taste, but complete sobriety wasn't a state he was sure he could be in for this. Not that he intended for this conversation to go anything like the last one. "I'm not usually like that," he continued, not missing a beat as their waiter disappeared. Dennis felt a little like all of this - the cafe and the waiter and the booths - was a farce, like an excuse just to talk. He felt like he wasn't the only one who felt it. "Angry like that, I mean. I don't think I've talked about it with anyone, really." She knew what he meant by it. "I don't mean to make this all about me, either, I just... wanted you to know," he finished lamely, smiling a little as he tried  to make up for his clumsy handling of language. A few beats passed. "It's nice to see you too," he added, a little surprised at how genuinely he meant it. "How are you?"

Ari pictured the two of them from the waiter's eyes for a moment, two teenagers who each deeply believed they were to blame. It could almost be one of the thousand other things teenagers felt guilty for--half of which Ari could only imagine experiencing, her own adolescence having progressed as it did--but for that both drew on deeper, darker chapters of their stories that coiled around their interactions to fuel their convictions. She matched his smile at his initial protest, soft and sad and full of the inevitability of their mutual apologies, until it faded at his next sentence. His gaze slipped out of hers, leaving her grasping. Was killed; by someone who saw not a valiant teenager but a warm body that needed cooling.

"I don't think it's a thing to be said lightly," she responded reflexively. It felt like 'Careful' all over again, both in uselessness and the urgency with which it bubbled up to her lips. She bowed her head slightly, trying to accept his deflection instead. "I..." she started, but just nodded, waiting for the waiter to vanish and for Dennis to finish the words he seemed to have dammed to refine for so long. Leaning forward onto her elbows, she let his words resonate until they dissipated, giving them the time they were due. For all the time he might have been thinking of them, they scattered in instants once uttered. "I thought about it too," she offered, a simple statement of fact.

Ari wanted to say that she didn't think that anger was like him, that she couldn't, but her brow furrowed as she considered what it meant that he'd never talked about it to anyone. It had been nearly four years: a fifth of a life to bear this burden alone. That anger was a part of him, a scaffold upon which his adulthood was woven. "And I...appreciate that you did, then." Dennis probably thought it was a crazy thing to think, but Ari thought any trust--even trust in a capacity to receive blows--meant something. The significance was not lost on the former Hufflepuff, as desperate and unplanned as she thought it had been. "And that you're here telling me now." She looked at him meaningfully.

Ari massaged her left arm slightly at his question. Ariana had healed physically from the curse that could have killed her, but sometimes she thought a phantom memory flicker roused it from slumber. It had been a rough week; after weeks of primarily noncombat work, they had sprung surprise duels on the trainees. "Been better," she admitted with a little smile, trying to brighten it from the sad version she'd shown earlier, "but nothing too bad. It was nice to get a few days off. What about you?"

"Right," he said, choosing to voice his agreement monosyllabically because he wasn't sure what else to add. He felt like his words were coming in a rather stuttered flow, like a moment ago he'd needed to get everything out and now suddenly he was closed off again. It didn't surprise him at all that she'd thought about it too, but he couldn't help but grimace just a bit to hear it said out loud. In the past few months, Dennis had spent quite a bit of time trying to imagine how she might have felt that afternoon. He glanced down at his hands resting on the table rather than at her. "Yeah, sorry," he said again.

In some roundabout ways and some far less roundabout ways, he'd more or less told her she was an idiot and blamed her for his brother's death. He'd replayed that memory from every angle, a thousand times. There remained a part of him that was not entirely convinced that she didn't hate him - that it was possible for her not to.

Dennis didn't respond when she said she appreciated him speaking to her. He looked up at her again though, searching for some subtext or hidden meaning behind her words in her expression. She appreciated what, exactly? Him yelling at her in a room full of people? Him pressing her even when she clearly didn't want to keep talking? It was all so damn morbid, and it made him cringe to remember. "Umm, yeah," he said, frowning a bit as he met her eyes, the weight of it all felt - he was sure - by them both. The image of a drop of blood blossoming from underneath his fingertip slipped intrusively back into his head and he gave a slight nod, acknowledging things unspoken.

"I'm good," he said, "heaps better." The teenager didn't bother to qualify his statement as he leaned back in his seat. Hopefully, he didn't need to. Last time he'd seen her he'd been at a far worse state than this, and while there wasn't really another way for her to know that, a part of him was probably trying to reassure her that this afternoon wouldn't end up like that one. Dennis scratched the back of his neck absentmindedly. "Hung out with Dean - Thomas, you know? - over Christmas... Then back to school in a few days." He gave a bit of a shrug. It felt strange to be talking about school. With her, especially. It was so much easier with people like Clementine, who were free from some of the specific kinds of baggage he shared with people like Ariana.

Sitting with her now, it was impossible not to think of the war. Impossible not to think of the ways that their lives had been touched and twisted by that year, and all of the fallout from it. The more similar ways - like their robbed childhoods, ongoing thoughts of loss, trauma, remembered wounds, both literal and figurative. Thinking specifically about the war, however, Dennis could see differences too. Ones he hadn't really thought about from this perspective. The blood that pulsed through their veins was not the same, despite its similarity in colour and viscosity. Their trauma wasn't the same either, and not because she'd actually fought in the battle, unlike him, or because he'd actually lost someone he really loved, unlike her. The fact that there was a war at all, that it happened because some people actually hated what he was... He wasn't sure he'd ever thought about it in these terms before; he felt like he was on the edge of understanding.

He'd fallen so willingly into the wizarding world under the promise that he was special, but he hadn't known that special wasn't safe. That it came at a price. Dennis wondered what it might have been like to grow with a family who was aware of wizarding history. A family who knew what dark magic was, or that it existed at all. His thoughts turned to his own parents, and how ignorant they'd been the entire time their sons had been at school. Colin hadn't even told them about being petrified in his very first year at Hogwarts, something that he thought only another muggleborn could really understand. Who could risk losing it? He wondered if Ariana could really understand these things. If she'd ever lived on the other side of the veil. Surely she'd grown up with that history, the one kept hidden from muggles and people like him.

Their drinks came and Dennis gave the waiter a bit of a smile, grateful for the distraction. "You're training to be an auror, right?" he asked, as if he didn't already know. He took a sip of his drink, feeling strangely comforted just by having the glass in his hands.

Ari realized with an internal start that everything she had said until now--maybe everything she had said last time, too--sounded as though she was stepping gingerly on eggshells around him. And it made sense. No matter how much she thought about how they were similar, in comparison to those around them, there was still a wide gulf between them. Because she had come back. But it felt wrong to her, to see that and put up this wall between them, like she was ashamed to really talk to him.

"No, wait, Dennis," she said. She swallowed and rushed ahead, to spite the awkward pit in her stomach. There was a reason why little Ariana had not been sorted into Gryffindor like her dad after all, she supposed. "I just...I'm sorry last time was so hard, if I made it harder than it had to be, I don't know, but I want you to know that, like," she hesitated, wishing she'd gotten her words in order earlier. She wished she had something to look at instead of flicking between the space between his hands and occasional glances at his eyes; it felt like she might find out they burned if she looked at them too long. "I don't talk about it with people, either," she said more deliberately. "Most of my friends are our age and most of them went home. It's like," she took a breath, "because we were supposed to go home, we're supposed to pretend like we weren't there, like it didn't happen. And I don't want people to talk about it, or me, because..." this breath shuddered as it moved through her lungs, "being here is like I got rewarded for breaking the rules." That fact had sharpened the point of the guilt she'd felt when telling him about it last time, when she'd apologized for being there instead.

"That's not really the point," she said quickly, forcing herself to look up at him. "We both know that I can't really know how you feel, but that's why it meant something to me anyway. Because talking and thinking about it is hard and it's something so many of us don't want to do even when the world makes a big deal about trying to 'remember' it." The greater the distance between the present and that night, the more excuses they would make, the more books they would write, like they did about the dome; the more absolution they would grant themselves. "I guess talking to you about it makes me feel like I can do better than go along with that." Dennis seemed like the kind of person who might hate being the kind of person that made other people realize something about themselves, a tangible symbol of something. He had gone from being a symbol of everything the people in charge had hated, back then, to whatever she had just said he represented to her. He probably just wanted to be himself. They just hadn't talked that much; she wondered if they would ever get there. It felt like a goal that no amount of Hufflepuff hard work was guaranteed to reach. "I should talk to my mum more," she said, a little distantly as if it had just occurred to her. It hadn't, but it was different with her mum, in a way. She still had the instinct to protect her children which stopped her from being so open about what she had gone through. Her parenting style had never really been the direct sort--that was more her dad's thing. Her mother's absence, the lengths she and Edmund had gone through to talk that year, often about it, Ari at fifteen had conceptualized most of it as happening to her and her siblings, not her mother. Now that she was older, maybe she was better equipped to understand it from her point of view.

Her spiel done, results of opening up yet to be seen, Arianaturned back to the lighter conversation they were happening. "I always wanted to know Dean better, he seemed so cool when we were younger," she said with a little smile, remembering. "Like in the relaxed way, not the ultra-popular way." She wondered how many of the people he knew were like that, even more integrated into that time. Ari wondered what Dennis would think about Prosper, about the idea that she had gone on a few dates with someone so disconnected from all of this. Then again, Kate had told her a few days ago at home that Clem Russell, her co-captain, had been hanging out with him a lot, and she'd only been a first year when it all happened. Ari liked Clem. She was a little younger than they were--to Ari, Dennis was her age, not a sixth year, and Clem was only a year older than Kate--but she supposed it was a little different when you were still in school after all. Dennis might find it weird if she brought up gossip, though.

"Yeah," she answered his last question with a bit of a shrug. It felt less weird to say now that she'd been doing it for half a year or so, months away from when she'd told him about the psychological tests. "It's more like school than I thought it'd be. I'm kind of glad about that for now," she said, wrapping her fingers around her mug and taking a cautious sip of the sweet, hot liquid, bracing for the inevitable scalding.