Fellow Kids

[Martin Abbott]

Before Martin and Liliana went their separate ways, they spent one last night together. Of course, they had split up at Lawrence and Brielle’s wedding, but something brought them back together for that one last week. In the morning Liliana took him to the airport. Martin knew that he was in love and he would do anything to stay with her, even if it meant abandoning all of his plans in America. But ultimately, Liliana would never let Martin give up on his dream. He had to go, and Liliana couldn’t follow.

Martin offered Liliana a sad little smile outside of the airport gate. It only occurred to him once he boarded the plane that he’d left her in a Muggle place that was probably totally unfamiliar to her. In that moment, all Martin could think about were Liliana’s green eyes. When Martin met Liliana in the Forbidden Forest, her eyes had been full of so much sadness. But slowly the sadness began to fade away until he found genuine happiness in them. But, outside of the airport gate, the sadness had returned. It occurred to him that this would be the last image he’d ever see of her. Their paths were so different, it was hard for Martin to see them ever crossing again.

When the Hogwarts story landed on Martin’s desk, it occurred to him that it was an opportunity to see Liliana again. But Martin didn’t immediately seek her out when he arrived on campus. Instead, he watched her from a distance, just hoping to see that she was happy and living her best life. In a way, Martin had been watching from a distance, following her work crafting brooms for her father’s company. Observing Liliana’s classes from under the bleachers of the practice pitch had become such a regular routine for Martin that his own grades had begun slipping, but who really needed potions anyway?

Martin was happy to see that Liliana was such a natural teacher. With young classes like this one, she was gentle. She encouraged the little first years as they struggled to get their brooms off the ground. They really seemed to like her. With the older students, the fourth and fifth or sixth years forced to take remedial flying long after most kids had learned the skill, she was a bit less soft. It was funny to watch her lob insults at a snobby teen who was so over trying.

Martin was snickering under the stands when he felt a finger tap his shoulder. He turned around to find Bryant Tannen giving his best “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed in you” expression.

“I am so mad,” Bryant said.

“I’m sorry, Professor Tannen,” Martin replied, holding his hands up in defense. “I was just, um…” How could he explain this? Hiding under the stands, watching Professor Quinn instruct first years. There were really no good explanations.

“Ditching class!” Bryant cut in. “The old ‘creeping under the stands’ trick. I was eleven once too.”
“I’m a sixth year,” Martin said.
“Ah-ha! The old ‘lying about your year after getting caught creeping under the stands’ trick! Ten points from Gryffindor!!”

Bryant took Martin by the bicep and yanked him out from under the bleachers. Yanked is a bit of an exaggeration since Martin followed willingly despite all three pounds of pressure Bryant managed with noodleboy arms.

“Look what I found creeping under the bleachers, Lily!” Bryant announced as he walked Martin onto the practice pitch.

“Don’t call her that,” Martin said.
“NINE THOUSAND POINTS from Gryffindor!” Bryant cried.
“Okay,” Martin blinked back.

Martin settled in line with the other first years, standing awkwardly with his hands shoved into his pocket. In the distance he heard the shriek of Bryant deducting twelve thousand points from a pair of Slytherin who were lounging on freshly cut grass.

Martin stood there, his eyes focusing on Liliana for small seconds before darting away, almost as if he might disappear from reality if he stopped looking. Finally, he realized he should say something.

“Hi,” he said.


    Liliana Quinn

[Liliana Quinn]

When was the last time Liliana thought about Martin?

When Liliana let him go in late 2003, she was determined not to dwell on their time together. It never worked out that way. She’d missed him so much that she covered it up with her sadness over Dominic. And somehow they both mixed in her heart, leaving her hopeless and utterly lost. When she missed the way Martin kissed the top of her head, she’d force herself to imagine Dominic instead. Everytime Martin’s name would pop into her head, she’d repeat Dominic, Dominic, Dominic. And she feared that she’d accidentally say his name instead of Dominic’s when her sister asked her what was wrong. Eventually, she obsessed so much over finding Dominic that it overshadowed everything else in her life.

So, honestly, she couldn’t really remember the last time she thought of just Martin without her mind twisting Dominic’s memory around him. But she knew the last time she’d seen him. She stood in that airport, her arms tightly wrapped around his neck and she knew this was it. Once she let go, it was for good. It was better to let it end on a good note so she didn’t cry even though she felt like she couldn’t breathe. When he was gone, she stood there for a long time unsure of what to do next. She was completely alone again.

In a span of a year she’d lost the two people who understood her the most. For six years, Dominic had been constantly by her side, he was like the moon or the sun, really depending on the mood he was in. But Martin… Liliana and Martin together were like a shooting star, their relationship was fast and bright and it burned out so fast.

Liliana had been learning, slowly, to let go of Dominic and she was building a new life for herself. She liked her job. No, she loved her job. She took to teaching surprisingly well. Anyone who knew her when she was a teenager would be shocked. Liliana emerged from a generation when the Slytherin girls were ruthless. Annalynne, Via, Liliana and Iola could take someone down with a couple of words and an icy look. No one would have guessed that she was kinda great with the younger students. She’d learned a lot from her nieces and nephew on how to speak to a child.

She had the first years lined up today, the morning sun was beating down on everyone and she could see some of them lose focus as they squinted out into the sky. “Put your wands away,” she warned as she walked down the line. She didn’t need another incident this early on in the year. Their magic wasn’t honed in yet and they liked to show off whatever they had learned in charms class. She proceeded to instruct the first student on how to keep his broom hovering on the spot when he mounted it.

“That’s it,” she said, offering a small smile. “If you can keep your focus o-.” Bryant’s voice cut her off and she hardly gave him a glance at first. He had a habit of patrolling the stands for her, without being asked to, and reporting any misdeeds. When Liliana finally looked over at the student he had dragged here, she had to do a double take. There was no other movement from her as Martin walked himself down to the end of the line. She was surely imagining things because why on Earth would Martin Abbott be attending a flying lesson at Hogwarts ten years after graduation?

He’d be gone by the time she got there, she knew it. So she took her time helping every single kid, one by one, letting them try over and over again. Finally, she left them all to practice what they’d learned and took slow steps to where he stood. The rest of the students began chattering behind her, completely uninterested in anything other than what she had taught them and showing off how steady they all could be.

She hadn’t heard that voice in a decade but she couldn’t mistake it for anyone else. Liliana stood frozen, just like she had in the airport after she had said goodbye. With a deep inhale and exhale, she gathered herself. She had so many questions but she could only bring herself to ask one, “What are you doing here?”

Martin Abbott

[Martin Abbott]

Martin knew that he would meet Liliana again at Hogwarts, but he hadn’t intended it to go like this. He could only blame himself, why wouldn’t Bryant Tannen wield his professorial power like a fascist dictator? Martin stood ahead above the tallest first year, but he still tried to make himself small by smooshing everything together. It didn’t work. The kids looked at him like Michael Jordan showing up to a public court for a game of one on one.

Maybe Martin hadn’t approached Liliana yet because he was committed to the story. In the weeks since the semester had started, no one had blown Martin’s cover. This was expected: though Martin was a good student, he had never been involved in a single extracurricular and was a rare participant in group discussions or class demonstrations without first being forced to volunteer. None of Martin’s old professors recognized him, and even his former schoolmates who held positions at Hogwarts now looked through him.

These were the rules that Martin established with his editor:

1. The story is as much about the professors as it is the students. To ensure authentic interactions no one can know that I am an undercover reporter.
2. To satisfy rule number one, I will attend and participate in a complete schedule of classes for the full year.
3. I will try out for every extracurricular activity that are available.

The plan had gone well for him so far. He was collecting a ton of information about student life and documenting administrative drama from afar, slowly piecing together a narrative that he could build into a full feature in the Prophet. There were only a few stumbling blocks. Bryant, for example, kept kicking Martin out of his Ghoul Studies class.

“But I am in this class,” Martin would protest.
“The hell you are!” Bryant would shoot back. “I would remember a creepy little face like yours!”

That terrible plant that sat next to Bryant’s desk would start to shriek and Bryant would cry, “You’re upsetting Leroy!”

It was seriously starting to threaten Martin’s GPA, but he was fine with Bryant’s punishments because serving a detention was one of his sub-goals for the project. Maybe not serving indefinite detentions, but Martin found the stories he found in the detention hall to be far more interesting than the ones in the great hall, though he did always risk the possibility that Liliana would be running the detention.

The truth was that Martin hadn’t found Liliana yet because, frankly, this wasn’t how he wanted it to happen. Martin had made a promise to Liliana that he would live his life and play it loud. Sitting in the back of classrooms ended with graduation, and every moment since then was in service to that promise. He went to parties, joined a band, smoked things he didn’t know the name of. What Martin learned about himself in college was that the facelessness he felt was such a setback at Hogwarts could be an incredible advantage to him in his career. Writing for the student newspaper, he discovered that he could blend into any group on campus, become any person he needed to for a story. And that was how he fell in love with investigative journalism.

Standing there in front of Liliana now in his Hufflepuff robes with his hair brushed forward to subtract age, it felt an awful lot like he’d only gone backward since he had last seen her.

For the record, it was never Martin’s plan to get close to Liliana again by masquerading as a student, even if it was technically his idea. He’d thrown it out as an example of a bad idea during a one-on-one with his editor Silas Moongrave and assistant editor Randy.

“It’s insulting what passes for journalism these days at big name publications. Stuff like, ‘We Sent Our Reporter Undercover at Hogwarts and This Is What We Found.’ I want to do something with teeth. Something that really bites,” Martin said.
“Yes!” Silas banged a beefy hand off the desktop. “What does that look like to you?”

Martin glanced at Randy next to him, then turned back to stare at Silas across the desk. “I’d like to write something about the Crocker mine which recently opened. They’re literally drilling into the planet’s lifestream without a single study into the potential, catastrophic impact.”

“Interesting,” Silas stroked the beard that he didn’t have. “I’m curious if it’ll play with the younger demographic though.”
“There’s a lot of young people at Hogwarts,” Randy spoke up.
“What do you mean?” Silas asked.

“Get this,” Randy said, holding his hands out to frame the headline. “‘We Sent Our Reporter Undercover at Hogwarts and This Is What We Found.’”
“Brilliant!” This time Silas’ coffee mug tipped over when fist hit desk.

Goddammit, Randy.

Martin was overcome with a kind of grief when he suddenly found himself face-to-face. Grief that he was wearing such ridiculous clothing, grief that he’d sold his career to the corporate machine, grief that he’d lost ten years with this gorgeous creature, grief that he couldn’t say the words that he wanted to say. Instead he said, “Hi.”

Liliana looked at Martin like he was a ghost. He wanted to reach out to steady her, to assure her that she hadn’t gone crazy, but she was able to stay composed as she asked, “What are you doing here?”

“I know, I know,” Martin said. “I told him I was a sixth year but he wouldn’t listen. Helmut McCoy,” he held his hand out for her to shake. “My friends call me Mut.”

Martin waited a moment until he was sure that all of the first years were distracted before he said, “Of course I could use a little special instruction over here,” and he took Liliana by the arm to lead her away from the kids. “This isn’t how I wanted it go, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m undercover for a story and I…I needed to get some information on how your classes run.”

That last part was a lie. Martin had missed Liliana dearly, and she was the only thing he’d thought about since he put on those awful robes.


    Liliana Quinn

[Liliana Quinn]

Well, what exactly was he doing here? It seemed like some sort of cruel joke that the universe would play on her. When Dominic first went missing, she’d see him in every corner of the castle. And today, she had thought for a minute that this was the same trick her mind had played on her more than a decade ago, except Martin had replaced Dominic. But then Martin grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the first years. It was all too real, his touch burned under her skin. Liliana instinctively tried to wriggle out of his grip. “Don’t touch me,” her voice was harsh, not at all like the girl Martin had known long ago. He’d managed to bring out a lightness in her, but that was gone now. She pulled her arm away from him.

Nothing made sense, not his words, not him being here. Liliana shook her head at every single word that came out of his mouth. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she finally spoke up. She stood there with her arms crossed over her chest as she looked him up and down.

“How long have you been here?”

It was a miracle that she hadn’t noticed before, to be honest, but Liliana usually kept to herself and her main classes. She spent a lot of time with the younger kids, unless she had Quidditch duties to attend to, but the older students were usually capable of scheduling their own practices. She rarely intervened in that matter. So while she was busy going through her everyday life, how long had he been around?

She thought about what he said for a long moment before she raised her hand and pointed towards the castle, far away from where they stood. “I need you to leave. You can’t just disrupt my class. You can’t just walk back into my life like it’s no big deal and expect me to… what? Let you use me for an article? Is that what you do? You’re some sort of reporter?”


Martin Abbott