Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned
by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books,
Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made
and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
"Always Alone"
by Christine Anderson
aka Lilly Malfoy
Before I came to Hogwarts, before I met Tara and Blaise and Draco, years before I would meet Alastor, before I turned eleven and my world changed, I was always alone.
Not so much physically, because my family was a large one. My parents' house was always full of cousins and their friends running about, while I sat in my room, usually curled up under my bedcovers with a book. I used to hope that if I were very still and very quiet, they would forget I existed and leave me alone.
Alone was what I always was, even when they barged into my room, bored of their other games, and so resorting to the old standby of teasing and poking at the strange, crazy little witch.
I ran away once, the summer after I turned fifteen. I came back because I had nowhere else to go. I didn't dare impose that far on any of my friends, and I would have had to use magic to travel anywhere I really wanted to be, since I certainly couldn't afford to travel in the normal Muggle way. My parents might have had money, but I never saw much of it. All I had was a wand I couldn't use outside of school without risking being cast out of the one place I had thought I might, someday, find a place in which I fit.
That day I ran away, I spent at the library. I went home at closing, wishing I could think of somewhere I might go where I could be welcome and safe.
I expected a harsh beating, because my mother always looked for an excuse, but for once I got lucky.
They never even noticed that I was gone. They assumed, I suppose, that I had been hiding in the house all day. I wasn't about to tell the different. I was more than willing to let the set of bruises from the last beating fade a bit more before my mother found her excuses again. She always seemed to find them soon enough, just about the time when I'd begun to hope that maybe this time she wouldn't do it, maybe this time she would let things go.
She never did, and eventually I learned not to expect her to. I learned not to expect her to change.
In the heart of a family always so warm and loving to members who were not me, I was always going to be alone.