Zero Gravity

The first time I met James Potter was in first year. Everyone was so starstruck by the first born son of the-boy-who-lived that they didn’t even realize he was wearing his robes backwards. Since then, I have come to realize that is the perfect explanation for James. He does mostly what he wants, pretty much whenever he wants, and no one really says anything about it.

I’d say its 50% because of his father and 50% because he actually turned out to be quite charming. I don’t know this due to any experience of my own, per say, but more so because nearly every girl at Hogwarts has something to say about it. I just take their word for it.

I was lucky enough to be roommates with Cecily Hayes, one of my best friends and resident James Potter fanatic. I’m not sure when her obsession with James began, but I swear she’d create and carry trading cards for every one of his hair phases if it didn’t make her seem loony. Luckily for her, Cecily just happened to be a gorgeous, blonde-haired bombshell, which made all the crazy things she did just seem “quirky”. She got off on a technicality.

I thought she would have gotten over her obsession with James last year after he took her out for coffee during a Hogsmeade trip, but I think that only made it worse, even though nothing happened after that. She spent days trying to figure out what she’d done wrong, but I don’t think there was a real answer.

“We’re going to win the cup this year, I just know it,” Cecily said as we walked down the hallway, her books clutched to her chest. The two of us had divination together in our first block, so we’d gotten into the habit of walking together to mentally prepare ourselves for Trelawney’s nonsense.

I looked at her with a half smile. “Don’t we win every year? I mean, we haven’t lost since James became captain.”

Captain and keeper, I might add. He had a lot of pressure when it came to quidditch, but, to be fair, he did to himself. He was as passionate about quidditch as Cecily was about him.

“Do you think we could ask Trelawney who’ll win? I bet she already knows.”

I chuckled as I shook my head. “Cecily, I’m sure James has already asked her a thousand times, and even if she did know, she probably wouldn’t tell us.”

“Don’t tell me you two think Trelawney can actually tell the future,” a casual voice called behind us, and I knew just enough about karma and James Potter to know that it was him. There was a small bit of laughter behind his voice that I knew Cecily would probably go on about forever.

Cecily turned around to face James, stopping at the top of the stairs right before we entered the classroom, and chuckled at him. “No, of course not. Everyone knows she’s just a quack.”

“And what about you, Posey?” James said, calling me by name, which forced me to realize just how smooth it sounded coming from his lips.

“Well, she did tell me once that I had good fortune coming my way and I aced three tests that week. She can’t be that loony.”

James smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “You ace like every test. It was a good guess on her part.”

“I think they call that ‘reading the room’,” I said, not knowing who ‘they’ was but knowing I’d heard that somewhere before.

James simply nodded before looking back at Cecily, who took a moment to realize that he was waiting for her to move out of the way so he could go to class. Her cheeks turned red when she realized, but she quickly opened the door so the three of us could take our seats.

We had arrived just as Professor Trelawney began speaking. James took his seat on the opposite side of the room, while Cecily and I sat next to each other in the same two seats we’d sat in since the beginning of the year.

As soon as we sat, Cecily began whispering to me. “Could he be anymore lovely?”

He’d barely spoken three sentences to us, but Cecily was already swooning. That was just the way with James. He had half the school wrapped around his little fingers, despite the fact that it seemed he had a new girl every week. I think that was something Cecily always noticed but pretended not to understand.

Fifteen minutes into Trelawney’s lecture, she was splitting us into groups to practice palm reading. As fate (or Trelawney) would have it, James and I were paired together, which nearly got a squeal out of Cecily, who I guessed was just happy that one of us was paired with him.

James walked over to where I was sitting and took the seat Cecily, who was now paired with a Hufflepuff girl I could never remember the name of, was just sitting in. He had his books in his hands and set them right next to mine.

“I have to admit I’m absolute rubbish at this,” he said with a laugh, raising his perfectly sculpted eyebrows as he looked at me. Did he have a professional fix them up during summer? That was probably a question that Cecily would know the answer to.

“Me too,” I said, which was only half true. I wasn’t absolute rubbish. “I can go first, unless you’d like to.”

He shook his head and held out his hands. “Lead the way.”

“Alright, well,” I paused, looking down at James’s hands. They were calloused from all the hours he spent riding his broom and so large that one of his hands could have swallowed both of mine. I grazed my fingers lightly over his palms, attempting to read what lines were still there and realizing I wasn’t as good at this as I’d hoped I’d be. “That’s your life line,” I decided, pointing out the one thing I could remember from our textbooks. “It’s long, which means you’ll live a while, I think.”

“You think?” He chuckled, and I wasn’t quite sure whether he was making fun of me or just trying to lighten the mood. “And how long is ‘a while’ exactly?”

“Like 70 or so,” I said with a confident nod, though I honestly had no idea. Seventy sounded good. Old enough to have lived a good life but no so old that you can’t move.

“I guess I can deal with that,” James said with another laugh. The two of us paused for a long moment, and I could feel his eyes on me, though I was only looking at his hands. When he realized I wasn’t going to be reading anything else, James pulled his hands back. “Alright, my turn now.”

I looked at him and held out my hands the same way he did. He took a deep breath and shook out his shoulders, much the way I imagined he did before a match. He grazed his fingers over my hand so lightly that it almost tickled and appeared to be concentrating very deeply.

“If I had to guess, I’d say you’ll leave Hogwarts in about a year and a half, get a nice job somewhere in London, get married, have a family and live a long, happy life.” He pulled his hands away from mine and leaned back in his chair casually.

“You got all of that from my palm?”

He shook his head and laughed. “No, just guessing.”

There was something about the way he was so confident in the fact that palm reading was clearly not his thing that was both hilarious and slightly troublesome. I decided to just laugh. “Wow, you’re right. You are rubbish.”

Trelawney walked by then and eyed James and me, apparently not privy to the fact that divination was the most laughable subject at Hogwarts. “Have you discovered all the wonders of the future?” She asked as she held her hands together.

James nodded his head and gave her a very Potter-esque smile. “Yes, professor. Posey has a real talent for this.”

I was just lucky that Trelawney didn’t catch onto his faux compliment or ask any questions. Instead, she walked away to check on our classmates and their futures.

There was little else to say now that we’d both failed at predicting one another’s futures, and a small part of me was wondering why everyone was so smitten with James in the first place. Sure, he had great hair and perfect cheekbones, but everything about him seemed so surface. He was funny, but that was about it.

“So, you’re Miles friend, right?” He asked, mostly to break the silence and partly because he already knew it was true.

Miles Hobbs had been my best friend since first year when we were both scrawny and had teeth that were too big for our faces. We bonded immediately over our awkwardness, but Miles got over his sometime after third year. It was like he’d decided over the summer that he should start working out, and when we came back for fourth year, everyone realized he was actually good looking.

He joined the quidditch team after that, as one of the best beaters the team had ever seen, and the rest was history. A panty-dropping, endless-snogging, heart-breaking history. Miles was almost as good with girls as James was. Or bad? It depends on who you ask.

“Um, yes, why do you ask?”

James shrugged his shoulders, as though it was the most casual question in the world. It wasn’t. “Just curious.”

“Right.”

There was an 87.8% chance that Miles had told some horribly embarrassing story about me in the locker rooms after quidditch practice and James was looking for confirmation. I was just going to keep my mouth shut until I could beat the truth out of Miles.

It felt like a decade before Trelawney decided we’d had enough palm reading to last a lifetime and began speaking to the class again. She stood in the front of the room, her hair tangled in her glasses while she clasped her hands together.

“Class, attention, please,” she said, scrunching up her nose like a rabbit. “For this week’s homework, I’d like you to meet up with your partner outside of class and confirm the future you found today using any one of the methods we learned in previous lessons. You will report your findings to the class next week.”

Of all the silly projects about nonsensical things that I’d done in my years Hogwarts, this one was definitely the most silly and nonsensical. I looked at James immediately and he looked at me. His jaw set to the left and he clicked his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

“Well,” he said as he let out a breath.

“I could just do the project if you’d like,” I finished for him. “I’ll just, you know, make it up and then show it to you before class.”

Cecily was probably going to hate me for missing an opportunity to work with James outside of class, but group work was never really my thing and I knew he was a busy guy.

“You’d do that?” He asked, a smile on his face. The smile quickly fell, though, and he shook his head. I imagined he had a conscience or something. “No, that’s okay. I should help. When are you free?”

I was always free, one of the many perks of being mostly unattached to anything extracurricular, but that was not something that was good to admit in public. It would be better to just lie.

“Whenever,” I said with a shrug of my shoulders, because I am worse at lying than James is at divination.

“Great,” he said with a nod of his head. “I’ll meet you in the library tomorrow after quidditch practice. Around 8.”

I knew from Miles that there was usually quidditch practice after dinner that could sometimes run late, but with no games in the near future, James had been more lenient with practice than normal.

“Sounds great.”

As soon as everyone had a chance to converse with their partners, Trelawney dismissed class and Cecily ran up to me as soon as James had walked away.

“I can’t believe you’re paired with James!” She nearly shouted, which caused a few heads to turn our way. All female heads, I might add. “I could just die.”

“Die because I’m paired with him or die because you’re not?”

“Both,” she said simply, shrugging her shoulders. “He’s just lovely, isn’t he?”

I didn’t disagree, necessarily, but after spending nearly an hour with James, I wasn’t quite sure what it was about him that had girls tripping over him like a pair of 6 inch heels. Maybe I was just immune to his charms.

It wasn’t until dinner that I saw Cecily or Miles again, but they’d both had two classes together and Miles was well filled in by the time I saw him. He had a huge grin plastered on his face that I knew only meant onething.

There was a chuckle in his voice as he spoke, leaning back a bit as he watched me take my seat. “So, I heard you’re going to be James’s next victim?”

Whenever Cecily told us about the latest girl that had caught James’s eyes and made her ever-so-jealous, Miles and I always laughed it off, saying how James had added another notch to the world’s largest bedpost. That always pissed Cecily off even more.

She had a problem with denying that James was ever actually with anyone, even though Miles basically knew it all from the locker room talk they had. Not that Miles was any better, because he definitely wasn’t.

“What? No,” I said, laughing myself as I shook my head. There was no other way to deal with Miles’s teasing besides to just laugh it off. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Cecily told me.”

Cecily, who was sitting next to him, quickly slapped him on his arm before looking at me. “I never said that. I just told him you were paired with him in divination. That’s all.”

“That’s how it always starts,” Miles said with a shrug. “Trelawney is quite the matchmaker.”

“Oh, knock it off,” I said shooting him a glare that barely masked the smile underneath. “And what about you? What girl are you adding to your extensive list?”

“Currently it’s Bailey Snyder, but ask me again tomorrow.”

I had to listen to Miles and Cecily fight over Miles sexual escapades for a while before he finally left to head off to quidditch practice. Cecily almost looked relieved when he left, but I wasn’t going to comment on that.

“Don’t listen to him, Posey. He doesn’t know nearly as much about James as he thinks he does,” she said with what was, I assume, supposed to be a reassuring smile. I wasn’t sure if she was saying it to reassure me or herself, but I was leaning more towards the latter. “James is not a man whore. He’s just not like that.”

I wasn’t quite as sure as Cecily was, but who was I to argue with the president of the James Potter fan club?