Archive of Our Own

Lily Evans is stunned by what greets her in her garden on the last Monday morning in March.

She's not stunned initially. Beatrice is what greets her initially and that's always expected. They've lived next door to one another since they were nippers in nappies. It's not even unusual for Beatrice to bounce on the balls of her feet and squeal and grab Lily's arm as soon as she steps foot outside; she's an excitable person with many treasured passions. Just last week she almost fainted during their post-school Starbucks jaunt when Harry Styles announced his new album on Twitter, and had to take several deep inhalations of her iced brown sugar oat shaken espresso before she could be prevailed upon to calm down.

What's unusual is what has caused her best friend's far-too-early-for-a-Monday-morning-hysterics. What's unusual is what she drags her outside to see.

Someone has graffitied Lily's drive.

Specifically, someone has graffitied the words I LOVE YOU LILY EVANS on her drive.

Someone has graffitied the words I LOVE YOU LILY EVANS with many different colours and accompanying illustrations of hearts and flowers and fireworks and iced doughnuts covered in sprinkles (Lily loves iced doughnuts covered in sprinkles), and that someone plainly knows their way around a can of spray paint. There's shading and everything. The detailing is accomplished. As far as street art goes, it's pretty bloody impressive.

It's also sitting at the end of her driveway, and Lily's house is right around the corner from her school. Practically half of the collective student body walks past her garden every morning.

Several of her peers are parked there now, including a bunch of Year 9s Lily doesn't know. They have been trying to stealth-capture her in their TikToks while she leans against her garden wall, hides her face behind her hair to avoid getting doxxed by proxy, and waits for Bea to finish taking photos so they can get to school in time for Law at 9 a.m.

Or for her body to experience any kind of sensation that isn't complete numb shock, whichever comes first.

To tell the truth, she's been stunned into quite the uncharacteristic silence by all of this. She has no idea how she's meant to react. Nothing quite feels safe to say.

On the other hand, Beatrice is not having that problem.

"It's like… meaningful," her friend confidently deduces, snapping her twentieth shot from the fourteenth different angle. "It's like a fucking romantic Banksy."

"It's nothing like a Banksy," says Evan McNamee, who has stopped on his way to lean against the wall next to Lily and offer unsolicited opinions as freely as he's offered unsolicited photos of his penis in the past.

Bea pulls a face but doesn't look at him. "Yes it is."

"No it's not. Banksy isn't known for using loads of bright colours."

"What does that matter?"

"It matters if you're misrepresenting Banksy!"

"Hah!"

"He means a lot to me, actually?"

"Oh yeah Banksy, your close personal friend," Beatrice drawls. "Name more than one of his works."

"Love in the Bin," he says immediately.

"And?"

It takes him several seconds to give an answer. "The one with the little girl and the balloon."

"That is Love is in the Bin," Lily quietly supplies, shooting a secretive smile at her friend.

Beatrice snorts and waves their unwanted spectator away. "Why don't you piss off, McNamee?"

"Why don't you and Evans suck my rock hard co—"

"Language." A passing Sirius Black shoves McNamee so hard that his backpack slides off his shoulder and lands on Lily's lawn, while its stumbling owner is prevented from following only by the wall that impedes his way. Without breaking stride, Black turns sideways and points a warning finger in his direction. "I hear you talking to a woman like that again and I'll fucking do you, yeah?"

Lily quickly propels herself away from the wall to avoid being hit by a flailing body part while Bea and the Year 9s laugh and McNamee frantically tries to reorient himself. If Black is here, his best mate turned adoptive brother must be, too. She peers over her shoulder and sure enough, there's James Potter, lagging several paces behind Sirius, presumably so he can gawk at the graffiti and turn a blind eye to acts of vengeful violence.

"So who loves you, Evans?" he asks her as he passes her by, chipper as a lark.

Lily shrugs.

He shrugs back with an expression of comically exaggerated confusion that successfully elicits a laugh from her unwilling mouth, then canters off to get caught up with his brother.

"Pricks," McNamee mutters, once Black and Potter are too far away to hear.

"Can we go now, please?" Lily asks Beatrice.

"In a sec," says Bea. "Just lemme get a couple more…"

The Year 9s continue to giggle.

McNamee leans over the wall and scoops his backpack off the lawn in a puce-faced, impotent rage.

Lily's dad will hit the roof when he sees this.

*

The good thing about being exceptionally clever and quick-witted is that it doesn't take long for Lily's brain to unjam itself, adjust, and start formulating smart-alecky answers for people who ask her about the graffiti.

The bad thing is that everyone asks her about the graffiti.

Her Law teacher asks about the graffiti, so she asks him why teachers gossip about their students' love lives behind their backs and he abruptly changes the subject to protection of individual rights.

The general assumption seems to be that Lily knows who is responsible, which she doesn't. There's also an assumption that she's either repulsed or thrilled about it all, depending on whose thoughts are being opined, which she isn't—not because the idea of having a secret admirer isn't a little bit thrilling, but because Lily doesn't have a mind that can settle with patience on shifting sands. Hers is a mind that has to know things, all things, especially things that concern her, immediately if not sooner. Right now, she knows as much as everyone else does: that it wasn't there yesterday but is there today. She can't even settle her opinion on whether or not it's genuine, if it's creepy or not creepy, or if someone dedicated a lot of time and talent to pulling an elaborate hoax.

Moreover, she's not sure which option is worse, and won't know until she finds out who did it. The idea of certain people (namely Severus Snape, although McNamee is a close second) being in love with her is so horrifying that on balance, she thinks she'll prefer it if it turns out to be a prank.

If it's not, though…

"It's definitely not a prank," Beatrice assures her.

The chips that get served in the canteen are floppy wet potato misery on a plate and sixth-formers don't have to stay in school during lunch hour, so the girls are walking into town to get something salt-drowned and unhealthy from McDonald's.

"How do you know?" Lily asks.

"Well I don't," she admits, "but it would be a pretty shit prank if it was. What would the end goal be?"

"To embarrass me in front of the whole school, maybe?"

"Maybe? But there are better ways to do that, and are you even embarrassed?"

"No."

"Then yeah, shit prank," Bea concludes. "If it is. Which it's not."

"So says you."

"Oh Lily." Beatrice sighs and slips her arm through the crook of Lily's elbow, hitting her in the face with a billowing strand of long brown hair in the process. "Can't you just enjoy the fact that someone was so swept up in crashing waves of love for you that they felt the need to paint it on your drive?"

Lily bumps her hip in retaliation. "You're just sick that no one's painted on yours, aren't you?"

"Fucking fuming, babe."

"And no, I can't enjoy it just yet."

Bea's thoughts on Lily's mental state are made obvious by an impatient scoff. "They'll all stop hassling you about it eventually."

"I don't care about being hassled, I can handle being hassled," Lily insists, patting her own chest, "but if you're right and someone is in love with me, I think I reserve the right to be told who it is."

"Argument, though," says Bea, swirling one finger in the air. "Everyone is entitled to their secrets."

"Rebuttal."

"Yeah?"

"They painted their secret on my drive."

"Fair point."

"I'll find out, you know," she decides aloud. It is, she thinks, a truly monumental resolution to make outside the better of the two slightly dodgy McDonald's branches that have a home in town. She ought to note the time on her watch. "I'm smart, I'm wily, I always figure out who the killer is ages before the detective does—that's why nobody likes watching murder mysteries with me, nobody."

"It's true, you're insufferable," Beatrice cheerfully agrees.

"Exactly!"

"So what are we going to do, go home later and search the scene of the crime for clues?"

"They already left a clue," Lily airily reminds her, and pushes through the door of the restaurant with a saucy tilt to her chin. "They left the painting."

*

Lily's first class after lunch on Mondays is Psychology, and the first thing she sees when she walks into the classroom—early as usual—is James Potter, who is slumped at a desk with his head in his hands, looking like a man who just lost his life savings in Las Vegas.

Considering the way he'd practically skipped by her garden that morning, to see him so despondent hours later is quite strange.

"What's wrong with you?" she asks, stopping by his desk.

His head jerks upwards but his hands stay where they are, cradling his chin instead of his forehead. She can see the faint outline of stubble on his jaw where he's recently shaved his face. "Sorry?"

She sends him a small wave. "Are you alright?"

"Yeah, great." He straightens up and stretches his arms above his head, palms pressed together. "I was trying to microsleep."

"Microsleep?"

"Opposite of macro."

"I know what it is," she says, with a brief, good-natured laugh, "but at your desk?"

"I'm a bo—man. I'm a man, I can sleep anywhere," he explains. His glasses are sitting on the desk and he puts them back on, blinking up at her as he buries a hand in his perpetually lawless black hair to ruffle it up, as if it needs it. "You okay?"

"I'm alright."

"Been getting a lot of stick about that thing on your driveway?"

"Nothing I can't handle," she assures him with a flick of her own hair that she hopes will make her look quite cool, rather than self-important. "Is anyone sitting here?"

Potter curls his arm around his backpack and sweeps it to his side of the desk before gesturing to the chair beside him with a funny little seated bow, a move that is quite cool and very like him. "Have at it."

She really likes James Potter.

There is absolutely nothing, in fact, that Lily dislikes about James Potter.

It's quite possible that she likes him a little too much.

There's something about him that gives her an inexplicable urge to giggle, always has and possibly always will. Back when they were distance learning and took all of their classes on Zoom, she'd find his face and stare at it and know, somehow, in the marrow of her bones, that he was looking at her too, and both of them would valiantly fight back smiles until one or both was called out by their teacher. It's something they've never acknowledged in words, but somehow they came back to school as friends when they never had been before, and the tradition of smiling like goons whenever they make eye contact is still going strong to this day.

"Anyway," she tells him, sliding into the chair and plopping her backpack in front of her. "I'm going to find out who did it. This is a challenge that I've been preparing for my whole life."

"How?"

"I read a lot of detective novels."

"And those are how-to guides, are they?"

"In the sense that I can almost always figure out the end and that must mean something, yeah," she says while she gets her textbook out, which makes him laugh. "D'you know that when I was little I read so many Enid Blyton books—all horribly problematic, by the way—that I genuinely believed smugglers were everywhere you looked? The Famous Five were always dealing with smugglers; I thought for sure I'd catch one but I never did."

He drapes himself over his desk, his cheek pillowed by his backpack, gazing sleepily up at her from below. "That's a tragic turn of events, Evans."

"You're exhausted, aren't you?"

"Slightly."

She pouts in sympathy and combs her fingers through the hair behind his ear. "You poor thing."

"I could start a smuggling ring for you to investigate, if you want," he mumbles. His eyelids have dropped at her touch, which isn't unusual—she once coaxed him into a sofa nap by doing the same thing at Camelia Pinkstone's birthday. "I realise that telling you of my plan inevitably removes the element of challenge, but I could wait until enough time has passed that you forget this conversation."

"I would like that, actually. What would you smuggle?"

"Telephone boxes," he supplies at once.

"You what?" She pulls her hand away and fixes him with a disbelieving stare. "Like, the old-fashioned red ones?"

"Yep. Those ones. Keep doing that," he instructs her, and her fingers delve into his lovely, silky strands again. "Sure, they're difficult to shift and you'll definitely catch me now that I've revealed my MO, but think of the income from foreign Anglophiles."

"You mean, the people who hear 'Britain' and see tea and crumpets and bowler hats and Colin Firth as opposed to—"

"—Love Island and football hooligans?"

"Stolen artefacts in museums…"

"Colonisation and jellied eels."

"We are good at taking the piss online, though."

"Oh, unmatched," he agrees. "That and naming research vessels."

"When I catch your smuggling ring can I tell you that you're Busty McBusted?"

"If you want me to feel like a… very cheesy porn star from a bygone age," he says, "then yeah."

She laughs and gives his ear a gentle flick. "Binns will be here in a minute. You should probably try to stay awake."

"Stop playing with my hair then. You know it's like sleepy drugs, when you do that."

She's wearing a charm bracelet on her left wrist that Beatrice gave her years ago, and it jangles when she takes her hand away and rests her arm on the desk instead. James lifts his hand to fiddle with it, brushing her skin with his fingertips as he picks up her little silver piano and holds it between his forefinger and thumb. It's the barest gesture, but it traps a breath in the back of Lily's throat, and the warmth that races straight to her face makes her glad to be wearing makeup.

Again. Again. There is nothing she dislikes about James Potter.

"Here's something you might not know," he says quietly, gazing at the charm in an unfocused kind of way. "It was my birthday yesterday."

She's all caught up in staring at his staring, at that shadow of stubble and the sleepy pout of full lips and the soft, wondering expression in his eyes; it takes her a moment to blink and react and absorb the words he's using. "Wait, it was?"

"Yeah."

How did she not know that? Why did he never mention it? They talk almost every day. She considers them close. "Was it really?"

"Yup." He lets the charm go. "Finally legal."

"Well, happy birthday, then!" she squeaks, landing a good-natured shove to his shoulder that successfully moves him to sit upright again. It's so overcompensatory that it feels blatant, being super extra matey with her super extra mate who she super extra frequently thinks about kissing. "You're eighteen?"

"I'm eighteen."

"Why did I think you were older than me?"

He shrugs. "I'm only two months younger, though."

"Maybe it's because you're so tall?" she wonders aloud, looking him up and down—or so much as she can when he's sitting beside her. "So wait, who's the oldest out of your—y'know, your friend group?"

"Peter," he says. "Then Sirius, then Remus, then me."

"So you're the baby?"

"I am an adult man, thank you very much."

"Did you spend your birthday doing very adult things like voting and fiddling your taxes?" she asks him, giggling.

"Alas, no," he says, once again fluffing up his magnificent hair with needless fervour. "I just got really, really drunk."

"On a Sunday!"

"It felt like the most grown-up thing to do," he explains. "Until Sirius found the absinthe bottle my parents had hidden away—we finished the whole thing."

"Absinthe!" Lily repeats in alarm. Suddenly his microsleeping agenda doesn't seem so strange. "How are you still alive?"

"Sirius's birthday gift to me was an espresso machine so this morning I made about… four?"

She laughs beneath her breath. How Jamesy of him to slam four espressos as a hangover cure. No wonder he's crashing now. "What did your parents get you?"

"A car."

"Do you have your licence?"

He nods. "Passed on my first try."

"So you have a car and a licence… but you walked to school this morning?"

"I like the walk to school," says James. "Plus, I was worried that I still had alcohol in my system, so…"

"Well, that's admirably sensible."

"Thank you. I agree."

"And a car will be really handy for when you start that smuggling ring, I suppose," she muses aloud.

"Oh definitely," he agrees, tipping his chair back on its hind legs, legs stretched out beneath the desk, long and lean and rumpled in the best way imaginable, "because teenage boys driving cars are inherently trusted by police."

She laughs, the perfect retort bubbling up on her lips already, but they're interrupted by bloody Binns, who totters in and blinks owlishly at them from behind his smudged milk-bottle specs.

"Oh good, Perkins, you're here," he says. "Come and help me with the projector screen, the pull string is broken and I can't reach it."

"Don't stare at my arse, Evans," James mutters under his breath.

He hops out of his chair and strides to the head of the classroom with his hands planted firmly on his backside, which makes her laugh again.

And she does stare, a little, when he reaches overhead to pull the screen down for Binns.

It would be perfect, she thinks with a pang, if James Potter were her mystery driveway vandal. She might have even suspected it when they were fifteen and he acted squirrelly whenever she looked in his direction, but many moons have passed and they are friends now, pretty good friends; friends who text during Masterchef and share bags of pretzels and have vague plans to live in digs together if they both get into Kingston. She has fished stray eyelashes from his cheeks and demanded he make wishes, he held her hair back while she vomited the contents of Camelia's birthday punch into an empty dustbin, and he's not squirrelly anymore—hasn't been that way for ages.

If he wanted to go out with her, he'd ask.

Of course, she's not asked him either.

But that's neither here nor there.

*

Lily's dad does hit the roof over the driveway and remains there all day, climbing to newer and higher plateaus of fury when it transpires that simply turning the hose on the concrete doesn't succeed in getting paint off. When Lily gets home from school she's met with a tirade of undeserved blame and anger that ends only when her mum declares the painting "cute," at which point her father fucks off "down to B&Q" to "buy paint stripper," claiming that he gets no respect in his house.

He's probably gone to the casino in town to down lagers and play on the fruity machines, and will undoubtedly apologise to his wife and daughter when he loses money he can't afford to spend and comes home with his tail between his legs, but Lily doesn't have mental energy to expend on her father's unreliability. Beatrice comes over after dinner and homework is done, settles on the bed with Lily's laptop balanced on her thighs, and the game is afoot from then on.

"So we know that whoever did it got here between the hours of 10 p.m. last night," Lily is saying, pacing from her bedroom window to the wardrobe and back again, "which was when you went back to your house—"

"It definitely wasn't there when I went home," says Bea.

"—and 8:30 a.m. the next morning, which was when you came back over."

"Shaving a few hours off because they obviously did it in the dark where they'd be harder to spot."

"Right," Lily agrees with an absent wave of her finger. "And Google says that the sun rose at 6:45 this morning which gives them… an eight hour window?" She stops walking and shoots a quizzical look at her friend. "Give or take?"

Bea nods. "Exactly."

"Okay." She mirrors the nod and resumes her pacing. "Okay, so I need a pool of suspects, right?"

"Right."

"So say I start with… everyone else in Year 13, yeah? Because that's the most likely situation, and it's good art, which means they're good at art, which means we should probably make a list of everyone who takes Art as a subject and work our way down from there."

"Yeah, or…"

Lily whirls around by her wardrobe. "Or what?"

"We can just agree that James Potter definitely did it?" Beatrice suggests.

Lily's stomach backflips. "No he didn't."

"Agreed, sure, but in an entirely different sense…" Beatrice holds her arms aloft, squinting in apparent sympathy for what she perceives to be her best friend's ignorance. "He definitely did?"

"No, he didn't. It can't have been James," Lily argues, as if the mere suggestion isn't enough to set her heart racing in giddy jubilation, trying to look unruffled when she's blushing furiously. "He's been very cool about it, and that's not like him at all. He is notoriously demonstrative, I've seen French words make him anxious."

Bea smirks. "You're loving this, aren't you?"

"What d'you mean?"

"Look at you, pacing up and down, recapping the facts, making me jump through hoops—"

"Hoops!"

"Hoops."

"Hoops?"

"Alright, let's stop saying 'hoops,'" says Beatrice, untangling a strand of her hair, which has fallen poker straight despite the waves she'd curled into it that morning, from one of five piercings in her left ear. "Point is, you're in your element, like a proper little detective."

"Yeah well," Lily sighs, "since I'd rather have my boob punched than join the police and there aren't smugglers everywhere I look, this is my only real chance."

"So what do you want to do tomorrow, go to the art room and ask Mr Crow who takes his class?"

"No need. Can you visit the school's website?"

"On it, boss!" barks Beatrice, and immediately begins to keyboard-smash at breakneck speed.

"What are you doing?" Lily asks, agog.

She stops typing and looks up. "So you know how in films there's always a person who immediately starts typing really fast and they've hacked into the mainframe in like, five seconds?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, I just tried that out," she says, pointing to the laptop screen, "but all it did was type 'guhwumpuhduhfuh' in your Start menu."

Lily laughs and mimes kicking her in mid-air.

"I'm going on the website now!" her friend protests, and resumes the use of Lily's laptop at a sedate and reasonable pace. "I didn't know they listed class attendants."

"They don't, but if you look in the gallery there should be a photo of Mr Crow with his class from the talent showcase we had before Christmas."

"Alright, looking..." Beatrice points, clicks, and narrows her eyes on the screen, and Lily crosses the room to flop next to her on the bed, tucking her legs beneath her. "Why are there so many sports photos? Who cares about sports?"

"You've done sports."

"Only track and field," she murmurs, scrolling down, then abruptly scrolls back up again. "Wait, is that it?"

Lily leans over and adjusts her gaze to focus on the spot where Beatrice's finger is now jabbing. "That's it! Open it up!"

One click enlarges the picture and Lily tries to ignore the way James Potter's pretty, smiling face and tousled hair sticks out like a sore thumb between the two much shorter classmates he's sandwiched between, behind the perpetually bearded Mr Crow.

"Okay, so there are…" Lily does some quick mental arithmetic. "Seventeen in the class."

"Including James."

"Seventeen," she repeats, ignoring her. "We can narrow down seventeen people."

"Unless some of them were out sick when this was taken, in which case…"

"Already taken care of babe," says Lily, and points her phone camera at the screen.

*

Is anyone missing from this photo?
<image attachment>

oh i see

See what?

i'm just the errand boy now am i?
your mole on the inside
your snitch
looking for information? call on james! he's not doing anything!

Yes.

aren't you even going to take me out to dinner first?
don't i deserve buttering up a bit?

You'd like me to take you to dinner and butter you?

yes i do
i like what i like and won't be judged

I'll buy you a Coke from the vending machine tomorrow.
The one that actually keeps them cold. Can't say fairer than that.

am i to be informed as to your reasons for needing this info?

It's called criminal profiling, James.

it's not even that good lily

Yes it is!

parts of it are sloppy. there's uneven lettering. they could have done better.

Given that the artist appears to have done it in the dead of night and within time constraints, I'm happy to give them a pass for non-ideal lighting conditions, I just want to find out who it is.

give it a minute, they might just confess, they might be terrified and building themselves up to it

I don't WANT them to confess, I want to find out myself, I want to FOLLOW THE CLUES

what clues?

THE CLUES, JAMES!
The clues to cracking this case wide open.
There ARE clues and more will follow!
I'm at the early stage of my investigation. I've been PACING in my bedroom. I am IN MY ELEMENT

is beatrice with you?

Yeah.

poor beatrice

She's having loads of fun, actually.
Are you going to tell us who's missing from the photo or not?

SIGH
davey gudgeon is missing

That's it?

that's it
and you owe me a coke, woman

THANK YOU APPRECIATE YOU SEE YOU TOMORROW

*

"What'll you even do when you find out who it is?" Beatrice asks her.

It's an overcast Tuesday morning, the graffiti is still living its best life on Lily's drive, and she and Beatrice are sitting on the wall that abuts the school's car park, watching the buses pull up and drop students off for the day.

"If somebody lives far enough away to need the bus to get to school, it's not likely that they'd have a way to get here in the middle of the night," she'd explained to Beatrice earlier that morning.

"True," Bea had agreed. "What about the ones who get dropped off by their parents?"

"Not as reliable. Someone's mum could be going to work and they grab a lift because they're running late, but they could still live close by. You have to pay a monthly fee to use the school bus and they all get here right before nine, no matter when your first class is."

So that was that. And here they are, scouting for more names to cross off the list after successfully eliminating several potentials last night. Two of the boys in Mr Crow's class are openly gay, and any suspect who is already dating someone, both girls agree, wouldn't be likely to risk such a public display. That knocked seven other candidates out of contention, though the social media scour is still ongoing.

"I don't know what I'll do," Lily answers. She wishes she had a pair of binoculars and a comfortable place to hide. Espionage is a lot less exciting when a girl is sitting on a wall in full view of the people she's spying on. "Feel crushing disappointment and say nothing? Depends on who it is, I suppose."

Beatrice produces a strawberry and cream Chupa Chups from her pocket and starts picking at the wrapping. "Well, it's Potter, so…"

"It's not Potter."

"It is Potter."

"It's not Potter."

"Like I'm not even being dramatic, right?" Bea removes the wrapper with a flourish, balls it up in her fist and pops the lollipop into her mouth, where it clatters against her teeth. "But he would literally die for you."

Lily bumps Beatrice's shoulder with her own, despite the roars of approval that are kicking up a storm in her head. "He would not."

"He'd die."

"He wouldn't."

"He'd instantly pass away."

"Shut up!"

"He would light himself on fire if—ooh!" Bea perks up, pulls the lollipop out of her mouth and uses it to point to one of the buses. "Stebbins! Cross off Stebbins!"

"Could you keep it down a bit, please?" Lily loudly whispers, flapping a hand at her outstretched arm to quell her enthusiasm, lest Stebbins herself hear them and come over to investigate. "I'll knock her off the list!"

"Didn't think it was Stebbins anyway," says Bea.

"Because you think it's James, I know."

"Yeah, that." She returns her lollipop to her mouth. "But she's also kind of…"

"Very aggressively hetero?"

"Yeah."

"To be honest, I really don't think it could be a girl," says Lily. She opens the list in her Notes app and highlights Charlene Stebbins to delete it. "Not that it wouldn't be an honour to know that Bonnie Grogan was in love with me, but I really don't think it is?"

"Why not?"

"Because none of the girls on this list live within a ten second walk of my house."

"And?"

"Would you as a woman feel safe being out here for so long alone at night?"

"No," admits Bea, "but she could have had a friend come with her?"

"True," Lily agrees, with a small sigh of disappointment. There are still four girls on the list and all but Helena Hodge are perfectly lovely, but the more names she can knock off in one swoop, the closer she can get to the one name she actually wants. "Still, there's far less of a safety issue for men, right?"

"Dunno, let's ask the person who did it," says Bea, and nods at something behind Lily. "Alright, Potter?"

Lily looks to her left and there's James, approaching from some feet away and wearing the school uniform so very well it almost justifies the extortionate cost, blazer unbuttoned, backpack hanging off one shoulder as usual.

"I'm alright," he replies, drawing level with them. "How've you been?"

"I'm good, I'm good." Bea's knowing superiority is so audible that she might as well tattoo it on her forehead. "Just wondering what you're doing hanging around us and looking so interested."

"She can tell you," he says, jerking his head at Lily. "I've come to collect, Evans."

Lily frowns at him. "Collect what?"

"Er, the Coke you promised?"

"I meant to buy you that at lunch."

"I don't want it at lunch, I want it now."

"At quarter to nine in the morning?"

"At quarter to nine in the morning."

She scrunches up her nose and pulls a face at him. "Urgh?"

He mimics her expression back at her. "Urgh?"

"Oh, fine," she sighs, like a person who has long suffered. "Just… hang on a second while I get off this wall, I'm not as tall as Bea, I can't just hop gracefully off—"

"No need," he says. "I've got you."

And before she can so much as try to shift off the wall, she's being hoisted into the air and thrown unceremoniously over his backpack-free shoulder, along with her poise, a regular heartbeat, and any inclination she might have had to act like she's not enjoying his attention tremendously.

"You shit! You utter shit!" she shouts through a peal of laughter, landing baby soft thumps to his back so that he'll see through her flimsy attempt to feign indignation. "You can't carry me to the bloody vending machine!"

"You have her bag?" James asks Beatrice.

"Hey!"

"Yeah, it's here," says Bea, "where'd you want it?"

"HEY!"

"Just hook it on my arm."

Lily cranes her neck around to gape at her friend, who is slipping Lily's backpack onto James's free and outstretched arm in an outrageous show of switched allegiances. "You're going to let him do this?!"

"You do owe him a Coke," says Bea, pairing innocent eyes with a big, shit-eating grin.

"Christ," James grunts. "The bag's heavier than she is."

"Some of us actually carry our books, James!" Lily cries, and screams in delight when he simply tightens his grip on the back of her legs and walks on. "Wait!" She frantically pats his back, huffing out a breath through her giggles. "Waitwaitwait I'm serious!"

He stops walking immediately. "What?"

"Don't let my skirt go flying up, yeah?"

He laughs and gently pats the back of her thigh. "On my honour, Evans. Off we go."

*

Lily buys James the Coke as promised, but gives it a strenuous shake before handing it over, which just makes him laugh and ruffle her hair so she tries to ruffle his back, but he's much taller than her and has hands that seem to anticipate where hers are going to go next. The resulting scuffle is fit for a six year old's playroom, but Lily has finally wrestled him into a headlock when McGonagall walks around the corner and gives them both a ticking off for "tomfoolery in the halls."

She also takes the Coke can as punishment, perhaps under the impression that James was using it as some sort of weapon.

The downside to all of this is that Lily's one chance to go to the art room—in order to look through whatever artwork she can find of Year 13's and compare it to Beatrice's photos—before classes start for the day is missed, Lily has stuff to pick up for her mother in town during lunch, and it's locked by the time she and Beatrice get there later. There's a corkboard outside the classroom that displays a new piece of student artwork every month, but all that's there is a poster for the funfair that's opening on Friday and a simple black ink sketch of a street, and it's the colourful stuff they need. However, they do manage to ascertain that Hanna Fudge has a significant other, which brings their total number of viable suspects down to seven-but-really-six, since Helena Hodge hates her and has vocally wished for her death. Lily crosses her off that night after a long period of musing in the bath, which she then texts James about, mostly because she wants him to know that she's in the bath.

His reply reads, don't drop your phone in the bath or it might sync, and she lets out such an idiotic yelp that her mum knocks on the door to ask if she's okay.

On Wednesday morning, she and Bea arrive at the art room first thing. Mr Crow is surprised to see them, but nonetheless believes Lily's lie about needing to see the artwork from the talent showcase so she can finish a report for student council. He shows them to the cabinet where Year 13 offerings are kept, and they're in luck—four of their six remaining suspects have left their work at school.

"Don't you think this is a bit… ethically wrong?" she suggests to Beatrice, midway through the talent showcase folder.

"That's Mr Crow's problem if it is," says Bea, holding up and then discarding Reshma Patel's painting of a woman sitting on a swing amidst cherry blossoms. "And this is all stuff they've shown in public. If we really wanted to be unethical we'd look through their portfolios."

Lily casts a wary eye at the open cabinet, where several large black portfolios are sitting, unguarded and temptingly within reach.

"No," she decides, with a resolute shake of her head. "It's these or nothing. Hand me Bonnie's again."

But it's no use. Aside from Martin Steel's offering—it consists of the word HATE! scrawled over and over in red ink over a scratched black background, which Beatrice deems "pedestrian" and which they use to discount him more out of worry than anything else—there's no telling which out of Bonnie, James and Terry Heaney's paintings bears greatest similarity to the one on Lily's drive. All three are very colourful, but differ absolutely in style. Janette Joseph and Davey Gudgeon's paintings aren't even there.

"So that leaves us with… five," Beatrice concludes, trying and failing to dangle her legs from the desk upon which she's sitting—they're too long, and her feet can easily reach the floor.

"Right," says Lily tightly. She's sitting on the floor with her back to the cabinet and James's piece on her lap. It's an absolutely gorgeous painting of a tree-lined river, with two tiny figures looking over the scene from a bridge. "Five."

"Bonnie, Terry, Janette, Davey and James."

"Yup." She spits the word out as if it tastes bad. "Five."

"We can narrow down from five, easy," says Bea confidently. "I mean, I can't, but you will. You'll figure out how."

That's all very well for Beatrice, Lily thinks.

She doesn't have a clue what to do next.

*

"Hey, Bon?"

It has actually come to this, Lily thinks, as Bonnie Grogan stops walking and turns at the sound of Beatrice calling after her.

It's Thursday, she's come up with zero new ideas, she starts one morning without a plan and Bea decides that the best course of action is to pull her over to Bonnie—who won't mind, or so she claims—by the arm and ask her outright, which is what she's doing now.

She's being manhandled. Literally manhandled. By someone bigger and stronger than she is. That is only okay when James does it; Lily does not want to climb Beatrice like a tree.

"Hiya!" Bonnie chirps, once both girls come to an ungainly halt in front of her. "Are you two coming to the funfair tomorrow?"

"We are but, no but—listen," says Bea impatiently, with a funny little shake of her head. "Sorry to spring this on you or whatever, but you know that thing that someone painted in Lily's garden?"

Bonnie tucks a tendril of curly black hair behind her ear as she shifts from one foot to the other. "That mad love declaration?"

Lily huffs angrily. "Don't listen to her, Bon—"

"Yeah, that," says Bea, elbowing Lily sideways. "Was that you?"

It's like an elephant has stomped on the conversation.

There is a long moment of silence—of completely, utterly, painfully awkward silence—of Bonnie blinking her bright blue eyes at them and Lily's stomach turning over and over and over like a hamster wheel of ultimate humiliation… until Bonnie lets out a tinkling laugh and swats playfully at Beatrice's shoulder.

"No, it wasn't, of course it wasn't!" she assures them with a breathy laugh, though her eyes widen when they land on Lily's face. "I mean, don't get me wrong, Lil, you're an absolute ride and I definitely would, but…" Her hand jumps to rest on her clavicle. "But there's another girl I'm mad about, to be honest."

"Oh, right. Well." Beatrice nods to Lily in encouragement. "There you go, we're narrowing it down and your guy's still in the running!"

"I don't care if we're narrowing it down," Lily snarls in response. She's sure her face must be redder than her hair. "You are not asking anyone else like that!"

"Why not?"

"It makes me look like a bloody narcissist, that's wh—"

"Don't you want to ask who I like?" Bonnie interrupts them.

Both girls stare at her, stunned into yet another silence.

She stares unblinkingly back, clearly unwilling to break it this time around.

"Um," says Lily, glancing sideways at Bea.

"Um…" echoes Beatrice. "I suppose not… really? That's your business."

"Oh," says Bonnie, looking crestfallen. "Alright. I'll eh… see you both tomorrow, then."

Bea offers a listless wave. "See you."

She turns and hurries down the corridor like her life depends on it, leaving Bea and Lily to look at each other in perfectly unified confusion.

"So, erm." Beatrice points after her. "Do you think—"

"Do you think she needed to—"

"To talk about it?"

"Yeah," says Lily. "Yeah. Shit, she probably needs someone to talk to."

"To us. She needs to talk to us."

"We should check in on her."

"Yeah, I was thinking that," says Bea, and tears down the hall after Bonnie without further ado, yanking Lily along with her. "Hang on a second, Bonnie, wait!"

*

how's the investigation going?

URGH

urgh?

It's not going.
The search has stalled. Officially.
We've come down to four names and run out of ideas and I can't ask everyone if they're in love with me like Bea asked Bonnie.

bea asked bonnie if she's in love with you??

She did.
She's not, incidentally, although she told us both who she does like and it is JUICY

ooooooooooooooooh who is it?

I can't tell you that!

OH
i see
I SEE
can't tell me who it is but can tell me it's JUICY and pique my curiosity
bloody tease, you are

I'm sorry for being a tease, James. What with my loyal secret-keeping.

you are not sorry for being a tease but we both know i'll forgive you

Anyway, there's no way to proceed with figuring out who put that painting on my drive so maybe that's my punishment for being a tease.
Done finito goodbye.

aw poo

An insincere 'aw poo' if ever I've seen one!

it's not insincere!
it's just, idk
isn't it enough to know that someone loves you?
does it really matter if you know or not?
how likely is it that it would be someone you felt the same about? really?

I mean, it matters in the sense that I really wanted to figure it out for myself.
I probably wouldn't have done anything about it, I don't want to embarrass or hurt anyone, it would've just been nice to know that I HAD figured it out, or at the very least feel confident in believing that yeah, it was THAT person, I am 95 to 100% sure.
But at best I can only be 25% sure now.
If even that.

so you don't care who it is as long as you're the one who figures out who it is?

I wouldn't say I don't CARE. Of course I care.
There's obviously SOMEONE who I'd like for it to be.
But essentially… yeah, I just want to Arrive at a Conclusion.

well chin up

Chin up??

lily. you are incredibly intelligent
it's only been four days and you're down from what? eighteen names to four?
take a deep breath and go to bed early and start again tomorrow
you'll get there

Start WHERE, though?
I've narrowed it down as much as I can and again, it's not like I can ask four more people if they love me, that's bordering on maniacal.
If I had anything else to go on whatsoever, maybe, but I don't.
It's so silly, this is such a nothing issue, but I'm so annoyed with myself.

start with the deep breath
work your way out
you'll be fine
the answer is black and white and right in front of you i'm sure of it
you'll find it, you just need to give yourself a break and get some sleep

I wish I had your sunny optimism, honestly.
You're always so sure that everything is bound to work out great.

i'm not. i'm really not.
but i am for you because you're brilliant
you get all the sun

All of it?

okay so, you get like… 90% of the sun
i do have to save some for remus

I suppose that's fair. He's pretty deserving.
Are you going to that funfair tomorrow night btw? Bea wants to.

not sure yet, friday night's footy training and graham pitches a fit whenever i miss one

Ah, okay.

and i'm usually knackered after
remus and peter should be going though

Bea will love that.

love how you can casually refer to bea's animal lusts for remus but can't tell me who bonnie fancies, some friend some friend

A) I'm not the one talking about animal lusts here, buddy boy.

BUDDY BOY

And B) I'm a tease, innit?

a tease who calls me "buddy boy"
so much for animal lusts!

*

She can't let it go.

She can't.

It's Friday, they're on day five, and for all of his complaining, her father still hasn't gotten off his arse to clean the driveway, her mum won't because she likes it and Lily doesn't think that she should have to. Specifically because her dickhead of a father thinks she should.

So it's still there, I LOVE YOU LILY EVANS, bold as brass and taunting her every morning and afternoon.

And night, when she looks out of her window in vain hope that the culprit will return to the scene of the crime.

To do what, she asks herself? Maintain it? Her dad is doing a perfectly good job of that through total inaction.

She just wants to know, is that too much to ask? Someone out there wanted her to know that she is loved, wanted her to know so badly that they took the time and effort to splatter their feelings at the entrance to her home under cover of darkness—not only that, but they made those feelings so huge, so insurmountable and bloody hard to miss they can still be seen when a car is parked on top of them. She has a right to know, and a right to be the one to figure it out for herself because that is what she does, what she adores doing, and if that someone really knows her enough to love her then they'll know, surely, they'll know that about her if nothing else.

James knows it well enough. He'd have given her something—some clue, some tiny detail that only she could spot—if it was him.

So it isn't him. Can't be.

And Lily can't get over it, there's no way over it, and she can't drill a hole through her dead end.

She gets herself into a right old strop instead, and opts to mope like a great big baby (which she never does), all the way through her morning classes and her trip to Costa at 11 and halfway through the lunch hour, when Beatrice finally reaches her limit and drags her out of the canteen by the hand.

"Would you—hey! Slow down!" Lily squeaks at her.

Beatrice responds by speeding up and almost sends her tripping over her feet.

"You have longer legs than me, you know!" Lily reminds her, lamenting the many life decisions that led to her—a woman who stands a good few inches above the national average for her sex—becoming best friends with a 6ft tall former track and field champ turned ballerina.

"I do know," says Bea, whizzing her around a corner, "it gets me places faster."

"What places?! Where are we going?"

"We're going to the art room."

"Why?!"

"To look through those portfolios that you were too noble to nose at."

"You can't look through someone's private—"

"Yes I can, Crow won't be there over lunch, and this way you'll get your answer," Beatrice explains, walking so fast still that Lily is jogging to catch up with her. "And if you don't get your answer, I'm asking James myself."

"But—"

"And then maybe you'll believe me, and maybe he'll finally pop your cherry like you've been wanting him to do for the last two years"—the art room is looming ominously ahead of them—"and then both of you can spend the rest of your lives thanking me profusely for being on your side the whole time, and yes I use the word 'profusely' now, I'm in a period of growth"—she barrels right through the classroom door—"and I've been reading lots—"

"Miss Booth!" cries Mr Crow.

Beatrice stops dead in her tracks, lets go of Lily's hand and shoves her away, which sends her stumbling several paces back.

"What do you think you're doing, bursting in here like this?" the art teacher scolds, though he doesn't call on Lily, which means he mustn't have seen her.

Mouth agape, Bea points towards the open door that Lily has just narrowly escaped being pulled through. "I was just—"

"You were just what? Running around the school like a toddler? Interrupting my lunch without knocking? Does your head of year know that you behave…"

His tirade now fully launched, Mr Crow continues to tear verbal chunks out of Beatrice, who has no choice but to stand there, bite back her laughter and take it while Lily shuffles off to the side and picks at the corner of the corkboard.

She really should go in and back her up.

It doesn't suit her to stand back and let someone else take all the heat, even if Beatrice has literally taken pains to push her out of the situation.

There's also not much point to being out here, not when Lily is the one on the student council and the report lie is only going to sell with her present, and it's not like she'll get any closer to the truth by letting this happen either, not unless the answer she needs can magically appear on the corkboard in the next five seconds, but all that's there is the funfair poster and that one sketch that's not at all relevant and unhelpfully black and white and…

…and right in front of her.

Black and white and right in front of her.

She's looking at it for the first time, really looking at it, this simple black ink sketch of a street she knows so well she'd barely noticed, that her eyes had merely skimmed over when they should have been looking right at it, and everything clicks into place in a moment of overwhelming, electrifying euphoria, and her heart damn near bursts out of her chest.

"I don't know what crawled up his arse and died," Beatrice is saying, some thirty, forty, fifty? seconds later, reappearing in Lily's periphery and shutting the art room door behind her. "He kept banging on about how he just wanted to eat his pizza in peace, as if me being in there was going to close up his throat? I bet he's been hard up for—"

"I know who it is," says Lily softly, gazing at the drawing still, and in something like reverence.

Beatrice falls sideways to lean against the wall with a thump. "You what?"

"I know who it is."

"How?"

She points to the very centre of the sketch but doesn't touch it. Touching it might break a magic spell. "There."

"That's a… telephone box," says Bea.

Lily nods. A lump is welling up in her throat. She wants to laugh and cry at the same time. Happiness is crashing straight into her, over and over and over again, like an incoming tide. "I know."

Beatrice leans in and squints at the squiggly piece of text at the bottom right corner. "And that's Potter's signature."

"I know."

"So you're saying he's—"

"I know."

"But how do you know that he's the one who—from this?"

"Because he told me," she says, through a silly, happy, breathless little giggle. "He told me so right to my face."

*

James has been putting on one hell of a fucking performance.

In one sense, it's nice to know that he can?

In another, entirely different and entirely more relevant sense, it's killing him.

Brutally, slowly and swiftly all at once.

He is fortunate for their friendship—more fortunate than he ever has been before, and he's been the luckiest prat in all the land from the moment he first realised that it was him she was smiling at on Zoom. One year of hard practice at being Lily's friend, one year of long text conversations and lunch breaks in the chippy and flirting—yes, flirting, they do it all the time, he's not so thick that he can't see that's what it is—has all been to prepare him for the last five days. He has thrown everything he's got into the only recourse that remained to him when he woke up on Monday morning and remembered the terrible, reckless thing he'd done to her driveway in an absinthe-fuelled fit of love and inspiration, and that recourse was to act like everything was completely normal. Which it never really has been, for him; every day that passes is a day he falls more deeply in love with her than he did the day before, every day is the same old mix of happiness and torture, though he supposes in a way that is his normal.

He's exhausted.

He's a fool.

And the kicker is, he wants to tell her. He wants her to know. She deserves to know.

His second recourse—that of simple, decent, man-up-and-face-it honesty—became abundantly clear to him halfway through Monday morning, once the four emergency espressos and initial panic had worn off. He'd gone to Psychology early with every intention of telling her then, only she didn't bloody want to be told, she wanted to crack the case and figure it out for herself, which is just so very typical of Miss Puzzle Queen Knows-It-All Special Agent Evans, and a great big whacking part of why he loves her to begin with. And because he's so in love that he's incapable of denying her what she wants, the best he could do was behave the way they usually behave and drop a couple of hints that she might not even remember. Who knows how much she really cares about the things he says? He flip-flops on it regularly. One minute he is certain that she's just as crazy about him as he is about her, the next he's equally as sure that she could never. He couldn't even tell her when his birthday was coming up in case she didn't make a fuss and broke his heart. This is a girl who wants to live with him in uni—or says she does, at least.

So now he's stuck. Acting normal. Excessively normal. He’s put his heart and soul into normal, whatever that is.

Some first week of adulthood he's having. That's the biggest joke of all, that at some point close to midnight he'd decided that he'd be a man and tell her how he felt, which would have been admirable if "being a man" had amounted to more than stealing to her house and spending three hours on cold ground spraying a sloppy rendition of his feelings under the light of a flickering street lamp. Some man he is.

"I can't take another week of this," he bemoans aloud, kicking at stray pebbles on the walk home from school.

"Stop going on about it," says Sirius, the only person in the world who knows about it because he was told (unlike Remus, who knows because he's Remus, and hasn't said a word but has been sending him funny looks—Pete believed his denial instantly and is angry on James's behalf about an imaginary love rival) and has taken the piss more times than James can count, but loyally kept his secret. "She'll have forgotten all about it by this time next week."

"She won't have. You don't know her like I do—she won't let this drop until she figures it out."

"Well, whatever, it's the weekend now." Sirius grabs hold of a lamp post and swings out of it, propelling himself forwards. "You don't have to see her 'til Monday."

"You know she and Booth didn't come to English Lit after lunch?"

"Yeah I know, perhaps you noticed that I did?"

"Then she didn't come to Psychology later either," says James, frowning at his trainers, "but she was around this morning."

"So she skived. Everyone skives."

"Lily doesn't skive."

"Well bully for Lily."

"What if she found out it was me and was so disgusted that she couldn't face seeing me?"

"That's skiving," says Sirius. "That's literally skiving."

"Then she's sick and went home, and Booth went to take care of her," James concludes. "But if she's sick that's worse?"

"I don't caaarrrrrrrrrreeeee!" Sirius gargle-groans at the sky, throwing his head back. "Jesus take the wheel, I will duel you if you don't stop!"

"What would Mum say about that?"

"What would she say if she knew what you did?" Sirius counters, which shuts James up. His mother doesn't know what happened at all, but one whiff of the story will have her suspicious.

He can't really blame Sirius for losing his patience. He's been the sole bearer of all of his brother's stored-up neuroses since Monday. Normally James will space them out a bit—a little to Peter, a little to Remus, some to his mother and a bit to his father and quite a lot to his cat, whose idea of love is unblinking judgement. Lily thinks he's perpetually optimistic and she's right, most of the time, until the problem is concerning her and life overall seems like an epic disaster.

Will she hate him when she finds out (she will find out)?

Will she be furious (of course she'll be furious)?

Does her desire to play detective begin and end only when the suspect is a stranger, not a friend who has lied to her face repeatedly when he could have told her the truth (of course it must)?

And in giving her what she says she wants, is he in fact making the worst mistake imaginable and heading for a fracture that he can't fix?

These are the questions that he ponders as he drags his feet along pavement, his mood burrowing deeper into what feels like a pathetic, bottomless pit, until at last he turns into his vast front garden and is almost at the house, intending to go inside and hop in the shower and maybe, perhaps, scream into a sponge, when Sirius lands a stinging blow to his arm out of absolutely nowhere.

"Ow!" he cries out, and springs away from his brother, clutching the smarting spot. "What did you do that for?!"

"Look, you mongrel," Sirius snarls through gritted teeth, pointing towards the front door.

Someone's done a drawing on the cement.

It's big and bright and colourful, hand-drawn by a person who didn't trouble herself with light or shade or illustration but was sensible enough to use chalk, every single colour in the box, to gift James with the four best words he's ever read and the second most beautiful sight he's ever beheld.

LOVE YOU TOO, DORK

"Love you too," he murmurs under his breath, and Sirius claps him on the back and heads inside but James simply cannot move from where he's standing and staring and witnessing a miracle, breaking out a massive, giddy grin from ear to ear; dumbstruck, awestruck, struck by lightning, taken by a tidal wave… whatever the expression, whichever is more powerful, whichever feels most similar to this.

It will, incidentally, be the second best moment of his day.

*

It's past eight.

She's at the fair. She dressed up nice. Her pretty blue polka-dot dress is so short that her skin is prickling in the cold, but at least her legs look fantastic.

Every part of her looks fantastic. Lily spent enough time this evening making sure of it. She hasn't even gone on a ride in case her hair gets all tangled—or worse, her already queasy stomach decides to evict her lunch without notice—and Lily loves the rides. The whole point of this excursion was to go on bloody rides. What is she supposed to do, hang around the Hook-a-Duck all evening like she's fucking five?

Beatrice has been on the waltzers with Bonnie and Isabella Marks already. The waltzers are Lily's favourite.

Why did she think that James would actually turn up instead of going to football training as usual?

Moreover, why was she so quick to believe he loves her?

Whatever.

He hasn't even bothered to send a text.

Not one. Single text.

Six hours have passed since she wrote that message in his garden; six hours in which her earlier, abundant self-assurance has dwindled into omnipotent self-doubt. What at first had seemed so obvious—the telephone box, why else would he have mentioned the telephone box?—is nothing more than a coincidence she'd grabbed and pulled and twisted 'til it gave her what she wanted. She's hinged her whole heart on a lie that she told to herself, and therefore she has no one else to blame.

What was she thinking, racing off and pulling such a stunt with nothing confirmed? Why didn't Beatrice stop her? Why didn't she stop herself? She would be just fine right now if she'd just kept it to herself, one person in a throng of other just fine people, laughing at Beatrice's jokes from the centre of her chest, sticky-fingered picking at a cloud of candyfloss and nursing a stomach that was queasy, yes, but wouldn't really matter. She wouldn't feel so assaulted by the cacophony of sound; by the throbbing bass lines and the hiss of hydraulics, by the rattle of metal and shrill, excited screams; and light and colour everywhere, and the lingering scent of newly-popped popcorn in the air, of hot chips and sugared doughnuts and vomit splattered fresh upon the ground. Lily would be happy, surrounded by all these just fine people, if she only hadn't been so fucking thick.

"Is every ride here on a personal mission to blast 'Titanium' in our ears until we hunt David Guetta down and knock his block off?" she grumbles, trudging through what once was grass but has become packed mud in the past few hours thanks to foot traffic, heading in the direction of the bumper cars, where Bonnie and Isabella are waiting for them with Wendy Wilde and Lucinda Zheng and a few of the other girls.

"It's a good track," says Bea.

"It hasn't been relevant since before either of us had boobs."

"Speak for yourself, I still have ant bites." Beatrice wraps her arm around Lily's shoulders and gives her a comforting squeeze. "You know he probably hasn't seen it yet, yeah?"

Lily expels a heavy breath. "Of course he saw it."

"He might not have! He has football on Fridays, you said so yourself."

"He does stop at home to eat and change before that, Bea."

"So maybe someone parked a car above it?" Bea suggests. "Or maybe he's planning a big romantic gesture? I bet—"

"So, what, he went home, saw the message and decided to sit on it for a while instead of saying something to me?"

"As opposed to you, whose first port of call was Hobbycraft?"

"I had to get the chalk!" Lily cries, pulling out from under Beatrice's arm and spinning around to face her. She plants her trainers firmly in the mud, unwilling to budge and gesticulating to accentuate her point. "He did a romantic gesture, I did a romantic gesture, now we're even, that's how it works, the quota for romantic gestures has been met, I got the wrong person and I'm paying for it now."

"So who do you suppose was responsible, then?" says Beatrice in evident and flat disbelief.

"Terry Heaney, knowing my luck!"

"Well, I know in my bones that it was James," she retorts, jabbing at one of her ant bites, "and my bones trump your luck."

Lily draws herself up to her fullest height, preparing her retort, but the energy to do it seems to flee her and her shoulders slump with her sigh.

"I wish I could agree with you," she says, twisting back around, but stops just as quickly, and with an angry squeak from her trainers, which do not agree with all the mud. "Shit!"

"What?"

"Remus."

He and Peter are standing with Bonnie and the others they came with, and they haven't noticed Lily, but Beatrice creates that problem by letting out a loud, "Ooooh!" and darting straight towards the group. She stops right next to Remus, flips her hair over one shoulder and is comfortably knee deep in the conversation—something about a bumper car face-off—by the time a lagging Lily catches up and extends a weak wave in greeting. Peter forgets her quickly enough, but Remus's eyes seem to settle on her face for just a moment too long to be comfortable.

"Hi," he says.

"Hey," she replies, twisting her left foot this way and that and grinding it into the mud.

He's looking at her with… is it sympathy? Confusion? Blind hatred? He's a difficult chap to read.

He must know. Remus always knows these things, and he and James are so close that he certainly would have been told if some random girl confessed her love—and it is love, inconvenient and horribly real and based on yucky unignorable things like trust and admiration—to him with coloured chalk, the way a small child might, under a terrible misapprehension. Maybe he's been instructed to find her here tonight and break the news gently. Remus seems like the type who gets delegated with tasks like that, whether or not he likes it.

Well, that's fine if he is, because Lily is wise to his game and simply won't look at him. He can't take her unawares. He can't pre-break up with her by proxy if she doesn't give him a window to start a conversation. She fishes her phone out from her purse instead of shooting him another glance, hoping that maybe, possibly… but there are still no texts.

Six hours and not one text.

She was wrong. She must have been wrong—the one time it really, truly mattered, she let her heart win out over her brain and got it fucking wrong.

She's humiliated, feels sick and just wants to go home, and the bumper car people are playing that stupid David Guetta song as if it's the only tune in existence, and if she could just find an escape route, some means of sneaking away while the rest of them aren't looking, some…

…but there he is.

James.

He's thirty feet away but straight ahead of her, the only motionless thing in a sea of moving bodies, face turned away and tilted up, looking up at a rotating contraption of dangling legs and effulgent bulbs that flash in many different colours; James Potter in his jeans and his worn-soft maroon hoodie that he knows she loves and always lets her wear when it gets cold out, James Potter who didn't go to football practice, James Potter who has come here seeking her.

She lets her phone fall into her purse and laughs, a quiet, shaky thing that nobody can hear—least of all him, but he drops his chin and turns in her direction as if he can somehow sense it anyway.

His eyes find hers immediately.

It takes him a second—a second of knowing what it feels like to gazed at in pure and unabashed awe—but his face breaks into a grin that is warm and winsome and beautiful, and even a little sheepish, so she grins back, they way they always do whenever they look at one another, only now the truth behind it all is written all over their faces for anyone to see. He starts to walk towards her and she takes a step and it feels as if she's dreaming, like she's moving underwater and everything is going in slow motion, her friends encircling her space and chattering excitedly over her head about other, less important things, but he closes the distance between them quickly enough, moves swiftly past families and couples and gangs of screeching children, and he doesn't let his gaze break away from hers at all.

"Mate!" Peter calls out when he draws near.

But James ignores him completely, pushing past Lucinda with a mumbled "S'cuse me," and not a single look back, takes Lily's face between his hands and kisses her, crashes into her, with such warmth and force and purpose that she's knocked clean off her balance and clutches at his shirt to keep afloat.

And then she sinks.

Into him, into madness, into arms that curl around her waist to pull her closer, into lips that are soft and warm hands on her back and the faint taste of toothpaste on his tongue; into a desperate, starving need for him that burns brighter in her the more of him she gets; into silky strands of hair that make a perfect home for her fingers; into matching, racing heartbeats that complement each other like a melody they'd already prepared; into love, more than anything else, and Lily loves, loves, loves kissing James Potter, so much so that she lets out a wanting little moan when he suddenly pulls away.

"I wanted to tell you so badly," he says, words that rush out in a heavy, heated gasp. "I really did, I—"

"I know, I know!" she breathlessly exclaims, and their lips collide again, clinging to each other like there's nothing left on earth.

She isn't sure for how long she and James stay in their little bubble, how long their friends put up with it before they leave, how many times that stupid David Guetta song plays over on repeat, but none of that matters here under the sea. When finally they break apart for longer than the time it takes to take quick gulps of valuable air, he cups her face between his hands again and grins again—beams at her, wide and bright and bashful—and his eyes rove with complete wonderment over her eyes, her nose, her freckled, flushed cheeks and parted lips.

"I'm so sorry!" he tells her, still a little breathless. "I wanted—I had this big romantic plan to come here and surprise you an hour ago but Mum—my bloody mum forced me to have dinner and then she didn't want me to wear this hoodie so I had to explain that you love this hoodie and then she was making my check my tyres before I drove here and I swear I'm against matricide on principle but I was so tempted, I honestly—please don't think—"

"It's okay, it's okay!" she interrupts, giggling, happily lightheaded and holding on to his wrists. "I was totally calm and cool the entire time."

His laugh is soft and low and just for her and lovely, and he drops his head to rest his forehead against hers.

"And you really love me?" he murmurs.

"I really, really love you, James."

He drops his arms to his sides, hands balled into fist, and pulls away just long enough to whoop and spin and fistbump his own chest, a firework show of excitement letting loose in a single person, then he scoops her into his arms and presses another lingering kiss to her eager, laughing mouth.

"I love you too," he tells her, the moment their lips part again. "Oh my god, do I love you. Believe me, you have no idea how much."

Her heart flutters a merry dance, but she shoots him a sly smile. "Enough to paint it in a couple more gardens?"

"I'll paint it on the side of Buckingham Palace, if you want."

"I think I'll make use of your other skills in crime, actually," she comments lightly. "Fancy smuggling me someplace quieter?"

"It is getting crowded around here..."

"And I'm told you have an excellent car for smuggling."

"Reckon you've cracked the case on that one," he remarks, lowering his mouth to hers.

"Get used to that," she murmurs. "I always, always do."