A Stroke Of Luck
I always thought she was like me. I looked up to her, followed her around. She seemed like the type of role model I could live with, one who ignored the boys around her--I'd spent my whole life trying to do that.
I always liked boys I never had a chance with. Safer that way. But she stayed in bed with me during the summers, held my hand at night when things got scary. She was smart, and cool to me. She knew my brother was a git, and knew Harry wasn't a big deal. Her skinny legs swished past me, the beginnings of down on long, long legs.
That bitch taught me how to shave.
Just for fun, she said. We were bored. She was. I wasn't.
We slept in the same bed and I wanted her to wake me up. I settled for cuddling up next to her. I watched those legs. I watched as hair would grow in, then disappear. We were underage, we couldn't magic it off. So we had to shave. And she was so damn lazy about it. That always bugged at me. Once she taught me, I did it every day. Because she taught me, I did it every day.
We never, ever fought. She was sweet and kind and always shared her candy. She was smart, with long spindly legs. She walked, and those legs promised long nights in the library, lazy afternoons reading out loud. The voice. I asked her to read to me at night when I was little and I acted like I was younger than I was and it was just to hear her voice.
My brother thinks it's the worst when she goes to the ball with some skulking Slavic boy who happens to be your teenage hero, your rock star. Your movie star. Your Quidditch player. Your best friend. He thinks it's the best that she likes his ordinary red hairy ass. He is so fucking wrong. The worst is when she likes your brother, a plain old git who nobody even---
It's worse when she wants you, only as a boy.
I started listening to the Pretenders, her favorite band before she started liking my brother. Her favorite band before she started listening to the Smiths and doing that maudlin swoon thing that stupid girls do. She wasn't stupid; why would she do that? Chrissie Hynde wouldn't do that. I started lining my eyes like Chrissie Hynde. I wanted to be like Chrissie Hynde. I wanted to be Chrissie Hynde. I wanted to be her Chrissie Hynde, but she had moved on to Stephen Patrick Morrissey and wasn't that just too fucking bad.
I would be my own goddamn Chrissie Hynde. I sure as hell wouldn't be Ginny goddamn Weasley anymore.
I picked up a guitar. And I kept the parts I had to. The long Weasley limbs that had always seemed a bit too skinny on me; the red Weasley hair that plagued our entire family and that I couldn't even afford Manic Panic for; the paleness. These were non- negotiable. Genetic. Couldn't do much about it. Any of it. But hey, I told myself, it was rock. They were assets now. Assets. They had never been assets before. But now, I didn't have to throw it all away. I liked having some things to hold on to, some things I would always be. Sometimes I need constance. But the Weasley had to go. I wasn't Virginia Weasley anymore. I was someone I didn't even know, someone I hadn't even met yet. I was someone else, with red hair and doe eyes and my first name Shirley cause it was what rolled off of my tongue the minute someone asked me who I was.
Shirley. It was a necessary step, at sixteen. It was.
A stroke of luck.