Flux
The first time Ginny saw a girl's breasts that were not her own, she thought she might die of it.
There were only bits and pieces of skin, poking out between tense, faltering buttons, but that seemed to make it worse somehow, because a person would have to stare to see anything. A person would watch the fabric shift and a soft rosy nipple bump up against the right button hole, too bright against the dull tangled curtain of hair that was piled over the girl's shoulder.
She had to wait and hold her breath, when she didn't understand why she was holding it, and press her thumb nail into the side of her quill until a shard of it peeled up to stick her.
She had to say something, make it stop, because it was all so horrible and real, except she didn't want it to stop, ever, and. Ginny thought she wanted to touch it, the reddened jutting bit of her. She had crazy, frantic heartbeat ideas of reaching out and moving the shirt just so, parting the robes a bit more and completely off the girl's hunched over shoulders. The sides of her fingertips would skim over front of the girl's shirt, and her brother would suddenly not be there, even though it was his girlfriend.
She would open her lips and before words could come out that round pink wind-chapped mouth would lean over the table and onto her mouth, and her fingers would skid from surprise, and the tight, hot center of that breast would be settled against Ginny's palm -- warm and rising and alive and falling with their breaths.
Of course, she did nothing of the sort. Ginny muttered something about inches and a mouse, gathered her books to her chest, and quickly left the library.
She ran as if seven banshees were at her heels, and didn't stop for air or a moment until she burst into the girl's bathroom. The sink chugged and groaned, but it spit out icy cold water that felt clean on her sweat sticky hands. She washed her face with it and looked up into the mirror at her wet cheeks and the soggy bits of hair smeared about her forehead.
She didn't understand what was happening to her.
Her mother's sensible, bustling nakedness didn't count, because her mother had never been a girl -- Ginny was illogically, wholeheartedly sure of it. They were bundled, hanging flesh on her mother and nothing like the hints of pink mottled peach that bloomed through the thin stretch of cotton that Hermione sometimes slept in, darker in the center on hot nights.
They weren't anything a person would notice, bared in the brightness of their kitchen, her mother hunched over and spelling spilled pumpkin juice off the back of a rumpled shirt.
They didn't smell of soap and wet morning air, sliding past Ginny's shoulder in the hallway between first class and breakfast, spreading a hot ebb up from her belly to the dip between her collarbones.
She took a peek when everyone's lights had gone out.
Ginny pulled the bed curtains tight, rolled up four layers of sheets and thick feathered comforters, shucked off her socks and shirt, and flipped her skirt up to curl around her middle. It itched and scratched at the bottoms of her breasts, like the scratching in her stomach.
She took two deep breaths before raising the layers, head pressed firmly back against the pillow and spots in her eyes. She looked with air tied into knots deep in the pit of her lungs -- waiting, waiting. Nothing interesting looked back.
There was nothing particularly special about any part of her, and the fact that everything was getting a bit scary was the only reason her heart was beating so fast.
The thousandth time Ginny noticed a girl's ankles, she noticed them sharper and stronger and deeper than ever before.
Hermione would sit on the edge of library desks and let her legs hang loosely over, swinging. Her shoes were polished, black, and impossibly dainty, like her ankles, and they didn't match any of her, like her ankles. They were never thick and clunky, like her teeth and hair had been.
They were something that Ginny, suddenly, might want to touch, stroking down to cup the back of that gliding foot, gently, gently, to put a thumb to the warmest vein, with a matching hand at her neck, to feel the pulse of her.
Ginny could sit there, just sit there, and nearly feel it. The racing, chugging of the blood in her throat and the flush in her face. The cool goose-bumped knees. The damp, hot backs of them. The swoosh as she swung and swung. The round tones in her voice that echoed off the book stacks.
There was an echoing in Ginny's head, and Ginny tried not to see them, the shiny buckles and slim up up from toes to leg, and jumped in her chair when a rubber heel dug into her calf, soft and grating. She jumped so far she though she might fly, but she didn't. She scrunched down in her chair and learned the five things one should never feed a Blast-Ended Skrewt, and thought of easy breakfast smells, like marmalade.
She caught them kissing in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom, quick and fumbling between classes, thought about if they could have a gigantic, gaping mouths fight.
She would come by afterwards and Hermione would tell her that Ron was so stupid and didn't understand anything, and Ginny would say, "You're right, he doesn't." They could hold hands, because that might make Hermione feel better.
Hermione's hands were small like hers and so they would fit perfectly, like they did in Ron's hair, twisting at the back of his head when she made those soft, shaking sounds. They would fit in Ginny's hair too, and look exactly the same, pale white against tangled and burnt dark pumpkin.
It could be her, almost, and maybe Ginny liked to watch and think it was them, but it was only thinking, and she knew better. She did.
It was only wishing, that's all.