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Two Tickets to Answers


Ermalene Talon awoke with a start. She lay still, staring into the dark, wondering what exactly had awakened her. Then she heard it again - a tapping sound on her window. She rolled out of bed and pulled on her bathrobe, tying the waist tight, and pulled open the window just as a small rock flew by, nearly hitting her forehead. She ducked and watched the rock skim the carpet behind her before looking down at the yard below.

“Sorry,” came a heavy whisper. “I didn’t see you open the window.”

“Andy. What are you doing here?” Ermalene asked, leaning out to see the pale, bespectacled boy below. His bright orange hair seemed to hum in the moonlight.

“Can you come down?” he asked in response.

She glanced at the door, then back at him. “One sec.” She rushed over and clicked the lock, and hurried to the trunk at the foot of her bed, pushing the lid open and rooting around through layers of pointless stuff until she’d unearthed the things she’d hidden at the bottom. She pulled out her wand - 10 ½”, cherry wood with a unicorn hair core, which she was very, very fond of - and crawled carefully out of the window. She inched along the roof to the drain and slowly lowered herself over the side until she was hanging by her hands at which point she dropped straight down to the grass below.

The light of her open bedroom window and the moon was all that lit the yard. She looked around quickly to see where Andy had scampered off to in the time it took her to get out there. He was standing at the edge of the property, ducked behind a little shed, beckoning to her eagerly. Ermalene rushed across the yard, her feet light as air, and joined him in the little corner he’d tucked himself into. He was sitting on top of a cord of wood by the time she got there, and she dusted away spiders with her wand tip, her back pressed against the fence that hid them from view on either side.

“This better be good,” she muttered.

Andy nodded, “Oh it’s good alright,” he said. Then he reached into the little leather messenger bag at his side and pulled out a couple slips of paper. “I’ve figured out a way around our dilemma,” he announced. “Muggle transportation.”

“What?” Ermalene reached out and snatched the papers, looking at them. They were airline tickets. To London. She looked up. “Andrew Fredrick Weasley,” she said, “Where did you get these?”

“Bought’em, of course,” he replied, leaning against the shed with a grin, “With actual muggle money, mind,” he added, “All proper and like.”

“How?” Ermalene stared at the typed letters on the tickets, her hands shaking.

“Does it matter?”

“Yes,” she replied. “I don’t want to hear you’ve sold a kidney or something.”

“Selling a -- what?” Andy shook his head in disbelief. “Oh Ermalene what am I going to do with you? Selling a kidney. Honestly. I worked for the money,” he said. He waved a hand to silence her before she could even ask the question on the tip of her tongue. “I’ve been working a couple days a week at the little ice cream stand down the road a bit. The muggles were getting onto my dad about me not working, so he suggested I do something just to get them to stop paying so much attention and everything.” Andy scoffed, “But it worked out to our advantage because now I’ve solved the problem. We don’t need to wait until you’ve learned to apparate to get to London, we can go now. Well. Not right-this-second now, but -- next week.” He pressed his finger to the date on the tickets in her hands.

Ermalene’s insides had turned to warm pudding-like mush. She felt a burning behind her eyes -- emotions as she stared at the tickets. “Thank you,” she said.

Andy shrugged, “Not a big deal. I’m as curious as you are. Not that I care if you’re a Mudblood or not --” he grinned as she scowled at the foul language.

“I just need to know, Andy, you know?” Ermalene asked.

He nodded. “I know.”

Ermalene leaned into him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. Andy took a deep breath of the smell of the muggle soaps in her hair and freshly laundered pajama top and it made his insides tremble. “You’re such a good friend,” Ermalene whispered. “The very best.”

Andy smiled, a crooked sort of smile that hitched up only one side of his lips as though they’d been caught up on his incisor teeth. “It’s nothing really. I magicked most of the way through the job thing anyways,” he muttered.

Ermalene, back in her own space now, looked at the tickets in her hands and her mind spun through the possibilities that laid before her. She’d dreamed of going to Hogwarts all of her life, ever since she was a small child. How disappointed she’d been when, at the age of eleven, an owl had arrived at her window bearing an acceptance letter to wizarding school only to discover that she was not going to Hogwarts. She would attend an American wizarding school - Flamel Academy of Witchcraft and Wizardry - a much smaller, less celebrated school founded by the famed alchemist, Nicholas Flamel, and his wife. Flamel Academy was nice, and certainly she had learned a lot already in her six years there, but it was still a disappointment not to be going to Hogwarts.

“Flamel Academy is a very good school,” her parents had told her when she’d cried upon the arrival of the acceptance letter. “Many brilliant wizards have attended Flamel Academy.”

For Ermalene it was less about the quality of lessons and more about the deepest desire to discover who she really was.

Ermalene’s parents were not truly her parents but her adoptive parents.

Matthew Nott, Ermalene’s adoptive father, was, after all, the grandson of Theodore Nott, a descendant of the man who authored the Pure-Blood Directory over a century before. While Matthew himself had never subscribed to his family’s beliefs of “magic is might”, he still lived beneath the stigma of the name. And Caterina, her mother, was no stranger to his struggle. Her maiden name, Malfoy, had been tarnished, too, during the wizarding war and though her brother had fared quite well in London, despite their father’s legacy as a bully and a coward, Caterina had dreamed of fleeing all of her life, and always planned to leave soon as she had come of age. When Caterina met Matthew, the pair had bonded over their shared distaste for family history and fell in love, devoting themselves to changing the emotions stirred by their family names. They began by proving their love for muggles by adopting one.

Or so they believed.

The couple had taken Ermalene in when she was very young and living at a muggle orphanage in London, and though they loved her very much, Ermalene had always wondered who her blood parents were. All she had to go by was her name - Talon - was not one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight pureblood family names of the wizarding world according to Cantankerous Nott. She’d spent years pouring over the Daily Prophet’s online databases, searching through old issues of the paper’s stories, desperate to see the name Talon in there, eager to find out something - anything - about the people whose blood ran through her veins. Not that it mattered. Perhaps she truly was muggle born and just got lucky to have landed in a wizarding family, but she wanted to know. There was a fire kindling in the depths of her that seemed impossible to put out with less than the answers she sought.

She couldn’t believe that she now held the ticket - literally - that would bring her closer to finding answers. “Magicked or not, you worked for these tickets,” Ermalene said, looking up at Andy after all of this thinking had deluged her mind. She felt her throat constrict with appreciation. “Thank you.”

Andy nodded, his cheeks almost as red as his hair, “Don’t mention it. Really Erma. You’re my mate.” He smiled. “And I imagine it’ll be a really good time going to London and seeing some of the old history with you. I reckon it’ll be a good holiday.”

At the word holiday, Ermalene realized there were flaws in the plan Andy was suggesting. “Where will we stay?” she asked, “How will we afford food and transportation once we’re there?”

“We’ll stay at my grandpa’s place,” Andy replied, “We’ll be of age there, don’t forget it’s only seventeen you need to be to be rid of the Trace, we could apparate legally wherever we need to go from Shell Cottage. And my grandma loves to cook, she’s really good.”

Ermalene, who had felt moments before like the idea was crumbling, now felt again that spark of hope. “You’re sure they wouldn’t mind us intruding on them?”

“They love company,” Andy said. “And they’ve got the greatest stories,” he added, bowling on before Ermalene could question further, “Grampa Bill knows Harry Potter personally. Harry Potter even stayed at Shell Cottage for a piece when he was trying to find the Horcruxes. It’s in all the history books.”

Ermalene grinned, her eyes filling with tears in the moonlight at the realization that this was absolutely, truly happening.

“Erma!” the voice echoed through the dark behind them from the house.

“Oh no,” Ermalene shoved the tickets back into Andy’s hands, “I gotta go. When do we leave?” she asked as she scrambled to her feet.

“One week,” Andy replied. “July 31. Your birthday.”

“Well,” Ermalene laughed, “Sort of my birthday.”

“Just because you chose it doesn’t make it less your birthday,” Andy said with a shrug, dusting off his pants as he stood up, too.

Ermalene laughed, “That’s precisely why it isn’t my birthday.”

“ERMA!”

“Gotta go. Thanks again!”

Before Andy could speak another word, Ermalene had dashed off from the bushes, running full-tilt back to the house. Andy sighed and leaned against the shed they’d been sitting behind, closing his eyes as he listened to the distant sound of Caterina Nott scolding Ermalene for sneaking out of the house in the dead of night. He heard their front door slam closed and slid the tickets into the leather messenger bag that he had slung around his torso.

As Andrew Weasley walked home, the bag thumping against his thigh with every step, he replayed the beauty of Ermalene’s smiling reaction to his gift, the words she’d said - calling him her best friend. Although the title was one that he did not at all take for granted, he wondered if there would ever be opportunity to be more than that to Ermalene, if she could ever see him as someone that she could love.

When he got to his room, he tossed the messenger bag into his desk chair and picked up a book that his Great Uncle Ron had given him for his seventeenth birthday - Twelve Fail-Safe Ways to Charm a Witch. It was an old book, but Ron had insisted that it would stand the test of time. “This advice doesn’t ever go sour, mate. Used it to charm your Great Aunt,” he’d written on the dedication page, “Worked blood well as we’ve been together for -- well, a rather long time.” He moved his thumb through the pages and cracked it open on the chapter about performing a grand gesture and dog-eared it down, marking it as yet another of the supposedly fail-safe ways that had yet to work.