Confetti still dusted her trousers as Charley squinted out the windows of the shop. The frost was slowly clawing back the little hole she'd rubbed in its bleary pane, closing in on her chance to peek out at the new world of 1895. It didn't look altogether very different than the year before, and the revelries of the last night were still obvious in the streets. She wouldn't be sad if Mrs. Mann was late this morning as well; like others on High Street, the flower shop seemed frozen in too pristine of a moment to shatter with the grouchy, irritable moods of a too-festive Hogsmeade.

Charley hadn't joined into their debaucheries, only braving the cold as much as she dared to see spells and fireworks alight in the sky, dancing under a rain of confetti that marked the hour of change. Then she, like the rest of the wide-eyed souls who preferred to crawl into their bed rather than their cups, went back in to the warmth and solitude of the quiet shop hearth.

The herbology book, the one that Missus Crouch had gifted to her to teach from, still lay open to the page of carnivorous plants. On the margins, she'd written a few things down last night, scrawled in the hasty hand that made grown-ups fret and pick up a glass to read with. Her list wasn't very long, nor one Charley thought held everything she planned to do. The first might have been the one to make herself start fretting, though it was the shortest of the numbered lines. All she'd written there was, Finish this.

Charley nearly scoffed at her own presence of mind when she'd written that. She grabbed at the page, turning it back and forth, her eyes rolling at her findings. Of all the things to write in all the places, the celebratory version of her was craftier than the urchin would have otherwise admitted. There was no one else in the shop yet to witness it, anyway.

She couldn't know what had caused Missus Crouch to stop with her promised lessons. Perhaps being away from her child was too much for the new mother, or she'd finally run out of patience for the street urchin taken under the patronage of her shop. Charley still cleaned and tended to the daily ongoings, something that seemed enough to keep her from being turned out onto the street, but the lessons and her chance to know than just how much water to give the begonias and flutterby bushes had disappeared. With the year turned over, Charley wondered at her chances to convince the shop's proprietor otherwise, starting anew with the new year.

Then she closed the book. Tomorrow would still be 1895, too, and maybe then the urchin wouldn't feel like the unfinished book was judging her idle writings as well. She stood to put it away, and nearly dropped it before sliding the book into its place on the shelf under the counter. Charley could have sworn she heard a whisper in the shop, but when she looked up there was no on there.

Shaking her head, the urchin turned to start on the morning tasks, but she would be partway through one or just finished with another when the whisper, and now she was sure it was just a voice in her thoughts, would come again.

"Finish me."

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