Already another year was coming to a close. How quickly time seemed to fly by. Soon they would all be adults, their lives altered irrevocably. She had lost Alice last year and now she was losing Ned and Cam and Lester. They had been staples of her life at Hogwarts, always there for her. And yes, she could admit that her friendship with Cam was not what it had once been, nor was it with Lester. But at the end of they day they were still her friends. She needed to talk to them, to set aside the old wounds. To reassure them that she would still be their friend. And with Cam she had begun that process. But Lester was a different story.

Lester had been her first kiss, her first taste of a dream realized, her first regret. She had tried to put the last year and a half behind her, but it was hard. The only thing that seemed scarier than talking to Lester was letting him go without a word. She'd been civil, living up to what she's said at the Christmas party. They could return to a friendship. But Sisse always felt so forced around him, pretending everything was alright. Pretending they could be friends. She had demanded it of him after all.

But instead of acting like the Gryffindor she was the moment there were no more exams to study for and nothing left to do than to spend time with her friends, Sisse had slipped out to the grounds with her sketch pad and settled beneath a tree. She was going to miss this, even if it was just for the summer. There were so many memories under this tree. So many of them revolving around her friends. Without realizing it Sisse had begun to sketch one of those memories. The shapes of her friends forming under the arc of the branches.

The sound of a cracking branch had Sisse suddenly looking up at the tree, her hand raising to cover her eyes against the sun. Was it a creature in the tree? A branch falling? Someone falling out of the branch?

Lester Hatchitt