Barking Mad (Sirius/OC)

I'm waking up

Chapter 11

I'm waking up, I feel it in my bones,

Enough to make my systems blow.

~Radioactive - Imagine Dragons

"So where is Sirius?" Lily asked me during dinner.

I was beyond thrilled that the weekend had started. It was Friday night, tomorrow was Quidditch day and I was pretty sure Ravenclaw was going to kill the Hufflepuffs. "He had a date that is most certainly not a date, because she isn't his girlfriend, with Sheila," I explained and laughed at Lily's expression. "Sorry. I've had to listen the whole afternoon to Sirius preaching how he is still very much single."

"Right," Lily drawled. "Not weird at all."

I nudged her side with my elbow and smiled. "How was your day?" I hadn't spoken to Lily since breakfast even though we had shared a couple of classes together. Sirius was soaking up all of my time, I realized. It defined Sirius perfectly though. He was the kind of guy that entered a room and drew the attention straight to him.

Lily shrugged. "I got my essay for Muggle Studies back."

"How was it?" I asked, eyeing the deserts greedily when the plates changed.

"I got an Acceptable," Lily grumbled, causing me to look up with a frown.

"An A?" I repeated slowly, the desserts as far from my mind as they could have been.

Lily looked away to the Slytherin table and I mentally cursed myself. "An A isn't all that bad," I tried to cheer her up. It wasn't her usual mark, but still. A positive grade was a positive grade, right?

"I have Muggle parents," Lily hissed. "How could I have messed this up?"

"Your thoughts must have been somewhere else?" I offered.

Lily laughed darkly at that. "Oh, I'll say. Halfway through my parchment I started comparing the proper potion ingredients to make Alihotsy Draught!"

I grinned at that. Only Lily, I suppose. "And you still got an A?"

"It isn't funny, Nika. My grades are really important to me." She glowered at the muffin in front of her and I feared that she was going to melt it if she kept it up.

I coughed and wondered if there were any Friendship Studies for me to follow. "I know they are, Lily," I said slowly, "but this is just one minor setback. Are you going to be depressed for a whole weekend, because you got distracted when you wrote your assignment? You know you'll have your grade back up in a blip, Lily. So that can't be what's making you this upset."

Lily sighed and poked at her muffin as if she were afraid that it was going to bite her. "James hexed my books today, so they'd spell the same sentence over and over again no matter which page I opened."

I wasn't even sure I wanted to know anymore. "What did it spell?"

"Well what does he keep on asking me?" Lily asked heatedly. "I mean, I appreciate the fact that he doesn't make such a big spectacle of himself like he did in third year, but come on. I needed those books in class!"

I bit my lip and stared at the boy in question. "That wasn't thoughtful of him."

"No, it wasn't," she spat, plunging her fork into the poor muffin to tear it to shreds.

I decided to let things be for a little while and grabbed a piece of cherry pie. We ate in silence and I noticed that the Marauders were laughing again. It was only when I saw James' laughing face when I realized that I hadn't heard the sound all week. I had foolishly thought that only Sirius had been suffering, but it seemed to me that the Marauders appeared to be as lost without Sirius as Sirius was without them.