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my mum is nagging me to take driving lessons, but i don't want to cos it's scary so I wrote this

Perfectly Fine

Harry bought a sensible car. He was going to be a sensible adult. He was absolutely not going to let his nineteen-year-old girlfriend drive it through Central London three weeks after buying a book about it. And yet. Here they are. On the A1. In traffic. Ginny is beaming. Harry has not let go of the door handle in forty minutes.

The book had been Ginny's idea.

The Complete British Driver's Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pass Your Theory and Practical Test with Confidence, by one Geoffrey M. Hartley, MIAM, whoever that was. She'd ordered it three weeks ago and Harry had watched her read the entire thing cover to cover in four days, which was frankly more academic effort than he'd seen from her in six years of Hogwarts combined. She'd highlighted passages. She'd made notes in the margins. She'd quizzed him on stopping distances at dinner until he could recite them in his sleep.

"Seventy-three metres at sixty miles per hour," he'd mumbled once at two in the morning, and she'd patted his head and said good boy like he was a very promising student.

He should have known this was all leading somewhere terrible.

"I'm ready," she said now, standing beside the Volkswagen Golf in the car park of a Tesco Extra in Islington with her hands on her hips and her chin up, looking like she was about to lead a Quidditch team into battle. She was wearing her hair back and she'd borrowed his aviator sunglasses and she looked, objectively, completely brilliant standing there.

She also had absolutely no business being behind the wheel of a car.

"Gin," Harry said. "We've talked about this."

"We have," she agreed pleasantly. "And I won."

"You didn't win, that's not — that's not how conversations work—"

"Harry." She looked at him with those brown eyes, warm and patient and utterly immovable, the way she looked when she'd already decided something and was simply waiting for the universe to catch up. "I have read that book twice. I know the stopping distances. I know what a box junction is. I know that you must not reverse further than is necessary, whatever that means. I am completely prepared."

Harry looked at his car. It was eleven days old. He'd driven it off the forecourt himself, still slightly amazed that he was the sort of person who could walk into a dealership and buy a car, that he had a bank account with enough money in it, that he was, in some technical sense, a functional adult. It was a very sensible car. Dark navy. Four doors. Good safety rating. He'd bought it because Teddy was three years old and you couldn't Apparate with a toddler, which he'd discovered the hard way — not by doing it, thank God, but by imagining it vividly enough to feel sick.

The car had done nothing wrong. It deserved better than this.

"What about," he tried, "we do the car park first? Just — driving around here? Getting used to the—"

"I've read about car parks. They're straightforward." She was already opening the driver's side door. "Come on, we're wasting daylight."

Harry stood very still for a moment and had a quiet conversation with himself. He was Harry Potter. He had faced Voldemort seven times, depending on how you counted. He had died, briefly, in a forest. He had flown a Hungarian Horntail and survived the bottom of a lake and walked through a wall of Fiendfyre and come out the other side.

He could survive his nineteen year old girlfriend driving a Volkswagen Golf through North London.

He got in the car.

***

Ginny adjusted the seat with the confidence of someone who had been driving for thirty years. She moved it forward two clicks, then back one, then decided the first position had been fine and moved it forward again. She tilted the steering wheel. She adjusted the mirrors with small, authoritative movements. She put both hands on the wheel at ten and two — that she definitely knew from the book, Harry had watched her memorize it — and sat up very straight.

"Right," she said. "Ignition."

"Gin, you need to—"

"Clutch in." She pressed the clutch. "Gear to neutral." She checked. "Turn the key."

The engine turned over and caught and Ginny's face broke into a smile of such pure delight that Harry almost forgot to be terrified.

"There we go," she said warmly, like the car was a horse she'd just gentled. "Hello."

"You're talking to the car."

"It's polite."

"Ginny—"

"Okay." She checked the mirrors in quick succession — left, middle, right, left — which was correct, Harry noticed despite himself, she had definitely read the book. "Handbrake off. First gear. Clutch up slowly to the biting point—"

The car kangarooed forward eight inches and stalled.

Silence.

"That," Ginny said carefully, "was a calibration."

"Absolutely," Harry said. His knuckles were already white.

She started the engine again. She found the biting point again — more carefully this time — and the Golf rolled forward in a manner that was, technically, driving. They crossed the car park at roughly four miles per hour. Harry breathed. This was fine. This was actually completely fine. They were in a car park. There was nothing to hit except a few trolley bays and a—

Ginny turned toward the exit.

"Wait—"

"I'm ready for the road," she said serenely.

"You've been driving for forty-five seconds!"

"And I've been reading about it for three weeks. It balances out."

It did not balance out. Harry was fairly certain that was not how any of this worked. He opened his mouth to say so and then they were at the exit of the car park and Ginny was peering left and right with great seriousness and then she pulled out into the road.

***

Holloway Road on a Saturday afternoon was, by any reasonable metric, not where you wanted to be with a first-time driver. It was busy without being gridlocked, which sounded ideal until you understood that it meant there were enough gaps for Ginny to feel confident and enough other cars for everything to be consistently, low-level, absolutely horrifying.

She was doing thirty-two miles per hour in a thirty zone.

Harry knew this because he could see the speedometer from the passenger seat and he had decided the speedometer was his primary relationship now. He and the speedometer. Together.

"You're at thirty-two," he said.

"I know."

"The limit is thirty."

"I know. I'm going with the flow of traffic." She said this with tremendous authority. He was almost certain she'd read it in the book. She was also, he noted, sitting about a foot and a half closer to the centre line than he'd have liked, though she was still technically in her lane, and she was holding the steering wheel with the focused grip of someone operating heavy machinery for the first time, which was, he supposed, accurate.

A bus pulled out ahead of them.

Harry grabbed the door handle.

Ginny braked smoothly, slotted in behind the bus without any particular drama, and glanced at him with an expression of mild amusement. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing."

"You're holding the door."

"I'm just — it's comfortable."

She looked back at the road. He did not let go of the door.

They followed the bus for two minutes, which were actually fine, which Harry chose not to trust. The bus stopped. Ginny stopped. Ginny checked her mirrors, indicated, pulled around the bus in a manoeuvre that was — objectively — competent. Harry made a sound in the back of his throat that he would later deny.

"That was perfectly fine," Ginny told him.

"I know."

"You made a noise."

"I didn't."

"You made a sort of—" she did an impression of the noise, which was unflattering and accurate.

"I was clearing my throat."

"Harry."

"I was."

She smiled and looked back at the road and Harry looked at the road too, because one of them absolutely had to, and thought very privately that if Geoffrey M. Hartley MIAM could see this he would have serious concerns.

***

The first roundabout happened at Nag's Head.

Harry had been dreading it since Highbury Corner. He'd watched it materialise at the end of the road like a prophecy, like something foretold, and he'd spent the preceding four hundred metres doing complex internal mathematics about when to say something and what to say and whether saying it would cause Ginny to dig in further on principle, which was a genuine risk.

"Roundabout," he said, going for informational rather than panicked.

"I can see it."

"You need to give way to traffic already on—"

"Give way to the right, yes, I know, it's literally Chapter Seven." She slowed as they approached, which was good. She checked right, which was good. She waited for a gap, which was — actually, that was all correct. Technically. Harry was almost calm.

She entered the roundabout.

She then proceeded to take the second exit, which required going around to the left, which meant she was on the roundabout for longer than a simple left would have been, and halfway through this process a Ford Focus appeared on her right that she definitely should have let go first, except that she'd already gone, and the Focus braked, and Ginny continued around the roundabout with total equanimity while Harry experienced several years off his life in about four seconds.

"That car," he managed.

"Had plenty of time."

"Gin, it braked for us—"

"It was fine." She emerged from the roundabout onto Seven Sisters Road with the air of someone who had conquered something. "I felt good about that."

Harry turned to look out the window. He needed a moment where Ginny couldn't see his face, which was doing things he couldn't control. He was thinking about the car. His eleven-day-old car. He was thinking about the fact that he had faced the Killing Curse twice and both times had felt marginally less like dying than this did, which was probably not statistically accurate but felt emotionally true.

He was also, and he hated himself for this, completely unable to ask her to stop, because the look on her face when the engine had first turned over — that absolute delight — sat in his chest like something warm, and he was twenty years old and completely done for, and he had been since he was sixteen, and that was just something he'd learned to live with.

He did, however, put his other hand on the dashboard.

***

"Left here," he said.

"I know."

"Your indicator."

"I was just about to—" she indicated. She turned left. The turn was slightly wide, which brought them closer to the oncoming lane than Harry's cardiovascular system required, but they were through it, and there was no traffic coming, and Ginny straightened up with a small satisfied nod. "There."

"The turn was a bit wide."

"Harry. I have been driving for—" she checked the clock on the dashboard "—twenty-three minutes."

"I know."

"And in those twenty-three minutes, have I hit anything?"

"No, but—"

"Have I gone the wrong way down a one-way street?"

"Not yet—"

"Have I—"

"Ginny." He pointed.

She braked. There was a red light ahead, which they stopped at with, he was furious to note, perfectly adequate following distance. Geoffrey M. Hartley MIAM would have had no complaints about the following distance.

"I'm doing brilliantly," Ginny said.

Harry pressed his lips together.

"You can say it," she offered.

"You're doing," he said carefully, "really well for a first time."

She glowed. It was physically visible. She actually sat up a little straighter. Harry thought about the Focus on the roundabout and said nothing and looked at the red light and waited for it to change and decided that loving Ginny Weasley was the single most cardiovascularly demanding thing he had ever done, and he chased dark wizards for a living.

The light went green.

Ginny stalled.

"That," she said immediately, "was the hill start. Hills require more revs."

"This road is completely flat."

"It's cambered."

***

By the time they reached Upper Street, Harry had developed a coping mechanism. He was watching everything as if through a sort of gauze, slightly removed from his own experience, the way he'd learned to watch Quidditch when the Snitch was nowhere and there was nothing to do but wait and take in the shape of things. He noted, academically: Ginny was genuinely getting better as they went. Her gear changes were smoother. Her lane position had improved. She'd checked her mirrors at every junction for the last ten minutes.

She was also, and this was the thing that made it so hard, so confident. Not reckless — she wasn't reckless, she was Ginny and Ginny was never reckless, she had her family's instinct for the real edges of things. She was just utterly, serenely convinced that she had this, and the gap between how she assessed the situation and how Harry assessed the situation was approximately as wide as the English Channel.

A cyclist appeared on his left.

Harry didn't make a sound. He was proud of this. He breathed through his nose and watched Ginny give the cyclist a full door's width of space, which was correct, she'd clearly retained that, and the cyclist went past and Ginny moved back left and Harry exhaled very slowly into the seat.

"There," Ginny said. "See? I gave him loads of room."

"You did," Harry agreed. "That was good."

"I read about cyclists. They're vulnerable road users."

"They are."

"I take my responsibilities to vulnerable road users very seriously."

Harry thought about the Ford Focus on the roundabout. "I know you do."

"Geoffrey says—"

"Please," Harry said, "do not quote Geoffrey at me while you're driving."

Ginny laughed. It was a real laugh, full and bright, and she glanced at him for just a second with her eyes crinkling, and Harry grabbed the dashboard because she'd glanced away from the road for a second while doing thirty in traffic, and also because he was twenty years old and completely lost.

***

They stopped at another red light and a man in a BMW pulled up alongside them and looked over with the expression of someone who had clocked a young woman in the driver's seat and was pre-emptively disappointed. Harry watched him look. Harry watched Ginny, who had not noticed, doing a perfectly reasonable check of her mirrors while stationary.

The light went green. The BMW moved off promptly.

Ginny stalled again.

"The clutch," Harry started.

"I know what the clutch is."

"You need to—"

"I know what the clutch is, Harry." She restarted the engine with a bit more force on the key than was strictly necessary. The BMW was now twenty metres ahead. Ginny found the biting point, moved off, and by the next block had caught back up to them and then overtaken them with a gear change that was, Harry noted involuntarily, actually quite smooth.

The BMW driver did not look over.

"Ha," said Ginny.

Harry looked at the ceiling of his eleven-day-old Volkswagen Golf and thought about all the choices he had made in his life that had brought him to this precise moment, and decided that, on balance, he wouldn't change most of them, even this one, even now.

He did keep his hand on the dashboard.

***

They were almost back. Harry could see this on the map in his head — they'd done a loop, he'd planned a loop, he wasn't an idiot — and they were three streets away from the Tesco Extra car park and his plan was to get back into that car park and never discuss any of this with anyone, specifically Ron, ever.

"You're going to need to turn right at the end," he said.

"Mm." She was checking her mirrors. Good. "Is it clear to move right a bit?"

Harry checked the side. "Yes, there's—" he stopped.

There was a gap. A very normal gap. In the traffic. About thirty metres long.

Ginny turned to him with a gleam in her eye.

"Don't," he said.

"It's a perfectly good gap."

"Ginny—"

"There's loads of time."

"There's really—"

She went.

The thing was, she was right. There was time. She made the gap, she completed the right turn, the oncoming car — which Harry's body had clocked as a missile but which was in fact a normal Audi doing twenty-five — slowed slightly and then continued and no one was in any real danger and the whole thing was completely fine.

Harry had left his stomach somewhere back on Upper Street.

"Perfect," Ginny said.

"You're going to give me a heart attack."

"You're twenty."

"Early onset."

She laughed again and it echoed in the car and they pulled into the Tesco Extra car park and Ginny navigated to an empty row and stopped the car and put it in neutral and applied the handbrake and turned off the engine in the correct sequence, which Harry noticed and slightly resented.

Then she turned to him, and she was luminous, she was absolute sunlight in his passenger seat, she was the most terrifying and wonderful person he'd ever met, and she said—

"I think I'm a natural."

Harry looked at her. He thought about the roundabout and the stalling and the gap on the right turn and the cyclist and Geoffrey M. Hartley MIAM and the eleven days he'd had this car and the at least forty-seven individual moments in the last hour in which he'd genuinely considered the possibility of his own death.

"Yeah," he said. "You really are."

She beamed.

He leaned across and kissed her once, briefly, because she was right there and still a bit flushed from concentrating and it was that or tell her the truth, which was that he'd been holding the door handle for the last forty minutes and his hand had actually gone slightly numb.

"Same time next week?" she asked.

"Sure," he said.

He was absolutely going to call his insurance company on Monday.

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