“It’s hard to think of something happy with those horrible things floating around,” she mumbled, still not looking up at Professor Snape. Coming from another student, the words might have sounded defensive, but in Theo’s mouth they simply sounded tired.
It seemed to her to be a particularly cruel paradox. To banish a Dementor, she needed to feel happy. But the presence of the Dementors sucked all the happiness out of her. When she was near them, she couldn’t feel happy. But if she couldn’t feel happy, then she couldn’t banish them.
And she was sick. Something inside her wasn’t put together properly, and it couldn’t be fixed. That was what her father had told her. Melancholy could be managed, he’d said, but it could never be cured.
But she couldn’t tell Professor Snape. Her father had said that, too – that she should never reveal that she was sick, should never breathe a word about it to anyone but him, because if people knew, they would think she was mad. They might even think that she was dangerous. If people knew, she would be ostracized forever. It wasn’t fair, but it was the way things were.
She focused instead on her teacher’s final question, biting her lip as she thought. “I don’t know,” she said, finally gathering the courage to look Professor Snape in the face, though her eyes flicked away again the moment she saw his expression. “I can’t use any memories from when I was little. Even the happiest ones are sad, too, because– because Mum was there. And now she’s gone.”
Theo had missed her mother more this year than any other time at Hogwarts. She loved her father more than anyone, but there were things she couldn’t talk to him about – how Pansy and Daphne and all the other girls had begun their monthlies and were wearing brassieres, but she wasn’t, and how it made her feel so much younger than her friends. She was certain that if she tried to talk about that with her father, one of them would die of embarrassment before the conversation was finished.
The Dementors, too, were a factor. Every time she was near one – when they’d searched the train, when she’d had to walk past them on her way to and from Hogsmeade – she remembered her mother. But not any of the good memories. She remembered the one thing she wished she could forget – being six years old, on holiday in Greece, and seeing her mother killed before her very eyes.
Severus blinked. The silence that fell following Theodora’s words was heavy and awkward.
What was he supposed to say to that — what could he possibly say? What did you tell little girls with dead mothers to make it better? How was a pain like that, bigger than Theodora, bigger than her entire world, erased? Professor Snape could teach her to brew a thousand different kind of Potions, but none of them would work against this.
“I see,” Severus sighed, feeling stupid, helpless, for not being able to think up anything more to say. Somewhere in the distant darkness, the Dementors moved.
“Perhaps I have pushed you too hard. It might be for the best if we forgot about this project.” So, that’s what he was going to do: Give up. Send her away. This was the first time Severus Snape had ever heard Theodora mention her mother, and he was going to cut the conversation short because the topic made him uncomfortable.
But to sweep problems under the rug was in the nature of this world: It was what came most naturally. And right now, Theodora Nott wasn’t a child as much as she was a problem.
Professor Snape felt like he now saw something in his pupil that he had never noticed before: The way she looked away just now, when their eyes met. How quiet she had been after the Dementors came. The fact that she didn’t really seem to have friends. Sure, she got along with most people, and Severus had never spotted her getting bullied or anything like that, but there was really no set of people Theodora seemed to spend her time with the way most children her age did.
But she got good grades: So good, in fact, that doing poorly in one test had immediately caught Snape’s attention. She pulled no pranks, didn’t get into fights, caused no trouble.
It was so easy to ignore the ones that caused no trouble. They could all choose to ignore her forever. Suddenly, Severus felt cold, frozen, like a Dementor had somehow sneaked into the room.
“It’s getting late. You should get going, miss Nott. Your friends will wonder where you are.” Snape said, knowing full well how this statement clashed with his previous thoughts. When was the last time he saw her talking to anyone, outside of a class assignment...?
“There’s no need to worry about your test score. I’ll count this lesson as extra credit. But do better next time, miss Nott.”
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