ugly: in defense of pansy parkinson
"And who did [Draco] marry? It wasn’t Pansy right, or was it?"
JKR: “No! God, it wasn’t Pansy Parkinson. I loathe Pansy Parkinson. I don’t love Draco but I really dislike her. She’s every girl who ever teased me at school. She’s the Anti-Hermione. I loathe her.”
Let’s talk about how Pansy Parkinson was a bully, how she sliced and cut with words, how she lied, cajoled, and taunted. She probably left some scars that never quite healed.
Now let’s talk about James Potter.
Let’s talk about James and his carefully rumpled hair and his cruel entertainments. Let’s talk about how McGonagall wept for him, how Hagrid bawled, how Lily loved him and Harry stood tall in his image.
No one wept for Pansy Parkinson.
Tell me about a Pansy who plucked the Inquisitor’s Squad badge off her chest with shaking fingers only in the cold comfort of her room or Draco’s, who leaned against him and whispered under the fire’s crackle, some nights, “What are we doing? Do you know what we’re doing?”
They both knew the answer to that question. Some nights Draco said, “Whatever we want,” or “What we have to,” and some nights he said, “Surviving.”
She listened to the shake in his voice and thought, with something like pride, and another something like grief, the boy’s learned how to lie.
"This isn’t what I thought heroics would look like," she confided, one night, when she’d fled to Draco’s little single room because Millicent Bulstrode had been crying herself to sleep in hers.
"Who said we’re the heroes?" said Draco, but he let her curl up on the other half of his bed, a careful three inches between their crescent-moon spines.
Tell me about the Carrows calling them into their office, telling them about all the viscera they would come to love, the sick little noises, about how good they all were, such promise, even you, Millicent, stop sniveling.
Let’s talk about how Pansy and Draco grew up at different rates. One had a tattoo on his left forearm and the other had terror in her voice when she told her school to give up Harry Potter and save themselves. The ink beading Draco’s skin, that was terror too, plain and simple, grasping for anything that looked like safety.
They screamed at each other, over the years, across mahogany dining tables and sticky pub booths, over words and deeds, broken hearts and old tremors. He felt guilty when she felt vulnerable. He felt redeemable when she felt dirty.
How dare you? Do you remember what they did? Do you remember what we did? Do you?
They swapped words, insults and frequencies, him shrilling in their own defense and her rumbling their own guilt. They spat and screamed and brought each other coffee on cold mornings.
"I want you to have something warm to hold onto," they didn’t say, as they bumped shoulders, sighed, and swallowed the bitter liquid down.
Warmth curled in their stomachs all day long. For the first few years, panic ran the edge of it, that warmth, because they were not supposed to be warm. Pansy let her fingers freeze some mornings, like a penance, though she wasn’t sure if it was for old deeds or for this morning, just this morning, taking a cup of coffee from Draco and loving the warmth.
You do not get to redeem forty year old stalkers on the grace of their undying obsessions and then leave young women out to rot.
Snape loved to oblivion, to delirium. He remade his Patronus in her image. Somehow, this saved him.
There is a difference between a bully and a Death Eater. There is a difference between a teenaged girl spitting words no crueler than her Head of House’s, and a professor—a teacher—an adult who terrorizes children who cannot escape him.
Snape never forgave Harry for his father’s sins. Severus saved his life, but only for his eyes—not for what Harry saw with them, or what he did, or said, or saved, or loved, but because of their color. For this, for this, Snape is redeemed.
Pansy Parkinson drifts on the page, wreathed in smug contempt.
