"Arms out, you two," Madam Malkin said as they began to fiddle with their sleeves.
Hermione noticed their fingertips were less than a foot apart; if she could lean over just a bit… Harry must've seen her in the mirror because he glanced over, causing her to overbalance and almost go tumbling off the stool.
"Watch yourself," she saw Madam Malkin say as she looked forward into the mirror again. "You don't want to go falling head over heels now, do you? You'll find yourself pricked and then you could have a bundle of trouble," the woman said with a sly grin.
Hermione felt her face redden and her only consolation was Harry looked a little confused rather than equally mortified. She was glad she'd left her dad back at the Leaky Cauldron; this was not supposed to be 'Pick on Hermione Day.'
After a moment she thought she saw something out of the corner of her eye in the mirror. Looking at it she noticed that Harry seemed to have a little bit of a lean. Her eyes darted to find his in the mirror only to see his flicker away to examine the sea of black robes around them. He did gain a bit more of a lean towards her though.
Trying to seem casual, though she knew the ladies around them wouldn't fail to notice, Hermione slanted herself ever so slightly, using the horribly inaccurate depth perception from the mirror to guide her way. She felt her fingertips meet his and couldn't help but feel a warm tingly feeling as a small smile grew on her lips. She didn't look at Harry, but she didn't need to; that little bit of him was all she needed.
...
...
"That should be you done," Madam Malkin said from behind Harry as she carefully removed the pinned robe from his shoulders. "If you step over here we can find your other things while I get these robes ready for you."
Hermione felt the touch of his fingertips leave hers and watched in the mirror as he followed the shopkeeper to disappear around a corner, leaving her with Marjorie. The older girl glanced at her and shook her head.
"Merlin, you've got it bad, don't you?" the curly haired girl asked as she removed the unfinished robe from Hermione's shoulders.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she said stuffily.
"There's no use denying it, I'm the one mooning over Quality Quidditch Supply-guy, remember?" Marjorie said with a slight smirk. "I know another mooner when I see one, and I never said it was a bad thing," she winked. "You go on and step into the changing room and I'll pass you some odds and ends to see what fits," the girl said with a gesture.
Hermione's first thought was to say it was none of her concern as she walked into the changing room, that would put more of a professional distance between them. When she looked to where the girl had gestured though all she saw was a rack of robes.
"She always over orders," the assistant said with a huff and an instant later the rack disappeared, revealing a door large enough for privacy but small enough to hand clothes back and forth. "There we go," the curly haired girl said with a smile and holding the door for her. "You nip in there and I'll get you sorted out."
Hermione went inside and tried not to stew on how the moment being gone and girl being nice to her meant she couldn't be as prickly as she wanted to be without looking overly mean. She turned to see a full length mirror and felt her blood run cold as she saw her mother scowling back at her. She knew at once that she'd made a mistake - her mother didn't have hair like that - but it didn't make the shock any less. With wobbly legs, Hermione sat on the small seat the room had as she waited for her stomach to come back up from the floor.
Her father always said she looked just like her mother when she was mad but this was the first time she had gotten a blast of it herself. She'd always thought it was just a joke he told when she was frustrated with him, one of his ways of prodding her into being less Puckle and more Granger; now she knew they were scarily similar. It wasn't her mother's full force Inhuman Scowl of Disapproval, just the look she had when she'd had enough of mankind for a while, but she hadn't expected to be the one giving it.
"You're really scary sometimes, you know that? Brilliant, but scary, " Ron had said the night she'd put Neville in the Full Body-Bind, and she hadn't even been mad at the time.
How many times had she been irritated, annoyed, or scowled at them last year? She didn't even know where to begin with her estimate since it seemed to happen at least once or twice a week. Had she looked like that every time, or were some of them even worse?
"She's a nightmare, honestly. No wonder she hasn't got any friends. " Ron had said that about her too, but it described her mother to a T. She hadn't thought of it at the time, she'd been too focused on it being a death knell to her ridiculous delusion that in coming to the wizarding world she'd find people like herself to make the connection.
There was only one person who was really like her in that regard: her mother. She'd been so determined to become just like her when she was younger that in the end she had - and no one wanted to be around her. She was astonished her father put up with her mother long enough to get married, let alone stay married. The man had to have the patience of a saint and it was a miracle Harry reciprocated her interest in the slightest if that's what he had to deal with more often than not.
No wonder she'd been doing everything she could to irritate and harass her mother this summer, she was everything about herself she'd grown to hate, everything that made other people hate her and made life difficult - except for school, well, homework and test-taking to be precise. If you focused on those two areas alone then being like her mother was a good thing. She had nearly encyclopedic knowledge on anything she was interested in - it was like she had the Internet in her head, but with much faster dial-up - the drawback was that when dealing with people she was absolutely dreadful.
Using other people as the norm, something had to be wrong with her mother. Hermione had always called her a robot - and in many ways she was - but that was because for all the words she had, for all the ones she'd researched and knew how to spell, she didn't have any words to describe her mother better than that one: robot. If she only had a name for what it was then perhaps living with her wouldn't be so bad, but as it was…
"Here you go," Marjorie said, passing over a few uniform shirts to hang on a hook on the door. "Try those on and tell me which one fits. And which of these is yours?" she asked, dangling two ties over the door: one the black and yellow of Hufflepuff, the other the blue and bronze of Ravenclaw.
"Neither, I'm a Gryffindor," Hermione said as she got to her feet and removed her shirt to try the others on.
"Really?" the girl asked, genuinely surprised. "The Houses really do take in all kinds, don't they?" The ties whipped back over the door.