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At an old 21, having served three years for attempted murder, been released on good behavior, and left to deprogram himself from a cult, Draco Malfoy’s command of popular culture was slim.
Nothing he had been taught about the world, how to approach it or move through it, appeared to be true. With his wand impounded for five years, he went to work in a big-box Muggle record store and slowly let new sounds and feelings bathe and change him.
Growing up, he had primarily listened to music played by a quartet of Austrian ghosts that the Malfoys kept locked in a cupboard. The wireless was strictly for news, not entertainment, and he had caught hell from his father for touching the knobs. At school he had briefly encountered popular wizarding music in the dormitory and on the dance floor, but was too convinced of its vulgarity to really respond. He became known as a disappointing date and, for all his money and ease, a joyless prig.
Things were different now. He bent every day to tie light blue shoelaces, rose to button his work shirt (the pocket embroidered with the store name, Bangers, and three tiny eighth notes inside a pair of headphones) and took the bus from his flat to the gigantic store, recently sold to American owners. A place where he would never see his former classmates, where Death Eater was nothing more than the name of a one-hit band, and where he could pass entire days without exchanging more than a dozen words with anyone (besides the very unpatriotic ones he was required to say after a transaction: Have a nice day).
He spent his days shelving, dusting, and counting the stacks of silver discs in his care, alongside other introverted employees in embroidered shirts. The Muggle payment machine was easy to learn, and the customers didn’t seem to want conversation. For the first time in his life, Draco listened more than he spoke. And since the store’s sound system only played popular American hits, mostly from the time that Draco had been in Azkaban, hits were what filled his ears.
The emotional world the Muggles described was bewildering. In a forgivable bit of cognitive dissonance given his recent experiences, he forgot what an emotional child he had been, and reflected that the Muggle singers had rhymes, but no reason. Emotional collapse and extremity seemed to be the norm. Nobody ended a song respectably engaged to another pureblood of similar social standing, happily married to such a person, or celebrating an anniversary with said individual. None of the domestic pleasures he was taught to anticipate were sung about at all.
Instead, Muggles broke up and were broken up with. They cheated and were cheated upon. Then they got back together with a frequency he struggled to keep up with, sometimes multiple times within the space of one song. They pined and they yowled for people they could not have. The learning curve was steep, and at first he was hopelessly literal. A reference to a genie in a bottle made him stumble in the aisle, wondering if the artist was actually Muggle and if he would actually find the solitude he hoped for. Another begged to be hit one more time, shocking Draco so badly that he asked if the music should be turned off; his coworkers just laughed at him.
It took getting used to. One Muggle asked to be kissed in a high, squeaky voice that felt like warmed-over butterbeer dripping down his neck. Another sang gaily about being caught naked on the bathroom floor. Caught doing what? thought Draco, who for a teenage boy had been fairly shy about undressing in front of others, and had only thrown up once in his life after sampling a fairly small quantity of firewhiskey (enhancing his reputation as a prig). He did his reputation no favors when cries of Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? rang through the store, a phrase that had somehow never come up in French tutoring.
Another group, who marketed themselves as children of destiny (a claim Draco thought far too serious for popular musical artists), sang about surviving something that sounded worse than a wizarding war; he visited the library to read up on Muggle history he might have missed. The same group also asked him to say their names, made reference to his booty, and questioned his readiness for jelly, all of which led him to crumble and ask his colleagues questions he later wished he had saved for the library.
There was another song with a word he did not recognize. Draco, by now aware that certain mysteries had to be solved on his own, and lacking a surfboard to go somewhere his coworkers called “online,” went into the bookstore next door, peered inside a dictionary, and looked up the subject of the song.
He slammed the volume shut and, shaking, replaced it among the cookbooks. His own experience of booties was limited, and belonging as it did to a naturally pale, recently incarcerated Anglo-Saxon wizard, his own underfed rear end required a belt cinched to the last loop.
But he was young, and he was resilient. Over time, as he acquired his own headphones and a small, handheld device that summoned songs as quickly as magic, he grew used to — even began to look forward to — the emotional unpredictability of the songs and the experiences they described. Groups of boys (he was not sure if they were the same boys every time) sang farewells, insisted they wanted “it” that “way”, and asked to be shown the meaning of being lonely. It was a feeling Draco knew more acutely than anything in the world, and he concluded the boys were imbeciles for not understanding. But he always listened, and when he was sure nobody was looking, mouthed the words.
He was adjusting to the ways that songs could seem to be reading your mind. Practicing a legilimency of their own. Lyrics and melodies could float along outside his head, barely registering as he did his work, and then suddenly, Lumos maxima, illuminate a crack or a weakness in his heart and unravel it on the spot.
A song he particularly loved, but could not explain why, was by a woman with a low, husky voice asking him to believe in life after love. He had never been in love to begin with, but it felt like a reassurance that even if he cocked it up — as he’d cocked up so very many other things in his life — he would survive it.
He would survive it. Just like the children of destiny. Just like the lonely boys. And the Muggle caught on the bathroom floor.
Time can and does heal, especially when the soundtrack makes easy listening. Draco went on a date or two, learned how to make small meals, and managed at last to lose his virginity, during a fumbling yet not entirely wasted evening with a slightly more experienced coworker. It was nowhere near as dramatic as promised in the songs — just sweet, and gentle, and a bit disappointing, despite his readiness for any flavor of jelly she might spoon onto him. He did manage to cast a contraceptive spell as he unwrapped the condom under the blanket, reasoning that as long as he risked his heart with premarital sex, he had better not risk premarital parenthood as well.
He did not feel more like a man after it happened. Nor did he fall instantly, ruinously in love. But given that he had been raised to imagine sex only with a wife (and then only to make more witches and wizards), and that Sonia appeared to have no intention of proposing, he could only conclude that he was now free to have more sex, in more ways, with many more people.
The thought excited him. Not only might there be life after love, there could also be sex before love. The songs that had once scandalized him now felt different in his ears: like inside jokes he had with the universe, winking reminders of the desire he now felt and looked forward to feeling. Desire he now welcomed not only between his legs, but all along his limbs — from his fingertips, to the hollows of his ankles, to the space between his lips.
Je veux coucher avec toi, he now thought from time to time when he saw an attractive woman, though he rarely acted on it. Still, it was good to know that he wanted to, and that he might not be turned down if he did.
It was nearly two years into the job, while restoring a display someone had knocked over — his shoulders straighter, his cheeks less hollow and his arse noticeably less spindly thanks to his discovery of a nearby Muggle gym — that she came in. A particularly embarrassing song happened to be on when she did. It was a song Draco had heard many times and found almost lurid in its sincerity, with its gruesome references to candy lips and a bubblegum tongue, but was ashamed to admit he looked forward to whenever it did.
Even through his cringe, he now admitted that songs had predictive, almost divinatory power, and had wondered for months which girl would fit the description in the song. But he did not notice her while her back was turned — she was wandering along the shelves of new releases, rifling through CDs of jazz piano. She was the one who took him by surprise, tapping him on the shoulder to get his attention, and when he turned and met her eyes for the first time in five years — no longer Gryffindor and Slytherin, pureblood and mudblood, but hourly employee and customer in a Muggle mall with air conditioning and a food court — he was shocked by how wild, and uncontrolled, and un-ghostlike he felt at last.
How worthy of being sung about.
His heart drummed as she narrowed her eyes and studied him in his new form. By no stretch of the imagination was her skin like porcelain, but it’s all right, I’m ghostly enough for both of us, he thought, the song washing in and out of his ears as he studied her back: her brown face, her brown eyes, her lush mouth. Her T-shirt with a panda bear on it. Her blue jeans with a small rip over one knee.
Her Muggle life. Her Muggle disguise. But undisguised as always, and freer than he had ever seen it, her hair. Falls in your face rhymed painfully with pillowcase as he stared at each spiral, each individual inky ringlet and curl, and felt himself wishing he could cram every lock of it in his mouth, along with every word he had ever said to her in their past.
Why is this song about me, he thought with misery and delight as she opened her mouth to say something he couldn’t understand. You want love, we’ll make it, the singer wailed as he realized she was asking why he worked in a music store where she was buying music for her father’s birthday. This is bound to be awhile, he thought giddily as he registered that she seemed shocked — understandably so — and angry at him.
Anger was understandable, everything was understandable given all they had been through. Her voice was hushed and intense, she spoke rapidly, her hair spilled over her shoulders. She was waving her hands around, a small bracelet sliding up and down her wrist. A muscle jumped on one side of her neck, then the other.
At one point, she even jabbed a finger into his chest.
He welcomed it. Any anger she felt, he was ready for it. Any emotion she held, he would harmonize with it. Whatever she wanted to say, he would hear her out.
As long as she didn’t walk away.
She said everything she had to say, then paused, her eyes still on his.
Draco felt that his life would now go in one of two directions.
She looked down. While gesturing at him, her bracelet had come unclasped and fallen to the ground beside her.
She turned and bent at the knees to pick it up. As she did, her shirt rode up and he saw the expanse of her lower back, smooth and brown.
From a narrow, purple lace waistband, a tinier, even lacier scrap of fabric emerged.
The lavender web crept down Hermione Granger’s spine like a trail of kisses from the gods, whispered over her tailbone, and disappeared effortlessly into the crack of her arse.
Draco now knew what to call all of these things.
She stood up, her bracelet reclasped, and told him to meet her after work because they had more to talk about. She made it abundantly clear that she would be doing the talking, and he would be doing the listening, and if he even attempted speech before she was finished saying what was on her heart, she would cast a curse that made this particular song follow him wherever he went.
That was when Draco Malfoy knew the direction his life would take, whether he liked it or not.
He smiled as she informed him where to meet her at six.