Though the brief time off the previous term had done Diana some good, she was still feeling rather frail and not up to her usual lessons. Every little thing was starting to bother her now, it didn’t really matter what it was. The ticking noise that crosswalk signals made to help the blind, the yellow shade of construction caution lights and the rate at which they blinked, the amount of time it took her mother to walk from the kitchen to the living room with a pot of tea and most of all how her parents still didn’t accept Stephen for who he was. She was sitting in her parents’ living room, her father ignoring her for the most part while he went through the daily paper, taking note of the various events that had happened around the world, her mother nervously sipping a cup of tea. For her part, Diana’s bony fingers were tapping against the thin porcelain of her mother’s best teacups and the shaking of her right leg caused the tiny metal teaspoon to clan against the smooth saucer it rested upon.
“Diana,” her mother’s voice came quick and sharp. “Would you refrain from doing that, please?”
After a moment’s hesitation, caused by the forced sound of the ‘please,’ she stopped—first her leg, then her fingers one-by-one until it was just her pointer finger making circles on the rim of the teacup. She stared at her mother, a battle of wills, until her father turned down the edge of his paper. “Diana,” he said in a warning voice. “I thought your mother asked you to stop.”
Suddenly she was thirteen again and utterly defiant. There was nothing more that she wanted to do other than pull a face at them and scream that she wasn’t making any noise so what did it matter anyway? She refrained. The clock on the wall ticked by the seconds. Her father rustled the page as he turned to the stocks section, her mother sipped at her tea, and despite her scratchy throat, Diana left her cup alone until her mother insisted that she drink it because it would get cold. Diana lifted the cool porcelain to her lips, the lukewarm liquid draining quickly down her throat as it soothed that god-forsaken itch that had been irritating her for the past half hour.
The clock on the wall ticked by the second. Her father rustled the page as he turned to the arts section, her mother sipped at her tea, and Diana stared at her empty cup, too prideful to ask for more. Finally she got up. “Thank you for the tea,” she said. The sentence was met with silence. She shifted back and forth on her feet. “Well, I’m going to go then.” She walked towards the door. As her hand touched the doorknob, her mother’s voice pulled her back in.
“When are you coming home, Diana?” The weakness in her mother’s voice caused Diana’s hand to waver, and at last she let her hand rest on the doorknob.
“I’m not,” she replied.
“Diana,” her father warned.
She opened the door and she walked out. Somehow she felt freer, as though a great weight had been lifted off her shoulders. She walked to the nearest bus stop and got on. She didn’t really care where she was going, she would ride until she arrived at a fairly empty area and then she would apparate home, to Stephen—and Henry.