Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all related characters belong to J. K. Rowling, who I am not.

"What?" I gasped involuntarily the first time I entered James's room, pointing at the offending thing. There, in the midst of all the teenage-boy clutter and surprisingly sophisticated reading material (The Rise of the Dark Lord: The Early Years, The Auror Handbook: Year One, and other such titles), was a lily.

James just blushed.

"I hate lilies, you know," I said, trying to keep my voice light so that it almost sounded like I was joking.

"Really?" James replied. "You conjure them when you're upset."

He'd noticed? "I conjure every flower I can think of when I'm upset. It was one of the first things I learned when I got my wand. I used to conjure flowers when . . ." I blushed, not wanting to continue, but then I took a deep breath and forced myself to finish the sentence: "when I was waiting for Se—Snape."

For a moment, neither James nor I said anything; we avoided each other's gaze. At last I found the nerve to break the silence, since it didn't seem right to make my host feel awkward in his own room. "I really do hate them—lilies, I mean. They always seem so . . . so passive, so stupid. They just sit there and look pretty. I always worried that people would expect me to be like that."

"I don't think lilies are stupid," James said. "Or passive, either. You plant a bulb, and then for a while there's just dirt, and then there's this green little stem coming out of the dirt, but it doesn't look like the lily you were hoping for when you planted the bulb. And then you can tell the stem from the leaves, and you start to think that maybe it's really going to be something. Then there's a bud and you've got something to look forward to, and then, finally, there's a flower and it's exactly as beautiful as you wanted it to be."

"All flowers grow like that, James," I said.

James shrugged. "I guess I'm defending all flowers, then. My point is that they're not passive; they grow and change. Like people."

Or relationships, I almost added, but I bit my cheek for thinking something so cliché. Instead, I said, "I never thought I'd see you 'defending all flowers.'"

He gave me a gentle shove. "Come one. I could totally pull off the whole gardener look."

I looked him up and down. "You could; the prank-pulling, arrogant, idiotic James Potter from a few years ago couldn't."

"I wasn't even in the budding stage then!" he protested.

Fair enough.