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Is the onslaught of adulthood the relative end of maidenhood, Ginny wonders in the balmy quiet of an Egyptian night. She is spending the summer with Bill. Here she is studying Middle Eastern culture and language. In a few years, she will hopefully be the Ministry attaché to Egypt and the surrounding nations—“Ambition is key,” Percy tells her before she leaves, and pecks her on the cheek. Egypt though, is an entirely different animal than what she expected. Here, their outcropping of Wizarding tents looks like an uncomfortable beige mirage, dwarfed and shadowed by the pyramids. Here everything is beige; Ginny notices when she first arrives. Here, she and Bill stand out like beacons of glorious proportion. Ginny knows immediately that this place is nothing like home or even like it was the last time she was here. Bill, Ginny realizes, is hard to think of as her brother. She has no cognitive memories of living at home with him. Everyone else she can pinpoint into moments she has mentally imprinted onto her retinas. So, when she clutches her small hands, with their pale underbellies and heavily freckled tops, around Bill’s biceps it doesn’t feel all that odd. And because she is so used to the contrast, Bill’s hair almost doesn’t look striking against her undone khaki shorts. End. |