Life Begins at Fourteen Solo Finished

Though people had been celebrating Aly's fourteenth birthday all day - far more than expected, honestly - she hadn't actually turned fourteen yet.

Aly was the kind of girl who liked to do everything precisely... when she could. Sure, her trunk was a mess and her hair often spun wildly out of control; she always littered her homework with doodles of flowers and could never wake up on time for anything. But her assignments consistently returned with grades of Outstanding, she knew the exact location of almost every wildflower patch on the Hogwarts grounds, her Silver Arrow broomstick was constantly groomed to perfection, and she always, always celebrated her birthday at exactly 8:20 p.m., at the exact minute she had been born however many years earlier.

She always did it a different way, too. Last year she had celebrated turning thirteen at precisely 8:20 p.m., May 9, 2021, by digging into the Cauldron Cake her parents had sent her - Aly's favourite, and a fantastic way to hope her year would be sweet. It had worked, too - what a fantastic year it had been for the Ravenclaw girl, full of Quidditch victories and cupcake-eating and friend-making and quite a lot of firsts. The year before that, during Aly's first year at Hogwarts, she had turned twelve at exactly 8:20 p.m. on May 9, 2020, and she had spent that minute in the Ravenclaw common room, surrounded by her housemates as they all studied for their final examinations that had been approaching the following month, hoping that the next year would bring her even closer to her House. That, too, had worked, and Aly had finally made it onto the Ravenclaw Quidditch team at age twelve, where she had met some of her greatest friends and the housemates she now cherished the most.

The lead-up to 8:20 p.m. on May 9th was always filled with some sort of trepidation for Aly. After all, whatever she did at the exact minute mark of her birth would clearly write out for her exactly what the coming year would be like - and making the wrong decision in the moment of could ruin her entire year. (Anyone who said Aly Salinger was not superstitious clearly did not know her well enough.) But even though she hadn't technically considered herself to be fourteen yet that day, she had still allowed all of her friends and loved ones to celebrate her "early". After all, if they knew she waited until the exact minute of her birth to celebrate every year, they'd probably think her a bit of a loon.

She'd awoken in the morning - a Monday birthday, how positively horrid, but at least she'd woken up early enough to attend breakfast for once - to find a gift waiting in the palm of her best friend, Dee Prince. It was a beautiful clear charm, which had encased inside of it a lovely pink-and-gold flower petal. The petal itself was a little hard to identify, but after five or six minutes of peering at it instead of getting ready for breakfast and her Monday classes, Aly had finally announced to a mostly empty Booted Eagle dormitory that she was quite sure it was a rose petal. Though she didn't have a chain to put it on, Dee had provided a piece of twine and helped Aly to tie her new necklace around her neck.

Aly had made sure Dee hadn't seen her eyes well up with tears. A year ago, she'd barely even spoken to Dealla Prince, and now they were roommates, late-night gossipers, supportive of each other, and, above all, best friends. The Taurus Ravenclaw had never had a best mate before - someone who would whisper about boys with her in the dead of night, who would begrudgingly allow Aly to decorate her hair with the flowers she always grew on her windowsill, who would eat the snacks she always kept in her trunk, who would root for Aly at Quidditch games even though she knew practically nothing about the sport. To have had Dee come into her life so rapidly had certainly been a large part of why Aly thought her year, like her thirteenth-birthday Cauldron Cake, had been sugary sweet.

Her classes had been as normal as ever, with a few of her classmates wishing her a "Happy Birthday" - word sure did travel fast at Hogwarts. During lunch, she'd received a little note from her boyfriend - her boyfriend, Aly still couldn't quite believe it was true, but ever since that fantastical (and albeit a bit chaotic) Midspring Festival, she'd been able to call Aaron that - asking her to meet him at the Training Pitch after courses for a bit of flying. And then, after class, she had positively sprinted up to the Ravenclaw girls' dormitory, careening through the corridors, to change very quickly into the post-classes (aka post-uniform) birthday outfit she had so specially picked out the night before. It was a bit impractical for flying, of course, but she hadn't cared, only pulled on the pink sweater and long white skirt before hurrying down to the pitch to see what Aaron had in store.

She'd giddily mounted her favorite Hufflepuff's broom and closed her eyes as asked, enjoying the feeling of the wind whipping through her hair as he'd flown them over places he definitely wasn't supposed to be flying over. When they'd landed and she had dismounted and finally opened her eyes, she had found, in the secluded area of the grounds to which Aaron had flown her, a beautiful little patch of wildflowers of all different kinds and colors. At first, after the initial surprise and blush, she'd teased him slightly for making the patch so uneven - but then he had told her to look closer, and she'd noticed that the patch actually spelled out her name. ALY in wildflowers, hidden on the Hogwarts grounds.

It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for her. (Well, not that anyone other than Aaron had ever done romantic things for her, but... still.) With the combination of Dee's gift and Aaron's, Aly was beginning to think she was perhaps Hogwarts' resident flower girl after all.

But all that had been hours ago; now it was 8:19 p.m., and after a long year of sweetness, Aly wasn't sure what she wanted her next year to be.

She couldn't repeat anything she'd done before. New experiences were something the Ravenclaw loved and treasured, and plus, it just seemed wrong to steal another year of sugar from fate's knobby hands. It had been a fantastic year, that much was for sure, but Aly just knew there was more in store. She just had one minute - less than sixty seconds, with the clicks of moments counting down to fifty and forty and thirty-seven and twenty-eight and all the numbers in between - to figure out exactly what that would be.

It has to be good. It has to be positive, the soon-to-be-fourteen-year-old mused as she sat on the edge of the courtyard fountain, twirling a single purple wildflower she'd plucked from Aaron's gifted garden just a few hours earlier between her fingers, staring down at the cobblestones. I could... jump into the fountain and try to be more adventurous? No, I'd just end up cold and wet, and I'd rather stay warm and dry this year. What about making myself laugh so I have a year of joy? I feel like that one's just fake... oh, I should have gone and gotten a hug from Dee to have a year of friendship... or spent time with Aaron to make my year romantic... but there's no time to go get them now and I don't want to spend my year chasing people down...

With a hefty groan, Aly flopped over onto the courtyard bench, lying down to face upwards, her green gaze drifting upwards into the sky.

"I'll just have to face it. This year won't be anything special," she grumbled to herself, staring upwards at the night sky. It had been cloudy all day, slightly rainy in the morning, but luckily the clouds had cleared by now, giving her a full view of sparkling stars above. "I suppose that's all right... it's been a good year. This year can afford to be subpar."

Her whispers convinced herself about as well as you would've expected them to. That is to say, not much at all.

As Aly stared up into the twinkling stars, she knew - somehow, instinctively - that the :20 mark had come. Here it was, the minute that would decide the next year of her life, and there were tears welling up in her eyes. She blinked them back, fiercely. No. No! I will not start my year with crying. I refuse to have a tearful year of fourteen - I refuse - I refuse.

The tears streamed down her face anyway, one on each side of her face, trailing down towards her ears and into her hair. And with her eyes clear again, Aly could once again see the night sky above her, full of Scotland stars.

As she watched, right before her very eyes, one streaked across the sky in a faint flash of light.

A shoo- a shooting star!

Bolting upright, Aly craned her neck backwards to stare harder at the dark above her, her mind running a kilometre a minute. What was that? What had that been? Scotland in May wasn't exactly known for its shooting stars, and Aly wasn't particularly good at Astronomy, but she was pretty sure those were no common occurrence. A shooting star had just so happened to cross the path of her eyes in the exact minute in which her birth had occurred fourteen years before?

That's no coincidence.

More tears sprung to her eyes, blurring the stars into fuzzy specks of light dancing across her vision, only these were the kind of tears that Aly didn't mind. Relief, happiness - whatever it was called, they were good tears, and Aly would take a single good cry for a lifetime of bad ones. She clutched her necklace from Dee in one hand, her flower from Aaron in the other, and smiled through the tears. What with all of the superstition in which Aly believed, there was only one meaning for that shooting star to be in that exact place at that exact moment with her looking exactly up at it.

"This year," she whispered happily to herself, "is going to be nothing short of stellar."

After all, she'd heard it said that life began at forty. But to Aly Salinger, her life was just beginning at fourteen, and just like that shooting star, fourteen was looking pretty bright.

Mentions of Aaron and Dee were approved by their writers ahead of time.