Ginger Granger🩷's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Ginger pressed her face against Hermione's bedroom door and listened. Pages turned inside — slow, careful pages that meant Hermione wasn't coming out anytime soon. She needed a better plan. If Sprinkles lived somewhere really good, somewhere with lights and music and maybe even a swimming pool, then Hermione would want to come see. Hermione would have to play. Ginger ran to her room and pulled out every single Barbie box from under her bed. The pink stable pieces scattered across the carpet like puzzle parts waiting to happen. She clicked walls together and pressed the little door until it stuck. The roof went on crooked the first time, so she tried again, tongue between her teeth. When it finally snapped into place, she clapped twice and added the string of tiny lights her mum had given her for dress-up. She wound them around the stable doors and stuck pink flowers in the window boxes. Sprinkles would live like a queen. She carried the stable downstairs and set it on the table in the front hall where Hermione walked past every single morning. Next to it, she propped up the pink sign with the happy bees and the word Welcome in swirly letters. She stood back and looked. It needed one more thing. She ran outside and dragged in the bigger welcome sign from the garden, the one with gold letters that said come on in. She positioned it right in front of the stable doors. When Hermione came down for dinner, she stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Her eyes went to the stable, then to the signs, then to Ginger waiting beside them with her hands folded. "Sprinkles has a proper house now," Ginger announced. "You can visit whenever you want." Hermione's mouth opened, then closed. She looked at the little lights twinkling around the stable doors. "It's very pink," she said finally. But she didn't say no. She didn't walk away. That was something.