Kate Mills ran a hand through her hair, dark blonde and slightly messy, but it got caught halfway through. After tugging for a while, she gave up on the hand method and pulled open the deep crimson curtains surrounding her four-poster bed in Gryffindor tower. As she reached over onto the mahogany bedside table to pick up her brush, she knocked over the pocket Sneakoscope she had been intending to give to her sister for her birthday. It flew off the table and even though she was Gryffindor's seeker, she was half asleep and failed to catch it before it hit the castle floor, gave a feeble whistle, spun twice, then cracked along its side.
Not only had she now broken her sister's birthday present, she had also woken the other girls in the room. Dana almost fell out of her bed, but Lily was sitting up, laughing. Marie had, unsurprisingly, already headed down to the great hall for breakfast so she could cram in some extra study time. "Sorry," apologized Kate feebly, although she, too, was fighting back Lily's contagious laughter.
"Lily Evans," Kate's ears pricked up automatically at the sound of her friend's name as Professor McGonagall read out the register, but she tuned out again as McGonagall moved on. "Kate Mills," she said in her short, sharp, teachers voice only a small while later. Kate replied with her customary "yes Professor," wondering what today's lesson would be about. Marie would ace it, no doubt, even though it was the last, and most difficult, lesson of the day.
Vanishing (for that was what the lesson was) was difficult, and neither she, Dana or Lily made any difference to their mice, not even after taking endless notes and practicing the incantation until their heads were fit to burst. Kate was about to ask Marie to help her, but McGonagall had demanded silence apart from the one incantation, and Kate didn't want detention on this weekend, not with the upcoming Quidditch match, Gryffindor against Slytherin, which she couldn't miss or Quentin, the team captain, would have her head. When McGonagall's sharp voice announced the end of class and to practice for homework, Kate would ask Marie.
As she slid into her seat next to Dana and James Potter (who Lily claimed utter hatred upon but Kate suspected she actually quite liked him) after Transfiguration, Kate felt a gentle tap on her shoulder. She turned around on her chair and looked up into a pair of perfect, brown eyes. "Um, hi," she said, wondering what exactly Remus Lupin was doing behind her chair.
"Hi," he replied, the corners of his mouth turning up slightly. "McGonagall asked me to bring this. You left it behind."
He was holding a quill, her quill, precisely the same rich, chocolate brown shade of his eyes.
"Um… thanks!" She smiled. "You interested in Quidditch?" she asked, "just, you know, because of the match, and Quentin leaves next year, you might want to try out..."
He smiled back with a shrug, "I can fly, but I'm not sure how good my Quidditch skills are."
She nodded and pocketed the quill. "See you at the match, I guess," she said, grinning broadly though she didn't know why. He smiled a "good night," back at her and then turned to go. She wanted to stare and stare at the spot he had been, and had just begun to do so, when a tug on her robes from James, presumably to talk about Quidditch, made her slide back down into her seat and continue dinner.
