Making Friends
I woke early on the first day of classes. At least, early enough that I was already showered and dressed when Peter woke up. James and Sirius had the air of two people who could keep sleeping forever, but Peter and I decided that it would be wisest to wake them, so they wouldn't miss any classes on their very first day. While Peter went to wake up James, I tried to shake Sirius awake. I was unsuccessful, however. Apparently a bit of shaking wasn't enough, so I left it to the very groggy James to jump into his bed and start hitting him. That worked.
In the end, I went down to breakfast alone, as James and Sirius still needed to dress and so on, and Peter wanted to wait for them, but I preferred having more time for breakfast. When I got down there, only one other first year was there: the red-haired girl from the train yesterday. Lily, I reminded myself. When I sat down, she smiled at me and immediately started talking to me, as if we'd know each other always. I quickly found out that she was Muggle-born and as so was as nervous about the classes as I was.
I sat with her all through breakfast, even when the other boys joined me in the Great Hall and Lily obviously wasn't interested in talking to any of them. James kept staring at her, but Sirius just shrugged and started stuffing his face with ten different kinds of cereal all at once. Peter followed Sirius in doing so without hesitation. Lily was great to talk to, even if she got a bit freaked out by James' continuous staring at her back.
When our timetables were handed out, Lily and I went through them together, and I was a bit surprised at first when Lily seemed happy about all the classes we had with the Slytherins, until I remembered that the boy she had been with yesterday had been sorted into Slytherin. She was thrilled when she saw that our very first class, Potions, was with the Slytherins, so that they could go to class together. Since we had had such a nice talk she invited me to come, and I accepted, seeing it as a chance to get another friend.
When we got to the Potions dungeon (without getting lost, thanks to Lily's friend, Severus, who had passed it on his way to the Great Hall that morning) we were met by a massive man called Professor Slughorn, who asked us to make groups of three for the day's lesson. So the three of us sat down together as a group. Although the other three Gryffindor boys sent me weird looks, when they arrived, they seemed to accept it when they heard we were forming groups of three.
The reason we needed groups of three was because we needed one person to continually stir the potion. Severus volunteered for that. One person had to cut the ingredients, I did that, and one person needed to supervise, read the instructions and tell us when we needed to do what. Lily was at first a bit unsure about being left with such a responsibility, but at the same time she seemed determined to prove her worth to all the kids around us, who had grown up in the wizarding world, and who thought themselves superior.
It quickly proved a good choice of Lily for supervisor, as she didn't give one single wrong instruction, resulting in a very close to perfect potion, something Professor Slughorn clearly hadn't anticipated. He was so thrilled with our result that he gave us each ten points for our houses, and added to the ten points Severus had already earned from answering two questions correctly earlier that lesson, we all left the dungeon proud of having secured each of our houses 20 points in our very first lesson.
While Lily and I went up to the 3rd floor for our Charms lesson, Severus went with the other Slytherins to the greenhouses for Herbology. We got lost on the way however, and arrived a bit late resulting in the fact that there were only two seats left, and they weren't next to each other. So I went to sit at the rear of the class with other three Gryffindor boys, and Lily went to the front, to sit next to some girls, whom I didn't know.
Charms was so different than Potions that I was surprised to find that both were taught at the same school. Where Potions had been mostly about silent concentration (except for the odd accident), Charms seemed to be all about noisy chaos, where everyone was waving their wands around wildly hoping for something right to happen, but mostly just causing things to fly across the room or explode. James and Sirius seemed to excel at making chaos and so they felt right at home. Peter tried not to show it, but it was quite obvious that he was scared shitless from all the things flying around the room that could possibly hit him on the head.
I wasn't sad to see the end of that lesson either, as I felt quite a lot safer, when we left the room and went to the great hall for lunch. I sat with the other boys at lunch, and they all seemed a very nice lot, which confirmed what I had thought on the train. However, they did have a hate for Slytherins, especially Sirius, who seemed to hate his entire family, and as such they were interested in what could have made me work with a Slytherin in Potions of my own free will.
They didn't seem to be entirely convinced when I said that he had seemed like an OK kind of guy, and that I just wanted to make friends, not enemies. After a while though, they let it go, and went on to other topics, like what kind of pranks they could pull without getting caught in the act. I left them to plan the details, and kept it to myself that I thought it very unlikely that they could manage to get into the Slytherin dorms without being seen, and even more dubious that they would be able to drop Dung Bombs in their common room fireplace, so that they would go off when the fire was lit.
Already in our first week of classes, a routine started to exist. When we Gryffindors had classes with the Slytherins I would sit with Lily and Severus, and otherwise I would sit with the gang of Gryffindor boys. At first the boys were sceptical about leaving me to sit with a girl and a Slytherin, but in time they accepted that it was my own wish. All in all, I was very happy about my new friends, all five of them, but there was a catch that I thought about too late: Having to lie to them every month.