Chapter Three: The Sorting That Wasn't
"Some of them look awfully old, don't you think?" I whispered as McGonagall marched the line of new students down the center of Great Hall. Meg and I sat about midway down the Gryffindor table which, like the Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw tables, seemed considerably emptier than usual.
"Well, it's not just the usual batch of First Years, is it?" Meg whispered back. "With the new laws, every underage wizard who lives in the UK has to come to Hogwarts. Everyone who was homeschooled or whose parents wanted them to go to Durmstrang or Beauxbatons or somewhere is here now. I imagine they have to be sorted as well."
As I watched the new students shuffle themselves about, nervously fixing their hair and whispering, I couldn't help thinking back to my own sorting. Ten years old, terrified that I'd be the only one in my family not in Gryffindor, half hoping that I'd be a Ravenclaw or even a Hufflepuff to prove that I wasn't just another Weasley, completely ready to fight a troll or jinx a Fifth Year or whatever intimidating ritual Fred and George had planted in my head that week. A particularly tiny blonde girl, who was looking anxiously around the room like someone might have life-saving advice for her, caught my eye and I winked. She flashed a startled half-smile, then went back to twitchily waiting for something to happen.
McGonagall fetched the Sorting Hat and its stool and placed them front and center. "You will come forward when called," she announced. "Sit on the stool, and I will place the Sorting Hat upon your head so that you may be sorted." She stepped slightly back and fell silent as the Hat opened the rip near its brim and began to sing.
"For many years, I've sorted all.
The good, the bad, the short and tall.
And every year, as I sing this song,
I know that my sorting will ne'er be wrong.
But times have changed, and now, I fear
A reckoning is drawing near.
Lines that divide, you have so many
This year, I pledge to not add any.
Though it's been my duty, I now report
That this year's class, I shall not sort.
I hope that things may change in time,
But for now, I respectfully resign."
The Hat closed and silence fell over Great Hall. Snape rushed down from the Head Table and appeared to have a heated discussion with the Sorting Hat, which responded to his angry hisses with calm words too quiet to hear. Whispers were starting around the room.
"It's not going to sort them?"
"Is it allowed to do that?"
"Will they all just be sent home?"
"Silence!" Snape called over the rising chaos. "Minerva, take care of this wretched excuse for a hat before I have it destroyed. I..." he trailed off and seemed to stare through the enchanted ceiling, as if looking for guidance. I snorted quietly—certainly Severus Snape respected no god. McGonagall stowed the Hat and stool somewhere with a flick of her wand; the entire school sat and watched Snape think.
"The House Heads and ghosts will meet in council tonight and decide where to place each new addition to our school," Snape announced after a moment, looking up and down his Head Table as he spoke. Disapproval was written clearly on McGonagall's face. Flitwick, Hagrid, and several of the other teachers also looked unhappy with the decision, but the unfamiliar faces mixed in with the teachers were positively grinning with glee. Snape flicked his wand several times, muttered something, and all of the House tables suddenly compressed width-wise. The tables and benches we were sitting on rose a few centimeters into the air and drifted towards the outside of the room; a fifth, shorter table appeared in the resultant gap in the middle of the hall. "Until placement, new students may sit at the center table," Snape explained. "Let the feast begin."
When the clinking and chatter had diminished to a dull roar, Snape stood and called once again for attention.
"The previous headmaster of this establishment," Snape began, "held a great many beginning-of-term traditions. He took this time to introduce new teachers, outline the school rules, and, of course, sing the school song." The revulsion in Snape's voice could not have been more clear if a neon sign reading "I HATED DUMBLEDORE" had blazed above his head. "I shall indulge none of this. You shall meet new teachers as is pertinent to your class schedule, I see no need for foolish songs of school pride, and the school rules..." Snape trailed off, a malicious shadow of a smile flitting across his face. When he spoke again, his voice was dangerously quiet. "School handbooks will be distributed by prefects later this evening, and I strongly advise that all students commit the rules therein to memory. We certainly do not want any...troublemaking."
I slowly became aware of a single hand that was raised in the air above the heads of the students. It took me even longer for me to realize that the hand was mine. I'd been running through all the derisive things I'd love to say in my head, but hadn't truly intended to disturb Snape's thinly veiled threats. His dark eyes flashed in my direction. "Yes, Ms. Weasley?" He snapped.
I stood. Dozens of comments were swirling around in my head. I could accuse him of killing Dumbledore, I could ask what it was like to be You-Know-Who's right hand man, I could, I could, I could...the image of my mother, frantically knitting and crying and watching my hand on the family clock, popped into my mind, echoed by my dad's voice asking me not to be too much of a Weasley. I was dimly aware that Meg was tugging frantically at my other arm, trying to get me to sit down. I bit my tongue, terribly aware of the hundreds of pairs of eyes on me, and asked innocently, "Sir, what about Quidditch?"
A look of surprise crossed his face for the briefest of a second. "Quidditch?"
"The House league, sir. I was made captain last year and need to know if I should schedule tryouts."
Hundreds of eyes expectantly turned to Snape. He pondered my question momentarily, then said, "I shall have to think on the subject. The announcement will be made in the morning."
I continued staring at him, fighting down my extremely Weasley-ish urge to call him the worst name I knew, until Meg poked me sharply in the back of the knee. "Thank you, sir," I said through gritted teeth, and let my shaking legs collapse me back onto the bench.
A fire blazed merrily in the Gryffindor common room as we assembled later that night to receive our new school handbooks. McGonagall handed them to Neville through the portrait hole and whispered something that made him smile. She disappeared from sight and let the Fat Lady swing back into place; Neville walked toward the other prefects and divided the stack of handbooks among them. He, Meg, Parvati Patil (who'd replaced Hermione as the Seventh Year girl prefect), Colin Creevy, and the two new prefects from the year below me whom I barely knew, Ryan Fuentes and Annie Markel, walked around the small circle of Gryffindors, handing them out.
"We don't know any more about these than you do," Neville said as he passed me a handbook, "but you heard Snape. Headmaster Snape, sorry. We should probably learn these soon."
"So we know exactly how many school rules we're violating?" I asked brightly.
Neville gave me a slightly exasperated look as Ryan cracked up.
"Guys," Neville said slowly, obviously planning his words carefully, "I think we should maybe play along. For a little bit, at least."
Jimmy Peakes, who was standing next to me, snorted derisively, Ryan and Seamus swore in unison, and even Annie looked discontent. My jaw almost hit the floor—what happened to Long live the DA?
"I mean it!" Neville protested. "A lot of this have changed. We don't know what the stakes are, we don't know where they'll stop. If they'll stop. We need to be careful until we know the game."
Furiously, I looked down at the stupid little pamphlet in my hands. Neville was wimping out on me. I'd counted on him to lead Dumbledore's Army, and now...I flipped angrily through the book, accidentally tear the bottom of a page. I pieced it back together, read the words "Educational Decree," and realized that the page was pink.
"Do you know what this is, Neville?" I asked quietly, flipping to the title page to confirm my suspicions. "The Helpful Hogwarts Handbook? It's an extended collection of the Educational Decrees passed by Umbridge."
Neville's eyebrows furrowed, and several angry noises were heard from the circle. Ryan flipped to a random page and read aloud: "Educational Decree Number Twenty-Four, All student organizations, societies, teams, groups, and clubs are henceforth disbanded...Educational Decree Number Forty-Three, Any school ghost suspected of fraternizing with a non-school entity will be subject to interrogation...bloody hell, she's got a hundred of these..."
Most of us stayed in the common room for a while, thumbing through our handbooks and reading the particularly outrageous ones out loud. No one really wanted to go to their rooms; almost every year was down a few students and—although the rooms magically shrunk to accommodate the lesser number of beds—the change was still terribly obvious.
Around midnight, Meg stood up from where she'd been flipping through a Muggle magazine near the fireplace and walked toward the door.
"Meg?" I asked. "Where're you going?"
She shushed me and held up a hand, cocking her head toward the door. Everyone in the room stopped what they were doing and listened to an argument that seemed to be taking place outside our common room.
"But I don't know the password!" A girl was insisting.
"If you don't know the password, I can't let you in," the Fat Lady said, sounding like she was tired of repeating yourself.
"No one told me the password," the girl protested. "The teachers only just put me in Gryffindor and told me to come up here and that someone would let me in!"
"If the teachers did not see fit to tell you the password—."
The Fat Lady was interrupted by an impressive string of swearwords from the girl. Meg snorted back laughter and pushed the door open, helping a girl with waist-length, shiny blonde hair climb through the hole.
"Thanks," the girl said exhaustedly, swinging her hair back out of her face. "I thought I'd be out there all night. I'm Bianca Delacour, Fourth Year—this is Gryffindor, isn't it?"
"Yeah, welcome," Jimmy Peakes said, walking toward her quickly with his hand outstretched, eyeing her long hair and slim waist.
"Delacour?" I interrupted. "Any chance you're related to Fleur and Gabrielle?"
"Of course!" She laughed. "My charmant French cousins. How do you..." she trailed off and gave me a critical once-over, settling on the red hair. "You can't be Ginny Weasley?"
"Yeah!" I exclaimed, a little shocked at the recognition but pleased at the coincidence. "How'd you guess?"
"Well, Gabry won't shut up about you, will she?" Bridget laughed. "They came to stay with us for a while after the wedding so Gabry and I could see each other before I started here—I used to go to Beauxbatons, but with the new laws and everything..." she shrugged.
"Does anyone feel like explaining?" Meg chimed in. "Some of us don't understand."
"Oh!" Bridget and I said at the same time, then looked at each other and laughed.
"My brother and her cousin," I began.
"My cousin and her brother," Bridget explained simultaneously. We laughed again.
"Got married," we ended together.
"Does this make us cousins?" Bridget asked. "In some distant sort of way?"
I laughed again. "I suppose so."
Bridget suddenly shrieked and lunged for the magazine in Meg's hand. "How the hell did you get a copy of this month's Seventeen in here?" she asked. "This is the one with the pictures of Jake Gyllenhall at the gym, right?"
Bridget and Meg dissolved into squeals of joy over finding kindred spirits in one another, quickly sitting in an armchair together and discussing the finer points of this Jake guy's body. Jimmy lurked behind the armchair, trying to insert himself in the conversation. I smiled to myself and went back to studying the Handbook, happy with the newest addition to Gryffindor. Maybe Meg wouldn't spend as much time trying to persuade me to let her hang pictures of shirtless Muggle actors in our room now that she had someone to talk to about it.
In the morning, we found lists of the new students in each House posted next to the giant hourglasses that tracked the House points. In addition to nine First Years and Bianca, Gryffindor had gained a Second Year boy, another Fourth Year girl, and a Seventh Year boy. Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff had gotten similar numbers of students, but Slytherin…
"Nineteen First Years!" Meg hissed in my ear as we walked toward Great Hall. "Slytherin has nineteen First Years and eight of the transfer students."
"I know, Meg, I read the lists too." I sat at the Gryffindor table, restored to its normal width, and looked curiously up and down its length. The First Years were easy to pick out, clustered around one end of the table nervously studying their class schedules, picking at their Gryffindor-colored ties. Neville dropped onto the bench next to me and put his forehead on the table, moaning something into his hands.
"Something wrong?" I asked, moving a bit of his hair out of a bowl of porridge.
Neville picked his head up and looked at me with bloodshot eyes. "There's a new Gryffindor Seventh Year boy. Hi, Bianca, welcome to Hogwarts."
"Thanks!" Bianca said cheerfully. "It's a lovely day, don't you think?"
Seamus Finnegan seated himself across the table from us, looking just as disheveled as Neville. "He showed up in our dorm 'round three in the morning. 'Course, it being just me and Nev now with Ron, Harry, and Dean gone, we weren't exactly expectin' anyone. We both threw a couple curses 'fore we realized no one was tryin' to off us."
"McGonagall pulled us out of bed and gave us a proper dressing down about not welcoming new students," Neville continued. "At three in the bloody morning."
"What's the guy like?" Meg asked. I could already see a familiar light in her eyes—Meg was one of my best friends, but she was also going through a very boy-centric phase.
"Seems decent enough," Seamus said through a mouthful of pumpkin juice. "Name's Peter Callahan. His parents sent him to some school in the States for the past six years. Didn't seem to particularly mind nearly gettin' his legs cursed off."
"Is he tall?" Bianca asked, and she and Meg dissolved into giggles for the umpteenth time that morning.
"Class schedules," Parvati announced, walking down our table with a small stack of papers and holding a cardboard box, looking as usual like an exotic goddess. "I'm to remind you all that tardiness is now a demerit-earning offense."
The entire table chorused a groan. One of the hidden joys of the Handbook was the explanation of a new, demerit-based disciplinary system. Throughout the week, you accumulated demerits every time you lost points for your House. At the end of the week, there were levels of punishment according to how many demerits you'd racked up.
"What's in the box, Parvati?"
"Another gift from Umbridge," she sighed, reaching inside the box and handing each of us a small, ruby-filled hourglass. "She's been reinstated as Hogwarts High Inquisitor, you know."
"We know," Neville, Seamus, and I said in unison.
"This is how they're tracking our demerits," Parvati explained. "They're specific to each of us, see on the base?"
Sure enough, around the base of my little hourglass the words "Ginevra Molly Weasley, Sixth Year Gryffindor" could be read in tiny gold letters.
"Look on the other side," Parvati prompted.
"Current standing: 50 demerits," I read out loud. "Fifty! What did I possibly do in the past night to get fifty demerits?"
"That's where everyone is starting," she explained. "Fifty for, fifty against. If you earn a house point, you are cleared of a demerit."
"How quickly do you think I can rack up all one hundred?" Seamus asked darkly.
"Seamussssss," Neville groaned. "We talked about this."
"You talked," Seamus corrected.
Parvati checked her watch. "You'd better get going, Ginny, Meg," she cautioned. "Sixth Years have got Potions first thing."
"Slughorn," I muttered. "Just what I need first thing in the morning. "C'mon, Meg."
"I don't suppose there's been some misprint about what we have at 1 o'clock, do you?" Meg asked as we headed out of Great Hall. I glanced down at my schedule, which I'd pretty much ignored, scanning until I came across "Introduction to the Dark Arts, Prof. Amycus Carrow."
I safely tucked my schedule away between two books and slid them into my bag, clutching the hourglass in my hand tightly. "No, Meg. I don't think there's been any mistake at all."
author's note: sorry about the long delay! i'm in the last few weeks of my semester and schoolwork controls my life. i'll try to be better. a million thank yous to gigiseesdenver for being my first reviewer :)
InkWeaverabc: i'm so happy you like it so far! re: george's ear, i guess i assumed that because it was cursed off by dark magic, it wouldn't grow back despite the polyjuice potion. thoughts? good catch either way!
mon-ing myrtle: i'm glad Meg's growing on you. i figured ginny had to have some female friends somewhere along the line, and having her be kind of apathetic/timid beforehand seemed to work as an explanation. thanks for the review :)