"I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want / So tell me what you want, what you really really want / I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want ..."
"What is it? What do you want?" exclaimed Kimmy in a half-awake voice as Susan took a throw pillow to Heidi's radio alarm clock, to little effect.
Ah, the joys of random room assignments.
"Heidi!" shouted Susan urgently, now jumping angrily on her new roommate's bed. "Heidi it's five-thirty A.M.! Turn that stupid muggle music off!"
She might as well have been talking to a broomstick. A violently snoring broomstick, at that. Susan was an only child and unaccustomed to both the shocking personal habits of others and the maddening sensation of not getting one's own way after a reasonable period of time. So it was not surprising that she took this matter so personally; it was a watershed moment in her social development.
Though it was hard to see how she thought shouting "Die, evil noise box, die!" would help.
Snape's prediction about the back-to-school midnight rave in the common room had come all too true for Hufflepuff House. After Professor Sprout finished reading the first-years a bedtime story (a lovely tradition that Heidi enjoyed immensely, heedless of Susan's protests that they were too old for such things), the kind old head of house had gone to bed herself and the older kids had come out to play. In consequence, no one in their charming little badger hole had gotten much sleep the previous night, and while the N.E.W.T. students had all cleverly written early classes out of their schedules, our protagonist and her friends needed their rest.
Kimmy sat up slowly, still about one-quarter asleep. "I missed it. She said what she really really wanted. What was it; did you catch it?"
It took Susan a moment to determine that she meant the song. "Who cares?" she called in mid-bounce. "We need to get Heidi conscious so she can stop that racket! Can you get some cold water?"
But Kimmy was now dancing, both gleefully and involuntarily. As a pureblood, she had never had opportunity to hear any pop music before now, and she couldn't think of a better way to start her secondary school career.
"Can't be battery-powered … that doesn't work here," muttered Susan to herself. "Must be some kind of magic hybrid. Probably illegal too – Kimmy, stop dancing and find me something wakeup-y!"
"Yeah, you're right; we have to wake her up so she can show me how to dance to this stuff!" Kimmy grinned. "Asomulus!"
Growing up pureblooded certainly had its advantages. Heidi awoke instantly and flipped a small, unobtrusive switch on the back of the clock as Susan gave Kimmy a 'why didn't you do that half an hour ago?' look.
"Sorry about the noise," Heidi yawned. "But at least it looks like you were already up. Make hay while the sun shines, eh?"
For the first of many times to come in the next seven years, Susan looked ready to strangle something. Heidi gulped. Kimmy pulled her defenseless white cat to herself nervously.
"YOU," Susan growled.
"What?" asked Heidi.
"YOU HAVE DISTURBED ME BEFORE SUNUP."
"I'm sorry!"
"YOU SHOULD BE."
"I am!"
"IN THE FUTURE, YOU WILL FIND A MORE DISCREET METHOD OF WAKING YOURSELF UP."
Heidi nodded.
Kimmy let out a sigh of relief; the danger was past. "Heidi, what's a zig-uh-zig-eye?"
In a timid whisper, Heidi explained about the Spice Girls, then headed for the boys' dormitory. Luckily, Louis was awake and dressed, while his roommate was still asleep; it would've been an awkward time for an introduction. "We've got Transfiguration with the Ravenclaws first thing," he told her, examining his new timetable. "Let's go find Adam."
"We can bring him to breakfast," Heidi agreed, heading up to the common room.
"But what if we get lost?" he worried. Rose had given them a map the previous night which sprouted little footprints everywhere they'd already been, but it didn't do much to show them where they were going.
Heidi wasn't listening. "Mr. Friar," she asked politely, "would you like to come to Ravenclaw with us?"
The Fat Friar looked up in surprise and pleasure. It was rather dull, haunting the same building for hundreds of years at a time. Unable to sleep as a human does, he had just spent the past four hours brooding over his horribly embarrassing death yet again. If you've ever wondered why ghosts tend to cause trouble at night, well, it's not for dramatic effect. It's because they're bored stiff and hooked on the spiteful notion that if they aren't sleeping, no one else should be either.
The Friar was gentler than most, though, and delighted to find diversion mentoring young people for a few hours. "Yes, let's!" he beamed.
But finding the Ravenclaw common room would prove twice as easy as gaining entry into it. Upon the Friar's advice, Kimmy knocked on the eagle knocker, at which point it promptly asked, "From whom or whence does the wand borrow light when one performs the 'lumos' spell?"
Louis shrugged. "From Donald?"
Heidi poked him playfully. "What?" he protested. "Whenever my dad wants to smoke a cigar, he bums a light from my Uncle Donald. I keep telling him to get his own lighter, but he's afraid Mum would find it and he'd be caught."
"Oooh, I bet this is a trick question," said Kimmy, ignoring him. "Does it borrow the light from the sun?"
"No," said the eagle unceremoniously.
"I know! It borrows it from nowhere," guessed Heidi.
The Fat Friar sighed. "The wand borrows illumination from deep within the heart of he whose heart is light." He turned to the others. "She's been using the same riddles for centuries."
"Correct," the eagle answered, slightly miffed. "And you try thinking up clever new things to ask people all day for fourteen hundred years with only a patchy old Enlightenment Enchantment for help and see if your brain doesn't run a little dry."
The children quickly located Adam and roused him in a most undignified manner. "It's magic time!" squeaked Heidi. "Let's get to breakfast."
Adam glanced at the clock and then at an informational sheet on his bedside table. "Breakfast doesn't even start for another hour," he muttered.
"Then we have time to wake everyone up," Heidi pointed out reasonably. "We'll go get Rilla, and then Hazel, and then by that time it'll be almost light out."
"Hurray, a wake-up-the-first-years parade!" Kimmy announced.
It was at this point in our narrative that our heroes and their bemused onlookers fell subject to a very curious effect of children and sociology. For you see, when a normal young human person spots five or more young human people, and the first young human person is not busy doing anything in particular at the moment, and the five or more young human people are giggling excitedly and heading at a leisurely pace toward an unknown destination, there comes over the observing person an overwhelming urge to follow the merry group. Like a snowball falling downhill, more people will keep joining until finally the small army arrives at the end of its odyssey with so many followers that there is not enough room for them all inside. (Invariably the mysterious El Dorado of their seeking turns out to have been somewhere extremely mundane and not at all worth the pomp and circumstance put into it, like 'the laundry room' or 'Tesco's' or 'Scotland', but this does not detract from the quest's value in the slightest.)
The effect is intensified tenfold one's first few days in a new environment. One would think that after a little trial and error, most young human people would know better, but in fact this nursery-school-esque behavior claims students in every transitional period up to and including the first week of law school, or even later in the case of especially insecure individuals – fresh recruits to retirement centers have been known to unwittingly follow new friends to the gerontologist's office. "Previous plans be damned," they find themselves thinking. "I, too, wish to be laughing and moving towards a goal."
Thus as they headed up to Gryffindor, our fearless leader's giddy group had grown considerably. Unfortunately, the Gryffindor common room had a proper password, but through sheer inertia the children managed to push past a surprised early riser coming out and into the tower. "Rilla!" Heidi shrieked, heading up a spiral staircase at random. When she was almost to the top, though, the staircase suddenly turned into a large slide and dumped a dozen delighted kids onto the carpet in a laughing tangle. Shortly after the Grey Lady finished explaining that young gentlemen were not permitted in the dormitories of young ladies at Hogwarts, under pain of slide burns, Rilla and her roommates slid down to join them, fully dressed. It is nearly impossible to get more than six hours of real sleep before one's first day of secondary school.
I hear you in the back protesting that you have never once allowed nerves to obstruct your sleeping habits since earliest babyhood, and I also hear you pointing out that Susan went back to bed many paragraphs ago, freed from the twin irritants that were her high-strung roommates at last. To this I respond that the Susan Deerfields of the world rarely have as much fun in their lives as Heidi and her friends had in the hour before dawn that day.
"Good morning," Rilla smiled. "Guess what? There are three open positions on the Gryffindor quidditch team!"
Louis grinned at her. "I love quidditch. Well, watching it, not playing it. You should definitely try out; did you know the last Gryffindor seeker made the team his first year?"
Rilla gave him a 'duh, who doesn't know that story?' look and everyone marched down to Slytherin upon Heidi's insistence.
"Hazel sleeps like the dead. It's going to take all of us."
The walk down to the dungeons was like a miniature children's crusade; the students were hardly bothering to keep quiet anymore. Heidi couldn't see how they were supposed to get in, as there didn't seem to be any doorknob on the solid brick wall, but suddenly the Grey Lady disappeared, reappeared, and discreetly whispered the password, muttering that she had ways of weaseling things out of the Bloody Baron. The door materialized and they all stepped through.
"It's a bit grim down here, isn't it?" Rilla whispered. Now that they'd arrived, the children instinctively knew it wasn't wise to linger. Quickly locating the first-year girls' dormitory, the seven or eight hands nearest Hazel's bed efficiently tickled her until she awoke. A crack of laughter roused the other occupants of the room, and in a few minutes the troupe of nomads had grown even larger.
"Thanks for coming," Hazel said sincerely, and Heidi heard what she wasn't saying, too. Thanks for having the courage to come down here. Thanks for not leaving us out simply because of the twelve hours separating us from the self-righteous attitudes of three-quarters of the school. And thanks for acting like it was nothing. Maybe one day it will be.
Their fear dissolved, the group chattered excitedly about their expectations for the coming year. Heads full of exploding dreams, they all trotted to the Great Hall: seventeen first-and-second-years, five ghosts, two curious prefects and a toad.
They walked straight into Professor Snape.
"And what," he hissed, "are all of you doing out of bed so long after curfew?"
Louis cowered. Adam shut his eyes. But Rilla marched right up to the headmaster and announced, "Please sir, my head of house told us curfew started at nine but she never said when it ended."
If anyone could appreciate the twisting of logic to one's own purpose, it was Snape. But he wasn't about to admit it."You didn't answer my question," he snapped. "My concern is not so much for your vacant beds as for the possibly irreparable mischief you plan to cause while not occupying them during the customary hours."
"I just wanted to wake up a few of my friends for breakfast," Heidi admitted.
Snape responded, "Ah, yes, an intimate gathering indeed. What do you take me for, child? A hag in a blood bank wouldn't be this excited about breakfast." He frowned his patented 'why are you still breathing the same air as me?' frown. "Out with it! Where are you all going that couldn't wait for..." he consulted his watch. "Fifty-two minutes?"
No one spoke for a moment, and then suddenly Kimmy squeaked, "Professor sir, my roommate taught me a muggle expression that says, 'make hay while the sun shrines'. I don't know if I understood it right, but I think the point was, when you get someplace as nice a sun shrine, you want to start making hay just as soon as you possibly can!"
Snape's eyes suddenly took in the full splendor of the scene. In the past twenty-four hours he'd gotten even less sleep than his students. Between talking his new Muggle Studies professor out of keeping a live muggle as a class pet, extracting a promise from the Dark Arts professor to keep to the Geneva Convention during his practical demonstrations on the students, grovelling egregiously to You-Know-Who-Annoys-the-Snot-Out-Of Me, fielding four dozen owls from various angry parents concerning his appointment, convincing half the staff not to resign in protest, and taking a serious browbeating from the portrait of the man he'd very reluctantly murdered the past spring, he'd been starting to wonder if it was all worth it. But suddenly, surrounded by a score of horribly innocent students beaming up anxiously at him, Professor Snape, the man they trusted to keep them safe and whole through the coming tribulation, he realized why he'd become an educator in the first place.
"Well," he growled.
Twenty grave throats gulped.
"The early bird gets the flobberworm. Have a great start-of-term." And with that he disappeared.
In the years to come, the rousing of the first-years would become a sacred tradition at Hogwarts. And though its form changed in several important ways over the decades, it was always led by a Hufflepuff and always concluded with the headmaster's blessing.
