Chapter Four
First Year – Part 2
Lily took her seat between Mary and Maggie. The three girls talking excitedly about the ceiling which was a stormy grey with lightning streaking across it, pumpkin lanterns floating beneath it with the candles that usually hung above the tables to light the vast hall. It was their first Halloween in the castle and Lily's family had never really done very much for Halloween so she was quite excited to be doing anything other than giving sweets to all the other kids whose parents let them dress up and go trick-or-treating.
James and his family had always gone all out for Halloween the house elves would decorate the house and his parents would invite over their friends from the ministry and their family for a big Halloween party. They'd be having it without him that year but James didn't particularly mind. All he was missing was his Uncle Ernie consuming too much firewhisky and dancing on the table while his Aunt Mabel shouted at him to get down and behave while she swayed a little from the wine she'd been drinking herself.
In the hall Professor Dumbledore stood up from the table and the room grew silent. "Happy Halloween students and welcome to our annual Halloween feast. I believe the food will be extraordinary and we'd better eat it quickly or the swarms of bats will descend on us." He said grinning, the students were hoping he was joking, "So let us eat." Dumbledore clapped his hands and in front of them appeared the most magnificent feast they'd ever seen.
Lily put some food on her plate while James and his friends piled it on with a very elegant air…not!
Anyway the reason behind that whole eating like a pack of wild pigs that were going to die in five minutes thing was because of the prank that they had pulled. There may or may not have been boxes in the rafters which when the clock struck six an hour into the feast. The feast for Halloween was open until seven-thirty for the special occasion. Anyway the boxes in the rafters contained a lot of fake blood held inside them. They were eating at such an alarmingly fast rate so that they could stand outside the hall to watch the surprise and horror that ensued when this happened.
The boxes were dotted among the rafters, six along the rafters above the Slytherin, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff tables while mercifully there was only three among the Gryffindor rafters but they couldn't leave them out entirely that would be unfair.
Lily and her friends completely unaware of the fact that they would soon be, either drenched or splattered with blood. They all ate and drank pumpkin juice merrily and soon the main course had disappeared from the tables to be replaced by a truly fantastic range of puddings. There was ice-cream of many varieties, chocolate gateau, buns, cakes and cookies etc. etc.
The pranksters sat and nonchalantly ate their dessert carefully checking the time every once in a while though Peter was getting noticeably jumpy at the thought of what was about to happen.
A few moments before the aforementioned prank the four boys exit the room quietly unnoticed by any of the others though Lily noticed and happened to be wondering at the precise moment when a box was tilting above her head that she wondered why those boys who ate almost everything off of the table every single night at dinner would leave such a magnificent feast early, it was bizarre and she was thinking about this when her head was suddenly covered in sticky fake blood.
She let out a little shout of shock and horror before jumping out of her seat and as she looked around she noticed that this wasn't unusual at that particular moment as twenty other locations in the hall were drenched in the fake blood. The only thing was, well, the box fell from the rafters after her and onto Lily's head and thus sprang the cut in her head and then came the real blood dripping from it. She bolted from the hall past the four boys. James had an interestingly twisted look on his face between amusement and terror at what Lily might do to him when she found out that it was him.
Mary and Maggie ran after her having been severely splashed by the gooey liquid also. Lily slowed at the base of the stairs and stopped to turn. She walked back over to the group of boys, "Why are you out here watching the great hall?" She asked in an extremely strained voice.
"Just standing." James said. Sirius whistled trying to sound innocent and failing entirely. Peter's eyes were darting around everywhere wildly. Remus simply looked guilty.
Lily growled under her breath, "I swear if I find out you had anything to do with this I'll kill you." She threatened and climbed the stairs to take a shower and wash the gross sticky stuff out of her hair. She didn't yet know that she was bleeding. Her waist length curly red hair was drenched and Lily was horrified. Her friends caught up with her on her way to the common room.
"My hair is ruined," Maggie growled. Mary was just extremely silent pulling her hairbrush through her tangle of brown hair.
Lily showered and it was only when the hot water splashed on the tender part of her head that she noticed the cut. She had been so angry that she hadn't noticed how sore it was. When she got out of the shower she carefully dried her hair and put on some clothes, she returned to her room and Mary looked at her head,
"Lil, I think that you should go to Madame Pomfrey." She said and Maggie nodded in agreement on the way past as she went down into the common room. Lily followed with her hand on the back of her head. They passed the four boys; James and Sirius each clamped a hand to their heads and making dramatic noises. Lily rolled her eyes,
"Sorry, just stopping the blood from coming out of my head." She said holding up her hand to show them. That wiped the smiles off of their faces as she immediately ran for it out of the portrait hole and along a maze of corridors to the infirmary on the first floor. When she arrived the lighting in the room was dim and Madam Pomfrey was bustling around a seventh year who had tried to curse his acne off, let's just say he was lacking a nose at that moment.
Lily walked swiftly up hoping she wouldn't need stitches. "Excuse me," She said to Madame Pomfrey who smiled,
"Can I help you dear?" she asked, Lily indicated her head and Madame Pomfrey took Lily's hand off of her head. She examined it for a minute, "What happened to you, dear?" She asked.
Lily shrugged, "Something fell on my head." She said, she may be mad, but she wasn't going to tell on him. That wouldn't gain her any friends. So Madame Pomfrey had her fixed up and ready to go in about five minutes and she went back up to Gryffindor tower to finish her homework. Lily showered again and it took almost an hour worth of shampoo and conditioning and her hair was back to its previously clean and shiny state. Maggie was sitting on her bed her hair in curlers and Mary's wrapped in a towel. They were dressed for bed early because they thought it pointless changing right before they were about to change into their pyjamas anyway. All of them were highly suspicious of those four boys and none of them doubted that it had been them one bit, earlier in the week they'd put itching powder in Severus's robes causing a sudden outburst in the great hall, Lily wasn't laughing with the rest of them, though he'd been avoiding her she was still his friend.
They all went to sleep early as it was Sunday anyway so they had to get up for classes on Monday anyway.
And that night Lily Evans fell asleep with dreams of revenge dancing in her head.
Monday morning started Lily off at six thirty am when Maggie shook her awake so they could have a go at getting the last of the stuff out of their hair. Maggie hadn't been quite unsuccessful in her pursuit but she still had a reddish tint to her blonde curls that morning. Mary's hair was a weird mixture of the usual hazel colour and bright red and she wasn't very happy about it evidently as she tried to clean it with magic, a book was resting open on the table under the mirror. Lily followed her friend's examples and after having washed and dressed she packed her things up and piled them into her book bag as her friends did the same, more slowly as they were less eager to get to class than Lily so she was out of the room and down in the common room before they all joined her and they walked to their first class together, Maggie still had a sort of reddish tint to her hair and Lily could tell it was annoying her, having the lightest hair of the three of them it didn't wash out as easily. They had charms first hour with Professor Marshall; they were on to lumos, producing light from the end of their wands. As they went in Professor Marshall was sitting at his desk with his feet up. Lily sat down next to Maggie who sat down next Mary and on Lily's other side was. Oh no. James Potter. She'd known him maybe three or four weeks but she had in that time grown to intensely dislike him because of his arrogance and his pranks and the way he and his little friends acted in the first place. She ignored him and turned to the empty desk in front of her, she pulled out a piece of blank parchment and an ink bottle, a quill and her Charms textbook. She copied the title written on the blackboard onto her parchment in her neat loopy hand writing. Maggie sighed, "I love your hand writing Lily it's just so pretty."
James looked over at her parchment, "God, how small can your hand writing be?" He asked and Lily looked at his clumsy scrawl. It was slanted and sharp with smudges coming out of some of the letters. She smiled,
"Well, my hand writing is nicer than yours anyway." She said, Maggie sniggered and Sirius laughed,
"Yes, having nice hand writing is totally way better than mad pranking skills." He said, "And if I do say so myself, I'm not so bad either." Lily's face grew sombre.
She touched her head subconsciously,
"Well, watch where you stage your pranks next time." Maggie said sensing Lily's inability to come up with a comeback herself. Professor Marshall captured their attention then with the actual lesson. Lily sat avidly taking notes at an alarming rate while the others struggled through what he was saying. At the end of that hour Lily had filled two and a half pages, Maggie close behind with almost two, Mary at one and a half and James and Sirius at a half page each. They were dismissed with the homework of actually producing light for the next lesson. Leaving Lily with virtually nothing to do, she had already managed to use lumos once or twice for reading under the covers, she had found it in the standard book of spells volume one.
There next class was potions, they had a double lesson. It was one of Lily's favourite subjects so far, she was really good at it and Professor Slughorn loved her. He was really surprised to hear that she was actually a muggle-born and in no way related to any wizards or witches that she knows of. The three girls walked to potions together, Maggie and Lily took their places at their desks with Sirius and James.
"We're brewing a babbling beverage today, collect your ingredients, cauldrons and take out your equipment, I have put the recipe on the board and I will be handing back grades on your potions from the last class." Professor Slughorn said from his big arm chair behind his desk, "Begin." He gave them a fifteen minute start before he began telling them their grades.
"Did Petunia write you back yet?" Maggie asked Lily as she cut up her ingredients. Lily looked down, carefully finished cutting a pile of roots.
"Not yet. She says she hates me." Lily said the sadness evident in her voice, "But she has to talk to me some time, what about Christmas and summer holidays? She'll get over it and we'll be just how we used to in no time."
Maggie shrugged, "I guess you're right, you know her. Maybe the letters just take longer from muggle post rooms."
"Post offices." Lily corrected her. She'd been doing that a lot lately, there were a lot more wizard born students than muggle born and wizards never really had the facts straight about muggles anyway. It's like someone made it all up the things she'd heard. Toasters are a weapon of mass destruction, cars were driven only by children of five or lower. She was pretty sure the girl who told her that had just made it up on the spot.
"Who's Petunia?" Sirius asked, Lily looked at him, her eyes narrowed,
"When did I invite you into this conversation?" Lily asked. James clicked his tongue.
"Temper, temper Evans." He said. Lily scowled at him.
"Appearances Potter." She said eyeing his hair. His hands messed it up again and he smirked at her,
"Look who's talking Evans, I guess what they say about red heads is true." He said, Lily's eyebrows knitted together.
"What do they say about redheads?" She asked.
"They have a temper to match their hair and nothing between their ears." He said, Lily's face went red and fire could be seen dancing in her bright green eyes. The thing is the fire was actually dancing on the desk between the two of them and James having left his fire on had set Lily's textbook on fire. Slughorn had pointed his wand at the fire and said, "Aguamenti." A jet of water extinguished the flames.
"Miss Evans, I am surprised at you, Mr Potter, not so surprised." Professor Slughorn said, "Detention tonight 7 sharp. Both of you." Before Lily could argue the class ended. Lily poured a sample of her potion into the vial and cleaned up her belongings. She left for transfiguration. Both Mary and Maggie thought it was terribly unfair. Lily decided that day. She had never particularly liked James Potter but now she hated him.
By the end of the day Lily was absolutely seething she'd been thinking about what happened and how she'd have to give up her nice relaxing Monday evening of finishing what little homework she had and then sit and read her favourite book 'Pride & Prejudice' and do absolutely nothing, that was the plan she had for the evening.