Dear Misunderstood,

It's not even the end of the first day back at school and already I've found trouble. It's the same jerk I've been telling you about. Well, complaining is probably more like it, but I can't help it, he's such a slimy GIT! He didn't even have the decency to wait until school had officially started to resume the war we'd been fighting since the first year we laid eyes on each other. No, he just had to barge in and snatch the letter you had sent me just this morning, and actually read it! MY personal letter! He just swiped it from my hands while I was in the middle of reading it! Now he knows we both practiced magic over the summer! I'm so sorry he learned about you, but hopefully he won't be able to figure out who you really are since we don't use our real names in these letters! If he does figure it out we might just find ourselves on the train home faster than we could say "crap!"

LOL. Okay, I'll stop complaining now, what's done is done and there's nothing we can do to change that.

Hee hee...Besides, I think I got my revenge for the stunt he pulled on the train today...Maybe we won't have to worry about his threats for right now...He's going to have a lot more to worry about than blackmailing me with that letter!

Speaking of which, no my parents did not find out about my little magic spell...They were to busy trying to keep the house in one piece from the onslaught of of Nathan, Adam, and James enjoying their holiday with bag after bag of candy for days on end. Mom just doesn't understand how three little kids could find and consume ALL the candy in the secrete candy stash no matter how well she hides it. She swears there either must be magic involved, or it's an inside job. Dad is currently under suspicion but so far, he hasn't cracked.

Needless to say with all the commotion going on my parents haven't noticed a thing, and for that I am grateful. I don't think I could have made it through the summer without being sent to Azkaban for three counts of first degree murder. Maybe they'd let me go if I pleaded insanity...Because surely a whole summer with my younger siblings would drive ANYONE crazy.

Sorry about your place though, at least you're back at Hogwarts with your friends! I know I'm happy to be back!

Well, I guess that's it for this letter, it's nearly two in the morning already! I'll post this in the morning before breakfast (hopefully) so I can make it through my first actual day back fueled with the hope of getting a response.

Your friend,

Graceful.

Grace put down her pen and began to reread the letter, looking to see if there was anything she left out. She smiled just a little bit as she looked at her signature at the end. Though she was supposed to make up a pen name, nothing she had thought of really fit, so she ended up just adding "ful" to the end of her name and hopefully no one would suspect that it was really Grace Winters. Lame, but really, Grace couldn't care less. She was sitting on her bed in Gryffindor tower, propped up with pillows, cozy warm with her covers to her waist and a blanket around her shoulders. Looking at the letter she knew there was a lot she had left out. Ranging from the unexpected (and of course, unwanted) kiss, to her sweet revenge on Malfoy afterwards, she just couldn't bring yourself to share that (especially the kiss) with anyone else. Of course the Trio knew about the Marker Incident with Malfoy, but they didn't know the full story, and frankly, she wanted it to stay that way!

Reflecting on her confrontation with Malfoy she couldn't help but feel a twinge of guilt. Maybe, just maybe she overdid it just a little bit.

Grace growled in irritation. Why did her conscience have to make an appearance NOW of all times? She didn't owe Malfoy anything, he was the one that was pure evil plain and simple. She tried to convince herself to just let it go, to ignore her rather loud guilty conscience.

The minutes ticked by as Grace tried to reassure herself.

One minute...Two minutes...Three minutes...Four—

"Ugh, FINE!" She exhaled angrily, flinging off her warm covers to rummage through her trunk at the end of her bed.

Muttering darkly she found what she was looking for:

Madame Marker's Magic Eraser, a bit of spare parchment and a bit of string. Tearing off a small piece of parchment paper Grace marched angrily back to her bed and with a quill and some ink from her bedside table drawer she wrote this:

Here you are you slimy git. I guess I'll fix you after all.

Don't bother sending it back because knowing you,

you'd probably curse it or something.

Maybe if you weren't such a pain in the arse you wouldn't have had this problem to begin with.

Consider us even.

Wrapping the parchment around the pen and tying it, she quietly snuck over to Lilly Pond's (I'm not even kidding, her parents were SO cruel) bedside table where her owl Jade sat blinking in her cage. Figures Lily would forget to let her owl out. It was good for her though, Grace didn't think she should test her luck by wandering the corridors so late at night on her first day back in the castle!

Opening the cage she held out her arm for Jade to hop onto. Explaining in hushed tones to the bird what she wanted, Grace tied the note and marker to her leg, writing a last minute "Draco Malfoy, Slytherin" on the outside just in case the bird got confused. Opening the window she watched Jade soar away into the darkness.

Still grumbling a little about gits like Malfoy Grace got back into bed, ready to tuck in for the night.

As an after thought, she grabbed her letter to her pen pal and wrote:

PS: My conscience got the better of me so I guess you won't see what I did to Malfoy. Still, hopefully he'll have learned his lesson and will keep his big mouth shut about the letter.

Hopefully...

With a jaw-cracking yawn Grace folded up her letter and put it away, extinguishing her light when she was done.

She may not have ended the day the way she would have liked, but at least her stupid conscience was finally keeping its mouth shut.

(A/N: Sorry about not updating in forever, I've been super busy with school!! And I know the Grace's pen pal has a LAME pen name, but honestly I couldn't think of anything better!!!

And if you have any ideas for Grace's pen name, please share!