Ten
Legilimency would have to wait. Eglantine was scheduled for all the normal classes—Defense Against the Dark Arts, Charms with the Gryffindors, Potions with the Slytherins, History of Magic, and Transfiguration. She was taking, of course, Apparation, since she'd be seventeen in October—and, by default, so would everybody except (thank Merlin) Peter, who wasn't seventeen until July. And Alchemy, and—though she hardly needed it—Muggle Studies. She actually couldn't stand Ursus Pulsifer, the Muggle Studies professor. He reeked of feet. Sometimes she fantasized about stealing his job, but then she'd have to work for Dumbledore.
Potions was first. Lovely—a room that was half full of people who wanted to hex her, half-full of people who didn't care what the other half did, and then Severus, who just sort of hovered between the halves, looking disapproving. It was odd, she thought, that she should finally begin to be able to stand him now that he wasn't friends with Lily. Despite knowing why. She didn't really delve into the details, but she felt like she could finally relate to Severus.
The Slytherins didn't care for the fact that Slughorn was fond of Eglantine—almost over-fond, really. It bordered on creepy. Lily had said that he was only a bit grabby with her hair, but Eglantine felt that Slughorn was a sort of insidious hovering spy, always watching people for signs of future fame, his beady little eyes making little wet squick sounds when he blinked. Was there a potion for that? Chronic eye goop? Thinking about it made her wrinkle her nose.
"Sorry, is the smell getting to you? Oh, God. I think I've added too much asphodel." Next to her, Stephen MacMillan was furiously stirring his Draught of Living Death potion—required, as she'd heard from Cam, for all sixth years who wanted to go on to NEWT level—which had turned an inky blue.
"Hm? Oh, no. Sorry. I was just thinking about—something." She sniffed. "Now that you mention it, that stuff reeks. What did you do, Steve?"
"I—maybe it's not the asphodel?"
Eglantine rolled her eyes and sighed. "Tell me exactly what you did."
"Well, I cut up the beans, and I put them—"
"Steve! What the hell were you thinking? You could've blown us all up!"
"Hhh—"
Professor Slughorn swept over, his robes billowing and knocking over one of Avery's vials. "What seems to be the trouble?" He wrinkled his squashy nose. "Phew. Bit foul, what?"
"Steve put his beans in first. Then the asphodel."
Slughorn's eyebrows disappeared beneath his "hair." (Who did he think he was fooling? He was a wizard, and yet he thought people would be fooled by a halfhearted rug that seemed to be made of donkey mane.) "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Oh dear, Mr. MacMillan. I do suggest pouring out that cauldron and adding a pinch of baby's breath to that water as it goes down the drain. Wouldn't want to explode the pipes!"
"Oh. I—I didn't know she was serious, Professor."
"Of course she is! A nice, honest girl like Miss Bertrand wouldn't lie about an explosive potion! Now, get to the sink, boy! Tidy up!"
Nice, honest girl. She liked to think she was nice—even though she wasn't entirely sure of this—but she really didn't know about honest. Take her performance in Potions, for example. All she'd ever done was position herself strategically. She was diagonally behind Severus, looking up briefly now and then to see what he was doing. She knew how to do everything, naturally. But she'd noticed early on that his potions always seemed to be just a touch better, the way Julia Child's boeuf bourguignon would always be better than anybody else's. He took extra care with the ingredients, doing things with them that nobody else—rushing just to get through it and not fuck up too badly—seemed to cotton onto.
He was crushing the beans under his knife, scribbling something in the margins of the potions book. It was hard not to think of it as a cookbook. Eglantine copied him. She copied the way he stirred his potion. She figured that by now he had to notice, though that one time he'd been out of class (something about a tree; she hadn't really cared), she'd done almost as well without him. He never called her on it, and she never took undue credit. She supposed it was all down to Lily. If she hadn't ever become close to Lily, she would've suffered the same fate as Steve, who had spent an entire month in the dungeon with Slughorn shredding roots because he'd looked over Severus's shoulder at an inopportune moment.
The arrangement suited her. The less attention she actually had to pay to Potions, the more time she could reserve for thinking. The tiny amount of information she had about Crevan's death competed against rather halfhearted daydreams about Remus for her attention.
Something about him did seem beige, now, where before he had been almost tantalizing. He seemed to have lost something: humor, sensitivity, whatever way about him he formerly had. But he was her standby, her constant. When things in a room got too boring, or when things in life got too complicated, there he was, ordinary, a blank canvas for her to paint upon in her mind. She could make him secretly brooding and artistic; she could make him secretly daring and fierce; she could make him such a good kisser she forgot her own name.
The class went on stirring. The clock drew nearer to nine-thirty, and Slughorn told them all to abandon their ladles. He went around examining each potion (and Steve's empty cauldron), unsurprisingly declaring Severus's the best, and Eglantine's the next-best, as usual. And also as usual, Slughorn was rather sparing in his praise of Severus, and lavish in his praise of Eglantine. It was a touch excessive, really, though Eglantine suspected it had nothing to do with any personal attractions of hers—Slughorn just didn't seem the type to care about a young girl's personal attractions, in her opinion—and everything to do with her successful (if absent) journalist parents and her much-lauded older brothers, the fallen hero and the Quidditch king. Even if he didn't see signs of future eminence in Eglantine, he knew they were there in her family.
The class filed out into the hall, the torches crackling on the wall, dispersing. Severus scurried off rather quickly in the direction of the North Tower. Eglantine felt a poke between her shoulder blades and spun around.
Mulciber, Wilkes, and the dopey-looking Goyle stood behind her. Goyle's podgy arms were crossed, and his eyebrow had descended over his beetle-black eyes.
"Nobody's going to stop us now," Goyle said thickly. It was, Eglantine thought, probably the way he said everything, when he could actually encourage his synapses to fire up and create something to say in the first place.
"They aren't? What makes you think I'm not?"
Goyle just snorted—Eglantine, without even beginning in her Legilimency studies, could figure out what would come next. "Because you're a girl."
"And you're one small step up from a mountain troll. Explain to me how that gives you any sort of tactical advantage."
He looked confused for a moment. Wilkes nudged him. "I don't hafta explain nothing to you."
She rolled her eyes. "All right, then. Show me what you're working with. Just you. No help."
"Vespertilio Mucosi!" Goyle managed to stammer out a fairly decent-looking Bat-Bogey Hex, but rather than hitting Eglantine, it hit the gargoyle at the base of the stairs.
"Chirolutris!"
A glittering turquoise flash exploded over Goyle's hands. Mulciber and Wilkes looked back and forth between the two of them, puzzled. Then Goyle began to clap. His hands joined—rather endearingly, given that he was a slightly antagonistic, goofy-looking lout—beneath his chin, making movements as if he were removing bivalves from their shells, and then he began clapping again.
"Ebullopygia!"
A swarm of red bubbles gathered around Goyle's hindquarters. Beneath his robes appeared a sphere like a beach ball where his bottom had been. Wilkes snorted. Before Goyle knew what was happening, both of his allies were giggling, slapping his bottom, which bounced around like a beach ball.
He kept clapping.
"Now, now, break up the—" Slughorn emerged from the door, arms spread. He saw Goyle's rear end. "What is the—what is the meaning of—how extraordinary. Is this—" he seemed to be suppressing a smirk "—Eglantine, this was you, wasn't it?"
"It was, Professor."
"Excellent work. Interesting choice." He cleared his throat. "But—er—I must give you detention, Miss Bertrand, for dueling in the corridors."
"I was hardly dueling, Professor. And what about them?"
Slughorn bit his lip. "Well…whether owing to your, er, hexing prowess, Miss Bertrand, or rather to, er, Mr. Goyle's lack therof…he doesn't seem to have actually hit you with anything."
Eglantine couldn't deny that. Goyle had been lucky that his wand hadn't backfired. That was probably a great improvement.
Goyle snickered, not seeming to notice that peals of mirth were still intermittently escaping from Mulciber and Wilkes, and that Wilkes was now bouncing a quill off of his bottom.
"He's very kindly calling you a thicko, Goyle," Eglantine snapped. "He's saying that if you weren't such a useless git, you might actually have been worth punishing. You can't even misbehave correctly."
"You deserve detention," pouted Goyle. "You cost my brother his job!"
Eglantine rolled her eyes. "Again with the job. It's not my fault that your entire family is inept."
"You tricked him!"
"I did no such thing—"
"Students! Students," said Slughorn, using the unctuously benevolent voice Eglantine hated, the one he reserved for times in which he wanted to stand as a Figure of Authority and Wisdom. "Please don't quarrel. Haven't you got classes to get to?"
Eglantine was late for History of Magic, which she knew perfectly well. She'd brought her Legilimency book with her, since without it she was likely to fall asleep.
"I hardly think it matters on Goyle's end, Professor. You don't need classes in order to become a Death Eater stooge. Which is all any of these three will ever be."
"That's a serious accusation, Miss Bertrand—"
"The truth is always serious, Professor. You were right. I'm late. See you after classes."