Tamblin seemed to be the very last Hogwarts student to arrive for the feast. He saw Lisa at the Ravenclaw table but she didn't seem to notice him. Looking over at the Hufflepuff table he could see Cascata wave at him tentatively. He wondered if he should feel guilty. Probably, he thought, although he wasn't exactly sure for what, maybe just for enjoying that moment upstairs.
He found a space at the Ravenclaw table and ate sparingly. He was feeling conflicted on too many levels to have much appetite. It seemed most of the students were more eager to get on with the selection of the champions, rather than eat. Tamblin saw the cup had been brought into the great hall and placed before the teacher's table. Throughout the meal he found his gaze wandering over to Lisa but she remained oblivious of him. What that meant he had no idea. Over the last few years he had had to resign himself to the knowledge that while he was smart and quite capable in a variety of scholastic capacities he did not have the knack for understanding people. They were too fidgety. They never seemed to fit into neat categories. It sort of annoyed him.
"I bet she's good at it, but you really shouldn't have kissed her."
Tamblin coughed on the pumpkin juice he had been drinking, spraying it everywhere. The speaker was a girl sitting next to Tamblin. He'd seen her around the Ravenclaw common room before but never spoken to her. She always looked rather stunned, like life was something she was utterly incapable of dealing with. She had the most atrocious taste in accessories. Currently she was wearing some sort of bangle that appeared to be made of a cord on which had been threaded a collection of various knick knacks, pieces popcorn, broken glass, and what looked like a squirrel skull. She had a set of earrings, one of which looked like a beaver and the other a cord of wood. When she turned her head fast enough the beaver was able to catch sight of the wood and would frantically wave its limbs trying to get to it. One side of her collar was inadvertently turned up while the other lay appropriately flat.
Tamblin hissed at her, "What do you mean?"
She spoke in a normal talking voice. Fortunately everybody else seemed to take for granted that she would just babble about things and paid her no mind.
"People get good at things when they do them a lot. Some get worse, though. Is she bad at kissing? I've never kissed her. I wonder if she'd get worse if she kissed me?"
"You saw it?"
The girl helped herself to some more potatoes.
"Sure. I see it a lot. But it's not what I'd expect. Why do you suppose she kisses the ones she can't have? Seems odd to me." She got a very thoughtful look on her face. "No, I wouldn't kiss someone just cause I couldn't, cause that would mean I could, so then I wouldn't have had a reason to kiss them in the first place. The whole thing is very strange. You kiss strange girls."
She stopped and looked at him very seriously.
"Don't get any ideas," she said and went back to her food.
Tamblin gaped at her. Somehow his day had managed to get even more bizarre.