Note: Looks like another disclaimer is needed. I don't own A Series of Unfortunate Events, which I love dearly and have tried my best to parody in this chapter.

Also, if you like Beauty and the Beast, Lily/Snape, and musical numbers, you should check out my newest story titled "Beauty and the Grease."

Chapter Thirty-Seven
Severus Snicket

"Sirius, are you sure you're teaching your subject correctly?" the newly resorted Slytherin named Harry asked his new potions professor.

Sirius dropped an entire carton of eggs into his cauldron, followed by a pair of purple socks. "Harry, are you sure you're teaching your subject correctly?"

"This seems horribly familiar," muttered Harry, thinking back to a disastrous class that involved Remus painting him with so-called "dark art."

"I think I'm getting the hang of this, professor!" said Goyle, dumping a pile of freshly grated gouda cheese into his cauldron. "This stuff should work magic on Snape's hair!"

"That's what this lesson is about?" demanded Draco, staring down at the raw fish he had dropped into his cauldron. "We're creating a treatment for Snape's hair?"

"Well of course, Draco," said Sirius. He was stirring his own cauldron recklessly, not caring that gigantic drops of potion were spilling out and wetting the papers piled on his desk. "How else are we supposed to help Snivellus fix that greasy hair of his? That's a grease antidote you're cooking up!"

"It's tasty," said Crabbe. He had already drunk half the contents of his cauldron.

Harry looked at him worriedly. "Crabbe, I don't think you should be drinking that."

"Nonsense, Harry!" Sirius chided him. "A grease antidote can also be a delicious beverage on cool afternoons!"

"I think you're just making that up, Sirius. And this can't be a real grease antidote! It calls for a quarter pound of lard and three cups of oil!"

Sirius wagged a finger at him. "Who's the teacher here, Harry? The professor knows best!"

Crabbe took another sip from his cauldron. Moments later, he was running to the nearest garbage can to be sick. Sirius didn't seem to notice.

"All right, class," said Sirius. "Now it's not a proper potion until the whole thing goes—"

BOOM!

"That's the spirit, kids!"

"I've had enough," said Harry, sliding out of his chair. "I'm leaving."

"Me too," Draco decided, following Harry out of the classroom.

"Malfoy, what do you think you're doing?"

Draco's lower lip trembled. "Nothing. Just walking behind you."

"Well stop it!"

"B-but, don't you want to be friends now?"

"We've been rivals since we were eleven, Malfoy. What on earth makes you think we would be friends?"

"Well, you know… I'm a Slytherin and you're a Slytherin… so naturally it makes sense for us to hang out, right? Maybe grab some butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks together, stay up late trading gossipy stories about the Gryffindors, cheer each other on at Quidditch matches. That sort of thing." Draco dug something shiny out of his pocket. "Look! I even had my father send me some hand-crafted friendship bracelets!"

Harry took one of the bracelets and read the engraving. "Draco and Harry: Besty Best Friends For Ever and Ever and Ever." Harry was so touched that his eyes immediately welled up with tears. "This is so beautiful. Nobody has ever given me something like this before!"

"So we're friends?"

"Sure, buddy! Best friends for all eternity!"

And Harry and Draco shared a heartfelt friendship hug in the middle of the corridor. Suddenly Blaise came rushing into the castle and skidded to a halt in front of his two fellow Slytherins. A spider was clinging to his hair.

Blaise popped the spider into his mouth and ate it. "Yum. It seems I've inherited a taste for spiders from my father, Crookshanks!"

"Crookshanks?" sputtered Harry. "As in Crookshanks the cat?"

"He's actually been an unregistered Animagus the entire time! That's what I learned from the spiders just now."

"Well Harry and I have got important friendship stuff to do," said Draco. "So if you'll excuse us—"

"Wait!" Blaise implored, falling to his knees. "I need your help! I followed the spiders, hoping to discover my true gender, but all they could give me was a mysterious clue. They said that if I look into the Pensieve of Severus Snape and say the word lederhosen, all will be revealed!"

"I know where to find Snape's Pensieve," Harry confessed.

"Then take me there. My gender depends upon it!"

And so Harry and Draco, wearing their matching friendship bracelets, led the way to the Pensieve while Blaise followed behind. At last Harry stood before Snape's Pensieve, tapped its surface with his wand, and said, "Lederhosen!"

The surface of the Pensieve swirled, but it did not reveal a memory. Instead it changed several colors and spat something out: something rectangular that flapped loudly as it hit the floor of the office.

Harry bent to pick it up. "It's a book!"

"What does it say?" asked Blaise. "Is my gender written on it?"

Harry looked at the title. "It's called A Series of Unfortunate School Years."

As the three Slytherins flipped the book open, they soon discovered that the table of contents was just as unfortunate as the title. The book contained all sorts of woeful subjects, with names like The Sinister Stone, The Catastrophic Chamber, The Predatory Prisoner, The Ghastly Goblet, and The Odious Order. Harry, Draco, and Blaise bent their heads over the first chapter and began to read…

To Lily—
I am cold in my dungeon,
while you are cold in your grave.

CHAPTER ONE

If you are interested in reading stories about brave, well-read, and talented orphans, you would be better off reading some other trash. In this book, not only is the orphan an egotistical twit of average intelligence, he has a complete disregard for rules and a great disrespect for his elders. This is because the orphan's last name was Potter—a word which here means, "a surname belonging to the arrogant git who took the woman I loved." The Potter boy was neither intelligent, charming, nor resourceful, and looked exactly like his father, which meant he had the most unpleasant facial features imaginable—aside from his green eyes. Despite all his unfortunate qualities, the Potter boy, whose name was Harry, always managed to squeeze through the tightest of situations with an extraordinary amount of luck. I often wish it were otherwise, but that is how the story goes.

The story of Harry Potter, Hogwarts' new celebrity—a word which means, "self-centered, attention-seeking little brat, just like his father—" begins in a shack on a lonely island in the middle of a storm. Harry was staying in the shack with his awful Muggle relatives for reasons I haven't bothered to research. The boy, who was a minute away from turning eleven, had absolutely no talents to speak of (aside from talents in rule-breaking and outright insolence), otherwise he might have been doing something useful with his time, like reading a book or inventing something. Instead, he lay on the floor of the shack waiting for his eleventh birthday to arrive.

It arrived with a tremendous BOOM, a word which hopefully requires no explanation.

An enormous man entered the shack. His name was Hagrid. He produced a letter from his pocket and said, "Yer a wizard, Harry." He paused and added, "A wizard is a fellow who can do magic—"

"I know what the word wizard means," said Harry, like an obnoxious know-it-all.

"Oh," said Hagrid. He then turned to a child named Blaise Zabini and whispered, "Yer a girl, Blaise."

Regretfully, it is my bitter duty to record the unpleasant events that befell the Potter brat, but you don't have to read any further about this insolent boy. In fact, I often find myself thinking of him as little as possible, and I advise that you do the same. Instead, I sometimes dwell on twenty feet of parchment written by the woman I loved on why she had to end our friendship, and whenever I think of this parchment I lock myself in my office and weep for hours.

I can't imagine why anyone would want to torment themselves any further with this book, but if you still insist on reading this odious narration, I will continue to report that after he received his Hogwarts letter, Harry was taken to Diagon Alley to purchase his school things with the enormous fortune his parents left him. After purchasing tedious things like spellbooks, an owl, and a wand—which is a slender wooden stick that Harry has often misused without proper punishment—he had his first run-in with a very intelligent, charming, and resourceful boy named Draco Malfoy.

"Hello," said Draco, as the two boys were being fitted for their school robes. "Hogwarts too?"

Harry looked blankly back at him.

"Hogwarts," Draco explained politely, "is a magical school that—"

"I know what Hogwarts means," Harry said in a rude voice.

Just outside the robe shop, Hagrid bent down to a child named Blaise Zabini and murmured, "Yer a boy, Blaise."

Instead of becoming friends with the intelligent, charming, and resourceful boy named Draco Malfoy, like he should have done, Harry boarded the train and picked up two most dreadful associates: a redhead with a long nose and a girl with two oversized front teeth. There were many others who rallied around the Potter boy, but they are too horrible to describe. As soon as he arrived at Hogwarts school, Harry was placed in Gryffindor, the worst house in the castle, and made to perform spells and assignments all day long that were far beyond the reach of his scanty intellect. Worst of all was the man placed in charge of his Defense Against the Dark Arts education. This man had no visible eyebrows, since his forehead was obscured by a purple turban, and his eyes were often fearful like somebody was telling a joke at his expense. His name was Professor Quirrell.

Harry stepped into the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom with his two cohorts—a word which here means, "irritating children cursed with freckles and bushy hair who insisted on hanging around the Potter boy." Professor Quirrell stepped forward to greet them, but instead of stuttering at the children, he turned around and slowly unwrapped the turban covering his head.

Another face was on the back of Quirrell's head, staring at the three students through slitted eyes. "Hello, hello, hello," he said in a high, cold voice—

"—I can't read any more of this garbage," Harry declared, shutting the book.

"Personally, I thought the author was a fairly excellent writer," said Draco.

Blaise snatched away the copy of A Series of Unfortunate School Years and began to furiously flip through the pages. "I can't believe this!" he cried. "This book was supposed to reveal my true gender!"

"I thought it did," said Harry.

"No, all it did was make everything more muddled. In the book, Hagrid tells me I'm a girl, but then he also tells me I'm a boy. Which one am I supposed to believe?"

"Maybe the author is just trying to trick you?" Draco suggested. "And there's actually a major plot twist later on?"

"Maybe you're right!" Blaise spent several minutes skimming through the book, hoping to find the clue that the spiders had promised him, and eventually dropped the novel on the floor with a sigh. "It's useless. This book doesn't explain anything. The narrator keeps dropping all these hints about a secret organization called The Order of the Phoenix that he's apparently involved in. And the main characters keep getting shuffled around from one Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher to another, year after year. And the villain, called You-Know-Who, is always trying to murder Harry—"

"—in order to lay hands on his enormous fortune?" Draco guessed.

"No," said Blaise. "I think it has something to do with a prophecy. And throughout the whole book, nobody ever confirms what my real gender is! Those spiders lied to me!"

"Well you know what they say, Blaise," said Harry. "Never trust a spider."

"The most unreliable bugs of them all," Draco agreed. He paused to admire his shiny friendship bracelet. "Want to have a slumber party in the Slytherin boys' dorm? We can eat popcorn and read the diary I stole from Hermione Granger!"

"Sure thing, best buddy!" said Harry.

"I guess I'll join in too," Blaise said with a sigh, "before I have second thoughts and decide to be a girl for the evening."

And the three Slytherin boys walked away from Snape's office, leaving A Series of Unfortunate School Years lying open on the floor where Blaise had left it. If Blaise had been inspecting the book more closely, he would have noticed that a page from the section titled "The Perilous Prince" had gotten torn. Right there on the ripped page was the incomplete remainder of the most important sentence in the entire book:

"Blaise," said Hagrid, very seriously. "Yer a —