Chapter 48

It's almost strange how fast February passes. Maybe it's the fact that it's a short month that it seems to go quicker. Maybe not. March was going to be a busy time for everyone it seemed. Gryffindor tower was abuzz with conversations.

One of the first things people were talking about was the upcoming match with the Hufflepuff team. The Gryffindors would be taking them on towards the end of the month on the twenty-second.

The Hufflepuff team had had a good start to the season. Their captain had left at the end of last year and their new captain was the best they had had in a long time. Not that the team would badmouth the ex-captain after all it had been Aaron Scott and to say anything bad about him would be to put either Alice or Frank in a foul mood. But nobody could deny that Pullman had brought their game up.

Jonathon Pullman, known by his friends as Jack, was one of the best Quidditch players in the school. He could quite well have fitted in with the Gryffindors with his talent but the sorting hat had had other ideas. Rumours flew around the school that he had already been approached by the Arrows and that he would be joining them when he finished school.

The Gryffindors however were confident. The Hufflepuff new seeker Adam Tomlinson was good but not as good as Frank. Plus they had one good Chaser, Cast and Book were still the same players they had always been. As for Smart and Beetle their Beaters, well their aim had improved but they were still slow and so the Gryffindors if flying fast could out pace them. Then there was Head their Keeper. He was good but not as good as Sirius and more prone to let the goals in.

In all the Gryffindors were quietly confident. Yes the Hufflepuff team had beaten Ravenclaw but they were having problems now that Billy Morgan had left and Christmas who was now their captain was having a hard time with authority especially over the older players Summers and Harris.

The Gryffindors were sure that if they could beat the Slytherins who were the second best team in the school they should have no problems in that game. However for most of the players the game wasn't the only thing they were having to cope with.

For James, Sirius, Amanda and Branwen they were faced with the realisation that the OWLs were only two months away, in nine weeks to be exact that was sixty-three days. They were beginning to panic a little. For the first time James and Sirius were seen to openly be studying. The Gryffindor common room was becoming a morgue.

The fourth years down didn't quite understand why they were not allowed to make a noise in the common room. They knew however that they had to be silent unless they wanted to hang from the ceiling for twenty minutes courtesy of Amanda. Far worse was when they were caught by Lily or Remus who would happily take a point from them or send them to detention for the disruption.

With the Gryffindors treading on eggshells around the fifth years they almost seemed to forget that the seventh years were just as bad. Andi had reminded some second year who was running around the common room of some chains in Pringle's office that she would happily borrow to hang him from the ceiling all night.

Both fifth and seventh years alike were counting down the days until their exams. Sixty-three days seems like a long time, even nine weeks does but when they were reminded that it was only two months then it seemed worse. The room was always full of paper and books that somebody was studying from.

While the exams kept five of the team members busy (after all Ted was a seventh year) Frank too was preoccupied. He and Joe were now receiving Apparition lessons. They had started at the beginning of February and would last twelve weeks. Both boys were hoping to take the test in May when the exams for the seventh and fifth years were taking place.

This meant that for two hours every Saturday they were down in the Great Hall trying to move across the room with the rest of the sixth years. Frank had to admit it wasn't as time consuming as the revision for the others but it was tiring and at the end of the day he just wanted to lie down and sleep.

However there was something else that was to occur during March that Frank knew almost nothing about. It would be his seventeenth birthday on the eleventh and that was an important mile stone in the wizarding world. After all it was on the seventeenth birthday that you came of age, would be an adult in the eyes of the wizarding world.

What Frank was unaware of was the party preparations going on. With the exams so close he had assumed that it would be a quiet affair. But the team had decided that you only turn seventeen once and that Frank should be allowed to celebrate just as they had with Joe. So after convincing the entire house that a party would be good they got to work on organising it.

However what nobody knew was that March was going to become a month of arguments. A month where friends turned on friends and relationships would be stretched to their limits. For while everyone knew that the Gryffindors were going to go up against the Hufflepuffs nobody knew that some of them were going to be going against each other and the Slytherins.

Yes time was passing quickly for everyone. Yet at the crucial part where they wanted it to pass so that they could try and move on, it wouldn't. That's the funny thing about time see it has a way of manipulating itself so that the bad things in your life are drawn out and the good fly by.