A few days later we were all hanging around the common room in the afternoon when Ron absently mentioned, "I found a mirror that shows the future."
"Oh?" asked Percy, who was sitting across from me by the fire, while we were both reading. The other Weasleys were put out that we'd been regularly snagging the most comfortable armchairs in the room over the holidays, by right of seniority.
Ron had been playing exploding snap with the twins, and probably forgot Percy was in the room, but admitted, "Yeah. In an empty classroom near the library." What he probably wasn't mentioning was that he'd found it sneaking around invisible after curfew. At this point, even Percy had to realize that his three little brothers had barely spent any time in their beds since Christmas morning.
"Well, let's see it," Fred insisted, bored with the magical card game but not bored enough to switch to chess. The magical world really had a very limited number of ways to waste time on a cold December day.
Even Percy seemed to be bored and so we all trooped after Ron down to the fourth floor, where he oriented himself by a particularly tall suit of armor and then led the way through a door into one of the abundant empty classrooms around the school. As he'd explained, a large, ornate mirror dominated a room where all the desks and chairs had been pushed to the walls and covered with cloth tarps.
"You have to stand in front of it like this," Ron said, taking a position immediately before the mirror. "Can you see? I'm head boy and quidditch captain!"
I read the inscription along the top of the mirror, then, quickly figuring out the nonsense was meant to be mirror-writing, read it backwards and laughed at Ron's pronouncement. "Quidditch captain I can see," I admitted, "but you're going to have to put in way more effort if you want to be head boy."
Percy didn't seem to have immediately jumped to reading it backward like I did, but explained, "I think this is the Mirror of Erised. I read about it. It reflects your… desire, I think?"
"I show not your face, but your heart's desire," I said, tracing the inscription backward with my finger so the other boys would get it.
The twins guffawed as Ron's face fell. "So it doesn't tell the future?"
Percy shrugged, "Like Harry said, if you want to be head boy, you need to put in a lot more effort. But mother will be pleased to learn that your heart's desire is academic excellence."
"Our turn!" sang the twins, in unison, picking up Ron and moving him aside so they could alternate looking into the mirror and whispering to each other what they saw.
"What do you see?" asked Ron.
"Oh, we're also definitely head boy," Fred lied, without even trying to sound honest.
"Both of us. How could they pick between such paragons of excellence?" elaborated George.
"Percy's turn!" Fred insisted, and they shoved him in front of the mirror.
"Youngest Minister ever, right?" George asked.
"Actually, no," Percy admitted. To the shocked looks of his brothers, he explained, "It shows me at the headmaster's desk, nearly as old as Dumbledore, with all kinds of awards for discoveries around me."
The brothers actually nodded at that, and Ron said, "You'd make a good headmaster, Perce."
Seemingly shocked that the twins weren't making fun of him, Percy just stepped aside and said, "Harry?"
Not as thrilled about the idea as the others, I couldn't really excuse myself. Standing in front of the mirror, it wasn't long before figures started to materialize within. To either side of me, my father, as I remembered him from childhood, and my mother as I imagined her from the photos I'd seen of her. Behind us, Justin and Dawlish appeared, and my mother spun around and blasted them away with a series of curses and hexes. My father briefly walked off frame, only to return with Elaine as she'd looked before the betrayal, tears in her eyes as she mouthed what looked like sincere apologies for what she'd done to me.
Wiping away a tear and vowing never to look into this heartbreaking artifact again, I coughed out, "Oh, hey, I'm head boy, too."