Year 1: Studious Success

Chapter 9: May 2018

With exams approaching, Rose felt herself growing more and more excited with each passing day. Her mother had told her all about the end-of-year exams, how exhilarating they were and how fun it was to prepare. Rose had been looking forward to exams for a while, and with the onset of May, she could finally start a full revision.

"Rose, we haven't even finished learning new material yet," Nicole pointed out to her one day in their dorm. "Why are you revising material from September?"

"It's never too early to start revising," Rose insisted. "And if I wait until we finish this last unit, I won't have enough time to go over everything."

The only other person who understood how important it was to study and study early was Albus. Unfortunately, with Albus so focused on Hayley all the time, Rose was afraid he was going to get distracted and forget to study, or leave things too late. So she decided to take it upon herself to devise a study schedule for the both of them, one that would keep them on track without getting too far ahead too quickly.

But in order to do that, Rose needed to know exactly when each of their exams was going to take place. And that information hadn't been released yet.

So, Rose made a trip to visit her Head of House and Deputy Headmaster, Professor Longbottom.

"Ah Rose, nice to see you," Professor Longbottom greeted her when she appeared in his office doorway. "What can I help you with today? Did you have a question about devil's snare?"

"No," Rose shook her head, trying not to scoff at the idea that she would have to come to see her teacher to ask a question about such a simple plant when she had a perfectly good textbook up in her dorm with all the information she could ever need. "I actually came because I was wondering if you had a copy of the first year exam schedule that I could take a peek at."

"The exam schedule?" Professor Longbottom frowned. "But exams are still a month away. That won't be finalized for another couple of weeks still."

"But I need to plan my revision!" Rose insisted. "How am I supposed to plan for something if I don't know when it's happening?"

"Well Rose, you know all the exams take place in the first two weeks of June," Professor Longbottom stated.

"I know," Rose agreed. "But if herbology is going to be in the first week of exams, for example, then I need to start revising for it sooner. And if it's in the second week, then I should be focusing on other subjects first. I need to plan my revision proportional to how much time I have to study for each subject. But I need the exam schedule to organize that."

"Rose, I think you're overthinking this," Professor Longbottom warned. "You're one of the top students in the class. You probably don't even need to revise."

Rose gasped. "Don't need to revise?" she balked. "Professor Longbottom!"

"I'm not saying revision isn't important," Professor Longbottom clarified. "Only that you know the material so well already that if you were to write the exams now, you'd be likely to get straight O's even without revision."

"I'd still prefer to do the revision," Rose insisted.

"That's perfectly reasonable," Professor Longbottom replied. "But I still don't have an exam schedule for you. You'll get it along with the rest of your year when it's ready. I'll be posting a copy of it on the noticeboard in the common room."

"But what am I supposed to do until then?" Rose demanded.

Professor Longbottom shrugged. "What everyone does, I suppose," he replied. "Just start revising what you can, and adjust later."

Rose didn't like it, but it was clear that she wasn't going to get what she wanted. Unless Professor Longbottom sat down right now and devised an exam schedule that minute, she was going to have to do as he suggested.

"What's got your wand in a knot?" Albus asked later in the common room as Rose began slamming books onto the table one next to the other.

"How am I supposed to plan my revision if I don't know what I'm planning for?" she demanded.

She had a copy of A Beginner's Guide to Transfiguration sitting next to a copy of The Standard Book of Spells: Grade 1 and didn't know which to open.

"What if I study transfiguration too early?" she asked. "What if I study it now, but then it's the last exam we write and by the time it comes around, I've already forgotten all the information?"

"You can always re-revise closer to the exam date," Albus suggested, having already committed to studying history of magic that day.

"Re-revise," Rose muttered, rolling her eyes. "So now you're suggesting I double my workload? Revise everything once now and again after the exam schedule comes out? That will only give me enough time to skim everything twice, but not to delve into the material."

"You already know the material," Albus frowned. "Isn't revision really about skimming and then delving into the bits you don't remember as well?"

"Maybe that's how they taught revision in the Potter house," Rose sniffed. "But my mother always said that if we weren't going over the material as in-depth as when we first learned it, then it wasn't proper revision."

"What are you so worried about?" Albus insisted. "You know you're going to do great. It's not like you're going to fail anything."

"That's not the point though," Rose claimed. "It's not about passing, it's about doing my best."

"I think you've covered that," Albus said, a little mockingly. "But you need to relax a bit too, you know. You can't be this high-strung for the next month and a half. It'll kill you."

Something about Albus' words struck a nerve with Rose. She wasn't supposed to be high-strung. She wasn't supposed to be stressing out. She was supposed to be enjoying this time. Her mother had always talked about how much fun end-of-year revision was, how enjoyable taking the end-of-year exams was. But Rose wasn't having fun. Her muscles were tight and her head hurt from the millions of worries swirling around inside it. Something was wrong - she was doing this all wrong. But she didn't know how to fix it.

Over the next few days, Rose struggled to remember what had been so fun about learning all the material in the first place. Part of the joy had been about learning new things of course, but it had to have been more than that. But the more she slogged through her revision, the more stressed she felt. She wasn't discovering new information, she wasn't learning anything. She was memorizing information she already knew, staring at textbook pages she'd read already, re-writing notes she'd already taken. It wasn't fun, it was tedious.

Maybe she was studying the wrong way, Rose decided. Maybe there was a trick to revision that she was missing out on.

So Rose decided to talk to the one person at Hogwarts that she knew took revision as seriously as she did: her cousin, Molly.

Predictably, she found Molly in the library. She was with one of her Ravenclaw friends, Debbie, if Rose remembered correctly.

"Can I ask you a question?" Rose asked, sitting down with the two fourth years.

"Make it quick," Molly insisted. "I'm helping Debbie catch up. She has a lot to learn before exams come."

"Okay," Rose agreed. "It's just - well I was wondering. You like to revise right?"

"Of course," Molly frowned. "Why wouldn't I? If I want top grades, I have to revise."

"But you like to revise," Rose clarified. "You enjoy it?"

Molly shrugged. "I guess," she agreed. "Is that really the point though? I enjoy getting top marks. I enjoy getting straight O's. Revising is how I can make that happen."

"But what do you do when you revise?" Rose demanded. "What do you do to make it fun?"

"Fun?" Molly frowned. "What do you mean fun? It's not meant to be fun, it's meant to be effective."

"But my mother always talked about how fun revision time was," Rose said. "She looked forward to it every year."

Molly shook her head. "My father always said Aunt Hermione had great potential. But she got sidetracked. If she'd been more focused, she could have had some of the highest marks Hogwarts has ever seen. As it is, I've already surpassed her in terms of grades."

"Sidetracked?" Rose frowned. "You mean helping Uncle Harry and Uncle Ron save the world?"

"That," Molly nodded. "And simply in having friends that weren't as focused on school as she was. They dragged her down."

"They saved the world," Rose exclaimed, a little too loudly for being in the library. "You're not seriously saying she should have focused on school instead."

"No," Molly shrugged. "I'm not saying what she should have done. Only that her choices led her to what she accomplished."

"Which is a lot!" Rose cried, defending her mother. Hermione was the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Rose thought that was pretty impressive.

Molly shrugged again. "If you're looking for shortcuts in your revision - I can't give you any. You just have to sit and study as much as you can, and then try to remember everything when you take your exams."

"I'm not looking for a shortcut," Rose muttered. But she could see that Molly wasn't going to give her the answers she was looking for. "I'll leave you to your studying," she said then, pushing her chair back and standing to leave.

As Rose returned to the Gryffindor common room, she thought back over her year and tried to figure out where she'd gone wrong. Had it been when she tried to devote time to making friends when she should have been focusing on her schoolwork? But spending time with her dormmates made her happy. She enjoyed having friends. But then, her mother had had friends and had still enjoyed revision. Molly was the one that thought friends were a waste of time.

Rose knew that she could always just owl her mother and ask the questions that were burning inside her. But she didn't want to. She didn't want to admit her failure. She didn't want to risk the possibility that she simply wasn't as much her mother's daughter as she'd thought she was. Though Rose loved her father, she did not approve of his work ethic, at least not the one he'd had while he was in school. If it turned out she took after him in this regard... Rose didn't want to imagine it.

Rose suddenly found herself feeling very lethargic. She knew that enjoyable or not, she had to get back to revising. Exams were coming and she needed to be prepared. But the thought of picking up a book, or leafing through her notes, practicing spells, or even going down to the after-hours potions lab to practice brewing a potion all sounded unbearably exhausting and disagreeable.

Rose just wanted to take a nap.

Maybe she would feel better when she woke up. Maybe a nap was just what she needed to feel rejuvenated. Maybe she was just overtired and needed to recharge.

RrRrRrRrRrR

Rose had meant to sleep for a few hours at most, but she awoke to find her dormmates getting dressed for the day and realized it was already morning.

Pushing herself out of bed, Rose noted that if anything, she felt even more tired than before she'd gone to sleep. She just wanted to go back to sleep, but she had classes to attend and knew that if she skived, she'd only get in trouble.

Rose made it through her morning classes, suffered through lunch, and then managed to attend her afternoon classes. But at the end of her final class of the day, she knew that she wasn't going to manage to stay awake much longer. She made it back to the dormitory in one piece, and immediately crawled into her bed, pulling the blankets over herself, still fully robed, and closed her eyes.

RrRrRrRrRrR

A week later, the same pattern had been continuing every day, but Rose didn't feel any better. In fact, if it was possible, she felt worse. Albus had expressed some concern, but he was so focused on Hayley these days that he didn't realize the full extent of Rose's situation.

Rose hadn't revised a single thing in days. She knew she was falling behind her other classmates, knew that if she didn't step up her game, she was going to fail her exams, but she also couldn't motivate herself to do anything about it.

Finally, she decided that something had to be medically wrong with her. She was getting plenty of sleep, so she should feel rested, not tired. So she went to see Madam Eldridge in the hospital wing.

After a series of tests, Madam Eldridge concluded that Rose was healthy as a hippogriff.

"But that can't be right," Rose insisted. "All I ever do is sleep. I don't have any energy."

"Have you been eating?" Madam Eldridge inquired.

Rose nodded. "As much as I usually do," she stated.

"Have you been doing any strenuous physical activity?" Madam Eldridge asked.

"No," Rose insisted. "I don't have energy for that! I barely have the energy to wake up in the morning."

"Hmm," Madam Eldridge frowned. "Wait here."

She disappeared into her office for a moment and returned with a bottle which Rose assumed contained a potion of some sort. The hospital wing matron handed her the bottle with a stern look on her face.

"This potion is no simple cough potion," she warned. "Overuse could be disastrous. Too much energy is as detrimental as a lack of energy. Take a small sip - just a sip - when you awake each morning."

"What is it?" Rose asked. "A pepperup potion?"

"Similar," Madam Eldridge said. "The pepperup potion is for physical ailments. This potion will target mental and emotional ills."

"You're saying I'm mentally ill?" Rose frowned.

Madam Eldridge shook her head. "I'm saying I think you might be suffering from mild depression. Common at this time of year, though not usually so much in first years. This should help mitigate the physical toll the condition is having on your body. If you continue to feel symptoms, I would encourage you to come back. Perhaps we can arrange for some sort of counseling, should the need arise."

"Thank you," Rose said uneasily.

Depression. It was such a serious word. And while Madam Eldridge had said her case was mild, it was still depression.

Rose couldn't understand it. What did she have to be depressed about? Her grades had been top of the class, she had good relationships with her dormmates. She had a best friend, a great large family - she had no reason to be depressed.

Hopefully the potion would solve her problem. She'd take a dose every morning until the bottle ran out, and then she would feel better. She wouldn't have to sleep through every afternoon, she'd get her revision done, and she'd get straight O's on all her exams. She couldn't afford to be depressed. She had things to do.

RrRrRrRrRrR

"Hey Rose," Albus greeted her when she joined him in the library later that day. "Haven't seen you in a while."

"Oh," Rose said uncomfortably. "Yeah, well I - "

"It's probably my fault," Albus confessed then, cutting Rose off. "I've been spending so much time with Hayley recently. She's finally starting to let me in!"

"That's great," Rose smiled, happy for Albus.

There - she was happy for someone else. So she couldn't be depressed. Depressed people didn't feel happy for others. Right? Or was it just because she'd taken the potion that she could feel happy for her cousin?

"What are you studying?" Rose asked, peering over at Albus' notes.

"Herbology," Albus said, gesturing to a diagram of a spiky bush that he was currently studying.

"Perfect," Rose said, getting her own herbology notes out of her bag. She would start there. Maybe Albus could help her catch up on the week of revision she'd missed out on.