Three days later, I received my first letter.

Katie- How is he holding up?

Simple, yet telling. My stomach twisted. Even though I knew on the surface that we had Oliver's best interests in mind, the sneaky aspect of the letter exchange made me feel queasy. I didn't like keeping anything from him. I decided that I would turn it over and take the day to respond to it.

I watched Oliver closely. Fred and George both approached me to let me know (again) that he had made them late for transfiguration because he spent too long talking about proper broom care and its importance to flying velocity and agility. When they told McGonagall why they were late, they could tell that she was torn between wanting to see her house win the cup and the injustice of having two students late for class. She told the twins that she would have a chat with Oliver.

My eyes kept darting toward the portrait hole for the moment when I would see his face appear behind it. Everyone had a sense of what it was like to be on the receiving end of any lecture by Professor McGonagall, and his fervor might draw him into a more intense reaction than the house head would appreciate. When he did appear, however, he seemed to be in higher spirits than I had seen him in earlier. What tone should I take when I asked him about his day?

It was a pointless question to contemplate since he sat next to me and started gushing. "I just know that we can do this, and McGonagall seemed to have a lot of faith in me and the team. This is the year!" I opened my mouth to reply, but I settled instead for patting him on the arm and smiling. I could report to Sean and Quincy that he was okay.

I bent over to pick up reading where I had left off on the page for my defense against the dark arts homework when I felt the couch start to shake. My head snapped up and I saw Oliver sitting on the edge of the cushion with his head in his hands taking forced, deep breaths.

"What happened to 'I know we can do it?'" I asked, taken aback by his quick change of mood.

"The dementors. I am four years ahead of Harry, and even I don't know how to deal with them properly. What if they suck the hope out of the team on the pitch, or what if he falls off of his broom and we have to forfeit again? I can't ask anyone else on the team to look out for him in that way. Even though Fred and George are most often more clever than they would like to appear, I don't think that they have any kind of real solution to getting past that ice cold feeling." He held his arms as if shivering in response to the imagined dementors.

"Your team won't let you down." I said with more confidence than I felt. I shot him a reassuring smile. I wanted the Oliver of two minutes ago back. I had never seen him so pumped and so defeated all at once. His feelings were all across the board and I didn't know what to say in reply to his brothers' letter. I continued my observations.

"And the scouts!" He ran his fingers through his hair, giving it its tell-tale stress angles. "I should have asked Sean and Quincy for more pointers when I saw them at Hogsmeade."

"You could write to them," I suggested.

He shook his head sharply. "No."

Even after a moment's silence he proffered no further explanation.

"I'm sure they would.." I began, but he cut me off.

"I said no. Absolutely not." His brow was furrowed and he slumped back into the couch with a hefty sigh. My hand that was reaching for him froze in mid-air and a tense moment passed while my hand lay suspended.

Oliver hung his head, relenting. "I didn't mean to be too short with you just now, but you don't understand." He said, eyebrows raised. I tried to continue my reach to rub his back in a soothing way, but he jerked out of my grasp.

"I'm going to bed," he said.

He left me there, hurt and confused. I pulled the letter from Sean and Quincy out from my pocket to look at its one line one more time. I found a fresh piece of parchment and scribbled my reply.

He is not doing well- doesn't want to write.

- K

I paused and stared at the words shining in wet ink. What else was there to say? The question I had been dying to ask whispered itself in the back of my mind. "What happened to Sean?"

The next morning, I woke to an owl scratching at the window to my dormitory. Angelina was the first awake and opened the window grumbling about missing her beauty sleep. The owl entered, deposited a letter onto my bed, then arced back out the window. Angelina raised her eyebrows in my direction. "Alicia was right, you do have secrets that you aren't telling us. Everyone you know is here and your family would hardly be so secretive as to tell the owl not to deliver the message during normal meal times."

I hesitated and grabbed the letter, more focused on that than responding to what Angelina had just said.

K- Thanks for the update. We thought that he might not want to write since there is a chance that our mother will sneak in and find out his concerns when she recognized his handwriting on the outside of a letter. Hang in there. Make sure that the supply closet in the changing rooms is well-stocked with everything. He will likely visit there to obsessively make preparations and repair his broom. See if you can keep tabs on him and head him off before he talks everyone's ear off on the team. It wouldn't hurt if you snuck a mild sleeping draught into his food. If he was anything like us, he is not sleeping. He is thinking about the scouts nonstop, no doubt, but he needs to think more about the game in front of him. We have included some plays that we have favored over the years. Just say that they are something that you found in the library. We used stamps to draw them out so that he wouldn't recognize our handwriting. Hope this helps and keep us posted. Q and S.

I was so absorbed in the letter, that I had not noticed Angelina slide behind me and read over my shoulder. "Who are Q and S? How do they know Oliver so well?"

I jumped. I crumpled the letter instead of folding it in my haste to conceal it. My mind raced, not knowing how much I was authorized to say.

"Oliver's family." I said and slipped the note in my pocket.

Angelina tilted her head, looking somewhere over my left ear. "I remember you telling us about them... kind of weird a little intense about quidditch?" I nodded and looked down at my hands holding the crumpled letter. When I looked back up, Angelina was staring at me. "You look like you could use a break from being our keeper's keeper."