Wednesday and Thursday were an arbitrary shuffle of my first two days of classes, but, because the scheduling was so weird, after lunch on Thursday, I was done for the week. It took me until Friday afternoon to realize that I had a big problem: the wizarding world was boring. If I had a free afternoon to myself previously, I could head to the park, go see a movie, or choose from libraries packed full of novels.
The wizarding world didn't have any kind of analogue to film, despite the moving photographs and paintings, and mostly didn't seem to realize what they were missing. And another downside of there being one wizard for a thousand muggles and insular as well was the lack of quality fiction. According to a popular sci-fi writer, 90% of everything was crap. In the muggle world, that 10% of possible good stuff was still a huge number of books. But for every thousand quality muggle novels, there was one wizarding novel. And, unlike in the rest of the world, good art didn't really seem to cross easily between countries.
I'd spent most of Friday sampling Hogwarts' fiction section—just a single shelf—and was really getting worried. I broke down and asked the dour librarian, Madam Pince, what she recommended for entertainment reading. "Well, I can see your difficulty," she explained. "I'm sure muggles have to invent interesting stories from total fiction, but plenty of wizards and witches lead such interesting lives that the biographical section can serve as entertainment reading. If you're looking for something modern, we have a set of Gilderoy Lockhart's memoirs."
She was certainly right, in that Lockhart was one of the better writers in the wizarding world. How anyone thought he was anything but a novelist baffled me, however. Did he pretend to be this Poirot-esque dandy adventurer when he met his fans? I'd be interested to meet the guy, but his command of magic wouldn't have been impressive for a muggle. How did wizards that had been to school not see the obvious problems in his descriptions of spells and creatures?
Percy found me ensconced in a reading nook before dinner, halfway through Year with the Yeti. "My mother loves those," he noted, voice low to keep Pince from being upset.
"Have you read them?" I asked. He shook his head and I flipped back to a page I'd marked earlier. "Read that paragraph."
Obliging, though with a confused expression, I watched Percy's face tense up, and he whispered, "That is completely inaccurate." He glanced at my face, saw me nodding, and asked, "Is it all like this?" I pointed to the other places I'd marked, and he read those as well. "I… this is a fourth year spell, but he got it completely wrong. Mother said these were biographies."
"The writing is good," I grimaced. "Maybe everyone just gets caught up in the story and overlooks the inaccuracies, or thinks they're deliberately changed to prevent kids from trying it."
"Perhaps," he allowed. "While I can understand pleasure reading, you might have more luck availing yourself of the nonfiction books. Hogwarts has quite a number of rare books of spells and studies of magical theory that you cannot read anywhere else."
"Fair point, I guess," I admitted. "I'm just trying out ways to de-stress before I hit the part of the school year where there's no way I'm going to have the willpower to try to learn for pleasure."
He nodded, "Sport, table games, and hand crafts are the main contenders, I fear. I, as noted, have little free time that is not devoted to homework and prefect duties."
"That reminds me: what's the deal with homework? I mean, we're going to take OWL exams at the end of the year and that controls which sixth-year classes you can take. But, if I just decided I didn't want to do homework because I thought I could pass the OWL without it…"
He winced, the idea of shirking schoolwork clearly almost physically painful to him, but he allowed, "There would likely be very little consequence. For flagrant violations, you might be assigned detentions or docked house points. But, particularly with no guardians likely to punish you for poor marks, dashing off mediocre essays might not matter much. As I understand it, many students here are already poor writers and logicians, so sub-par written work with strong practical demonstrations might not even be noticed."
I grinned, "You thought about it but couldn't bring yourself to sandbag, could you?"
"While I am considering your suggestion for other career options, I have planned to work at the Ministry for quite some time. 'Sandbagging' as you refer to it is a classic bureaucratic ploy. And I do wish quality written work was better incentivized. The professors barely even give out house points for strong essays compared to how many they give on-the-spot for class participation."
"And the house points barely matter anyway," I grumbled.
"Quite. Well, I need to go find a few more books before dinner. See you there." He nodded and wandered off.
Not really feeling like finishing the "biography" I'd been reading, I started wandering the library looking for something else to catch my eye. It was by happenstance that I found the shelves devoted to school yearbooks. I almost completely disregarded it, before remembering that McGonagall had mentioned my mother went to school here, albeit briefly. Maybe she was in the yearbooks.
It was harder than it should have been, since I didn't actually know my mother's exact age or maiden name. I wound up having to come back after dinner and most of Saturday morning before finally finding a promising candidate in the 1967-1968 yearbook. Margaret McGregor was a fifth-year Slytherin who hadn't appeared in the next year's book, so must have left after earning her OWLs. It was hard to be sure with her as a 16-year-old against the one adult picture of my mother that my father had shown me, but I thought I saw a family resemblance.
I knew for sure when I found, toward the end of the book, a candid photo of her and another girl relaxing by the lake. Even sitting on the shore, she was obviously much taller than her friend, which would make sense for my frankly unusual height. But while I'd never gotten a really good look at my mother, I had plenty of opportunity to recognize my godmother (even though she was over twenty years younger in the photo). All her implications of being some kind of ancient immortal were washed away by the simple caption of the photo.
Best friends relax by the lake (fifth years Margaret McGregor and Bellatrix Black).
