I'd built up enough projects that the next few weeks slipped away from me. I kept teaching focus-based magic to the kids once a week and McGonagall agreed to pay me a token amount for the effort, expecting me to want to spend it at the eventual shopping field trip to the nearby wizarding town. It wasn't much, but having a little bit of money was better than none. I felt a twinge of guilt for betraying Filch's trust and selling a few of the more generic toys from the pile to the Weasley twins. They were unlikely to be provably the same ones, weren't too dangerous, and it got me a little more savings and also more allegiance from the twins. I expected to need that friendship eventually.

At least I was helping out Flich on the other side, spending a fair amount of free time in the runes laboratory breaking down the rest of the salvaged items. I had some ideas for what to do with the materials involved, but the problem wasn't just how the materials were already carved up. Enchantment burned the matrix of the magic into the materials. I couldn't just take apart an item and re-use the pieces, but had to render them back into an inert state. For the metals, that meant melting them down. For pieces that wouldn't melt, I was having to research other ways to nullify the magic, and it was slow going.

That wasn't my only reason to spend long weekends in the library. Percy and Penelope—who'd eventually asked us to just call her Penny—liked the idea of the Dumbledore-suggested project, and we'd begun the research as well as an attempt to learn the patronus charm. None of us were really close to getting it to work correctly, though I was perhaps even further behind. I didn't have a focus designed for the spell, and, if I was honest, I was having a hard time coming up with a happy memory to use. My life hadn't exactly been misery, but, especially after the betrayal and deaths of my mentor and girlfriend, even previously pleasant memories were tainted.

When my birthday, which happened to be on Halloween, dawned with no one mentioning it, that didn't lift my mood any. Somehow, my teenaged mind expected it to be as important a date to anyone else as it was to me. But, for those who cared, it was because it marked a decade since the end of the wizarding war.

Most of the kids at school had been too young to really understand, so they either paid lip service to the sacrifices or didn't even pretend to care. I would have been among them, if Dumbledore hadn't warned me that the leader of that faction of magical terrorists was trying to come back and had singled me out.

Arithmancy and runes went by without incident that morning, and I had my class teaching the first-years in the afternoon. I'd started them learning how to use ritual circles to do transfigurations, since I didn't really have any foci that supported the charms they'd learned since the lighting charm. Well, they'd apparently learned the levitation charm that morning, but I wasn't about to hand them my staff to practice that.

Between the intricacies of the lesson and my own funk about my uncelebrated birthday, it took me halfway through the class to ask, "Where's Hermione?"

"Ummm…" Seamus hedged, embarrassed by the question. "Well, she was partnered with Ron in charms this mornin'. She's bein' a swot like usual. Ron was complainin' on the way outta class... an' I may've mentioned how sometimes she was a swot in here." I didn't interrupt, so he eventually continued talking, "An' she wasn't as far away as we thought. She ran past, an' we didn't see her at lunch or in transfiguration, neither."

"Rumor is she's been sobbing in the girls' toilet all day," added Millicent. "The other girls have been joking that she needs to go down to Myrtle's so there's not a sobbing girl in all the toilets." It was left unsaid that Millicent probably hadn't participated in the gossip, since it seemed like the two cat-loving girls had an armistice, if not a friendship.

"Why haven't any of the other girls gone and talked to her?" I asked, expecting the answer.

"I don't think she's real close with any o' them in our house," admitted Seamus.

"None of the others either," added Millicent. It was left unsaid that she only felt a tiny bit guilty admitting that she and Hermione weren't friends and that she hadn't tried to help.

I finished up class, trying to figure out what to do. I'd have gone to McGonagall, but she had her seventh-year NEWT class the rest of the afternoon. I could go try to track down one of the girl prefects, but I didn't know where they were and didn't exactly trust them to be a big sister to Hermione if they hadn't made an effort already. Ultimately, I couldn't live with myself if let a girl spend all day crying in a bathroom without trying to help.

It took me an annoying amount of the last period before dinner to even find her. Hogwarts didn't make sense in the best of times, and I hadn't had a need to map the girls' bathrooms. When I found it, after finally getting one of the girls to tell me (hopefully not assuming I was being a pervert), it just looked like another nondescript classroom door, and had a standard handle with a lock. The key was even sticking out of it (how such a thing had not been stolen by a prankster was an open question).

I knocked at the door with my staff, and when no one said anything I poked my head in. "Hermione, are you in here?" I called, not seeing anyone out and about in the bathroom.

"Go away," her voice came from the last stall, her voice still ragged from crying, "please."

"It's Harry Dresden," I said, not really sure whether I should take that as permission to leave her to work it out on her own. Realizing I needed to do more, I asked, "You sure you don't want to talk about it."

"You'll just think I'm being stupid," moaned the girl.

Well, that definitely sounded less like permission to go to dinner, conscience absolved. "No I won't. I'm going to come in and lock the door so we won't be disturbed, okay?"

There was a hesitation, then she said, "Okay."

I let myself the rest of the way into the bathroom, took the key from the outside of the lock, and locked the door from the inside. I did a little wandless cleaning spell on the floor by the door, just in case, and took a seat, legs crossed and back against the door. "Bad day?"

Echoing slightly through the still-closed stall door, it all came rushing out at once in her hoarse voice, "I was just trying to help them. And I came to Hogwarts and I thought it was going to be different here than at my old school. They told me it was the best school. I thought everyone else would be smart and want to learn and we could learn about magic together! But none of them want to know anything, they're just as bad as the kids at my old school, and," her voice rose into a wail, "none of them want to be my friends either!" She let out a couple of choking sobs, but seemed like she was too cried out to do much more.

I was really going to have to harangue Percy for not doing a better job mentoring this girl. It sounded like she had problems he was perfect to empathize with. I didn't understand nearly as well, but I also didn't have anything better to say, so I just shared, "It's my birthday today. And nobody's said anything to me all day. It's been killing me. And, you know—I just realized—I don't actually think I told anyone when my birthday is. McGonagall might not even know."

That got a coughing laugh from the girl in the stall, and she said, "Happy birthday, Harry."

"Thanks," that gave me a moment to think of what to say to her. "I don't really know what it's like for you. When I was your age, I'd just been taken in by a new foster father. He was teaching me magic, but it was just me for the first little bit. So I didn't have a chance to make friends. When I eventually got–" I didn't really want to say Elaine was my foster sister, since that would be weird given our eventual relationship. "When he took on another student, she and I became friends because we didn't exactly have anyone else to be friends with. But when we went to muggle school classes, we couldn't make friends, because we couldn't tell them about magic.

"And, it turns out, he had basically kidnapped me just before I would have gotten my Hogwarts letter."

"That… that's awful," she admitted.

I went on, "I'm not trying to say that I have it worse than you, or anything." I may have thought it, but I wasn't going to say it. "I'm just… I'm having a pretty bad day too, and I wanted you to know that you aren't alone, wanting to just hide and wait for it all to blow over."

We didn't talk for a minute, and finally, she let herself out of the stall so she could look at me. She was still carrying her book satchel and her face was red and puffy from crying all day. She realized what I'd done before sitting, whispered, "scourgify," with a wand gesture, and took her own seat on the tile across from me. Finally, she asked, "How am I going to make friends? I don't think I can do this for seven years."

I sighed. I'd obviously thought about it, because Percy had the same problems. "Do you want the easy answer or the hard one?"

Despite how smart she was, the girl was a born Gryffindor, and she'd always go for extra credit. "The hard answer, please." She tensed up, as if physically preparing for me to lay some harsh truths on her.

Nodding, I asked, "Why do you need to answer every question?"

What I'd said barely seemed to make sense to her. "Because I know the answer?" she eventually ventured.

"What if you just waited to see if anyone else knew the answer first, and only raised your hand if you saw nobody else was going to?"

She still didn't seem to get it. "But then… the professors wouldn't know that I know the answer."

"Hermione, everyone knows you know the answer. You do extra homework. You give the right answer when called on. You could barely participate for the rest of the year and you'd still be top of your class. What are you actually afraid of happening if you give someone else a chance to answer a question?"

She thought about it for a minute, rather than giving me the first answer that came to mind. Finally, she admitted, "I didn't really understand that there was a magical culture. I thought everyone here would be like me: muggleborn. And as soon as I got to school, they started making fun of me. I had to show them that I'm not just some girl that doesn't know anything about magic. Not just some mudblood."

"So you don't want them to act like you're stupid? You want to prove that you're smart?" She nodded to my question, so I asked, "How do you think you treat Ron and Seamus? Do you act like they're stupid?"

An instant objection about to drop out of her lips, she caught herself and admitted, "I don't mean to. I just don't understand why they don't get things that are so easy."

I shook my head, wondering at how someone could be so smart but miss the obvious. "Hermione, I haven't checked with the professors to be sure, but I'm pretty sure you're a genius at this. Stuff that seems easy to you is hard for everyone else. You've been doing this for two months and you seem to understand concepts that took me years to really get, and I'm pretty smart.

"If you just sat quietly in class and only spoke when spoken to, but turned in all your homework and kept doing spells right the first try, all the other first-years would just be intimidated by how smart you are. But when you have to constantly show off in class and act like you're their teacher, they feel like you're making fun of them. They feel like they're too dumb to be at the school."

She nodded with appropriate gravity at my pronouncements, but as soon as I finished talking, she grinned and said, "You think I'm a genius?"

"At magic, yes… at understanding how to make friends with your dumb-dumb classmates, no," I smiled and stuck my tongue out at her.

That got a giggle, but she asked, "Then what should I do?"

"I assume that, like you said, even if they're not as smart as you, you don't want to go through seven years just ignoring them and doing your own thing?" She nodded, so I told her basically what I'd told Percy, "Then you've got to try to be interested in whatever weird wizard sports or games they're interested in… and not make them feel like you think they're dumb.

"Which means waiting until they ask for your help, and not over-helping." I thought about it for a second, "It probably also helps if there's something they're better at than you that they can do for you. How do you feel about being 'Hermione, who's great at magic but terrible on a broom, so we're working really hard to train her up to play quidditch some day'?"

"Ugh, flying," she frowned, then giggled when I made the same face. "Yeah, I guess I can try that. Can I ask you for more help if I think I'm still getting it wrong?"

"Yeah, sure," I said, then smiled and pointed at her, "See! You're already getting it!"

She nodded, "You know, what you said makes a lot of sense in light of an article I was reading in a psychology magazine my parents had in their waiting room, and it was talking about 'reciprocity' and it's starting to make a lot more sense, because–"

I put up a finger to stop her from getting all the way wound up and said, "Can you finish that at dinner? We're missing the Halloween feast."

"Oh, right!" she said. "I didn't actually eat lunch and I guess I am starving."

I levered my gangly limbs up from the floor and unlocked the bathroom door, "Then let's see what kind of strange wizarding foods are at this feast. I mean, it's pumpkin juice with every meal, so at Halloween they'll have to have, what, double-pumpkin juice?"

We were laughing walking toward the great hall when both of us turned up our noses at once at the awful smell of something living that had never bathed. In the quiet, I heard the sound of snuffling, and heavy footsteps coming from up ahead. I grabbed Hermione by the shoulder and pulled both of us to hide behind one of the omnipresent suits of armor nearby. I had my staff ready and my shield bracelet out, and, behind me, Hermione drew her wand.

From around a corner, a creature emerged so straight out of The Hobbit that I expected it to be dragging a sack full of dwarves. The gray-skinned cave troll was taller even than Hagrid, and had to lean over to avoid bashing its head on the high ceiling. As it slowly strolled by, snuffling, it sniffed at a piece of cloth in the hand that wasn't carrying a whole tree trunk as a club. "It can't be," whispered Hermione. I thought she was talking about a monster being in the school, but she said, "I think that's the jumper I lost last month."

The troll definitely seemed to be going more or less straight for the bathroom where she'd spent the whole day, which wouldn't make any sense unless it was tracking her by smell. Fortunately, it hadn't caught the fresher scent from where we were hiding. It was only a matter of time, though, so I waited for it to actually enter the bathroom and then we were going to book it down the hall toward the professors.

Unfortunately for the plan of running away, as soon as it kicked open the door of the bathroom, I heard the unmistakable sounds of Seamus Finnegan shouting, "Oy! That's the girl's toilet!"

Not far behind him was Ron Weasley, who said, "Do you think Hermione's still in there?"

And, finally, Neville yelled, "We have to save her!"

Let it never be said that 11-year-olds aren't deceptively fast when they're on a mission. Before either Hermione or I could say something to stop them, the three boys had sprinted down the hallway and were about to get into a fight with a cave troll that was so big they'd have to stand on each other's shoulders for any of them to look it in the eye.