Chapter 7: Puking Prototypes
Selected Listening: The (After) Life of the Party- Fall Out Boy
Later that afternoon, Anastasia checked in on Hermione in the common room to make sure she was okay.
"I'm fine," she said, "but I don't understand how Slytherins can be so—"
"Mean? Vile? Prattish?" Anastasia asked.
"All of the above," Hermione said and settled in over her charms homework. After Harry and Ron trudged out for their detention, Anastasia grabbed her invisibility cloak and snuck down to the second floor where the knight guarded the back entrance to the headmaster's suite. Fred and George had agreed that scheming together in the common room would be too suspicious, so they planned to meet there to enact their plan against Malfoy.
While she waited for the twins, spotted another redhead whipping around the corner.
Ginny walked noiselessly down the hallway, clutching her journal to her chest. The Weasley girl had her feet locked towards her destination, the back stairway at the end of the corridor, eyes unblinking.
Anastasia thought it so strange, she almost called out to her, forgetting she was underneath the cloak. But Ginny had already disappeared down the stairs and Fred and George appeared on her left. Anastasia looked both ways before pulling on the knight's spear, and the door slid open for her.
"Come on." She signaled to the twins, one hand peeking out from her cloak, and let them inside the small alcove.
"Where do you think the twat's keeping it?" Fred asked once they had settled into their usual spots: Anastasia on the stairs, knees up to her chin; George bouncing a ball against the wall and catching it again; Fred leaning against the opposite wall, avoiding being hit.
"In the dorm? Maybe in his trunk?" Anastasia asked. She didn't know much about how Slytherins kept anything, or if their living arrangements were anything like Gryffindor's. Where could you keep personal items in a dorm where everyone was out to get everyone else?
"Sneaking into the Slytherin's dorm isn't going to be easy…" George rubbed his chin.
"Not to mention against school rules. I can't break into a common room that's not my own and a bedroom of the opposite gender! I'm not sneaking in anywhere! I don't even have a way to—"
And then, as if all three were thinking the same thing, they looked down at Anastasia's invisibility cloak.
"You could do it," the twins said. Anastasia felt sick to her stomach.
"When?" Anastasia asked.
"The most common class time is Tuesday morning. I can't think of any professors who have office hours during that time, so that must mean they're all busy teaching," Fred said.
"Which means all the students will be in class," said George.
"But you forget, I also have class Tuesday morning. I can't exactly go to the loo and disappear for an hour," she whined.
The twins' expressions grew into two twisted, conniving smirks.
"Yes, you can!" They sang. George pulled out a glass vial of tiny green candies from his robes.
"What are these?" Anastasia asked as she took the bottle and examined it.
"Remember that bottle of instavomit you helped us steal last year?" Fred asked. "Well, this is the result of our experimentation."
"A puking pill," George said, "guaranteed for one good puke, good enough to get you out of class without spoiling your day."
"Is it safe?" she asked them with an anxious look.
"Well, we've been through several testing periods," said Fred.
"Several revisions," said George.
"And the conclusion is—"
"These definitely work! When used as directed," George held up one finger as if to point out an asterisk on the label.
"So, you're saying all I need is one of these, and I'll vomit then and there."
"Well, you need to take it 5 minutes before you want to vomit. So, take it at the end of breakfast," George suggested.
Anastasia nodded and pocketed the pills.
"Hold on, Georgie."
"What, Freddie?"
"Let's at least try the simple way before we put her through all this."
"What? That's no fun."
"What's the simple way?"
Fred pulled out his wand. "Accio, Anastasia's necklace!" he said.
***Meanwhile, in the Slytherin dorm***
Draco sat on his bed, unlacing his quidditch boots when a thump came from one of the drawers carved into the post of his bed frame.
"What was that?" Pershore, another blonde second-year, asked.
"Nothing." Draco said, flushing slightly pink. He had tucked Anastasia's necklace away in one of the locking drawers so that he wouldn't lose it. He didn't mean to hurt it, but he needed some sort of collateral so she would nab the medicine for him.
Thump. The necklace banged again on the front of the drawer. Crabbe, Goyle, and Pershore rose from their beds and encircled thumping drawer. A prefect, Crowley, came into the room.
"What are you skrewts looking at?" Crowley asked, pushing through the line of boys. He called them skrewts as often as he could, to remind them that he could smash them with his shoe if he wanted to, if they broke any rule.
"It's nothing! It's nothing." Draco said.
"Are you trying to keep a pet in here, Malfoy? Find a toad to your liking?"
"I don't keep toads!" Draco exclaimed.
Thump. The necklace jolted again.
Crowely raised his wand and waved it rapidly, using a nonverbal spell all Slytherin prefects knew to open the locked drawers of suspicious students. Out flew the necklace and its golden diamond. It sailed into Crowley's hand.
"See? It's a necklace! Give it back!" Malfoy said, snatching to grab the necklace from the cackling seventh year.
"Giving this to your girlfriend, are you?" The other boys roared with laughter.
"It's a Malfoy family heirloom!" Draco seethed, "And if you don't give it back, I'll make sure my father—"
"I don't give a rats arse about your father, Malfoy." Crowley grinned, "I'm sure he'd be happy to know about how his son took a precious heirloom to school and had it confiscated!"
Draco, red in the face, could do nothing. He stood, unmoving. He couldn't have a Slytherin prefect owling his father about a necklace that didn't belong to him in the first place.
"That's what I thought. Now what will you do for me to get this back?" Crowley asked with a devilish grin.
***Back in the hidden stairwell***
A few minutes later the necklace had not appeared. Anastasia put her cloak over her head and checked outside to see if it had levitated there.
"No, it's not," she said as she pulled it closed.
"Well blast," Fred said, "thought for sure that would work."
"That's alright. Thanks for trying," she said, and held the bottle of puking pills up to her eye level. "Guess I'm sneaking into the Slytherin dorm."
On the following Tuesday at precisely 8:55 am, Anastasia, Hermione, Harry, and Ron finished their breakfast. As everyone busied themselves packing their things, Anastasia dropped the puking pill into her remaining apple juice and drank it down in one swig.
"Thirsty, are you?" Ron asked, bewildered. Harry raised one eyebrow as he adjusted his shoulder strap.
"Hydration is important," Anastasia said with a spritely smile and picked up her bag, prepacked with her invisibility cloak. Hermione glared. Anastasia had told Hermione about her plan, and as expected, Hermione did not approve.
Anastasia felt her energy drain as she walked to potions with the others, and felt a queasy sensation rise in her stomach. She took her seat beside Hermione and began readying her notes as if she were about to sit through double potions like normal. Snape swept in and took to the teaching lectern when Anastasia's hand shot up.
"Professor, could I please go to the hospital wing? I feel positively ill."
Snape stared at her with an unamused expression.
"No," Snape said, "now, today we are going to learn about the uses of acromantula venom in potions—"
Anastasia heaved her stomach contents onto the stone floor. The entire class gasped and started laughing. Snape, enraged, waved his wand and vanished the evidence of her half-digested breakfast.
"Go to the hospital wing, and ten points from Gryffindor!"
"For being sick?"
"For interrupting my class!" he thundered.
Anastasia grabbed her things and spun to leave, but as she did, she caught Draco's expression. He had his hand clamped over his mouth, trying not to vomit himself.
She didn't stop walking until she rounded the corner and slung the invisibility cloak around herself. She had forgotten that her taking the pill might affect Draco. All she could hope for was that he wouldn't come back to the common room in time to catch her.
Anastasia had snuck around on Sunday to make sure she knew the password for the Slytherin common room. She approached the slab of wall confidently and said, "purebloods," which was the least inventive password she'd ever heard, but it worked, and the secret door slid open.
Anastasia took a deep breath. If she were caught, she would have to be expelled. She let it out in one drawn out exhale and stepped into the Slytherin common room, door sliding closed behind her.
She walked down a dark entryway. A cold dampness settled on her skin. Instead of torches, an eerie green light drifted down from the glass ceiling that bounced off Anastasia's skin, making her arms glow green.
A shadow darted above. Anastasia paused, looking up, and realized the entryway's ceiling was a glass skylight to the Black Lake. She shivered and kept walking.
The entryway opened into a vast sitting room with dark leather sofas and armchairs and emerald draperies. Black marble walls and columns stretched up to the arched, stone ceiling. A portrait of Salazar Slytherin hung above the unlit fireplace. She crossed the ornate rugs to the only corridor on the opposite wall.
Though the right side of the corridor remained stony and dark, the left side wall gave way into an entirely glass alcove, revealing all the slimy creatures living within. Anastasia froze, stunned at the sight of fish, mermaids, and kelpies moving in the murky depths. She shook herself, realizing she had maybe thirty minutes before the first block of classes let out, and ran forward.
The hallway came to a fork with no indication of gender. In the Gryffindor dormitories, girls were on the right side and boys on the left. Anastasia took a guess it would be the same and tried the left hall.
She opened the first door, in case she chose wrong, and she found she had. A singular vanity took up most of the space on the right-side wall, with a large mirror for multiple girls to use at once. Hairbrushes, ribbons, and jewelry littered the surface of the vanity. Unlike Gryffindor dorms, where all the beds faced inward toward the stove, the Slytherin beds lined the vast aquarium window, each its own dark wood alcove with a curtain to close it off from the rest of the room for privacy. Trunks lay in special nooks beneath the mattresses. The stove seemed an afterthought, put off to the side, as if the coldblooded Slytherins needed no heat to survive.
Anastasia backed out of this room and ran to the other hallway to find the boys' dwellings. Luckily, each dormitory had a shining silver number, a label indicating the year of the students. That meant the second-year dorm was the second door she found on the boy's hall with a glinting "2."
Once inside, Anastasia threw off her cloak and pulled out her wand. This dorm mirrored the girls' dorm with a slightly smaller dresser. She knew her target instantly. Draco's Nimbus Two-thousand-and-one had been mounted over his bed like a trophy, his name glinting in silver on the handle. She vaguely thought about sabotaging it, but remembered her goal.
"Accio necklace!" Anastasia said, waving her hand in a curved motion towards the trunk underneath Draco's bed.
Nothing in the room moved.
"Accio necklace!" she tried again, ensuring she did the movement exactly like Fred and George taught her.
But again, nothing moved. Nothing made a sound.
Anastasia approached the trunk but found she could not pry it from its hole. The trunk flashed verdant as if it knew she were not the owner. Her fingers strayed over the smaller drawers, which lay flush in the posts of the bedframe. A carving protruded from each and served as a handle: snakes swirled with scales and sneers and filigree flourishes flitted fancifully. She tugged at each, but they refused to open, flashing angrily at her as the trunk had. She growled in frustration, but when she pulled back, she noticed something quite wrong.
Anastasia peered down at her arm. The viridian glow of the Black Lake had not gone away. The thick green tint coated both her arms, even though the windows in this room were completely covered by velvet curtains. Anastasia rubbed at her wrists, panicking. She turned, searching and finally found a floor length mirror in the corner.
Anastasia's entire body had turned a ghastly green. Her stomach lurched.
She snatched up the cloak, threw it over her, and ran down the stairs. As she did, she heard voices of the older students filing in from their morning electives. She darted between them swiftly, causing people to yell out, "Peeves! We know you're there!" at the brush of cold air she left behind. She ran out of the Slytherin dorm, down the dungeon corridor, up the stairs, and to the entrance of the hospital wing, clutching her stomach all the way.
She ducked between the wall and the propped open door, removed her cloak, and stowed it in her bag before entering the infirmary.
Madam Pomfrey carried a glass of bubbly tonic. Draco, sat on a cot, looking miserable.
"Well, took you long enough, didn't it?" The agitated nurse asked. "Did you enjoy your detour?"
Unable to hold it in any longer, Anastasia vomited directly on the floor.