Quidditch practise, which was that Thursday evening, didn't help lift Bagsy out of the miserable state she found herself in. Finding her hunger lacking, Bagsy had skipped dinner.

According to Teresa, walking with Jon and Bagsy to the Quidditch pitch, Mezrielda had been looking for her at dinner. 'She can be such a pest,' Teresa moaned. '"Where's Bagsy?" what am I, your babysitter?'

'She was probably just worried about her,' Jon offered. 'I'd be worried if Itsuki didn't turn up to dinner one day.'

'You all worry too much,' Teresa argued. 'If someone doesn't show up for dinner it just means they're doing something else, or they're busy, or just couldn't be bothered to come along. Everyone needs to stop worrying and toughen up a bit.' She breathed out harshly through her nostrils and folded her arms. 'It's tiring how sensitive people can be.'

Bagsy didn't say anything in response because she felt a little flattered that Mezrielda had been concerned about her.

The three third years pulled the hoods of their Quidditch gear up as it began to patter lightly with rain. Ford, Emmeline and Kat were already at the pitch and Greenda arrived a few minutes after them. Ford shot Bagsy a meaningful look – clearly, he was hoping she had some brilliant plan to reconcile Emmeline and Greenda. Instead of fixing an ancient feud, though, Bagsy spent the training session tiredly going through the motions, barely paying any attention. When, inevitably, Emmeline got mad at Greenda for being too slow in response to a glint of the golden snitch, and an argument broke out, Bagsy watched on with hollow eyes, not caring to intervene.

'Hey, hey, hey!' Ford yelled angrily, flying over to Emmeline and Greenda who were throwing insults back and forth.

'No one knew before you went and ruined everything!' Emmeline growled. 'You just can't keep your big mouth shut, can you? I hope the attention was worth it.'

'Well at least I understand that people make mistakes!' Greenda shot back. 'And when they do make mistakes, I give them a chance to explain themselves, and try to forgive them!'

'Both of you!' Ford cut over them. The rain was starting to pick up, and Bagsy didn't hear much of Ford's rant, but it was clear neither he, Greenda nor Emmeline were happy about it.

As the fighting continued Bagsy looked down at her hands. They were holding the Fleet Footed Fox, a broom she'd modified and had been invariably reliable during Quidditch. Rain drops splattered onto her hands, the only part of her body uncovered from the weather. She decided she'd had enough for that day and, without a word to anyone, descended to the ground and headed back to the castle.

'Of course. Missing Hufflepuff,' Teresa grumbled as she left. 'Leaves the second things get even slightly hard.' Bagsy stopped in her tracks and looked up at Teresa, who was looking down at her from her broom. Teresa shrugged. 'I'm not being mean. It's true. You need to grow a bit of a back bone, Bagsy.'

Bagsy watched Teresa silently, then turned and left. Maybe Teresa was right, but it wasn't a nice thing to say.

At double Herbology the next morning, Bagsy decided to enact Teresa's advice, and stop being a coward. 'We're not going to be partners this year,' she announced to her.

Teresa blinked, floored at the proclamation. 'What? Who's going to be your partner then?'

'I don't know,' Bagsy admitted. 'But I think you should be partners with Neve this year. It's clear she wants to be your partner, and I feel bad for stealing you from her.'

Teresa narrowed her eyes. 'Is this about what I said yesterday? Because if it is that's a massive overreaction.'

'It's not,' Bagsy lied. 'I just think it's only fair that Neve gets to be partners with her friend. Besides, I know other people are keen to partner with me who didn't get to last year.'

Teresa smouldered at this but didn't protest anymore. Under the smoke of anger, she seemed somewhat impressed with Bagsy. 'Alright,' she relented. 'If that's really what you want, fine. I did enjoy being partners with Neve in first year, anyways. Hey, Neve!' Teresa called to her friend, walking over to where Neve was prepping the ground for the clostra boab's to grow. 'We're partners now.'

Arice glared at Teresa. 'No, I'm partners with Neve,' he said firmly. 'First you take Bagsy from me, and now you're going to take my next partner?'

'Bagsy was never your partner,' Teresa dismissed him, 'but she can be now, if you're that desperate.'

Arice didn't need telling twice. He suddenly couldn't care less if he lost Neve as a partner and happily walked over to Bagsy. 'So!' he said in excitement. 'We're partners this year, then?'

'Guess so.' Bagsy smiled.

'Shall we get to work?' Arice asked and Bagsy gave a nod.

Unlike Teresa, Arice was not good at Herbology, but unlike Winifred, he was very happy to do his fair share of the work, and listened closely to Bagsy's advice, encouraging her to share what she knew when she felt self-conscious about possibly being condescending.

'It's not condescending if I ask for the help,' Arice explained to her, which Bagsy reckoned made sense. 'Now, tell me again why we need to put these long metal bars into the earth?'

'Well,' Bagsy began, having read up about boab's as part of the risk assessment they'd done for the class, 'boab's grow into these really large, swollen trunks that can be used as…' She trailed off.

'As what?'

'Prisons,' Bagsy explained. She'd read some not so nice histories about how they'd been used to trap spellcasters, both good and bad. 'Boab's take the strongest substances around them and use them to build up the trunk walls. If we give it the correct amount of different metals and materials we can grow a boab that, according to legend, can withstand all sorts of powerful things.' Bagsy paused, humming while she tried to remember what she'd read.

'Like explosions?' Arice asked, his eyes alight.

Bagsy nodded as she carefully pushed a metal bar into the earth where she'd dug a hole for it. 'Exactly.'

'What about massive carriages crashing into it?'

'That too.'

Arice paused, violent creativity buzzing around him. 'Spells that freeze things? What about shrinking spells? Oh! What about water pressure? Can a boab sink to the bottom of the deepest ocean and remain intact?'

'Uhh…' Bagsy paused, sitting back on her haunches and shaking her dirt covered hands as she thought, the trowel clasped in one of them dangling loosely. 'I reckon collisions and spells like freezing won't do anything. As for pressure, yeah, I reckon it could withstand it. The shrinking one, though…' Bagsy hesitated, imagining a poor person trapped inside a boab as it shrunk, crushing them in the process. The idea of a small place slowly growing smaller until it crushed you made her feel ill, and she had to take a few calming breaths. 'I really hope such a spell wouldn't work on a boab.'

'How do you know all this?' Arice asked, amazed.

Bagsy shrugged. 'I don't, I'm just guessing based on what I already know about boab's, and other plants and stuff like that.'

'You see all these patterns I could never notice and figure stuff out that way… so cool…' Arice trailed off and Bagsy's faced flushed in embarrassment. She barely managed a shrug before setting back to work.

It wasn't until the end of the lesson, when Professor Wattleseed was telling them to start collecting their shovels and trowels, that Bagsy noticed something odd beyond the fence, in the forbidden forest. Little blue flowers, like the ones she'd seen at Mezrielda's, were sprouting in the distance on one of the tree roots. They were barely visible in the dark shadows of the forbidden forest but Bagsy could still see the viscous blue liquid running off of them like tears. If the plants hadn't been such a pale blue, so pale they were nearly white, she never would have noticed them. Mezrielda had told her they were called weeping weeds, but that their real name was forgotten, and that was why they cried. Bagsy couldn't help wondering what their real name was, and that if someone remembered it if they'd stop crying.

Friday evening was Thaumathletics. Unlike last week, when Professor Kim had been preoccupied and unable to teach the lesson, this week she was ready to begin their elective.

It turns out she had been lying when she said she'd been preparing the stands for quidditch last week. However, Maisy had been mistaken in claiming she'd skived their lesson to hang out with Professor Wattleseed. 'It's because I was preparing the Thaumathletics track!' Kim announced, bouncing up and down on her toes excitedly. 'With Wattleseed's help,' she added. She had the same mad exuberance Wattleseed had embodied when announcing the clostra boabs. 'Do any of you sleep with blankets?' Kim asked suddenly, pulling the hair tie at the end of her complicated plait tighter. She wasn't wearing her usual flying gear but, instead, an exercise jumpsuit with knee, shin, elbow and arm pads, as well as tough looking brown gloves. Next to her was a large bag that Bagsy assumed had similar kit for the students and piled next to that were a number of large goggles.

Kim was standing in front of a vast expanse of green grass, where she had installed ramps, walls, poles, ropes, ladders, hurdles, ditches, floating monkey bars, climbing walls and other odd obstacles. 'No? No one sleeps with blankets?' Kim checked. Bagsy was sure some of them did, but the class seemed mute. The only people Bagsy recognised in the class were Itsuki and Jon, who she'd already known had chosen Thaumathletics as their elective, as well as Paloma, a very pretty girl who Bagsy had shared a dormitory with last year, and Maisy Jewel, the Slytherin girl with triangular, rose coloured glasses who was known for telling fibs. Kim continued, sounding a little disappointed at the lack of class interaction, 'When you sleep with blankets there are multiple layers, right? One blanket on top of another. They're both in the same place, but you can only see the one on top.'

'Is that why the area behind you is hard to focus our eyes on, professor?' a student asked in a Scottish accent. Bagsy saw ginger hair tied in a bun and her first thought was confusion as to what Teresa was doing there – she'd chosen Care for Magical Creatures and Muggle Studies, not Thaumathletics. But then she realised the ginger hair didn't have the same fiery tone, but instead looked more like smoky wood than the flaming colour of Teresa's, and her skin wasn't as pale. Also, most obviously, Teresa did not have a Scottish accent like this girl did. If anything, Teresa sounded Irish.

Kim's eyes flashed excitedly. 'Why do you ask, Fiona?' she said.

Fiona, who Bagsy dimly recognised, but couldn't quite remember why, smiled quizzically. 'Because you've used the dayblua charm?'

'Exactly! Five points to Gryffindor,' Kim awarded her. 'Can you explain what the dayblua charm does?'

'No,' Fiona snorted. 'I'm not that much of a nerd, Professor.'

'Alright, alright,' Kim calmed the class, which had broken out into giggles and snickering. 'Dayblua is like the blankets I mentioned earlier. You only see the blanket on top, that acts as an illusion, hiding what's beneath. It's… pretty darn cool, to be honest with you.' Kim took out her wand and pointed it at her left palm. 'Revelio,' she murmured, and a faint orange wisp settled into her hand. She put her wand away and leant down. Her left hand seemed to grab the air, the image behind it warping like it was an unfolding sheet. The next moment, Kim threw her arm upwards and pulled the sheet away. The class let out a gasp, their eyes settling on the jungle gym hidden beneath it.

Bagsy furrowed her brow. 'What changed?' she murmured in confusion to herself. Nothing new had been revealed, so what had the dayblua charm made invisible, then? She'd seen the hurdles and ditches and monkey bars both before and after Kim had pulled the dayblua charm away.

'I made this Thaumathletics track behind you invisible,' Kim explained, gesturing to the ditches and hurdles and other assortment of things. Bagsy frowned even more. She was certain they hadn't been invisible. 'In previous years, we simply had students running and jumping around the field, which didn't lead to the most interesting lessons, or any real room to improve, but…' Kim's face darkened in a fearsome determination. Electricity seemed to crackle around her she was so enamoured with the course she'd set up behind them. 'Behold! Now we have an intensive, creativity-demanding classroom for you. We received permission to build it because we could hide it from you so that you wouldn't use it without supervision!' Kim burst out into happy laughter, like some kind of comical villain.

Bagsy felt a feeling of fear and confusion twist in her stomach. Apparently, it had been the monkey bars, climbing walls, and other obstacles that had been invisible – so why had Bagsy been able to see them before the illusion had been lifted? It must have been an issue with the spell, she decided.

'Thaumathletics is a special kind of sport,' Kim announced. 'One only recently discovered. Do you know why?' Kim was bouncing on the balls of her feet now. 'Because it was my thesis when I was qualifying as a professor!' she exclaimed before anyone could answer. 'It may not be as purely thrilling as quidditch and flying, but Thaumathletics is a brilliant activity on its own. Essentially, its utilising your magic to augment your natural sporting abilities.'

'Augment?' Itsuki asked in confusion.

Kim nodded at him enthusiastically. 'It's like, making your strength, speed and precision better, or something,' she explained. 'You're going to spend this introductory lesson using the equipment to the best of your natural ability. We will begin practising augmentation much later – for now I just want to judge and improve what you can do at a base level.'

Kim split them into groups. Itsuki and Jon stood right next to Bagsy, hoping to make good on their excitement earlier last week and hang out with her, but Kim had other plans, numbering students from one to five and grouping them that way. Bagsy waved sheepishly at Itsuki and Jon as she walked over to group number three.

'Drat,' she heard Jon cruse.

'We'll be luckier next week,' Itsuki assured his friend.

Bagsy found herself grouped with Maisy, Paloma, a boy she didn't know and the girl with the smoky red hair tied in a bun who Bagsy now knew was called Fiona.

'I just wanted to say I'm sorry,' the boy rushed out in an accent as Scottish as Fiona's, looking straight at Bagsy, who stalled in abrupt shock.

'S-sorry?' she squeaked. 'For what?' The boy had tan skin and a buzzcut with wavy patterns shaved into it. She recognised him but couldn't remember from where.

'Fiona and I get bored easily, and we didn't mean to pick on you, but we were first years and wanted to try out some spells, and you seemed the easiest target, so we just-'

'What he means to say,' Fiona, cut across him, 'is that it was us who sent all those dumb jinxes your way in Herbology during first year and we're sorry. We were being dumb kids.'

'Aren't we still?' Paloma said, not unkindly.

'True,' Fiona laughed, adding, 'I'm Fiona, by the way.'

'Killian,' the boy introduced himself. He was very tall.

'I'm Paloma Nacht,' Paloma explained as she took a hair tie out of a pocket and elegantly scraped her straight, auburn hair into a ponytail that went down to her waist. Paloma paused. 'Hey, Fiona, think you could show me how to put my hair into a bun? I worry it will get in the way otherwise.'

'Sure thing.' Fiona smiled. 'Who are you two?' she asked as she set to work on Paloma's gorgeous hair, complementing its smoothness.

'I'm Maisy,' Maisy introduced herself. She had dark skin, and the silver strings twined into her countless braids did, all things considered, look like unicorn hairs. She was pulling all the braids back with a stretchy pink head band that matched the colour of her triangular glasses.

Fiona, Killian, Paloma and Maisy all looked expectantly at Bagsy.

'O-oh!' Bagsy exclaimed. 'I'm… Bagsy.'

'Not Bagsyllia?' Paloma teased with a smile.

'No, not Bagsyllia.'

That lesson Bagsy hung at the back of her group as they worked their way through the obstacles. On a normal day, Bagsy felt she'd be thoroughly enjoying the activity, but she couldn't ignore the fog clouding the memories in her brain Tod had placed there. It was like pushing her tongue against a space were a missing tooth had been. Bitterness was swallowing any fun she might have felt and replacing it with tedium. That, and she wasn't particularly fond of being out of breath all the time, especially around people she didn't know that well.

The weekend was a welcome break from lessons but Bagsy didn't feel like socialising. She did her homework, finished upgrading the school brooms so that they were match ready, and wondered about how she could build a weather machine, and the even more impossible task of reconciling Emmeline and Greenda.

By Sunday evening Bagsy had only left the Hufflepuff common room to try and send letters to Bontie, all of which were returned to her by confused owls. Having given up, she found herself sitting facing the fireplace.

'You alright, Bagsy?' Greenda asked, taking the armchair next to her and spreading a torrent of books, paper and quills around herself in preparation for her evening's studying. 'You've had a scary look on your face for a while.'

'It's nothing,' Bagsy responded more harshly than she'd intended.

Greenda put her hand on Bagsy's shoulder. 'I won't tell anyone.'

Bagsy let out a sigh, relenting her gaze from the fire and to Greenda's face. 'Someone… a friend of mine… he…' Bagsy swallowed.

'Do you have a crush!?' Greenda breathed scandalously, gossip alight in her eyes.

'No, no, nothing like that,' Bagsy assured her incredulously. 'I spent a lot of time and effort doing something for him and then he basically told me he didn't trust me at all. He… used magic on me that he knew I couldn't defend myself from, and that he knew I didn't want to be…' Bagsy chose her words carefully, she didn't want to give Tod's power away, 'jinxed with. Now we're not friends anymore. I feel weird about it.'

'Sounds like you feel betrayed,' Greenda analysed.

'Yeah.'

'Do you think you can forgive him? Do you want to forgive him?' Greenda asked.

Bagsy wasn't sure.

'Forgiveness is always the best answer,' Greenda said. 'People make mistakes all the time – no one is perfect. Everyone has fears, flaws, you name it. No one is mean without a reason, Bagsy. Sometimes if you understand that reason, you can understand why someone did something. Once you understand why someone did something, it becomes a lot easier to forgive them.' Greenda folded her arms. 'Unfortunately, it's difficult to know what someone's reason for being mean is without talking to them, and it's difficult to talk to someone without first forgiving them, even if only enough to stomach their presence.'

'What are you saying?' Bagsy asked, feeling more confused than before.

'I'm saying what you do is up to you,' Greenda continued, 'but that, if it were me, I'd try to talk to him. I'd try to understand why he did it. And then I'd forgive him. If his friendship was worth something before your fight, it may still be worth something afterwards. Who knows, maybe moving past this fight will make your friendship stronger in the long run,' Greenda added, a bright smile lighting up her face.

'Thank you, Greenda,' Bagsy responded quietly, narrowing her eyes in thought. She didn't disagree with Greenda – but the situation became far harder when the person you wanted to have a conversation with can, and has shown they will, change your memories and perceptions with words alone. Bagsy trusted Tod once and was made a fool. But, then again, even after what Tod had done, Bagsy still felt she should trust him. Trust was too important to throw aside because of one bad action. If one bad action destroyed all the trust you had for a person, did you really trust them to begin with? Shouldn't trust be a little more durable than that? Bagsy thought it would be sad if it wasn't. Whether or not that meant she should trust Tod again, though, she didn't know.

As she usually did with these things, Bagsy decided she'd make her decision another time.