Chapter 5 Thursday 17 August

I read this interview in the Daily Prophet with Mildred Trimble and she said if you wanted something badly enough the whole world would conspire to make sure you got it. Much! I wanted to go to this pikey festival about as much as I wanted to be locked in a room with Veronique, but at every turn I was thwarted. I didn't want to sleep in a field or have communal showers or be forced to eat veggie burgers injected with lethal doses of salmonella. But every time I said anything about not wanting to go, the girls would accuse me of being a princess. And not in a good way either.

Even Draco, a wizard famed for the sharpness of his robes and the volume of his quiff seemed uncharacteristically up for roughing it.

At least, I thought, Anna wouldn't give me, Susan and Ron the weekend off but she'd decided to close the café for the bank holiday and was even letting us borrow her van. The same van whose back doors fly open if you take a corner too fast.

My last hopes was the 'rents when they made their weekly phone call to make sure I hadn't killed the cat, the plants or myself.

But before I spoke to my 'rents there was something way more important I had to do, and for once it didn't involve boys. It involved (cue dramatic music) going to Hogwarts to get my NEWT results. If I'd been left to myself I'd have been quite happy to wait for them to arrive in the post, but Mum had given Anna strict instructions. When I got to work that fateful Wednesday morning she was standing at the door with the Floo powder in her hand.

"Hey Anna," I said brightly. "Shall I put the kettle on?"

"Nice try, kiddo," was Anna's reply. "In the fireplace now, I'm taking you to get your results."

I whimpered something about planning to go in my break but Anna took my arm in a freakishly strong grip for such a little witch and practically shoved me into the fire. We didn't say very much as we took a horseless carriage from Hogsmeade (we came through the Three Broomsticks.) Anna asked me once if I was nervous and I lied and said I wasn't but when we went over a rough area I thought I was going to puke.

Anna took her loco parentis role far too seriously for my liking. She frogmarched me into Hogwarts, obviously expecting me to bolt, and hauled me over to the notice-board where the results were pinned up. I stood and gazed at a spot just above where I should have been looking.

"Do you want me to.?"

I shook my head. "No, I'll do it."

I tried to look at the board and everything went blurry. I traced my finger down the list until I came to the Gs and found, "Granger, Hermione". I shut my eyes. This was my last moment of blissful ignorance. After this, I was either going to go to Fortescues Ice-cream parlour and fill in an application form or actually commit to getting a top job in the Ministry of Magic.

I heard Anna make an impatient clucking sound behind me and I opened my eyes and forced myself to look.

"A for History of Magic, A for Charms, A for Astronomy, A for Herbology, A for Potions, A for Defence Against the Dark Arts, A for Care of Magical Creatures, A for Study of Ancient Runes and another A for Transfiguration. I've got nine NEWTs." I managed to say. You will not cry. You will not cry, I told myself sternly.

I'd been so good at pretending not to be worried about my results. I'd assumed an air of nonchalance for weeks while secretly angsting about them and I felt relieved but also really sad too. Like, now I was set on the path of being a grown-up and having to make big decisions that were going to change my life forever. No wonder I was nearly crying. But Anna was hugging me and then Parvati and Lavender were there, and Parvati had straight A'ed everything and Lavender hadn't done as bad as she thought. We were just about to get our getaway when I saw the Deputy Head, Professor Snape (who taught Potions) bearing down on me. He must have spent the last two years thinking I was a complete know-it-all and he didn't seem surprised at my results. I just turned to Anna and said, "Can we go now?" Well, I guess all that book learning paid off.

I spoke to Mum and Dad once we got back to the café by taking the back door into the London street to use a pay phone. (My parents stayed all night waiting for me to call) And if I'd asked them for a pet Hippogriff they'd have agreed to build a jumbo kennel in the back garden. By the time Mum had finished cooing and Dad had got on the phone to say, "Oh yes, quite good Hermione, really", which is what he comes out with when he's pleased with me, there wasn't much time to say anything else. What I really wanted to say was that I was scared and confused and wished they'd come home and did they think it was a good idea to have sex with Draco? But Mum insisted that I went to the festival as long as the neighbours agreed to feed the cat, and then badgered me for five minutes about what I was planning to do the following year. Strangely my options didn't seem to include moping around the house watching daytime television, which was all I really wanted to do. After I got off the phone, Anna made me close my eyes and when I opened them Italian Tony and Winky were holding a cake in the shape of a guitar which said, "Congratulations!" in sparkly gold lettering and underneath that in scarlet sparkly icing was added, "We knew you could do it."

Then they all starting singing For She's A Jolly Good Witch and all the customers joined in. It was too hideous for words. But I couldn't be an ungrateful cow so I smiled until my jaw muscles ached and acted like I was really pleased. Don't get me wrong, I was touched that Anna, Winky and Tony had gone to so much trouble but I just wished everyone would just up about my flamin' results.

Ron had called in sick, for which I was eternally grateful. We'd had an unspoken pact since my barbeque to ignore each other, but when Susan came in at lunchtime she started avoiding me too. Every time I caught her eyes as we waited tables, she looked away. I didn't know what was going on. The minute Anna turned the sign with her wand to "Closed" Susan was out the door. I gave Anna a big hug for being an ace surrogate mum and raced after Susan.

"Susan! Su! Wait up!" I called after her but she carried on walking. I finally caught up with her at the end of Diagon Alley.

"Didn't you hear me calling?"

She gave me a nervous look. "No."

"What's up?" I demanded, turning her to face me. "You've been strange with me all day. Have I done something wrong to annoy you?"

Susan ran a hand through her messy ginger curls. "I've been trying to plan out what I was going to say to you but everything I rehearsed sounded wrong," she began.

"What are you talking about?" I asked in a confused voice.

Susan took my hand; led me over to an outside table outside the ice-cream parlour. We sat down and Susan sighed deeply. "Draco made a pass at me at your barbecue."

"What?"

"You'd disappeared and I was talking to him about bands we liked and then some insect thingy landed on my shoulder and bit me. And he -Draco, I mean -he pulled me forward to see the sting and then he kissed my shoulder and before I knew what he was doing, he'd kissed me properly, on the mouth."

"Are you sure?" But I already knew the answer.

"Yeah, Hermione, I'm sure," said Susan sadly. "I told him to cut it out and he just laughed and said that I'd been flirting with him. But I hadn't. I just like him, that was all. He was someone to talk about music with." I tried to smile as if the whole thing was a silly misunderstanding. "He'd probably had too much to drink." Susan shook her head. "He hadn't. And he said. no, it doesn't matter."

"Tell me!"

"He said he was fed up with you playing games," Susan continued unhappily. "And that he'd fancied me for ages and you were just seeing him to make Ron jealous." I could feel the sun beating down on my back through my thin blue robes as I sat there and listened to Susan's confession. And as I looked at the tears trickling down Susan's face I knew she wasn't lying. I might be able to snog someone else's boyfriend but Susan was a straight-edge. She'd never break the girl code. That didn't mean I wanted to believe her though.

"Are you sure?" I asked her.

"I'm positive," she said firmly. "I didn't want to tell you but Parvati and Lavender said you'd want to know."

"Christ Susan," I exclaimed angrily. "How many other people have you told?" I hated myself for that little outburst. Draco was the one I should be mad at, not Susan.

"Just them and erm, Cho," came the worried reply. "I had to tell someone and Draco stomped off once I'd yelled at him and they could tell I was upset about something."

"No wonder everyone was being weird when I got downstairs," I said. And I could have told her what I'd really been doing while Draco had been lunging but for some reason I didn't. Call it self-preservation.

"Are you and me alright?" Susan asked.

"Oh, come here," I told her and gave her a hug and made her promise not to worry about it anymore.

I floo home and tried to work out how I felt about Susan's revelation. I was sorry that she was upset but I didn't feel any blinding white jealously I felt when I thought of Veronique and Ron together. Maybe it was because Susan was my mate. And maybe it was because I knew that Draco must have been drunk. He'd been so patient with me, stuck by me while I'd tried to make up my mind. Draco was stupid. He must have known that Susan would tell me. Which made me think that he must have been drunk. I mean, why else would he have done it? But drunk or not, I was still going to give him ten shades of hell when I next saw him.

It had been such a tempestuous day. I must have gone through every emotion invented. The last straw was the next-door neighbours agreeing to look after Crookshanks while I spent quality time in a field with the kind of muggles I normally crossed over the road to avoid. I couldn't understand why Fate was being such a meanie. The neighbours usually wrote Mum angry letters about Crookshanks because she kept having it with tomcats while they were trying to sleep. God, even my cat was doing it!

When I finally got indoors, I felt so restless -I didn't know what to do with myself. It was beyond hot now and I was so confused about every single last bit of my stupid little life. I threw my clothes off, pulled on my new boy-cut bikini bottoms and bandeau top, and went into the garage to look for my old paddling pool. With the 'rents away our household was using hardly any water so I felt I could safely sneer in the face of the hose- pipe ban.

Finally I was at peace, sitting in five inches of cold water with a tub of Floretescue's Cookie Dough ice cream. The summer wasn't going to get much better than this. Or worse, I thought as I saw Draco climbing over the gate that led back to the street. There was plenty I had to say to him but I hadn't planned to say it while I was half-naked in a kiddies' paddling pool. But I also didn't fancy trying to scramble out and fall over, which was what usually happened when I tried to get out of said pool.

"I tried ringing the doorbell but there was no reply," Draco said sauntering towards me. "You look.," he paused for effect, "enchanting."

I tugged my top more securely into place and folded my arms as Draco squatted down next to me.

"So did you get your results?" he asked after a minute had gone by and I hadn't said anything.

"Yup," I said shortly.

"And they were good, bad, indifferent?" he prompted.

"They were fine," I hissed.

Draco took of his shades and gave me an annoyed look, narrowing his dark blue eyes and curling the top lip of his beautifully sculptured mouth. He looked like he'd been carved out of marble. "What's up with you?"

"What's up with me?" I couldn't believe his nerve. "I had a chat with Susan today," I spat out. "She told me that you, you, that you tried to snog her at my party!"

Draco froze for a second before going completely ballistic. He called me a selfish mudblood who'd spend the last few months putting him through hell. He said that Susan had been drunk and made a pass at him. And he said that I'd strung him along for ages and he'd just taken it like a fool. And finally he accused me of using Susan's story as an excuse not to have sex with him. And I had to sit there in the God Forsaken paddling pool and listen while Draco shouted at me and hurled a couple of deck chairs down the length of the garden in his fury.

"Ok, I'm just going to walk out of here now," he said once he'd managed to lower his volume control. "And I'll be out of your life for good. It'll save you having to come up with sad stories like this. I love you but obviously that's not enough for you."

And he turned to go and I realised that he must have been telling the truth. Why else would he have got so mad and been so hurt? Or offered to leave when he'd spent months hanging around waiting for me to get over Ron?

And although I didn't think Susan had lied, maybe Draco was right and she'd been the one who was drunk and couldn't remember what had happened. Besides, he loved me! He was the first non-family person in the world to ever say that they loved me. Um, apart from, well, you know.

"Draco, don't go," I pleaded, standing up. "I'm sorry." Draco carried on walking.

"Please come back," I begged, starting to cry. "I've said I'm sorry."

He turned around slowly, looking shamefaced. "Oh, don't cry," he said huskily, walking back to me and pulling me into his arms. It felt so good to be held by someone. I wound my arms around his waist and clung on for dear life while I sobbed all over his shirt.

Draco made soothing noises and stroked by hair. "There, there, baby," He purred. "I'm not going anywhere."

"I'm sorry," I repeated. "I had to believe Susan."

"I know you did, sweetheart," Draco said soothingly. "But do you really think I'd have hung around this long if I'd been lusting after another girl?"

"I guess not," I choked out.

And then Draco suddenly swung me up in his arms, climbed into the paddling pool and settled me on his lap.

"You're mad," I said laughing even though I was still crying a bit. "All your clothes are wet."

Draco shrugged. "They'll dry."

Our faces were so close I could see the tiny scar that bisected his eyebrow. I stroked it with the tip of one finger.

I was sitting in my flowery pink bikini on the lap of a fully-clad wizard in a child's paddling pool and it felt normal. And really, really nice.

I pulled Draco's head towards me and kissed the corner of his mouth gently. He smiled at me.

"Aren't you going to kiss me properly?" he said. "You've never had any trouble before."

I kissed him again and his lips parted to let me snake my tongue into his mouth. I like being the kisser and not the kissee for once. I kissed Draco harder and tugged at him so were both lying in the water with our entwined legs handing over the edge.

I started unbuttoning his shirt and Draco's hands which had been idly caressing my back stilled.

"Don't you want to?" I whispered. "I was going to make it up to you."

"That sounds interesting," Draco drawled. "How were you going to do that?"

"I thought we could, y'know.," I ran my fingers down his chest in what I hoped was a suggestive manner. " Are you saying what I think you're saying?" Draco asked a hint of a smile playing at his lips.

"I think I'm ready," I said decisively. "Let's do it." Draco held my face in his hands and gave me a long, deep kiss before getting to his feet and reaching a hand to me. I let him pull me up.

He placed his hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eye. "I'm going to pass this time, Hermione." I tried to twist away from him but he held me tight. "Oh thanks for letting me make a complete idiot of my myself," I said bitterly. "I though it was what you wanted."

Draco tucked my hair back behind my ears and gave me a gooey look.

"It is," he insisted. "And I'm incredibly tempted but I want you to have sex with me when it's right for you. Not because we've had a row and you want to make it up to me. Trust me, I know what I'm saying."

"I feel stupid," I muttered, still standing in front of him.

"Well you shouldn't," he said firmly. "It was generous and lovely of you and you'll never know how much I wanted to take you upstairs and ravish you to within an inch of your life."

"Yeah, right." But I was smiling now. It might have taken some time but what I was feeling towards Draco now was definitely a love thing.

"Are you going to stick around?" I asked him as we walked into the house hand in hand.

"You bet," he answered giving me another marshmallow look and I knew he was talking about the months ahead and not just the next few hours. "Why don't you put some clothes on before I change my mind and then we'll.what do you want to do?"

"Eat some food, exploding snap, snog a bit," I decided. "You interested?"

And then I ran upstairs and jumped up and down on my bed because I was so happy I thought my heart would burst into millions of sparkly pieces.