Chapter Three
Lessons
Across Gryffindor Tower, in the fifth-year girls dorm, Llewellyn, Hermione, Lavender, and Parvati were still quite awake.
"So, you just kind of showed up, right in Hagrid's cabin?" asked Parvati, her head in her chin.
"Yup. Right when he was making...what'd you call it...tea!" answered Llewellyn, grinning widely.
The four girls erupted into not-quite-fifteen-type giggles.
"So, what do you think of that new teacher? Matthew Visilio?" Lavender looked around at the others, hugging her pillow. Parvati gave a low whistle and toppled off her bed. Hermione pursed her lips again.
"He is missing some manners," she started.
"Hey, Llewellyn, isn't he from the States, just like you?" interrupted Parvati, reappearing on the bed with a big, sappy grin.
"Not from Maine, I hope, that would just be too weird," said Llewellyn.
"I wonder how he teaches? Maybe he's really smart," commented Lavender. Hermione made a small sound through her nose.
"And cute!" Parvati giggled. Lavender walloped her with her pillow.
"I can't believe we're having a dance next Saturday!" she said dreamily. "D'you think Seamus'll ask me again?"
"Maybe, but I don't think Harry'll ask me," replied Parvati, sighing.
Llewellyn turned the same color as her four poster. Fortunately, no one seemed to notice.
"No Viktor Krum for poor Hermione," said Lavender, grinning from ear to ear. "Maybe Harry will ask her, eh, Parvati?"
"It's a dance," protested Hermione. "You don't need couples. That's the Yule Ball."
"Oh, of course, the prefect would know," shot back Parvati, frowning.
"What is it, Llewellyn?" interrupted Lavender, eyeing her face, now a brilliant shade of flamenco.
"Hermione knows," she responded.
"What?" replied Hermione.
"You know," she answered. "What I told you?"
"Oh! That." Hermione smiled broadly. "Well, either Harry's going to ask you out or he's going to never talk to you again. I don't know."
"Are you two going to tell us what's going on?" cut in Parvati.
"It's none of your business," retorted Llewellyn, leaning back into her four-poster. "Fine then, then what we have to say isn't any of yours," snapped Lavender. She pulled the side of her hangings facing Hermione and Llewellyn shut. They stared at the wall of red for a second, slightly surprised. Llewellyn crossed over to Hermione's bed and yanked closed her drapes.
"What the -" began Hermione.
"Their loss," interrupted Llewellyn softly.
They looked at each other, grinning, finding at last a friend to depend and lean on at Hogwarts.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"We don't have Visilio until Wednesday," said Llewellyn, slightly disappointed.
Hermione looked over at her timetable. "Oh, you're taking Divination and Muggle Studies?"
Ron and Harry looked up from their toast at the mention of Divination. Ron caught Hermione's eye, and opened his mouth. At finding no words to say exactly, he quickly shut it again. She smiled at the corners of her mouth and was just about to say something when the massive fluttering overhead announced the owls had arrived.
Llewellyn screeched and put her hand over her head as a barn owl landed rather inexpertly into her oatmeal ."Jarmahada! Honestly!" she grumbled, wiping some of the sticky cereal off of his feathers. Miraculously, the letter attached to Jarmaharda's leg had remained rather un-oatmealed. As she unfolded the note, the brownish-gray owl shook just like a wet dog and took off again. Harry, so amused by the messy arrival of Llewellyn's owl, hadn't noticed Hedwig had arrived.
"Ouch, Hedwig, I'm getting callouses from all your nips," complained Harry as he freed the note from her leg. She looked at him disdainfully and flew off with a bit of bacon as soon as he had freed the paper.
"Who is it?" asked Ron, looking over Harry's shoulder.
"Hagrid, I think," he replied. He was right.
Harry,
How are you? Just saying hi before the first Care of
Magical Creatures class. This year is going to be really
interesting. Just you wait til Wednesday, I want this as a
surprise to the whole school.
Hagrid
"Really interesting?" asked Ron, frowning. "How much do you want to bet this creature has poisonous fangs? Spits fire? Has four heads?"
Harry opened his mouth and was just about to respond when Hermione and Llewellyn erupted into laughter held back behind tightly-clamped hands.
"What?" asked Harry, looking from the two faces to the letter in Llewellyn's free hand. "Just gossip from my old school," she replied, gaining her breath back. "A friend of mine named Tim Wyvern loves to enchant things. He had a carnivorous rabbit, a tap-dancing grasshopper, and a flying skateboard and bike. Well, the rabbit got onto the skateboard, and now Tim's in big trouble because it crashed through a window right into the principal's office."
Hermione and Llewellyn had to duck under the table because they were giggling so hard. Harry and Ron looked at each other, shrugging.
"Giggling should be made illegal," commented Harry nonchalantly, repeating last year's thought. With a sudden rush into his stomach, he remembered the time he had come up with that phrase. He was asking a very pretty older girl named Cho Chang to the Yule Ball. Now he was thinking of asking Llewellyn...so what about Cho?
He shoved the thought down into the squelchy bottom of his troubles and followed Ron as he left breakfast for their first class, Divination. He didn't see Llewellyn until they were waiting with the rest of the class in the North Tower. She arrived out of breath just seconds before the silvery ladder fell out of the circular trapdoor into the heads of the crowds.
"So sorry," she admitted to Harry, who was just a few feet higher on the ladder than her, "but I couldn't find my copy of Unfogging the Future. Sometimes, I can get really unorganized with my school supplies. Wow, this is Divination?"
"Yes, it's the miracle room," responded Ron sarcastically, his head sticking up just where Llewellyn had gotten off the ladder. "And don't say you're unorganized until you meet Neville Longbottom."
There was a movement in the shadows in front of the fire, and Professor Trelawney appeared. She slowly approached Llewellyn, who was examining the classroom with a lot of interest.
"Welcome, my dear," she said in her mystical whisper of a voice, "to Divination. Since we here in this room are working on our third year of seeing the oracles of the future, you will receive a brief explanation of what we have covered from my two best students." She waved a bracelet- encrusted arm towards Parvati and Lavender, who sprouted identical looks of disgust on their faces.
Llewellyn thought fast. "We...we did some of that at Columbia. Crystal ball gazing, er, palmistry, um, egg whites - -"
Trelawney's eyes widened, making them appear frighteningly huge behind her out-sized glasses. "Egg whites? That is an interesting accomplishment, especially since we are doing it today."
Harry groaned, just in Ron's earshot, as Llewellyn sank into a pouf next to him. He wondered what horrors Trelawney would find in his cup today. She launched into an explanation of the day's activities, interrupted only by Neville spilling his glass of water all over Dean. Ron got up and brought back three eggs for Harry, Llewellyn, and himself. Silently, wondering just what baloney Trelawney would reveal their cups held, they dropped the egg whites into the cups and tried to decipher the symbols.
"Look, I've got something, that looks a bit like a teapot," commented Ron. He opened his book and scanned the pages. "That's supposed to mean a change in friendships, well, I hope not...." He looked sidelong at Harry, who rolled his eyes back and searched through his list.
"Now, that skinny thing...I think that's a candle, okay, that's supposed to mean a light from the future, or help from friends. Thanks already, Ron."
Trelawney hurried over to Harry's table. "A candle?" she asked, picking up his cup and looked carefully at the shape. She let out a shriek and put the cup back down on the table, as quick as if it was on fire. "My dear!" she said shakily (Lavender and Parvati turned around quickly). "You have the axe! Danger to you or a friend!"
"Ooh," said Parvati, her face shining in the light given off by Harry's candle. "Professor Trelawney, Lavender has a question mark, what does that mean?"
Trelawney pulled a very strange, half-worried half-amused kind of face and hurried over to Lavender's cup. "It is!" she exclaimed, in a much quieter voice than when she had announced Harry's images. "My, my, Lavender, my dear, a question mark means questionable morals."
Ron, Harry, and Llewellyn broke into furious fits of laughter, just quiet enough so that they could hear Trelawney whisper "But, these things shouldn't always be trusted, my dear," into Lavender's ear. This just made the three of them laugh harder, much to the dismay of both Lavender and Trelawney.
"Hm, what's that ring?" asked Llewellyn, poking at a thin circle floating around in her glass with her quill. She stared at her book. "A necklace, I guess that's close enough. Ooh, it means I have admirers."
Harry shot a quick glance at Ron, who grinned back broadly. "Ack, I broke it. Okay, what's a broken necklace? Darn, it's danger ahead in love." She stared at her cup morosely, oblivious of the fact that Ron and Harry were giggling so hard they had to duck under the table.
They left the North Tower in considerably better spirits than when they had entered, and met up with Hermione in front of the Great Hall. "Loads of homework?" asked Ron, half joking and half hopeful. Hermione glared at him, shaking her head.
Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Llewellyn walked in to lunch. Harry and Ron sat across from Hermione and Llewellyn, still remembering their promises to have asked them to the dance by dinnertime. They hadn't worked up the courage to ask yet, and hurried off to Herbology without much as a backwards glance to the girls, who were trailing behind them.
Professor Sprout introduced the class to a highly interesting, carnivorous plant called a snapdragon, which was, in fact, a real kind of dragon. It blew a few sparks out of its nose as Sprout poured fertilizer down the head, which was surrounded by tall, dark leaves. Hermione was highly interested, as Harry guessed Hagrid might have been, too, but Ron and Llewellyn seemed to be rather bored.
"Charlie'd have no problem with that snapdragon," he said to Harry out of the corner of his mouth. "And you wouldn't, right?" he added, grinning.
"Oh, come on. This is nothing compared to Tim's Venus flytraps," whispered Llewellyn flatly.
"Shh!" hissed Hermione, as Sprout came around with several buckets of different animal parts for cutting up. Llewellyn and Ron worked on one table, with Harry and Hermione on the next one over. Harry and Ron kept shooting asserting glances at each other, but said nothing until they could send back their cut-up pieces and watch the two snapdragons eat.
"That was disgusting," grumbled Hermione as they made their way up to History of Magic. Harry felt the same way, as the dragons seemed to enjoy thrashing about and getting their food everywhere except for their mouths. They entered the classroom silently.
Llewellyn took a seat between Hermione and a window, pulling out A History of Magic. Hermione shook her head and put the book back into Llewellyn's bag. She opened her mouth to ask why when, suddenly, Professor Binns appeared through the wall. Yelling in fright, Llewellyn toppled backwards right onto Neville, who was passing by to get to his desk behind her. Binns shuffled some papers and started right into his notes as Llewellyn stared at him, horror struck, still lying on the floor.
Hermione pulled her up by simply lifting the back of her chair and started on a few sentence's worth of notes on the 1652 goblin rebellion. Llewellyn blinked a few times and started writing several notes, still surprised at her professor's apparent lack of a body.
Suddenly, it seemed to Harry, he was sitting back down again in the Great Hall for dinner. He looked sideways at Ron, who was fidgeting around with his book bag. Ron looked up at him and raised his eyebrows. Harry nodded, and stood up with Ron.
"Do you want to go to the dance with me?" they asked at the exact same time and with the same pitch. Hermione and Llewellyn looked up, bewildered, from their conversations on the other side of the table.
"Who's asking who?" asked Hermione, a piece of steak floating halfway to her mouth.
Harry and Ron looked at each other. "Ron with you and Llewellyn with me," blurted Harry quickly.
"Oh, well, er," Llewellyn began, looking at Hermione.
"Yes, we'll both go," she responded, determined.
"Excellent," replied Ron, sitting down. "Pass me the potatoes, will you, Llewellyn?"
Lessons
Across Gryffindor Tower, in the fifth-year girls dorm, Llewellyn, Hermione, Lavender, and Parvati were still quite awake.
"So, you just kind of showed up, right in Hagrid's cabin?" asked Parvati, her head in her chin.
"Yup. Right when he was making...what'd you call it...tea!" answered Llewellyn, grinning widely.
The four girls erupted into not-quite-fifteen-type giggles.
"So, what do you think of that new teacher? Matthew Visilio?" Lavender looked around at the others, hugging her pillow. Parvati gave a low whistle and toppled off her bed. Hermione pursed her lips again.
"He is missing some manners," she started.
"Hey, Llewellyn, isn't he from the States, just like you?" interrupted Parvati, reappearing on the bed with a big, sappy grin.
"Not from Maine, I hope, that would just be too weird," said Llewellyn.
"I wonder how he teaches? Maybe he's really smart," commented Lavender. Hermione made a small sound through her nose.
"And cute!" Parvati giggled. Lavender walloped her with her pillow.
"I can't believe we're having a dance next Saturday!" she said dreamily. "D'you think Seamus'll ask me again?"
"Maybe, but I don't think Harry'll ask me," replied Parvati, sighing.
Llewellyn turned the same color as her four poster. Fortunately, no one seemed to notice.
"No Viktor Krum for poor Hermione," said Lavender, grinning from ear to ear. "Maybe Harry will ask her, eh, Parvati?"
"It's a dance," protested Hermione. "You don't need couples. That's the Yule Ball."
"Oh, of course, the prefect would know," shot back Parvati, frowning.
"What is it, Llewellyn?" interrupted Lavender, eyeing her face, now a brilliant shade of flamenco.
"Hermione knows," she responded.
"What?" replied Hermione.
"You know," she answered. "What I told you?"
"Oh! That." Hermione smiled broadly. "Well, either Harry's going to ask you out or he's going to never talk to you again. I don't know."
"Are you two going to tell us what's going on?" cut in Parvati.
"It's none of your business," retorted Llewellyn, leaning back into her four-poster. "Fine then, then what we have to say isn't any of yours," snapped Lavender. She pulled the side of her hangings facing Hermione and Llewellyn shut. They stared at the wall of red for a second, slightly surprised. Llewellyn crossed over to Hermione's bed and yanked closed her drapes.
"What the -" began Hermione.
"Their loss," interrupted Llewellyn softly.
They looked at each other, grinning, finding at last a friend to depend and lean on at Hogwarts.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"We don't have Visilio until Wednesday," said Llewellyn, slightly disappointed.
Hermione looked over at her timetable. "Oh, you're taking Divination and Muggle Studies?"
Ron and Harry looked up from their toast at the mention of Divination. Ron caught Hermione's eye, and opened his mouth. At finding no words to say exactly, he quickly shut it again. She smiled at the corners of her mouth and was just about to say something when the massive fluttering overhead announced the owls had arrived.
Llewellyn screeched and put her hand over her head as a barn owl landed rather inexpertly into her oatmeal ."Jarmahada! Honestly!" she grumbled, wiping some of the sticky cereal off of his feathers. Miraculously, the letter attached to Jarmaharda's leg had remained rather un-oatmealed. As she unfolded the note, the brownish-gray owl shook just like a wet dog and took off again. Harry, so amused by the messy arrival of Llewellyn's owl, hadn't noticed Hedwig had arrived.
"Ouch, Hedwig, I'm getting callouses from all your nips," complained Harry as he freed the note from her leg. She looked at him disdainfully and flew off with a bit of bacon as soon as he had freed the paper.
"Who is it?" asked Ron, looking over Harry's shoulder.
"Hagrid, I think," he replied. He was right.
Harry,
How are you? Just saying hi before the first Care of
Magical Creatures class. This year is going to be really
interesting. Just you wait til Wednesday, I want this as a
surprise to the whole school.
Hagrid
"Really interesting?" asked Ron, frowning. "How much do you want to bet this creature has poisonous fangs? Spits fire? Has four heads?"
Harry opened his mouth and was just about to respond when Hermione and Llewellyn erupted into laughter held back behind tightly-clamped hands.
"What?" asked Harry, looking from the two faces to the letter in Llewellyn's free hand. "Just gossip from my old school," she replied, gaining her breath back. "A friend of mine named Tim Wyvern loves to enchant things. He had a carnivorous rabbit, a tap-dancing grasshopper, and a flying skateboard and bike. Well, the rabbit got onto the skateboard, and now Tim's in big trouble because it crashed through a window right into the principal's office."
Hermione and Llewellyn had to duck under the table because they were giggling so hard. Harry and Ron looked at each other, shrugging.
"Giggling should be made illegal," commented Harry nonchalantly, repeating last year's thought. With a sudden rush into his stomach, he remembered the time he had come up with that phrase. He was asking a very pretty older girl named Cho Chang to the Yule Ball. Now he was thinking of asking Llewellyn...so what about Cho?
He shoved the thought down into the squelchy bottom of his troubles and followed Ron as he left breakfast for their first class, Divination. He didn't see Llewellyn until they were waiting with the rest of the class in the North Tower. She arrived out of breath just seconds before the silvery ladder fell out of the circular trapdoor into the heads of the crowds.
"So sorry," she admitted to Harry, who was just a few feet higher on the ladder than her, "but I couldn't find my copy of Unfogging the Future. Sometimes, I can get really unorganized with my school supplies. Wow, this is Divination?"
"Yes, it's the miracle room," responded Ron sarcastically, his head sticking up just where Llewellyn had gotten off the ladder. "And don't say you're unorganized until you meet Neville Longbottom."
There was a movement in the shadows in front of the fire, and Professor Trelawney appeared. She slowly approached Llewellyn, who was examining the classroom with a lot of interest.
"Welcome, my dear," she said in her mystical whisper of a voice, "to Divination. Since we here in this room are working on our third year of seeing the oracles of the future, you will receive a brief explanation of what we have covered from my two best students." She waved a bracelet- encrusted arm towards Parvati and Lavender, who sprouted identical looks of disgust on their faces.
Llewellyn thought fast. "We...we did some of that at Columbia. Crystal ball gazing, er, palmistry, um, egg whites - -"
Trelawney's eyes widened, making them appear frighteningly huge behind her out-sized glasses. "Egg whites? That is an interesting accomplishment, especially since we are doing it today."
Harry groaned, just in Ron's earshot, as Llewellyn sank into a pouf next to him. He wondered what horrors Trelawney would find in his cup today. She launched into an explanation of the day's activities, interrupted only by Neville spilling his glass of water all over Dean. Ron got up and brought back three eggs for Harry, Llewellyn, and himself. Silently, wondering just what baloney Trelawney would reveal their cups held, they dropped the egg whites into the cups and tried to decipher the symbols.
"Look, I've got something, that looks a bit like a teapot," commented Ron. He opened his book and scanned the pages. "That's supposed to mean a change in friendships, well, I hope not...." He looked sidelong at Harry, who rolled his eyes back and searched through his list.
"Now, that skinny thing...I think that's a candle, okay, that's supposed to mean a light from the future, or help from friends. Thanks already, Ron."
Trelawney hurried over to Harry's table. "A candle?" she asked, picking up his cup and looked carefully at the shape. She let out a shriek and put the cup back down on the table, as quick as if it was on fire. "My dear!" she said shakily (Lavender and Parvati turned around quickly). "You have the axe! Danger to you or a friend!"
"Ooh," said Parvati, her face shining in the light given off by Harry's candle. "Professor Trelawney, Lavender has a question mark, what does that mean?"
Trelawney pulled a very strange, half-worried half-amused kind of face and hurried over to Lavender's cup. "It is!" she exclaimed, in a much quieter voice than when she had announced Harry's images. "My, my, Lavender, my dear, a question mark means questionable morals."
Ron, Harry, and Llewellyn broke into furious fits of laughter, just quiet enough so that they could hear Trelawney whisper "But, these things shouldn't always be trusted, my dear," into Lavender's ear. This just made the three of them laugh harder, much to the dismay of both Lavender and Trelawney.
"Hm, what's that ring?" asked Llewellyn, poking at a thin circle floating around in her glass with her quill. She stared at her book. "A necklace, I guess that's close enough. Ooh, it means I have admirers."
Harry shot a quick glance at Ron, who grinned back broadly. "Ack, I broke it. Okay, what's a broken necklace? Darn, it's danger ahead in love." She stared at her cup morosely, oblivious of the fact that Ron and Harry were giggling so hard they had to duck under the table.
They left the North Tower in considerably better spirits than when they had entered, and met up with Hermione in front of the Great Hall. "Loads of homework?" asked Ron, half joking and half hopeful. Hermione glared at him, shaking her head.
Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Llewellyn walked in to lunch. Harry and Ron sat across from Hermione and Llewellyn, still remembering their promises to have asked them to the dance by dinnertime. They hadn't worked up the courage to ask yet, and hurried off to Herbology without much as a backwards glance to the girls, who were trailing behind them.
Professor Sprout introduced the class to a highly interesting, carnivorous plant called a snapdragon, which was, in fact, a real kind of dragon. It blew a few sparks out of its nose as Sprout poured fertilizer down the head, which was surrounded by tall, dark leaves. Hermione was highly interested, as Harry guessed Hagrid might have been, too, but Ron and Llewellyn seemed to be rather bored.
"Charlie'd have no problem with that snapdragon," he said to Harry out of the corner of his mouth. "And you wouldn't, right?" he added, grinning.
"Oh, come on. This is nothing compared to Tim's Venus flytraps," whispered Llewellyn flatly.
"Shh!" hissed Hermione, as Sprout came around with several buckets of different animal parts for cutting up. Llewellyn and Ron worked on one table, with Harry and Hermione on the next one over. Harry and Ron kept shooting asserting glances at each other, but said nothing until they could send back their cut-up pieces and watch the two snapdragons eat.
"That was disgusting," grumbled Hermione as they made their way up to History of Magic. Harry felt the same way, as the dragons seemed to enjoy thrashing about and getting their food everywhere except for their mouths. They entered the classroom silently.
Llewellyn took a seat between Hermione and a window, pulling out A History of Magic. Hermione shook her head and put the book back into Llewellyn's bag. She opened her mouth to ask why when, suddenly, Professor Binns appeared through the wall. Yelling in fright, Llewellyn toppled backwards right onto Neville, who was passing by to get to his desk behind her. Binns shuffled some papers and started right into his notes as Llewellyn stared at him, horror struck, still lying on the floor.
Hermione pulled her up by simply lifting the back of her chair and started on a few sentence's worth of notes on the 1652 goblin rebellion. Llewellyn blinked a few times and started writing several notes, still surprised at her professor's apparent lack of a body.
Suddenly, it seemed to Harry, he was sitting back down again in the Great Hall for dinner. He looked sideways at Ron, who was fidgeting around with his book bag. Ron looked up at him and raised his eyebrows. Harry nodded, and stood up with Ron.
"Do you want to go to the dance with me?" they asked at the exact same time and with the same pitch. Hermione and Llewellyn looked up, bewildered, from their conversations on the other side of the table.
"Who's asking who?" asked Hermione, a piece of steak floating halfway to her mouth.
Harry and Ron looked at each other. "Ron with you and Llewellyn with me," blurted Harry quickly.
"Oh, well, er," Llewellyn began, looking at Hermione.
"Yes, we'll both go," she responded, determined.
"Excellent," replied Ron, sitting down. "Pass me the potatoes, will you, Llewellyn?"