bA/N: Again, I must apologize for the long time in between uploads, but it is the rainy season in my area right now, and the thunderstorms keep knocking our phonelines out. That usually shorts out the digital cable, too, so I wind up either playing vinyl records or watching 'Moulin Rouge' for the odd-hundredth time whilst I tap away at homework for my inbound tutoring and this story for the reviewers who respond to it so faithfully. I'm not really allowed to do much of anything, as the doctors finally discovered why I've been having seizures and losing peripheral vision. Whatever a pituitary adema is, I've got one, and basically that's what's keeping me home from school to write for you. I'm also working on an original novel, which I don't plan to upload or even type until I have it really good, you know. I'm something of a perfectionist git about writing now. Anyway, here you go.

Chapter Thirty-Three: And If You Came Along…

"What?"

"I want to go along. That's why the Yank's here, isn't it? You're doing something in New Orleans, I was eavesdropping."

"Chloe, I don't have that kind of authority. And it's ging to be really dangerous, why would you want to go anyway?"

"Julie, it's New Orleans. I'd use any excuse I could get to go. And besides, somebody's got to keep an eye on you."

"Uncle Ron and Mitchie are going!"

Chloe indicated the transfixed American, who was still perfectly oblivious to everything but Donaghan.

"You could hand her a scorpion right now and she wouldn't notice. I get the impression that she's not the most observant type."

"Precisely!" Julie exclaimed, her eyes brilliant red. Chloe's jaw dropped in amused shock.

"You are getting really out of control, you do know that, Julie?"

"Know it, I've got to put up with it! Never be fifteen, Chloe, it's an ugly age to be."

"I keep forgetting you aren't my age sometimes."

"That's very flattering," Julie replied sarcastically. "It makes the whole ferret thing so much easier to handle."

"I thought it would. So can you get me in or not?"

"What'll you do to me if I tell you I can't?"

"If you try, I'll be alright, but if you don't I'll… Aldous, what would really tick Julie off?"

"Tell her parents about the hollow book full of Dungbombs- no, wait, that's Tom. Uh, you could leave pieces from one of Weasleys' Transvestite Wizard Chess Sets all around her room."

"I don't think that would be sufficiently horrible," Chloe observed.

"Aldous, why are you helping her torment me?" Julie asked plaintively.

"Because she asked me. Do spiders bother you much, Julie?"

"Not especially."

"Oh. Maybe a rubber rat in her bed sometime."

"Don't you dare!" Julie warned, seeing Chloe's cheerful little smile getting dangerous. "I'll ask."

"Ask what?" Aldous asked.

"I've decided I want to do something," Chloe said.

"Oh. Say no more." The Chaser was used to his small girlfriend's sometimes-bizarre whims. "Just don't get hurt or turned into a cat again."

"Cat?" Julie asked.

Chloe smacked Aldous gently upside the head.

"Absolutely nothing, Julie! Say, are you going to audition for the play next week?"

"You're changing the subject again, aren't you?"

"Yes. Who do you think I should try out for?"

"Well, if you could stop being more mouthy than me for a whole minute I'd say Hero, but otherwise you could play Beatrice excellently."

"I don't think I've got much shot at a lead. I'm eleven. Actually, the one lady, the one who goes to trick Beatrice with Hero, what's her name?"

"Ursula? She's supposed to be, like, old and stuff!"

"If you could be an eleven-year-old French boy when you were nine, I can certainly carry off an Italian lady's maid."

"That was an emergency!"

"You never know, I might get it."

"Why don't you try out for one of the leads anyway?"

"Because it's hopeless. Nobody's going to want Ursula, and besides, that would be more of a challenge. I think you were born to play Beatrice."

"Can't. Miss Parkington already had me understudy that at Broughton, she won't cast me again in it."

"Well, I can't see you carrying off 'meek and innocent' any more than your dad could play Richard the Third in drag. What else could she possibly do with you?"

"I could be Margaret."

"Sorry, you aren't quite that slutty yet. You're certainly working on it, but I doubt you'll be as bad as Jen Blodgett in time."

"Speaking of, I think Jem Blodgett would make an excellent Borachio," Aldous observed. They had all been given copies of Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing' to study and most of the Gryffindors had read it through the very first day. "Either him or Lyff Grudgett. I think Matt Flint's got Don John in his back pocket."

"Definitely," Chloe agreed. "I think Professor Pureblood could be Leonato, though."

Julie choked on her pumpkin juice and gave Chloe a look of absolute venom.

"I sincerely doubt that," she said menacingly under her breath.

"Naw, I think 'Fessor Malfoy could do quite well as Benedick," Aldous observed.

Julie was not having an easy time with her drink at all. Chloe burst into airy laughter at the sight of her older friend putting down her goblet as if it might kill her the next time she attempted to drink out of it.

"He could pull that off," Julie agreed with Aldous. "Who would you cast as Dogberry, though?"

"Maybe Mack or one of the Weasley boys. You have to be kind of silly to play him, what with the imaginary horses and all of that."

Just then an owl landed on Julie's shoulder. The note was merely a guitar chord drawn in grid style with the notation 'G7m' above it. Aldous and Chloe were puzzed by it and asked Julie what it meant.

"It's G seventh minor for a guitar. The dots are where you put your fingers on the frets, you know."

"Frets?"

"The little lines on the neck, y'know, the part your left hand plays the notes on?"

"Oh."

"Why would anybody send you a chord and not a proper note?" Julie and Aldous laughed at Chloe's clever joke.

Actually, Julie knew exactly why someone would send her a chord. It was the new password to get past Bodrick the Unmusical.

She had a date that night, definitely.

********************************************

Now this was weird. Severus had seen a figure with a much darker ponytail than Draco's going into the portrait hole almost every night for a solid week. He assumed that Malfoy was either tutoring or punishing a student with long detentions, and he decided to investigate.

"'Allo, man," the goblin greeted him in a very well-counterfeited imitation of Ringo Starr. "Got the password?"

"G seventh minor."

"Groovy." The portrait swung aside.

To Severus's horror, not only was the student his daughter, but she and Malfoy were arguing very vocally with open paperback books in their hands. It took him a second to realize they were merely rehearsing lines.

"I had no idea that de Diablo was so terrified of Shakespearean comedy."

"Dad, you scared me!" Julie protested. "We're both auditioning tomorrow at the drama club."

"Pray, continue. I believe you actually managed to hint at the character."

Julie scowled briefly at him and continued:

"A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours."

"I would my horse had the speed of your tongue. Nay, I am finished!" Draco made as if to turn away, while Julie read her next line perfectly. Or at least she thought it was perfectly. Her father abruptly stood up and took the script away from her.

"No, no, no. That line refers to the unmentioned history between the two. You have to say that a little more ruefully, make it cynical. Try it this way..."

And to Julie's vast amusement, her father proceeded to give her acting advice on the lines of a female character. Then she and Draco flipped forward to the scene at the masked party, and Severus wound up showing Draco a better way to do a truly ridiculous foreign accent. It was especially fun when they attempted the first scene Benedick and Beatrice realize they don't hate each other; as Julie had no problem kissing Draco it seemed to give her dad a little bit of a scare.

"By my troth, Beatrice, thou love'st me!" Draco exclaimed in perfect character, only to have his script confiscated by his ex-Head of House.

"I think you both have fairly decent shots at landing parts, if you can get these memorized as well as being able to read it with inflection."

Draco got the message and recited Benedick's monologue where he condemns the idea of love as an excessively trivial and basically nauseating thing. Next, Severus put Julie through the paces of Beatrice's scene at the masked ball with Leonato and Hero, both of which parts he read.

"Aren't you auditioning?" Malfoy asked.

"Why should I?"

"Because you're good, Daddy," Julie observed mildly. "Your 'Hero's a little frightening, but you did 'Leonato' very well. Why don't you read Don John's villian speech in Act One?"

"I don't think that would be-"

"Oh, come on, Sev, it'll be fun."

"Isn't watching the Bard's comedy be vivisected by amateurs enough without myself adding to the cacophonous riot this production promises to be?"

"There again, you do use a lot of big words, there, maybe you should play Conrade."

"It'd be neat to see whether I got this acting thing from you."

Severus sighed.

"I'll audition, but it's just for the fun of it, alright, Julie?" he offered.

"Okay."

**********************************************

It was easily the biggest mistake of the elder Snape's life since gambling on the Quidditch game. A month and a half had him dressed in period costume for Messina, Italy, in Shakespeare's time, with his hair artfully charmed to a salt-and-pepper gray.

"Calm down, you make a good Leonato, Dad." Julie was fixing his cravat.

"Yes, Beatrice," he replied a little nastily.

"At least this is one of Mum's favorite plays."

"She's one of the reasons why I ever read most of the plays that this Shakespeare wrote. Before her, I really wasn't much into comedies."

"And now look at you, you're a relative lead in one."

"A lead's relative and a relative lead at once, how clever. That Judy Parkington is giving in to type casting."

"Hey, she cast Mitchie as Hero, didn't she?"

"That may be the most surprising thing about this play."

"No, I think this bloody accent is," Mitchie observed, sweeping in and sticking out her tongue at Julie. "Thee? It'th all bruithed."

"Hey, I've done it for fifteen-odd years."

"You grew up on this ruddy island, though, didn' you? Let's see you try to talk without sounding like the fifth Beatle!"

"Sure thing, y'all. Ah jes' cain't wait to see yoah sweet little ole country!"

Mitchie winced as Julie used a deep Southern American accent, not too badly, but it was funny considering her white Tuscan dress and costume hairstyle.

"And I assume you're going to show me all of Cobham, then?" she replied, in a dead-on impersonation of John Lennon with her glasses moved down her nose a bit. "The English are just so bloody fascinating sometimes an' all."

"Why not? Y'all goin' ta' show me yoah little ole hometown after we kick that damnyankee Dyablo, aren't ya?"

"Excuse me, Limey, but we do not refer to Pittsburgh as 'little ole' unless you happen to be thirty-seven feet tall and two minutes old."

"Excuse me, Yank, but we do not refer to our fellow actresses as limeys," Miss Parkington observed calmly. "Twenty minutes 'til curtain, everyone!"

***********************************************

Almost everyone at Hogwarts called Mitchie 'Yank' or 'damnyankee,' the former as an almost affectionate term, the latter as an insult by some Slytherins. Lyff Grudgett had set out the very day after her improptu Sorting to bother her, but both Julie and Donaghan protected their foreign friend with a surrounding border of Gryffindors at all times. Already Tom and Tim had mastered several of the American accents under her tutelage, and they drove people crazy switching from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh to Southern and back in the course of one argument between the two.

For her own part, Mitchie had abruptly 'gone arse over teakettle' (in Julie's words) for Donaghan, and with a hint of Slytherinish interrogation skill got the story of Julie and his relationship from Chloe, minus the name of the new guy she was now seeing. After about ten minutes of American time-wasting, including a solid five devoted to how wonderful Scottish guys sounded compared to Americans, Mitchie got to the point and asked her new friend if it was alright if she asked him out.

"Mitchie, I'm over him. Of course it is!"

"No, you're not! You couldn't be! How could anybody get over Donaghan?"

"Mitch, it's not like I don't have someone else, you know."

"I was unaware that Ewan McGregor was at Hogwarts."

Julie sighed. She'd have to take the American into confidence to convince her.

"Can you keep a secret?"

"Sure." Mitchie spat in her hand and held it out to Julie, who was in the process of doing the same.

"Why'd you-" they both started.

"It was a Matthews thing." Mitchie asserted.

"It was a Broughton thing." Julie replied, startled.

"You were an orphan, too?" they both almost shrieked.

"But you have parents, I've seen them!"

"I found out two months ago!" Briefly Julie outlined her past. Mitchie was shocked, having very neatly found her own English counterpart.

"I got sent to a wizarding foster home when I was ten. The Morrison Academy isn't a boarding school."

"This is so freaky! We're like...long-separated twins or something."

"'Scuse me, but I do not look like your twin, darkhair."

"Nor do I resemble you, foureyes, but I'm starting to wonder if this isn't coincidence."

"Well, your Minister sent for me personally. I thought that was really kind of odd. I mean, I hardly ever went to church anyways."

"What's church to do with it?"

"He's a minister, isn't he?"

"Cripes, you dumb Yanks. 'Minister' to us is like 'governor.'"

"I suspected that. He wasn't wearing a liturgical collar –not that I could necessarily tell under that beard, and normally ministers seem a lot more...well, you know, holy. He reminded me of how you'd expect Merlin or King Alfred to look, impressive, but still kind and sort of mischievous."

"I think we've just discovered the mischievous."

"So who is it you're dating? It'd have to be somebody completely incredible for you to be over Donaghan. I mean, he's got those eyes, and that gorgeous smile and that accent...rrrr! It's like when I used to watch Ewan McGregor movies as a little kid."

"Try James Marsters." Julie spat in her hand and held it out toward Mitchie.

"You aren't!" Mitchie spat in hers as well and they shook on it. "He's your professor!"

"'Zat a problem, petit chat?" Julie asked in a flawless New Orleans Cajun dialect. "C'est magnifique, non?"

"Well, sure he's dishy, but so's your dad. He's gonna kill you if he finds out what you're doing with Pureblood."

"I rather wish people would think of something better to call him- you think my dad's dishy?"

"Incredibly, kind of in a weird Alan Rickman way."

"Fine. I'll snog Spike while you lust after the Metatron. We are not twins, you sick monkey!"

"I didn't say I was lusting after him! I just appreciate a nice longhaired guy when I see one, even if he did take six points from Gryffindor for the way I pronounced 'herbs' and docked my essay three points because I forgot that you limeys put a 'u' in the word 'color.' Pardon me for not getting the memo on that."

"Are you seriously thinking of asking Donaghan out?"

"Yeah, I was thinking maybe to the Three Broomsticks for some jaggers and then maybe a fly around the towers for a little while."

"What the bugger's a jagger?"

"That's what we call thorn sodas in America, or thorn pop if you're really desperately Pittsburgh."

"I've never heard of such a thing."

"Well, do the Muggles have Diet Coke?"

"If you know where to find it, yeah."

"That's sort of what jaggers taste like, only with a serious aftertaste. I've probably got about three left in my footlocker upstairs, y'know, private stash."

"What's a footlocker?"

"Trunk. Do you really think he might go with me?"

"Well, I'm not sure how he'll react to you asking him out, but since you're foreign he'll probably just assume it's perfectly correct where you come from. It is, right?"

"Well, not exactly. It's acceptable, but not really often done. How do you date –you know, without causing a flurry of wild gossip?"

"I don't. We just sort of meet and talk about stuff or rehearse more."

"Is that all?"

"No, but I don't want to do any more spitting."

"You English," Mitchie observed in exasperation, taking off her glasses to polish them and shutting her eyes. "How do you think you can possibly get away with this, dating a guy who's likely older than your mum?"

"He's three months younger!" Julie protested weakly. "And my mum got away with it, didn't she?"

"She did? I thought your father seemed older, but not quite that much. Was he a professor, too?"

"Yeah, I'm technically illegitimate, you know."

"How can you be technically illegitimate? They're married, aren't they, and your mother uses her maiden name to prevent things being confusing, right?"

"Yeah, but I was born before that. Illegitimate."

"Not by American standards. Oh, sure, it's still a little bit frowned on by right-wingers, but generally that happens a lot to Muggle actors and musicians, noone gives it a thought. So many people are divorced and remarried so many times over that to have your original parents in one house is considered quite something, you know. There's very little odd about your family."

"What would you do if you found yours?"

"Oh, I won't. I know for certain what happened to mine. Car wreck, drunk driver, you know the tale."

"That's terrible, I'm so sorry!" For a few seconds both of the girls were quiet. "Can you remember what they were like at all?"

Quietly Mitchie replied:

"They were driving me home from the hospital."

And that was how Julie discovered her new friend's past. Now, three weeks later, they were playing cousins in a Shakespearean comedy. Like orangutans, they groomed each other's hair and made other such minor adjustments before checking their reflections in a full-length mirror.

"We'd look a damn sight more related without your nose, Limey."

"That goes for those glasses, too, Yank."

 "Hey, I can take these off." Mitchie took off the offending spectacles and shut her eyes totally, unable to bear even the backstage light.

"And that red hair! You and Donaghan are reinventing the Weasley clan."

"Are they?" Tim asked interestedly.

"I don't think they've got it red enough," Tom observed.

"Speak of the devil, Julie," Mitchie chastised her friend. "Not that ravens have any room to talk, y'know."

"Ravens?" Julie protested.

"Forgive me, crows," Mitchie clarified.

"Is it just me or do you two not like each other?" Chloe asked, suddenly popping up in her costume –as Ursula.

"Actually, we're better friends than anyone realizes," Julie said.

"We're arguing because we're both terrified. I have to kiss Donaghan onstage, you know." Mitchie tried her best not to smile happily at this prospect. Julie gave her a cynical little grin.

"I don't think you have much to be worried about, Yankee."

"Yeah!" Tom interjected. "Poor Julie's got to lip-lock with Professor Pureblood for crying out loud, Mitchie!"

"Speaking of, did you see Madam Pomfrey about a tetanus?" Tim asked her. "You'd better be up on all your immunizations."

That seemed to remind Mitchie of something. She excused herself and almost bolted to where Donaghan was giving his boots a last polish with a cloth and wand. The four Gryffindors watched as she got his attention and whispered something in his ear. Donaghan then caught her arm as she tried to run away and appeared to make an impassioned point. Finally, a very nervous Mitchie whispered something else in his ear, then took off her glasses to clean a tear away. It was odd the way she couldn't open her eyes without her glasses on. Donaghan looked shocked for a second and then kissed her long and well, at which performance Chloe, Julie, Tim and Tom all burst into applause.

"I am, too," Donaghan whispered, and Chloe was grateful for learning how to read lips years ago. She didn't need spit in her hand to keep it a secret, though.

*********************************************

At intermission, Julie took advantage of the short break to crack open a butterbeer and squiff half of it down within ten seconds. Tom and Tim came up behind her and tapped her shoulders, almost causing her to jump right out of her corset there.

"Cripes! Do you have to scare me like that?"

"We have something for you," Tim announced, holding up a small vial with a cork in it.

"It should help you with kissing the ferret an' all tonight," Tom explained.

Now Julie knew full well how bad the situation was. If she insisted she could handle it, it would only be a matter of time before they put two and two together. Even if she tried to make a show of bravery out of it, this could shoot their trust of her in the foot.

"Thank you so much!" she wound up saying, as if a probably-illegal potion was just what she had been hoping for. "What's it do exactly?"

"It helps to remove strong emotions temporarily,"

"Such as distaste, loathing, and profound disgust at the idea of kissing someone."

"Instead it'll be like kissing one of us, you know,"

"Minus the pure animal lust for our manly bodies, of course," Tim joked.

"Thanks, guys!" With only a small amount of trepidation, Julie downed the contents of the vial and chased it with butterbeer. For a few moments she wondered if the Muggle rule of never mixing medication with alcohol applied, or even if butterbeer had alcohol in it. For some reason she had never remembered to ask Madame Rosmerta about that, and the taste didn't give a thing away as to it's nature. Oh, well. She felt very warm and fuzzy inside now, like the way one feels when you wake up before everyone else and have another two hours to nap before your alarm goes off.

She didn't think to ask the boys what the potion they had given her was called.

************************************************

A/N: Does that explain a bit more? I purposely cut last chapter off before it was revealed how Chloe had found out about New Orleans, as it seemed like a nice cliffhanger to make my reviewers keep coming back. As of now I haven't quite thought of any excuse Julie might use to get her on the trip, but I know she/I'll think of something. Perhaps something to do with that little being one-eighth veela thing. What does everyone think of Mitch so far? I have a great long outline of what's going to happen, just a big framework, and she needs to be there, so I'm sorry if the Xerox effect annoys anyone. Thanks for reviewing so faithfully!

-J.McN.