Disclaimer-I don't own any characters that J.K. Rowling owns. Carolina, Taryn, and Peyton belong to themselves (once again—I'M SORRY!)…keep reading, I swear it has a plot!
Chapter Three: Sweet, Sweet Revenge
"Hello there!" Carolina sat up from her place by the fire, grinning with a pained expression on her face. Lily also seemed to know that they were both done for. As the Prefects started talking, James headed up to bed. His work here was done. Lily and Carolina had been soaked, and now they were in some serious crap. James couldn't help but smile. Ever since this afternoon when he had been covered in slime for the first time, he had been planning revenge on the two girls who had caused his humiliation. Finally, when Sirius had had his little eating contest (which caused James to loose five sickles) he came up with a perfect plan. Sirius could pretend to faint outside the common room and the girls would feel bad. They would take Sirius to the Hospital Wing, and James would tag along. He had only planned on getting them in trouble, but Peeves had been very helpful. Then, all James had had to do was use the secret passages that his father had taught him to get to the common room before the girls, come up with a story, and hey presto! Revenge was served to him on a silver platter.
James changed into his boxers, flopped down on his bed and fell asleep without even taking his glasses off. The next day James woke up early to go get Sirius out from the clutches of the mad nurse. As he walked out of his dorm, he was hit full in the face by a giant rhubarb pie. When he looked up he saw Lily grinning her maniac grin and Carolina tossing another pie up and down. James shook his head and sprinted back into the dorm and shut the door just in time. He heard the girls laughing as they skipped off down the hallway, leaving the mess behind. All of the noise had woken up Remus, who took one look at James and started laughing. James pulled a bit of crust out of his hair and tossed it at Remus's head, but his glasses were clouded with the pie's filling and he missed by a good few feet.
After James got out of the shower and dressed again, he sent Remus out into the hall first to make sure that there weren't any other people hiding, ready to attack him. Fortunately there were none, and James escaped into the corridor unscathed. He walked to the Hospital Wing where he snuck a confused Sirius out of his bed and into the Great Hall.
"So, how'd it go?" Sirius asked. James explained the whole thing, but left out the parts where he had gotten slimed and pied. But then as they were sitting down to breakfast, Lily and Carolina came in and sat across from them.
"Hey Jamsie," said Carolina, happily, "I do believe that you still have a bit of pie crust stuck in your hair. My, my. Don't you even know how to bathe properly?" She and Lily started laughing, and Sirius looked perplexed.
"D'you know what they're talking about?" he asked James.
"Oh, is little Jamsie pretending like it never happened? Well, this morning Carolina and I went down to breakfast early because we couldn't sleep. Imagine our surprise when we found these pies left on the tables from last night. Well, we didn't know what to do with them, and then Lina thought that you might be hungry, so we went upstairs and gave James the pies, if you know what I mean," said Lily, loud enough for the whole table to hear. "Did you like our pies, James?" Sirius finally got it.
"Dude! They pied you!"
"Not the brightest crayon in the box, are we Sirius? Oh yeah. We know that you were in on it too, so take this as a friendly warning. You have five seconds. I suggest you run," When Carolina had announced this, Sirius scampered from the room as the girls continued to count.
"4"
"3"
"2"
"1"
Then the girls sprinted out of the hall after him, Carolina carrying a pitcher of fresh pumpkin juice, and Lily with a bowl of grits.
James grinned. Poor Sirius. Poor, poor Sirius. He heard a tortured scream, and the hall fell silent. When Sirius entered the Hall a moment later flanked by Carolina and Lily, the silence blossomed into laughter. Sirius was drenched, his robes sticky with the pungent juice. His normally black hair was now speckled with white from the grits that Lily had dumped over his head. He squelched his way over to James amidst the gales of laughter, and sat down next to him with a giant squishing noise. Lily and Carolina walked over to the Gryffindor table, and sat next to two girls who James had never seen before. He looked over at Sirius, who was turning red. Sirius slowly turned to his friend and said, "Jamsie, my boy, I do believe that this calls for some prankage. What do you say?"
"I say, those girls will never know what hit them!" They high-fived and James's hand became all sticky with half-dried pumpkin juice. "Okay, you need a shower. I'll grab our schedules and meet you in, erm…" James glanced down at one of the laminate cards in his hand, "I'll meet you in Charms." Sirius agreed and ran off, only slipping twice.
James sighed, and walked out of the hall, calculating the way that would get him from the Hall to the common room to the Charms class room.
"Ah ha!" he cried. Making sure that no one was looking he walked over towards a bright painting of a group of old goblins sitting around a table. Checking again, and seeing that the Great Hall was clear he just slipped through the painting that he knew was just a wall, pretending. James found himself on a short flight of stairs that were of such a steep incline that he had to get down on his hands and knees. The stairs stopped short, causing him to slam his head up against the wooden trap door. He gently cracked it open to find himself staring into the first year girl's dormitories. He seemed to be in the window seat! He saw that Lily was bouncing around on her four-poster bed, and Carolina was lounging on the floor. Trying not to breathe too loud, he strained his ears to hear what the girls were talking about.
"Did you see Sirius's face when I dumped the grits on him? That was priceless. Too bad we didn't have a camera!" James could tell that it was Lily, because her voice carried, and she was the one that had dumped the grits on Sirius. James grinned. He had to hand it to them; the girls had class.
"Well, Sirius isn't too bad. He's pretty nice. It's James that bugs me. I don't see why he was so upset; it was just a bit of slime. They had it all cleaned up in seconds for pity's sake! You know he's going to try to get revenge for this morning, don't you?" Carolina's Spanish accent drifted past him.
"Yeah, I know he will. We just have to be prepared. Now, where did Taryn say our first class was?" The girls walked out of the room and shut the door leaving James alone in their room. "Well, thank goodness for that," he thought as he crawled out of the stuffy window-seat. "Couldn't have asked for better timing." He slunk towards the door and opened it cautiously. Well, at least no one was out there. He quietly picked his way to the first year boy's dormitories to find Sirius wasn't in the room.
"Slug! He's probably still making his way up the Great Staircase."
"Or he could be hiding behind a door, waiting for you," said a voice. James jumped as Sirius popped out and yelled, "SURPRISE! Gotcha!" James groaned picked up his pile of books while Sirius held open the door, saying, "After you, you old slug!"
While James was working out the best route to get from the corridor outside Gryffindor to the Charms classroom, Sirius asked, "What took you so long? I thought that you knew all of the passageways in the castle."
"Well," said James as they sprinted down the hallway and knocked three times on a wooden door, "I do. But I encountered one that must lead somewhere else on Mondays, or else it's just on the first day of term or something." They were panting now, but they managed to jog the final stretch and skid into the classroom full of Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs right as a short wrinkled teacher said, "Welcome to Charms!"
The lesson with the miniscule Professor, known as Professor Flitwick, was rather uneventful. Sirius caused a ruckus by levitating the tiny professor instead of his feather, and, somehow, Frank Longbottom managed to blow up six feathers and one textbook. James didn't have a chance to speak with Sirius until the end of the lesson, because Flitwick gave a rather long lecture about the importance of pronunciation and the flicking of the wrist, so he couldn't get a word in edgewise. At the end of the lesson, as he and Sirius were walking out of the classroom, and he finished explaining about the hidden passageway that led right into the girl's dormitory! Sirius's jaw dropped in awe.
"James you are an amazing marauder. I could never have pulled off something like that. We need to commit your genius to paper so that it may be immortalized in the Marauder Hall of Fame. My uncle's in there you know. He once pulled a job on the Minister of Magic himself! It was the talk of the town for weeks…" James let Sirius's voice fade into the background. He had heard this story many times before. The minister was hospitalized for a week, and Sirius's uncle had been in hiding ever since. By the time Sirius finished his story he and James had already made their way down to the Greenhouses for Herbology with the Hufflepuffs. A short, plump witch was waiting for them in front of Greenhouse 1.
"Hello class," she said in a small voice. "I am Professor Metus. Today we will be feeding Venomous Tentaculas. I suggest that you wear your Dragon-hide gloves, as these plants are particularly vicious in the mornings." The class followed her into the warm Greenhouse, where they spent about an hour tossing raw meat and live mice into what can only be described as the Venomous Tentacula's mouth. James was very pleased to see that the plant Lily's group was trying to feed succeeded in biting off one of her gloves and eating it. At the end of the lesson the tired group of first years made their way up to the Great Hall for lunch. Then the Gryffindors meandered up to their first Defense Against the Dark Arts class in a dingy sort of room just off the main hallway.
The room was full of junk. There was a collection of odd gold tops, some spinning and whirring at unimaginable speed, others just lying on the table. All along one wall there was an assortment of weird shaped wands, or at least, that's what the class thought they were. James turned around in his seat to tell Remus about the passageway, but when he saw the look on Remus's face he stopped short. If Remus had looked sickly and pale on the first day of term, that was nothing compared to how he looked now. His face had turned a nasty, pasty color that looked like sour milk. His knuckles were white and shaking, and it seemed as if he were having a hard time staying upright in his seat. James wasn't the only one that had noticed. Lily had moved into the seat next to Remus's and was trying to talk to him with a terribly concerned look on her face. James was about to turn to Sirius and tell him about Remus, but there was a disturbance in the form of a wizard.
The man came bursting through the door with incredible force, his brown hair falling in his eyes. Then, seeing that he had an audience, the young wizard straightened his robes and walked down the stairs to the front of the class.
"Hello," he began in a warm voice. "My name is Hunter Necare, but you may call me Professor." Some of the Gryffindors were staring intently at the Professor, but others were still looking at the odd wands hanging along the wall. The Professor followed the children's gaze, and smiled. "I see that you have noticed my Dark Arts detectors."
'Excuse me, sir? But I know Dark Arts detectors, and I have never seen anything like those," a girl that was, apparently, a Gryffindor had raised her hand.
"Yes, well, you see I am not just a Defense Against the Dark Arts professor; I am also a professional werewolf hunter. These are Muggle guns with silver bullets which are, as you should know, the only thing that can kill the terrors known as werewolves." After this announcement there was complete silence until little Peter said in a squeaky voice "Cool, sir!"
Soon the whole class was up and examining the so-called 'guns'. Well, almost the whole class. Remus remained in his seat with a pained expression on his face. After the lesson really got underway, the class began an intense study on Poltergeists. They learned how to repel them with a simple "Westicticuli!" spell. Lily learned the spell with such fierceness that James feared for Peeves's life. As the class walked off towards their double Transfiguration class with the Ravenclaw's James saw Remus lagging behind. He walked up to him and asked him if he was okay.
"No, really James, it's just a stomach ache. There's nothing to worry about. I just ate some bad eggs at breakfast," Remus was still looking pale when they got to McGonagall's class, but he cheered up when he learned that they were turning matches into steel needles. James mastered it quickly, as did Lily and her partner. Sirius had fun trying to poke everyone with his seven needles, but, at the end of the lesson, Peter's needle would catch on fire if anyone would so much as touch it. Then, right as the bell rang, McGonagall stopped them dead in their tracks. She assigned a project. On the first day of school. They were to research the history of Transfiguration and come up with a three foot essay by the end of the week. They had to choose boy-girl partners on their own, and she expected them to be mature about it. Chaos broke out.
"Oy! Carolina! Be my partner?" Sirius was yelling across the room.
"Sure. Why not?" Carolina was grinning as she shouted back. Then she turned to Lily. "You might want to grab a guy before they're all taken. Or before you get stuck with the Pot-head." James bristled at the insult and was seeing red. He turned on his heel and walked out of the room with Sirius in tow. He dragged Sirius away from the classroom and pulled him up to the Common Room.
"Why do we have to have girl-boy partners? And why did she call me a pot head? Sirius? We are going to strike tonight," James was furious. Sirius smiled. He loved it when James got all upset because that meant that they were going to kick ass.
The boys skipped dinner and spent the whole night in their dorm trying to think of a prank worthy enough to pull on the girls. There were too many what if's and how about's to count and eventually they settled on one thing. Well, I actuality it was several things, but those few things added up to one great prank.
By eleven o'clock they had gathered the necessary materials and were creeping down the Grand Staircase. They slipped into the special passageway that James had found and climbed the steep steps. At eleven thirty James rapped his head against the trap door again and poked his scraggily black haired head through it. James couldn't see anything, so he assumed that the girls were asleep. He and Sirius picked their way around the four four-post beds that had the scarlet hangings drawn close around them. James pointed out Carolina's bed to Sirius, and then moved into the bathroom. He found a bottle of Muggle shampoo called Herbal Essence. He saw the name Evans written on the side in sharpie. He then proceeded to dump the contents of the bottle down the sink and re-fill it with a potion that Sirius had brought from home. Content that he had done his job, James went back into the girl's room to find Sirius putting the finishing touches on his part of the job. Then they both snuck out of the room, into the hallway, and back up to their beds.
"That was bloody brilliant!" Sirius was really excited that they had pulled it off. James was happy too, but he had pulled his fair share of pranks in the past, and wasn't terribly excited about this one. He took off his glasses, fell onto his bed, and fell into a deep sleep.
(A/N) Hey Y'all! Thanks SO much to those of you who have reviewed (especially Musicizdbest who was my first reviewer! YOU ROCK MY SOX!) Ariana- I'm sorry about the spacing, my computer hates me. I'm working on the paragraph thing, so wish me luck! Sorry 'bout the eye hurting thing-hope it wasn't too serious :*( monkeybaby- I know where you live. BACK OFF! peanutguy- yeah that thing at the beginning was the Sorting Song…as to the paragraph thing-I'M TRYING! My computer is the root of all evil and it's getting revenge for when I smacked it (I get a little psychotic while playing computer games *looks guilty*) I'll try and fix it…I try to be funny…please let me know if I'm ever not funny (and I know who you are too, so please stop…)
Okay, after all of that general weirdness—KEEP READING AND PLEASE REVIEW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
