Entertaining The Johnsons

Hermione was sick of smiling brightly. She could be in Bulgaria now, fighting off Viktor's affections – not that it seemed like a terribly appealing option. She could be revising the year's work; Professor McGonagall said that the syllabus for the OWLs provided the basis for the NEWTs and that it was well worth looking over the material that had been on her exams for revision purposes. She had a collection of books from the library upstairs; Madam Pince had made an exception and let her take a few texts home for the summer, although she'd been warned that if any of them were returned with the slightest bit of damage, she'd be paying for it for the rest of her schooldays. She could be reading up on Defence Against The Dark Arts, even if it was frustrating not to be able to practise – why on earth, she wondered, wasn't the Minister making concessions and allowing underage wizards to practise defence? – or rolling her eyes at what The Quibbler had to say for themselves this month, or watching paint dry, or doing anything, really, anything but sit and make small talk with friends of her parents who had no idea that the darkest wizard of the last century was alive and well and not too fond of Muggle-borns.

They didn't even know what Muggles were. They didn't know that they were Muggles. As far as they were concerned, they were just ordinary Mr and Mrs Johnson. And to top it all off, Jill had come along, too.

The Johnsons and the Grangers had been friends for quite some time. Mr Johnson was a dentist, too. Mrs Johnson was the odd one out, being a psychiatrist, and it was this fact which made Hermione's parents so very worried about what little details their daughter might let slip.

She knew that Mrs Johnson would think she was certifiable if she started babbling on about witches and wizards and magic. Of course she knew that. She was hardly going to start off a conversation with, "So, what do you think about the plight of house-elves, Mrs Johnson?" now, was she? The reminders that had come from both her parents before the Johnsons' arrival really hadn't been necessary.

She was used to keeping secrets when she was at home. Even though her parents enquired about her schoolwork and what Hogwarts was like, she knew that it was easier for them to pretend that she was just a normal girl. She'd disappointed them in some ways, she knew. They'd had grand plans for her. They hadn't expected her to be whisked away from them. They had no real idea of what the wizarding world was like. She certainly hadn't mentioned Voldemort to them. They'd want to keep her away from school, to keep her at home with them, because in their minds home was the safest place to be. She'd offered to let her mum borrow Hogwarts: A History once, but now she realised that neither of her parents really wanted to know.

And there were other secrets, too, she thought, biting on her lip because she felt she had to do something whenever that occurred to her, as though there had to be physical proof of what was going through her mind.

This wasn't the time to be thinking about any of her secrets, anyway. Mr Johnson was asking her about GCSEs.

"They went quite well," she said, smiling and nodding. Well, she was sure they would have, if she'd been in a Muggle school. Sometimes she wondered just what she was missing out on. She had a few Muggle textbooks up in her room, trying to get an idea of the sort of knowledge that "normal" teenagers were being taught, but it wasn't the same as attending classes.

"Jill had a bit of trouble with Maths," Mr Johnson said conspiratorially. "Not her strongest subject. She couldn't quite come to grips with it."

Jill looked thoroughly annoyed at her father discussing her academic ability like this. "Dad. Stop."

"Some people just aren't mathematically inclined," he continued.

"And the examination system is really only geared towards one type of ability, anyway," Hermione said brightly. "You could be, as you put it, 'mathematically inclined', but perhaps not respond to the teaching methods, or the testing methods. It's a tricky one, isn't it?"

She could go on like this for a while, she thought. She had a copy of Wizarding Education Throughout The World among the books in her room. It was the same argument with different subjects. And she was fed up with nodding and smiling.

Jill looked at her gratefully. That, too, was a very good reason to keep going.

Jill had been her best friend once upon a time, before everything changed and a whole new world was opened up to her. Jill was at the school they'd both intended to go to, having the sort of teenage life that they'd both dreamt of when they were younger. Jill had been rather huffy when Hermione had had to go off to boarding school suddenly, seeing it as a personal betrayal. They didn't write to one another, but saw each other most summers owing to their parents' friendship.

Jill wasn't a friend anymore, but maybe that would have happened anyway, even if they'd gone to the same school. Jill was wearing her hair in pigtails and it was blonde now, instead of the ordinary brown colour it had always been. Apparently she was trying to look like someone called Baby Spice and after a confusing conversation in which Hermione had insisted that really, she wasn't against pop music as an act of rebellion and no she wasn't into "grunge" either and she didn't mind what kind of music Jill was into, the matter had been dropped.

But even though they couldn't quite connect anymore, she still felt as though she owed Jill something. It wasn't Jill's fault that Hermione had spent the last five years of her life getting involved with dangerous situations and encountering the sort of things that Jill could only imagine and that she didn't have access to a television during the school year, after all. As far as Jill was concerned, Hermione was a perfectly normal, average girl just like her, if a bit of a swot.

Normal. As in, not deviating from the norm, her brain offered helpfully.

She had only a vague idea of the statistics because she didn't want to actually go and research this topic, but she was certain that, yes, she was deviating from the norm.

And not just because she was a witch.

Mr Johnson was impressed with her point of view on education. Hermione had a sneaking suspicion that he was going to go home and ask Jill why she couldn't be more like Hermione.

She knew that her own parents were going to ask her why couldn't she be more like Jill. Jill, athletic and popular, someone who didn't spend her summer with a nose in a musty old book. The subtext was clear: why can't you be a normal girl? Why do you have to be a witch?

She thought of the book she had upstairs and sighed. She'd been half-avoiding it, and it was currently under her bed, so that her parents wouldn't see it – not that it would mean anything to them if they did see it. The Trials and Tribulations of Oswald Beamish wasn't a title that meant anything to them. It hadn't meant anything to her, at first. She'd got it out of the library because she wanted to research his life. Professor Binns had mentioned that his role in working towards rights for goblins, and she'd hoped that by reading up a bit about him, she might get some new ideas for S.P.E.W.

Madam Pince had given her a funny look, and about one-third of the way through the book Hermione had figured out why.

Beamish's affair with an older wizard, listed in court records only as EG, was to be the catalyst for his downfall. Beamish's enemies saw this relationship as an opportunity to attack him, knowing that he would lose all credibility among his peers while engaging in such an "unnatural love" (see Chapter Four for the entire text of one particular attack).

She'd had to reread that paragraph before it actually sunk in. With an older wizard – oh. Oh. Funny how that part of the story had never been mentioned in school, or for that matter, any other book she'd consulted. Was this why the book was kept in the Restricted Section?

She'd read the rest of the book – always hiding it, guiltily, whenever she could hear one of her parents on their way upstairs, just in case they'd walk in and see her reading and know, and it was stupid, she knew, but it was how she felt – and had come to the conclusion that the only reason it had been placed in the Restricted Section was, in fact, because it discussed the relationship between Beamish and this EG.

And it didn't matter that it was hardly complimentary – Hermione had a feeling that while the author approved of Beamish's work with the goblins, he entirely disapproved of Beamish letting himself fall in love with another man – it still acknowledged it.

Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself, she'd reminded herself, but it had taken her four years to speak Voldemort's name aloud and she had a feeling it was going to be another four years before she could say gay or homosexual out loud too.

But she wasn't afraid. She was just – uncomfortable. And it bothered her that she was uncomfortable, because she knew what she should be doing. She should be preparing an argument as to why this book should not be tucked away in the Restricted Section, because there was no reason it shouldn't be available to all students, except perhaps bigotry, which she was fiercely opposed to.

But this was different. If she took this up as her latest crusade, people would think things about her.

Why did she care what people thought of her? She shouldn't.

But she did. She had to spend the better part of the year with these people. She had another two years at Hogwarts left. She had to share classes and a common room and a dormitory with some of them. It was impossible to live in your own little world at Hogwarts, unless of course you were Luna – and she didn't want to be Luna, thank you very much. Luna was off the wall, and even though she'd been quite useful at times, it didn't mean Hermione wanted to emulate her way of living.

She could just imagine Luna's reaction to reading something like this. She'd take it in her stride, probably. Luna probably wouldn't blink an eyelid even if Beamish and EG came to life right in front of her eyes and started having sex right there and then.

Luna wouldn't care if people thought she had a personal agenda in starting a campaign. For all Hermione knew, Luna was a –

It was funny, the word starting with an l scared her more than both of the other two. She didn't even want to think about that one.

Not that she herself was – except maybe she was, because that would explain everything. But she'd know, wouldn't she? It wasn't like she was interested in girls. Looking up to people, or being friends with them – that didn't mean she wanted to do anything with them.

On the other hand, she wasn't like Parvati and Lavender, who were girly-girls, who knew all the make-up charms and could work them as easily as breathing, and who held breathy conversations about boys who were cute.

Hermione, when she took part or listened in to these discussions, agreed, mostly, on their choices. But she didn't understand why they wanted to discuss these boys in such great detail, or how they could sigh about someone's hair or nose or arms or whatever it was.

They thought she was either in love with Harry or Ron, anyway. Last year she'd told them she wrote to Viktor, and they'd squealed and sighed and said that long-distance romances were really special.

She didn't have the heart to tell them that while she enjoyed her correspondence with Viktor, she wasn't entirely bothered by the fact that he was in a different country and wouldn't be around to try to convince her to sneak off somewhere and demonstrate their love for one another. Words on a page were much safer.

It had stopped them asking questions about whether she preferred Harry or Ron, though, which was a relief as she'd started to feel as though she had to choose properly, as though whatever she said would influence her friendships with them. She loved both of them, that was the thing, but she wasn't in love with either of them. She wanted to save them, to protect them, to be there for them. She might been able to be in love with Harry if she'd understood him better, but she knew she was never going to understand what it was like to have grown up with the Dursleys and have faced the things he'd faced. She might have been able to be in love with Ron – and at one point she'd thought, maybe, maybe – if he hadn't been so infuriating.

That was three boys in her life, three potential romantic interests for a perfectly normal heterosexual girl, and she wasn't in love with any of them.

And she was hiding The Trials and Tribulations of Oswald Beamish under her bed.

She didn't particularly want to draw conclusions but even without making any definite decision, she knew that she was not normal.

The dream hadn't helped, either, but she definitely wasn't going to think about that. Because it couldn't have meant anything. If it had been someone else – Ginny, or Tonks, or even Jill – then she might have been a bit worried. But when her dream seductress hadn't even been someone she liked in a friendly way – well, it was clearly just one of those random things. It was a terribly obvious interpretation of her dream, anyway, and even though she didn't have much faith in dream interpretation, she had a feeling that if Trelawney, or perhaps even someone who knew what they were talking about, were to analyse her dream, they'd find it hadn't meant anything as obvious as that. It probably meant fear of death or something.

Or a desire to see the houses unite. Yes, she decided, that was what it had been about. The kiss was symbolic. It didn't mean that she wanted to be kissed. It was just a sign of forgiveness, perhaps, of letting bygones be bygones, of putting the rivalry between the houses aside and working together for a better future.

This was hardly the time to be thinking about these things, anyway. Her mum was handing out cups of tea and offering around sugar-free biscuits, and Hermione was sure that if any one of them looked closely at her, they would be able to read her mind, regardless of their lack of Legilimency powers.

It was this sort of paranoid behaviour, more than anything, that made her think that on some level, there was something going on, and she didn't like it.

If it had been anyone else, she would have been – she liked to think she would have been, at any rate – supportive and understanding and open-minded and tolerant. But it wasn't anyone else. It was her.

Maybe there were just too many secrets to keep. At least when she was with the Weasleys at Grimmauld Place she wouldn't have to hide the fact that she was a witch. And maybe being around her friends would help. She was isolated here, with just her parents and the occasional guest. Even though she knew they missed her, she was starting to feel more and more detached from them. It was natural – she was in boarding school for most of the year, and she lived in a different world, a world they didn't understand. They had different lives. The time they spent together each year was growing shorter and shorter. Sometimes she wondered what it would be like if she was living at home and going to Jill's school, whether she would be closer to her mum and dad and tell them, if not secrets, then at least some details about her daily goings-on.

In just a few days she'd be around Ron and Ginny, both of whom seemed delighted that she was going to be visiting. She could only imagine how dull the place must be without Fred and George around. Not that she approved of their antics, of course, but she had to admit they did make life interesting. And she had to admire their nerve. Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes was already a thriving business, from what she'd heard. For a couple of eighteen-year-olds it was pretty impressive, even if it would have been more sensible to stay on and get their NEWTs first of all.

On the other hand, Umbridge had been utterly rotten. Hermione's fists clenched automatically just thinking about that woman. If they didn't get a decent Defence teacher this year, she was going to take drastic action. They needed to learn how to defend themselves, to prepare for the worst.

For a moment she thought she'd be better off staying at home after all, and burying her head in the sand and pretending she'd never heard of Voldemort and had no magical powers whatsoever and avoiding the entire wizarding world.

That wasn't an option, she told herself firmly. She was going to go and stay at the Order headquarters next week and immerse herself in the world she belonged to.

And she wasn't going to think about that other thing. No. Definitely not.