Not that there wasn't something quite appealing about the thought of opening the door and finding a room full of gorgeous girls. But Sirius was not about to get his hopes up.
He took a deep breath and opened the door.
To his surprise, he found the room almost empty. It was quite a bit smaller than it had been when they'd used it for transformation practice, and the ceiling was tilted as if the room were right up under the roof... which was ridiculous, because Sirius knew very well it was on the ground floor. The room was dusty and cobwebby, with bare stone walls and plain wooden floor, and absolutely empty except for a small, square table on which was a single lit candle in a mason jar, and a small black book.
Sirius stepped inside, shut the door behind him, and picked up the book. It was clearly rather old - the corners were tattered and the pages dog-eared. The edges had been gilded once, but what little was left was all but unrecognizable as such, and the cover was plain, soft leather, with tht title Shakespeare to Hardy embossed on it in gold.
"Poetry?" Sirius asked out loud. "You've got to be kidding me." What did the Room think he was, some kind of poetic hero? Not bloody likely. There had to be something else going on here... he opened the book for a look.
To his surprise, he discovered that it in fact belonged to somebody: inside the front cover was a yellowing bookplate declaring that the Richmond County School for Girls had awarded this book to Dorothy Lawrence as a prize for excellence in mathematics... in 1938.
"Nineteen thirty eight?" he asked in disbelief. What the hell was the point of giving him a book of mushy poetry belonging to some witch who would be fifty or sixty years old by now? He certainly wasn't going to go to any balls with her.
Disgusted, Sirius dropped the book back on the table and started to stomp out of the room, but then changed his mind and tucked the little volume into his bag before leaving. Maybe he could turn it in at the lost and found... you generally got a couple of House Points for doing that, although in this case he doubted the owner would ever come for it. Dorothy Lawrence in 1938 had probably been the last idiot who'd wandered into the Room of Requirement looking for a date.
"That took long enough," said James, as Sirius slipped back into the History of Magic classroom and sat down beside him. "What did you do, fall in?"
"No... uh..." Sirius thought fast. "I couldn't use the downstairs bathroom because Moaning Myrtle was in there for some reason. So I tried to go upstairs, and the staircase changed on me."
James grinned. "Good old Hogwarts! Where else can you actually get lost on the way to the loo?"
Professor Binns paused in chalking up notes about the Court Sorcerers of Henry VIII and glanced back over one semi-transparent shoulder. "Are you paying attention, gentlemen, or do I have to repeat that?"
"We're fine," said Remus quickly, as James and Sirius quickly settled down and tried to look busy.
Fortunately, prenteding to listen to Professor Binns was something Sirius was very good at. All he had to do, after all, was have a textbook and notebook open on his desk, and keep glancing at one while working in the other. He accomplished this by slipping a 'Hulderbrand the Animagus' or 'Wizard Detective Peregrine' comic book into his text, and charming the panels to stand still so that he could draw copies of them in his notes.
He was in the middle of what was, if he did say so himself, one of his better drawings of Hulderbrand's wolf transformation when James' handwriting appeared on a corner of the notepaper. Any more ideas how we get dates? it said.
Sirius wondered for a moment if he should mention going into the Room of Requirement... but James would tease him if he did, and he hadn't found anything useful. No, he wrote back, and then after a moment's thought added, Andy has a Makeover Mirror. If we're stuck with ugly girls, maybe we could use that.
He touched the page with his wand and murmured the spell to send it back to James. After a moment, the reply appeared: Only as a last resort.
Agreed, said Sirius. It's cheating, anway.
Remus' tidy had materalized next: Has anybody but me considered actually apologizing to the triplets?
Sirius had not in fact thought of that... he'd just assumed that Narcissa, Andromeda, and Bellatrix were now entirely out of the realm of possibilities. And now that he did think about it, something in him rebelled at the concept. He and his friends were, after all, the infamous Marauders! They didn't apologize... especially not to stuck-up girls who thought it was fun to leave them dateless two weeks before the ball! Sirius would rather die than apologize to Andy for this... she was the one who'd gotten the wrong idea.
Fortunately, he wasn't alone in thinking so.Why should we apologize to them?James asked. They're the ones being difficult.
Exactly, Sirius wrote.
We've got to lure them back to us, said James, not crawl back to them.
Sirius frowned - apparently, he hadn't been on the same page as either of his friends... but 'get the triplets back' was certainly a lot better than no plan at all. How to do it, though?
Most of the rest of History of Magic was devoted to brainstorming... flowers were suggested, as were chocolates and poetry - the latter by Sirius, who wondered if that were maybe why the Room of Requirement had given him that book - but James turned down all three as being too much like apologizing. Knowing James, Sirius suspected they were going to end up with some brilliant scheme for humiliating Malfoy, Ted, and Rudy in front of the entire student body. But it would be James himself who'd come up with the plan; that was how it worked. James was the mastermind, and Remus and Sirius carried things out.
By the end of History of Magic, however, James had not yet had a eureka moment, and the boys set off for the Great Hall with the gloomy knowledge that there was now less than two weeks - just thirteen days, a terribly inauspicious number- until the ball, and they remained dateless.
"A love potion?" James suggested as they headed off to Study Period with the Hufflepuffs. "Just a temporary one, of course."
Sirius shook his head. "Nah. That's cheating, too."
"Better than Andromeda's Makeover Mirror," Remus pointed out, though he didn't sound as if he liked the idea.
"Well, yeah," said Sirius, but he wasn't comfortable with it, either. Love potions were hard to make and could go wrong in all kinds of bizarre and often painful ways. "There's got to be something better, though."
The boys sat down at their usual table in the corner, where they could talk and plan out of sight of the hawk-eyed librarian. "Well, since we're here, we might as well look," said James. "I'll bet there's something in the advanced potions section. You two make some noise, okay? The librarian will get suspicious if it's quiet back here."
"I don't know, James..." Remus began.
"I'm only going to look," James interrupted. "I didn't say we'll actually do it, I just want to look. No harm in just looking, right? We did a thing on love potions earlier this year. Maybe it'll be on the final. There's nothing wrong with looking."
"I guess not," sighed Remus.
"I'll be right back," James promised, and wandered off into the forest of shelves.
"Don't worry, Reme," said Sirius. "He'd not actually gonna brew it. He'll think of something else."
"I hope so," said Remus, propping up his arithmancy textbook so it covered his face. Remus had always been intensely uncomfortable with spells and potions designed to make people do things against their normal character - even things like truth potions bothered him. They reminded him too much of his own curse.
Sirius reached into his bag for one of his own books, but what his fingers fell on was the little book of poetry he'd found in the Room of Requirement. Frowning, he pulled it out for another look. Perhaps he'd missed something in looking at it before? He began flipping pages at random, looking for some clue to what he was supposed to do with it... preferably a clue that didn't involve making a fool of himself by reciting poems to anybody.
At this point he really wasn't expecting to find anything, but as it turned out, there was a sheet of folded foolscap tucked between pages 364 and 364. Sirius pulled it out for a look - in somebody's carefully neat printing was a list of Latin vocabulary words to study for charms class... and the date in the corner was last monday.
Interesting. So this book had in fact belonged to somebody more recently than Dorothy Lawrence in 1938. It was starting to seem like this book was some kind of riddle he was meant to solve, and the solution would get him a date for the ball. Maybe he was supposed to find... but that train of thought was cut off before completion when he noticed the poem printed on page 365; one of Shakespeare's sonnets.
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the Sun
Coral is far more red than her lips' red
If snow be white, why then her skin be dun
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head
I have seen roses damasked, red and white
But no such roses see I in her cheeks
And in some perfumes there is more delight
Than in the breath with which my mistress speaks
I love to hear her voice, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound
I grant I never saw a goddess go
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground
And yet, by Heaven, I think our love as rare
As any she belied with false compare
Oh, for crying out... Sirius grimaced and closed the book again. That was the point of the entire exercise? The stupid book was a way of telling him that he was going to have to swallow his pride and date a dog? Well, if whatever pseudo-intelligence inhabited the Room of Requirement really thought he was going to do that because of a book of poems, it could go stuff...
"Excuse me," said a voice.
Sirius looked up; a Hufflepuff girl was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder at the book. He quickly stuffed it back into his bag, feeling his ears heat up as he did - great, now everybody was going to think he was some sappy dork who read poetry. "What?" he asked.
She pointed into the bag. "Where did you get that book?" she asked.
"I found it," he said. "It's not mine."
"I know," said the girl, and held out her hand. "It's mine."