Girl Friends
Snape hadn't explained anything at double-potions on Friday, and that she hadn't minded. The assigned homework had been plenty. They had very little classroom time, and Hermione was happy that they seemed to be spending most of it brewing, not rehashing what people were already supposed to have learned. Yet the class was miserable anyway.
She and Harry had sat at the back, and Snape had kept coming over and criticizing every little thing, like Harry's knife being a quarter inch out of place when he wasn't using it or the dill being cut a little too fine or a little thick. Usually Hermione would love that much attention and feedback from a teacher, but it had been clear as day that he had only been looking for things to pick on them for. He glowered unhappily at Harry whenever there wasn't anything to criticize, but he gave fulsome praise to Slytherins who weren't doing worse, or at least, not better. Especially Malfoy.
But they had kept their eyes down and not spoken any more than they'd had too, and in the end they'd produced the best potion in class. Professor Snape had deemed it acceptable, and then he'd torn into Harry.
"Found a girl to do your work for you, have you, Potter? Don't think I haven't seen her whispering instructions in your ear and taking over the less mind numblingly easy tasks. But there will no shirking or riding of coattails in this class. Next week, you'll partner with Longbottom."
He had smiled nastily. Nevilles' potion had been a putrid yellow-brown sludge that smelled like dog poo. Hermione had bit her tongue to stop herself from saying anything, knowing that if she did, she'd only lose points. She had been taking the lead, sure, but Harry had been doing just fine. She had never imagined a teacher being so mean and unfair.
But it had ended, and Hermione couldn't help the small, traitorous thought it would be a relief next week when Snape's attention was concentrated on Neville and Harry rather than Harry and her.
"And Malfoy's being a complete ass about it," Daphne said in Charms Club on Saturday, "Prancing around like he's won something over every time Snape's snarked at you two, or over that damn thing with the broom."
Tracy said, "Daphne, you shouldn't say-"
"What? Draco's a little git and everyone knows it, but we all have to play nice with him because his daddy's rich. I wish he'd gone to Durmstrang like he keeps mentioning. Just don't tell him I said that and everything's fine." She tried the spell on her piece of glass and glared ferociously at it when it didn't light up right.
Hermione said, "It's Lumos Ex- ter- na, not ext-ern-a. And more of an upward flick — remember, it's a bright motion, not a dark one."
Daphne tried again, and the glass lit properly. She smiled. "You know, you're really much cleverer than I expected. And now that I have a genuine muggleborn friend, I wondered if you would take a look at this and explain certain things." She set a book called Facts About Muggles in front of Hermione.
The cover showed a shirtless man in pajama pants licking the tailpipe of a car, but Hermione hardly saw it. Her mind had screeched to a halt at Daphne referring to her as a friend even though this was literally only their second time talking.
Daphne was paging through. "It says here that muggles clean themselves after the loo with pressed pieces of dead trees. And I think I understand that now — it's the rolls of white paper in the girls' loos here. I'd never seen them before, but it makes sense, as they don't have Hygenies. But it says here that muggles love to watch portraits put on plays and many of them watch these plays for hours every day, and I don't understand that at all because I thought muggles didn't have portraits."
There was a small, unhelpful picture, but eventually Hermione understood.
"They're talking about the telly. Some people do watch it for hours most days, but other people hardly watch it at all, and muggles do have portraits, though they're not like magical portraits, but the telly isn't portraits. It's more like… you have the wireless, don't you? It's like if the wireless had lots of pictures too instead of only sound."
"Like watching an old Quidditch match on omnioculars?"
"...I don't know what those are," Hermione admitted. But after Daphne explained, she agreed that the telly was very much like it.
Daphne said, "I don't think it would be too hard to make one. A telly, I mean, and you could watch all sorts of memories on it. It might be cheaper than swallowing them directly."
Understanding what Daphne meant by that was a whole other conversation, and by the time she looked up, Sue had finished her lantern. It looked untidy and jagged, as if she'd rushed through, but she was flicking it on and off and running through all the colours. Even Harry was screwing on his colour dial, while Hermione was hardly more than halfway through.
The lantern was, in the end, made from a kit. All the more difficult Charm work had already been done, and they had only to assemble the pieces and cast the few simple spells that had been left intentionally undone. But it still took a good bit of time to do, and Hermione began to work frantically. Barely a minute before four o'clock, she got it finished. She would have to recast the spells once a week or so, depending on how she often she used it, but she now had the magical equivalent of a small table lamp, and she could even control the colour. She felt a rush of excitement at the thought that over Christmas break she could take this home and tell her parents she'd made it, even if it was from a kit.
She saw with satisfaction that even though she'd spent so much time chatting with Daphne, a number of others were still struggling. Terry's light was flickering off and on, Hannah's was stuck on pink, and Justin had destroyed two dials. Harry's….
"Harry, you've got on a second colour dial and no off-switch.
Harry spun the second colour dial. A click, and the light dimmed. A second click, and it dimmed to no more than a night light. A third click, and it was extinguished. He spun the dial the other way, and the light rose by the same steps. "It's a dimmer switch," said Harry.
Her jaw dropped.
"My cousin breaks his things all the time, and I fix them. No wires makes it easier."
"But how did you do it?" she asked, reaching for his lantern.
He shrugged, "The switch was planned to go back and forth between the two contact points for the Lighting Charm and the Extinguishing Charm, and we have extra contact points. So I cast the Lighting Charm on two of them, but dimmer each time. Then the dial just needs to contact all of them one by one while turning."
It wasn't any harder, magically speaking, than what she'd done, but it was clever and a bit more work. Hermione said, "But won't it bother you that you're using a colour dial to control the brightness?"
"I'll blacken it with ink."
Professor Flitwick came over, attracted by Harry's display. "A regular chip off the old block, aren't you, Mr Potter?"
"Sir?"
He gestured to one of the pictures lining the walls. "Your mother was one of the best Charms students I ever taught, and Club President for her final two years."
Harry stood as if in a dream. The pictures weren't there during the Charms Classroom's normal hours, but during club hours, the walls featured club photos going back decades. Harry walked slowly to the ones Professor Flitwick had indicated.
Front and center was Lily Potter, easy to pick out thanks to her dark red hair. Professor Flitwick was speaking quietly to Harry, and Hermione wanted badly to know what they were saying, but perhaps just this once, she ought to keep her nose out of things.
Daphne said, "Hermione, want to meet up in the library tomorrow to finish homework?"
"Oh, I-" had finished her homework the night before, though she had planned to revise it this evening, with the idea that she could spend all Sunday relaxing without it weighing down on her.
"I don't think Harry would come," she said. He wouldn't want to make a second draft of homework that had already been finished.
"That's fine. He could come if he liked, but I wasn't planning to invite any boys anyway. But you'll come? Excellent. Right after brunch." Then Daphne turned and made the same invitation to Sue.
Hermione turned away to hide the broad grin spreading across her face.
#
#
Lisa and Padma hadn't come, so it was just Hermione, Daphne, Tracy, Sue, Susan and Hannah at the Hogwarts library. They claimed a table at the back of the library, as far from the check out desk as possible so that they could talk with Madam Pince shushing them.
Hermione had hardly taken out her things and sat down when Daphne said, "So, tell us about Harry."
Hermione looked up wildly. "I thought we were doing homework?"
"We will. But first, we simply must address the fact that Harry Potter, the boy-who-lived, who seems clever, curious, talented and not stuck up at all, besides having the brightest green eyes I've ever seen, shown off quite well by his new spectacles — and I swear he's got taller since Tuesday, maybe he's just hunching less — is following you around like a puppy, love shining in his eyes. Dish girl, dish."
All the other girls were looking at her too. Not a single one of them was holding a quill with any apparent intention of writing anything with it.
"His eyes are not shining with love," Hermione hissed.
"Is it hunger then?" said Sue. "Does he think you're made of chocolate?"
Hannah Abbott started giggling.
"He does not look at me any way at all. And he doesn't follow me around like a puppy either."
"You're always together," said Susan. "Classes, meals, going to and from classes and meals…"
"So are you and Hannah. And Daphne and Tracy. You wouldn't think there was anything strange about it if Harry were a girl. And if you haven't noticed, he's not here right now. When I left, he was planning to let Ron Weasley teach him to play chess. Just yesterday morning, before club, he went with his dorm-mates to watch the Gryffindor Quidditch tryouts.
Sue said, "A hear a bit of time apart is healthy for any marriage."
"Oh, be quiet you."
Sue grinned and stuck out her tongue.
Hermione said, "Anyway, I'm pre-pubescent, and he's very pre-pubescent, so it's not even worth thinking about right now."
"Pre-what?" said Daphne.
"I mean I'm not a woman yet, and he's definitely still just a boy."
"You can still fancy someone before then," said Daphne airily. "I rejected my first marriage proposal at three, and fancied my first bloke at four."
Wrinkling her nose, Hermione said, "When you say marriage proposal you don't mean anything serious, do you?" Magical culture seemed to map fairly well onto normal muggle culture, but there had already been a few surprises, and arranged marriages would be an unwelcome one.
"I mean an older wizard — at the time, he was nearly four— attempted to tie a daisy around the wrong finger. I pushed him over."
Fair enough. Hermione had fancied a couple of boys, more or less, but thinking about Harry that way was just wrong. "It's not like that. He's so lost and small and confused that I feel like his big sister half the time."
"Lost?" said Susan Bones.
"It's not about him really. He's great. But you heard him on Tuesday, and it was even worse on the train. He didn't know anything. I knew more about him than he did. Like I said, he didn't know about magic at all until the 31st of July. Hagrid is the one who took Harry to Diagon Alley, and he didn't let him buy any books but textbooks."
"Hagrid?" said Tracy.
"The Gamekeeper," Sue explained. "My sisters say he's really stupid."
Hermione said, "Harry hadn't been to a healer either, and he didn't even know he needed new spectacles until I got him in to see Madam Pomfrey. I think everyone assumes that because he's famous Harry Potter, he knows about the magical world already so they don't do the things they would for a muggleborn, so he ends up knowing less and getting less. It's terribly unfair, and I think whoever's in charge of it is doing a very poor job."
"I think that's Dumbledore," said Susan. "My Aunt's complained about it. She keeps wanting to check on Harry's security, but Dumbledore always gives her the brush off."
"Dumbledore as in Professor Dumbledore?" said Hermione, feeling for a moment as if she'd committed some sin by criticizing him even indirectly. But no one jumped out to condemn her.
"I suppose he must be very busy," Hermione said. "Now could we please do some homework? I'm still struggling to understand functional commonalities but I'm sure I'll be able to write my way through it."
"So this is how you wooed him?" said Sue, but she was sorting through her frighteningly messy bag for her own work. "The first two weeks haven't been too tough, mostly, but I think I hate Potions."
Hannah said, "For me it's Transfiguration and Astronomy. I didn't expect them to have so much maths. Especially not Transfiguration."
Tracy groaned, "Working out all those equivalences is a nightmare, and this is just the beginning."
"Really?" said Hermione, "I didn't think it was that bad. It's very basic pre-algebra. I'll help you."
And she did.
/
I've never been an 11 or 12 year-old girl, but I think the boy-centric conversation was very necessary. (This is a first-year fic, so there will be no amorous activities. Kids this age sometimes do get up to some experimental kissing and the like, but it's creepy for me to write and for you to read, so I won't.)
Hygenie is a brand name, not a misspelling of hygiene. Within their world, it's a play on hygiene and genie.
If you don't see why Daphne was sorted in Slytherin, you will eventually.
Hermione thinks she's being discreet, but Harry would be upset if he knew how much she was saying.
