Characters introduced in this chapter: Internet friends: I LOVE TOM - Faith Hopkins, Big John - John Greenman
Holding First
Alice and Ava walked up the stairs to their room, each wearing a huge smile.
"I never thought this would happen! And first year too!" Ava threw out her arms as if she were trying to hug the stairway.
"Yeah, it does seem perfect," laughed Alice.
"That was just such an awesome catch!" called Ava, springing up into the air and snatching at an invisible object above her head. "Rodney was great!" Ava opened the door to their room and the two girls walked inside.
Alice giggled at Ava. Her hop on the stairs was nothing compared to Rodney's catch. The Hufflepuff Seeker! Alice still felt the butterflies in her stomach, struggling to escape.
"Are they still at it?" asked Keri. A new chorus of yells sounded from below, as if in answer to the young girl's question.
Just as Alice turned around to shut the door, she heard a voice above all the others. "GO TO BED! Now! All of you! The party's over; the party's been over for over an hour!"
Bella chucked from behind her curtains. "Prefects!" she snorted.
"What time," yawn, "is it?" asked Daphne.
Ava, who had just thrown herself onto her bed, bounced back up and checked the clock on her vanity. "One thirty-two in the morning," she replied.
Bella pushed her curtain to the side and rolled out of bed. "Just the perfect time to be awake," she announced. She passed Alice, who was walking toward her own bed, and made her way to the door.
"Wait!" said Keri. "You can't go anywhere now! It's well after hours!"
"We can visit the common room at any time," said Bella.
"I don't think you can right now," said Alice, slipping into her pajamas. "They just made us go to bed," she motioned toward herself and Ava.
"Yeah," said Ava, sounding a bit peeved. "All we wanted to do was celebrate Hufflepuff's victory! You should know what all the older students have been saying. Hufflepuff hasn't been in first place for the Quidditch Cup in years, not after their first game or their second game and surely not after their last game!"
Bella stood at the door, her hand on the knob. "I know," she said excitedly. "Prefects or no, we really should party all night! We deserve it!"
"I don't know," said Daphne. "I mean, we won, but Ravenclaw has such a weak team this year. How many players last year did Sean say were seventh years?"
"Four," said Alice.
"Yeah, four," continued Daphne. "That's over half the team that are new players! It wasn't that much of a feat for us to win."
"Daphne," said Ava, "are you trying to dampen our spirits? This is such a great victory! Who cares if it was an easy game! It was a game that we won! We're in first place in the running for the Quidditch Cup!"
"Probably for the House Cup as well," said Bella. "We'll have to wait till tomorrow to see. The hourglasses! Those citrines are going to look so beautiful, I know it!" After a quick good-bye, Bella opened the door and shot down to the common room from where the sounds of merriment could still be heard.
Alice couldn't wipe the smile from her face, and Bella's last words caused her daydream (of Rodney catching the Snitch, with the Ravenclaw Seeker right on his tail) to change. The four hourglasses in the entrance hall, each filled with a gemstone to match the colors of the four houses, floated to the top of her mind. The four houses had remained fairly equal to each other until after the first Quidditch game (when Slytherin and Gryffindor pulled far ahead of Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw, Slytherin in first), but now the real race had begun. Alice almost couldn't get herself to fall asleep, the idea of seeing yellow citrines pilled high within Hufflepuff's hourglass crowding her mind, but somehow sleep took her.
Alice awoke what felt like a moment later. Daphne was already gone, but the other girls all appeared to be asleep. As Alice stirred around her trunk and vanity, Ava woke up as well and sat up in her bed with a yawn and a stretch.
"I love Sunday," she said. "It's just such a pleasant day. No school!"
"Yeah, but there always seems to be homework to do," said Alice, slipping socks onto her feet.
Ava shrugged and got out of bed. "I guess that if we did our homework on Saturday that wouldn't be the case. Actually, I think many Hufflepuffs do. The hard working factor."
Alice giggled. "Then what am I doing here?"
Ava planted her hands on her hips and regarded Alice with a stare. "You're very hard working," she proclaimed. "And if you can't see it, the rest of us can." She went back to getting dressed.
"Are you two going to go down to breakfast?" asked Keri, sticking a sleepy head out of her bed curtains.
"Sure," said Ava, sitting down at her vanity to attempt to tame her frizzy hair.
"We probably shouldn't wake Bella though," whispered Keri. "I'm not sure how late she stayed up."
"We could let her sleep," agreed Alice.
Arriving in the Entrance Hall a few minutes later, the three Hufflepuff first years found a crowd of students standing before the House hourglasses. Keri, being the tallest of the three, stood on her tip-toes and got a glimpse. "We're in first!" she said excitedly to the other two.
"I knew it!" said Ava, doing a little dance of glee.
"Oh, come off it!" snapped a familiar voice nearby.
Ava turned her dance into a spin so that she could face her opponent. It was Juliana Ramsden. Oddly, she wasn't hanging out with the Falcon twins this morning, but was instead standing with another Slytherin girl who Alice had heard a teacher address as Hopkins once. "There's no way you're going to win the House Cup," said Ramsden.
"Or the Quidditch Cup either," said Hopkins. "I mean, come on! You're Hufflepuffs! And you may have beaten Ravenclaw, but that means nothing. We beat Gryffindor, the team with the most seventh years!"
The look on Ava's face made Alice uneasy; she wasn't sure what the girl was going to do. "You think you're so great, don't you?" asked Ava.
"Of course," said Hopkins. "Slytherin is so obviously the best house. You know, you could have been one of us. Your father, at least, was a pureblood. Wasn't he?"
"I would have died before I would have become a Slytherin," Ava snapped, the color rising in her face.
"Hey," said Keri worriedly. "Let's not argue! We'll get in trouble. Why don't we just try and get along?"
"Hear that Faith?" asked Juliana, "She sounds scared!"
"I am not!" said Keri, but she didn't sound very convincing.
"Of course she isn't," defended Ava, taking a step in front of Keri. "What's to be scared of? You're just a couple of garden snakes and nothing more."
"Ava!" said Alice with concern.
"What?" asked Ava, looking away from the two Slytherins. Alice made a bobbing motion with her head to instruct Ava to look behind her. The girl turned around to see Snape standing at the top of the stairs leading to the dungeons. He was watching the group of first years intently but hadn't made a move toward them yet. Ava turned back around and began to walk toward the double doors leading into the Great Hall. "I'm hungry," she called back over her shoulder. Alice and Keri hurried to catch up with her.
They found Daphne sitting with John at the table already, each with a plate full of food and a face full of cheer.
"Hey guys!" said Daphne happily, "Did you see that we're in first?"
"Yeah," said Alice, sitting down and grabbing a doughnut.
"We're going to get the House Cup, I can feel it," she continued.
"Hey?" asked Ava suddenly, "What's the order of the other houses?"
"Currently," said John, speaking up for the first time, "it's Hufflepuff, Slytherin, Gryffindor, and Ravenclaw. But Gryffindor and Ravenclaw are really close."
"How odd," said Keri. "I heard that Ravenclaw won the House Cup last year and Gryffindor the Quidditch Cup. And then Gryffindor was second in House Cup and Ravenclaw second in Quidditch Cup."
"How did Hufflepuff do last year?" asked Daphne.
"Third in Quidditch Cup and last in House Cup," said Keri with a frown.
Ava giggled. "Well, not this year," she said. "We're in first and we're going to stay in first! We'll show those Slytherins!" She began to pile food onto her plate.
"Slytherins?" asked John, obviously puzzled.
"I have to agree with John," said Daphne. "Slytherins? I mean, you'd think the house to beat this year would be Gryffindor. I heard a prefect saying the Gryffindor N.E.W.T. students were neck and neck with Ravenclaw this year and we've all seen the difference in their Quidditch teams."
"She's just mad with the Slytherins right now," said Alice, letting Ava start eating without needing to respond.
"Ok," said Daphne, "alright."
Later that evening, Alice sat beside the lake, books ranged around her. She was putting the finishing touches on her latest History of Magic essay. Most of the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws had chosen to take this time to work on their papers as well. The assignment was to compare and contrast two wizard wars of the past and how they were fought. Of course, most people in the class had chosen the recently fought war between the Ministry of Magic and the Death Eaters as one of their choices, but Alice had opted for a different route. She had compared one of the wizard/goblin wars with the uprising and defeat of the dark wizard Grindelwald. It still surprised her how many of her fellow students had never heard of this wizard who reminded her so much of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named that she almost viewed this latter dark wizard to be nothing more than a copy cat.
Setting her quill to the side, she rolled out the parchment to its full length and began to measure it with her wand. "Four feet and about … two inches" she mumbled to herself. The essay had to be three and a half feet long, but Alice always wrote longer.
"Really?" asked Daphne, looking up from her own essay. "I don't have even two feet yet!"
"Alice, you have to help us!" called Michael from his spot under a nearby tree. "I don't know how you take so many notes in Binns' class."
"How can I not?" Alice called back. "He talks straight for the whole period."
"That's why," said Jadea. "But Alyson's just like you too! I don't understand how you do it."
Alice and Alyson made eye contact. True, they were the best in their year at History of Magic, though Alice had also heard from a Gryffindor, to her annoyance, that Juliana Ramsden wasn't too bad at the subject either.
"History of Magic is easy," said Alyson, turning to Jadea and her fellow Ravenclaws.
Bella snorted. "Yeah," she said, "and hags are nice company."
"Alyson," said Eve, scanning her own paragraph, "how long is your essay? I saw you put your quill up a while ago."
"Um," said Alyson, looking down at her rolled up parchment. "It's three feet eleven inches."
Yes, I beat her! thought Alice. She nearly flinched at her own thought though. She hadn't realized she was competing with the brown-haired Ravenclaw before, but she couldn't help it. In her mind, History of Magic was her subject.
"Wow!" said Eve. "There's no way I could write that much by tomorrow!"
Kai regarded her roommate with raised eyebrows. "That's because you procrastinate too much. I finished my essay yesterday morning. Three feet and eight inches. I compared the Grindelwald and Voldemort wars." Many of the students gasped as she spoke Voldemort's name. "What?" she said. "He's dead! Anyway, I couldn't get away with calling him 'He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named' in my family. My parents still call him the Dark Lord." Her tone of voice turned dark as she said this.
"What about your sister?" asked Jadea. "I noticed that my brother has taken to talking of him in that way. I just wonder if he'll dare to say that in front of our parents."
"I don't know," said Kai. "Akiko … well, she's in Slytherin, but I still believe that she's a good person." Kai shrugged and shook her head, her black braid swishing from side to side. "I'm the black sheep in the family."
"It's the opposite in my family," said Joseph. "My brother, Peter, is in Slytherin, you know." Joseph tapped his quill on his parchment. "I'm sorry, but I can't remember. Harry Potter's companions, the children who helped out in the war… There was Ronald Weasley, Ginny Weasley, Hermione Granger … and that's all I remember."
"Luna Lovegood" said Alyson just as Alice said "Neville Longbottom."
"Thanks," said Joseph, quickly jotting the names down.
"You know what," said Steven, looking up from what appeared to be a nearly finished essay, "you two could tutor together. Just like I help some people with Defense Against the Dark Arts. I think there are more people than need help with History of Magic than Defense Against the Dark Arts."
The thought had passed Alice's mind a few times before. She really enjoyed talking about history and tutoring it would give her the perfect excuse to talk about it. Still, she had her own studying to do. She still had to work extra hard in order to get her Defense Against the Dark Arts and Charms spells to work, and even in Transfiguration, she was slow. Even though it was her easiest spell-casting class, she worked hardest in it. Maybe she did so because it was her easiest wand class. It had been a long time since she had left Professor McGonagall's class without a headache, though she kept that information to herself.
"What do you think, Alice?" said Alyson, breaking into her thoughts.
All of the eager eyes on her, mostly of her fellow Hufflepuffs since Alyson was a Ravenclaw, made up Alice's mind for her. "Sure, I could do that." A sudden thought occurred to her. "And Binns never seems to add or take away house points based on behavior in class" ("Does he even know we're there?" asked Ava sarcastically.) "but only based on the grades we receive. So, Ravenclaw can move ahead of Gryffindor and Hufflepuff will be able to hold onto first."
"Not unless we catch up to you," said Dominic. The brown-haired boy was lying on his back in the grass. Blaine and Ava were beside him, watching the clouds go by.
"We'll never catch up to anyone if you don't learn how to stop procrastinating," scolded Kai.
"Hey!" said Dominic, affronted. "You do what you're doing and don't worry about what we're doing. My work always gets done on time."
"Yeah," voiced Eve, finishing up half a foot worth of her own essay.
"Procrastination is a sign of intelligence," said Blaine from his spot in the grass. Kai rolled her eyes and Jadea began to giggle at her.
"Hufflepuff meeting, after dinner," said Elizabeth to the first years as they sat down to eat.
"Huh?" asked Josef.
"There's going to be a meeting in the common room," repeated Elizabeth. "Actually, I'm excited. We didn't do anything like this last year!"
"Hmm, I wonder what it's about," said Keri, filling up her glass with pumpkin juice.
"Won't be too long till we all find out," said Elizabeth. "I'm going to make sure other people know." She got up and moved on down the table.
Chatter filled the Hufflepuff table as everyone learned of the meeting. The prefects left the table early, tired of being asked repeatedly what it was about. Alice, along with the people sitting around her, ate her food quickly so that she could get to the common room and figure out what was going on. She stood up when Ava did and the two girls exited the Great Hall together. John, Josef, and Michael were quick to follow them, the three boys carrying more food with them since they hadn't been able to eat as much as they wanted in the short period of time.
"Wait up!" called Josef, precariously balancing an overloaded napkin. Ava and Alice stopped to let the boys catch up with them.
Alice laughed when she saw the two turkey legs and half a loaf of bread in John's hands, much more than either Josef or Michael were carrying. "Are you sure you need that much extra food?" she asked. She felt a bit bad asking such a question. John was big, the biggest Hufflepuff younger than a third year, the biggest first year out of all of the houses. And it was more than obvious that he loved food.
John grinned. "Of course I need this," he said, taking a bite out of one of the turkey legs.
The Hufflepuffs descended the stairs into the hallway filled with food portraits and quickly made their way to the common room. In no time, they were standing before Mr. Cripps. The Nightwatch squinted down at them all, holding his lantern out before him. The light in it was very faint today, as if the wick needed to be replaced.
"I can barely see you," he complained. "How do I even know you're Hufflepuffs?"
Spot, at his side, began to wag his tail vigorously and then barked.
"If Spot knows you, then so do I," said Mr. Cripps.
"Toppinhopper," said Ava to the portrait.
"Yep, that's it," agreed Mr. Cripps as his portrait swung outwards. It looked like over half of the House was already packed into the common room, though Alice had been certain that not that many had left the Great Hall yet.
"Let's head for the corner," she suggested, pointing toward the far end of the room. The five Hufflepuff first years pushed their way through the crowded room and took all but the last beanbag in the corner to sit on.
"Want some?" asked Michael, holding out his napkin filled with cookies to the two girls. Alice politely declined by Ava snatched up a cookie right away. As the rest of them snacked, Alice surveyed the room. A table and chair and been dragged across the room to just before the fireplace and one of the prefects was currently sitting at the table, engrossed in a paper before her.
The common room continued to fill up steadily. The prefect sitting at the table in front of the fire finally stood up and began to count the people in the room. It looked like she attempted to count three times, but in the mass of moving, excited students, Alice wondered if she could have possibly gotten the same number any of those times. After the third counting though, she seemed satisfied, picked up her papers, and quickly stepped up onto her chair and then onto the table.
"May I have your attention please?" she yelled. The room began to quiet down, but a few seventh years made snide remarks about how it wasn't fair only prefects could stand on the furniture. The girl ignored them and held out her paper before her to read aloud.
"Hufflepuff is in first place in the Quidditch and House Cups," she announced to resounding cheers. "First place," she repeated, even louder. "In my seven years at Hogwarts, this has never happened before! There was a short period of time in my second and then my fourth years when we were first place in the House Cup, but never the Quidditch Cup, and surely never at the same time as the House Cup! This is a momentous occasion! This is Hufflepuff's chance to show the other three houses what we're made of! Loyalty I see in this room! Every face, I know, would be proud to sport yellow and black! We are the badgers; we are the best!"
She paused as the noise level in the room rose to a crescendo.
"Wait to go Kelley!"
"You tell them, Jessica! We are so the best house!"
Jason Trent, the Quidditch Captain, jumped up onto the table next to Jessica Kelley and put his arms up into the air. "We're going to win!" his voice boomed across the room. "I can feel it!"
"Hardwork!" Kelley shouted. "I know you all have it in you! It's part of what makes us all Huffles! Work hard and I'm certain we'll be able to hold first place! This is our year!"
Alice almost couldn't hear herself think. The cheering and shouting lasted much longer than this short speech, and it was sweet dreams that met them all as they fell to sleep that night.