Over the next several days, Hermione realized just how crazy she had really gone.
The next morning, her friends all looked at her at breakfast tentatively, as if she might snap at any moment, and it made her heart ache to think that she might have hurt them or pushed them away.
With a deep breath, she took an apple.
"Defense today," she remarked, taking a bite. "Wonder what travesty Lockhart has planned for us."
She offered her friends a soft smile, apologetic, and she could practically see the tension radiating from Blaise, Millie, and Tracey slowly start to dissipate, their shoulders relaxing and faces smoothing out as she greeted them calmly, not snapping or snarling at all.
"My bet's on his vampire adventure again," Blaise said. "He likes going on about that one."
"That's because he likes doing both parts," Millie pointed out. "He likes being able to twirl his cape around and speak in a terrible accent to portray the vampire."
Tracey's eyes sparkled.
"I don't mind in the slightest," she said, shameless. "Have you seen how tight the trousers he wears under his robes are?"
Hermione smiled at her friends, eating her apple, feeling her sense of kinship with them slowly rebuild as they continued to mock the Defense teacher and make snarky comments, things settling back to normal once more. She knew it would take a while to fully repair their trust – she had become quite the terror, hadn't she? – but she was on the path to reconciliation.
Harry, Neville, and Ron seemed relieved to see her in a more typical mood when she caught up with them in the library, making her feel even guiltier. She hated realizing how she's lashed out at those she most cared about. Hermione couldn't bear to make eye contact with Ron – the shame of him having been sort of right about what had been causing her bad mood was overwhelming.
Her classmates seemed on edge around her too. She caught more than a few surprised and suspicious glances when she calmly answered questions and earned points for Slytherin, which made her head spin with worry and wonder. Had she not been doing that the past few weeks? What had she been doing in class?
Apparently storming through the school in a bad mood and glaring at people, if their reactions were any indication.
No wonder her friends were so relieved to have the regular Hermione back.
Her mental episode had cost her more than just her friends' good will, however. Hermione found her homework for the past three weeks had been done appallingly poorly, with barely any extra details included at all and nary a footnote in sight. She was horrified, and she spent the first day scrambling around to all her teachers in her free time, dragging Blaise with her, begging for extensions to fix her homework or to get extra credit to make up for her mediocre work.
Most of her teachers looked on her kindly, some with pity, and most were willing to give her extensions or offer extra credit to make up for her lacking work. As she went around, Hermione realized just how much the faculty must have noticed her erratic behavior. Snape had been telling the truth – all her professors seemed unsurprised by her begging to make up her marks, and they all seemed relieved to see her back to normal as well.
Hermione was surprised when Blaise pointed out that her marks hadn't suffered as much as she'd feared. Though her work wasn't up to the quality she usually provided, her essays had been complete and had always fulfilled the entire scope of the assignment. She was surprised to see that she had still earned perfect grades, despite her lack of supplemental research and supporting details and footnotes.
She was rather relieved, though; there was no way Snape would have ever given her extra credit.
The embarrassment and shame she felt from Snape's dressing-down was pressing and horrible. Though Hermione was now able to go outside and cycle her magic through the earth to help her calm down, the emotional misery she faced wasn't a symptom of an unstable core – it was the very real symptom of majorly messing up, and the disappointment in her of someone she looked up to.
She took some small comfort in the fact Snape had been wrong about one thing; she hadn't been hallucinating. Riddle had tried to possess her, she knew. At the least, he'd tried to mess with her mind, only to fail from the protection she had from the Occlumency ritual.
(Not that it was a great comfort, knowing someone had tried to take over her mind.)
Now that she could think straight again, though, Hermione felt a little better at being able to lay out a well-thought out plan: research basilisks and how to kill them, research how a diary could possibly possess people, and then go to Snape with her conclusive results.
She couldn't bear the thought of going to Snape again and admitting she was out of her league with something else. Admitting to talking to what she knew was an evil diary wasn't quite the same as being oblivious to her magical core destabilizing, and she could just imagine the rage and fury in Snape's eyes if she told him what she'd done. If she could figure out a solution to the whole thing, she could present it as the answer to a research problem she'd discovered and not have to go into detail about the diary itself – Snape and Dumbledore would quickly move into action to stop the basilisk, and hopefully they'd just follow her recommendation on how to disenchant the diary or whatever solution she found.
Maybe going to him with the answer would help restore her reputation in his eyes, she hoped.
But only after she figured out what was going on.
There were other, more subtle things Hermione's spiral out of control had caused, and ones that had lingering effects she couldn't mitigate as easily. She'd neglected braiding her hair before bed in her constant anxiety, and her hair had taken to frizzing out beyond all belief when she got emotional, which Hermione hadn't noticed in the slightest. Blaise said sometimes there had been sparks in it, when she'd been particularly riled up.
She'd had to resort to the book her parents had gotten her on grooming charms to hex her hair into submission. It had taken an obnoxious amount of time and a lot of trial and error, which Tracey had happily helped with, but she finally found a spell that calmed her hair down and helped it lay in pretty waves down her back. It still had volume, and Hermione expected it might still spark for a while, but at least it looked controlled.
Hermione might not care much about how she looked, but even she had her limits. And looking like Albert Einstein was one of them.
Less easily handled was the fact Hermione's metabolism had gone out of control, fluctuating wildly day by day. Hermione was dismayed to discover somewhere in the past month of her instability she'd gained nearly a stone, and she'd developed hips and breasts along the way.
Millie found this hilarious, when Hermione raged about it in the mirror in the dormitory, turning and looking at herself from different angles, noting the changes in her from the front and the side.
"I've had to deal with breasts since I started Hogwarts," Millie said, smirking. "You can learn to deal with it the same as the rest of us."
"You've chrysalized, Hermione," Tracey piped in. "It's appropriate to have a more womanly figure now."
Hermione shuddered. "Don't remind me."
"It's a good thing," Tracey said firmly. "It means you're a woman, now. People will look on you with more respect."
"It's still weird to me, realize," Hermione said. She shook her head. "In the muggle world, it's not normal to announce to the world you've gotten your cycle."
"Don't forget to wear a butterfly," Millie said slyly. "You have to let everyone know of your societal debut."
"I don't go into Wizarding Society much, at least," Hermione sighed. "I suppose that'll be this summer in Diagon Alley, won't it?"
"Whatever your next appearance outside school is, really." Millie shrugged. "That'll at least give you a few months to get adjusted to the idea."
Hermione looked at herself in the mirror again, tugging at her robes and blouses, which refused to lay how she wanted them too.
"At least our school robes cover us up," she sighed. "All you can see is the shape, really."
"Except for your casual robes," Tracey teased. "That one with the V will look quite different now, won't it?"
Hermione's face flamed, and Millie and Tracey teased her about her new figure as Hermione went through her entire wardrobe, observing the changes in how everything fit and looked now that she had a different silhouette.
She never thought she'd be so glad Madame Malkin had put in magical extensions in her robes, nor so grateful to her mother, who had insisted she get a few bras to grow into with a cup size too large.