Chapter 40: First Week

When transfiguration was over, I rushed to the Great Hall. Starving, I started shovelling food into my mouth, which got me another comment from Harry about turning into Ron.

Ron, however, still seemed to be in a bad mood from divination. I tried cheering him up with food by pushing a dish of stew towards him – food always cheered Ron up – but it was to no avail. He continued to get worked up and I tried to talk some sense into him, but ended up snapping at him and leaving instead. Ron could be so irritating sometimes.

I had both care of magical creatures and ancient runes next. Since I didn't feel like seeing Ron right away, I decided to go to ancient runes first. For the first half of the lesson, I could barely pay attention, my thoughts still swirling around the argument with Ron. However, by the end of the class, my anger had dissipated and I was in a much better mood as I slipped into a broom closet and used my time turner to go back an hour.

I made my way to the Entrance Hall, eager to see my friends again, and I almost didn't see my past self come around the corner. I jumped behind a suit of armour as she passed by and I waited until she was out of sight before resuming my journey. I really had to be more careful.

I reached the Entrance Hall, and was just heading out the door to the grounds when Harry and Ron caught up to me. Ron apparently was still not talking to me, which really hurt for a minute. I had to remind myself that we had had our argument only two minutes ago, though for me, it had been an hour and I had already cooled off.

We arrived at Hagrid's hut for care of magical creatures and were met by the Slytherins. As it was Hagrid's first class, I had assumed it wouldn't go exactly as planned. Now that I knew that the Slytherins were in the class with us, I knew something was going to go wrong. So, when Malfoy walked up to the hippogriff and began insulting it, I couldn't really say I was surprised.

It was a horrible thing to happen in Hagrid's first class, so I really ought to have felt badly, but in all the commotion, Ron seemed to have forgotten he was mad at me, so all I felt was relief and even a bit of joy.

After dinner, once we had returned to the common room, we saw that a light was on in Hagrid's hut and decided to go down to see him. I was hesitant at first, remembering what Harry had told us on the train about Sirius Black having broken out of Azkaban to find him, but really, with dementors all around the castle, it's not like he would be in any danger.

Hagrid was miserable and drunk. We tried cheering him up, but he didn't seem to be responding. Finally, I decided he's had enough and I removed the tankard he was drinking out of from the table and dumped it out in the back. Hagrid followed me, and I thought he was going to yell at me for taking his drink, but instead, he walked over to the large water barrel and sort of toppled over into it headfirst.

I returned to Harry and Ron, leaving Hagrid to deal with the water. When he rejoined us, he seemed much more sober. Unfortunately, that meant he had also gotten some of his senses back and he yelled at us for coming to see him and escorted us back to the castle.

Harry and Ron went right to bed then, not having much homework to do. I, on the other hand, had been to three classes more than them, and had lots of homework to get done. By the time I had finished all that I was going to finish, it was three in the morning and I was exhausted. I did a quick calculation, factoring in every time I used the time turner, and realized I had been awake for twenty-three hours: almost a whole day.

I checked my timetable and noted that I only had six classes today instead of eight. Then it would be the weekend. Despite this, I knew I wouldn't be able to sit through six classes with only four hours of sleep, so I snuck upstairs to my dormitory and crept into the bathroom. I pulled out my time turner and turned it three times counter-clockwise. Then I put on my pyjamas and headed for bed.

Just as I was going to turn off my wand light, Lily Moon came up from the common room. She stopped in the doorway, looking at me confused.

"Hermione! I thought you were downstairs doing homework. I just saw you," she said.

I mentally berated myself for being so careless. "Oh, yes, I was down there for a while. I came up just before you," I said, hoping she would accept this explanation. She did, but she watched me warily while she got ready for bed. I did a quick check and sighed in relief when I saw that the rest of my dorm mates were all in bed already and I wouldn't face the question again.

I fell asleep quickly that night, being extremely exhausted. When Lavender shook me awake the next morning, I had a difficult time dragging myself out of bed. My seven hours of sleep had not sufficed to fully rest me from a twenty-three-hour day. I decided I was going to have to find some way to get more sleep, but I couldn't think about it now because I was already late and I had potions first thing.

I had my first check-in with Professor McGonagall that afternoon following our final class of the day. Even though I'd only been using the time turner for two days, she had insisted that we meet every Friday afternoon so that she could make sure everything was going alright.

"Have you had any problems so far?" Professor McGonagall inquired with me.

"Well I've almost run into myself a couple of times," I confessed. "But I managed not to and I think I've got the hang of things now. And I think I'm doing a pretty good job of keeping the same people from seeing me in two places at once."

"Good," Professor McGonagall nodded. "The less people you have asking questions, the easier it'll be to keep this a secret."

I agreed. "There is one thing that's going to be a bit of a problem though," I said then, deciding to just be honest about the situation. "I've been really tired recently. With the extra waking hours my body is going through, I haven't had enough time during the night to rest from it."

Professor McGonagall nodded. "This is a common occurrence," she said. "There is a spell I can perform on you to relieve you of the exhaustion those extra hours would cause you."

It was honestly a relief to have her say that. I'd been worried that I wouldn't have time for homework if I had to start going to sleep at seven o'clock every night.

"Now let's see," Professor McGonagall muttered to herself as she rummaged around in her desk. "I know I have a copy of your timetable somewhere…"

"Here," I said, offering her my own copy.

She took it gratefully and glanced it over. "Excellent," she said. "That's four extra hours of class you've lived over the past two days."

She produced her wand and pointed it at me and I closed my eyes so as not to panic at the sight. In my head I knew she was casting a good spell on me, but any decent witch or wizard would feel a bit of natural panic at the sight of a wand being pointed at them.

She cast the spell non-verbally, so I wasn't expecting it when it happened. I felt the tiredness that was lingering in me dissipate and then I started to feel more alert and energetic, like I'd just downed a cup of coffee. It felt great.

"Thank you," I said gratefully, taking my timetable back and stowing it in my bag. "I feel much better now."

"Good," Professor McGonagall said. She had been standing, but now she took a step back and lowered herself into her chair. "Now go and study," she ordered me. "Don't let all my hard work to get you that time turner go to waste."

Not wasting any time, I hurried off to the library to get to studying. I had lots of runes to memorize before our next ancient runes class and I wanted to get started right away.

As the days passed, I started to settle into a comfortable pattern. I made the decision that whenever I had multiple classes to attend in one hour, I would do them in the same order, so as to give myself a routine. I even ended up selecting a few key locations from where it was the easiest to disappear and reappear in time, where nobody would see me. I also started coming up with better and better excuses for why I had to slip away from Harry and Ron so often.

My favorite class quickly became ancient runes. The memorization of the runes and various vocabulary words alone was enough to keep me interested and Professor Babbling was a fantastic instructor who made the class interactive by selecting students at random to read and parse sentences based on the grammatical elements of the runic languages that we were studying in any given class.

Harry and Ron's favorite class had become defence against the dark arts, and while I appreciated that Professor Lupin was by far our best teacher in the subject yet, the subject matter itself didn't excite me quite as much as that of ancient runes or transfiguration or history of magic.

Care of magical creatures turned out to be one of my least favorite classes, but I didn't dare say so for fear of hurting Hagrid's feelings. But after the mishap with Draco Malfoy and the hippogriff in the first lesson, Hagrid had basically stopped teaching us and was having us babysit flobberworms every lesson. It almost made me want to skip his lessons, if not for the fact that he would have noticed. It was a waste of an hour every time I had to attend and I wished I could be spending the time being more productive. But it gave me a bit of a break too, which I supposed was useful, especially on my longer days.

All in all, the year was shaping to be a good one. The time turner was a gift I'd never expected and I just felt special and honored to have one, regardless of the negative consequences. I was determined to make Professor McGonagall proud and get straight O's in all my twelve classes.