Year 1: Outstanding

Chapter 10: June 2015

After weeks of studying, it was finally time for Molly to sit her first exam. Monday was Charms, and it was in the afternoon, so she and her friends spent the morning in their study room passing charms notes back and forth.

At lunch, everyone was eerily quiet – not just the first years, but the whole school. It gave Molly goosebumps to listen to. If only the library could be this quiet year-round, there would be no problems.

After lunch, the first years made their way to the Charms classroom and waited outside until Professor Flitwick was ready for them. Though the anticipation was killing Molly, she reveled in this time. It was like the moment before opening a present. When it's sitting there in your lap, all wrapped up with a bow, waiting to have the lid pulled off or the paper ripped to shreds. It's a time where anything is possible.

Professor Flitwick poked his head out the door and beckoned them all inside. Along with the rest of the class, Molly was instructed to take her inkwell and a few quills out of her bag and then to leave it along the front wall of the class. This way, nobody would be able to cheat. For O.W.L.s and N.E.W.T.s, students were given quills spelled with anti-cheating spells, but for regular exams things were far less strict.

The room had been rearranged in preparation for the exams. Normally, the desks were pushed together so that they were touching, and they were arranged in a u-shape around the room. Today, they had been pulled apart and placed into neat rows, all facing forward in an orderly fashion. It gave Molly chills to see.

Molly chose a desk in the front. She didn't want to be able to see the rest of the class while she wrote her exam, or she might get distracted. The exams were laying facedown on the desks, and Professor Flitwick informed them that if they turned them over before he said, they would receive an automatic T and be asked to leave the room.

"Make sure to write your name on each sheet of parchment," Professor Flitwick instructed. "In case one gets misplaced, so that I'll know it's part of your exam. You have two hours to complete the exam. I will not be answering questions about content, but if you have a question about the wording of a question, you may raise your hand. You may begin."

Excitedly, Molly turned over the exam and immediately wrote her name at the top of the first sheet. She scanned the first page and then went to the next, scanning it also while she wrote in her name. She did this for all the pages – there were nine in total – before flipping back to the first page to start.

The first question was easy – it was about how to properly hold one's wand. Molly answered it with ease and then moved onto the next question. As she made her way through the exam, she realized that there was a certain orderliness to it. All the material from the year was covered in the order which they had learned it. And the questions were very straightforward, not at all the trick questions she was expecting from the horror stories she had heard.

She finished with an hour to spare and raised her hand to ask what she should do.

"Well if you're certain you're finished," Professor Flitwick said. "Then you're free to go."

Molly knew her answers were right, and didn't feel the need to look them over like Professor Flitwick suggested, so she handed in her exam and left. She was the first person out of the room and felt proud that she'd beaten all her friends in finishing it.

As she emerged into the corridor, she wondered what she should do now. Julie had said that it was bad to study the night before, because she should get a good night's sleep, but it was the middle of the afternoon. Molly decided that it couldn't hurt to study a bit of potions – it was a morning exam after all, so she wouldn't have much time to study tomorrow morning.

As Molly made her way up to the fifth floor, she found herself feeling kind of disappointed. The charms exam had been fun, but it had been over so fast she'd barely had time to enjoy it. Maybe next time she should go slower, to savor the experience. If only it had been more difficult, maybe she could have stuck around longer. Then again, a more difficult exam might not have proved quite as fun.

Sarah was the next to join Molly in the study room, taking up her potions notes as well to go over them quickly. Feeling like she was going to burst, Molly attempted to discuss the charms exam with Sarah, but Sarah only shut her down, insisting that it was over and that they needed to focus on potions now.

Soon Debbie and Julie arrived, having stayed in the exam the full two hours. Julie explained that she'd finished in an hour, but had felt uncomfortable leaving early and instead had read over her answers in case anything seemed amiss, or else if there was a grammatical error or something. Molly noted that this sounded like a good idea – it would be far too easy to make a grammatical error in her haste to complete the exam.

The next day was their potions exam. After breakfast, the first years trooped down to the dungeons, where Professor Abbott-Longbottom had them line up along the wall and enter the room in single file. Molly placed her bag at the front of the room again as instructed and sat down at a workstation at the front of the class. The room hadn't needed to be reorganized like Professor Flitwick's, but Molly could still feel the difference from potions classroom to examination room.

Professor Abbott-Longbottom did things a little differently than Professor Flitwick. She hadn't placed the exams on their desks before they cam in, but instead passed them out once everyone was seated.

"Should we place them facedown?" Molly asked, raising her hand unnecessarily. "So that we can't cheat and read the first question before we start?"

"No, it's fine," Professor Abbott-Longbottom said. "Just don't open the exams until I say you can."

With a shrug, Molly figured it couldn't hurt to start writing her name on the front page – it would save her time later on.

"Hey!" Tim Hall cried from the workstation behind Molly. "Molly's starting the exam!"

"I am not," Molly shot back. "I'm just writing my name."

"No talking!" Professor Abbott-Longbottom reminded them. "This is an exam and the exams have been circulated."

Molly silently cursed Tim for making her speak out of turn.

The potions exam also lasted two hours. Molly finished after about an hour and a quarter, and then began looking back over her answers for grammatical errors. She had finished this in under twenty minutes and then found herself fidgeting uncomfortably. She didn't like sitting here with nothing to do, and her exam was finished and even double-checked. So she handed in her exam and returned to the study room to start looking over history of magic notes.

There was no exam the next day, which gave the students a full day of study. Though Molly was scheduled to only study history all day, she found herself getting bored about halfway through and allowed herself to look over her astronomy notes as well.

By Thursday, Molly was confident in her ability to ace her history of magic exam and knew exactly what to expect.

Similar to Professor Flitwick, Professor Binns already had the exams placed facedown on their desks when they walked in. He didn't ask them to put their bags at the front of the classroom, which Molly found odd. What if someone had snuck their notes into the exam? It would be much easier to read them secretively under their desk than to read them from across the room while they were tucked away in their bag.

Molly thought about pointing this out, but didn't. When she'd spoken up in potions, Professor Abbott-Longbottom hadn't seemed to care. Molly figured the Professors had their various systems and were determined to stick to them. Professor Binns surely had had his system in place for many years by now and would not take kindly to having new suggestions thrown his way.

Just so that she herself couldn't be accused of cheating, Molly put her bag under her chair, where she wouldn't be able to reach it during the exam without considerable effort. Some people had their bags next to them on the floor, and Molly could only hope that Professor Binns was going to keep his eyeB on these ones.

The history of magic exam was the easiest yet. Molly finished it in forty-five minutes, and by the hour mark was ready to hand it in and go study astronomy. The next evening was the astronomy exam, which also went by without incident. Following this, Molly had three full days to focus on her last three subjects before her final exams.

Before she knew it, Molly had handed in her transfiguration exam and was walking out the door. Automatically, she'd started walking towards the study room, but then she realized there was no need. There was nothing left to study. This realization was of course followed by the realization that there was always something to study, and Molly hurried upstairs to get her notes back in order for pre-second year revision.

When the rest of her friends had finished their exams and joined her in the study room, they all agreed that it was time to start putting the room right again. With a sigh, Molly packed away her things, having to make two trips to Gryffindor Tower to clear them out of the room, and then started to drag away the furniture.

"This is so sad," Molly lamented as she dragged the broken furniture back across the hall from the classroom they'd temporarily stored it in. "I feel like we're saying goodbye forever, even though we're coming back in two months."

"We might be saying goodbye to this room forever though," Debbie pointed out.

"True," Molly agreed.

They got all the furniture back to where it originally came from, and then stood in the doorway of the classroom nostalgically.

"We did a lot of studying in here," Sarah said.

"We sure did," Julie agreed.

"It was a good year," Molly added.

MmMmMmMmMmM

By the end of the following week, their grades were ready to be picked up from their Heads of House. Molly was exceptionally nervous. If she got anything but straight O's, she didn't know what she was going to do, let alone tell her parents. So it was a relief when she received her grades and saw that she had O's in all seven classes. She checked with Sarah, Debbie, and Julie and discovered that all three of them had received straight O's as well – according to Professor Longbottom, not something that happened often.

Though she was sad to leave Hogwarts, Molly was very happy to be leaving her roommates behind. Though her sister was arguably as annoying as Flora, Eliza, and Amber, at least she didn't share a room with Lucy.

"I'm going to get my second year books as soon as the booklists are sent out," Julie said one afternoon. "I want to know as much as I can before September first."

"I'm going to see if I can borrow my cousin's notes," Molly volunteered. "She's not the brightest, but at least I'll be able to get an idea of what's to come."

"I'm especially excited to start using proper star charts next year," Debbie said. "It'll be so much more precise than those sky maps we worked with this year."

"I heard that in second year, Professor Binns spends the whole year teaching about wizarding politics since the beginning of wizardkind," Sarah said. "How fun will that be?"

"I just want to learn some new spells," Julie said. "I hate that the older students can do so much more than we can."

"What about you Molly?" Debbie asked. "What are you most looking forward to?"

"All of it," Molly replied with a smile.

MmMmMmMmMmM

Soon it was the day they were leaving Hogwarts, and Molly and her friends were gathered in a compartment on the train, watching as Hogwarts got smaller and smaller in the distance.

"Well what do we do now?" Sarah asked, looking around aimlessly. "We're here the whole day."

"We might as well start on our summer homework," Julie said, reaching for her trunk to locate what she would need. "I'm going to start with herbology."

"I think I'll start with transfiguration," Molly decided, searching for the assignment in her own trunk.

"I'm going to start with transfiguration too," Debbie agreed.

"I think I want to get history out of the way first," Sarah declared. "It's going to take forever."

The girls settled in contentedly. Their compartment was almost as good as their study room. It was quiet, private… the only problem was that they were also moving, and so every few words that Molly wrote, she smudged some of it.

"I'm going to have to recopy this when I get home," Molly muttered to herself.

"Same," Julie agreed. "But at least we're doing something."

MmMmMmMmMmM

They arrived at King's Cross station in the afternoon, and the four girls made their way down to the platform with their trunks to locate their parents.

"I see mine," Molly said, waving to her mother so that she would know she'd located them. "I guess I'll see you guys in September."

There was no need for long heartfelt goodbyes like many of the other students were having. It was only going to be two months apart – and they could always write if they felt compelled to. Molly saw no reason to be emotional, so she simply said goodbye to her friends and joined her family.

"How were your exams?" Percy said by way of greeting when Molly walked up.

"Straight O's," Molly smiled proudly.

"That's my girl," Percy smiled, patting Molly on the back.

"Come on honey," Audrey said, taking Molly's trunk from her and leading her towards the barrier to the Muggle world. "Let's go home."