There was something very rushed, hectic, and unrelaxing about the days back in school. During the late winter there were no Quidditch games or lunch hours spent outside in the sun to look forward to, only studying and work. And from the very first day they came back, Remus's calm and peaceful piano playing that the boys and Lily were used to hearing in the common room most of the time was suddenly replaced with loud guitar and rock organ exploding from Sirius's record player. Lily at first had the instinct to tell Sirius this wasn't very nice and that he shouldn't be stealing the common room from Remus, but in the end she figured it could only be good for him to get out from behind his big grand piano every once in a while and be part of the action.
Which was usually Sirius standing on the coffee table moving wildly and singing along to the Doors "Back Door Man" (though he liked to change the lyrics to say "black dog man") or doing something of the sort that probably only Sirius could get away with without being pelted with books by the rest of the Gryffindors who were trying to study.
"I can't believe I'm actually getting used to this," Lily remarked to James one night as they were studying spells in the common room and Sirius put on a Jethro Tull record.
James laughed. "Well, we'd be stupid to complain. Hardly any magic school students get to have any kind of exposure to music. Well, recordings of music, at least."
"Yeah, that's true," she said. "But it's just...not exactly the most conventional environment for doing homework."
Sirius had started listening to their conversation, and said, "What are you talking about? This is relaxing. Right, Moony?"
Remus obviously had no comment. He simply smiled in his characteristic way, barely lifting the corners of his mouth so that his faced changed only a little, and looked back down at his books.
"You people are no fun, honestly," Sirius sighed.
"We're back at school now," Lily reminded. "We're not supposed to be having fun."
"Ah, Lily," Sirius said in a sort of sympathetic way. "In the name of Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and the Holy Ghost, I will pray for your soul."
"Shut up and do your homework, Padfoot," James said.
"I'm done with it, Prongs," Sirius shot back in a sarcastically fluffy voice.
"Dang it," Peter said, who was looking very stressed with a lot of Potions notes arranged haphazardlyaround him. "He's always the one who gets to say that, and yet I never actually see him working."
Sirius, realizing that there was nothing to do in the common room but be surrounded by people studying when he wasn't, went out the portrait hole and decided to go to the Great Hall and see if there was anyone more amusing to talk to. When he got there, there were about a dozen people at each table. At this time of night students usually paid no attention to what table they sat at since kids from different houses would join each other anyway, and some were changed out of their uniforms into more casual clothes. Sirius spotted William Bell, the Gryffindor Quidditch captain who he and James liked to talk to, sitting in a small group and started to walk over to him.
On the way there, however, he was suddenly distracted by a girl sitting at the Ravenclaw table on his left. What caught his eye was that she was leaning forward with her elbows on the table as she read a book so that her shirt came up in the back and showed a considerable strip of pale skin above where her dark gray skirt began. In an obviously unintended way this drew attention to itself, but that was not the reason he stopped; the light skin contrasting with her dark clothes just made him suddenly notice the rest of her as well. The girl was all thin limbs and smooth skin, and her black hair which shined like wet ink was cut off evenly a couple inches past her jaw, just short enough for her confidently upright neck to be visible from every angle. Her sleeves were rolled up to the elbows to show her white arms, and the pleated skirt was sloppily bunched up over her crossed knees, which were a little bony and looked like theyd never been scraped on rough concrete her whole life.
Before Sirius knew what he was doing, he had sat down right next to her at the table and was now looking at her from a level and close-up perspective. She looked up at him and the expression of confusion came as expected at the moment she concluded that she didn't know him. Her face was just as regardable as the rest of her, he saw. She had those glassy kind of eyes that should be staring across a smoky room with dim lights and a wonderfully pouty mouth.
"Er...Hi," he managed to say before too many seconds of silence had gone by for this encounter to be saved from complete awkwardness. "So...How was your Christmas?"
She cracked a smile and even giggled a little. "Um. My parents are Jewish."
"My parents are servants of the devil, and that didn't stop them."
Then she laughed for real. She had a very throaty, textured laugh.
"Okay, then," Sirius said. "Laughing. We're getting somewhere. So, what are you then?"
"Huh?"
"Well, you said, 'My parents are Jewish.' That kind of sounds like you don't follow the same road."
"No, you couldn't say I do." She thought for a moment. "I guess you could call me an Agnostic transcendentalist with some Daoist principles."
Sirius's eyes widened as if he had just been explained a very complicated math equation in three seconds. "Transcendentawhat?"
She laughed. "Never mind."
He eyed her as if trying to figure something out. "Are you one of those hippie people? Like...the Muggles that go around hitting tambourines and meditating?"
"Though I must admit that sounds like a lot of fun, the war ended a long time ago," she said.
Sirius could only partially understand what she meant from the things James had tried to explain to him about the "hippie movement" that was very slowly and belatedly moving into the knowledge of the magic community.
Sirius paused a moment, and then with a snapping realization put his hand forward. "Oh. I'm Sirius Black."
She took his hand and shook it. "Sophia Stabbard."
"Sophia," he repeated. He stared at her as if either burning it into his memory or just enjoying the sound of the name as he said again, "Sophia..."
She smiled. The smile was clean, mischievous, and vampire-like, and her teeth were as white as her skin.
"What house are you from?" she asked. "Gryffindor?"
"Roar," he said in answer.
"That's what I thought."
"How'd you know?" he asked.
"Oh," she said mysteriously, "I'm good at these things. I can tell lions from badgers all right," she added with a laugh.
Sirius leaned over and looked at the pages of her book. "The Twelfth Night," he read off of the top of the page. "What's that?"
"Come on," Sophia said. "Shakespeare."
He squinted his eyes a little as if racking his memory. "He's some Muggle, isn't he? A writer or something."
She smirked. "You're a Pureblood."
"Yeah," he said in an unfortunate tone. "It's not hard to tell, is it?"
"Well, any wizard who doesn't know who Will Shakespeare is can't have grown up exposed to much Muggle culture."
"I know who Mick Jagger is, though," he said, as if trying feebly to impress her.
She gasped and put her hand to her chest. "Well, thank goodness. I don't think I could have a conversation with someone who's not familiar with the Stones." He smirked and she shoved his shoulder teasingly. "I'm just kidding. Being a Pureblood is nothing to be ashamed of."
"Oh, believe me, it can be."
She seemed to frown a little. Then she closed her book and put it in her bag on the table. "Don't tell anyone I've been reading sappy Muggle poetry, though, alright?" she said as she stood up from her seat.
"Wait," he said as she started to leave. "Can I...er...see you sometime?"
She stopped walking away and stood there unmeaningfully. "We live at the same school. I'm sure it's a likely possibility."
"You know what I mean."
She shrugged. "Whatever. But I have to get going. It gets really cold down in the dungeons and I want to get a chair near the fireplace to finish a paper."
"What are you going down there for?" he asked.
"Well...that's where my common room is," she said obviously.
Sirius's look of confusion dropped to one of disbelief as the realization sunk in. "...You're a Slytherin?"
She didn't nod or give a positive answer. She just waited a moment and asked without smiling, "Not what you were expecting?"
He didn't reply. He just sat there staring at her, taking in what he'd just learned, and she knew he wasn't going to say anything more and walked away. Then he slowly turned forward and put his arms on the table, feeling like he had just been flying and then suddenly spit out from the sky back into the dirt on the ground.
Sirius didn't know any dramatic Shakespearian words of expression to give this situation justice, so he just stared down at the table unmeditatively and muttered, "Damn it."