(A/N): Its summer! I have a LOT of time on my hands, so I gotta get to work on all the half-written stories I have lying around...

Aria's eyes opened to the dreary sight of the royal-blue dormitory canopy. Ugh, I can't freaking believe this. She stared at the canopy, wishing she could just fall back asleep. But she couldn't, not with her fellow Ravenclaw sixth-years giggling and chattering about the day ahead.

"I wanna hook up with James Freed again."

"Doesn't he have a girlfriend?"

"Oh, yeah..."

"Hey, is that a puppet?"

"What, where?"

Aria's ears perked up.

"Yeah...it's a pig." Someone laughed. "What the heck?"

Aria bolted out of her bed, pajamas askew, and tore Pigtunia from Naomi Ziegler's hands. Her heart raced wildly. "Umm...this is just...umm...Mike's pig puppet. He-he's too macho to admit he still likes it, so I keep it for him."

"Oh, really?" Naomi smirked.

"Yeah. But don't tell anyone. He's really sensitive about it," Aria quipped.

"Oh, we won't." Naomi said gleefully in a tone that implied that she definitely would.

Aria stuffed Pigtunia in her trunk, thanking her stars that she'd been able to come up with a somewhat-decent lie. No one knew about her pig puppet- except Ali. Aria would die of embarrassment if anyone else ever found out that she, a fully mature seventeen-year-old girl, spent lonely nights talking to a frayed felt pig puppet, and pretending it talked back. Not that she did that anymore. Well...not too much.

Ten minutes later, she and the other girls headed downstairs for breakfast. She gobbled the bland English food at the table, trying not to notice the stares everyone was giving her. This was worse, much worse, than second year. Back then, she'd had Ali to give her popularity points. Now, everyone looked at her and saw a girl who was too weird and too different to fit in at Hogwarts.

"Finland!" Aria looked up to see Noel Kahn approaching the Ravenclaw table.

"Hey, Noel," she said monotonously.

"Hey...what have you got first period?"

Aria glanced at her schedule. "Defense against the Dark Arts."

"Really? Me, too. See ya there." Noel said, beaming at her.

"Okay," replied Aria, feeling a squelch in her stomach. Aria was used to male attention, with her C-cup breasts, pouty lips and ice-blue eyes, but Noel Kahn's crush on her just seemed a little...juvenile. After that passionate makeout in the bathroom of the Leaky Cauldron, her standards had definitely changed. She wasn't going to settle for teenage boys anymore. Now she had something going with Ezra, a sophisticated older guy. Aria had written to him and was waiting for a reply.

As Aria walked towards her first class, she found that she could easily navigate the corridors. It was the same old Hogwarts, even if the stairs and portraits had moved around. Right here was the spot where she and Ali had skipped Divination, and there was the hallway where she and her friends used to check out older boys...

She spotted two girls lounging in one of the corridors. One of them looked vaguely familiar. Aria blinked. Hanna? What had happened to her? The Hanna she remembered was chubby and dorky. This Hanna had silky red-brown hair, a supermodel's figure, and perfect teeth.

"Hey," said Aria.

New Hanna stared at her, pursing her cherry-glossed lips. "Oh...Aria? Hey." She looked her up and down, from her lace-up boots to her freshly curled hair. "Where was it you went? Finland?"

"Yeah." Close enough.

"That's interesting."

Aria had so many questions on the tip of her tongue. Like, Did you guys ever find out what happened to Ali? and Do you still talk to Spencer and Emily?. But she didn't know how awkward it might sound after all these years. "Well, I gotta go. I have class."

"Okay. C'mon, Mona," Hanna said to the other girl. Aria did a double take at the pretty blonde who was standing next to Hanna. This was Mona, the dorky girl she and her friends used to tease? How did Hanna ever come to be friends with her? Aria shook her head. Hell is other people.

She walked up the hallway and into the Defense against the Dark Arts classroom. Aria took a seat at the back and stared at the board. The teacher was writing his name, Mr. Fitz, in long, spindly letters not unlike Aria's own handwriting.

"What's this guy like?" Aria asked the girl beside her. Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers changed frequently. Some students said the job was cursed.

"I don't know. He's new. But he's hot."

Aria scrutinized the teacher. He looked pretty young from the back, not much older than the students themselves. Her gaze fell on his shapely backside. Not bad, she thought.

All of a sudden, there was a flurry at the window, and a mottled brown barn owl with a heart-shaped white face flew into the room.

"Terra!" exclaimed Aria as her owl dropped a note on her desk. She tore the envelope and took the card out.

"Hey, can you send her away?" said the teacher, wiping the chalk dust off his hands.

"Huh?"

"The headmaster said I'm not supposed to let you guys have owls in the classroom."

"Okay. Terra, you have to go back to the-"

There was a sudden plink of the teacher dropping the chalk, and Aria looked up. She gasped.

Oh. My. God. Standing at the board, looking uber-adorable in his teacher's vest and khakis, was Ezra. Her Ezra. He was staring at her with a deer-in-the-headlights look, not even noticing that he had dropped his chalk. "Oh, shit," he mouthed.

The whole class turned around to see who he was staring at. Aria looked down at her desk, her cheeks burning. How could this have happened?

Then she saw the note that she had been about to read, sitting on her desk.

Hmm...I wonder what your pig puppet has to say about your little teacher fling!

-A

Aria was wondering the same thing.