"Okay." I said defeatedly, flopping down onto my bed one night, "I lose. I admit it." Katie and Angelina looked at me inquisitively.
"Don't mean to be rude or whatever sweetie." Said Angelina, "But what the hell are you on about?" I didn't look up, instead burying my face in my pillow.
"I admit it. I fancy George." I said through my pillows.
"I'm sorry Lis, what did you say?" enquired a slightly shocked Katie. I rolled over and threw a pillow and Angelina who was giggling quietly the dropped back onto my bed.
"George Weasley is the sexiest thing on legs and I have a full blown crush on him. Happy?" I asked
"Errm, hello, no! Fred Weasley is actually the sexiest thing on legs, but since you can't have him you can settle for the second sexiest thing on legs. There, now I'm happy." I love Angie; she always knows what to say, even if she doesn't always say it.
"So can I stop sitting on his lap at breakfast now?" I asked hopefully. Both my friends shook their heads.
"Sorry Lis, but now you've finally come to terms with it; we're really going to have to get you together." I groaned and rolled over again. "By the way, when did you come to terms with this?" Good question. It was probably due to all the breakfasts. "It really hit me just now in the common room." I said miserably.
Before we came up, us three had been sat in three of the four best chairs by the fire. Then Fred, George and Lee had come up to sit with us. Lee had sat in the empty one and Katie had sat in Angelina's lap to make room for George then Fred came and tried to turf me out of my seat. Fortunately, thanks to Mad Captain Ollie's dawn start five hour training sessions I've got a lot of muscles and I'm a lot stronger than I look.
Unfortunately, large beater muscles beat small chaser muscles every time so Fred got the chair. "Fine then." I said. I wasn't going to sit on the floor and Angelina was already taken so I sat on George instead. For pure comfort's sake he had to put his arm around me, awkwardly at first, but as I relaxed into him and he relaxed too his arm around my shoulder became more natural and I decided I quite liked it there. Lee then brought up the topic of Serius Black, the escaped Deatheater and mass murderer. I always hated this topic.
One of my earliest memories is of my mother sobbing into my father's shoulder as she was told that Deatheaters had killed her sister and her sister's young children. I wasn't scared of Black specifically but losing family to Deatheaters makes you more aware of them and aware of what they do. I could tell George could feel me tensing up with fear, but he didn't say anything and just tightened his grip around my shoulders. I could've sat like that with George forever and I was slightly miffed when the other two girls announced that they were going to bed as I had to go with them. Then it hit me.
It was actually a surprisingly nice revelation. Finally coming to terms with it made me feel better and the scope for twin jokes with Angelina was endless. Any half glance any time we were in the company of the twins set us off giggling. I love having secrets.
During a particularly boring double transfiguration lesson I decided to do something to keep myself occupied. Transfiguration has never been my strong point, art, however, has. So I decided to practice that instead of listening to McGonagall going on about cross species transformations.
I drew a little picture of Fred in a giant love heart with lots of other love hearts around it for Angelina and turned it into a paper bird which flew across the classroom to her. Unfortunately, my concentration waned and the paper bird only made it half way across the room, landing instead in the worst place possible. Angelina had seen me sending the bird to her and watching it landing on the twins' desk in horror. We shared a look which plainly said that the worst had happened, then we had to look quickly at the front as Fred and George looked around for the source of the picture.
During the rest of that lesson I tried to count my blessings;
1. I did not put any names on it
2. Both twins had been staring into space so hadn't seen where it had come from
3. There was no way of knowing which twin was in the picture.
Katie had been sitting next to me, listening to McGonagall at the time so I filled her in what had happened in a whisper. It was all she could do not to burst out laughing. Fortunately I wiped the smile off her face before McGonagall noticed it by threatening to send another one to Lee Jordan for her.
We left transfiguration as quickly as possible and sat on the sofa in the common room, talking in mortified whispers. "I can't believe you did that!" snapped Angelina in a whisper
"Well at least it wasn't named!" I retorted quietly. Unfortunately our discussion was interrupted by none other than the twins themselves.
"Hello ladies! Did one of you happen to send us this picture in transfiguration?" asked Fred, holing up the incriminating artwork.
"No." we all said quickly, and so abruptly with so much conviction I think they were offended. Thank god Angelina has such dark skin or they would've seen her blush. I sighed, "Come on girls, no more time for chat. We've got that three page essay to do for McGonagall." We all groaned but, "Come on, this is nothing! We've got quidditch practice in half an hour!" Angelina swore,
"Shit. Well then, let's get started. We've also got that essay on the twelfth goblin rebellion to finish for Binns. Fun, fun, fun." We didn't have time to do our history of magic homework but we did at least finish transfiguration before setting off for the quidditch pitch.
Quidditch practice was awful. Wood informed us angrily that we were playing a different team than expected then we went out to the pitch where we froze to death and drowned in the pouring rain, and it didn't look like conditions would be improving in time for the match.
The weather got worse in time for the match. Never before have I played in such awful conditions. The rain beat down on us and the wind threatened to knock us off our brooms. I could barely see ten feet ahead of me and spotting the quaffle in time to stop it from hitting me in the face was hard, sometimes impossible. But we were still winning by a decent margin of points. Then came the cold, and the chill and the horror that could only have been dementors, and Harry fell.
"Well that was shit." Commented Fred as we walked away from the hospital wing.
"Agreed." Said George. "The match was shit, the weather's shit and Harry's broom got broken."
"And our keeper's still trying to drown himself." I added. I turned to Katie, "Katie, could you please go and deal with him? You're the only one he'll listen to." Katie and Oliver have known each other since they were kids and were great friends. Katie looked despairingly out of the window at the bucketing rain and the howling wind before she reluctantly agreed and set out to find our insane captain. "I hate you all by the way!" she called over her shoulder at us as she left.
"She's lying about that." I whispered to Angelina as we headed up to the common room to dry off.
"Of course she is you idiot! We're her best friends!" She whispered back.
"No, no, that's not what I meant. I meant that there is one person here she definitely doesn't hate!" I snickered with a meaningful look at the back of Lee's head. Angelina burst out laughing madly making everyone stop and turn to stare at us. Now they were all staring I started laughing too, I couldn't help it.
"What's so funny guys?" asked a clueless (as usual) Lee. At this Angelina just laughed harder, she was struggling to breathe. Damn her infectious laughter, now I was laughing almost equally hard, and she had managed to attract the attention of the one person we had been talking about and who Katie would not hesitate to kill us if he found out. I saw this as a decent reason to hit her, apparently she did not as she hit me back. The three boys watched in amused puzzlement as we continued to exchange blows.
"Ow, shit Angie, what was that for?"
"You hit me first!"
"Well you earned that one!"
"What? What did I do?" she asked me, refraining from hitting me for a moment while she waited for the answer.
"Well I was talking about…" I subconsciously looked over toward Lee before noticing then looking quickly back at her, "And you know she'd kill us if… found out and you just went and laughed really loudly and you could've blown our cover then we'd have died, then she'd tell them" I said meaningfully, meaning Fred and George, "and then they'd know about us and we'd kill ourselves!"
Fred, George and Lee stared blankly at me, then over at Angelina to see if she'd made any sense of this cryptic message. Fortunately she had realised that I was talking about what Katie would do if we told Lee she fancied him and blushed. "Oops." She bit her lip and smiled apologetically. "Well, I didn't blow our cover and I only laughed so… couldn't know what we were talking about!" she grinned victoriously and thumped me on the shoulder. "So I didn't deserve that first hit so you deserved that!" fortunately our audience has a very small attention span and was far to confused by this point to bother asking what the bloody hell we were on about.