Behold the revised Chapter Two! I'm quite...well, a little bit, anyway...proud of this. I don't get to be quite proud of anything until I write a new chapter. And this thing is ancient.

My encounter with Scorpius Malfoy shocked me somewhat. It wasn't as if we had never spoken—for the past six years, we had shared an uneasy rivalry in classes. But I had never expected to find him in tears over the corpse of a tiny owl. I guess, if it had occurred to me, I would have expected him to be the kind to desecrate the corpse of the tiny owl. People surprise you all the time.

This didn't change anything. I was still the halfblood who was better than him, and thus the halfblood who he was honor-bound to try to beat for the sake of pureblood superiority and all that rot.

But though I had always watched him, now I stared. So did he, come to that, with a half-curious quirk to his eyebrow and mouth as if I was some rare creature—not human, but not far from—that had suddenly revealed a powerful secret ability.

He doesn't have many friends. It was no more than a fragment of a thought and disappeared as quickly as it had come with no memory of it left behind.

All these thoughts were spinning through my head as I sat in the Gryffindor common room with my History of Magic book on my lap—I liked H of M, and it came easily to me—completely oblivious to my surroundings.

My surroundings, at that moment, consisted of my best friend Emma Bishop and whatever nasty charm she was concocting around my head. Emma was ditzy, but she had several excuses to be, and her skill with mischievous charms that did strange things to people who sat quietly lost in their thoughts was also legendary—and also with good reason. "What have you done to me this time?" I asked, trying not to move.

"Nothing," she said, her voice that of an earth-bound angel, "absolutely nothing."

I turned around, and a pile of random crap fell on my head. Emma dissolved into giggles. "Oh, you think it's funny, do you?" I growled at her, trying not to do the same thing as I pelted her with anything that came to my hands. She threw them back at me, and I gave up and laughed my head off.

"What could you possibly be thinking about for fifteen bloody minutes, anyway?" Emma asked when I could no longer lift my arms for laughing so hard. She was shaking with helpless mirth. "The handsome and talented Garrett Drake, perhaps?"

Emma has yet to get it through her head that I would rather snog a woolly mammoth than the 'handsome and talented Garrett Drake.' "No," I said, my tone matching hers for sugar-sweetness. "I was thinking of more pleasant things, like smelly mud and flobberworms and mustaches with food in them." If I revealed that I had actually spent the last fifteen minutes thinking about Scorpius Malfoy, my romance-minded friend would never shut up about it.

She gagged at the mental image and laughed again. "Hah! I just bet you were, Rose Weasley, I just bet you were." The problem with Emma is that she could tell when I was lying. She just preferred to believe that I was lying completely, and that I actually had been mooning over the idiot Drake.

"You are a completely miserable excuse for a friend, and I leave you now, alone and miserable, because my free period is almost over," I announced grandly. Emma just grinned; we played this charade with great regularity.

I ran out of the dormitory—I had wasted so much time with Emma that I had about 30 seconds to get to Advanced Potions, a class Emma didn't take. When I got to the class, panting and five seconds late, the only available seat was one directly in front of Scorpius buggering Malfoy, who gave his trademark smirk—not that much had changed—when I arrived. I ignored him and sat down just before Slughorn entered the room.

I pretended to listen carefully to Slughorn's every word, and when he stopped talking, the wood of my desk suddenly became very interesting, as did the myriad of ingredients required for the particular potion we were making today. I realized what I was doing and blushed—I had never found it necessary to act like a fool in Malfoy's presence before. But my ingredients were still very interesting.

"Hey, Weasley!" came Malfoy's voice from behind me. I ignored him. Armadillo bile is a fascinating color…Malfoy jabbed my back. "Weasley!"

"What do you want, Malfoy?" I demanded softly, not turning around.

"I just wanted…to say thank you. About my sister's owl," he said. "I got another letter from her today…she…she says she doesn't blame me at all and…she's glad I took such good care with it, sending it back and all."

"That's great, Malfoy," I said rolling my eyes, my tone dripping pure sarcasm. "I'm busy." It is one thing to spend almost half a free period thinking of him, another to spend half a minute in front of him in class.

"I was just trying to thank you!" he snarled.

"You're welcome," I said. He was not, but it was the right thing to say, and my head was going fuzzy. Malfoy shut up. And I went back to studying my Potions ingredients.

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