Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter, but I do own Professor Caverleigh.
"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference" – Elie Wiesel.
Term began the next day in the usual fashion, as I tripped over my trunk on the way to the bathroom, summarily waking everyone up. In my defence, I did not utter so much as a squeal as I bashed my knee on the corner of my trunk: rather, it was the resounding crash from the impact of my body on the floor which woke everyone up early.
Being an early person also translated into being an early-morning person. I love waking up early: before most people are up, it feels as though the world belongs to you. However, this trait does not endear me to many people, my dorm mates especially, who often enforce a 'don't-even-attempt-to-talk-to-me-until-I've-showe red-and-had-a-cup-of-tea' policy.
My friends shot up from their slumbers at the din, even Katie, who is normally very hard to wake. Hoping to avoid their notice, or just to avoiding confronting their grumpy "it's-frightfully-early-in-the-morning" scowls, I lay still on the floor, my hands clenching my throbbing knee up against my chest, my face regarding the lid of my ill-placed trunk.
Despite its excessive weight and tendency to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, it was a good trunk. As an eleven year old, I had been rather cross with my mother when she forbade me from buying a yellow trunk – yellow having been at that time my favourite colour. Her sensible argument that it would 'show the dirt' had failed, and so she settled for 'because I said so', which is the worst reason in the world, but cannot be argued against. Sneaky parents.
However, upon being sorted into Gryffindor, I had been rather pleased to find out that the wine red trunk and golden brass fittings had perfectly conformed to my new house colours. Not that I ever admitted that to my Mum. My name was embossed across the top in bold, golden letters: Rose E. A. Logan.
My full name is Rose Elizabeth Artemis Logan. Quite fancy, but I feel as though it lends me some much needed gravitas. Although at my first proper meeting with Black, he seemed to disagree.
In our first Herbology lesson of our First Year at Hogwarts, Professor Cresere had asked us to get to know the people around us by filling out a questionnaire. I had the misfortune to be standing near to Sirius Black. When asked my full name, I very shyly imparted the information.
His response was immediate:
'Hey – your initials spell REAL!'
"Oh. Um. I've never really thought of it that way."
I was obviously blushing at this time – not because my eleven year old self paid very much attention to the attractiveness of the opposite sex, but because I was painfully shy, and speaking to a complete stranger was difficult for me.
"Hmmm." He pondered this. "Maybe it's because my initials spell SOB, that I always think about what other people's initials spell."
"Oh. Well um - … what's… what's your name then?"
"Sirius Orion Black." He stated proudly.
"Serious?" I asked, as timidly as a mouse.
He rolled his eyes – I can imagine that he got that the whole time.
"No, Sirius – like the dog star."
"Oh." Shyness pushed to new levels by feelings of stupidity, I was silent.
"Orion is the name of a star too." He stated, searching for something to say to the small, pudgy and very silent red head.
"Yes." It came out as a whisper. I cleared my throat. "Orion's belt is the only star constellation I know. I can never see any of the others – my brothers try and point them out to me, but I don't see how the stars can all join up. Even if you had a pencil, like dot-to-dot." Realising that I had imparted so much information, I retreated back into my shell.
"Dot-to-dot? What's that?" he questioned.
"Oh – um – a game. For children. Like a puzzle. You join up lots of dots to form a picture."
"Oh right – are you muggleborn then?" he asked.
"Um – sorry – I don't know what that is." I said. My timidity was increasing by the second as my feelings of ignorance rose.
"It's a person who comes from a muggle – non-wizard – family." He stated, eyes regarding me.
"Oh – well, yes."
"I thought I didn't recognise your surname – how do you spell it?"
He gestured towards the questionnaire form.
"Oh – um – L-O-G-A-N. Like the berry – you know: a Loganberry."
And that is a moment which I have come to regret, and shall most likely regret for the rest of my life – or at least for the rest of my school career.
Right then, I was thankfully released from the terrifying task of conversing with a strange boy as Professor Cresere called the class to order. I put the whole conversation from my mind until a few weeks later, when I was absent from class on account of having a stomach bug. Lily later informed me that in my absence, he had told all the teachers, and most of the students, that my real surname was 'Loganberry', and I was too shy to correct the teachers when they got it wrong.
I was absolutely livid, but my introversion prevented me from doing anything about it. I lacked even the courage to correct the teachers when they got it wrong. I don't even deserve to be called a Gryffindor. I convinced myself that it would probably die out soon anyway. It didn't.
This is now why, with the exception of Professor Dumbledore, who seems to know absolutely everything, and Professor McGonagall, who has my name on a class list, the whole school knows me as Rose Loganberry. It makes me want to smash my fist into Black's smirking face every time someone calls me by the ignominious name of a piece of fruit. Plus he just loves to rub it in, by accosting me as 'Real Loganberry'.
By the time that I had reminisced about this incident, my annoyance at Black had supplanted my pain, and my dorm mates were safely dozing once more, none the wiser as to the fact that I had rudely awoken them so early.
This gave me a chance to take my time in the bathroom, and then read a book as my friends frantically threw on clothes and shoes, before we all headed down to breakfast.
Here, Professor McGonagall handed out NEWT timetables to us all. My OWL results meant that I was not restricted as to my choice of subjects. However, before anyone starts to think that I am in fact very intelligent for achieving all O's and E's in my OWLs, and rolls their eyes in disgust, let me make it clear that I practically killed myself through studying so hard.
That is not an overstatement. Unlike Potter and Black, who swan about doing no work and obtain excellent marks, and Lily, who works quite hard, but is somewhat of a natural at everything, I work my socks off, day in, day out, to achieve an acceptable standard of grades in class, and grades that I felt very proud of at OWLs. I am not particularly clever – it takes me a lot of time and effort to achieve the grades that I do.
The perks of this were that I could choose anything I wanted to for NEWTs, and thus, as my six subjects, I had decided to take Potions, Defence, Charms, Transfiguration, Herbology and Ancient Mermish, with absolutely no view at to what I wanted to do with my life.
Our new Defence Professor had been the cynosure of every female eye at the feast the night before. Most of the teaching faculty had been granted with brains rather than stellar looks, and so Professor Caverleigh had flashed like a ray of sunshine amongst the shadows of the Potions dungeons.
He had slightly longish blond hair that fell into his eyes, dark blue eyes, and a rather attractive smile. Fate had smiled upon my decision to take Defence at NEWT level.
Lily and I grinned at each other as we regarded our timetables over the breakfast table: first thing on a Monday morning, we had Professor Caverleigh's visage to ease us into the working week, with double Defence.
Whilst Lily and I are firm believers in feminism; not the bra burning sort, or the "keep-men-in-cages" sort, but rather anything a man can do a woman can do just as well; we did appreciate male beauty.
"Do you think he dyes his hair? – it certainly is a lovely shade of blond." Lily commented.
"I don't know – I don't know the first thing about hair dye. I was just admiring his forearms – you can see the muscles, even from this far down the table."
"Oh yeah – I –"
Then, our lovely conversation was rudely interrupted by Black.
'It's interesting that as soon as I walk into a room, you immediately start talking about attractive men.'
Ugh. Sirius's ego – his one unattractive feature. My previous embarrassment from the train ride forgotten, I turned round and said coolly:
'I'm just compensating for you.'
"Darling, I don't need compensating for. Besides, I know you girls prefer the tall, dark, handsome stranger.'
'Luckily for me, you're not a stranger.'
'Is that because you'd like to know me better?'
'No Black, it's because it would be weird if I did this to a stranger.'
And then I performed a little spell I had learnt over the summer; a spell that stuck the tongue to the roof of the mouth. That shut him up, though sadly the effect wouldn't be permanent.
I chuckled in glee as he fixed me with an angry glare, to which I just licked my lips and took another bite of toast: it tasted like victory. He wouldn't be able to eat under the influence of that spell.
(Not that I wanted him to starve, but he would experience five minutes panic when he couldn't stuff himself as he normally did. In an elegant way. Not that I ever watched him eat, or anything. That would be weird.)
Our first Defence lesson was interesting. A large number of people had elected to take NEWT Level Defence, which meant that we were still split into houses, unlike other NEWT subjects, for lessons, and so we Gryffindors shared our lesson with Ravenclaw. I suspect that most of the students chose it because it was always a popular subject, but for those who had been unsure, the teacher might have been a deal-clincher.
Professor Caverleigh had not only been blessed with intelligence and looks, but also with a charismatic personality. Having introduced himself to the class, he told us to put our books away, get into pairs, and to practice duelling with all the spells that we had learnt so far in our school career.
At the beginning, Lily and I were just disarming and stunning one another, and sending other such boring and basic spells. Professor Caverleigh then came round to supervise our duel, telling us to be a little more creative, to take our 'enemy' by surprise, and to perform the unexpected.
By the end of the lesson, Lily and I were wheezing with laughter as we sent spell, hex, and jinx towards each other, rarely stopping to mutter the counter curse unless it impeded our duel too much. We had to pause when I sent a muscle-relaxant hex at Lily, and she sank slowly to the floor, surprised, as her slackened muscles could no longer hold her upright. Professor Caverleigh gave me ten points for Gryffindor for it.
She returned the favour with a Disequilibrium jinx, which messes with the balance that your inner ear fluid maintains, and left me stumbling around like a drunken reveller. I was glad that I was paired with Lily, as other duels seemed to be getting a little nasty, with Stinging Hexes and Boils Jinxes being bandied about. Lily and I stopped short of causing each other pain in our duel.
Safe to say, it was the best Defence lesson I have ever attended, and by the end of it, I had decided that Caverleigh was, to use the popular British expression, a good egg. Despite his good looks, he wasn't sleazy or discerningly arrogant, and was definitely a great teacher.
The final lesson of the day was Potions, which was always amusing for me, mostly because Professor Slughorn had one thing in common with James Potter: an obsession with Lily Evans. As soon as we entered the classroom it was-
'Ah, Miss Evans. How are you Miss Evans? Did you do much potion making over the summer, Miss Evans?'
To be honest, I think I'd rather take Potter than Slughorn; he has a marginally better sense of humour. Having said that, apart from his blatant favouritism, Slughorn isn't bad. I mean for being the Head of the Slytherins, you would think he would like to hex every Gryffindor that passed, fail us in every test and set us copious amounts of homework. McGonagall does that - the homework I mean, and she's supposed to support us.
However, this particular lesson turned out to be very different from any previous Potions lesson I had ever had. Perhaps I had attained a certain level of confidence, which had been slowly growing ever since I met Lily, Katie and Alice. Perhaps it was my frustration when my heart panged as I heard Black flirting with Helen Cornes, a Hufflepuff, as we were queuing to get into the dungeons. Perhaps it was the martial attitude that had begun this morning as I gained the self-assurance to hex Black at breakfast, and duel with Lily in Defence. Perhaps it was a combination of all three.
Whatever it was, it started off with the Marauders. It ended with detention. You can see where I'm going. So after James began his daily ritual of asking Lily out, and to his infamous question she turned round, as he had conveniently taken the bench behind us, and gave, in a very strained voice, a firm no.
To be honest I thought that would be the end of that, as Slughorn was fast approaching our table. However, Black decided to step in and say with an amused smirk on his face that I refuse to think was sexy-
"When are you going take out that poker and go out with him? It's not like anyone else would go out with you. I mean, James has practically marked his territory on you."
Lily gasped, and seemed to be just gathering energy to explode. I beat her to it. Anger surged within me, suddenly but forcefully, and for the first time in my life, I completely lost my temper with Black. This was no jokingly cast hex, or frustration caused by my irrevocable feelings towards him. This was anger.
I picked up the silvered eels; stink sap and pickled toad that I had spent ages cutting up, and dropped them into his potion. It promptly exploded. Just as Professor Slughorn was walking past.
And in his annoyance in being covered in a brown potion which smelt absolutely disgusting, he promptly gave Black detention for playing yet another prank in class. Result. Lily gave me a hug, and thanked me profusely for standing up to her. I decided to revel in my revenge for the next five minutes. That is, until my temper cooled and I began to feel guilty. It's a really annoying habit of mine.
For example, once, in the summer of third year a male friend of my eldest brother stole my favourite book, and then deliberately threw it in the pond. I was fourteen at the time, and he was seventeen, and towered over a 5ft 3 me in all the glory of 6ft 2.
Despite being shy, if there was enough provocation, the impassioned tendencies engendered in every red head (auburn hair still counts) generally won out. Losing my temper, I hit him square in the face and broke his nose. Ten minutes later, as blood was spewing out of his nose, I apologised over and over again, and then spent the next week baking him cakes by way of apology. Maybe an apology was in order for my assault, but his bullying definitely did not merit cake.
This reminiscence got me thinking. I probably did need to apologise. Sexist comments were not in order, but I never meant for him to get detention. Or was it just because I fancied him that I unconsciously wanted him to think well of me? However, he might not care much about it, as he and Potter were always in detention. Maybe he even liked detention. Or not.
Stupid, over-analytical brain. Stupid temper. No, stupid attraction to a sexist idiot who would never truly consider me as girlfriend material.
Oh well – at least it was the end of lessons. I was off to have a bath. As Jasper Fforde wisely stated: "There is no problem on Earth that can't be ameliorated by a hot bath and a cup of tea."
Or in my case, hot chocolate.
Ellie Baby xxx