She was still floating among the clouds when she went to her next Potions class and Snape went around passing back their essays on horned slugs. She was feeling much more confident that she had gotten a better score this time. Not only had she worked a lot harder, but now Snape was acting a lot nicer and wouldn't have dared to hand out any more unwarranted zeroes.

Her heart was about to burst with anticipation when Snape glided toward her and handed her her essay. At once, her eyeballs were assaulted by a huge circle scribbled in red ink on the top.

Another zero! — she opened her mouth to scream — and then to the right of the circle, she saw a one. Okay, so not a zero — she closed her mouth, calming down again — and then sitting conspicuously right between the zero and one, there was a big fat dot! And then her brain put all the parts together and she finally registered what she was looking at: 0.1! She had gotten a zero point one!

And then all the feelings bubbled over and Ari let out the shriek that had been bottled up inside her. Shock and disbelief and frustration warred within her in equal measure as the huge red 0.1 burned into her retinas. This couldn't be real… no… Maybe this was all just a big dream and if she screamed loud enough, she would wake up.

But she didn't wake up, and when she looked up, Snape was still standing in front of her. He was smiling, but it wasn't a nice smile. "Is there a problem?" he said smoothly. Over his shoulder, she could see Malfoy and his friends holding back silent guffaws.

Ari was so shocked she couldn't even respond. She just couldn't believe it. After all that hard work and honing of her beautiful calligraphy, the idiot had the nerve to give her a 0.1! Not even a one percent, but a zero point one! He couldn't even spare a single point for her!

At once, she forgot about whatever reservations she might have had about Snape — it was clear he hadn't changed one bit, and the niceness she had felt from him had just been an illusion. A disguise that had concealed the insufferable bully underneath. She could have written the most perfect essay, but it didn't matter, because Snape was a terrible person and would have done anything to give her a horrible score and make her life miserable. But Ari wasn't going to let him get away with it. Oh, no! She was going to take his huge ego down ten notches and show him once and for all he had picked the wrong person to mess with!

When the bell rang, Ari jostled past everyone and stomped up to Snape's desk in a fierce determination or blind rage, she couldn't tell which. He was lounging against his desk, an indolent smirk on his face. Just like the big-headed villain he was, he made no move to defend herself from her earth-rumbling attack — and he sure was going to regret that!

"Yes?" he drawled as Ari planted her feet in front of him and glared up at him.

She swerved her head around the room to make sure it was empty, then uncrumpled the parchment in her fist and thrust it in Snape's face. "It says I got a 0.1 percent here, Professor!" she exclaimed, jabbing the huge red numbers on the front of her essay. "A zero point one percent! As in, even less than one! I didn't even get a single point!"

"And?"

"And I did it right, just like you said!" she shouted, stamping her feet. "I made sure it was all neat and legible and twelve inches long! I measured it with a ruler and everything! So why'd I get a 0.1 percent, huh? How's that any better than a zero, when I did everything perfectly this time around, huh?!" She crumpled her parchment back up and glowered at him.

He detached himself from his desk and narrowed his eyes down at her. "Simply because you wrote a readable essay and turned it in does not automatically grant you a passing mark, you entitled brat," Snape said in that silky voice that would have put Ari to sleep if it weren't for the murderous undertone in his words. "The content matters as much as the form. Think of it as a painting. What is the point of making a beautiful painting if it contains no soul? What is the point of art if it cannot evoke the intended emotions in the beholder?"

"Huh? Art? What painting?" Ari made a face and scratched her head. "You're talking weird again."

Snape rolled his eyes to the back of his head. And then changing his voice to that slow, exaggerated drawl again, he said, "when you write an essay, idiot child, you need to respond to the prompt in a factual and thorough manner. If you do not answer the prompt, or your response is incorrect, you will not get a passing mark. Even if your essay is neat and legible and the appropriate length, as long as your information is incorrect, you will still fail. Do you understand now, imbecile?"

"Yeah, yeah," she said impatiently. "You don't have to use that tone of voice, though. I can understand you just fine!"

"I beg to differ," he retorted. "Given your pathetic excuse of an essay, it is clear that you do not possess a shred of basic comprehension skills."

"Nuh-uh!" Ari said indignantly, stamping her foot. "I can understand things! And I understand everything about horned slugs and wrote it all down in my most prettiest handwriting! It's all correct, I know it is!"

"Oh? And you're just so confident, aren't you?" Snape said scornfully. "Do you need me to deflate your ego again? Remind you of how worthless you really are, you little weed?"

And before Ari could respond, he snatched the essay from her hand lightning-fast and uncrumpled it. "'The Uses of Horned Slugs in Potion-Making, by Ari Rossi,'" he began reading off the parchment. "'I am writing this essay to talk about the uses of horned slugs in potions. Horned slugs are a common ingredient used in potion-making. Horned slugs are very cute and look like a shell-less snail.'" He met her gaze over the paper and raised an eyebrow, all the world's judgment radiating from that one expression. "That statement is redundant and dreadfully idiotic. Right away, it's clear that you're too brain-dead to make any useful insights and are just reiterating the obvious so you can fill up space."

"W-whatever!" Ari snapped. She had thought she had written a good introduction, but when Snape was reading it aloud and adding his snide commentary, she had to resist the urge to cover her ears and run away. "I was just getting into the swing of things, so it's not too good at first. But the next part's better, I mean it!"

"You call this part 'better?'" And he looked back at the parchment and continued in that drawl that oozed of incredulous derision with each syllable: "'the horned slug is used in potions a lot. There are many ways to use the horned slug in potions. One way you can use the horned slug in potions is to add the horned slug into your cauldron when you are brewing the potion. You should add the horned slug to your cauldron when the horned slug is in its larva stage.'"

He lowered the parchment again, a horrible sneer on his face. "Ah, so when you finally attempt to make a statement of value, it's not even correct. How very surprising. You do realize, dunderhead, that it is physically impossible for a slug to even take on a larva form?"

"That's not what the book said!" Ari snarled, curling her fists. She wanted to whack the smirk off Snape's slimy slug face. "The textbook said it's best to use lava slugs for potions, or whatever!"

"You confused it for another creature," Snape said smoothly. "Either that, or you can't read. I believe the latter is more probable at this point. Even a toddler would be able to use a textbook and find the passage that states horned slugs reach their maximum potency when they develop into their adult form."

"Whatever!" Ari said again, her face turning warm. "I was just falling asleep when I read that part, that's all. But I was awake when I did the rest of the essay. It's a lot better, trust me!"

"Ah, indeed it is." Snape raised the parchment to his face again and continued, "'from the following, it can be deduced that the writer of this essay is a complete idiot and has less brain power than the horned slug she was so enthusiastically fixated upon.'"

"No!" Ari squealed in horror. "I didn't write that! I didn't!"

"Oh?" he raised an eyebrow. "But the words are printed here very clearly — of course, since you're illiterate, you wouldn't be able to understand what you wrote, anyway."

He showed her the essay. Before she could take it, however, he shredded up the parchment, faster than she could blink. Then he threw the pieces everywhere like confetti. "There," he said, dusting off his hands. Ari gawked at him in stunned silence. "Much better."

"You ruined it!" she shrieked.

"Nothing to ruin when it was already rubbish."

His sharp, uncompromising words cut through her bones again and made her flare up with indignation. "Meanie!" she growled, sticking an accusatory finger in his greasy face. "You're mean!"

He raised an eyebrow. "It really took you that long to notice, dunderhead?"

"No!" she snapped, glaring at him with all the force her eyeballs could muster. "But now you're really mean!"

"I'm only speaking the truth," he retorted. "And after you've blown up your ego with your delusions for so long, you need a reality check to bring you back down to earth. Once that happens, I'll get to the root of the problem and eliminate the weed once and for all. Make no mistake about that."

He flashed her a knowing, malicious look, and Ari could feel the anger boiling in her stomach like a pressure cooker. What a stupid toad! He was still bent on exterminating the so-called weed, huh? Didn't he have anything better to do?!

It turned out, he didn't. To add insult to injury, Snape gave her another detention for turning in her degrading excuse of an essay and causing brain damage. And then he went on another rant about how bad her essay was, and that if she ever turned in something so pathetic again, he would punish her with something a lot worse than just detention.

Ari wanted to scream. Great, just great! Another horrible detention, and right after she had finished her last one! Would the torture ever end? Oh, how good it would feel to give that big bat a lesson and yank his hair out until he was a bald egg head!

Ari stomped to the common room in an unquenchable rage, screaming and swinging her arms with so much force it was enough to make the gods in the heavens cower with fear! The people in the common room, however, didn't seem as impressed and just gave her dirty looks.

To add onto her annoyance, a grumpy Percy came over and scolded Ari. He ordered that she needed to be quiet or else he would send her to her dormitory. Ari rolled her eyes. What did he think he was, forcing her to go to time-out like that?! He was becoming as bossy and annoying as Snape!

As the mini Snape strode away and Ari glared at his back, Fred and George suddenly popped up beside her. "Hey, Ari, what's up?" Fred asked — or maybe it was George.

"You all right?" George added — or maybe it was Fred. "You were screaming up a storm!"

"Oh, no, I'm not okay!" Ari snapped as lightning bolts of rage zapped through her body. "Snape just gave me a 0.1 on my essay!"

"What the!" Fred exclaimed, his eyes wide. "A zero point one?! Are you for real?"

"Yeah!" she said. "I can't show it to you, though, 'cause he ripped it up."

"He ripped it up?!" Fred repeated.

"Yeah! And then he threw it around like confetti!"

"HA! There he goes, being petty as usual!" George chortled. "Ripping up your essay, giving you a 0.1 — not even a zero, but a zero point one?!"

"I know, right?!" Ari said vehemently. Just thinking about it made her want to bash Snape's head inside-out. "He's an ugly warthog! He called me an idiot and a weed. And then he said I've got less brain power than a horned slug — oh yeah, and then he gave me detention!"

"Aw, no!" Fred choked out through his laughter. "You got detention?"

"Yeah," Ari growled, flexing her fingers. "And right when I finished my old one, too!"

"Don't worry," George said reassuringly. "It'll go by in a flash. And it only gets easier from here. The more detentions you get, the easier it gets."

Fred nodded sagely. "Trust me, we speak from experience. Me and George have gotten so many detentions we're practically detention veterans now. We've seen it all, the highs and lows, scoured endless battlefields and taken down just about all the obstacles you can think of."

George exchanged smirks with his brother. "And we've encountered many opponents along the way, too. We've practically become BFFs with Filch and his cat now, now that we see them on a daily basis."

Fred snickered. "Ugh, yeah. Just the past week he made us mop up the entrance hall and scrub the hourglasses and wipe the marble staircase — each and every last stair! And we had to do it all by hand — without any magic!"

"Thankfully the detentions were late at night," George said, "so we didn't miss any Quidditch practice."

"But we were sleep-deprived," Fred added. "Had to rely on a pack of Turbo-Charged Xtra-Caffeinated Monster Coffee to keep us chugging through our classes."

"And while it helped us stay awake, we did have to deal with some other unintended side effects," George said, rubbing his abdomen. "If you know what I mean." He winked at Ari and she laughed.

"It was a harrowing plight," Fred smirked. "Nightly detentions, coffee runs, oh my."

George smirked back. "It was simply the price we had to pay, I suppose, for our forbidden exploration of the third-floor-corridor door."

"The third-floor corridor?" Ari piped up, perking up even more. "What's that?"

"Oh, you don't know?" George said. "Dumbledore said during the welcoming speech that the door in the third-floor corridor was out-of-bounds."

"Oh really?" Ari said, her interest piqued. She couldn't remember anything about that! Then again, she had been too busy trying not to fall asleep to listen to Dumbledore's boring old speech. "But why is it out-of-bounds?"

"No doubt there's something hidden behind that door," Fred said wisely, "something deliciously dangerous that could take us all out if it was released. A Pandora's box, of sorts."

"What do you think's inside?" she asked.

"It could be anything," George responded, a faraway gleam appearing in his eyes. "Both good and bad. A stash of gold, an infinite supply of Chocolate Frogs, a passageway leading to a certain underwater city… ahh, the possibilities are endless."

"And George and I set it upon ourselves to retrieve the missing key to Atlantis," Fred said, smirking devilishly, "and get to the bottom of the mystery once and for all."

"We tried," George said. "We really tried. But little did we know we would just end up becoming martyrs for our cause."

"What's a martyr?" she asked.

"It's someone who's so loyal to their cause they'd rather die than abandon it," George explained, and Ari gasped. "Yes, it's quite a serious undertaking — thankfully, in our case, we didn't die, but were punished with detention."

"What happened?"

"Our tale begins on a cold September night," Fred began in a low, dramatic voice, "when explorers Fred and George were feeling a bit... how should we put it? Frisky?"

"Frisky indeed," continued George. "We ventured out of the common room with the intent to bust down the third-floor corridor once and for all."

"Once we arrived, we did the obvious," Fred said. "We tried opening the door. Locked — aw, crikey!"

"Then we tried using Alohomora," George said, then shook his head. "Still locked."

"But we were even prepared for that," continued Fred, smirking devilishly. "Because you see, we had smuggled a decent stash of some Filibuster Fireworks."

"What're Filibuster Fireworks?" Ari asked.

"Powerful fireworks that make a big sound," George explained, "and make an even bigger explosion. They're another one of me and Fred's BFFs. Because if there's one thing we love, it's blowing things up and creating chaos."

"Hear, hear," Fred grinned. "And me and George lobbed said Filibuster Fireworks right beside the door, and waited for the magic to happen.

"And a few seconds later, the fireworks did their job," George said, imitating an explosion with his hands. "It was the boom heard 'round the world. Shook the entire castle to its core."

"What happened?" Ari asked urgently, quite invested in the story at this point. "Did it break down the door?"

Fred sighed, his shoulders slumping like a balloon deflating. "Alas," he said sadly, "despite the grand, fiery fireworks show, we found that the door didn't even budge. The stubborn donkey."

"We reckon the door had some anti-destruction charms on it," George said, shaking his head, "in an attempt to keep out curious adventurers much as ourselves."

"And maybe we set off an alarm, too," continued Fred, "because next thing we knew, Filch's cat showed up."

"Oh, no!" Ari cried.

"Oh, yes," George said grimly. "When there's Mrs. Norris, there's Filch. The moment Mrs. Norris catches someone acting out of line, Filch'll teleport to his cat in two seconds. Those two are connected by some uncanny spiritual connection, I tell you."

Ari laughed and Fred continued dramatically, "the two fugitives made a run for it. But before they could even take two steps, that was when the great bogeyman Filch emerged from the shadows — reeking of doom and gloom!"

"No!" Ari squealed. "What did you do?!"

"We tried making another run for it," George said, "but like we said, Filch's teleportation abilities are mythical. Not even a cheetah on Turbo-Charged Xtra-Caffeinated Monster Coffee could have outran him."

"So he caught you?" Ari asked, her entire body practically buzzing with tension.

Fred sighed. "Yes, unfortunately. Despite our best efforts, the mange-ball caught up with us in the end. He grabbed us by the knees and dragged us all the way to his office."

Ari screamed and George nodded gravely. "And then he showed us his whips and threatened us with them."

"Oh my bananas!" Ari screamed again, slapping her hands to her face. "He actually whipped you?!"

"Not this time," Fred said proudly. "George and I kept a cool head and talked our way out of it. In the end, he reduced our flogging sentence to a one-week detention."

"And we served our due and here we are today, alive and well," George said, smirking. "Unfortunately, we can't say the same about our grand plans. We started the year with so many grand visions, so many aspirations to break down the door and find hidden treasure — and in an instant, all our dreams and potential for riches went crashing to the ground."

Fred shook his head, disappointment tangible in his every movement and word. "We put in so much time and effort, and yet, it seems we're not any more enlightened than we were at the beginning of the year."

George sighed resignedly and mirrored his brother's head-shake. "If even the great masters Fred and George are unable to break down its barriers, perhaps the contents inside the door are really meant to be sealed away. Looks like the secrets of Hogwarts will have to stay just that — a secret."

"No!" Ari cried, jumping up from the couch she had been making herself comfortable in. "You can't give up that easily! There has to be a way in, I know it!"

"Oh, yeah?" Fred said, smirking at her.

"Yeah!" she nodded vigorously. "Don't let Filch stop you! Even if the fireworks couldn't break down the door, there's got to be another way inside. Maybe you can use a hammer or something and break it down!"

"Hm, maybe you're onto something," George said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "But I think we'll need something a lot stronger than a hammer if we're gonna break down such a big door."

"Then you can use a cannon! Or a rifle!" Ari exclaimed. "There's gotta be a way in, there's gotta! And then we can find all the treasures inside and become rich and famous. Oh, and then they'll build a big statue of us in the entrance hall 'cause we'll be the first people who opened up the mystery door. We'll be written in the history books! Everyone'll know our names!"

Fred and George laughed. "You're really something, Ari," Fred said, grinning. "But you know, if you're really so curious in finding out what's behind the third-floor door, then why don't you check it out yourself?"

"Who knows, maybe you'll have more luck than us figuring a way in," George added, winking. "Just learn from our mistakes and don't let the mange-ball catch you."

As Ari stared at the twins' eager faces, she felt her heart quicken. Oh, it truly did sound tantalizing…! If she found a way in, not only would she stumble upon some never-seen-before treasure, but she would also be hailed as a hero by becoming the first person to find a way in the forbidden doors. That would definitely show Snape that she was a lot more than some worthless little weed!