28 April 1992
Addie was packing up her things from class which had been a Gryffindor – Hufflepuff joint class when Neville leaned over to talk to her from the across the aisle.
"Do you want to walk to lunch club together?" he asked.
"Of course," Addie replied. Neville was always nice to talk to. He was very shy, but shy people were just as capable of being nice as confident people.
"Oi, Longbottom!" came a voice from behind them.
"Oh. Hi Ron."
"Why aren't you coming to the picnic? You're the only person in our year who was invited who's not coming."
"Oh, that. I'm afraid that I am otherwise engaged on that day," he said very formally, "but if you give me more notice next time, I might be able to fit you in."
"What else could you possibly be doing? Come on Longbottom. Don't be a bad sport."
"I already told you I'm otherwise, and more agreeably engaged." Addie raised her eyebrows. Neville, as shy as he was, really did have a way with words.
"With what?"
"Bold of you to assume that I'm going to be doing an activity alone. It's more with whom?"
"Ok, with whom?"
"My friends."
That one was clearly a surprise to Ron. "You don't have any friends. Nobody wants to talk to you..."
"At your party." Neville interjected. "Nobody wants to talk to me at your party. Elsewhere however..."
"You..." Ron bit out.
"You know Ron, I think I should thank you for making sure that Addie could make it by not inviting her. If she had been invited, she would have made time in her busy schedule. She knows very well that Potter is looking forward to it. If she had been invited, she would have worried about offending him and would have found a way to do both and she's already spread too thin. I suppose that's probably what good siblings do, try and show up and be supportive. Although, I wouldn't know myself, being an only child." He then turned around and walked away from Ron, and Addie moved to follow him, but then Neville turned around again. "In a way, that's something else that Potter and I have in common. Same birth month, equal lack of understanding of how to be a good brother." With that, Neville looped his arm with hers, and together, they walked to lunch club.
Professor Sprout knew that this was the final week of scheduled talking points, and still had not figured out how to proceed. She was seriously considering asking the members about what they thought, as she was drawing a blank.
Her charges entered the room, and Professor Sprout could not help but compare them to their earlier selves. In the first week, none of them had seemed as though they actually wanted to be there. They had always done as she had asked, but she had not expected them to progress so quickly. First, they proved to actually have interesting things to talk about with each other, before beginning to acknowledge the existence of each other in the halls, before founding a study group entirely unprompted and helping each other both with subject matter and concentration. She did of course know about some of the other things they had done, but she had promised confidentiality in the first week, and this extended to even the stickiest situations.
She clapped her hands to get them to be quiet. "Alright everyone," she said. "For this week – our last week with a solid plan – Addie will be talking about animals."
"Animals..." Addie started, before ceasing abruptly, "are difficult to talk about because there are so many things I can say about them."
"Well, Addie," Professor Sprout said, reassuringly, "I'm sure it will be interesting, no matter what you say."
"Well, if that's the case, I'll go ahead. I have a complicated relationship with animals. I am sure that many of you will have noticed that I do not eat meat. I also find it quite difficult to justify animal transfiguration. I tried to read about it, but it is ethically iffy, and the descriptions were rather graphic, so I returned the book I had found to the library."
"I've always meant to ask," said Cho, "is there anything that you miss from before you were a vegetarian?"
"Urm, there were some things we got at primary school sometimes that I liked, but at the Dursleys, the meat and fish we tended to be given was quite possibly the chewiest to have previously walked (or swum) the earth. Harry minded less than I did – I think he was just glad that we had food," (she paused there for a second to add that she of course always had food, but Professor Sprout really didn't believe this) "and would complain less than I did. I was always a difficult child. I know that it's strange to object to eating animals, but there is something about doing it that just doesn't make any sense to me."
"I suppose there are lots of reasons, Adelaide," Adrian reasoned. "I can't quite understand it myself, but I understand that you are doing what you think to be right, ethically speaking."
"What do your aunt and uncle think about it?" Neville asked. "From what we've all heard about them, they don't sound like the most accommodating people."
"Oh, they kicked up a fuss to start with. Aunt Petunia told me that I was being overly nice and that I was just doing it for attention. But then I took a detour with Harry on the way home from primary school and put together a presentation for her. I did some basic calculations about nutrition from beans and legumes, and some of them had recipes on the back. My proposal had information on how much money it would save and how much gas it would save if they didn't have to cook me meat as well."
"Gas?" asked Adrian, who Professor Sprout doubted had ever set food in a magical kitchen, let alone a muggle one.
"Muggles get it from the ground, and set it on fire to create heat. Most houses use it to cook and some to heat them up as well," Cho explained.
"You always seem to be the one to explain the differences between muggle and magical homes," Adrian said. "I hadn't noticed it before, but I don't think any of the rest of us have enough understanding about the other side to explain to the other."
"My dad was a muggle, and I still see members of his family sometimes. My grandparents that side, who I don't know very well are aware of magic (legally of course) and I always have to explain things to them. I also helped them to set up their tv because they still don't quite understand how it works. In a strange way, I live in two worlds, and I always have."
"Do you mind?" Neville asked. "It can get annoying for me to have to explain things to my gran about things that go on nowadays, and that doesn't happen often."
"Oh, of course it does, sometimes. None of you seem to expect it from me though, so I am quite happy to do it."
"Thank you," Addie said sincerely. "It has been fairly bizarre trying to adapt to all this," she gestured around her, "but you are an excellent translator. To all of you really. Thank you for being patient with me."
"Of course," Adrian said. "It must be a lot to adapt to."
"I still don't think that I will ever be able to use a quill properly, though.
"Don't let my parents hear me saying this, but I think that quills are an incredibly inefficient way to write anyway."
"My mum always uses a fountain pen," Cho said. "She says that it's the best of both worlds and doesn't need to be dipped so much."
"Gran refuses to write, she thinks it's below her. She has her maid answer all correspondence. She has no limits to what she tells her, and even dictates her diary entries to her."
"Oh my goodness, I can't even imagine that," Cho giggled. "The things she must know."
Professor Sprout chose that moment to get them back on topic, "Alright everyone, back to animals."
"Well," said Addie, promptly doing as requested, "I like cats and dogs and owls. I can't disconnect them and other animals from what's on my plate. It doesn't make sense to me."
"Do you have a pet?" Cho asked. "I know that other people have owls and things. Neville, you have toad, don't you?"
Neville said that he did.
"I don't have a pet. Hagrid bought Harry and owl, but I couldn't stand the noise in the pet shop, so I stood outside. I'd like a cat though. If I got a very unwitchy one, the Dursleys might even tolerate it."
"Oh, there are so many wonderful cats I've met at Hogwarts," Professor Sprout said mournfully, "but I am far too busy to have a cat."
"Mrs Figg who I grew up near, and who babysat me quite a lot when I was little has dozens of cats. Harry always hated going over there as we had to eat cabbage and look at photos of every cat she had ever so much as set her eyes on, but I was quite willing to do that so I could talk to the cats."
"How about your family?" Neville asked. "Muggles must have pets."
"Some do. Most muggles live in cities, and don't have space or a reason to have an owl," Cho said.
"The Dursleys don't. Dudley used to have a tortoise, but he put it through the roof of the greenhouse."
"How barbaric," Professor Sprout whispered venomously. She knew that she probably shouldn't be surprised that a group of unkind muggles would do that to a greenhouse (or, indeed a turtle) but some people never ceased to surprise her. She wondered how Arabella dealt with living near those people.
Addie left the meeting and went about the rest of her day. She tried to think over some potential answers to the specimen paper that Professor Snape had forced them to copy down, but kept on drawing a blank. She decided to instead go for a wander around the castle before dinner. Leaving the very populated areas of the castle for calmer areas always made her feel better. The library had probably been designed to encourage learning, but anxious fifth, sixth and seventh years and Hermione Granger created a bad environment.
She gathered up her things and went exploring for an hour or so, occasionally looking out of the windows at the Highland views. She was not sure of their precise location, and would not be able to identify it on a muggle map. It was far from cities or towns or villages or farmland. All around there was only green and blue, a stark change from her grey and more grey childhood. The houses had all been the same (and grey) the sky had been grey, much of her clothing had been grey due to age and her future, one at Stonewall, had been grey as well. For most of her time at Hogwarts, she had spent herself inside, where there was plenty of greyness for her to be occupied with. She hadn't got the appeal. She had seriously considered braving Stonewall, reasoning that school in Surrey couldn't possibly be worse than her sad existence at Hogwarts. Now, however, looking out over the beautiful sight before her, she felt sure that this must be what happiness was.