Chapter 5: In Practice
"I can't believe you're actually coming to the party tonight!" squealed a female voice right in Ariadne's ear.
"Take it down an octave, please, Sophie," said Ariadne, wincing. Sophia quieted down but replaced her squealing with happy little hops and claps. Sometimes Ariadne wondered what on earth could have bound them so tightly as friends since first year. But she couldn't imagine her life without Sophie's sunshiny energy and candor.
They were standing in front of a full-length mirror in the Gryffindor seventh-year girls' dormitory; Ariadne, carefully putting up her hair and applying eyeliner; Sophie, "helping" and getting herself ready (in theory) but mostly jumping around and effusing. The three other seventh-year girls were variously showering, rummaging through trunks of clothes, and sending puffs of makeup into the air. Priya stopped by the mirror to borrow a hair tie from Sophie, and paused to admire Ariadne's makeup. "So pretty, Ari," she complimented. "Your eyes are to die for."
"Says the girl whose cheekbones could slice wormwood," responded Ariadne.
Priya laughed, wrangling with her long, dark hair. "So what convinced Miss Responsible to let loose for a night?"
Sophie almost convulsed with her desire to tell the story of her deal with Sirius—except that Ariadne had forbidden her to mention it to anyone. Priya was too perceptive, though, and had known Sophie too long not to pick up on her body language.
"Spill it, Soph," she commanded, waving a hairbrush around authoritatively.
Sophie hugged herself and looked at Ariadne pleadingly. Ariadne sighed. "Fine, you can tell her."
"SIRIUSBLACKMADEHERITWASADEALTODOTHETRANSFIG—"
"Whoa, whoa, Sophie! Try talking at a normal human pace rather than startled hippogriff speed."
Sophie took a deep breath to calm herself down. "Sirius. Black. Made her a deal—"
"Sirius? Like that Sirius Black?" interrupted Priya, already surprised.
"How many Siriuses do you know at Hogwarts?" replied Ariadne rather snippily.
Priya raised her eyebrows suggestively. "Since when has prefect Ariadne Morrigan been hanging around with official seventh-year playboy Sirius Black?"
"We don't 'hang around,'" said Ariadne impatiently. Meanwhile, Sophie had almost keeled over with the effort of holding in the rest of the juicy story. "Okay, Soph, you can explain the rest."
"Sirius and Ari are Transfiguration partners," gasped Sophie at last. "McGonagall made them. So Ari wanted Sirius to work on the project, and he said okay but only if she came to the party because he wants to see her at the party and dance with her and kiss her and marry her—"
Ariadne laughed at Sophie's rapid descent into absurdity, but Priya was still raising her eyebrows, intrigued. "Why exactly does Sirius Black want you to go to this party so badly?"
Ariadne had honestly not even considered this question. She agreed to the deal because she needed to get Sirius to read, and that was that.
"I don't know, just one of his dumb Marauder pranks, probably. Maybe he's planning to set the Common Room on fire and watch me have a prefect panic attack."
"Maybe," said Priya, unconvinced. "Not just any girl gets a personal party invitation from Mr.-I'm-Too-Good-For-Everyone Sirius Black, though. There are a half-dozen Gryffindor girls alone who are dying for him to even make eye contact in the hallway between Charms and Potions."
It was Ariadne's turn to raise her eyebrows. "Why? He's arrogant, lazy and thinks he's too brilliant for schoolwork. Not to mention he does fairly illegal things with no regard for how dangerous they are just to show off."
"But his hair."
"And those brooding eyes."
"He's quite fit, too."
"Marjorie said when she saw him swimming in the lake with his shirt off…"
"Okay, okay, I get it," said Ariadne. "People think he's attractive. But half of his appeal is the cool and aloof act. You all wouldn't be nearly so crazy about him if he didn't act like he doesn't care." She pulled out her lipstick and started applying it. "At least Potter is honest about loving all the attention he gets. Black pretends like he's above it all, but he secretly craves it."
"Huh."
"Yeah I guess."
"Right as usual, Ari."
"Anyway, I might not be seducing too-cool-for-school Sirius Black, but I do know that if Sirius and Potter are at the party, Remus will be there, and that means I need just the right outfit…" Priya's words trailed off as she dove headfirst into a pool of tangled clothes spilling out of her trunk.
Technically, (as Ariadne knew from having memorized the book of school rules back to front) Hogwarts students were required to wear their school robes at all times. But the rules didn't necessarily specify what they could wear under their robes. Sure, they usually wore standard school uniforms consisting of white blouses, plaid skirts, and slacks, but every good Gryffindor knew to sneak in a few more exciting items at the bottom of their trunk when packing for a new school year. Skirts got shorter, blouses tighter and more colorful, and many would simply wear strapless skintight dresses or corsets and skinny jeans under their robes. Before the night was over, most of the robes came off.
Ariadne had chosen a black velvet pencil skirt and a fire-engine red blouse, which matched her lips. Priya, Sophie and many others had told her she was pretty and could turn heads when she entered a room, with her glossy black hair, golden-brown skin and striking round eyes. Looks wouldn't get her NEWTs, though, so even if Ariadne recognized this, she didn't spend much time thinking about it most days.
But today wasn't most days. And if Ariadne Morrigan was going to party, she was going to look as good as the high standards she set for everything else.
"AND THE MAN OF THE MOMENT…POTTER!"
James Potter rose to the ceiling of the common room, hovering on his Shooting Star with his fists in the air, while the already tipsy crowd of Gryffindors bellowed their approval. Peter Pettigrew and a few other members of the James Potter fan club started up a chorus of the "Gryffindor song"—the Sorting Hat's description of Gryffindor from their first year, with a few raunchy alterations. When they had finished, someone cranked up the Wizarding Wireless set and the castle walls seemed to thrum with vibrations. Ariadne expected a noise complaint from a disgruntled Ravenclaw at any moment.
She was standing in a corner with a bottle of butterbeer in hand, as far away as she could possibly be from Potter and his groupies in the close, cozy common room. Sophie couldn't resist the excitement of the crowd and had joined them to cheer on James, but Priya stayed with Ariadne for slightly calmer conversation, along with a few others.
"So what is this…Gryffindor's fourth consecutive win?"
"Potter and his crew had already planned this party before the match today even happened," said Ariadne, taking a sip. "They were that confident they would win."
"To be fair, Hufflepuff hasn't had a solid Chaser trio in almost five years, and Gryffindor's front is probably the strongest it's ever been," added Lupin.
"How do you know they had already planned it?" asked Priya.
Ariadne hesitated for a fraction of a second. "Black told me."
She thought she saw the tiniest curve on Remus' lips as he raised his butterbeer for another sip. But she told herself she must have been imagining it.
"Well it doesn't hurt to plan ahead, right? I mean, they couldn't have thrown this together in a few hours," said Priya.
By "this," Priya meant the massive gold and red banners bearing the Gryffindor lion hung across the back wall of the common room, golden and scarlet streamers hovering in the air above them, and all the lights dimmed except for real torches flickering with red and gold flames. Last but not least, the centerpiece of the affair, a table dragged into the center of the common room literally overflowing with wizard alcohol. There were six-packs of bottled Butterbeer stacked as high as Ariadne's shoulder, and a few more pitchers on the table. And then, gleaming red in the firelight like a warning and a temptation at the same time, half a dozen handles of Firewhiskey. No doubt funded by the generous spending money provided by Mr. and Mrs. Potter to their son every month, thought Ariadne.
"It's getting so hot in here," commented Ariadne, shrugging off her heavy black robe.
She wasn't the absolute last person to come to the same conclusion and discard this essential wizarding garment, but she certainly wasn't the first, either. Robes were draped over the backs of armchairs and thrown carelessly across the staircase bannisters. Figuring out which robes belonged to who would be a nightmare in the morning.
While Lupin, Priya and Sophie hypothesized about how Potter and Black had managed to pull all this together while they supposedly were in double-period Charms yesterday afternoon and at the Quidditch match all day today, Ariadne felt a pair of eyes on her. She turned her head discreetly and sensed it coming from a cluster of armchairs pulled around the common room fire. There, a group of girls were draped across the chairs in varying states of exposure. One perched on the arm, her short pleated skirt revealing a long stretch of crossed legs; another sat on the floor with her back against the chair; and a third hung over the chair back, speaking into the occupant's ear. That occupant, of course, was none other than Sirius Black, sprawled sideways over the armchair with a Firewhiskey in hand and now gazing at Ariadne with his brooding black eyes.
Despite being the reason why Ariadne was even at this party in the first place, Sirius had entirely ignored her existence up to this point. He had occupied himself earlier in the evening by bewitching James' Quidditch robes so they were fringed with heatless flames and taking a few rounds of shots, and now seemed content to lounge with his posse of attractive girls. That is, until he noticed Ariadne.
Ariadne loosed her hair from her half-updo and let it fall into glossy waves, and angled her bare shoulders and tightly wrapped waist slightly to the right to give him a proper show. Sirius's stares didn't bother her. She knew how good she looked and she was aware that she would attract attention. Later, she couldn't be sure if she would have acted exactly this way had she not been under the influence of two Butterbeers, but in the moment, she simply wanted to dominate Sirius Black's mind. After ensuring that his attention was fully occupied by her, she turned her own attention back to the group's conversation.
"Flitwick's one failed summoning charm away from losing it if Potter and Black skip class to get booze again," Lupin was joking.
"Can't you exert your good influence on them and turn them into straight-O students like you?" said Priya playfully, lightly touching Remus's arm.
Lupin smiled in his good-natured way, and gesturing toward Ariadne, said, "Well evidently that's McGonagall's plan in pairing up Sirius and Morrigan."
Ariadne felt a fleeting jump in her stomach, like someone had slipped a Peppermint Frog into her drink. She brushed off the feeling. What did it matter if people knew she and Sirius were working together on the Transfiguration project?It wasn't like it was a secret or anything.
"Speak of the devil and he shall appear," said a husky voice near Ariadne's ear. At the same time, a shot glass was pressed into her hand and significantly larger, rougher hand closed her fingers around it.
But Ariadne knew he would eventually come over, so she was expecting him. "Learned Horatio's formulas yet, Black?"
"The difficulty of transforming an object is directly related to its weight and complexity and inversely related to the number of magical properties that inhere in the object," answered Sirius, slowly raising his glass to his lips.
"Good. And how do you determine the relative values of the size and shape of the object?"
Sirius gently grasped the hand that was holding her shot glass, and moving closer, guided it up to her lips. "By looking at the object very carefully, assessing its shape, angles, openings, and spaces, and if necessary, holding it," he murmured, barely audible. "Now drink up, Morrigan."