'Right,' said Harry, when she had sat down again, 'shall we get practising then? I was thinking, the first thing we should do is Expelliarmus, you know, the Disarming Charm. I know it's pretty basic but I've found it really useful -'

'Oh, please,' said Zacharias Smith, rolling his eyes and folding his arms. 'I don't think Expelliarmus is exactly going to help us against You-Know-Who, do you?'

'I've used it against him,' said Harry quietly. 'It saved my life in June.' Smith opened his mouth stupidly. The rest of the room was very quiet.

'But if you think it's beneath you, you can leave,' Harry said. Smith did not move. Nor did anybody else.

'OK,' said Harry, his mouth slightly drier than usual with all these eyes upon him, 'I reckon we should all divide into pairs and practise.'

It felt very odd to be issuing instructions, but not nearly as odd as seeing them followed. Everybody got to their feet at once and divided up. Predictably, Neville was left partnerless.

'You can practise with me,' Harry told him. 'Right - on the count of three, then - one, two, three -'

The room was suddenly full of shouts of Expelliarmus. I was with Luna, and she, to her credit, managed to disarm me right away. She hid a lot of power, speed and skill under her kooky surface. Perhaps that was part of the reason she acted the way she did, to give people a false sense of security. Wands flew in all directions; missed spells hit books on shelves and sent them flying into the air. Harry was too quick for Neville, whose wand went spinning out of his hand, hit the ceiling in a shower of sparks and landed with a clatter on top of a bookshelf, from which Harry retrieved it with a Summoning Charm.

Glancing around, I saw there was a lot of shoddy spellwork going on; many people were not succeeding in Disarming their opponents at all, but merely causing them to jump backwards a few paces or wince as their feeble spell whooshed over them. I found this somewhat surprising considering most of us were a few years younger when we first had it demonstrated to us, though, I reasoned, that was Snape just trying to embarrass Lockhart, and no one else was able to disarm anyone that day either. He probably knew full well it was too advanced.

Matilda though, had over succeeded, shall we say. She was standing there, looking half delighted, half embarrassed, with no less than 4 wands in her hands, her own, her partners, and that of two others she hadn't even been aiming for, one of which was Hermione's. Hermione had a strange mix of anger and admiration on her face. Anger at having been disarmed, but also admiring the power of her childhood idol. Blushing slightly, Matilda threw each of the other wands back to their owners and sat down on a cushion, with this spell clearly being too easy for her.

Luna and I exchanged a few successes each, before Harry blew a whistle to signal us to stop.

That wasn't bad,' said Harry, 'but there's definite room for improvement.' Zacharias Smith glared at him. 'Let's try again.'

Luna and I demonstrated the spell with ease to Harry, who then indicated that we could sit down with Matilda. Soon, we were joined by Ron, Hermione, Demelza and Amy. We watched the various erratic performances of the other DA members. Ernie Macmillan was flourishing his wand unnecessarily, giving his partner time to get in under his guard; the Creevey brothers were enthusiastic but erratic and mainly responsible for all the books leaping off the shelves around us. Ritchie Crouch could only succeed in sending sparks flying at Thomas Cochran, who promptly had his first success with the charm. I couldn't help noticing something rather worrying though, in that Harry seemed to be deliberately trying to avoid Cho Chang, but eventually had to watch her with her friend Marietta.

When Harry approached Cho, she became flustered and ended up catching Marietta's sleeve on fire. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at this. I could laugh at Cho's embarrassing failure in front of Harry, or I could cry because Cho was clearly reciprocating what must be romantic feelings that Harry had for her. Demelza saw my discomfort and squeezed my arm.

"You're strong willed Ginny, remember" she said, and in the nick of time too, because I could feel the very beginnings of tears forming. I blinked them away and smiled at Demelza

"Thanks" I said, fist bumping her.

"I'm here whenever you need, buddy" she replied

Luna at this point stood up and went to join Harry, who was in conversation with Cho.

'Hey, Harry,' Hermione called 'have you checked the time?'

I looked at my watch. 10 past 9!

Harry blew his whistle; everybody stopped shouting 'Expelliarmus" and the last couple of wands clattered to the floor.

'Well, that was pretty good,' said Harry, 'but we've overrun, we'd better leave it here. Same time, same place next week?'

'Sooner!' said Dean Thomas eagerly and many people nodded in agreement.

Angelina, however, said quickly "The Quidditch season's about to start, we need team practices too!'

'Let's say next Wednesday night, then,' said Harry, 'we can decide on additional meetings then. Come on, we'd better get going.'

Matilda fell into step with Demelza, Amy and I as we walked towards the door.

"Yeah, you're a superblood alright" said Amy "three disarms at once on your first try! The Death Eaters won't know what's hit them!"

Matilda blushed

"It's only Expelliarmus" she said modestly "and I didn't mean to disarm more than one person. Plus, you three all did it easily too"

"We didn't do three at once mate" I said

"Still, I'm sure Harry will set us up with stuff I'll find challenging soon. I am only a third year at the end of the day"

We reached the door, but just before Matilda split off towards Ravenclaw Tower, she said something that made the three of us stop and think.

"That Lillian Avery really is something isn't she..."

But before we could ask what she meant, she was gone.