"But, my dear," said Professor Trelawney at lunchtime in the Divination tower, "a red-eyed man with a skull-white face… it must be He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named!"

So much for trying to avoid thinking about that. Lavender felt the room reel slightly. She gripped the edge of the small table in front of her. Parvati, beside her, was looking both appalled and intrigued. "Why didn't you tell me it was him?" she demanded. "All this about a 'creepy stranger,' you could have been more specific!"

"I didn't know for certain," said Lavender defensively. "Not all of us grew up hearing stories about what You-Know-Who looks like."

"Oh, come off it! You saw a man looking like that and thought, 'Yes, that seems perfectly usual'?"

"Well, no, but it could have been someone else, couldn't it?"

Parvati scoffed. Lavender retorted, "You don't understand, it was really scary! Seeing the snake bite Professor Snape was bad enough. I didn't want You-Know-Who to be back on top of everything!"

"But, Lavender… is he back? Just because he showed up in a dream of yours…" Parvati looked at Professor Trelawney for support.

"It is a common mistake for young Seers to take their dreams literally," Trelawney said. "The Inner Eye is not so crude as to show the future so directly. One needs the aid of a skilled guide, such as myself."

"No," said Lavender stubbornly. "Not this time. I know what I saw —"

"You said not two minutes ago that you didn't know it was You-Know-Who!" Parvati interrupted.

"But don't you see, that proves it! How can I dream so exactly about someone I've never seen?"

"Maybe you saw an old newspaper clipping and forgot about it!"

"A clipping from when we were one year old, you mean? That's impossible, you know my mum's a Muggle —"

"Lavender, dear," said Professor Trelawney unexpectedly, "if you're this certain, let us assume this is a true Vision of the Inner Eye after all. I myself harbor doubts, but this will be beneficial for your training. Every Seer must have at least one mistaken prediction."

Lavender swallowed down an unfamiliar feeling of irritation towards Professor Trelawney and asked, "Then what do we do?"

"We will notify Professor Snape, of course. I shall write, as I am the established Seer." Trelawney pulled out a piece of light purple parchment and began to scrawl a note upon it. Lavender could just make out the words, "Dear Severus Snape: One of my students, as yet a novice in the ways of the Eye, has reported a vision of yourself being bitten by a snake being controlled by He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named…"

Before Lavender had finished reading, Trelawney rolled the note up, sealed it in purple wax, and left the room. Lavender and Parvati followed her all the way down to the Great Hall. The rest of Hogwarts was just beginning to finish lunch. Trelawney paused on the threshold; Professor Umbridge was looking towards the door, and the sight of her appeared to remind Trelawney of something. With suddenly widening eyes, she gave the note to a passing first-year and hurried away.

The first-year reluctantly turned back, shoved the note at Professor Snape, and scampered off. Lavender watched as Snape opened it. His lip, which had already started to curl when he saw the scroll, went into a full sneer, and he began slowly tearing the note into small pieces. Lavender stopped watching when he set the pieces on fire. She was not sure, but she thought Professor Snape's eyes had flicked towards her during this performance. He might well have figured out exactly who the student mentioned in the note was.

More students pushed past Lavender and Parvati, heading towards their classes; Divination would begin soon, and they would have to hurry to be on time. Parvati began walking as quickly as possible towards the staircase that led up to Trelawney's trapdoor. Lavender had to run to catch up. "Parvati," she said uncertainly, "what do you think about all this?"

Parvati sighed. "I hate to say this, but… don't you think you're acting a bit like you did third year? When you were trying to match up things that, well, didn't make sense? Like when you thought Harry was going to drop dead that year, because you got the timeframe of Professor Trelawney's prediction wrong —"

"You thought the same as I did!"

"— Or when you thought she was talking about your rabbit, when she was probably talking about Sirius Black breaking in —"

"What? But you defended me back then!"

"Well, yes, of course I did, but Lavender… Professor Trelawney told me I had the makings of a Seer, and I haven't gotten any dreams like this at all. Neither has she, from the sound of it, and she's an expert."

Lavender noticed the slight emphasis Parvati had given to the word "me" when reporting what Professor Trelawney had said. It was true that Professor Trelawney had never told Lavender anything of the sort, though she had praised Lavender's proper respect for the Art. Still, Lavender hadn't thought Parvati would bring that up.

She hadn't thought Parvati would bring up Binky's death, either. With the distance of two years, Lavender could admit that she might not have been thinking with strict logic at the time, but she still felt that she had expected devastation that day and she had experienced it, and that was what mattered to her. Lavender had always thought that Parvati understood, but Parvati's apologetic smile seemed to say otherwise. Parvati, Trelawney… was everyone just humoring her? How long had this been going on?

Tears were gathering in Lavender's eyes, but she blinked them away. Parvati had been her best friend for five years, and Lavender wasn't going to let anything change that. She didn't trust her voice yet, but she gave Parvati what she hoped passed as a sheepish smile and followed her up the stairs.

They managed to arrive at Divination at the same time as most of the class. Parvati settled on a pouf at their usual table and pulled out her dream diary. Lavender pulled out hers too, but she did not open it. Professor Trelawney began handing out Dream Oracles, and then Professor Umbridge came through the trapdoor. Umbridge's smile reminded Lavender of a cat playing with a mouse.

So this was why Trelawney had seemed so distressed at the Great Hall. Lavender watched her gathering her shawls as though they were protective armor, her hands and voice shaking slightly. She thought she knew how Trelawney felt.

Parvati, meanwhile, had seized the opportunity to start talking about her own most recent dream, dwelling especially on the symbolism that it surely contained and its dissimilarities to regular life. Lavender followed her lead, and Parvati's shoulders seemed to relax slightly. Professor Trelawney joined them. All of them stayed very firmly on the topic of Parvati's dreams, and Parvati and Lavender continued to speak only about Parvati's dream diary once Trelawney had left them.

Watching Umbridge bully Trelawney throughout the class did not help Lavender feel better. Trelawney's way of dealing with it, if anything, made matters even worse. Was Lavender supposed to cope with not being believed by shouting about Snape's gruesome and early death, the way Trelawney was shouting about Harry's?

Trelawney had always done that, of course, and Harry had never believed her; from the exasperated glance he gave Ron, he evidently still didn't believe a word Trelawney was saying. This time, however, Lavender had seen what a gruesome death might actually look like, and she was horrified at the callousness Trelawney seemed to have about revealing such a terrifying future to a whole crowd of listeners, with no kindness or hope for the person who would suffer it. For the first time, she was not sure she wanted to be like Professor Trelawney.