Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (28 page)

‘How do you remember stuff like that?’ asked Ron, looking at her in admiration.

‘I listen, Ron,’ said Hermione, with a touch of asperity.

‘So do I, but I still couldn’t tell you exactly what –’

‘The point,’ Hermione pressed on loudly, ‘is that this sort of thing is exactly what Dumbledore was talking about. You-Know-Who’s only been back two months and we’ve already started fighting among ourselves. And the Sorting Hat’s warning was the same: stand together, be united –’

‘And Harry got it right last night,’ retorted Ron. ‘If that means we’re supposed to get matey with the Slytherins –
fat chance
.’

‘Well, I think it’s a pity we’re not trying for a bit of inter-house unity,’ said Hermione crossly.

They had reached the foot of the marble staircase. A line of fourth-year Ravenclaws was crossing the Entrance Hall; they caught sight of Harry and hurried to form a tighter group, as though frightened he might attack stragglers.

‘Yeah, we really ought to be trying to make friends with people like that,’ said Harry sarcastically.

They followed the Ravenclaws into the Great Hall, all looking instinctively at the staff table as they entered. Professor Grubbly-Plank was chatting to Professor Sinistra, the Astronomy teacher, and Hagrid was once again conspicuous only by his absence. The enchanted ceiling above them echoed Harry’s mood; it was a miserable rain-cloud grey.

‘Dumbledore didn’t even mention how long that Grubbly-Plank woman’s staying,’ he said, as they made their way across to the Gryffindor table.

‘Maybe …’ said Hermione thoughtfully.

‘What?’ said both Harry and Ron together.

‘Well … maybe he didn’t want to draw attention to Hagrid not being here.’

‘What d’you mean, draw attention to it?’ said Ron, half-laughing. ‘How could we not notice?’

Before Hermione could answer, a tall black girl with long braided hair had marched up to Harry.

‘Hi, Angelina.’

‘Hi,’ she said briskly, ‘good summer?’ And without waiting for an answer, ‘Listen, I’ve been made Gryffindor Quidditch Captain.’

‘Nice one,’ said Harry, grinning at her; he suspected Angelina’s pep talks might not be as long-winded as Oliver Wood’s had been, which could only be an improvement.

‘Yeah, well, we need a new Keeper now Oliver’s left. Tryouts are on Friday at five o’clock and I want the whole team there, all right? Then we can see how the new person’ll fit in.’

‘OK,’ said Harry.

Angelina smiled at him and departed.

‘I’d forgotten Wood had left,’ said Hermione vaguely as she sat down beside Ron and pulled a plate of toast towards her. ‘I suppose that will make quite a difference to the team?’

‘I s’pose,’ said Harry, taking the bench opposite. ‘He was a good Keeper …’

‘Still, it won’t hurt to have some new blood, will it?’ said Ron.

With a whoosh and a clatter, hundreds of owls came soaring in through the upper windows. They descended all over the Hall, bringing letters and packages to their owners and showering the breakfasters with droplets of water; it was clearly raining hard outside. Hedwig was nowhere to be seen, but Harry was hardly surprised; his only correspondent was Sirius, and he doubted Sirius would have anything new to tell him after only twenty-four hours apart. Hermione, however, had to move her orange juice aside quickly to make way for a large damp barn owl bearing a sodden
Daily Prophet
in its beak.

‘What are you still getting that for?’ said Harry irritably, thinking of Seamus as Hermione placed a Knut in the leather pouch on the owl’s leg and it took off again. ‘I’m not bothering … load of rubbish.’

‘It’s best to know what the enemy is saying,’ said Hermione darkly, and she unfurled the newspaper and disappeared behind it, not emerging until Harry and Ron had finished eating.

‘Nothing,’ she said simply, rolling up the newspaper and laying it down by her plate. ‘Nothing about you or Dumbledore or anything.’

Professor McGonagall was now moving along the table handing out timetables.

‘Look at today!’ groaned Ron. ‘History of Magic, double Potions, Divination and double Defence Against the Dark Arts … Binns, Snape, Trelawney and that Umbridge woman all in one day! I wish Fred and George’d hurry up and get those Skiving Snackboxes sorted …’

‘Do mine ears deceive me?’ said Fred, arriving with George and squeezing on to the bench beside Harry. ‘Hogwarts prefects surely don’t wish to skive off lessons?’

‘Look what we’ve got today,’ said Ron grumpily, shoving his timetable under Fred’s nose. ‘That’s the worst Monday I’ve ever seen.’

‘Fair point, little bro,’ said Fred, scanning the column. ‘You can have a bit of Nosebleed Nougat cheap if you like.’

‘Why’s it cheap?’ said Ron suspiciously.

‘Because you’ll keep bleeding till you shrivel up, we haven’t got an antidote yet,’ said George, helping himself to a kipper.

‘Cheers,’ said Ron moodily, pocketing his timetable, ‘but I think I’ll take the lessons.’

‘And speaking of your Skiving Snackboxes,’ said Hermione, eyeing Fred and George beadily, ‘you can’t advertise for testers on the Gryffindor noticeboard.’

‘Says who?’ said George, looking astonished.

‘Says me,’ said Hermione. ‘And Ron.’

‘Leave me out of it,’ said Ron hastily.

Hermione glared at him. Fred and George sniggered.

‘You’ll be singing a different tune soon enough, Hermione,’ said Fred, thickly buttering a crumpet. ‘You’re starting your fifth year, you’ll be begging us for a Snackbox before long.’

‘And why would starting fifth year mean I want a Skiving Snackbox?’ asked Hermione.

‘Fifth year’s O.W.L. year,’ said George.

‘So?’

‘So you’ve got your exams coming up, haven’t you? They’ll be keeping your noses so hard to that grindstone they’ll be rubbed raw,’ said Fred with satisfaction.

‘Half our year had minor breakdowns coming up to O.W.L.s,’ said George happily. ‘Tears and tantrums … Patricia Stimpson kept coming over faint …’

‘Kenneth Towler came out in boils, d’you remember?’ said Fred reminiscently.

‘That’s ’cause you put Bulbadox powder in his pyjamas,’ said George.

‘Oh yeah,’ said Fred, grinning. ‘I’d forgotten … hard to keep track sometimes, isn’t it?’

‘Anyway, it’s a nightmare of a year, the fifth,’ said George. ‘If you care about exam results, anyway. Fred and I managed to keep our peckers up somehow.’

‘Yeah … you got, what was it, three O.W.L.s each?’ said Ron.

‘Yep,’ said Fred unconcernedly. ‘But we feel our futures lie outside the world of academic achievement.’

‘We seriously debated whether we were going to bother coming back for our seventh year,’ said George brightly, ‘now that we’ve got –’

He broke off at a warning look from Harry, who knew George had been about to mention the Triwizard winnings he had given them.

‘– now that we’ve got our O.W.L.s,’ George said hastily. ‘I mean, do we really need N.E.W.T.s? But we didn’t think Mum could take us leaving school early, not on top of Percy turning out to be the world’s biggest prat.’

‘We’re not going to waste our last year here, though,’ said Fred, looking affectionately around at the Great Hall. ‘We’re going to use it to do a bit of market research, find out exactly what the average Hogwarts student requires from a joke shop, carefully evaluate the results of our research, then produce products to fit the demand.’

‘But where are you going to get the gold to start a joke shop?’ Hermione asked sceptically. ‘You’re going to need all the ingredients and materials – and premises too, I suppose …’

Harry did not look at the twins. His face felt hot; he deliberately dropped his fork and dived down to retrieve it. He heard Fred say overhead, ‘Ask us no questions and we’ll tell you no lies, Hermione. C’mon, George, if we get there early we might be able to sell a few Extendable Ears before Herbology.’

Harry emerged from under the table to see Fred and George walking away, each carrying a stack of toast.

‘What did that mean?’ said Hermione, looking from Harry to Ron. ‘“Ask us no questions …” Does that mean they’ve already got some gold to start a joke shop?’

‘You know, I’ve been wondering about that,’ said Ron, his brow furrowed. ‘They bought me a new set of dress robes this summer and I couldn’t understand where they got the Galleons …’

Harry decided it was time to steer the conversation out of these dangerous waters.

‘D’you reckon it’s true this year’s going to be really tough? Because of the exams?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Ron. ‘Bound to be, isn’t it? O.W.L.s are really important, affect the jobs you can apply for and everything. We get career advice, too, later this year, Bill told me. So you can choose what N.E.W.T.s you want to do next year.’

‘D’you know what you want to do after Hogwarts?’ Harry asked the other two, as they left the Great Hall shortly afterwards and set off towards their History of Magic classroom.

‘Not really,’ said Ron slowly. ‘Except … well …’

He looked slightly sheepish.

‘What?’ Harry urged him.

‘Well, it’d be cool to be an Auror,’ said Ron in an off-hand voice.

‘Yeah, it would,’ said Harry fervently.

‘But they’re, like, the elite,’ said Ron. ‘You’ve got to be really good. What about you, Hermione?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think I’d like to do something really worthwhile.’

‘An Auror’s worthwhile!’ said Harry.

‘Yes, it is, but it’s not the only worthwhile thing,’ said Hermione thoughtfully, ‘I mean, if I could take S.P.E.W. further …’

Harry and Ron carefully avoided looking at each other.

History of Magic was by common consent the most boring subject ever devised by wizardkind. Professor Binns, their ghost teacher, had a wheezy, droning voice that was almost guaranteed to cause severe drowsiness within ten minutes, five in warm weather. He never varied the form of their lessons, but lectured them without pausing while they took notes, or rather, gazed sleepily into space. Harry and Ron had so far managed to scrape passes in this subject only by copying Hermione’s notes before exams; she alone seemed able to resist the soporific power of Binns’s voice.

Today, they suffered three quarters of an hour’s droning on the subject of giant wars. Harry heard just enough within the first ten minutes to appreciate dimly that in another teacher’s hands this subject might have been mildly interesting, but then his brain disengaged, and he spent the remaining thirty-five minutes playing hangman on a corner of his parchment with Ron, while Hermione shot them filthy looks out of the corner of her eye.

‘How would it be,’ she asked them coldly, as they left the classroom for break (Binns drifting away through the blackboard), ‘if I refused to lend you my notes this year?’

‘We’d fail our O.W.L.,’ said Ron. ‘If you want that on your conscience, Hermione …’

‘Well, you’d deserve it,’ she snapped. ‘You don’t even try to listen to him, do you?’

‘We do try,’ said Ron. ‘We just haven’t got your brains or your memory or your concentration – you’re just cleverer than we are – is it nice to rub it in?’

‘Oh, don’t give me that rubbish,’ said Hermione, but she looked slightly mollified as she led the way out into the damp courtyard.

A fine misty drizzle was falling, so that the people standing in huddles around the yard looked blurred at the edges. Harry, Ron and Hermione chose a secluded corner under a heavily dripping balcony, turning up the collars of their robes against the chilly September air and talking about what Snape was likely to set them in the first lesson of the year. They had got as far as agreeing that it was likely to be something extremely difficult, just to catch them off guard after a two-month holiday, when someone walked around the corner towards them.

‘Hello, Harry!’

It was Cho Chang and, what was more, she was on her own again. This was most unusual: Cho was almost always surrounded by a gang of giggling girls; Harry remembered the agony of trying to get her by herself to ask her to the Yule Ball.

‘Hi,’ said Harry, feeling his face grow hot.
At least you’re not covered in Stinksap this time
, he told himself. Cho seemed to be thinking along the same lines.

‘You got that stuff off, then?’

‘Yeah,’ said Harry, trying to grin as though the memory of their last meeting was funny as opposed to mortifying. ‘So, did you … er … have a good summer?’

The moment he had said this he wished he hadn’t – Cedric had been Cho’s boyfriend and the memory of his death must have affected her holiday almost as badly as it had affected Harry’s. Something seemed to tauten in her face, but she said, ‘Oh, it was all right, you know …’

‘Is that a Tornados badge?’ Ron demanded suddenly, pointing to the front of Cho’s robes, where a sky-blue badge emblazoned with a double gold ‘T’ was pinned. ‘You don’t support them, do you?’

‘Yeah, I do,’ said Cho.

‘Have you always supported them, or just since they started winning the league?’ said Ron, in what Harry considered an unnecessarily accusatory tone of voice.

‘I’ve supported them since I was six,’ said Cho coolly. ‘Anyway … see you, Harry.’

She walked away. Hermione waited until Cho was halfway across the courtyard before rounding on Ron.

‘You are so tactless!’

‘What? I only asked her if –’

‘Couldn’t you tell she wanted to talk to Harry on her own?’

‘So? She could’ve done, I wasn’t stopping –’

‘Why on earth were you attacking her about her Quidditch team?’

‘Attacking? I wasn’t attacking her, I was only –’

‘Who
cares
if she supports the Tornados?’

‘Oh, come on, half the people you see wearing those badges only bought them last season –’

‘But what does it
matter
?’

‘It means they’re not real fans, they’re just jumping on the bandwagon –’

‘That’s the bell,’ said Harry listlessly, because Ron and Hermione were bickering too loudly to hear it. They did not stop arguing all the way down to Snape’s dungeon, which gave Harry plenty of time to reflect that between Neville and Ron he would be lucky ever to have two minutes of conversation with Cho that he could look back on without wanting to leave the country.