Dear Diary (part 2a)
Eleven-fifty a.m.
Oh my giddy goodness. There is calamity afoot. And I’ve only been on the train twenty minutes.
I had really thought the world was going to end when I first got Dumbledore’s letter. I had expected to look out the window and see fireballs raining down from the sky, massive locust infestations, great flash floods washing away the cars on the street… but the nest of baby sparrows just outside my kitchen window carried on chirping cheerfully, as if they were totally unaware of the tragedy that had befallen me. Wholly un-plagued by fireballs.
But now I know the cruel, cruel truth; that the world was just biding its time. Lulling me into false complacency. Waiting for the Right Moment to hit me with the Big One.
I’m talking in epithets again. I must calm myself. For all I truly know, it may just be a rumour.
A rumour directly from the mouth of Ginny Weasley.
Who, being the sister of two former head boys, could be trusted to know these things.
“How lucky are you, Hermione - your own room!” Ginny cried out, when she slid open my compartment door moments after departure and found me there, quietly perishing from exhaustion.
“Um?” I puffed faintly.
She dropped onto the seat across from me, Crookshanks draping himself belly-up over her lap, apparently intent on settling there for the next thirty years or so.
“All to yourself…” Ginny went on dreamily, scratching under Crookshanks’ chin. “God, I envy you; if it’s not a poky old room with paper-thin walls at home, it’s a dormitory full of hormonal, silly girls with all the maturity of a split pea.”
I eyed her uncertainly, opening my notebook to the sketch of a half-formed idea I’d had over the summer. It was the outlines of a new reward system; I was hoping to get Dumbledore and the rest of Hogwarts away from the archaic, frankly detrimental points system we currently had going. This replacement one was still quite raw, but I had a feeling there were going to be gold stars involved somehow.
“I just found it like this, you know,” I replied bemusedly, uncapping my pen. “Besides, I expect Luna and Neville will turn up soon. You’re welcome to stay.” I lifted a shoulder, lowering my gaze back down to my notebook.
There was a pause, and then Ginny huffed in exasperation.
“I don’t mean the compartment, you cucumber, I mean your dormitory,” she corrected impatiently. “Well - no, I think the dormitory itself is shared between the two of you, but you do get your own bedroom. God, I’m so jealous I could cry.”
Now I did look up.
“Shared between the two of who now?” I blurted.
“You and the head boy?” Ginny prompted in a slow voice, like she was speaking to the very, very dim. Then she grinned. “Still, it ought to be loads better than rooming with Parvati and Lavender, even if there is only the one loo. But I’m sure the two of you’ll get around that.”
Misinterpreting my dismayed expression, she hastened to assure me, “Sharing a loo with boys isn’t so bad, Hermione, you learn not to notice all the disturbing odours and the hair stuck to everything.” Her face suddenly brightened and she asked eagerly, “Oh, hey, do you know who made head boy yet?”
“I know nothing, stop interrogating me!” I replied.
So you see my predicament. Heinous disaster, if we’re being accurate. There goes my formal education. I may as well just pack it in now and join the naval guard.
I wonder if Hagrid will let me sleep on the floor of his hut, you know, during shore leave.
~*~
Two-oh-nine p.m.
Finally decided to go looking for my friends, when the lunch trolley had already come and gone and there was still not even a whiff of teenage boy.
An aroma commonly quite difficult to miss.
I remembered Ginny mentioning something about the last car of the train before she left. I made sure the door to my compartment was latched tight so if anybody walked past Crookshanks couldn’t savage them, and then headed towards the rear of the train.
Minutes later, I found myself on very familiar territory indeed, and drew immense comfort from it. One sometimes misses being needed.
“Harry, oh Harry, do stop bludgeoning him, you’ll get in such trouble,” I chimed for form’s sake, leaning against a compartment door and beginning to examine my cuticles.
Harry, not very surprisingly, was easy to locate. I just followed the path of destruction and found him engaged in rather vigorous fisticuffs with Theodore Nott from Slytherin. Someone had insulted someone else’s mother and as was the usual practise, it had ended in violence.
Quite a good scrap actually, I mused, watching as Nott got an elbow in the trachea and Harry was rewarded with his head roughly locked under Nott’s arm. Nott, being the “slimy tosser” with foul breath and sundry other hygiene problems previously mentioned by my father, appeared to be enjoying this rather more than Harry was.
“Think of the example you’re setting, Harry, do have care and so on,” I murmured distractedly, peering closer at a particularly stubborn hangnail.
Like a shark scenting blood, carving a path through the crowd that had formed around us, Ron was suddenly at my side.
“Hang in there, Harry!” he cried, and then dove straight in. Taking their cue from him, several Slytherins joined the tangle and it became very confusing to keep track of indeed.
Padma Patil was at my elbow an instant later.
“O, mine eyes! - somebody’s shirt has been torn asunder. Too bad, innit,” she giggled merrily, just as Parvati squeezed through the crowd and joined us, looking flushed and excited.
“Is it Ron’s? Is it? Oh-my-God-I-can-see-a-nipple,” she gasped, and I barely got out of the way in time to let past the swift surge of sixth and seventh year girls with nothing but impure intent.
It was at this illuminating moment, while half-a-dozen sweaty teenage boys grappled at my feet and three times as many teenage girls peered on in apoplectic delight, that I came to realise something.
I didn’t have to be head girl.
True, the hateful badge that was currently tucked away in the deepest compartment of my trunk said otherwise. But I didn’t really have to be.
Of course, this would mean that all my plans for changing the school for the better - and then the entire world, one corrupted echelon at a time - were going to have to find some other way of being accomplished, if not from the inside. It would certainly put a hold on affairs, but not make them impossible.
I could just not do this.
Couldn’t I?
Which was when a Slytherin accidentally snapped the buckle of Harry’s belt; a glimpse of pants and trim, muscular treasure-trail were revealed, and all girlish pandemonium let loose.
~*~