Dear Diary (part 3b)
Eight-thirty-eight p.m.
I found myself wandering away from the excitement (precisely because I spied McGonagall wandering towards it with a hawkish look in her eye).
I pressed my palm to my forehead and decided I was becoming horribly over-heated. I wasn’t sure if it was due purely to public humiliation or if I was in fact coming down with something. I was still quite damp from the rain, after all. Which meant, if I looked half as over-warm as I felt, I ought to begin steaming round the collar right about… now.
Hmm. Science has failed me once again, it would appear. I plucked at my collar to take a peek inside, just to be certain.
“Is there anything of particular interest down the front of your cardigan, Granger, or have you only mislaid a bit of breadstick?”
My head snapped up so fast I thought I must have given myself whiplash.
“Malfoy,” I replied with scathing wit, trying not to make it too obvious that while I was treating him to the full brunt of my Death Glare (patent pending), I was also giving him the obligatory end-of-summer up-and-down.
God, he was tall. When did this happen? How was this is in any way fair? I’ve never exactly had what one could call the height advantage, but Draco Malfoy certainly does not need yet another excuse to look down his nose at somebody.
And of bloody course he was standing there so obviously smug with himself, acting as though he pulled off the rain-bedraggled look effortlessly. His pale hair (which he had grown out even longer since last year, I observed in an entirely disinterested and aloof manner) was hanging negligibly into his eyes, while his white Oxford shirt (his unnecessarily damp and clingy shirt) was open at the collar, the pale ridge of his collarbone gleaming faintly in the candlelit Hall.
Apparently during all of this, Malfoy had been conducting his own evaluation of my appearance and came to the according conclusion.
“You rather resemble a drowned cat. Is this a new look you lesser mortals are trying on? It seems to be a recurring theme.” He made a vague gesture to encompass the other soggy-clothed students wandering around the Great Hall, taking ages to find their seats.
I turned up the intensity of my glare just a little bit, and shot back with, “You are positively obscene.”
Malfoy’s left eyebrow flicked up at that, and I hated myself a little for noticing which eyebrow it was.
His gaze dropped to his shirtfront, guessing rather intuitively just what I’d meant by that clumsy statement. Not seeming bothered in the least, however, the corner of his mouth merely twitched and he replied, “You’re quite safe from me, Granger. One shouldn’t lose sleep over one’s threatened virtue, if one were you.”
My mouth dropped open and my fingernails bit into my palms involuntarily. Oooh-er, he was unbelievable! Captain, that’s full-power on the Death Glare front, all hands on deck!
Now, to think of something to say back that won’t make me sound an utter loon…
Malfoy reached out, then, as if to give me a patronising pat on the head - then froze suddenly, instead curling his fingers back in and hiding his fist firmly away in his pocket. Where there had once been a faintly amused sneer gracing his pale face, there was now an expression of open resentment.
I was not over bothered by this - Malfoy has a whole range of unpleasant faces reserved just for me, and I am quite accustomed to each and every one of them by now. It was simply the abrupt change, without my having done anything to elicit it, that caught my notice.
Well, regardless, it’s no concern of mine if this summer he slipped and cracked his head on the Manor’s parquet flooring. It may even help my petition against wrongly treated head girls if I can get an insanity plea. Not my own, obviously.
I mused, for the briefest of moments, that I might want to consider paraphrasing that last bit for my protest signs.
Malfoy was still standing there in the middle of the gradually thinning crowd, just glowering moodily at me as people started to find their seats at last.
“On your merry way then?” I suggested sweetly, fluttering my hand as if to shoo him along.
Malfoy’s jaw went rigid, but he simply turned and disappeared into a horde of passing fifth year Slytherins, presumably heading to his own table. Not even so much as a vitriolic parting comment.
So all in all a remarkably uneventful meeting. Rather worryingly so, actually. When is the worst to come and how far away can I get before it does?
~*~
Hello, lovelies! Please be a darling and leave me a comment to let me know what you think--you must have noticed by now I love hearing from anyone who reads my fics, big or small (the people, I mean--my stories are nearly always exhaustively long.) And so I do! Happy Easter to you all, in the meantime; I hope your hams are as gloriously glazed and your chocolate bunnies as swiftly dismembered as mine will be. xo