Owl Post

Chapter Five

Owl Post

Thursday 3 - Friday 4 March 1994

BANG!

Suddenly, where there had been a cauldron, there was simply a bubbling mass of dark, treacly liquid. I was frozen for an instant before I remembered to jump up onto a chair, only a second before the ruined potion could splash my legs. Blaise and Theo were not so quick; they both yelped in pain.

"What abysmal fool," hissed Snape, "was so idiotic as to add the bromine before stirring the moonstone powder? Zabini, can you count up to two?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then why were there three of you crowding around that ruined cauldron? Miss Davies, did I give you permission to work in threes?"

This was typical of Snape. Draco always commandeered both Vincent and Gregory to his cauldron, but Snape never said a word about it because Draco was his favourite. Since a student who worked alone never had time to finish a Potions practical, and the girls still weren't speaking to me, that forced me to team up with Blaise and Theo. Snape tolerated Theo, but he had no time for Blaise or me, so he used our working in a trio as an excuse to give us detention.

"It's Davies's fault," muttered Blaise. "Get her to replace your cauldron, Nott."

What? I seethed as I swept the mop over the spillage. I did try to stir the moonstone powder first, but Blaise was too quick with pouring in the bromine. Besides, his mother's rolling in Galleons: why can't she be the one to pay for her son's mistake?

"Father was going to buy me a new cauldron anyway," Theo hissed back. "The real problem is that this year I had a clean record until you two went and landed me in detention. I've a good mind to make you serve it for me!"

Obviously that was not possible, so at four o'clock all three of us slunk back down to the dungeons. Waiting for us with a grim non-welcome were Snape and... oh, no...

Roger.

My heart sank to my shoe-buckles. I usually managed to avoid Roger at Hogwarts, but now he and a couple of classmates also had detention with Snape!

"Hello there," he said with a stupid grin. "Girls, this is my little sister Tracey. Tracey, these beautiful young ladies are Miss Olivia Goldstein and Miss Yvonne Rivers."

They smiled and I scowled.

After a pause Roger asked me, "Aren't you going to introduce your friends?"

"Davies has no friends," interrupted Blaise quickly. "If you really want the names of her victims, I'm Zabini and this is Nott. We are definitely not her friends."

Yvonne Rivers gasped. Roger began, "Look here – " but then Snape opened his mouth and we all fell silent.

"You know what you have to do. Third-years mix a usable Photopergaz Potion. Fifth-years brew an Invigoration Draught. I require six individual efforts, brewed without conferring, and nobody leaves until I am satisfied."

Snape had done me a favour. It was bad enough to have to work in the same room as Roger without having him prying into why I was a social failure. But even he had better sense than to chatter on while Snape was sitting in front of us.

For weeks after I had confronted Pansy in the common room, her little coterie had pushed me away, splayed my quills, hidden my books, stolen my sweets and whispered about "the upstart fraud". After a day or two, I had taken refuge in the dusky study corner of the dungeon, refusing to speak to any of them even if they spoke to me first. They could jolly well apologise if they wanted my attention, and of course the word "sorry" wasn't in Pansy's vocabulary. I had spent the summer holidays exploring Diagon Alley (pretending to my family that I was meeting friends there – I really did meet up with Susan Bones a couple of times) and finding out all kinds of useful information to write in my Book of the Dead.

I had hoped it would all blow over once we started third year. On the first day, Cecilia had greeted me shyly, so I had made a great fuss of seeing her again and pretending that last term had never happened. But then Pansy had waltzed in and demanded to know why Cecilia was speaking to a Mudwallower. Cecilia had burst into tears and fled, but she had kept away from me after that. She sat next to me in Divination because we were the only Slytherins in the class, but she always darted such sad, reproachful glances at me that I wouldn't speak to her even then. I wouldn't speak to any of them. They didn't deserve it.

That third year at Hogwarts had been miserable, what with Dementors guarding every exit and Roger showing off about being Quidditch Captain, so I had been spending every spare minute on homework, hoping that at least I could beat Roger academically. It was so unfair that I was now serving detention because of Blaise's mistake! I jabbed my spatula down in my cauldron, pouring all my anger into the Photopergaz Potion.

However, by a quarter to six, it was obvious who was a competent potioneer. I was pouring a perfect red-brown Photopergaz Potion into the laboratory flask. Blaise had apparently had not learned from his mistake, as his potion was nearly black and far too viscous, but Theo's was fine. Roger's Invigoration Draught was a pretty crimson colour, but it was too translucent; Olivia Goldstein's draught had a mysterious opaque quality that was so obviously right. Yvonne Rivers had managed to curdle her brew, and we knew even before Snape descended on us that she was in trouble.

"Nott and Miss Goldstein, you may leave. Next time, get it right on the first attempt. Miss Rivers and Zabini, you can get rid of this muck and start all over again. Davies, that will prove a somewhat feeble Invigoration Draught, but rather than wasting any more valuable unicorn horn on a third attempt, you may sit here and write a report on your mistakes. Miss Davies, while you have produced a usable Photopergaz Potion, I have rarely seen such an appalling mess on the benches. You are to sweep up before you leave."

I couldn't believe it! Snape knew very well that I was a neat worker; most of the mess was on Roger's bench. But apparently it was my job to clean it up. Snape went out to check supplies in his private store, so Blaise and Yvonne risked a hushed conversation. I ignored them.

Next to me, Roger put down his quill. "Tracey," he said, "what did that boy Zabini mean by saying that you had no friends?"

Flushing, I swept Roger's spilt charcoal into the dustpan and tried to sound casual. "That's just Zabini. He didn't want to admit that this detention was his fault, so he's been blaming me for it."

Roger checked that Blaise and Yvonne could not hear us before pointing out, "That other boy – Nott – didn't say anything to stand up for you."

Get lost, Roger, I thought. I don't want you meddling in my affairs. But I didn't dare run out of the dungeon without Snape's permission, so I shrugged. "Theo's all right. He's just about my best friend." This was actually true. Since Theo didn't care what anyone else thought, he had never sneered at or ostracised me, even when Draco had called him a "scumsucker" for keeping quiet. But Theo didn't care what I thought either, so he had never shown me any actual friendship.

Roger frowned. "Do you have a best friend who lets other people insult you in public? Then what are your worst friends like? What happened to that group of girls who used to go everywhere with you? Lately I've only ever seen you skulking around alone."

"Roger, I do not skulk! How dare you spy on my private life!" I hurled a couple of spare blocks of charcoal into his cauldron, just to destroy some small thing that was his. "Why does it matter to you who my friends are?"

"Calm down; I only do it to keep an eye on you. Mum and Dad have been worried. They think your letters have sounded lonely. So tell me about your friends."

"It's all your fault!" I hissed. I could have screamed, but that would have pulled Snape back into the classroom. Instead, I lit a white fire under Roger's cauldron, hoping I could melt the charcoal into the lead. "I lost my friends on the day they found out that Dad's a Muggle-born. You told them that."

"Did I? I don't remember. Sorry." He put on a fake-kindly grin. "By the way, that fire is way too hot. If this were a Muggle laboratory, you'd be just about burning it down by now. But never mind; you don't want friends like that anyway."

"How do you know what my friends are like?" I asked coldly. I slammed my crusher down into the cauldron, muttering the squashing spell from the last Transfiguration lesson: "Premo! Premo!"

"I told you, I keep an eye on you. I've often ended up sitting quite close to your group over dinner, you know. What I've noticed about the Slytherin girls is that they all seem very fond of gossip and scandals. They just can't wait to pass on the bad news about other people."

If the lake had burst in through the dungeon roof and drowned us all, I would have been grateful to it. Had Mum and Dad asked Roger to invade my life and rip open my secrets? I couldn't let Roger get away with being so smugly right, so I snapped at him, "You're wrong. The girls hate bad news. When I reminded them of a few home-truths about their own families, they – " I broke off in horror. "Premissimo!"

I had just presented Roger with a tad too much information about why I was unpopular. What catalyst could I add to my molten charcoal to draw out all the impurities before I crushed down all the chemical structures to annihilation, making the concoction pure and intense like my anger? I stormed off to the cupboard to pull out castor oil and hurled rather too much into the cauldron.

Roger grinned triumphantly. (So he's more popular than I am! Everyone knows that already!) "Talk about naïve! The only useful thing you can do with other people's dirty secrets is threaten to tell the world. Once you've actually told, they just get angry and then you have no more bargaining power."

"They insulted our family first," I protested.

"Yes, you might have been justified, but you weren't exactly wise, were you? The girls want gossip about other people, not about themselves. Listen, Tracey. If you want to make friends with people, you have to be, well, friendly. Do something nice for the girls if you want them to like you."

"Nice? You mean be their slave? Run around polishing their boots and doing their homework for them? Premissimo, Prem – "

"Your classmates didn't quite strike me as the academic types. What actually interests them? Is it clothes? You really should stop mucking around with Snape's ingredients and clean up properly; at this rate, you'll only land another detention."

Snape walked back in at that moment, so I became very busy with extinguishing the white-hot fire and chilling down my fake-potion. Little glassy specks had appeared in my satisfyingly useless mess, and I knew I had to get rid of it all before Snape noticed.

That was the end of the conversation with Roger. But it wasn't the end of Roger's interfering with my friends. The next morning – you wouldn't have thought birds could fly so fast – an owl dropped a scroll into my bacon. It was from Grandma Bones.

My dear Tracey,

I am so sorry to hear from dear Roger that you are having a little tiff with your friends. When I was your age, I had a friend who didn't speak to me for a whole week, and I think I cried every single day!

Tracey, let me give you some helpful advice. First, don't bear a grudge, but be the first to smile and forgive. Don't even wait for your little friends to speak to you first – just approach them in a pleasant way anyway.

Second, go out of your way to be kind. The first minute a classmate accepts your sympathetic advances, slip her one of these little tickets. I'll let you into a secret: they once helped your own mother over a difficult patch at school.

Don't be disheartened, my dear, for these things do blow over. I do hope it clears up quickly for you.

With love from

Grandma x x x

My heart turned over at the "little tickets". They were stiff, cream-coloured cards, inscribed with Grandma's slanting cursive.

Miss Cecilia Runcorn

to a free robe-fitting

and a free set of house-robes

at Twilfitt & Tatting, Fine Dressmakers

Roger had even blabbed my friends' names, for the first four were personalised; Grandma had also slipped in a couple of blanks in case, I suppose, I felt like making new friends.

Grandma was trying to help, but she just didn't understand that people like Pansy can't be "bought" with silly little favours. I was on the point of tearing the vouchers to shreds when Daphne's sarcastic moan sailed over the marmalade.

"You know what my Mum says about new clothes. 'Syrinx's old rags are quite good enough for you, dear, and when you've finished ripping holes in them, you can pass them down to Astoria.' Anyone would think my parents didn't have a Knut! But whenever darling little Rhoda starts pouting and whining that she needs new robes, my parents will mysteriously manage to afford all the togs that they could never quite buy for me."

"It's a dirty great shame!" chimed in Cecilia. "I get our Ursula's cast-offs too. Pansy, you're dead lucky not to have an older sister at home."

"The best families buy new clothes for every daughter no matter how many girls live at home," Pansy reminded them. "Perhaps we could start a campaign to blackmail those mean-spirited parents – "

In a flash, I remembered Roger's words about threats and bargaining power. Blackmail! I did have something that all the girls wanted, and it wasn't Grandma's vouchers. My Book of the Dead contained everything I would ever need to blackmail each one of them! It had been stupid to shout their dirty secrets to the whole common room. It would be cleverer to whisper those secrets, make my housemates afraid that I might start shouting, and then they would bargain desperately for my silence.

"I never get nice clothes," said Millicent, unaware she was interrupting. "I have only brothers."

I slid off my chair and tapped Millicent on the shoulder. She scowled, about to remind me that we weren't on speaking terms.

"Millicent, here's your chance," I whispered, slipping her a voucher. "I only have a few of these, so they're only for my closest friends. It's time you had some pretty robes, isn't it?"

Alarmed by the strange phrase "closest friends", Millicent stared at the voucher. "Is it really a free robe, or is it buy one and then get one free?"

"It's really a free robe."

At these magic words, Cecilia whirled around. "What? Who's giving away free dress-robes?"

"Not dress-robes," said Millicent flatly. "Just ordinary house-robes. They are only for Tracey's closest friends."

"Cecilia," I interjected, "wouldn't you like some new house-robes?"

Cecilia hesitated, throwing a covert glance at Pansy, who was puffing up with indignation. Daphne was watching Pansy. But Cecilia loved clothes, and she had forgotten why she was supposed to hate me. Before Pansy had time to object out loud, I handed over a voucher, and Cecilia took it.

"Really free!" she exulted. "Our Ursula will be green with envy!"

"My grandmother is Tabitha Twilfitt of Twilfitt and Tattings," I reminded them. "I'm sure we all have a few useful relatives here and there. Why don't we pool our resources and think up ways we can all help each other? Cecilia's grandparents do perfume, and Millicent's aunt runs that beauty parlour. Let's say we wanted something else..." I looked casually at Daphne. "Say, a bargain on woollen rugs or peaches in January or even – um – a prophecy or a memory – help from an Unspeakable... Do we know anyone who could help us there?"

Daphne's clear milk-and-roses complexion flushed much rosier. "Point taken, Tracey! I've never hidden the fact that my mother's mother works for Woolman's and my father's parents are greengrocers! They might even donate rugs and peaches if we asked them nicely." She frowned and stared down at her coffee cup, displeased that I had revealed what commonplace tradeswizards her grandparents were and terrified of what I might say next.

"So which of us knows an Unspeakable?" asked Millicent.

I shrugged. "I don't know; that was just an example." But Daphne, still nervously jiggling her cup, knew that I was lying. Her grand-uncle was the disgraced Unspeakable Augustus Rookwood, a Death Eater who was now locked away in Azkaban. I looked pointedly at Daphne, opened my mouth and asked, "Would you like some free, tailor-made house-robes, Daphne?"

She pulled herself together and said stiffly, "Thank you. That would be lovely."

I snapped my mouth shut as she meekly accepted the voucher. She knew that I was telling her: I won't talk about your Uncle Augustus if you let me be your friend again.

Pansy stared in horror, unable to believe Daphne's defection.

I held a voucher just out of her reach. "Of course, Pansy's mother knows all kinds of useful people at the Witches' Institute," I said.

"Of course she does! Mummy's best friend is Mrs Fudge!"

"What else? Aurors... genetiwitches... Quidditch tickets... sailing... No, that's too obscure. There wouldn't be wizards who built boats, would there?"

Pansy blanched as white as a sheet as she gasped out, "Not any more! I think there were some boat-wizards once, but they went out of business years ago!"

I casually dropped the voucher onto Pansy's plate. She was related to Cynbal and Cyneward Avery, who had been forced to stop their boat-building hobby when it was exposed as a screen for their Death Eater activities. Cynbal had died in Azkaban, but his son Cyneward had been acquitted because he had pleaded acting under Imperius, an excuse that no-one had ever really believed.

Pansy grabbed at the voucher and choked out, "You guessed right about one thing, Tracey – Mummy's Cousin Rufus is the Head Auror. And if ever we do want to watch his son Brutus playing Quidditch, he probably can get us good seats. But it won't be free tickets – he's only my second cousin."

That day the girls let me sit with them in every lesson. Pansy kept close to me; Daphne gave me sweets and lent me quills; Cecilia chose me for her partner; and Millicent was grumpy about once again being relegated to the bottom of the pecking-order. Draco Malfoy glared at us furiously, and I knew I had to do something about him before he persuaded Pansy to break friends with me again. So I approached him with a sweet smile at the end of Transfiguration.

"Draco, lend me your eagle-feather quill."

He ignored me.

"Draco, if you don't listen to what I have to tell you, I'll tell it to the whole common room instead!"

He still seemed to ignore me, but he hung back as Vincent and Gregory marched out of the classroom. "What makes you think you're worth my time?"

"You give Potter your time and you don't even like him. So from now on, you can give me your time too. I don't really want to borrow your quill; I just want you to stop interfering between me and my friends. If you don't interfere with me, I won't make any trouble for you."

"And if I don't care about your petty trouble-making?"

"Then I'll tell Blaise and Pansy and the rest that your father was a Death Eater."

Draco shuddered violently before trying to bluff. "They won't believe you because it isn't true."

"They'll believe the trial records – which anyone can read in the Hogwarts Library. Draco, shall we carry on this childish competition of telling everyone else who has the worst family? Or shall we be friends?"

He slammed down the eagle-feather quill. "Fine. You can keep it. I can always buy new luxury quills, which your father certainly can't afford. We'll all mind our own business and then we'll see how stupid half-bloods look when they try to mix with persons of breeding."

He stalked out of the Transfiguration classroom, leaving me miserably – and furiously – on the verge of tears. I had bought my friends back. But I hadn't been able to do it on my own. I owed it all to Roger's advice and interference. Wouldn't he ever leave me alone?