“So, now that you’ve been of age for over twenty-four hours, do you feel any different?” Ivy asked curiously. It was Halloween evening, the day after Emma’s birthday, and having finished the feast, the three girls were sitting in their dormitory chatting comfortably. Emma was perched on the window seat, Ivy was lying on her stomach on her bed, and Haley was sitting cross-legged on the floor trying to catch jelly beans in her mouth and failing rather miserably.
Emma shrugged, pulling a fluffy orange blanket around her. “I really don’t feel that different”I thought that maybe as soon as I turned seventeen, I’d feel super-powerful or something. I mean, we’ve all heard stories about Squibs who got magic powers when they turned seventeen, or, like, urban legends about some kid who found out he could do wandless magic on his seventeenth birthday.” She chortled. “I don’t know what I was hoping for.”
“Shooting fire out of your fingers?” Haley suggested brightly, picking some Bertie Botts Beans out of the carpet and popping them into her mouth.
“Yeah, I guess,” said Emma. She glanced out the darkening window behind her. “Ivy, it’s getting pretty late. You don’t want to be late for Ted’s transformation, do you?”
Ivy jumped up. “Oh, right!” she exclaimed. “Thanks for reminding me. Can I borrow the Invisibility Cloak?”
Her sister nodded, getting to her feet as well. “You know I’m a complete sucker for mushiness. I’ll always lend you my cloak if it means you get to spend some time with your favourite guy.” She paused. “Also, I’m just really, really nice.”
Emma snorted.
“ANYWAY!” Haley continued in highly dignified tones, ignoring her cousin’s lack of support, “I should actually get going, too. I have to go work on my Inter-House Unity project.”
She’d been remarkably devoted to her project, Emma noticed, meeting up with that Slytherin twice a week in the Muggle Studies classroom. Clearly, she was going to great lengths to prevent Zabini from having the satisfaction of failing his two least-favourite students. Emma and Nelson Blenkinsopp hadn’t met for their project since the first mandatory meeting in September, and she was in no rush to see Slug Boy again… and after all, they did have until April.
“See you later, then,” said Emma, waving a lazy goodbyeto her friend as they left the dormitory together.
She snuggled under her fuzzy blanket in the window seat, thumbing through a well-worn copy of Quidditch Through The Ages and humming to herself. Autumn had always been her favourite season, and not just because of her birthday. She loved the smells and the colours, and the crisp, cool, air… though this fall seemed to have an emphasis on the ‘cool.’ It had been unseasonably cold lately. In fact, she heard a distinctive tapping on the window that could only mean that it was hailing outside.
“Get over yourself and either snow or turn out warm,” she muttered to herself, not looking up from her page.
The tapping got louder, harder, and faster”it was hailing harder now, and Emma wondered vaguely how Ivy was faring, stumbling around the hail wrapped in the Invisibility Cloak. But then, Ivy, for some crazy reason, loved wintry weather in general, which probably explained why her Animagus form was an arctic fox.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
“That is some crazy hail!” Emma said aloud. “It must be the size of Quaffles.” She turned around to see if the hailstones really were so impossibly big”and nearly toppled backward out of her window seat.
“AAAAAAGH!” she screeched, going an odd mixture of red and white that made her look like a candy cane. Floating casually by her window, grinning and waving, was Tyrone, seated comfortably on his broom.
Emma flung open the window and stuck her head out into the brisk air. “What the Helga Hufflepuff do you think you’re doing?” she demanded. Only she didn’t say ‘Helga Hufflepuff.’ “This is the girls’ dormitory, you creep! You’re lucky I was fully dressed”DON’T say anything disgusting about that or I’ll knot both your arms behind your head.”
“Relax,” laughed Tyrone, holding up both hands in a gesture of surrender while simultaneously showing off his flying skill. “I was just going for a ride, and I got bored and I thought, hey, Em just had her birthday yesterday and mine’s tomorrow, so maybe we could, I dunno, celebrate by just going for a ride. On our brooms.” He smiled hopefully.
Emma cast a wary eye on him. “You know I should hex you off your broom right now and watch you fall seven stories, right?”
“Yup,” confirmed the boy happily. “But come on, it’ll be fun. Please?” His eyebrows tilted upward in an expression Emma knew only too well.
She folded her arms. “Oh, all right,” she sighed, rolling her eyes. “But only because I don’t want you to bust out the puppy-dog eyes.”
“Yesss!” exclaimed Tyrone, punching the air with a jubilant fist as Emma grabbed her broom, a thick orange sweater, and her warmest traveling cloak.
“Here I go,” she said nonchalantly, jumping out of the seventh story window and landing smoothly on her broom. It was an impressive trick, but she’d done it before, and Tyrone managed to regard her with a bland and disinterested eye as he swooped down sharply to the ground.
“Catch me if you can!” he shouted.
“You’d better believe it!” Emma yelled back, kicking her broom into gear. “Just watch this thing accelerate! Naught to ninety!” She zipped alongside Tyrone, her long, wavy hair billowing out wildly behind her in the wind.
They were flying so low now that their toes skimmed the dewy grass of the school grounds, and the hems of their cloaks gathered moisture. Suddenly, Emma pulled up sharply, rocketing skyward in a great spiral until she was level with the treetops. She laughed freely as she soared through the air. Flying was her absolute favourite thing in the world, and it was especially fun with company… even more so in the evening when the grounds were empty and had the vaguely eerie, moonwashed look of a dream.
Tyrone pulled up beside her, zooming along leisurely. “I can show you the worrrrld,” he sang, rather louder than Emma would have liked. “Shining, shimmering, SPLEN-EN-DID! Tell me, princess, now when did you last let your heart decide?”
Emma smiled. “Don’t quit your day job,” she said.
Tyrone chose to ignore her, lifting his head haughtily. “It’s nice out tonight, isn’t it?” he mentioned. “I mean, it’s cold, but look up at the sky.”
Emma did. The stars were bright and clear, and sparkled all around the castle like silver sparks on midnight-blue dress robes”a less-than-original analogy, but one that accurately described one of Haley’s recent Hogsmeade purchases. She’d never seen so many stars in the sky before… or maybe she had, and had just never looked.
“The moon’s incredible, too,” she whispered. Indeed it was. It was round and full and bright yellow, looming over the sky and framing the North Tower of the school perfectly. It looked like a golden Galleon floating in the sky, and Emma found herself wondering why she didn’t go out much at night.
The pair circled the turrets of the Astronomy Tower. “That really is a huge full moon,” agreed Tyrone, doing a show-offy loop-the-loop, which Emma combated with a double barrel roll. “Shouldn’t you be down at the shack with Ted and company?” Although it was technically a secret that Ted regularly had visitors during his transformations, virtually everyone knew anyway. Emma suspected that most of the teachers knew as well, but it was best to use the Invisibility Cloak just in case.
“Actually, Ivy just usually goes by herself. I mean, she and Ted like to spend some time alone. It’s their special time, or something weird like that.”
Tyrone laughed. “Love shack, baby, love shack!” he sang loudly, wiggling his broom from side to side, a rakish smirk plastered across his face. He never seemed to stop smiling, Emma had noticed. This was a pleasant change from the sulky Tyrone who had pouted and squinted throughout the school during their several months of chilly silence the previous year. “Loooove shack!”
“Yeah!” exclaimed Emma. “I should call it that the next time I see them. Let’s see how many shades darker we can get Ivy to blush!”
Tyrone hooted as they zoomed past the Whomping Willow, and kept singing, clearly entertained by the sound of his own voice. “The Love Shack is a little place where… WE CAN GET TO-GETH-A-ER! Love shack, bay-ay-beee! Love shack””
“Shut up!” groaned Emma. “Please!” She clamped her hands over her ears, steering her broom with her knees. But Tyrone was so caught up in his song, he didn’t appear to have heard her. Emma pulled right up next to him and hollered in his ear, “In the name of all that is sane and tasteful, I command you to shut up!”
That seemed to do the trick, at least momentarily. The boy broke off and turned toward her, and Emma realized how very uncomfortably close they were. Their noses were almost touching. “You’re not my boss,” Tyrone stated, his breath palpably warm on her face. “Since when can you command me to shut up?”
Emma pulled back on her broom, feeling very awkward about having been in such close proximity to Tyrone. “Well, I do have some authority,” she sniffed, making a show out of haughtily examining her nails. “After all, as of yesterday, I’m a woman. You, my friend, are still a little boy.”
“Hey, I resent that!” protested Tyrone. “I’m very mature for my age.”
Emma chuckled. “And that’s why there’s a Hello Kitty coin purse looped around the end of your broom?”
Tyrone’s face might have flushed, but they were entering the outskirts of the Forbidden Forest, and it was too dark to tell. “It’s Tabitha’s,” he explained in a long-suffering sort of way. “It was the only way I could think of to let Fido ride, too.”
“Wait, you mean your pet toad’s in there?” Emma whirled to face him on her broom.
“Yep.”
“You’re not just a little boy, you’re a weird little boy.”
Tyrone flashed her yet another of his famous smiles. “And proud of it.”
They were silent again for a peaceful moment as they flew through the forest along its edge. They didn’t have anything in particular to say to one another, but they didn’t feel the need to. They were just content to fly and feel the wind and see the sights together.
At last, Tyrone broke the silence by saying, “Em, I know you can fly with no hands, but can you fly one-handed? It’s actually kind of hard”it throws off your balance.”
He knew her too well. There was no way she could ever pass up a challenge, particularly a flying-related one. She gripped her broom handle with her right hand and waved her left one around in the air. “Ta-daaa! What are you on about, this is really easy. It doesn’t throw off my balance at a”oh!”
She broke off in surprise. Tyrone had just taken her free hand in his warm, callused one as she spoke. He gave it a squeeze. “Let’s see how well we can fly like this,” he challenged, his hazel eyes gleaming bright even in the night. “It’s like a teamwork test.”
Emma returned the squeeze. “Teamwork test it is,” she agreed, smiling back.
The test went extremely well.
Ted was understandably pale and tired after his werewolf transformation the next day, but he’d gotten used to it enough to eat breakfast in the Great Hall instead of the hospital wing. However, he was hardly the only person there who looked thoroughly exhausted.
Jordan, who had never been able to sleep well lately, was hunched over irritably with bags under his eyes big enough to hold Haley’s shopping. Ivy, who had stayed at the Shrieking Shack all night, looked nearly as sleepy and unwell. And Emma, for some reason, was snoring face-down in her scrambled eggs and cursed loudly at anyone who tried to awaken her.
Jordan couldn’t help but wonder what Emma had done that kept her from sleeping the night before, and hoped fervently that she had not been pranking Professor Zabini.
Only Haley, who was a morning person to an insane degree, was her usual perky and overly noisy self as she chattered about nothing in particular to nobody in particular.
Suddenly, the door banged open, and in strode Tyrone, head thrown back and chest thrust out. He gave his wand a lazy flick, and a red carpet rolled out across the floor toward Gryffindor table. “Make way for The Man!” he shouted, strutting across the carpet.
Emma’s egg-splattered face jerked up from her plate at the sound of his thunderous voice; no one could possibly sleep through it. “Whaa?” she muttered sleepily.
Tyrone plopped himself down on the bench next to her. “That’s right!” he boomed. “The ‘Ronester is seventeen years old! That means no more ordering off the kiddie menu, no more drinkin’ my Juicy Juice out of a sippy cup, and nooo more training pants for me!”
Emma cracked up hysterically, spraying him with bits of egg. For some reason, Tyrone seemed to have gotten much funnier in the past year or so. He was just so… weird, but at least it was entertaining. “Okay, I get the picture!” she spluttered, still laughing. “So, what are you gonna do for your birthday?”
Tyrone shrugged. “Maybe go outside the school grounds and blow up stuff now that I can do it legally? Doesn’t really matter. I mean, we already celebrated.”
“Blowing stuff up? I can help with that. The first thing to go is that Hello Kitty coin purse!”
Haley blinked. “Wait, what? I am not following this at all.”
“Oh, inside joke,” Tyrone explained patronizingly. “You wouldn’t get it.”
Ted and Ivy exchanged glances. Emma hated inside jokes. Whenever she heard someone mentioning one, she demanded to hear the entire story behind it, no matter how long it took. And now, here she was, laughing like a loon at inside jokes of her own.
“Well,” she said, “Thanks to your late arrival, Tyrone, you came just in time to see me leave. I have Potions in ten minutes with old Potato Head.”
Tyrone nodded. “Well, good luck,” he replied, raising his hand in a salute. He’d elected to quit Potions after his O.W.L.s”because he was an aspiring pro Quidditch player, he had no need for a further knowledge of potion-making, and would rather not waste his time on such a difficult course.
All the way to Potions, Jordan puzzled over when Emma and Tyrone could have come up with their inside jokes and ‘celebrated’ their birthdays, as Tyrone had put it. He’d been with her and his other friends all day the day before, except for after the feast, of course, when the girls had headed off to their dormitory and Jordan himself had gone to work on researching magical genealogy with Cecilia Longbottom. Maybe he was just reading too much into this”maybe Tyrone merely meant the Halloween feast the day before when he referred to how they had both celebrated. Equal parts curiosity and anal-retentiveness did not make a good mix.
The second he stepped into the dungeon for Potions, he knew something was different. A cluster of Ravenclaw girls was sitting on the desk that Ted normally used, doing one another’s hair in French braids. Charybdis Nott was going through Zabini’s storage closet. A Hufflepuff boy and a Ravenclaw boy were playing Exploding Snap on the floor. And Anatoly Capshaw was drawing spectacularly ugly pictures on the walls with chalk.
“What the Hogsmeade is going on in here?” exclaimed Emma, only she didn’t say ‘Hogsmeade.’ After six years of sitting silently, awaiting Zabini’s emergence from the storeroom, the class was suddenly a madhouse again.
“Substitute teacher!” a Ravenclaw named Valencius Twigg shouted over the commotion as his Exploding Snap cards burst into flames and singed his eyelashes. He pointed toward the front of the classroom, where a withered old man was snoring at Zabini’s desk.
Haley’s eyes lit up. “This,” she breathed, “is beyond awesome.” And with a whoop, she was off like a rocket, zooming around the classroom adding curly mustachios to all of Anatoly’s pictures (including the women, animals, and inanimate objects).
The other four Gryffindors behaved in a rather saner fashion. Ted and Ivy settled down in a corner to chat quietly, Emma stretched out on top of her desk to lie down, and Jordan pulled out his Quidditch playbook to work out tactics for the team.
It was amazing how much noise the class could make without disturbing the substitute teacher. By the end of the hour, Haley had managed to obtain some cheesy ‘80’s dance music, and it was blaring throughout the classroom at a very high volume. Many students were dancing on desks, with Haley herself occupying Zabini’s.
Sheets of paper fluttered down like snow, one of which landed on Jordan’s desk. He picked it up and turned it over, and realized it was a note to the substitute teacher from Professor Zabini.
“Mr. Snodgrass,
I will be absent on Nov. 1 due to my volunteer work with the Mimosa Phelps Foundation at the Ministry of Magic, which has also occupied me on Saturdays. These absences from teaching will continue to occur regularly once a month, and you must make certain that my students work just as hard, if not harder than I am here.
Sincerely,
Blaise A. Zabini.”
Jordan shook his head, watching his sister do the Macarena. This wasn’t exactly the lesson that Zabini had planned. Speaking of Zabini, Jordan couldn’t imagine him working with a charity foundation, especially as a volunteer”he seemed like the type to laugh at people in need, not help them. Maybe Zabini had been arrested for something like animal cruelty and was doing required community service? He smirked at the idea.
Emma rolled over on her side and moaned, clamping her hands over her ears. “Will you keep the stupid music down?” she yelled. “My head feels like an anvil that someone keeps whacking with an axe!”
“Why are you so tired, anyway?” asked Jordan.
“Why are you so nosy, anyway?” Emma shot back.
Jordan’s expression did not change. “There’s no need to get testy, I just wondered.”
“It’s nothing big,” Emma said, rolling her eyes. “Tyrone and I just went flying around the grounds last night, and we stayed out pretty late. Merlin knows how Tyrone’s so perky today”we kind of lost track of the time. When I got back, I thought it was maybe midnight, but it was three in the morning!” She rolled over. “So now my bum’s really sore.”
Jordan raised an eyebrow.
“From sitting on a broom so long, I mean,” snapped Emma.
Three in the morning? Ridiculous! What could have possibly possessed them to do something so stupid, on a school night, no less?
“Three in the morning?” Jordan said. “That’s ridiculous. What could have possibly possessed you to do something so stupid, on a school night, no less?”
“Well, it was fun,” Emma said exasperatedly. “Ever heard of that? We almost made it through to the other side of the forest.”
Just then, Jordan felt his body tense up and go rigid again. It was odd how something so strange and uncomfortable could begin to feel almost familiar. “We almost made it through to the other side of the forest…” The words seemed to echo and reverberate in his skull.
Images flashed through his mind like a hyperspeed slideshow. A handsome young man with dark skin and hair, accompanied by a girl whose reddish hair spilled down her back in waves, both of them laughing together. The moonlit sky. The dense centre of a forest. Four ragged-looking middle-aged men holding… what? They flashed by too quickly, before Jordan could make out what they held in their hands.
Then suddenly, from the centre of the forest, a loud and earsplitting ‘bang,’ followed by a shrill, anguished howl of pain. A man’s horrified, grief-stricken voice screamed, “Me! Me! Get back here, if you’re going to shoot her, why don’t you come after me as well?”
Jordan blinked and snapped back to reality, his eyes wide, his pulse racing, and his breathing heavy. He had returned to his normal state, but what he had seen, the stream of sounds and images lasting less than five seconds, chilled him to the bone. Surely what he had seen was merely a product of his own paranoid imagination, but the possibility terrified him. He had just seen Emma’s death, as unlikely as it was.
“Promise me you’ll never go in the Forbidden Forest with Tyrone again,” he said quietly.
Emma folded her arms. “You can’t tell me what to do. I’m a big girl, remember? In fact, I think I seem to remember that one of us is of age, and it isn’t you. I don’t need you sticking your nose in my business.” She squinted. “You look weird,” she noted. “I mean, weirder than usual. What’s the big deal anyway? I’ve broken loads of rules before.”
“You”you don’t have a good record with the Forbidden Forest!” spluttered the boy. “First year, you ran into a tree when we went to rescue Ivy and got a concussion. Fourth year, you ended up dueling with Malfoy. Fifth year, you fell into a ditch and got another concussion. The forest is dangerous and, let’s face it, you have a propensity to be reckless.”
“Propensity?” spat Emma. “Talk like a normal person for once, will you? I’d think you’d be thrilled that me and Tyrone are getting extra flying practice in for the Quidditch season.”
“Tyrone and I.” Jordan, who would have shouted back at his cousin just a few years before, remained calm. It was so much easier to watch Emma blow up over his cool, disinterested expression.
“Whatever! You know, this is typical. You love to be the boss. You’re always giving orders, and you always expect everyone to follow them just because you’re a super genius or something. Have you ever thought that maybe one day, someone might stop listening?”
Jordan looked up at her with dark, serious eyes. His voice was low and soft, but with an underlying hushed urgency. “Emma. Listen. Right now is an extremely good time to pay attention to what I say.”
“No, thank you!” yelled Emma, and she rolled over, stuck her fingers in her ears, and pretended to sleep.
Jordan looked down at his knees. Maybe he, like Emma, was overreacting. Why should he believe that Emma was going to die just because of a strange idea that popped into his head?
But still, he felt horribly uneasy, and a sense of foreboding seemed to latch onto him like a leech, one that he couldn’t quite shake off however hard he tried.