Playing It Straight

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"This year will be your most important at Hogwarts," Professor Flitwick said, "not just because you are all taking your N.E.W.T.s, but because you have all come of age and so have earned the right to be treated as adults."

"Even me, sir?" asked a boy with curly hair. His face broke into a roguish smile, and one of his friends guffawed beside him.

"Even you, Carmicheal," Professor Flitwick replied with a smile, and the rest of the Ravenclaw students laughed good-naturedly. Eddie Carmicheal laughed with them; a joker at any opportunity, he never considered anyone - even himself - above ridicule.

"Coming of age brings a great deal of privileges," Professor Flitwick continued, after his students had quietened, "but it also comes with more responsibilities. This year, your classes will be run a little differently. Your professors will not be responsible for planning what you focus on each lesson: that task is going to fall to you. You will all be given a list of areas to study and possible tasks required in your N.E.W.T. examination, and it will be up to you to decide how best to prepare yourselves. If you plan well and study hard, you'll all have no trouble passing your end-of-year examinations. If, however, you choose not to act responsibly..." He spread his tiny hands in front of him.

"Then we'll be back here with Eddie next year," said Roger Davies, and the seventh-years all laughed again (except Eddie, who first punched Roger in the shoulder and then smiled and ran a hand through his hair).

"Now, I'm not going to tell you how to go about your studies, but I am going to suggest something that many students of past years have found effective, and that's to find a friend or two whom you share most of your classes with, and plan your year together. I don't need to explain them importance of working well with others, do I?" All the students made some noise of assent: Cho Chang was among them, and as she did so, she felt an uncomfortable jolt twist through her stomach.

"Very good," said Professor Flitwick, and he clasped his hands together in the way he always did in classes when finishing an explanation. "Good luck to all of you." And with that, he went to leave down the hallway and away from the common room, a couple of students shuffling out of the way. Despite his diminutive size, Professor Flitwick managed to carry himself no differently to anyone else; Cho found herself wondering for a moment if she could do the same if she were his height, or if she'd just get lost amongst a sea of legs and robe-hems.

The cluster of students started to disperse, heading off in different directions; the first block of their timetable this week had been marked out for 'N.E.W.T. Orientation', but it had only taken a couple of minutes. Possibly the students were meant to use the rest of the time to begin organising themselves into study pairs and triads for the year. Marietta, who had been standing at Cho's side, hurried to ask Eddie if he was taking Muggle Studies all the way through. Cho watched her go, not moving from the entrance to the Ravenclaw common room, and then looked down at her class schedule. There were six classes planned out for the week on it, which was a heavy workload. Cho knew only a few other students that were taking six classes, and all of them had one of the softer classes in their week, like Muggle Studies or Divination. Hers were all business: Potions, Transfiguration, Herbology, Charms, Defence Against the Dark Arts, and Ancient Runes. This time last year, she had told Professor Flitwick that she would have no troubles with keeping up her grades and playing Quidditch too, but now... now she wasn't as sure as she had been then. Maybe she hadn't been all that sure last year, either - she just didn't know any better.

She turned to the imposing door to the common room, and the eagle mounted on it surprised her by springing to life and posing a riddle: "No sooner spoken, than broken." It must have assumed she was planning to go inside. Cho hadn't realised that was what she was planning; she hadn't felt like following after any of her classmates, but she found she didn't really want to go into the common room, either. She briefly considered giving the answer that had first come to her mind - 'Promises' - but realised she didn't have much reasoning to give to the door to say why that was her answer, and backed down a step.

"Sorry, never mind," she muttered, and turned away from the door, and it fell silent. Cho started walking away, thinking perhaps she would go to the Great Hall and possibly put up a notice to see if anyone had similar classes this year to her and if they wanted to partner up, but halfway there found herself heading towards the library instead, where she sat at a desk with the intention of planning some kind of timetable out for the year. Instead she just looked at her schedule, unformed thoughts milling in her head and the uncomfortable knot still sitting in her stomach.

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The first class of the year was Herbology. Cho was making her way to the greenhouses, looking at the big stone slabs that made up this section of the castle floor, when she ran into something. Or, perhaps it would be more correct to say something ran into her, and perhaps it would have been even more correct to say that someone ran into her, lost their balance, and went sprawling to the ground. It was Katie Bell, who Cho knew from the Gryffindor Quidditch team. She had been looking the other way while coming around the corner, waving to a girl who looked like she was going in the other direction, and hadn't noticed Cho at all. The other girl, as if this happened all the time, gave Katie an exaggerated shrug and sigh - an obvious 'whatever are we going to do with you?' gesture - and started walking down the corridor in the other direction.

"Oh! I'm sorry," Katie said, looking like she was trying not to laugh and not making much of an effort to stand back up. "I was just saying to Leanne that I'd try to not fall over my own feet this year. Typical. I guess I fell over someone else's feet, that's a start, right?" She extended her hand and Cho automatically offered hers to help Katie up; she had been so consumed in thought herself that she hadn't seen Katie coming, but was unsure if she should admit this or not.

"Hey, you dropped this." Cho's mind was awfully unfocused today: she hadn't even noticed she had dropped her timetable, or that Katie was offering it to her, until she spoke.

"Oh. Thankyou." She began to head to the greenhouses again, rechecking the piece of paper to see which of the greenhouses the lesson was in, when she noticed something wrong with the timetable. Herbology, Charms, Defence, Transfiguration... Divination? She wasn't taking Divination.

"Wait," she said, "this must be your timetable."

"Huh?" Katie glanced at the piece of paper she had been about to tuck into her robe pockets. "Oh! Good catch. You'll probably need this more than I will." They exchanged timetables, and began walking in the same direction, not intentionally together but not making a point of keeping a different pace, either.

Cho then realised something about what she had seen on Katie's timetable. "You don't have a partner for this year, do you?" she asked

"Hm?" Katie cocked her head to the side, and Cho realised how lacking in context that question must have seemed, and faltered a little when she explained.

"For studying for the N.E.W.T.s. Professor Flitwick said it might be a good idea for students with similar classes to pair up and work together..." Bet the Gryffindors don't do that, no wonder she looks confused. "...And we've got a few classes in common, so..." Katie's gaze was making her a little uncomfortable: she was looking at her a little like she might have if Cho had suddenly started speaking a different language and she was trying very hard to follow along. "I mean, if you've partnered up with someone then that's okay, I just-"

"No, I haven't," Katie said, and she paused for a moment as if considering. "What classes do we have together? Defence Against the Dark Arts, Transfiguration... you don't take Divination, do you?"

"No."

"Didn't think so. But you're doing N.E.W.T. Herbology, right?"

Cho nodded. "And Charms. We're in Charms together, too."

"Right, right. Well, that covers everything I'm taking this year, what about you?"

"I'm taking Ancient Runes, too..."

"Mm-hm."

"...And Potions."

Katie whistled. "Guess that means you won't be playing Seeker this year, then."

"No, I..." Cho began, and then realised she didn't know what she was going to follow it with. She had never considered stopping playing Quidditch, even though the training took up a lot of free time and there had been more than a couple members of the Ravenclaw team that had stopped playing to focus on their classes during their last year. "That never occurred to me."

A broad grin crossed Katie's face. "Me either, you know? I'm not going to captain though, but I couldn't not play." She gave a short laugh, like she had thought what she had said was funny in some private way, and then added: "That works out pretty well, if we're both sticking with Quidditch."

"How come?"

"If we ever get too stuck with studying, we can go muck about on the Quidditch pitch a bit to clear our heads." She grinned broadly again, and Cho managed a smile, although she had never considered doing anything like this while studying: in her mind athletics and academics were quite separate areas.

Katie paused in mid-stride, and Cho stopped with her. Katie stuck out her hand, and Cho was again unsure of how to proceed, until Katie asked her, "So... partners?"

Oh. Cho took Katie's hand, and they shook. "Partners," she agreed, liking how the word felt. It was like they had both officiated something, like they had passed some crucial rite of passage on the path to being treated and trusted as adult, like Professor Flitwick had been talking about earlier. A good first decision in a year that would be full of important decisions.

Now, if only that knot in her stomach would loosen a little.

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"How was your summer?"

"Hm?" Cho had been deep in thoughts of her own, and for a moment thought Katie had said something about the sun, since they had just stepped outside.

"Summer holidays, how were they?"

"Oh. They were good, I guess."

"What did you do?"

What had she done? She had spent roughly equal amounts of time wishing the summer break would end so she could avoid her parents and wishing the summer break would not end so she didn't have to come back to school. It seemed like this had been all that had happened.

"Nothing much," Cho said, feeling this was about as truthful as she could be.

"Yeah, me too," Katie said. Her tone sounded bright, bright like the sunshine. Perhaps she wasn't listening. "I went to Fred and George's shop, though - you remember Fred and George, right?"

Cho nodded. The Weasley twins would have been difficult to forget even if she hadn't played against them in several Quidditch matches.

"Yeah, so, they have their joke shop open in Diagon Alley now, it's pretty cool. They must be working like fiends to keep their supplies up, it was like all the people that would have been in the closed shops all went there to buy stuff instead. I met Alicia and Angelia there, and Lee, and we stayed the whole day there, helped Fred and George a bit, mostly made fun of what they think looks like cool fashion. It was a bit like being back at school."

For a moment Cho didn't understand this comparison, but then she realised all the people Katie was talking about had been in the year above the two of them, and only Katie was still at Hogwarts. She also found it hard to imagine doing anything like this with her friends, since she had spoken with most of them less and less all through the last school year. She had only kept in contact with Marietta over the summer break, and even that was in the form of a couple of short letters.

"Have you seen what Diagon Alley's like now?" Katie asked, filling the silence.

Cho shook her head. She had opted out of going when her parents had insinuated they could buy her school supplies alone.

"Half the stores are closed. Some are boarded up, signs in the windows." Katie glanced about, as if watching for eavesdroppers who would want this information. "One was trashed."

"It's meant to be dangerous to be out alone," Cho said, thinking of headlines in the Prophet seen across the breakfast table, thinking of the D.A. last year.

"It looked it. I thought the game I had tickets to might get called off, new security measures or something, but I guess the Ministry doesn't think Death Eaters care too much about Quidditch matches."

"Who did you see play?" Cho asked.

"The Harpies. They slaughtered the Wasps. Slaughtered."

"Gwenog Jones can be pretty vicious." Cho had made a point of keeping up with the national Quidditch league over the summer, since she could easily request the sports section of the Prophet and be assured of being left alone by her parents: Quidditch, and Cho's interest in it, perplexed them. Cho was thinking of a article she had seen about the Holyhead Harpies.

"She's the best. My brother came to the game with me, it's the first one he's been to, and I was really glad it was, y'know, an impressive one."

"How old is your brother?" Cho imagined a wide-eyed little boy pointing to the sky as the players zoomed past on their brooms.

Katie laughed. "Oh, he's older than me, he's just never been to a game before. I think he was a bit stuck for inspiration for his next big project, that's when he gets the most interested in, y'know, magic stuff."

It took Cho a moment to decipher this statement. "He's not a wizard?" she asked, her voice a little lower than normal.

"No, he's an artist. He paints, makes things out of wood sometimes. He's done a couple of paintings of magical things - he did a really great one of Diagon Alley, actually, like you were standing right in front of Gringotts - and he says they're the best for listening to people trying to understand what they mean. Like there's some deeper meaning to why there's owls out the front of the pet shop, when he's just been painting it from memory." Katie looked like she also might have found this concept funny.

"Is he allowed to do that?"

"Sure, why not? Muggles aren't ever going to recognise his paintings, and wizards only pay attention to art if it moves."

They had reached the greenhouses. Cho was considering what Katie had been talking about, but could not find anything meaningful to add before the lesson began and Professor Sprout launched into a speech about responsibility and being of age that sounded awfully like the one she had heard from Professor Flitwick earlier in the morning. Cho listened to the rest of the lecture attentively, and as she watched the demonstration of how to remove the toxins produced by a vibrantly-coloured and very deadly flower for potion-making without instantly becoming very ill she did not take notes but instead imagined a man who looked a lot like Katie Bell putting this flower on a canvas and smiling like he knew a secret that was both very funny and very private.

After Herbology was over, Cho said goodbye to Katie and walked to her Potions class. The way to the dungeons felt very quiet.

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Cho sat with Marietta for lunch. Across the Great Hall, Katie spotted her and gave an enthusiastic wave from the Gryffindor table. Cho waved back, and Katie went back to talking with her friend Leanne.

"Who's that?" asked Marietta.

"Katie. I've partnered with her for this year."

"Oh, okay." Marietta went on to talk through all of lunch about how she was going to be studying with Eddie Carmicheal. Cho barely heard any of it.

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Moving between classes took Cho across one of the high, open sections of Hogwarts Castle. Over the edge of the low wall (which had a specific name since it was part of a castle, but she couldn't think of it), she could see some students moving across the grounds. From up here they seemed very small. She watched them for a long time before moving on, thinking about what she would write back to her parents. They sent letters, signed 'Mr & Mrs Chang' at the bottom of each, at regular intervals during the year, encouraging her to do well in her classes, asking about things happening at Hogwarts they would have been able to read in the papers. Only once had the content of these letters changed. Cho had been forbidden to get involved with any juvenile student rebellion against a teacher last year in a curt letter that must have been written moments after her parents had received her letter about the D.A. and Dolores Umbridge. That was when she began lying to her parents in her letters home. She told them they were right, she would not be a part of the group, would not talk to Harry Potter, would concentrate on school.

Now she was thinking of a new set of lies to write home: that she was doing fine, that she knew she would make excellent grades this year, that she was happy being back this year. While she watched the ground in thought, nobody else came past.

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"The first thing we should do," Cho said, "is work out a study timetable. We can base it around our classes." She was thinking of comparing the free slots they had, to arrange times to meet out of class.

Katie stuck her tongue in the corner of her mouth and made a visible show of thinking, and then clapped her hands together with a pop that made a couple of the other seventh-year students working in the library turn their heads in her direction. "Okay, how's this?" She ran her quill across the blank strip of parchment sat in front of her, dividing it into two sections, top and bottom. She then broke this line up into several divisions with quick vertical marks, and began labelling them across the top of the parchment: M, T, W, Th...

"Okay, so, here's the times we're in class every week," she said, and marked down five of the divisions in the top row with a big 'C'. "And these are evenings, and then there's the weekends, which we can split into morning and afternoon, instead of day and night. Yeah?"

"Okay," Cho agreed, although she wasn't completely sure what it was she was agreeing to yet.

"Yeah, I don't really want to be studying every Sunday night. Okay, so you've got six classes, right? So we'll put those in..." She filled in numbers across the bottom row of the timetable, and finished with putting six on Saturday morning. "...And I'll do my Divination work during one of those. Then there's a free space on Saturday, so we can use that like a sort of wildcard, yeah? That's when we can work on whatever study session we missed because of Quidditch practice."

Cho realised she had forgotten all about leaving a gap in any potential schedule she had been imagining for Quidditch. Then again, she hadn't imagined working together through the night so much, either. "What about Sundays?" she asked. "They're still blank."

"Well, they should be," said Katie in a matter-of-fact tone. "We can't study seven days a week the whole year, we'd go funny in the head." While Cho was considering this fact, Katie added, "Sunday should be for, like, mental rest. Taking a break. I was thinking we could just leave the free spaces during the week like that, too, for an hour or so here and there to not think about class. Maybe we could do that together sometimes. You know, since we've probably got some overlapping free spaces, and everyone else is going to be planning their extra studying around those times."

"I suppose. That's what I was thinking."

"This is better though, right?" Katie said, looking for approval from Cho. "I mean, we're going to end up working nights anyway, this just takes the place of doing homework all the time, so I thought we'd just do the bulk of the work then, when we've got more time to do things, instead of plan to study during the day, find out we're running out of time... Hey, you're okay with studying together at night, right? I should have asked about it."

"No, that's okay," said Cho. She was impressed by how quickly Katie had thought of all these things. Maybe it was more intuition, instead of a conscious weighing of options to find the best method. "I've done most of my studying at night, and like you said, it takes the place of homework, mostly."

"Great! Should we look at the class overviews now, make up a bit of a timetable for those?"

Planning for each class went mostly in the same fashion, with Katie proposing a thoroughly practical timetable. Cho had been planning to just draw up a timetable to work through the textbooks for each of her subjects, based on the length of each chapter. Katie, however, took the list of N.E.W.T. exam tasks and began crossing off things they had already covered the previous year (some, in the case of Defence Against the Dark Arts, from outside of class), then separated out the pure theory parts and said they should be left until last ("Because you don't need to know the history of a charm to be able to perform it, yeah, and it's probably better to have all the theory stuff fresh in your head closer to the exams anyway."), and grouped together the various practical elements seemingly at random to study through the year, and finished by adding 'Revision' on the end ("For going over stuff we might have forgotten, quizzing on the theory, you know."). Cho had mentioned that she would have to separate up her other two classes in the same way, and Katie had immediately started helping her do it right then: this took a little longer, since she was less familiar with the N.E.W.T. requirements for Potions and Ancient Runes, but by now Cho had discovered a kind of method to the grouping - it was based around avoiding clumping together several tasks that looked especially difficult or time-consuming - and so was able to take the lead. Later that night, in the common room, Cho would look over her (hers and Katie's, really) study plans for the year, and marvel a little over how simple organising it all had been. If only the rest of the year could be just like this.

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The Ravenclaw Quidditch trials were a far less hectic affair than the Gryffindor try-outs had been. Cho circled the pitch in long lazy rotations; she was meant to be observing the three potential Chasers to see which was the best, but it was clear who the rest of the team was going to vote in so instead she mock-dived for an invisible Snitch. The ground looked very far.

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"What do you want to do, when school's over?" Katie had a habit of suddenly leaping into a completely random topic. Cho was still trying to decide if she planned it, or if it was just a reflex to fill in gaps of conversation.

"I'm going to be a Healer," she replied without much thought.

"Really? Wow. But I guess I could have figured that out from your classes." Katie cocked her head and asked, "do you need Runes to be a Healer?"

"No, it's not required."

"Why'd you keep with it, then? I was taking it in third year, but I dropped it as soon as I could."

"It's..." But she couldn't find the right words to describe how it had never crossed her mind to stop taking the class. "I'm not sure."

"Oh."

"What are you going to do, after school?" Cho asked, shifting the subject away from her.

"Dunno." Katie laced her fingers behind her head and stretched her arms. "I thought maybe I could try out for one of the local Quidditch teams, but that's a bit silly because they don't really pick people that way. Oliver - you remember Oliver Wood, he used to be captain - he got scouted to play reserve for Puddlemere, but he's only been in like three games, and I thought he was really good, when he was in school. Maybe I could do something like Herbology. I like plants, I like being outdoors."

"I don't really like Herbology that much," Cho confessed.

"Leanne - my friend, Leanne - she didn't care for it too much either. She hated the dirt getting under her nails all the time."

"It's not that. I think the practical is okay, but there's too many things in the theory that are similar to Potions theory, but not quite. I found it really hard to keep them straight in my head, if I didn't concentrate."

"Maybe it's just how Snape and Professor Sprout taught differently."

"That could be."

"Hey, how's the new professor? Slughorn. He seems like a way more fun teacher than Snape. He never gave away cool stuff, just sort of glared at whoever added five-eighths of a teaspoon of powdered monkey knuckles when they should have added three-quarters."

Cho smiled a little at this. "He's a bit like Professor Snape's opposite. He smiles a lot and only ever says good things about the students he likes." This was as much as she dared to criticise a teacher who she had relatively positive first impressions of; she had even felt a little uncomfortable with speaking bad about Professor Umbridge.

"Not to mention he's short, fat, and red in the face all the time, where Snape's tall and gaunt and really needs to get a tan once in a while."

Cho clapped a hand to her mouth to stifle a giggle. She had just imagined Professor Snape at the beach, wearing a hopelessly archaic swimming costume and Muggle sunglasses, holding a folding chair under one arm and a massive potions tome under the other.

Katie smiled and tucked some of her hair behind her ear, and made to go back to the section she was reading in her textbook. This made Cho remember something she had meant to ask about, but had forgotten.

"There is something I don't like about Herbology," she said after a moment's pause. Katie looked back up from her textbook. "I always find something in my hair, whenever I've been in the greenhouses, like some dirt or a dry leaf or something. And the other day I saw you do this thing with your hair..."

"What?" Katie asked, pulling her wand from her robes. She bunched her hair in one hand and tapped somewhere on the back of her head with her wand, and her hair wrapped itself into a messy coil at the base of her neck. "This?"

Cho nodded. "Could you show me how...?"

"Oh, sure! It's real easy, you just hold your hair back and make like a bit of a turn with your wand, like this, and then tap lightly just under your hand." She demonstrated with her wand in the air, but Cho wasn't completely sure this would be all the guidance she would need. Nevertheless, she held her hair back and pulled out her wand.

"Like this?" Just a bit of a turn, and then tap lightly under the hand... She could feel her hair bunch up and draw tight at the back of her neck, and she took her hands away, a little stunned she had managed to get it right. This feeling quickly disappeared when she felt the tight knot of hair go slack and then drop, spilling over her shoulders. Katie laughed, and Cho joined her after a second, closing her eyes and finding that, although she felt a little foolish, she didn't mind all that much.

"Well... almost," Katie said with a smile. She let her own hair down with her wand and held it back again, and turned her head purposely to the side so Cho could see what she was doing. "There's a bit of a trick to it, you've got to tap your wand in just the right spot..."

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In her next Potions lesson, Cho found not having her hair distracting her made it a lot easier to prepare ingredients.

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"I don't think you're allowed to have tea in the library," Cho said, eyeing the teapot that had been a battered thermos a second ago.

"This isn't tea," Katie said, pouring out what was clearly tea into two freshly-transfigured teacups. She was grinning.

"It's not?"

"No, it's a study aid. I'm revising different methods of fortune-reading that might come up in my exams. I'm going to read your leaves."

"Then what's that cup for?" Cho asked, a little mischievously.

"For me to drink my tea out of."

Cho shook her head and went back to her rune translation. She knew Katie actually was revising something to do with Divination, but that it had very little to do with reading tea leaves. Still, it was nice to have the tea; her hands got very cold when reading for a long time, and she would occasionally take moments away from her textbook to warm her hands on the over-large teacups that Katie created.

The pair studied in quiet for a length of time. Cho broke the silence when she was more than halfway through her cup of tea, asking, "How do you like Divination?"

Katie shrugged. "It's good because it's a different sort of class. Less theory and more sort of just... thinking about stuff, you know? I don't know if I've got much of an Inner Eye, but if you just remember which stuff is supposed to symbolise what, it doesn't even really feel like schoolwork. It's more like telling a story."

"I don't think that's how Professor Trelawney sees things."

"Well, she just likes her stories to be a little morbid. I think she thinks more people will pay attention that way, focus on the doom and gloom and all. Firenze isn't like that, though. He's barely like a professor at all."

"What is he like?"

"Very into the heavy workings of the universe, and how we can't really change the big things the universe wants to do. Deep stuff. I'm glad he's taking the seventh-year class, his lessons are very cool. Did you ever see his classroom?"

Cho shook her head. Someone might even have described it to her once, when Firenze was first appointed to Divination, but she had most likely been occupied with other thoughts at that time.

"It looks just like outside, with grass and trees and the night sky and everything, and everyone just sits on the ground and looks up at the sky and he walks about the room and talks about the movement of the planets and how all the stories they tell are centuries long and both incredibly complex and incredibly simple. I wish I could have all my classes like that, a bit - everyone with their shoes off sitting around and not being, y'know, pressured to remember all this stuff."

Cho murmured an agreement. "It sounds very pleasant," she said.

"Of course," Katie continued, "there are some girls who spend more time looking at the professor than the sky, in my Divination class."

Cho felt her eyes go wide. "Really?"

Katie nodded. "Yeah."

"Why?"

"They're into horses. I guess lots of girls are, and Firenze, he's a bit like the best parts of a horse and a man."

"But that's..." Cho looked around, like she was physically searching for the right word in the library stacks. "Silly. He's a centaur, he's not a horse or a man."

Katie smiled. "I knew it."

Cho blinked. "Knew what?"

"That you weren't like that."

"That I wasn't like what?"

"Like the girls that had all these fantasies of riding horses everywhere all the time when they grew up."

Cho found herself laughing: Katie's tone had made her statements seem a lot more serious. She shook her head and said, "No, I guess I'm not."

They lapsed back into quiet study, and it was Katie who broke it after a few moments. When she spoke, it was unlike how she normally began conversations; slow, a little hesitant.

She asked, "Hey, Cho... what's it like, having a boyfriend?"

Cho took a long drink of her tea, almost emptying the cup. If she drank from it again, she would have to be careful not to swallow any of the dregs. "You've never had a boyfriend?"

Katie shook her head. "Lee kissed me once. But we sort of agreed we were better as friends." She was looking into her own teacup as she said this.

"Oh..." She could feel a heat spread across her face; it must have been the tea. "I don't know, really."

"If you don't want to talk about it..."

"No, it's okay. I just... don't really know what to say, you know? There's been some boys and I called them my boyfriend and we held hands and kissed and went on dates and things. That's what you do with boyfriends, isn't it?"

"Well, and be in love with them, I guess."

"I guess. But how do you know if you are in love with someone? Really in love with them, I mean."

"That's right," Katie said, holding Cho's eyes with her own, "how do you really know?"

Cho had some half-formed answers in her mind, but it was only after a moment that she realised she hadn't spoken any of them. She was still looking at Katie, Katie still looking at her.

"You finished your tea," Katie said, and this statement was so disconnected, so far from where her mind was, that Cho was sure for a moment that she had misheard Katie, but she remembered the teacup she held between her hands and fell back into the moment. She slid the teacup across the table.

"Will I find a...?" she began to ask, but Katie waved her off as she examined the bottom of the cup. This was the Katie she was more familiar with, the one whose internal energy seemed to burst out of her through her hands and her smile if she sat still too long.

"There's a shape here that looks a bit like a bell - that means you're going to do well in school, getting eight N.E.W.T.s, as well as winning the House Cup. Ravenclaw is also going to lead by a thousand House points by the end of the year."

"I think you may be making some of this up." Katie looked up from the teacup and grinned. Cho smiled back at her.

"I would never! The ancient art of interpreting the Inner Eye is..." She trailed off at Cho rolling her eyes. "Well, yes, but mostly Divination is storytelling and making up a bit what the other person wants to hear. But, look." She turned the cup around on the table so it faced the other direction. "If you don't like that fortune, you get a second one in every cup. Now the bell looks more like a cup, so..."

"I don't think you're supposed to do that, turn the cup around."

"Shh, I'm viewing with my Inner Eye here."

"I think it may need glasses." She craned her neck to see inside the teacup. "That doesn't look much like a cup."

"Who's had four years of Divination, you or me?"

"Or a bell. I think they just look like tea leaves."

"You're making fun of me, aren't you?"

"I would never," said Cho, copying Katie's tone from before as best she could, and sitting back down in her seat.

------------------

Cho was in the common room by one of the windows with her Potions textbook propped in her lap when Marietta came through. She noticed Cho and took a slight double-take; they hadn't really spoken properly in the past fortnight.

"Oh! Hi, Cho."

"Hi Marietta," she said, looking up from the textbook. "How's studying with Eddie?"

"It's good," she said, nodding and giving a knowing smile. "I was just getting something I'd left in my trunk, so..."

"Sure. Have fun studying." She went back to the textbook.

"Hey, Cho..."

"Mm?"

"You look good, with your hair like that." With that, Marietta disappeared up the stairs to the dormitories.

Cho touched her hand to the back of her neck, realising she had left her hair charmed in place from Potions. It took her several moments to find the place in her textbook where she had stopped reading.

------------------

"The rules are really simple," Katie said, "because it's not really much of a game." She was mounting her broom as she spoke. "I'll try to tag you on the back of your broom, and then when I do you try and tag me, and then we switch back. You'll know when you get tagged, there's a little bit of a wobble to how you fly, but it's nothing that's, you know, dangerous. It's maybe better practise with three people, but I think we can manage with two."

Cho and Katie had come down to the Quidditch pitch because they had picked up on each other's restlessness - the grey weather that came with the onset of winter had broken for a moment, and outside was too appealing in the crisp twilight. They were also further ahead in their studies than either had imagined, and so the decision had been made to take a night off. Flying wouldn't even be such a waste of time, either, since Gryffindor would be playing against the Slytherins in the first Quidditch match of the year in a few weeks.

"Isn't that a little unfair? I have a faster broom than you." Cho's Comet was showing its age a little, but Katie had been positive during a discussion of their respective brooms that it would easily overtake her Silver Arrow at top speeds, since she was beginning to think some of the charms on it were failing.

"Maybe, but my broom corners better, so I think it's about even for just tag." She kicked off into the air, saying with a huge smile, "Besides, I'm a better flier than you!"

Cho's made her eyes go wide in mock scandal. "You are not!" she called, mounting her own broom.

"Come prove it!"

Katie's broom was indeed better at cornering, and she took full advantage of it, throwing her weight into making turns right up against the edges of the stands that Cho would have found impossible. She skimmed close enough to the ground to touch the grass of the pitch and darted among the goal hoops, until Cho was able to read her feints correctly, and put on a burst of speed to tap the bristles of Katie's broom as she hooked around the centre goal. Katie wasted no time in turning her broom about to pursue Cho. Now the nature of the game changed, with Cho rising higher and higher from the ground to have less obstacles to avoid. Cho glanced back to see Katie only a short distance behind her, and then realised they had risen above the height of the stands, and she could see out for miles - the expanse of trees that was the Forbidden Forest, the still water of the lake, the little knot of lights far in the distance that was Hogsmeade. Without really thinking about what she was doing, Cho urged her broom onward in the direction of the lake, away from the Quidditch pitch.

"Hey! You can't do that," Katie called.

Cho glanced over her shoulder again. Katie looked like she was keeping pace with her, conviction her broom was getting old proving false. "Who says I can't?" she called back.

She turned back and looked out across the lake, any thoughts about watching for a small wobble in the course of her broom far from her mind. She closed her eyes, feeling the wind above the water cool on her face and catching and whipping her hair. In this moment, she cared only about going fast, faster, fastest.

Cho opened her eyes and saw Katie had drawn level with her. Some surprise must have shown on her face, because Katie started laughing, and Cho joined her. She decided she didn't care about the game any longer. Evidently Katie didn't either, as she guided her broom up into the night sky, and Cho followed her. It became a kind of follow-the-leader like the flight of a flock of birds, but with only two members; who led and who followed at any given time was difficult to say. It was a form of communication without words, the sharing of laughter and the simple joy of flying. Below them, the calm black lake was impossible to tell from the cloudless night sky.

As they walked away from the Quidditch pitch later that night, Katie said, "Hey, there's a Hogsmeade weekend tomorrow."

"I hadn't realised."

"Maybe, ah..." She paused to catch her breath. "Maybe I'll see you there. If you're going. Because I was thinking of going."

Cho hadn't been planning to go - how could she, if she hadn't known it was this weekend? - but suddenly the strip of stores and cafés seemed more appealing than going over her Ancient Runes notes, and she said, "Sure. I'll look for you."

Katie smiled. Her face was still flushed from flying. "Great."

------------------

In the morning, Cho ran into Marietta and Eddie in the common room. Eddie asked if she wanted to tag along with them to Hogsmeade.

Through the day, Cho kept glancing through windows at the street and at opening doors. She never saw who she was looking for.

In the afternoon, Cho heard there was a commotion in the main street. Something had happened to a girl there.

Before dinner, Cho confronted Leanne. She relayed the whole story of what had happened while leaving Hogsmeade while Cho listened, silent, unsure how she should react.

After dinner, Cho came by the Hospital wing. She was chased away by Madam Pomfrey, who told her Professor Snape needed to concentrate.

That night, Cho sat in the common room, her Transfiguration textbook closed on her lap. She turned away from looking out of one of the large windows, and began writing a letter that would go to St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries.

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An owl dropped a letter at Cho's place at the Ravenclaw table during breakfast while she was picking listlessly at her toast. It was in a bright green envelope and sealed shut with an insignia bearing the crossed wand and bone. She tore the envelope open in one swift movement. Inside was a very brief note in a font that looked less like a letter and more like the typesetting found in books.

We regret to inform you, read the letter, that due to new regulations, St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries will be suspending the delivery of all letters, parcels, packages, and other sundry items to any patients in a critical and/or non-conscious state. Your letter/parcel/package will be held until the intended recipient is not longer in a critical or non-conscious state, at which point your letter/parcel/package will be delivered. You as the sender will not receive any notification of this having occurred, nor can we provide you with an accurate estimation of when your letter/parcel/package will be delivered. We at St Mungo's apologise for any inconvenience, and wish you the best of health and the intended recipient a speedy recovery.

Cho read the letter through a second time, then set her jaw. She pulled her wand from her robes and used it to wipe the note free of ink, forcing the ink to sit in a little bubble in the corner of the now-empty note, then summoned a quill that lay on the table beside her bed in Ravenclaw Tower. When it landed in her raised hand a moment later, she dipped it into the ink bubble and began writing.

------------------

The following morning another owl came for Cho bearing a similar envelope. Inside was a similar letter.

We regret to inform you that due to new regulations, St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries is unable to release details about any injuries, hexes, jinxes, enchantments, or any other magical effects Katie Bell (the name was written by hand) may have incurred, or the treatment thereof, to anyone other than immediate family members. We at St Mungo's apologise for any inconvenience.

Cho spent her first spare lesson writing a letter addressed to Andrew Bell. She spent the rest of the day unable to concentrate on her classes, an uncomfortable knot writhing in her stomach.

------------------

The next morning, an owl came with a letter that was not from Andrew Bell, nor his sister, nor St Mungo's, but from Cho's parents. She opened the letter and folded it up again without absorbing a single word written on the parchment. She would have to reply to this. She had no idea how, nor did she feel like thinking about it, when the many things that she imagined stopping a reply from Katie's brother weighed so heavily on her mind. Maybe the owl had delivered the letter and left, leaving him no means with which to reply. Maybe letters sent through owl post didn't work properly, if written by a Squib. Maybe Andrew couldn't get in contact with St Mungo's either. Maybe. Maybe.

Cho pushed her plate away from her. Marietta said from her side, "Hey, aren't you going to eat anything?"

"I'm not hungry," Cho replied, and she left the table.

------------------

The next letter that came for Cho caused her to pause. For a moment she considered that it might be for some other student who would snag it in a second but was too busy with a mouthful of eggs at the moment, until she saw her name clearly written on the envelope. She opened it and read through it once very quickly, and then a second time where she looked at every word instead of every third one. The letter had not come from Katie's brother, but her mother.

Dear Cho, it read,

First let me tell you that Katie is okay and you don't have to worry about her. The Healers have told us she'll be awake within the week. She will have to spend some time recovering at St Mungo's though, and they also say she's very lucky not to have been hurt more than she was. That's our Katie, though - she's always been very unlucky with accidents but very lucky with how much damage they actually do to her.

It's so wonderful to know Katie has such a good friend at Hogwarts - most of her friends finished last year and I was a little worried she might be lonely (but don't tell her I told you that). I'm sure she'll write back to you as soon as she can, she hates having to stay in bed and I'm sure she'll complain to as many people as she can.

Write back if there's anything further you need. Andrew says he would appreciate getting another letter through owl post, as he's quite taken with being known as the Birdman of Lancaster.

Peace and Love,

Maggie Bell

As she read the letter, Cho felt something nagging at her, but she dismissed it since whatever it was could wait. After she had refolded the letter she realised she had not taken anything for breakfast yet, and it was the smell coming from a pile of sausages reminding her about it.

------------------

That night, Cho wrote her response to her parents' letter that had arrived a couple of days ago. She wrote about her classes, her progression with her studies for the year, her continued place on the Quidditch team. It felt like she was simply acknowledging each individual line without giving out any real information. She did not mention Katie at all.

------------------

Even if I take a break from studying, Cho thought to herself, I can't get away from books.

She had intended just to clean her broom and maybe clip it a little, but halfway through had remembered she had seen the Hover Charm used on brooms in an example in her Charms textbook, and the current chapter she had been taking a break from was on strengthening existing charms already in place. Cho had intended to fetch her textbook and experiment a little with the technique, practically, but quickly realised she would have to actually practise the Hover Charm on something other than her broom to get a feel for it first. So, she was sitting in the Ravenclaw common room with textbooks and scribbled diagrams spread out in front of her, her broom propped against the chair she was sitting in, a couple of sticks gathered from the grounds just near the Forbidden Forest, and a determined look on her face.

It was some time in the small hours of the morning before Cho managed to get the Hover Charm to work right, and it took a few more practice applications before she was ready to try the charm on her broom. She went to bed not exhausted and thinking she had wasted the night, but excited, anticipating testing out a broom that she was, in part, responsible for how well it flew.

------------------

The morning of Halloween, another letter came for Cho from St Mungo's. It was not the same bright shade of green the previous two had been. Cho hastily swallowed the rest of her juice, and opened the envelope. She recognised Katie's handwriting, messy and somewhat boyish, right away.

It's like Christmas already here, I woke up and there was all this stuff waiting for me. Some of it was even presents, too - Fred and George sent me one of every new thing they've made since they opened their shop, I think.

I feel fine, by the way. You sounded so worried in your letter! It'll take more than some old Dark junk to stop me, haha. The Healers say I'm going to be in here for a while though, because there's some potion I have to keep taking and they want to make sure they didn't miss anything, something like that. They sound like they're being too careful. As soon as I can walk around - and it's nothing serious, I'm just sore everywhere - I'll really start on getting them to let me come back to school.

You, however, are still at school, so there is something you have to do for me. Something incredibly important, possibly the absolute most important thing ever. On Saturday, Gryffindor is going to be playing Slytherin, and not only am I not going to be playing, I can't even go and watch the game. It's very very very important that you go to the game, take notes, and write me back about Slytherin losing by 300 points and how the new commentator isn't a patch on Lee, and also go and hit Harry for me if he's replaced me with anyone dreadful. That last part is the most important of all.

I'm going to open my presents now. It's almost enough to make me want to go to the hospital more often!

Katie

Cho folded up the letter and tucked it into a pocket. Marietta looked over at her, and asked, "Who have you been writing to?"

"Katie," Cho said, "in St Mungo's. She's not hurt, but she's going to be away from school for a while."

"Oh, okay. Well, that's good. That she's not hurt, I mean." Marietta dropped her voice, like she was worried about being overheard. "It's a bit scary, isn't it? All this stuff that's going on."

"A little," Cho said. Not so much, any more, she thought.