The Little Lightning Girl

50- How to Teach a Lesson (I Swear it Wasn't Violent)

As it turned out, OWL exams weren't nearly as horrible as everyone had mentioned. The actual content, that is. By the time May came around, my friends and I had prepared for the exams well enough that we knew we'd do alright. Thankfully, our strengths filled in each other's weaknesses quite well. I helped Kaley and Rose at Potions while Kaley helped me with Charms and Rose helped us both with Transfiguration. We were all of us pretty decent at DADA, and it was the one class all three of us felt fully prepared for. None of us, unfortunately, had any particular knack for History of Magic.

My Potions OWL went by as smoothly as could be expected. After all, I was a year or two ahead in that class, even after being absent for half a year, so I'd learned the concepts during second and third year. If I hadn't fallen asleep during several of the History of Magic lectures this term, I might have felt more confident on the exam, but as it was, I fully guessed on several questions. The only issue with these exams was that they were in English, and were spelled to repel any magic that would alter the paper. So, I couldn't cast the English-to-Greek charm. The DADA exam was mostly practical, and the written questions short enough that I could sort them out. Transfiguration and Charms exams were structured similarly. Only when it came to History, did I truly struggle.

I sat there squinting at the parchment as the words wiggled about mockingly. The questions were each a paragraph long, if not more. Rose looked at me sympathetically from her chair to my left, but I just shook my head. Leaning closer to the paper certainly didn't help. It only made the swimming letters blurry. I'd already looked up at the Ministry official who was "monitoring" us, and he'd glared at me long enough that I abandoned the thought of asking him to perform the language-changing charm himself.

It was almost hilarious. I'd been through so much, survived so much, and now I was going to be bested by a History exam? Part of me just wanted to scribble down some nonsense and turn in the paper. I had no intention of entering into a history-related career anyway. But how upset would my mother be if I failed a test this important? So I squinted at the paper and tried to make sense of the alphabet-soup that was there.

.................

Later, Rose found me pounding out my emotions in the Room of Requirement. The animated dummy only made me long for Camp all the more. For Noah and Raegan, Maya and... Adrian. He'd called me several times in the past few weeks. We hadn't talked about anything serious since that first night, but it didn't matter. Maya stole the phone to talk to me often enough, and as much as Hogwarts was also my home, I was homesick for Camp.

I'd just landed a particularly hard blow that knocked the dummy over when Rose spoke from behind me.

"You can't possibly be this frustrated about a stupid exam, right?"

I waved a hand to stop the dummy from getting up and turned to my friend. We sat side by side on the old, red sofa.

"Nah," I said as I tucked my feet underneath me, "I couldn't care less about History of Magic. My mother... well that's another story."

Rose scoffed, "I don't think she'll care much either, Alana. So what's got you all ruffled?"

I held her gaze for a while, then shrugged, "I don't know. And before you yell at me about keeping secrets, it's not a secret. I don't know what's getting me so... riled up. I wish I did."

She pulled her hair over one shoulder and began tucking the red curls into a braid absentmindedly. It was a tick of hers, and because a nervous Rose Weasley usually meant a yelling Rose Weasley, I waited for her to finish the braid. Then I waited for her to talk.

"I feel it too," she eventually admitted, "this... tension. It's strange, not quite "fear," but I just keep looking over my shoulder and expecting something bad to be there. Like that feeling when you know you've forgotten something, but you can't remember what and for some reason it makes you nervous."