Julie Stone was a regular girl; she lived in an orphanage, had some friends, and every now and then would bang her head against the wall due to stress. . . . Normal!
Anyway, all her life Julie never seemed to quite fit in. She loved it, but her life...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒆𝒊𝒈𝒏𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒊𝒏 𝒉𝒐𝒈𝒘𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒔
────── *•. ⚡︎ .•*──────
The appearance of the sign in the entrance hall had a marked effect upon the inhabitants of the castle. There seemed to be only one topic of conversation during the following week: the Triwizard Tournament. Rumors were flying from student to student like highly contagious germs: who was going to try for Hogwarts champion, what the tournament would involve, how the students from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang differed from themselves.
Well, Hermione had gotten another letter from Aidan Lynch (answering her response to him) during one of the breakfasts of the week. The letter was much longer than the previous one and he mainly related to her his last Quidditch Practice. Apparently, one of his teammates had sent a bludger to another, which cause the latter to fall of his brooms and land on top of their coach. He also mentioned that he may start to write less as Quidditch season was starting. Hermione promptly answered that there was no trouble, at all, and that she would also be occupied with other things.
Meanwhile, in the castle, they noticed that it seemed to be undergoing an extra-thorough cleaning. Several grimy portraits had been scrubbed, much to the displeasure of their subjects, who sat huddled in their frames muttering darkly and wincing as they felt their raw pink faces. The suits of armor were suddenly gleaming and moving without squeaking, and Argus Filch, the caretaker, was behaving so ferociously to any students who forgot to wipe their shoes that he terrified a pair of first-year girls into hysterics.
Other members of the staff seemed oddly tense too. "Longbottom, kindly do not reveal that you can't even perform a simple Switching Spell in front of anyone from Durmstrang!" Professor McGonagall barked at the end of one particularly difficult lesson, during which Neville had accidentally transplanted his own ears onto a cactus.
When they went down to breakfast on the morning of the thirtieth of October, they found that the Great Hall had been decorated overnight. Enormous silk banners hung from the walls, each of them representing a Hogwarts House: red with a gold lion for Gryffindor, blue with a bronze eagle for Ravenclaw, yellow with a black badger for Hufflepuff, and green with a silver serpent for Slytherin. Behind the teachers' table, the largest banner of all bore the Hogwarts coat of arms: lion, eagle, badger, and snake united around a large letter H.
Harry, Ron, and Hermione sat down beside Fred and George at the Gryffindor table. Once again, and most unusually, they were sitting apart from everyone else and conversing in low voices. Ron led the way over to them.
"It's a bummer, all right," George was saying gloomily to Fred. "But if he won't talk to us in person, we'll have to send him the letter after all. Or we'll stuff it into his hand. He can't avoid us forever."
