Dunderhead - A Harry Potter story: Snape becomes Harry's mentor

Chapter 14: THIN BOOK

Thursday arrived much too quickly for Harry's liking and he awoke to the sound of Ron snoring. The low vibrations seemed to carry what Harry might have described as a foreboding hum in his fatalistic state of mind that morning. Everything seemed bleak to Harry: they had potions that morning, first thing, and Harry's insides were tying themselves into knots. How would the lesson be, would Snape act differently towards him after the events of Monday evening? And, by different, Harry did not hope to think that the change might be positive. That Snape would suddenly act kindly towards him was a laughable thought, but Harry tried to comfort himself by thinking that Snape could not have told his Slytherins. He was still a teacher, despite being a greasy git as Ron always so aptly put it. No, what had occurred in the potion master's office on Monday evening surely fell under the title of student confidentiality and, though Snape could make hints torment Harry with snide comments about how pathetic he was, about how weak he was, the man could not overtly say what had happened.

Harry sighed deeply and turned over onto his side. He had forgotten to close the curtains around his bed the night before and he could see his bedside table. His books were sprawled all over the floor, some lying with their titles partially hidden beneath the shadow of his bed. Harry saw Mint's thin grey book and a curiosity, which he not felt in all the time that he had had the book in his possession, swept over him suddenly. He leaned over the side of his bed to pick it up. Harry remembered Snape's accusations about his nosiness and disregard for personal privacy and he paused. But, Harry reasoned, anyone would have peaked at a lost book! Ron, Hermione and Ginny had been all for having a look during breakfast on Tuesday. In fact, Harry felt that he had done very well not to have had a peak in the three days and an evening that he had had it in his care. Harry opened the cover and looked at the first page. It was blank. Then Harry saw that there was a neat inscription on the inside of the cover. It read: 

'Photo album, notebook, and place to jot down whatever rubbish comes to mind. Journal to write absolute crap in.'

Harry nearly laughed out loud but instead he produced some wheezy breaths through his nose to contain the sound, so as not to wake the whole dormitory. He was surprised by the girl's dry humour, the tone was self-deprecating. Harry slowly fingered through the book and he was struck more and more by the writer's scathing voice.

'Not that it'll make a difference to my impressively thin memory, but I need to remember to look over that essay on banishing charms.'

'I wonder how long it would actually take for me to die of boredom. Professor Binn's couldn't speak with less enthusiasm if he tried. Maybe he died bored himself and the characteristic got stuck?'

There were also fantastic, elucidating comments about people that she found fault with. Harry was thrilled to see that many Slytherins were mentioned.

'I hope that Malfoy will be a race that dies out. If its not his intergenerational, pure-blood legacy that finishes him off through interbreeding, he'll slip down a drain from all that disgusting oily gel that he lathers his hair in. He is such an idiot.'

'I saw Milicent Bulstrode today. She still hasn't worked out that the reason for her blindness in one eye is from that magical creature juice I splatted her with last Thursday in Potions.'

'Do Slytherins receive training to look down their noses at people or are they put in this house because they all have a default look of disdain?'

There were also small ink drawings of creatures with annotations alongside them, and Harry could see straight away that she had an artistic talent that was easily superior to Dean Thomas of Gryffindor, and Dean was the best artist in their year! Mint had drawn the head of a Hippogriff to fill up one full page of the book and the dark shades of its eyes effortlessly translated the fierce orange gleam that the real-life creature had. Harry flicked through the book some more and he found some rather bewildering notes that he couldn't make any sense of.