ABANDONED || Me and my Evil Cousin

IX - Tea Leaves

Right now, it was the 1st of September 1940 and for the third time, I was at Platform 9 3/4 about to get on the train to Hogwarts so that I could start third year. I felt like this year was going to be really good. I don't know exactly why - I just had a feeling. Mary and Liza were also there - Mary's little sister Myrtle was in the uniform since she was about to start at the school. She looked exactly like Mary, but she was shorter, had longer hair, and was wearing slightly oversized glasses.

I checked my watch and realised that I was actually a little bit late so I hurried onto the train and sat with Mary, Liza and a few other Ravenclaw girls in my year. The ride was fun, but I somehow managed to throw up after eating too many sweets. What a good start to the year. About halfway into our ride, Myrtle walked into our compartment, while crying. "The first year girls over there won't let me sit with them. One of them, Olive I think she was called, said my glasses looked ugly." There was a moment of silence, then Mary hugged her, and we eventually let her sit with us.

As the afternoon turned into the evening, we were nearing Hogwarts again. How good it was to be back! I was looking through my new Divination textbook - it was one of the new subjects I was going to take. I found it really interesting - I've always wanted to learn how to tell the future. Before I knew it we were there.

An hour later we were sitting up at one of the tables in the Great Hall, about to start our feast. Myrtle had been sorted into Ravenclaw. She'd stopped crying by now and was sitting relatively close to us. After the feast was done I went up to my dormitory. It was so nice to be back in my bed up here, which was so good compared to the hard metal bed and thin blanked I had to sleep on back in the orphanage.

I woke up pretty early. I watched the sunrise and went on a walk in the grounds to clear my mind before going off to double Transfiguration, to start the year - it was pretty fun. I felt a small sense of achievement when I walked out after successfully managing to turn my tortoise into a teapot. After lunch was over we went to Divination class which was pretty exciting to me.

Our teacher was a wispy-haired woman with a dreamy look at her eyes. She was handing us around some china teacups since today's lesson was about reading tea leaves. I found it so fascinating and managed to read the dregs at the bottom of my teacup faster than most others in my class. After glancing at my textbook I managed to find out that my tea leaves meant four things: 'relative, darkness, decisions, two'.

My professor was there with me, while helping me to decipher it. "Hmmm, a relative of yours.... in two years..... dark decision....", she said. The only relative I had was Tom, since my father was locked up in Azkaban and I had no Idea who my mother was. So Tom was going to make a dark decision in two years? I wonder what that might be... He's made many dark decisions in the past - most of them were back at the orphanage. But for some reason I could visualise it in my head - like I was really a seer.

I could see a huge snake, a pair of yellow eyes, and I could hear someone speaking in parseltongue... I heard a familiar scream... but then Liza cut my thought short. "Vi! How do you do it? What does this mean? It looks like some sort of horse, and a tree. Can you help me?" I wanted to tell her how angry I was at her for interrupting me, but I didn't want to seem rude. Instead, I just did what she asked and helped her.

As the day drew to a close I kept thinking about what I'd seen in Divination class - the huge snake and the scream. However when I woke up I forgot all about it.