Extra Ordinary (Riddle Era)

Chapter 2

"It's official," Avery muttered as he shoved his doodle-covered parchment haphazardly into his bag, "O'Connell hates us."

"Hush," Hornby urged, looking over Avery's shoulder as she waited rather impatiently for him to pack up his things. "He might hear you."

"So?" Avery asked, now dropping in his ink bottle and apparently electing to ignore the fact that the rest of the group was waiting on him. "Maybe if he hears someone say it, he'll do something about it."

Tom sniffed, but didn't answer. He never did when they talked about teachers. He smiled and listened and he was reasonably certain that most of his peers thought he was on their side when it came to complaints about professors, but he never said anything. It was too likely that someone would overhear and tell the teachers and he wanted them to think he was on their side too.

Of course, the truth was that he was on his own side, but no one needed to know that.

"It won't change the fact that we have this stupid project," Hornby countered, crossing her arms and tapping her foot as Avery rummaged through his bag, apparently looking for something.

"Yeah, well, my point exactly," Avery muttered, looking up and at long last swinging his bag over his shoulder. "He hates us and nothing I say can make anything any worse than it already is."

"Don't jinx it," Augustus Lestrange pitched in as he leaned against the desk next to Hornby's, his arms, like hers, crossed, though he at least had the self control not to tap his foot. Not, Tom thought, that Hornby's tapping was so much a product of poor control as it was a wish to send Avery a message that the latter was most certainly not receiving.

"Says you," Hornby muttered with a scowl, twisting to look at the other boy. "You got partnered with Nott. You'll be fine. I'm stuck with that halfwit Reston."

"At least you two both ended up with other Slytherins," Avery countered, pushing himself off his desk as the whole group headed for the door. "Tom and I are stuck with Hufflepuffs we've never heard of."

Hornby snorted and shot an annoyed sort of look over her shoulder. "Hufflepuffs you've never heard of," she corrected pointedly. "Tom's heard of everyone."

"Apparently not quite everyone," Tom admitted with a little shrug and a half smile he didn't really feel. Because though it was true, the realization was less than comfortable. He had gotten used to the idea that he had, as Hornby said, heard of everyone. Because for the most part, he had. Tom had a good memory for faces and names and he'd made an effort. People, he knew, liked to feel cared about. They liked to feel known. He supposed it was something of a universal among humans, that need to be known. It was just that most people thought small.

Regardless, however, Tom had tried to know enough about everyone in his year to be able to make decent conversation. To make them think he'd been paying attention. To make them like him. And by the end of his first year, he'd been reasonably certain he had accomplished this. Sure, there were a couple of new kids at the start of the new term and every once in awhile a name slipped his memory, but when O'Connell had wrapped up classes by reading out names and pairing them all up for a project on cheering charms, Tom had been partnered with a girl whose name he couldn't recall ever hearing before. That he had looked around and hadn't been immediately sure who she was was even stranger.

But, then, he supposed, it didn't really matter. They were paired for a project and if it was like any other project then he would meet up with the girl and they would work and he would learn enough about her to make sure that if he ever saw her again he could recognize her and make some reasonable amount of conversation. Then they'd sit in the library and do work and later he'd scrap all that and redo the whole project himself because he had yet to work with anyone who managed to keep up with his standards. And his sterling record was not going to be tarnished just because the professors insisted they work in groups.