Avacyn Lily Potter

Classes Start Now.

As I walked the corridor I heard lots of whispers "There, look." "Where?" "Next to the tall kid with the red hair." "The girl?" "Did you see her face?" "How come she doesn't have her brother's scar?" I wished they wouldn't because I was trying to concentrate on finding my way to classes. There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where anything was because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other, and we were sure the coats of armor could walk. The ghosts didn't help, either. It was always a nasty shock when one of them glided suddenly through a door you were trying to open. Nearly Headless Nick was always happy to point new Gryffindors in the right direction, but Peeves the Poltergeist was worth two locked doors and a trick staircase if you met him when you were late for class. Even worse than Peeves, if that was possible, was the caretaker, Argus Filch. Harry, me, and Ron managed to get on the wrong side of him on our very first morning. Filch found us trying to force our way through a door that unluckily turned out to be the entrance to the out-of-bounds corridor on the third floor. He wouldn't believe they were lost, was sure they were trying to break into it on purpose, and was threatening to lock them in the dungeons when they were rescued by Professor Quirrell, who was passing. I stopped walking with the boys that first day.

Once you had managed to find them, there were the classes themselves. There was a lot more to magic, as Harry and I quickly found out, than waving your wand and saying a few funny words. We had to study the night skies through our telescopes every Wednesday at midnight and learn the names of different stars and the movements of the planets. Three times a week we went out to the greenhouses behind the castle to study Herbology, with a dumpy little witch called Professor Sprout, where we learned how to take care of all the strange plants and fungi, and found out what they were used for. Easily the most boring class was History of Magic, which was the only one taught by a ghost. Professor Binns had been very old indeed when he had fallen asleep in front of the staff room fire and got up the next morning to teach, leaving his body behind him. Binns droned on and on while we scribbled down names and dates and got Emeric the Evil and Uric the Oddball mixed up. Professor Flitwick, the Charms teacher, was a tiny little wizard who had to stand on a pile of books to see over his desk. At the start of our first class, he took the roll call, and when he reached our names he gave an excited squeak and toppled out of sight. Professor McGonagall was again different. She gave us a talking-to the moment we sat down in her first class. "Transfiguration is some of the most complex and dangerous magic you will learn at Hogwarts, Anyone messing around in my class will leave and not come back. You have been warned."

Then she changed her desk into a pig and back again. We were all very impressed and couldn't wait to get started, but soon realized we weren't going to be changing the furniture into animals for a long time. After taking a lot of complicated notes, we were each given a match and started trying to turn it into a needle. By the end of the lesson, only me and Hermione Granger and had made any difference to our matches; Professor McGonagall showed the class how it had gone all silver and pointy and gave Hermione and me a rare smile. The class everyone had really been looking forward to was Defense Against the Dark Arts, but Quirrell's lessons turned out to be a bit of a joke. His classroom smelled strongly of garlic, which everyone said was to ward off a vampire he'd met in Romania and was afraid would be coming back to get him one of these days. His turban, he told us, had been given to him by an African prince as a thank-you for getting rid of a troublesome zombie, but I wasn't sure I believed this story. For one thing, when Seamus Finnigan asked eagerly to hear how Quirrell had fought off the zombie, Quirrell went pink and started talking about the weather; for another, I had noticed that a funny smell hung around the turban, and the Weasley twins insisted that it was stuffed full of garlic as well so that Quirrell was protected wherever he went. All I know is the guy creeped me out.