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ii. Done Deal written 22/feb/23; edited 7/aug/23
Choosing Divination despite having the option to drop it every year might have been the worst decision I'd ever made. It even trumped the couple times I've set my friends on fire. Nothing about the class was particularly nasty, to be honest: The professor was very nice and she brought muffins and biscuits to every class and let us eat them—though maybe she didn't let us so much as she couldn't see us, given the fact she was very much blind.
What was bad about it is how boring it was. Not a single thing Professor Thornsden taught us could be applied later in life, not even if you were looking to become a professional seer, for the professor didn't even follow the curriculum. She marched to the beat of her own drum and, as inspiring as it may be, it wasn't very good for our academic knowledge. One day we'd be studying tessomancy, the art of looking at tea leaves and making up some way this is a bad omen for your future, and the next we'd completely abandon them and she'd tell us of Chinese Fortune sticks, which were as good as a horoscope and told you your daily fortune.
There was an upside to all this, though: I could do whatever I wanted, stuff my face, and still passed the class. Thornsden had a pass/fail system where, so long as you submitted your assignments at the end of the class, you aced it. Jea was convinced she could change the professor's mind about it and implement a stricter grading system, but I was pretty comfortable sitting back and chewing a chocolate muffin.
On one side of me, Jea furiously jotted down everything Thornsden said. Jea was the chief reason I still took the class; she's one of the rare students who actually enjoys the course, and it killed me to see her going to every class alone back in third year, when she picked it up, so when fourth year came around I added Divination to my timetable as well.
Distracted, the professor mused, "Oh, blackbirds can be seen as a good omen or a bad one." She giggled. I hadn't been following along to the lecture, but I was pretty sure we were studying mice as prophetic devices, not birds. "Though often as the messengers of death." Isn't that lovely? Now I could look at innocent little birds and worry about how that means someone close to me could die until that was inevitably proven false by absolutely nothing happening to me or those near me.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jea write down the professor's side comment, starting the section as NOTES. I had no idea how she took it so seriously that she actually penned it in her notebook.
In direct contrast to Jea, on my right sat Craig, a seventh year Gryffindor I'd spoken to a couple times, who was at the moment doodling in his notebook. If you saw him from afar you'd suppose he was writing like Jea was, but it actually looked to me like he was drawing birds. Leaning forward slightly, I zeroed in on his paper and, indeed, several colourful birds filled the page. There even was a blackbird on one of the corners, with an arrow pointed at it and, in the neatest cursive I've seen a guy write, next to it said: "Bad omen."
