The Founders

Chapter 7

By breakfast the next day, everyone knew that Kyra Chen had been beaten by Alexander Fyfe. She had to endure incessant teasing from Oscar, who found it just hilarious that Kyra had broken her wrist rather than be beaten.

"Yes, yes, I'm a sore loser, can we please move on?"

Oscar looked over his pumpkin juice at her. "I like to think of this as payback for the time when you told everyone that I matched my cousin on tinder." Kyra covered her eyes with hand, her shoulders shaking. "Even though they just had the same NAME- she wasn't actually my cousin!"

"Hey, no judgement," Kyra responded holding her palms up, her voice filled with laughter. "Keep it in the family, that's what I say. And you too, apparently." She checked her watch as Oscar opened his mouth in indignant response. "Well, I'm off." She swung her legs over the bench and hopped up, her ponytail swinging.

"Why, don't we have free period now?" Grace frowned, looking around at the almost empty breakfast hall. The only good thing about starting NEWTs was that they suddenly had a huge number of free periods. The downside of course being that they were expected to use them productively.

Professor Brockett hadn't been very impressed the previous year when she'd found out that Oscar and Kyra had spent their free periods in the kitchen, playing table football with the house elves. She hadn't been very impressed when she'd heard where they'd gotten the table either. Theft was still theft even in the magical world, it seemed.

Grace had sensibly used most of her free periods to study in the library, although Kyra later found out that Michael had worked as the assistant in the library for spring and summer term, so Kyra wondered how much actual work was gotten done.

Oscar was the kind of person who did minimal work throughout the year, yet still cared deeply about his grades and would become very stressed a couple of months before exams, cloistering himself away in his room to work for eight hours straight.

Kyra tended to work very hard in the subjects that interested her, like DADA and Herbology, but had little patience for other subjects. She was decent in Potions, since knowledge of Herbology helped, and she could usually scrape a pass in Care of Magical Creatures, but Transfiguration was her real weak point, since it required such incredible precision and focus, and didn't leave much room for personal interpretation.

She had tried to drop it for NEWTs, but that was one of the subjects that her father, Carson, had insisted that she and Grace both take, since it was a 'life skill'.

Kyra adjusted the strap on her bag and shrugged. "Yeah, we do and I need to use it well if I want to not be humiliated next DADA lesson." She gave Oscar a friendly slap on his shoulder and walked away.