Y/N Potter

The Potions Master

"There, look."
"Where?"
"Next to the short girl with the bob."
"With the red hair?"
"Did you see her face?"
"Does she have a scar?"
Whispers followed me from the moment I left my dormitory. People queuing outside of classrooms stood on tiptoe to get a look at me, or doubled back to pass him in the corridors again, staring. I wish they wouldn't because I am just trying to find my way to classes.

There are a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different in 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 (this was how the boys in Slytherin chose to lock their doors, they thought it funny until half of them forgot where to tickle); and doors that weren't really sorry at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where everything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit eachother and Harry told me he was sure the coats of armour 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. The Bloody Baron lived up to his name by being bloody useless and Peeves the poltergeist was worth two locked doors and a trick staircase if you met him when you were late to class. He once dropped a waste paper basket on my head, pulled a rug from beneath me and Astoria, pelted chalk at me and Arwyn and snuck up behind me, invisible, grabbed my nose and screeched,
"GOT YOUR CONK!".
Even worse than Peeves, if that's possible is our caretaker, Argus Filch. At first I believed, against the warning of my friends, that he was just a mistreated man that would be nice and respect you if you were nice and respected him however when I tried to be nice, he said he hated ass-kissing wizards and stalked off. The following day Ron and Harry had told me how they were trying to get to class when they had accidentally stumbled across the out-of-bounds corridor on the third floor. Filch wouldn't believe they were lost, was sure they were trying to break into it on purpose and started threatening to lock them in the dungeons when they were rescued by Professor Quirrell, who was passing. Filch owns a cat called Mrs Norris, a scrawny , dust-coloured creature with bulging, lamp-like eyes just like Filch's. Now, I believe all animals are adorable in their own way so it means a whole lot that I find it very hard to be enamoured by her. She patrols the corridors alone. Break a rule in front of her, out one toe out of line and she'll whisk off for Filch, who'd appear, wheezing, two seconds later. Filch knows the secret passageways of the school better than anyone (except perhaps the Weasley twins) and can pop up as suddenly as any of the ghosts. Us students all hate him and it is the dearest ambition of many to give Mrs Norris a good kick.

And then, once you find them, there are the lessons themselves. There is a lot more to magic, as I quickly found out, than waving you're wand and saying a few funny words. We have to study the sky through telescopes every Wednesday at midnight and learn the names of different stars and the movements of the planets. Three times a week we go out to the greenhouses behind the castle to study Herbology, with a dumpy little witch called Professor Sprout, where we learn how to take care of all the strange plants and fungi and found out what they're used for. Easily the most boring lesson is History of Magic, which was the only class taught by a ghost. Mattheo told me that when Mr Binns was alive, and very old, he had fallen asleep by the fire in the staff room and got up next morning to teach, leaving his body behind. Binns drones on and on and on and on and on and on...
You bored yet? Yeah, well that's nothing compared to his lessons ... While we scribble down names and dates and get 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 register he said everyone's names and when he reached my name, he gave an excited squeak and toppled out of sight. Professor McGonagall is again different. Harry had been quite right to think she wasn't a teacher to cross. Strict and clever, she gave us a talking-to the moment we had sat down in her first class;
"Transfiguration is some of the most complex and dangerous magic you will learn at Hogwarts," she said. "Anyone messing around I'm my class will leave and not come back." She said this particular part looking directly at us Slytherins, as opposed to the damn Ravenclaws who were hanging of her every word. "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 realised we weren't going to be changing the furniture in to animals for a long time. After making a lot, and I mean a lot of complicated notes, we were each given a match and tying to turn it into a needle. I got close by making my needle wood, but Mattheo was the only one that got it completely right in the first lesson.