An American At Hogwarts: Book Three

Chapter Seventy

A/N: This one's dedicated to @UltimateGhostNerd for all the wonderful comments you've left as you've read through the books! It was genuienly so helpful in reminding me of how much I love these characters and this story, so thank you.

****************

When I finally pulled myself away from the peace of the morning, the energy drinks had worn off and the tiredness had well and truly sunk in. It felt like a bad plan to stay up all night only to pass out for the entire morning, but I couldn't bring myself to care. I'd adjust my sleep schedule later; right now I needed a nap. My friends and I all stayed passed out until the afternoon, and the rest of the weekend was spent napping and recovering our sleep schedules. And thank goodness for that, because starting Monday morning, my life went back to being absolutely full-tilt crazy.

Thankfully, this time, it was for mostly good reasons. With two weeks exactly to go before the first NEWTS and OWLS were taken and with the final Quidditch game of the year coming up this Friday, things were absolutely packed. Gryffindor would be playing Ravenclaw on Friday, and because of how things'd worked out in other games across the season, we actually still had a shot at winning the Quidditch Cup this year. Needless to say, Angelina had squeezed extra practice into every single spare moment we had.

I had to keep reminding myself that the next week was the last week of Quidditch practice I ever had to deal with—otherwise I would've just sat on my broom in the middle of the pitch, working on my laptop instead of running our thousandth rep of my least favorite drill. But I loved Angelina, so I stayed, and gave her my complete attention.

Every spare moment of mine that wasn't spent with Angelina was split two ways, both with at least a partial impact of getting the best of Umbridge. The first way was more subtle, and more generally helpful to my friends and classmates. Since I was fairly confident Umbridge would be violently against my normal OWL/NEWT studying method, I didn't bother to tell her it was happening. Instead, I worked with friends I knew I could trust to set up quieter, more impromptu study sessions without anyone who would rat us out. We weren't doing anything technically "illegal", especially since we were careful not to fit her definition of a club, so the stakes weren't as high as they'd been with the DA. But still, everyone who showed knew not to mention our group to the wrong people, lest someone decide to be a dick and ruin it.

The second, slighlty more fun (and definitely more risky) way I'd been spending my time was with Lee, raining absolute terror on every asshole in the school with every single prank we could think of. Our niffler had been in regular rotation throughout Umbridge's office, and I'd followed through on using muggle superglue to stick things everywhere. Lee and I weren't the only ones causing the chaos of minor inconvenience throughout the school, but we were the only ones really living up to the legacy of the twins, besides Peeves. And to be fair to everyone else, we were also the only ones who'd had actual contact with the twins since they'd left.

The last time I'd seen the twins, when we all met up and went to New York, I'd asked them for a favor. And true to form, they'd come through with a big supply of exactly what I'd asked for: magical decorative plates with moving pictures in the center. Just like the ones Umbridge had up all over the walls of her classroom and office.

Unlike Umbridge's plates, however, these didn't have cute cats in the center. Instead, they had other, stranger furry animals, like an angry wombat and a few different raccoons. The plates were the long game, since she'd be much more likely to notice if I changed too many at once, but every few days Lee and I worked together to swap out a few kitten plates for our replacements. Hopefully we'd be able to get at least half of them before she noticed, but even now, seeing a hissing raccoon over her shoulder while she was trying to lecture the class made sitting in the same room as her a little easier.