Adventures of Harriet Potter

Professor Umbridge

Lavender dressed at top speed next morning and left the dormitory before Harriet had even put on her socks. "Does she think he'll turn into a nutter if he stays in a room with me too long?" asked Harriet loudly, as the hem of Lavender's robes whipped out of sight. "Don't worry about it, Harriet," Parvati muttered, hoisting her schoolbag onto her shoulder. "She's just . . ." But apparently she was unable to say exactly what Lavender was, and after a slightly awkward pause followed her out of the room. Lydia and Hermione both gave Harriet it's-her-problem-not-yours looks, but Harriet was not much consoled. How much more of this was she going to have to take? "What's the matter?" asked Ron five minutes later, catching up with Harriet and Hermione halfway across the common room as they all headed toward breakfast. "You wouldn't believe us if we — oh for heaven's sake." Hermione said, she was staring at the common room notice board, where a large new sign had been put up.

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"They are the limit," said Hermione grimly, taking down the sign, which Fred and George had pinned up over a poster giving the date of the first Hogsmeade weekend in October. "We'll have to talk to them, Ron." Ron looked positively alarmed. "Why?" he said. "Because we're prefects!" said Hermione, as they climbed out through the portrait hole. "It's up to us to stop this kind of thing!" Ron said nothing; Harriet could tell from his glum expression that the prospect of stopping Fred and George doing exactly what they liked was not one that he found inviting. "Anyway, what's up, Harriet?" Ron continued, as they walked down a flight of stairs lined with portraits of old witches and wizards, all of whom ignored them, being engrossed in their own conversation. "You look really angry about something."
"Lavender reckons Harriet's lying about You-Know-Who," said Hermione succinctly, when Harriet did not respond. Ron, whom Harriet had expected to react angrily on her behalf, sighed. "Yes, Seamus thinks so too," he said gloomily. "Been having a nice little chat with him about whether or not I'm a lying, attention-seeking prat, have you?" Harriet said loudly. "No," said Ron calmly, "I told him to keep his big fat mouth shut about you, actually. And it would be quite nice if you stopped jumping down Hermione's and my throats, Harriet, because if you haven't noticed, we're on your side."
There was a short pause. "Sorry," said Harriet in a low voice. "That's quite all right," said Hermione with dignity. Then she shook her head. "Don't you remember what Dumbledore said at the end-of-term feast last year?" Harriet and Ron both looked at her blankly, and Hermione sighed again. "About You-Know-Who. He said, 'His gift for spreading discord and enmity is very great. We can fight it only by showing an equally strong bond of friendship and trust —'" Harriet was impressed, she'd not remembered that herself due to having had a lot to think about since then. "How do you remember stuff like that?" asked Ron, looking at her in admiration. "I listen, Ron," said Hermione with a touch of asperity. "So do I, but I still couldn't tell you exactly what —"
"The point," Hermione pressed on loudly, "is that this sort of thing is exactly what Dumbledore was talking about. You-Know-Who's only been back two months, and we've started fighting among ourselves. And the Sorting Hat's warning was the same — stand together, be united —" Harriet sighed in response. "And Harriet said it last night," retorted Ron, "if that means we're supposed to get matey with the Slytherins, fat chance."
"Well, I think it's a pity we're not trying for a bit of inter-House unity," said Hermione crossly. They had reached the foot of the marble staircase. A line of fourth-year Ravenclaws was crossing the entrance hall; they caught sight of Harriet and hurried to form a tighter group, as though frightened she might attack stragglers. "Yeah, we really ought to be trying to make friends with people like that," said Harriet sarcastically. They followed the Ravenclaws into the Great Hall, looking instinctively at the staff table as they entered. Professor Grubbly-Plank was chatting to Professor Sinistra, the Astronomy teacher, and Hagrid was once again conspicuous only by his absence. The enchanted ceiling above them echoed Harriet's mood; it was a miserable rain-cloud gray.
"Dumbledore didn't even mention how long that Grubbly-Plank woman's staying," she said, as they made their way across to the Gryffindor table. "Maybe . . ." said Hermione thoughtfully. "What?" said both Harriet and Ron together. "Well . . . maybe he didn't want to draw attention to Hagrid not being here."
"What d'you mean, draw attention to it?" said Ron, half laughing. "How could we not notice?" Before Hermione could answer, a tall black girl with long, braided hair had marched up to Harriet. "Hi, Angelina." Harriet said. "Hi," she said briskly, "good summer?" And without waiting for an answer, "Listen, I've been made Gryffindor Quidditch Captain." That was news, though made sense since Oliver left at the end of Harriet's third year. "Nice one," said Harriet, grinning at her; she suspected Angelina's pep talks might not be as long-winded as Oliver Wood's had been, which could only be an improvement.
"Yeah, well, we need a new Keeper now Oliver's left. Tryouts are on Friday at five o'clock and I want the whole team there, all right? Then we can see how the new person'll fit in." Angelina said in a tone that said there'd be no questions asked. "Okay," said Harriet, and she smiled at him and departed. "I'd forgotten Wood had left," said Hermione vaguely, sitting down beside Ron and pulling a plate of toast toward her. "I suppose that will make quite a difference to the team?" Hermione didn't know the half of it. "I s'pose," said Harriet, taking the bench opposite. "He was a good Keeper . . ."
"Still, it won't hurt to have some new blood, will it?" said Ron. With a whoosh and a clatter, hundreds of owls came soaring in through the upper windows. They descended all over the Hall, bringing letters and packages to their owners and showering the breakfasters with droplets of water; it was clearly raining hard outside. Hedwig was nowhere to be seen, but Harriet was hardly surprised; her only correspondents were Sirius and Lupin, and she doubted Sirius or Lupin would have anything new to tell her after only twenty-four hours apart. Hermione, however, had to move her orange juice aside quickly to make way for a large damp barn owl bearing a sodden Daily Prophet in its beak. "What are you still getting that for?" said Harriet irritably, thinking of Lavender, as Hermione placed a Knut in the leather pouch on the owl's leg and it took off again. "I'm not bothering . . . load of rubbish."
"It's best to know what the enemy are saying," said Hermione darkly, and she unfurled the newspaper and disappeared behind it, not emerging until Harriet and Ron had finished eating. "Nothing," she said simply, rolling up the newspaper and laying it down by her plate. "Nothing about you or Dumbledore or anything." Professor McGonagall was now moving along the table handing out schedules. "Look at today!" groaned Ron. "History of Magic, double Potions, Divination, and double Defense Against the Dark Arts . . . Binns, Snape, Trelawney, and that Umbridge woman all in one day! I wish Fred and George'd hurry up and get those Skiving Snackboxes sorted . . ."
"Do mine ears deceive me?" said Fred, arriving with George and squeezing onto the bench beside Harriet. "Hogwarts prefects surely don't wish to skive off lessons?" She smiled. "Look what we've got today," said Ron grumpily, shoving his schedule under Fred's nose. "That's the worst Monday I've ever seen." Harriet would agree, if she was in Divination. "Fair point, little bro," said Fred, scanning the column. "You can have a bit of Nosebleed Nougat cheap if you like."
"Why's it cheap?" said Ron suspiciously. "Because you'll keep bleeding till you shrivel up, we haven't got an antidote yet," said George, helping himself to a kipper. "Cheers," said Ron moodily, pocketing his schedule, "but I think I'll take the lessons." Harriet rolled her eyes, thinking of better reasons for not skipping lessons besides not wanting to bleed out through her nose. "And speaking of your Skiving Snackboxes," said Hermione, eyeing Fred and George beadily, "you can't advertise for testers on the Gryffindor notice board."
"Says who?" said George, looking astonished. "Says me," said Hermione. "And Ron." Harriet grinned at Ron being roped into being an authority figure in the Gryffindor common room. "Leave me out of it," said Ron hastily. Hermione glared at him. Fred and George sniggered. "You'll be singing a different tune soon enough, Hermione," said Fred, thickly buttering a crumpet. "You're starting your fifth year, you'll be begging us for a Snackbox before long."
"And why would starting fifth year mean I want a Skiving Snackbox?" asked Hermione. "Fifth year's O.W.L. year," said George. "So?" she said. "So you've got your exams coming up, haven't you? They'll be keeping your noses so hard to that grindstone they'll be rubbed raw," said Fred with satisfaction. "Half our year had minor breakdowns coming up to O.W.L.s," said George happily. "Tears and tantrums . . . Patricia Stimpson kept coming over faint . . ."
"Kenneth Towler came out in boils, d'you remember?" said Fred reminiscently. "That's 'cause you put Bulbadox Powder in his pajamas," said George. "Oh yeah," said Fred, grinning. "I'd forgotten. . . . Hard to keep track sometimes, isn't it?" Harriet giggled before a wave of intense nausea swept through her, making her cover her mouth. "Anyway, it's a nightmare of a year, the fifth," said George. "If you care about exam results anyway. Fred and I managed to keep our spirits up somehow." Harriet swallowed the nausea. "Yeah . . . you got, what was it, three O.W.L.s each?" said Ron. "Yep," said Fred unconcernedly. "But we feel our futures lie outside the world of academic achievement."
"We seriously debated whether we were going to bother coming back for our seventh year," said George brightly, "now that we've got —" He broke off at a warning look from Harriet, who knew George had been about to mention the Triwizard winnings she had given them. "— now that we've got our O.W.L.s," George said hastily. "I mean, do we really need N.E.W.T.s? But we didn't think Mum could take us leaving school early, not on top of Percy turning out to be the world's biggest prat."
"We're not going to waste our last year here, though," said Fred, looking affectionately around at the Great Hall. "We're going to use it to do a bit of market research, find out exactly what the average Hogwarts student requires from his joke shop, carefully evaluate the results of our research, and then produce the products to fit the demand." It made sense to Harriet. "But where are you going to get the gold to start a joke shop?" asked Hermione skeptically. "You're going to need all the ingredients and materials — and premises too, I suppose . . ."
Harriet did not look at the twins. Her face felt hot; she deliberately dropped her fork and dived down to retrieve it. She heard Fred say overhead, "Ask us no questions and we'll tell you no lies, Hermione. C'mon, George, if we get there early we might be able to sell a few Extendable Ears before Herbology." Harriet emerged from under the table to see Fred and George walking away, each carrying a stack of toast. "What did that mean?" said Hermione, looking from Harriet to Ron. "'Ask us no questions . . . ' Does that mean they've already got some gold to start a joke shop?"
"You know, I've been wondering about that," said Ron, his brow furrowed. "They bought me a new set of dress robes this summer, and I couldn't understand where they got the Galleons . . ." Harriet decided it was time to steer the conversation out of these dangerous waters. "D'you reckon it's true this year's going to be really tough? Because of the exams?" she asked taking a piece of toast with marmalade on it. "Oh yeah," said Ron. "Bound to be, isn't it? O.W.L.s are really important, affect the jobs you can apply for and everything. We get career advice too, later this year, Bill told me. So you can choose what N.E.W.T.s you want to do next year."
"D'you know what you want to do after Hogwarts?" Harriet asked the other two, as they left the Great Hall shortly afterward and set off toward their History of Magic classroom. "Not really," said Ron slowly. "Except . . . well . . ." He looked slightly sheepish. "What?" Harriet urged him. "Well, it'd be cool to be an Auror," said Ron in an offhand voice. "Yeah, it would," said Harriet fervently. "But they're, like, the elite," said Ron. "You've got to be really good. What about you, Hermione?"
"I don't know," said Hermione. "I think I'd really like to do something worthwhile." That made her friends blink. "An Auror's worthwhile!" said Harriet. "Yes, it is, but it's not the only worthwhile thing," said Hermione thoughtfully. "I mean, if I could take S.P.E.W. further . . ." Harriet and Ron carefully avoided looking at each other. History of Magic was by common consent the most boring subject ever devised by Wizard-kind. Professor Binns, their ghost teacher, had a wheezy, droning voice that was almost guaranteed to cause severe drowsiness within ten minutes, five in warm weather. He never varied the form of their lessons, but lectured them without pausing while they took notes, or rather, gazed sleepily into space. Ron had so far managed to scrape passes in this subject only by copying Harriet and Hermione's notes before exams; they alone seemed able to resist the soporific power of Binns's voice.
Today they suffered three-quarters of an hour's droning on the subject of giant wars. Harriet heard just enough within the first ten minutes to appreciate dimly that in another teacher's hands this subject might have been mildly interesting, but then her brain tried to disengage, and she spent the remaining thirty-five minutes avoiding playing hangman on a corner of her parchment with Ron, while Hermione shot them filthy looks out of the corner of her eye. "How would it be," she asked them coldly as they left the classroom for break (Binns drifting away through the blackboard), "if I refused to lend you my notes this year?"
"I'd fail my O.W.L.s," said Ron. "If you want that on your conscience, Hermione . . ." Harriet sighed. "Well, you'd deserve it," she snapped. "You don't even try to listen to him, do you?" Harriet opened her mouth to reply, but Ron was faster. "We do try," said Ron. "I just haven't got your brains or your memory or your concentration — you're just cleverer than I am — is it nice to rub it in?" Harriet shook her head, seeing where this was going. "Oh, don't give me that rubbish," said Hermione, but she looked slightly mollified as she led the way out into the damp courtyard.
A fine misty drizzle was falling, so that the people standing in huddles around the yard looked blurred at the edges. Harriet, Ron, and Hermione chose a secluded corner under a heavily dripping balcony, turning up the collars of their robes against the chilly September air and talking about what Snape was likely to set them in the first lesson of the year. They had got as far as agreeing that it was likely to be something extremely difficult, just to catch them off guard after a two-month holiday, when someone walked around the corner toward them.
"Hello, Harriet!" It was Cho Chang and what was more, she was on her own again. This was most unusual: Cho was almost always surrounded by a gang of giggling girls; Harriet remembered the agony of trying to get her by herself to ask her to the Yule Ball. "Hi," said Harriet, feeling her face grow hot. At least you're not covered in Stinksap this time, she told herself. Momentarily forgetting that Cho herself had said she wasn't into girls romantically. Cho seemed to be thinking along the same lines. "You got that stuff off, then?"
"Yeah," said Harriet, trying to grin as though the memory of their last meeting was funny as opposed to mortifying. "So did you . . . er . . . have a good summer?" The moment she had said this she wished she hadn't: Cedric had been Cho's boyfriend and the memory of his near death must have affected her holiday almost as badly as it had affected Harriet's. . . . Something seemed to tauten in her face, but she said, "Oh, it was all right, you know . . ."
"Is that a Tornados badge?" Ron demanded suddenly, pointing at the front of Cho's robes, to which a sky-blue badge emblazoned with a double gold T was pinned. "You don't support them, do you?" Harriet wanted to slap him. "Yeah, I do," said Cho. "Have you always supported them, or just since they started winning the league?" said Ron, in what Harriet considered an unnecessarily accusatory tone of voice. "I've supported them since I was six," said Cho coolly. "Anyway . . . see you, Harriet." She walked away. Hermione waited until Cho was halfway across the courtyard before rounding on Ron.
"You are so tactless!" she said hotly. "What? I only asked her if —" he said raising his hands. "Couldn't you tell she wanted to talk to Harriet on her own?" Hermione said pointedly. "So? She could've done, I wasn't stopping —" started Ron. "What on earth were you attacking her about her Quidditch team for?" said Hermione wagging a finger at him. "Attacking? I wasn't attacking her, I was only —" he spluttered. "Who cares if she supports the Tornados?" she said with an exasperated gesture. "Oh, come on, half the people you see wearing those badges only bought them last season —" Ron said as if the fact explained everything. "But what does it matter?" said Hermione, as if buying team memorabilia between seasons wasn't a big deal. "It means they're not real fans, they're just jumping on the bandwagon —" Ron said, unsurprised he had to explain sports to Hermione.
"That's the bell," said Harriet listlessly, because Ron and Hermione were bickering too loudly to hear it. They did not stop arguing all the way down to Snape's dungeon, which gave Harriet plenty of time to reflect that between Neville and Ron she would be lucky ever to have two minutes' conversation with Cho that she could look back on without wanting to leave the country. And yet, she thought, as they joined the queue lining up outside Snape's classroom door, she had chosen to come and talk to her, hadn't she? She had been Cedric's girlfriend; she could easily have hated Harriet for coming out of the Triwizard maze unaided when Cedric had nearly died, yet she was talking to her in a perfectly friendly way, not as though she thought her mad, or a liar, or in some horrible way responsible for Cedric's near death. . . . Yes, she had definitely chosen to come and talk to her, and that made the second time in two days . . . and at this thought, Harriet's spirits rose. Even the ominous sound of Snape's dungeon door creaking open did not puncture the small, hopeful bubble that seemed to have swelled in her chest. She filed into the classroom behind Ron and Hermione and followed them to their usual table at the back, ignoring the huffy, irritable noises now issuing from both of them.
"Settle down," said Snape coldly, shutting the door behind him. There was no real need for the call to order; the moment the class had heard the door close, quiet had fallen and all fidgeting stopped. Snape's mere presence was usually enough to ensure a class's silence. "Before we begin today's lesson," said Snape, sweeping over to his desk and staring around at them all, "I think it appropriate to remind you that next June you will be sitting an important examination, during which you will prove how much you have learned about the composition and use of magical potions. Moronic though some of this class undoubtedly are, I expect you to scrape an 'Acceptable' in your O.W.L., or suffer my . . . displeasure."
His gaze lingered this time upon Neville, who gulped. "After this year, of course, many of you will cease studying with me," Snape went on. "I take only the very best into my N.E.W.T. Potions class, which means that some of us will certainly be saying good-bye." His eyes rested on Harriet and his lip curled. Harriet glared back, feeling a grim pleasure at the idea that she would be able to give up Potions after fifth year. "But we have another year to go before that happy moment of farewell," said Snape softly, "so whether you are intending to attempt N.E.W.T. or not, I advise all of you to concentrate your efforts upon maintaining the high-pass level I have come to expect from my O.W.L. students. Today we will be mixing a potion that often comes up at Ordinary Wizarding Level: the Draught of Peace, a potion to calm anxiety and soothe agitation. Be warned: If you are too heavy-handed with the ingredients you will put the drinker into a heavy and sometimes irreversible sleep, so you will need to pay close attention to what you are doing." On Harriet's left, Hermione sat up a little straighter, her expression one of the utmost attentiveness. "The ingredients and method" — Snape flicked his wand — "are on the blackboard" — (they appeared there) — "you will find everything you need" — he flicked his wand again — "in the store cupboard" — (the door of the said cupboard sprang open) — "you have an hour and a half. . . . Start."
Just as Harriet, Ron, and Hermione had predicted, Snape could hardly have set them a more difficult, fiddly potion. The ingredients had to be added to the cauldron in precisely the right order and quantities; the mixture had to be stirred exactly the right number of times, firstly in clockwise, then in counterclockwise directions; the heat of the flames on which it was simmering had to be lowered to exactly the right level for a specific number of minutes before the final ingredient was added. "A light silver vapor should now be rising from your potion," called Snape, with ten minutes left to go. Harriet, who was sweating profusely, looked desperately around the dungeon. Her own cauldron was issuing the correct light silver vapor it was supposed to; Ron's was spitting green sparks. Seamus was feverishly prodding the flames at the base of his cauldron with the tip of his wand, as they had gone out. The surface of Hermione's potion, however, was a shimmering mist of silver vapor, and as Snape swept by he looked down his hooked nose at it without comment, which meant that he could find nothing to criticize. At Harriet's cauldron, however, Snape stopped, looking down at Harriet with a horrible smirk on his face. "Potter, what is this supposed to be?" The Slytherins at the front of the class all looked up eagerly; they loved hearing Snape taunt Harriet.
"The Draught of Peace," said Harriet tensely, wondering what she could possibly have done wrong. "Tell me, Potter," said Snape softly, "can you read?" Draco Malfoy laughed. "Yes, I can," said Harriet, her fingers clenched tightly around her wand. "Read the third line of the instructions for me, Potter." Harriet squinted at the blackboard; it was not easy to make out the instructions through the haze of multicolored steam now filling the dungeon. "'Add powdered moonstone, stir three times counterclockwise, allow to simmer for seven minutes, then add two drops of syrup of hellebore.'"
Her heart nearly sank. She had almost not added syrup of hellebore, before she had proceeded to the fourth line of the instructions after allowing her potion to simmer for seven minutes. "Did you do everything on the third line, Potter?" Snape sneered, as if hoping she'd done it wrong. "Yes," said Harriet very quietly. "I beg your pardon?" said Snape hotly. "Yes," said Harriet, more loudly. "I nearly forgot the hellebore but I didn't . . ."
"I know you nearly did, Potter, which means that this mess was nearly utterly worthless. Evanesco." The contents of Harriet's potion vanished; she was left standing foolishly beside an empty cauldron. "Those of you who have managed to read the instructions, fill one flagon with a sample of your potion, label it clearly with your name, and bring it up to my desk for testing," said Snape. "Homework: twelve inches of parchment on the properties of moonstone and its uses in potion-making, to be handed in on Thursday."
While everyone around her filled their flagons, Harriet cleared away her things, seething. Her potion had been as good as Hermione's, which was now firmly bottled and on its way to Snape's desk, and loads better than Neville's, which had achieved the consistency of just-mixed cement and which Neville was now having to gouge out of his cauldron, yet it was she, Harriet, who would be receiving zero marks for the day's work. She stuffed her wand back into her bag and slumped down onto her seat, watching everyone else march up to Snape's desk with filled and corked flagons. When at long last the bell rang, Harriet was first out of the dungeon and had already started her lunch by the time Ron and Hermione joined her in the Great Hall. The ceiling had turned an even murkier gray during the morning. Rain was lashing the high windows.
"That was really unfair," said Hermione consolingly, sitting down next to Harriet and helping herself to shepherd's pie. "Your potion was nearly as good as mine and nowhere near as bad as Goyle's, when he put it in his flagon the whole thing shattered and set his robes on fire."
"Yeah, well," said Harriet, glowering at her plate, "since when has Snape ever been fair to me?" Neither of the others answered; all three of them knew that Snape and Harriet's mutual enmity had been absolute from the moment Harriet had set foot in Hogwarts. "I did think he might be a bit better this year," said Hermione in a disappointed voice. "I mean . . . you know . . ." She looked carefully around; there were half a dozen empty seats on either side of them and nobody was passing the table. ". . . Now he's in the Order and everything."
"Poisonous toadstools don't change their spots," said Ron sagely. "Anyway, I've always thought Dumbledore was cracked trusting Snape, where's the evidence he ever really stopped working for You-Know-Who?"
"I think Dumbledore's probably got plenty of evidence, even if he doesn't share it with you, Ron," snapped Hermione. "Oh, shut up, the pair of you," said Harriet heavily, as Ron opened his mouth to argue back. Hermione and Ron both froze, looking angry and offended. "Can't you give it a rest?" she said. "You're always having a go at each other, it's driving me mad." And abandoning her shepherd's pie, she swung her schoolbag back over her shoulder and left them sitting there. She walked up the marble staircase two steps at a time, past the many students hurrying toward lunch. The anger that had just flared so unexpectedly still blazed inside her, and the vision of Ron and Hermione's shocked faces afforded her a sense of deep satisfaction. Serve them right, she thought. Why can't they give it a rest? . . . Bickering all the time . . . It's enough to drive anyone up the wall. . . . 
She passed the large picture of Sir Cadogan the knight on a landing; Sir Cadogan drew his sword and brandished it fiercely at Harriet, who ignored him. "Come back, you scurvy dog, stand fast and fight!" yelled Sir Cadogan in a muffled voice from behind his visor, but Harriet merely walked on, and when Sir Cadogan attempted to follow her by running into a neighboring picture, he was rebuffed by its inhabitant, a large and angry-looking wolfhound.
Harriet spent the rest of the lunch hour walking alone around the castle on a circuitous route to Gryffindor Tower, and consequently she was the first to sit by the roaring fire that warmed the common room studying when the bell rang. Divination was Harriet's least favorite class after Potions, which was due mainly to Professor Trelawney's habit of predicting her premature death to her friends every few lessons. A thin woman, heavily draped in shawls and glittering with strings of beads, she always reminded Harriet of some kind of insect, with her glasses hugely magnifying her eyes. She was busy putting copies of battered, leather-bound books on each of the spindly little tables with which her room was littered when Ron entered the room, but so dim was the light cast by the lamps covered by scarves and the low-burning, sickly-scented fire that she appeared not to notice him as he took a seat in the shadows. The rest of the class arrived over the next five minutes. Ron emerged from the trapdoor, looked around carefully, spotted an empty table and made directly for it, or as directly as he could while having to wend his way between tables, chairs, and overstuffed poufs.
"Hermione and me have stopped arguing," he planned to say, the very next time he saw Harriet. "Good," he imagined Harriet grunting. "But Hermione says she thinks it would be nice if you stopped taking out your temper on us," he planned to say. "I'm not —" he imagined Harriet replying. "I'm just passing on the message," Ron planned to say, talking over her. "But I reckon she's right. It's not our fault how Lavender and Snape treat you." Hoping she'd get the point. "I never said it —" he started to imagine Harriet replying. "Good day," said Professor Trelawney in her usual misty, dreamy voice, and Ron's imagining broke off, feeling both annoyed and slightly ashamed of himself again. "And welcome back to Divination. I have, of course, been following your fortunes most carefully over the holidays, and am delighted to see that you have all returned to Hogwarts safely — as, of course, I knew you would. You will find on the tables before you copies of The Dream Oracle, by Inigo Imago. Dream interpretation is a most important means of divining the future and one that may very probably be tested in your O.W.L. Not, of course, that I believe examination passes or failures are of the remotest importance when it comes to the sacred art of divination. If you have the Seeing Eye, certificates and grades matter very little. However, the headmaster likes you to sit the examination, so . . ."
Her voice trailed away delicately, leaving them all in no doubt that Professor Trelawney considered her subject above such sordid matters as examinations. "Turn, please, to the introduction and read what Imago has to say on the matter of dream interpretation. Then divide into pairs. Use The Dream Oracle to interpret each other's most recent dreams. Carry on." The one good thing to be said for this lesson was that it was not a double period. By the time they had all finished reading the introduction of the book, they had barely ten minutes left for dream interpretation. At the table next to Ron, Dean had paired up with Neville, who immediately embarked on a long-winded explanation of a nightmare involving a pair of giant scissors wearing his grandmother's best hat; Ron merely looked at the table glumly.
"I never remember my dreams," Ron muttered to himself. "You must remember one of them," said his mind impatiently. "Well, I had one that I was playing Quidditch the other night," said Ron to himself, screwing up his face in an effort to remember. "What d'you reckon that means?" Wondering if he was going mad, talking to himself. "Probably that you're going to be eaten by a giant marshmallow or something," said his mind, as he was turning the pages of The Dream Oracle without interest.
It was very dull work looking up bits of dreams in the Oracle and Ron was not cheered up when Professor Trelawney set them the task of keeping a dream diary for a month as homework. When the bell went, Ron led the way back down the ladder, Ron grumbling loudly upon reuniting with Harriet.
"D'you realize how much homework we've got already? Binns set us a foot-and-a-half-long essay on giant wars, Snape wants a foot on the use of moonstones, and now I've got a month's dream diary from Trelawney! Fred and George weren't wrong about O.W.L. year, were they? That Umbridge woman had better not give us any . . ." When they entered the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom they found Professor Umbridge already seated at the teacher's desk, wearing the fluffy pink cardigan of the night before and the black velvet bow on top of her head. Harriet was again reminded forcibly of a large fly perched unwisely on top of an even larger toad.
The class was quiet as it entered the room; Professor Umbridge was, as yet, an unknown quantity and nobody knew yet how strict a disciplinarian she was likely to be. "Well, good afternoon!" she said when finally the whole class had sat down. A few people mumbled "Good afternoon," in reply. "Tut, tut," said Professor Umbridge. "That won't do, now, will it? I should like you, please, to reply 'Good afternoon, Professor Umbridge.' One more time, please. Good afternoon, class!"
"Good afternoon, Professor Umbridge," they chanted back at her. "There, now," said Professor Umbridge sweetly. "That wasn't too difficult, was it? Wands away and quills out, please." Many of the class exchanged gloomy looks; the order "wands away" had never yet been followed by a lesson they had found interesting. Harriet shoved her wand back inside her bag and pulled out quill, ink, and parchment. Professor Umbridge opened her handbag, extracted her own wand, which was an unusually short one, and tapped the blackboard sharply with it; words appeared on the board at once: