Chapter 51 — Old Magic
The shop door, with its thickly frosted windows, closed behind Ginny with a muted jingle. After leaving school, she never imagined visiting Flourish and Blotts more than once a year, let alone needing to make weekly visits for writing supplies. To the left of the counter, near the floor, she crouched to reach into the torn box of stenographer notebooks and pulled out handfuls with the intent of not needing to buy more for a while.
The notebooks she had already hitched into the crook of her arm began to slip to the floor. Ginny let all the notebooks fall and began bundling them better when a pair of fuchsia alligator-skin pumps strutted over and scraped to a stop after toeing the pile aside.
Ginny glanced up at Rita Skeeter's disdainful, magenta smile. "So many notebooks, my dear? One might get the mistaken impression that you actually take notes," she said.
Ginny rolled her eyes and gathered the bundles to her chest to carry to the counter. "And what would you know about journalism?" Ginny retorted, willing herself not to blush in anger.
Skeeter whispered in Ginny's ear as she passed. "Knowing when one is getting played has nothing to do with journalism, necessarily. I'll agree with that. Your Potter puff piece was a stunning success on that point." She then followed to where Ginny stopped to wait for the shop clerk to finish with a young girl who was taking her time choosing between perfumed notecards.
The girl's mother eyed them curiously, so Ginny moved off to peruse the collection of Super-Stubby Neverout Quills behind Skeeter and kept her voice low. "I know Harry better than you ever will in a hundred years of writing the drivel you do. Can't you find anything better to harp on?" Ginny considered adding, you Harpie, but decided to make an attempt at professionalism since that was ostensibly the topic.
Skeeter crossed her arms and leaned closer to the same rack of quills. Up close her curls were perfect, not a hair out of place. "I have sources everywhere, more than you will ever have in a hundred years of your amateur interviewing of your old school chums."
Behind them the register ticked and clanged. Ginny gritted her teeth in her determination to come up with a properly scathing insult. Skeeter went on, "Your friends may think the Prophet runs the news world, but there are many ways of reaching the wizarding public, my dear child."
"Stop calling me that," Ginny said. "And speaking of getting played, wasn't it you who fell for a pile of fake letters?"
All false pleasantness faded from Skeeter's face. Her makeup became pale smears upon her anger-rudded skin. "No one with a reputation worth defending has ever survived for long as my enemy, Ms. Weasley. Don't think I've forgotten your not-so-small role in that."
Ginny rolled her eyes and managed a prim tone. "I'm quite certain that if you hadn't been eavesdropping, you would not have had any difficulty with it whatsoever."
Skeeter's voice became sickly chummy. "So, where did you get the letters? They were too good for you to have produced them, of that I'm certain."
"Oh, right," Ginny scoffed, moving to the now empty counter. She was still holding a Super-Stubby Neverout Quill and put that down beside the notebooks. Now that she had a decent salary, free room and board, and no time to spend money, expenses were suddenly, magically, a non-issue. Ginny said, "Clearly you have enemies you have not dealt with. That's not MY problem."
