Unforgettable - Draco Malfoy Love Story

2 - Spiders & Skrewts

Chapter 2

"Don't tell me you're thinking about entering that contest," Olivia said to Tony over breakfast.

"Why not? I'll be 17 by the time we're allowed to enter."

"It's dangerous!" Olivia said. "I read in the 1792 tournament, all three of the Headmasters were injured by a rampaging cockatrice the champions were supposed to be catching..."

I tuned out Olivia's rambling and took in everyone in the Great Hall. It wasn't creeper-staring...just watching. Watching Parvati Patil whisper excitedly to Lavender Brown, watching the Weasley twins try to sell a joke box to a first year, watching Cedric Diggory joke around with his friends, watching Luna Lovegood staring dreamily at the enchanted ceiling. Then my eyes fell at the far end of the Slytherin table.

Draco Malfoy was shooting me a cold glare. Chills went down my spine as I turned away from him and back to breakfast.

I've decided Mad Eye Moody wasn't someone you wanted to get on the wrong side of.

He was writing on the blackboard, his back turned to the class, and when Seamus Finnigan tried to stick his wad of gum under his desk, he yelled, "You need to find a better place to put your chewing gum than the underside of your desk, Mr. Finnigan!"

"No way, the old codger can see out of the back of his head!" Seamus whispered to Dean Thomas.

"And hear across classrooms!" Mad Eye roared. I flinched as he threw a piece of chalk across the room, nearly hitting Seamus in the head.

"He's a bloody lunatic," I remarked under my breath.

He proceeded to show us the Unforgivable Curses on a spider. Under the Imperius curse, the spider leapt from desk to desk, climbing on Parvati Patil's clothes, and to the fierce pleasure of the Gryffindor side of the classroom, dancing on Malfoy's face.

I started laughing uncontrollably, until the spider landed right on the top of my head, twirling around my ponytail.

I froze with shock, holding still, suppressing a whimper.

"Not so funny when it's on your head, Strathmore," Malfoy sneered.

I made a face at him as the spider leapt off my head and danced its way back to Mad Eye.

The rest of class was awful, Mad Eye tortured the spider on Neville Longbottom's desk -- the Gryffindor boy whose parents were tortured to insanity by the Lestrange's. I had to look away as he silenced the spider's squeaks with the killing curse.

Care of Magical Creatures class was more or less of a joke. I never usually minded Hagrid, the gamekeeper, like most Slytherins did. But I wasn't exactly too fond of picking up squelchy handfuls of frog liver and ant eggs to feed to the Blast Ended Skrewts.

The skrewts looked like shell-less lobsters, pale, slimy, and sluggish, with no visible head and legs sticking out in odd places, about half a foot long. They smelled foully, like raw sewage and dead fish. Every so often sparks would burst out of the ends of them and propel the sad-looking slug forward a few inches.

"On'y jus' hatched," rumbled Hagrid, "so yeh'll be able ter raise 'em yerselves!"

"And why would we want to raise them?" asked Malfoy coldly.

Hagrid was stumped at the question.

"I mean, what do they do?" Malfoy said. "What is the point of them?"

"Tha's next lesson, Malfoy. Yer jus' feedin' 'em today. Try feedin' 'em ant eggs an' frog livers an' a bit o' grass snake. Don't know what they'll go fer, so try a bit o' each."