The Chosen One [#Wattys2016]

HOGWARTS

Apparently, you had to be brave to be in Gryffindor. In that case, the sorting hat had made a major screw-up.

Neville wasn't feeling particularly brave when he woke up on his first morning at Hogwarts. He just wanted the ground to swallow him up. Except for few of the Gryffindors, everyone stared and pointed at him the moment he left his dormitory. People lined up outside his classrooms and the common room to get a look at him, or doubled back to pass him in the corridors again. He wished they wouldn't do that – he had been trying to concentrate on finding his way to class and all the staring was proving extremely distracting.

He had woken up extra early to reach classes on time – the staircases had a habit of moving and changing the paths and there were tapestries that were hidden doors or doors that were actually tapestries or solid walls just pretending to be either. All in all, he had discovered that Hogwarts had one hundred and forty two staircases and almost a thousand portraits, tapestries and doors. He had learnt that the hard way that the staircases weren't just a straight flight of stairs when his foot went through a stair with a vanishing step in the middle of it and he had to wait for someone to pull him up. He made a mental note to jump the next time but knew that he would forget it in moments.

Hermione Granger proved to be extremely resourceful. Hermione had not only memorised all their course books – she had also learnt all routes by heart. She found Neville on the third floor, trying to find his way to the Great Hall for breakfast, when in fact the route he had chosen led up to the Astronomy Tower. Had she not stopped to talk to the portrait of a wizened old wizard, he would probably have spent the whole day going up and down without a clue in the world.

Although used to magic, Neville still found it hard not to stare at the portraits which he swore talked and whose contents moved. Why, he saw a thin witch in a frilly Navy blue dress and jet back hair give him a cold stare and walk towards the frame, only to emerge in the neighbouring painting the next moment. Even more surprising than the talking portraits and coats of armour were the ghosts, who popped up anywhere and everywhere. It was a nasty shock to see them gliding through a wall that looked like a door and then bang into the wall when you tried to do the same.

Nearly Headless Nick was happy to point the students the right way but Peeves was worth a lot of trouble if you happened to cross him when you were late for class. He would drop wastepaper baskets on your head, pull rugs from under your feet, pelt you with bits of chalk, or sneak up behind you, invisible, grab your nose, and screech, "GOT YOUR CONK!"

Even worse was the caretaker, Argus Filch. It seemed as though each student had done him a personal harm. Filch owned a cat called Mrs. Norris, a scrawny, dust-colored creature with bulging, lamp-like eyes just like Filch's. She patrolled the corridors alone. Break a rule in front of her, put just one toe out of line, and she'd whisk off for Filch, who'd appear, wheezing, two seconds later. Filch knew the secret passageways of the school better than anyone and could pop up as suddenly as any of the ghosts. The students all hated him, and it was the dearest ambition of many to give Mrs. Norris a good kick.

And then, once you had managed to find them, there were the classes themselves.

Their first ever class was held in the greenhouses behind the castle. Herbology was taught by a dumpy little witch called Professor Sprout, who was the head of Hufflepuff house, where they learned how to take care of all the strange plants and fungi, and found out what they were used for.

Neville felt glad when Professor Sprout told them they would be studying new plants and distressed when she introduced them to Devil's Snare, a magical plant that strangles anything that happened to touch it but cannot stand light or fire.