Fred and George and the Toilers of Trouble (Year 1) ✔

Chapter 17:11

At the end of the lesson, George and Angelina hung their heads while the Potions Master led them back to his office. They could just hear Fred and Lee crowing with laughter as they entered the chilling space. The dark gray stone on the chamber walls was almost black in the scant light of a few dim gas lamps. When their eyes adjusted, they noticed the many cabinets of labeled bottles beside crowded shelves of bubbling vials, fragmented animal skulls, crumpled hides of scaly skin, dismembered horns, and a vast collection of unrecognizable items that made them eerily uncomfortable.

Angelina sat in the chair across from the spindle-legged desk. There was a second chair, but George kept his distance.

"What's the matter with you two?" said Snape in an exasperated voice. "Working together, you were the best in class. Mister Weasley, sit down."

George dragged the second chair away from Angelina and dropped to the green, crushed velvet cushion. Snape appraised them with narrow eyes. Then, with a wave of his wand, brought the chairs so close together they were touching. George and Angelina turned their backs to one another.

"Just give us detention and be done with it," he pleaded. "I don't want to be anywhere near her!"

"That much is clear. Close your mouth!" their professor ordered.

Angelina rolled her eyes and prodded George in the back, as Snape produced a scrap of parchment. He quilled a short note and handed it to her.

"Read this."

She looked down at the words, bewildered.

"Aloud, if you would," he continued.

"A clean cauldron...crafts a peak, precise potion," Angelina read rapidly. "Is that supposed to mean something?"

"Silence!" he said, before turning to George. "Now, how would you critique that reading?"

"She's over-pronouncing the words," he replied, rather unwillingly.

"It was written that way!" she argued.

"Mister Weasley, your turn."

George tore the parchment from her hand and read it twice as fast. "A clean cauldron crafts a peak, precise potion."

"Miss Johnson, your most honest opinion?"

"Of that?" asked Angelina. "Well, his voice is nasal...and irritating."

"Oh, shut up," George barked.

Snape had seen enough. He stood from his desk, took the parchment back from them, and exhaled a long, unwavering breath through his substantial nose. When he moved toward his immense curio cabinet, with its numerous drawers and darkened glass windows, George scooted his chair away from Angelina. They waited uncertainly as Snape concocted a colorless potion and poured it into a strange glass beaker that partly resembled a tapered flute. Upon returning, he handed it to George.

"Breathe out," he said firmly.

"Into this?"

"Yes."

"Why not make her do it first?"

"Weasley, stop trying my patience."

George assessed the vial nervously. The eddying potion smelled of rain-moistened wood. He hesitantly pressed one end of the glass vial to his lips and did as he was told. An overwhelming desire to cough came over him. Spurting out of his nose and mouth came a cloud of pink, glittery mist. He nearly dropped the vial as he covered his mouth and continued coughing, the sparkling cloud coming through his fingers in puffs.