The Little Pureblood [1]

Chapter 20: A Bad Bludger

"Heir of Slytherin? Is this school really that dramatic?" Sam exclaimed as she flipped through the pages of Hogwarts A History.

It was the following week of classes and after the disastrous Halloween where Filch's cat was used to scare the school, no one would shut up about it. Everywhere I walked I would see groups of people standing in the middle of the hallway (hate those types of people) and hear snip bits about the Chamber of Secrets. This included a portion of the teachers as well. Lockhart would not drop the subject and started to reference more stories from his "treacherous" journeys that somehow were like what happened to the cat.

The only good thing we got out of him was that the cat was not actually dead, but rather petrified. That is how in Herbology, we got on the topic of helping Professor Sprout with her mandrakes- a plant that grows like a human but is squashed and ripped to shreds when it comes time to use their bodies to create potions to cure petrified things like Mrs. Norris. What a lovely thought.

Like I expected, everyone crowded to the library the next day to figure out what the Chamber of Secrets was. But, what I did not expect was for the rest of the school to grow even colder to us Slytherins. That was of course until Sam found out why.

I peered over Sam's shoulder to look at the page where I scanned it quietly.

"The bloodline of Salazar Slytherin can open a chamber? Why is that so important?" I asked before continuing my Lockhart homework, also known as a poem used to inflate Lockhart's already blown ego.

"A monster lies inside it." I looked up from my homework and looked back at the book curiously.

"What kind of monster?" Sam huffed a sigh before passing the book to me.

"Well what do you reckon it to be other than a snake? If it's related to Slytherin it just has to be. And any relative of Salazar's has got to be Slytherin." The thought of a monster sized snake petrifying a cat did little to make me uneasy. Probably because this all seemed a little far-fetched. Sam seemed to believe what I thought too since we stopped talking about it and started on our poems, where we tried coming up with words that rhymed with pigheaded git.

But while Sam and I did not seem that involved with what was going on, the rest of the school seemed deeply invested in The Chamber. It made sense now why the Slytherins were thought of as the major villains, like we weren't already. Everyone thought any Slytherin could send a scary monster out on the school and so naturally, people stayed away from us and Sam and I embraced it along with other Slytherins.

The one thing that did bug me was how little we saw Ginny. After Halloween, she became an emotional mess. Crying in the hallway, barely speaking in potions and when Snape did peer over one of our shoulders to see what disaster we had created, Ginny would lose it and become mute or become very flustered, thus dropping too many beetles eyes into her cauldron that one time, making the whole room smell like rotten meat. Snape gave her detention and docked points for good measure.

As much as Sam and I tired, there was little we could do to help Ginny. Whenever we tried, she always ran back to her common room, the one place we could not follow. I tired reaching out to Hermione about it but she also became strangely distant to me.

Couldn't everyone just get it through their thick heads that I was American so I could not possibly be the heir of Slytherin so there was no real danger with being near me.

My worries about Ginny faded as the first Quidditch game of the season came closer. It was Slytherin verses Gryffindor, probably the most exciting game of the season. My brother and the rest of the team always went out in the afternoon and came back to the common room soaked with mud and rain, all of them exhausted from their training.