Echo | Harry Potter - George Weasley

Chapter 29: A Summer Well Spent

Year 3 at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

"Oh, is that what our daughter looks like, Elise?" Dorian peered over the top of his newspaper at Shaye, who had just come down for breakfast. "I'd all but forgotten."

Shaye rolled her eyes as she grabbed a bowl from the cupboard, a box of cereal from the pantry, and the jug of milk from the fridge. After spending nearly all summer hold up in her room, pouring over the map she had found her first year at Hogwarts, the letter about the Lost Wanderer, and repeating Dumbledore's words over and over again in her head, she was used to the comments and jokes about her rare appearances around the house. They got tiring really fast.

Not all of Shaye's limited summer activities were her doing, however. For the first few weeks of break, she had been serving the grounding she had coming from the year previous when she, Harry, and Ron had taken the flying car without permission. So, she passed the time by looking for clues about her sister. After those few weeks were up though, she had become too caught up in her 'sleuthing' to do anything else. 

Of course, Shaye couldn't tell her parents the truth about what she was really doing in her room, so she had lied and said she was reading up in advance for her third-year classes. This meant that she had to have some sort of textbook on her at all time—and also that she had needed to purchase her school supplies for the year much earlier than normal to keep the ruse up—but somehow, she had managed to make it through two months with neither of her parents suspecting anything. 

The one catch, however, was that she was going to have to do really well in her classes this year or else it would seem like she was the most useless witch in all of London. With pre-reading two months in advance, her parents were expecting Hermione-level grades.

"Your humour never ceases to amaze me," Shaye said with a straight face as she sat down at the table with her bowl of cereal. 

"We're just worried about you, is all." Elise smiled and took one of Shaye's brown braids in her hand. Shaye rolled her eyes. "Not that we're not proud of you for taking your studies so seriously, because we are, but most kids your age are out playing all summer."

Dorian nodded. "The only time I ever saw you walk out that front door was to check for letters from your friends that that knobhead of an owl of yours dropped outside your window."

"Hey!" Shaye spoke with a mouth full of cereal. "Erwin is not a knobhead! He's just small ... he has trouble holding those big envelopes with his tiny talons sometimes."

"Don't talk with your mouth full," Dorian scolded lightly. "And didn't I tell you that getting a small owl was going to cause you more trouble than any bird could ever make up for in cuteness?"

Shaye smiled sheepishly and shrugged. "Yeah, but ... he's is really cute."

Dorian just shook his head before folding his newspaper back up and setting it down on the table. Shaye scanned the front page quickly, the headline reading, Escape from Azkaban with a deranged-looking man laughing manically below it. 

Shaye shovelled a spoonful of cereal into her mouth. "Who's that?" She gestured to the man with her spoon, a drip of milk dropping onto the paper and smudging some of the ink.

"You are such a mess." Dorian swatted his daughter's spoon away. "When are you leaving again?" Shaye just rolled her eyes again and waited for an answer. "That's Sirius Black," he finally said.

"Cool." 

"He is an escaped convict. Not 'cool'."

Finished with her breakfast, Shaye took her dishes to the sink and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "Mum, Dad thinks I'm going to grow up and become an escaped convict."