Accio Evans

Chapter 44: Ball?

Recap: Marlene McKinnon is forced to go into hiding, along with her aunt and cousins, to avoid the danger that is surrounding her and urges Sirius not to contact her for both of their safety.

Hestia and the girls freak out after they receive their mysterious letters from Professor Dumbledore; Lily manages to calm them down. Meanwhile, the boys are initially calm, but start to panic after Sirius points out Dumbledore may know of their thing, Frank is bemused, but they all calm down and manage to meet the girls at breakfast.

James and Lily are collared throughout the day by several other students, worried and confused about their mysterious letters; these include Cardarac Dearborn, Meghan Daley, Benjy Fenwick and a quiet Ravenclaw named Julia. Dumbledore appears at the prefect meeting and announces there will be a ball to lift the student's spirits and the Prefects are to help plan it – James and Lily are in charge as Head Students, but it doesn't go off to a smooth start with them being inundated with outlandish requests, Lily muses this is not quite what Dumbledore had in mind.

"Class! Class! QUIET!" Professor Sprout yelled to try and be heard over the top of her seventh year NEWT students. Fresh from teacher training, and not long out of NEWTs herself – 7 years to be exact – she could sympathise with her students; properly sympathise, not the artificial kind that some teachers put on – the kind where they'd coo, then ruffle your hair and tell you you'd have done fine. Being told you'd done fine was probably the worst thing someone could say, especially since you weren't sure you had. The advantage of being able to sympathise with her students was she was able to reassure her students that it wasn't the end of the world to not do as well in some NEWTs and life would go on regardless of whether you got an O or an E in your Charms exam. The disadvantage however, was still a fresh memory of the exams themselves. With her disability to keep her lips sealed, she seemed to have upset the majority of the class when she blurted out that the Auror academy would only accept applicants who got at least four Outstanding grades and at least one of those must be in a core subject; Alice Prewitt had nearly fainted when she'd heard. The blonde witch was currently hyperventilating in the corner being sympathised by an equally hysterical Lily Evans, for whom it seemed the pressure of yet another bad Transfiguration lesson was weighing heavily on her mind. Minerva had quipped earlier that morning in the staff room, for someone so bright it is a marvel how the girl could be so terrible at Transfiguration. Pomena Sprout just hoped that Lily could pull up her marks with the written portion of the exam, so even if she failed the practical she could be in with a chance to snatching an Exceeds Expectations, Merlin knows that girl will need every precious mark to succeed in the current climate. However, that is another story for another day.

The class that she had worked so hard to maintain control of had descended into chaos. Frank Longbottom seemed to be the only student was remotely calm, reviewing his notes he was oblivious to the bedlam happening around him. Flicking the page to the next chapter The advantages and disadvantages of having a mandrake in the garden, Frank's attention only returned to the class when Isaac Athold knocked his plant pot from the end of the work bench and sent it spiralling off onto the marble floor with an almighty crash. Shaking his head at the silliness of it all, Frank returned to his textbook.

"But I don't want to fail!" Samia Rain squawked, flapping her arms around, so much so that she was in danger of taking off. "She said I need four Oustandings to get into the Auror Academy!" the Professor assumed she was the she Samia was referring to and supressed a smile at Samia joining the Auror Academy, she wouldn't last ten minutes. James Potter seemed to have come to same conclusion if the look he shared with Lily Evans across the room was anything to go by. With all her flapping Samia hadn't noticed the green tentacle creep from the ceramic pot behind her desk and skulk closer towards her desk and curl its way round the table leg, before sneaking up the back of her chair and across her shoulder or the scratch of the green skin as the shoot stretched down the arm of her school robes, swirling around her arm like a olive scaly bangle...