Poisoned Youth | ✓

32- S N E A K

The Quibbler article came back sooner than expected. Loads of people believed Harry and others didn't. Unfortunately enough, Professor Umbridge caught Harry and banned him from going to Hogsmeade along with giving him another week's worth of attention. My sharp tongue also got me another attention being I "don't seem to have learned how to respect authority". Despite her disdain, some of our other teachers were more proud than not and gave Gryffindor crazy amounts of points for simple things and even slipped Harry a few secret treats. The only person who had anything to say about it was Adelaide Ward who cornered us in the library and lectured our ears off.

"I don't know what you see in her," Ron mumbled as she retreated, "but she is mental."

Hermione knocked him upside the head as I narrowed my eyes at him.

"What! I'm just saying," he defended himself. "That Slytherin Princess is all types of mad. What happened to Cho?"

Again, Ron was knocked upside the head, not by Hermione, but by me.

But along with the magazine, there was also another Gryffindor game. The very best thing you could say about the match was that it was short; the Gryffindor spectators had to endure only twenty-two minutes of agony. It was hard to say what the worst thing was: Ron's fourteenth failed save, Sloper missing the Bludger but hitting Angelina in the mouth with his bat, or Kirke shrieking and falling backwards off his broom as Zacharias Smith zoomed at him carrying the Quaffle. The miracle was that Gryffindor only lost by ten points: Ginny managed to snatch the Snitch from right under Hufflepuff Seeker Summerby's nose so that the final score was two hundred and forty versus two hundred and thirty.

Professor Trelawney had gotten sacked as well. There was a huge scene in the courtyard, her trunks thrown everywhere and an empty bottle of sherry in her hands. Professor Umbridge, as High Inquisitor, had the authority to sack her without consulting Dumbledore. But Dumbledore being his marvellous self found a loophole in Umbridge's reign of terror and appointed his own choice of substitute: Firenze, a centaur.

As the teachers, Hermione, and I persisted in reminding Harry and Ron, the O.W.L.s were drawing ever nearer every day. All the fifth years were suffering from stress to some degree, but Hannah Abbott became the first to receive a Calming Draught from Madam Pomfrey after she burst into tears during Herbology and sobbed that she was too stupid to take exams and wanted to leave school now.

I was nearly at that point as well and ended up crying, in the common room, into my Alchemy coursebook. It took Harry, Ron, and Hermione almost an hour to calm me down and promise to help me study. There were no more breakdowns like that from me afterwards. If it had not been for the D.A. lessons, I thought I wouldn't have been able to keep a level head. I sometimes felt that I was living for the hours I spent in the Room of Requirement, working hard but thoroughly enjoying myself at the same time, swelling with pride as I looked around at my fellow D.A. members and saw how far we've all come.

Harry finally had us work on Patronuses, which everybody had been very keen to practice, though as he kept reminding us, producing a Patronus in the middle of a brightly lit classroom when we were not under threat was very different to producing it when confronted by something like a dementor.

"Can you show us one more time?" Dennis Creevey asked Harry.

He sighed and expelled his Patronus. The stag galloped across the room and disappeared into the wall. Everyone seemed to love his Patronus.

"Although," Harry stated, "Patronuses may be pretty, the need for them is not. It is horrifying and dangerous because of the threat that is present at the time of need."

"Oh, don't be such a killjoy," said Cho brightly, watching her silvery swan-shaped Patronus soar around the Room of Requirement that she managed to make during our last lesson before Easter. "They're so pretty!"