Celeste Shalom and the Philosopher's Stone

~Chapter 8~ {The Potions Master}

There, look.'

'Where?'

'Next to the tall kid with the red hair.'

'Wearing the glasses?'

'Did you see his face?'

'Did you see his scar?'

Celeste's kept hearing whisper's about Harry as she stepped out of the home room.

People queuing outside classrooms stood on tiptoe to get a look at him, or doubled back to pass him in the corridors again, staring.

"Ya, leave the boy alone" Celeste interrupted the starer's, "look how clueless he is!" She stated.

One look at the boy and he looked clueless.

Celeste wished she could help whatever he's clueless for but she still thought he would make fun of her.

Everything was so confusing, You first had to find the class And then, once you had managed to find them, there were the lessons themselves.

There was a lot more to magic, as Celeste quickly found out, then waving your wand and saying a few funny words.

She felt like a muggle!

They had to study the night skies through their telescopes every Wednesday at midnight and learn the names of different stars and the movements of the planets.

Three times a week they went out to the greenhouses behind the castle to study Herbology, with a dumpy little witch called Professor Sprout, where they learnt how to take care of all the strange plants and fungi and found out what they were used for.

Easily the most boring lesson was History of Magic, which was the only class taught by a ghost. Professor Binns had been very old indeed when he had fallen asleep in front of the staff-room fire and got up next morning to teach, leaving his body behind him.

Binns droned on and on while they scribbled down names and dates and got Emeric the Evil and Uric the Oddball mixed up.

Professor Flitwick, the Charms teacher, was a tiny little wizard who had to stand on a pile of books to see over his desk. At the start of their first lesson he took the register.

Professor McGonagall was again different. Celeste had been quite right to think she wasn't a teacher to cross. Strict and clever, she gave them a talking-to the moment they had sat down in her first class.

'Transfiguration is some of the most complex and dangerous magic you will learn at Hogwarts,' she said. 'Anyone messing around in my class will leave and not come back. You have been warned.'

Then she changed her desk into a pig and back again. They were all very impressed and couldn't wait to get started, but soon realised they weren't going to be changing the furniture into animals for a long time. After making a lot of complicated notes, they were each given a match and started trying to turn it into a needle. By the end of the lesson, only Hermione Granger and Celeste had made any difference to their match; Professor McGonagall showed the class how it had gone all silver and pointy and gave Hermione and Celeste a rare smile.

The class everyone had really been looking forward to was Defence Against the Dark Arts, but Quirrell's lessons turned out to be a bit of a joke. His classroom smelled strongly of garlic, which everyone said was to ward off a vampire he'd met in Romania and was afraid would be coming back to get him one of these days. His turban, he told them, had been given to him by an African prince as a thank-you for getting rid of a troublesome zombie, but they weren't sure they believed this story. For one thing, when Seamus Finnigan asked eagerly to hear how Quirrell had fought off the zombie, Quirrell went pink and started talking about the weather; for another, they had noticed that a funny smell hung around the turban, and the Weasley twins insisted that it was stuffed full of garlic as well, so that Quirrell was protected wherever he went.