Jenna Lily Potter: Sorcerer's Stone

Chapter 7: Suspicious

The next day I woke up and put my robes with the Gryffindor crest on. I combed my hair and let it flow down my back. I fixed the necklace Uncle Sev gave me with the snake on it. Even though I wasn't put in Slytherin he was still happy for me. Aunt Minnie and him had sent me a letter to congratulate me yesterday late at night. Accalia wanted me to do her hair so I did a loose bun on it. We headed down the stairs of our dormitory and hurried down the staircase.

"There, look."

"Where?"

"Next to the kid with a bun on her hair."

"Wearing the snake necklace?"

"Did you see her face?"

"Did you see her scar?"

Whispers followed me from the moment I left the dormitory. People lining up outside classrooms stood on tiptoe to get a look at me, or doubled back to pass me in the corridors again, staring. I wished they wouldn't, because he was trying to concentrate on getting to the Great Hall.

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept going to visit each other, and I was sure the coats of armor could walk.

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 learned how to take care of all the strange plants and fungi, and found out what they were used for. This was Neville, Accalia, and Jenna's favorite class.

Easily the most boring class was History of Magic, which was the only one 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 the next morning to teach, leaving his body behind him. Binns droned on and on while they scribbled down names and dates, and got Emetic 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 class he took the roll call, and when he reached Jenna and Harry's name he gave an excited squeak and toppled out of sight.

Then Aunt Minnie was stricter with her 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 realized they weren't going to be changing the furniture into animals for a long time.

After taking 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 Lilian Starling had made any difference to their match. Lilian was a Hufflepuff girl who was in her first year and she had straight blonde hair and grey-blue eyes. She was Jenna's partner and they became friends.

Professor McGonagall showed the class how it had gone all silver and pointy and gave Lilian a smile.

The class everyone had really been looking forward to was Defense 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.