Imagine Knowing Me :: Chapter One (1/7)
Prologue | Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven
CHAPTER ONE
he Sorting Hat had sung a lot of different welcoming songs over the years. It made up a new one every year, after all, and the theme of it had changed according to its mood. During the Grindelwald years, there had been many messages of standing strong together and accepting all wizards as brothers, and then, during the Sixties, it had apparently felt the need to sprout a message of peace, love, and some other such thing in every welcoming song.
Firewhiskey in the Jar was, however, hitherto unheard of.
Brendon Urie was trying to look at the whole thing with an open mind. The stories from his family about what awaited him when he arrived at Hogwarts had been very varied-containing everything from warnings not to go near the lake at any cost whatsoever, do you hear me, young man? from his mother (Ravenclaw), to extensive, hand-written maps of the best Bubblehead-diving spots in the same lake from his eldest brother Matt (Gryffindor)-and he had grown up with a very vague and contradictory picture of how his time at the finest school of magic in Britain would be. The tales about the Sorting, especially, had changed with how pleased whoever was doing the telling was with him that day, and Brendon thus had no idea if whatever had just happened was part of the ordinary process or not. He had noted that the face of the stern woman who had led them into the Great Hall had become steadily more stony as the song progressed, and that sometime around the second verse the very old man who sat in the centre of the Head Table had started laughing so hard he’d had to produce a very large purple handkerchief to dry his eyes, but he thought maybe it was all part of some test or other. He concentrated on looking very serious and grown-up, and not at all like he was about to throw up from nervousness.
The Sorting Hat came to an end on a final, warbled “Mush a ring dum-a do, dum-a da”, and the stern woman professor quickly waved the first kid in line to her, talking over the Hat’s suggestions that it be allowed to continue with The Scotsman. And right about here, Brendon developed a short-lived but intense hatred for his last name. It was bad enough realising that you were going to have to put on a (possibly drunk) mouldy old hat in front of a huge hall full of students that might just be very judgemental. It was worse to realise you’d have to do it among the very last.
He looked straight ahead as kid after kid shuffled forward and put the Hat over his or her head. Most of them looked as terrified as Brendon felt. A little further down the line, however, he became aware of a boy who was looking out over the Great Hall, looking calm in a stiff sort of way.
He had nice hair.
The boy turned his head suddenly, almost as if he had sensed someone staring at him, and Brendon looked away, embarrassed. He looked behind him in the line instead, needing to focus his attention on something-anything-that wasn’t his stomach. There were only two people with last names even further back in the alphabet than his: a red-haired, pale girl and a boy who was managing to look sleepy and scared at the same time. They were holding hands, tightly.
“Urie,” Brendon said, pointing to his own chest and smiling weakly at them.
The girl smiled back at him-a smile with just about as much sincerity as his own-and introduced herself as, “A Weasley. Ginny.”
“Weasley.” Brendon tasted the name. “Do you have a Morgana in the family?”
“Aunt.” Ginny smiled at him, slightly warmer this time, and Brendon smiled back.
“Third cousin once removed. I knew we had a Weasley connection somewhere.”
“I’m Walker,” the strange boy said, letting go of Ginny’s hand and shaking Brendon’s. “Jonathan, if we’re sharing first names as well.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m Brendon.” Brendon blushed, feeling stupid. “I was just pleased I wasn’t at the very end of the line.”
“No, that’s me,” Ginny said, and she was back to looking scared. Jonathan grabbed her hand again and squeezed it.
“You’ll be fine.”
“My brothers said the Hat asks you a lot of questions, and if you answer wrong, you aren’t allowed in at all.”
“You shouldn’t trust older brothers,” Jonathan said stoutly. “They lie all the time, because they’re prats. If I’d trusted mine, I’d have thought there was no such thing as magic.”
“You’re Muggle-born?” Brendon asked, interested. There were very few Muggle-borns in his family, although there were a couple of Muggle in-laws and one or two Squibs. Jonathan shrugged.
“Yeah, but I figured it’d be all right.”
“It’s no different, really,” Ginny told him earnestly. “You met Hermione on the train-the girl who sat in the compartment with us? She’s Muggle-born and the best witch in her year. And I’m sure you’ll be in Gryffindor as well with us, so you’ll be able to ask her things all the time.”
Jonathan brightened up at the mention of this, and turned his attention back to Brendon, asking what House his family was mostly in. Brendon was still trying to figure out how to answer-it was a question that needed a very long answer or none at all-when there was a very audible cough from behind him. He turned to realise that it was his turn, and that the stern professor was holding up the Hat for him with a very displeased look on her face. Face burning, he hastened forward, somehow managed to avoid tripping over his own robes, placed himself on the stool and felt the soft material of the Hat settle over his ears.
Cheers, said a small voice in his ear, and Brendon gasped. He had been so concentrated on his discussion with Ginny and Jonathan that he hadn’t paid very close attention to the rest of the Sorting. He had noticed that people seemed to be sitting for a longer or shorter period of time with the Hat over their head before the house was called out, but hadn’t attached importance to the matter. Suddenly he remembered what Ginny had said about the Hat asking questions, and he realised that she had been serious about the Hat actually talking.
How are we feeling today, then? the voice continued, sounding cheerful and slightly fuzzy, the way Matt sounded when he came home from an evening out with the other Hogwarts graduates. About to throw up, I shouldn’t wonder. Well, let’s look at you-oh, what a pretty little mind you have. Sort of makes me think of puppies, you know? Loyalty abounds, honesty astounds, love... is all around...s. See what I did there? Kind of poetic, right?
Brendon didn’t know if he was supposed to answer this one, but he whispered yes, sir very quietly into the brim of the Hat, anyway. It giggled.
It’s adorable, it wheezed, in between giggles. OK, I’ve decided. You, sir, are an obvious, quintessential and all around perfect... SLYTHERIN!
Brendon felt the Hat be lifted off his head and realised the last word had been shouted out loud. He looked up at the professor-McGonagall, he recalled now-who nodded curtly at him and pointed the way to one of the students’ tables.
Realising that the terrible ordeal was over and that he was now a real student of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he couldn’t stop grinning as he made his way over to the table and found a vacant spot near the middle.
“Hello,” he said to the people on either side of him, and then to the ones on the opposite side of the table as well as a couple of places away, to be on the safe side. “Hello, I’m Brendon. Urie. Hello. Hello, nice to meet you, hello.”
“Hey, you,” said a boy nearly opposite him. He had blond hair, slicked back, and looked a bit like he had just found something brown and sticky under his shoe. “Urie, right? Did they really tell you Slytherin? Because-” He stopped suddenly and blinked as Brendon beamed at him.
“Yeah, they did!” he said. “It’s amazing, I had no idea where I was going to end up, so I’m really excited. Someone told me your Common Room is actually under the lake, is that true? It must be so, so cool.”
There was a pause, and then the boy just opposite Brendon laughed, turning to his neighbour and muttering something that could have been “he’s good” and could have been “new food”. Brendon wasn’t sure how he should take it, but then the boy turned back to him and gave him an appreciative smile, so he thought it was probably fine.
The boy to Brendon’s right had been very quiet so far, but as the conversation eventually resumed around them, he nudged Brendon’s shoulder with his own and stuck out his hand when Brendon turned to face him.
“I’m Spencer Smith,” he said. “I’m in Year One, too. Seems like we’re going to be class mates-I’m looking forward to it.” He glanced briefly past Brendon as he spoke, but he had the nicest smile Brendon had ever seen.
“Me too!” Brendon said happily, shaking Spencer’s hand. “It’s really nice to meet you. I can call you Spencer, right?”
This was something Kara had been quite insistent about, telling him that it was rude to simply assume a first-name familiarity. Kayla had agreed to this, but mentioned that this was mostly the rule when speaking to people from other Houses, and this has sparked a debate between the sisters on whether addressing people by their last name was proper form or not (it seemed that things were done somewhat differently between Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff). The sisterly spat had not done anything to relieve Brendon’s confusion, but he had decided to at least try and ask first. He’d slipped up several times already, though. It felt unnatural to introduce himself as Urie-his last name was pretty strange, if nothing else-and he felt like it didn’t come off as very friendly.
Spencer didn’t have time to reply to the question, since the very old guy at the Head Table stood up at that moment and introduced himself as headmaster, so Brendon decided to assume it would have been yes.
The headmaster spoke for quite some time about school values, changes in rules and, for some reason, the relative merits of asparagus, and when he eventually finished, Brendon was more than ready for the food that materialised in front of him. The rest of the Welcoming Feast was spent making up for the very long train ride with only sandwiches for nourishment-Brendon’s mother didn’t believe in eating sweets on weekdays, so he’d had to say a polite “no, thanks” to the lady with the food trolley-and he didn’t manage to catch anybody else’s name until the Feast was over and the Prefect calling himself Bletchley called all the first-years together. Bletchley led them from the Hall and down one level, telling them on the way about curfews, general rules and password for the Common Room entrance. Brendon caught about half of it. There was too much to see to be able to concentrate on just one voice.
All of what he’d seen so far paled, however, in comparison with his Common Room.
“Wow,” he said, stepping into the middle of the room with Spencer at his shoulder, “wow, this is amazing. Look at the light, Spencer! Isn’t it amazing? I’m so glad I ended up in Slytherin and not anywhere else.”
“Hey,” said someone, tapping him on the shoulder. It was the boy with the hair gel, and he was grinning at Brendon. “Just wanted to make sure you didn’t take offence or anything by my question before, at the Feast. And to introduce myself-Draco Malfoy. I’m in Year Two. If you want help with anything you can always ask me.”
He held out his hand. He didn’t have quite as nice a smile as Spencer-but then, thought Brendon, probably no one in the entire world had as nice a smile as Spencer.
“Thank you!” he said, shaking Draco’s hand. “I’d love to be friends with you. I’m Brendon and this is Spencer.”
“Smith,” said Spencer, holding out his hand for Draco to shake, too. Draco did so, watching Spencer’s face carefully.
“I think there are some Smith connections in our family,” he said thoughtfully. “Think I remember seeing you out on the far right of the family tree.”
Spencer smiled at him. “Yes, I thought you seemed like the family tree type,” he said pleasantly.
Brendon looked from one boy to the other, confused. They were both smiling, and they both sounded nice, but he got a weird impression from them, nonetheless.
“So do you know where your dormitory is?” Draco asked, breaking the eye contact.
“Yes, thank you,” Spencer replied, very politely. “We’d better go see that our stuff made it here all right. Thank you so much for your help.”
“Nice to meet you both,” Draco said lazily, now looking a bit bored as he started gazing around the rest of the Common Room.
“Bye, Draco! See you later.” Brendon pondered a hug, but remembered what his sisters had taught him about personal space and contented himself with a short wave before running after Spencer.
“He’s nice, isn’t he?” he said, and Spencer mumbled something in reply. It was probably a yes, Brendon decided.
Their dorm contained three beds apart from their own, but no one else was there yet. Brendon didn’t mind, quickly filling up the space with talk and stories from home, occasionally punctuated by Spencer’s laugh. His clothes were already in the closet, and someone had folded all his socks before putting them in a drawer. All that remained for him was to place out all his family photos, something that took longer than expected. Partly because he had to tell Spencer about the people in every photo before placing it in its proper place, and partly because he found that his night stand was only just large enough. In fact, for a while it seemed as if it was just a couple of inches short, but Brendon patted the side of it pleadingly and was delighted to have it stretch itself out to just the right size. Spencer blinked at him, looking surprised, then looked at his own night stand with a look of such comical and exaggerated consideration that Brendon laughed.
Brendon finally went to bed with his head still in a whirl, thinking that he couldn’t have got off to a better start. He had two friends already, as well as the two Gryffindors (maybe) who had seemed so nice. Hogwarts was a wonderful place.
ogwarts was a horrible place, Ryan Ross thought bitterly. He was supposed to be answering a mind-expanding riddle-like question for an elegant eagle door knocker, not this.
“Well?” said the Fat Lady, tapping the frame of her painting impatiently. “Do you have the password or not?”
“Have you ever thought that maybe it would be a good idea to choose passwords that aren’t easier to crack than a pane of glass as well as utterly inane?” Ryan asked her, rolling his eyes.
“None of your cheek. Give me the password, or you’ll just have to stay the night here.”
“Captain Farrell,” Ryan said, sighing.
“Right you are, love,” the Fat Lady said as she swung forward to admit him. “And I would work on that attitude of yours, if I were you.”
Ryan made a face, but was careful to do it after he passed from under her eyes. He had no doubt she would close the passage against him entirely if he got on her bad side.
Someone was calling him from the fire, but he ignored them and made his way up to his dorm instead. Once there, he sat down on his bed and looked around himself. There were six other beds in the room, and three of them had Quidditch posters or banners pinned up beside them. The fourth had a framed photograph of three teenage boys standing in front of the Slytherin crest on its night stand, which was a little confusing since most families after all often got Sorted into the same House. (Then again, Ryan was living proof that that did not have to happen.) The fifth night stand had a large camera in the same place of honour and the sixth lacked any obvious declarations of interest or loyalty.
Ryan’s night stand carried four encyclopedias of spells, potions and plants, as well as Hogwarts: A History and two more books on magical theory. He picked up one of these, Spell Residue: A First Aftertaste of Magic, and opened it, looking sadly at the inside of the cover where Jennifer Ross, Ravenclaw was written in careful, elegant script. He sighed deeply, thinking back on the previous night’s unending Quidditch discussions with contempt. His attempts to switch the subject to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the obvious magic knowledge hinted at therein had not been appreciated, and he was sure that he had heard one of his dorm mates laugh at his lavender scarf.
They would totally have liked his scarves in Ravenclaw.
pencer laid the last of his pens and scrolls of parchment in his night stand, turned and jumped, startled. The boy who had sat opposite Brendon the night before was leaning in the doorway, grinning at him.
“Ever heard of maybe letting people know you’re there?” Spencer asked, sharper than intended.
“Sorry,” said the boy, not looking sorry at all. “But I wanted to introduce myself. Blaise Zabini.” His grin widened a little more, but he didn’t uncross his arms, and Spencer didn’t move towards him. Someone who didn’t bother with unnecessary handshakes, it seemed.
“Spencer Smith,” he said.
“Well, I knew that, of course,” said Zabini. “Wasn’t there another Smith, as well? The one who ended up in Hufflepuff. Any relation of yours?”
“Third cousin,” Spencer replied, frowning a little. He’d been surprised not to have Zacharias join him in Slytherin, actually.
“Well,” said Zabini, “this is going to be interesting. Draco Malfoy’s been king of the hill here since we started-money can buy a lot of respect and awe, even when it is,” he made a delicate pause, “new. I wonder how he’ll react to suddenly having not just one, but two Smiths to reckon with. And she was a Grey, wasn’t she, the girl who was sitting next to you at the Feast?” He laughed. “It seems we’re simply drowning in nobility this year.”
Spencer shrugged. He was descended from a family that in the Muggle world was indeed called noble, but his father had early on instilled in him the knowledge that this nobility did not extend to the wizarding world. There was no such system in place there, and Spencer had been taught never to flaunt his title. Still, it was stupid to pretend ignorance of the fact that many people in the wizarding world, too, still deferred to the noble families.
Zabini laughed again, seemingly very amused by Spencer’s casual acknowledgement. “And modest as well,” he said ironically. “Like I said, just wanted to say hello. Give promise of my support, and all that. I’ll see you around.”
He waved and left, and Spencer smiled to himself. In a way, people like Zabini were easy to predict. He had no doubt at all that the promised support was about as real as a marsh-light, and Zabini certainly gave off an impression of “eel”, but his treacheries were foreseeable-his unpredictability predictable. His motives were as clear as anything, not least because he more or less paraded them for the world to see. I care about myself and, yeah, that’s about it.
Not like Brendon. Spencer frowned again. He wasn’t sure what Brendon was all about.
rendon’s first week passed in a happy daze. People were nice to him all the time, lots and lots of his House mates had talked to him and seemed to want to be friends with him, and his first owl home had arrived back with a gently bemused but mainly congratulatory missive from his mother:
We were surprised at first, I have to admit, because we are after all mostly Huffles and Ravens in the closest family-except for Matt, but we all knew from the first time he climbed the apple tree where that one was headed, didn’t we? But then we remembered your father’s cousin George, and of course, as you know, we’ve always said his wife would make such a good Slytherin as well if she wasn’t so very Muggle. And you always did resemble Georgie closer than the rest of us, I always said so. There’s the whole Lancashire branch of the family, too-they’ll be so pleased to hear there are more Slytherins at last. We should invite them over for dinner, shouldn’t we?
Brendon had been a bit disappointed when he realised that he was supposed to sit with his House at every meal time. He could see a whole row of third cousins over at the Gryffindor table, as well as his two sisters over at Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff, respectively, and he couldn’t see why he shouldn’t be allowed to spend some time with them, as well. Then again, he was having such a wonderful time with all his new Slytherin friends that he only had time for a vague regret about the matter. Hogwarts people were all so very nice.
During his first Herbology class he was pleasantly surprised to meet up again with Jonathan Walker, who had been behind him in the Sorting line. They quickly paired off to work together, Brendon giving Spencer an apologetic smile and a mutter about “old friend” first.
They got to work quickly on replanting pots of honking daffodils and spent the best part of the lesson sharing first impressions and descriptions of their respective Houses. Jonathan had been Sorted into Ravenclaw and was thrilled with the view from his Common Room, although not so much with the very long, winding walk up the stairs to reach it.
“I thought you were a sure Gryffindor?” Brendon asked him. Jonathan shrugged.
“I don’t know, that was just what Ginny said. I didn’t really know anything about any of the Houses, so for me Ravenclaw didn’t sound much weirder than anything else, you know?”
“What did the Hat tell you, then?” Brendon asked, curious to hear other stories about how the Sorting worked.
Jonathan frowned. “I was pretty confused about that,” he admitted. “Professor What’s-her-name-something Scottish-anyway, you know her, she put the Hat on my head and it just sort of started laughing. It did that for a while, and then it said I know, I know, this is great. You’ll be a RAVENCLAW! And that was it. I didn’t really get it.”
“It told me a poem,” Brendon said. “And something about puppies. I guess it has a really advanced and magical way of telling where you belong,” he added, but without much conviction.
“Maybe.” Jonathan didn’t sound all that convinced, either. “Ginny ended up in Gryffindor, anyway. It’s a bit of a bummer, because we only have Astronomy with them. And I haven’t made any friends as good as her in Ravenclaw yet.”
“Oh, you know what we should do?” Brendon said, his eyes lighting up. “We should start a study group or something-that way we could all still hang out! Good, right?”
“Oh yeah, that’d be great!” Jonathan grinned, looking delighted with the idea. “Then I wouldn’t have to be with only Ravenclaws all the time-I mean, they’re nice and stuff, but it gets kind of boring with only the same people all the time.”
The bell for the next class rang much too early for both of them, but they agreed to meet up in the library after Brendon’s final class on Friday.
“Who was that?” Spencer asked Brendon, coming up behind him as he was waving goodbye to the Ravenclaw boy.
“That’s my friend Jonathan Walker!” Brendon said, grinning enthusiastically. “He thought he was going to be in Gryffindor but he’s in Ravenclaw and their Common Room is right in the top of a tower. Kara never told me that before but it sounds like it’s amazing. He’s Muggle-born so there are lots of things he doesn’t really get yet but apparently Professor Flitwick helps out a lot. We’re having him for Charms now. I’m really excited, Jonathan says he’s nice.”
Spencer blinked, a bit dazed by this onslaught of information but still managing to pick up on the most relevant part. “A Muggle-born?” he asked. Brendon nodded.
“I know, isn’t it interesting? We only have four of them or something in our entire family. I thought they were really rare, but apparently there are more of them every year. Jonathan says there are two in the year above him, and that’s only in his House.”
Spencer sighed. “Well, at least he isn’t a Gryffindor,” he muttered.
“Oh, yeah, I’m glad you said.” Brendon grinned at him. “We’re starting a study group, me and Jonathan and some other friends. You should come! It’s going to be great.”
hat kind of study group?” Ron Weasley asked.
“Just a study group,” said Ginny. “I don’t know, I think we’ll go over homework together and things.”
“Well, as long as you’re not just copying each other’s work,” Ron said, shrugging. Ginny saw Hermione look up from her work and give him a look of complete disbelief.
“It sounds like a great idea,” she said. “Who thought of it?”
“That boy I met on the train.”
“Jonathan?” asked Hermione. “He seemed nice.”
“He is,” said Ginny, warming to the subject. “So far it’s him and a friend of his from Ravenclaw and a boy who was Sorted just before us. Brendon.”
“Brendon?” That was Harry. Ginny blushed. “Brendon Urie?”
“You know him?” asked Ron, saving Ginny from having to answer. Harry frowned.
“No,” he said, “but I overheard Malfoy talking about a Brendon Urie in class today. Sounded like it was his new best friend or something.”
“But Brendon’s nice,” said Ginny, then bit her tongue.
“Yeah, Harry, the Uries are cool,” Ron filled in. “Bit weird, but nice people. I think our aunt married into them a while back, right, Ginny?”
“Still a Slytherin,” Harry mumbled, but then he shrugged and smiled at Ginny. “Just be a bit careful with him, OK?”
Ginny nodded dumbly, wishing she could come up with something clever in reply but not able to think of a single word to say. She turned away instead to hide her face, stumbled against one of the armchairs and would have fallen flat on the floor if she hadn’t managed to catch hold of the chair’s back. She ended in a weird half-sitting, half-standing position, hugging the chair for support. As she straightened up and hurried towards her dorm, head low and face and neck burning with shame, she heard Ron snorting back a laugh.
She wished she knew how to turn herself invisible.
pencer had been looking forward to Potions. The professor for the class was their Head of House, a former Slytherin, and so far Spencer had noticed that professors seemed to favour the students of their own House. Whether unconsciously or by design Spencer didn’t know, but it was a fact that while Brendon had told him that his Ravenclaw friend had received two House points for pointing out the constellation known as Cassiopeia in Astronomy, Spencer and Brendon’s class mate Margaret Grey had received no similar reward when she managed the same feat for their first Astronomy lesson. Hopefully now in Potions the scale would be tipped even again. Otherwise it just wasn’t fair.
“Colin!” Brendon waved suddenly to a boy in the other end of the class room. “Hey, hey, Colin! Spence, me and Colin met in the boats. Hi!”
The boy called Colin smiled a smile that flickered between delighted and uncertain. The former seemed to win out, and he waved back, faltering as eleven pairs of Slytherin eyes looked him up and down in a very assessing manner.
“You know people everywhere, it seems,” Spencer said, filing the information under “watch and learn”. He had looked on as Brendon chatted happily to a pair of Hufflepuff twins during the theoretical Astronomy class the day before (“Jeff and Douglas, old neighbours”) and had seen him walk through the library, grinning like an idiot and waving to a Ravenclaw here and a Gryffindor there with every semblance of innocent joy (“met on the train”).
He was growing steadily more impressed. Brendon obviously took manipulative to a whole new level. He somehow managed to pull off an act of complete, honest innocence, and he made everyone around him believe that he liked them.
Spencer couldn’t deny that he was good at it, too. But he overdid his act sometimes-seguing over from cute to annoying, and from believable to caricature. No one could be that energetic and bubbly.
Someone was pulling on his sleeve.
“Spencer,” said Brendon, looking apologetic, “is it OK if I work with someone else in this class, too? That’s Ginny-over there, see? She’s great. And I haven’t got to talk to her since the Sorting.”
“Of course,” said Spencer, seeing out of the corner of his eye how two of the remaining Slytherin boys almost visibly perked their ears. “I’ll just work with... Harper,” he decided, turning to the same. “That’s all right, isn’t it?”
Ian Harper nodded enthusiastically. Both his and the other boy’s families were from Spencer’s county and had grown up with a deep-seated respect for the Smith family. At Hogwarts, it was up to Spencer to maintain the good inter-family relations, perfected over generations, and he made sure to spend time with them now and again.
Brendon beamed at all of them. “Great! I’ll see you guys for lunch.”
Spencer watched him hurry across the room and set up his cauldron next to Ginny-Weasley, obviously; nature couldn’t have been cruel enough to gift more than one family with that hair. He watched how Brendon unloaded his equipment, placing his ornate silver knife next to Weasley’s old, notched one and dropping Potions ingredients in her lap. Within a minute of his sitting down, they were both giggling together.
He wondered what Brendon’s agenda was. The Uries were too altogether odd to make it onto the pure-blood map, and all he knew of them was that they were neither strictly traditional nor successfully integrated into the Muggle world, but some kind of culture all to themselves. From what he’d heard of them so far, they were at least not another bunch of Malfoys, although they shared a couple of fourth cousins here and there-but then, the Uries shared at least a couple of fourth cousins with just about everyone. If Spencer had been asked to give an assessment, he’d have said that the Uries were a bunch of oddballs with little influence in the greater scheme of things.
And out of this rose Brendon, a Slytherin son who seemed to be slowly infiltrating every other House by dint of careful networking and a very well thought-out, cute front. But why? What was his goal? Brendon confused Spencer terribly. It was probably best to keep an eye on him.
nd this is Luna,” said Jon, presenting his House mate to Brendon and Ginny. She was one of the first people he’d got to know in Ravenclaw, and he was sure she’d get along with the other two, as well.
Luna smiled vaguely. “Your brother received a Howler this Tuesday,” she told Ginny, who flushed.
“I know he did,” she said shortly. “There’s no need to rub it in.”
“I thought it was very interesting,” Luna continued, as if Ginny hadn’t spoken. “They’re very loud, aren’t they?”
“The Howlers?” Brendon asked.
“That’s kind of the point,” said Ginny.
Luna looked from one to the other, gently perplexed. “No,” she said, “screech owls. Very loud, I think. I would like to start with Charms.”
“She’s a bit weird,” Jon told Brendon, as the four of them placed themselves around one of the smaller tables in the area of the library reserved for group work. “I like her, though. She tells funny stories. What happened to your friend, by the way?”
Brendon had brought a class mate from Slytherin, Spencer. He had chatted with them for a while until Ginny arrived, when he’d unfortunately had to go.
Brendon frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “He said something about limits. I guess he was busy after all.”
“He seems nice,” Jon said. He and Spencer had discovered that they shared a common interest, both being very fond of dogs, and they’d talked about retrievers and setters and Crups (Jon wasn’t sure what the last one was, but Spencer seemed to like them) until Spencer had to leave. “You should invite him again. If he has time. What did you get for Charms?”
It quickly turned out that Jon was the best teacher among them. Brendon was definitely very good at magic, and he’d had no trouble at all during practical lessons, but when asked how exactly he had managed to make his goblet turn around in Charms, he only responded with an uncertain “You just tell it to,” and could not be persuaded to elaborate. Luna had grasped some of the introductory magic very well, too, but was if possible an even worse instructor than Brendon (“It’s like imagining you’re lavender in colour, and then you have to do that thing-like breathing, but more deliberately”). Jon wasn’t as instinctively good at magic as either of them, he knew, but he was much better at explaining the process than any of the others.
“You have to find the part in the matchstick that wants to change,” he said patiently, as Luna and Ginny waved their wands ineffectively at their respective match. They had abandoned their real homework some time back in favour of practical lessons, and had decided to concentrate on the girls’ main difficulty so far: Transfiguration. Brendon, having mastered turning his match into a needle long ago and already bored with the basics, was turning his own into a small matchstick man. He had managed to make the match stand up on two legs already, and was now trying to convince the wood to split into arms.
“It’s like, um,” Jon continued, distracted for a second by Brendon’s small whoop of success as the matchstick man acquired an arm. “Look at how the light looks, shining on the wood, right? And then you have to imagine how it would shine if that was metal instead, and concentrate on that...”
There was a gasp from Ginny; her match had just turned silvery.
“Ginny, that’s fantastic!” Brendon exclaimed enthusiastically, looking up from his own work. His little matchstick man wobbled, waved its new arm frantically and then fell over, turning back into a regular match as it landed.
Ginny blushed, and her smile faltered. “I know you’ve done it several times already,” she said defensively. Brendon blinked at her, uncomprehending.
“Yeah, but you haven’t, right?” he asked. “That’s amazing-you got it so quickly when Jonathan started explaining.” He beamed at her.
Ginny still looked as if she was on her guard, waiting for the sting to come. But Brendon only returned to his own match and started the labour of making it stand again, now and then throwing her and Luna admiring as well as encouraging glances. The suspicious look left Ginny’s face, and she grinned, huge and satisfied.
They finally left the library when Madam Pince started to make pointed comments about curfews, staying for a moment outside the doors to agree that it had been very nice and that they should definitely meet up again next Friday. Ginny was off first, hugging Jon quickly and waving at the other two before dashing to catch up with her brother, who had just passed on his way to the Gryffindor tower.
“So I’ll see you in Herbology,” Brendon said. His fingers were plucking at the straps of his school bag restlessly, and Jon recalled that he had looked kind of wistful when Ginny ran off.
“Yes, looking forward to it,” he said. He held up his arms, pleased to have his theory proved right when Brendon all but threw himself into the hug. Brendon hugged Luna next, then stepped back quickly, blushed and mumbled a confused apology.
But Luna only smiled serenely. “I like you,” she told him. “You’re like a Billywig.”
rendon’s first flying class turned out to be a bit of a chore. The first fifteen minutes had consisted of mounting their brooms and hovering, then sinking back to the ground slowly and landing “in a controlled and proper manner”. He was growing steadily more bored, but knew from his brother Matt what happened to kids who didn’t keep to the rules. (Matt had been forced to wait until his fourth year to try out for the Quidditch team, and even then it was only because Charlie Weasley had gone to Professor McGonagall and begged.) However, even Spencer-whose flying experience so far had consisted of a couple of very slow laps around his country house-had muttered that this was excessively cautious.
Brendon started to look around at the rest of the class. Ginny had grown up in a Quidditch family just like him, and she caught his eye, giving him a resigned shrug of the shoulders. He rolled his eyes in reply, and she giggled. His gaze moved on, coming to rest on a boy who was hovering by himself a little off from his House mates.
It was the boy from the Sorting. He was staring intently at the handle of his broomstick, looking as though he wished himself anywhere but there. He was good, though-a lot of the other students were still wobbling a little or weaving from side to side, but he was hanging calmly in the air, just high enough that his toes didn’t touch the ground.
He looked lonely, Brendon thought.
“And land!” Madam Hooch shouted. Brendon had once been to a Quidditch match where the commentator had used a charm Brendon’s dad told him was called “Sonorus” to make himself heard. He now thought that if they’d just hired Madam Hooch, they wouldn’t have had to bother.
He was still looking at the strange Gryffindor when her order came, and his landing was too hasty, making him stumble. Thankfully, Madam Hooch didn’t have time to see it. Brendon had a sneaking feeling she would assign students extra hovers if she caught them messing up their landing.
“All right,” she called, fishing her wand out of her boot and conjuring up a set of large, brightly coloured bubbles that hovered about six feet above the ground. She waved them away, one after the other, until they had placed themselves in a circle fifty feet across. “You will fly around this circle until I tell you to stop. There is to be no racing. You will fly in a slow walking pace, never straying more than eight feet above the ground. If you need to overtake one of your fellow students, you will do so on their right side with a safety margin of at least three feet, first calling out to let them know you’re coming. Anyone who breaks these rules will spend their next two weekends clipping bent tail twigs from the school brooms. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Madam Hooch,” they chorused demurely, at least half of them deciding on the spot that rules were made to be broken and resolving to see how far they could bend them before Madam Hooch snapped.
“Right then. Mr Ross, you will lead, and the rest of you follow him in order. I want a nice, orderly flight. Up you go.”
She blew her whistle and the boy Brendon had been watching kicked off, gliding calmly through the air and settling into steady orbit of the newly constructed track. One by one, the other students followed, and Madam Hooch soon had her hands full, shouting at Harper that if that was his walking pace, she expected to never see him late for her classes, and that if Miss Claque didn’t stop scraping her knees along the ground, Madam Hooch would spell a scythe to her broom and employ her as lawnmower. Brendon felt pretty safe in setting a pace slightly faster than most other students, and spent five minutes slowly edging past student after student in front of him. (Spencer, meanwhile, was flying along at a sedately pace and would not be persuaded to go any faster.)
He slowed his pace as he started to catch up with the Gryffindor called Ross, watching how steady his flying was and how his bronze-and-blue scarf fluttered gently as he swerved to stay on track. Blue and bronze were Ravenclaw’s colours and not Gryffindor’s, Brendon knew, but they seemed to fit Ross better than the red and gold would have. The blue was nice against his hair.
Eventually he called out softly, Overtaking, and edged forward while Ross drifted gently left. Brendon slowed his pace again as he came up alongside Ross, clearing his throat nervously. “Um,” he said. “Hi.”
“Hi,” said Ross non-committally, looking sideways at him.
“I just, er, I thought,” Brendon began, faltered and continued, “I like your scarf. It’s nice. Pretty. I like that it glitters.”
Ross stared at him, a small frown creasing the space between his eyebrows.
“You’re really good at flying,” Brendon continued, now somewhat desperately. “Have you flown much? You look like you’ve flown really a lot. You’re good.”
Ross was still staring at him, and before Brendon could attempt to fill up the silence further there was a shout about “and no side-by-side, Mr Urie, stop taking up space” and he felt obliged to complete his overtaking after bidding Ross an awkward, “Bye, I guess.”
He had barely settled into orbit when a voice called out about overtaking in measured monotone, and Ross nudged his broom alongside his. Brendon slowed marginally, assuming that Ross wanted to get his spot back and avoid him, but Ross slowed to match his speed.
“I’ve never flown before,” he said, as if there had been no break in their conversation. “It’s OK, I guess.”
“Really?” It was Brendon’s turn to stare. “You’re very good!”
“You mentioned,” Ross said dryly, but there was a hint of a smile on his face.
“I’m Brendon,” said Brendon. “What’s your name?”
“Ryan,” Ross said.
Brendon grinned happily. Ryan. “That’s a nice name,” he offered, before Madam Hooch’s voice called out a sharp “Mr Ross!” and his new-found friend swerved in front of him.
They spent the remainder of the exercise overtaking each other by turn and sharing snippets of information about their respective knowledge of flying and Quidditch-Ryan sometimes listened to Appleby Arrows games on the WWN, but had never owned a broom or even wished to, while Brendon had ridden his first one on his fourth birthday and nursed a fervent but not very hopeful wish to become a professional Quidditch player since the same day.
Madam Hooch eventually put an end to their fragmented conversation by declaring that since Mr Ross and Mr Urie were so keen on slalom, they could lead the way for the next exercise. She quickly rearranged the floating bubbles into a straight line and instructed them to fly a slow slalom between them, all the way to the end of the line and then back, one at a time. Brendon started, happy to finally do something that at least resembled real flying, only to realise that once he’d finished his round, he had to wait in line while the rest of the class did their turn before going again. His disgust over the slow tempo evaporated, however, as Ryan finished his round and came to rest in the line right behind him, mumbling that if he-being on a broom for the first time-found this embarrassingly easy, he didn’t even want to imagine what it was like for Brendon.
By the end of the lesson, when they had each had time for two more rounds of the slalom course but nothing else, Brendon was inclined to agree. Right about then, however, Madam Hooch earned his unending respect and love.
“I want the following students to gather around me,” she said, then rattled off a handful of names, among which Spencer’s was to be found but neither Brendon’s nor Ryan’s. “I will go through a couple of things with you. The rest of you are free to take a short round of the grounds-where I can still see you, of course. And the threat about detention still stands if I see you above fifteen feet. All right, off with you. Or back up to the castle, of course, if that’s your cup of tea.”
She waved her wand at the slalom course, making the bubbles disappear in a series of wet pops, and then turned her back on Brendon and the others, addressing her selected students, “So, grip technique...”
Ryan stepped off his broom and shouldered it, turning towards the castle.
“What-wait!” Brendon exclaimed, grabbing his arm. “Don’t you want to fly with us?” He indicated Ginny, who had hurried up to Brendon as soon as Madam Hooch turned her harsh eye from them. “We’re going to fly around the lake. Come on, it’s a lot more fun when you don’t have to keep so close to the ground you’re afraid to catch your foot on something.”
Ryan hesitated, looking from him to the expectant Ginny, and then gave in, looking resigned.
“Fine,” he said. “One lap.”
pencer watched, bemused, as Brendon set off together with the Weasley and that other Gryffindor-Ross, something or other. Networking was all fine, but to hang that much with Gryffindors? Gryffindors, who were generally known as loud-mouthed sports nerds with about as much foresight as a Divination teacher at, well, Hogwarts actually. (Spencer’s father had snorted, very unimpressed, as he read through the teacher lists for their later courses.) Spencer had to admire Brendon’s perseverance, if nothing else.
Then again, the Ross guy seemed unusually quiet for a Gryffindor. Not even Brendon, who could probably enthuse a rock, had managed to coach more than a smile out of him so far. It was intriguing to see someone so clearly not cast in usual mould.
He received additional information on Ryan Ross-the full name-as he and Brendon made their way back up to the castle after locking their borrowed Cleansweeps in the school’s broom locker. As far as Spencer could tell, Ross was an Astronomy nerd with a bit of an unhealthy love for books, apparently inherited from his mother. Spencer had immediately drawn up the wizarding bloodlines in his head, finding Ross in the “mixed” part of the map, a family that had married several times with Muggles throughout their history. The greater part of their actual wizards and witches were Ravenclaws, just like Ross’s mother.
It was difficult to tell with people sometimes, Spencer thought. Ross probably had strong Gryffindor characteristics under that quiet surface-from what Spencer had heard, the Sorting Hat otherwise usually followed family tradition when someone was between two Houses.
He and Brendon, along with the rest of their class mates, arrived back in the Common Room just before a storm of second-years entered, complaining loudly about the greenhouses’ dampness and the idiocy of working with Mandrakes anyway. Loudest amongst the complainants was, not surprisingly, Draco Malfoy. Spencer rolled his eyes.
“It’s freezing in here,” Malfoy said petulantly, throwing himself in one of the sofas close to the fireplace. “Why haven’t the House Elves set the fire yet? Slacking off, probably, the little-”
The rest of his words were drowned in a sudden fwoosh as the fire leapt to life.
There was a stunned silence for a few moments, and then Blaise Zabini started laughing. “Looks like they heard you,” he said. “Wish for pudding next, come on.”
The rest of the first- and second-years gathered around Malfoy, giggling and theorising about how the House Elves had managed it, what else they were capable of and what kind of sweets one could, possibly, make them bring. But Spencer remained where he was, frowning to himself.
Maybe he was being stupid, but he could have sworn he’d seen Brendon snap his fingers just before the logs burst into flames.
ey,” said Ginny carefully, setting her books down gingerly in front of Ryan. He had chosen a table in a secluded corner of the Common Room, and while he didn’t glare at her as she arrived, she got the impression that interrupting his study time was a grave offence in his book.
“Hey,” he replied, glancing up at her briefly and then back down into his book.
“You were very good at flying yesterday,” Ginny said, encouraged by the lack of Go away and sitting down. “Do you play Quidditch at all?”
“No. And I don’t plan to.” Ryan flipped a page casually, without looking up at her at all.
Ginny was a bit daunted, but decided to plunge bravely on. “Listen, I was thinking,” she said, “that you might like to join our study group. Maybe? It’s nice, we help each other out with homework and things like that.”
“I study well on my own,” Ryan replied, pushing the book a little to the side and starting to scribble on the near-lying parchment.
“I guess...” Ginny sighed inwardly. She’d been hoping it’d go easier than this. Brendon had asked her to invite Ryan to join them, and she agreed with him in that Ryan seemed a bit lonely. She’d try to spend more time with him, she thought, especially during lessons. She’d been picked last when they were asked to pair off for practical work once and knew how mortifying it was, and she’d seen that happen to Ryan several times already.
“It’s nice to meet people from other Houses as well, though, don’t you think?” she went on, making one last attempt. “Apart from me and Brendon there’s Jonathan and Luna from Ravenclaw so far, and I think it’s great to be able to meet people that aren’t in Gryffindor sometimes. Apart from lessons and stuff.”
Ryan’s quill stopped moving. “You know people in Ravenclaw?” he asked.
“Yes, I met Jonathan on the train here,” Ginny explained, “and we both got to know Brendon while we were waiting for the Sorting. And then Jonathan brought Luna along last Friday. She’s-nice, too.” She grimaced inwardly, but Ryan seemed not to have noticed the small hesitation.
“It does sound like a good idea to spend time with people other than Gryffindors,” Ryan said slowly, as if trying out the idea in his head. Ginny could understand his hesitation. Mixing with other Houses was not something they were usually encouraged to do. “Fine, I’ll come.”
“Great!” Ginny smiled happily. Brendon would be delighted.
***
Brendon was so delighted that he broke his own rule about talking to people more than three times before hugging them. Ryan was not entirely comfortable with this, but considered it a necessary evil. He’d get to meet Ravenclaws, after all. Maybe it would even be possible to eventually find a way to switch Houses.
Next chapter
CHAPTER ONE
he Sorting Hat had sung a lot of different welcoming songs over the years. It made up a new one every year, after all, and the theme of it had changed according to its mood. During the Grindelwald years, there had been many messages of standing strong together and accepting all wizards as brothers, and then, during the Sixties, it had apparently felt the need to sprout a message of peace, love, and some other such thing in every welcoming song.
Firewhiskey in the Jar was, however, hitherto unheard of.
Brendon Urie was trying to look at the whole thing with an open mind. The stories from his family about what awaited him when he arrived at Hogwarts had been very varied-containing everything from warnings not to go near the lake at any cost whatsoever, do you hear me, young man? from his mother (Ravenclaw), to extensive, hand-written maps of the best Bubblehead-diving spots in the same lake from his eldest brother Matt (Gryffindor)-and he had grown up with a very vague and contradictory picture of how his time at the finest school of magic in Britain would be. The tales about the Sorting, especially, had changed with how pleased whoever was doing the telling was with him that day, and Brendon thus had no idea if whatever had just happened was part of the ordinary process or not. He had noted that the face of the stern woman who had led them into the Great Hall had become steadily more stony as the song progressed, and that sometime around the second verse the very old man who sat in the centre of the Head Table had started laughing so hard he’d had to produce a very large purple handkerchief to dry his eyes, but he thought maybe it was all part of some test or other. He concentrated on looking very serious and grown-up, and not at all like he was about to throw up from nervousness.
The Sorting Hat came to an end on a final, warbled “Mush a ring dum-a do, dum-a da”, and the stern woman professor quickly waved the first kid in line to her, talking over the Hat’s suggestions that it be allowed to continue with The Scotsman. And right about here, Brendon developed a short-lived but intense hatred for his last name. It was bad enough realising that you were going to have to put on a (possibly drunk) mouldy old hat in front of a huge hall full of students that might just be very judgemental. It was worse to realise you’d have to do it among the very last.
He looked straight ahead as kid after kid shuffled forward and put the Hat over his or her head. Most of them looked as terrified as Brendon felt. A little further down the line, however, he became aware of a boy who was looking out over the Great Hall, looking calm in a stiff sort of way.
He had nice hair.
The boy turned his head suddenly, almost as if he had sensed someone staring at him, and Brendon looked away, embarrassed. He looked behind him in the line instead, needing to focus his attention on something-anything-that wasn’t his stomach. There were only two people with last names even further back in the alphabet than his: a red-haired, pale girl and a boy who was managing to look sleepy and scared at the same time. They were holding hands, tightly.
“Urie,” Brendon said, pointing to his own chest and smiling weakly at them.
The girl smiled back at him-a smile with just about as much sincerity as his own-and introduced herself as, “A Weasley. Ginny.”
“Weasley.” Brendon tasted the name. “Do you have a Morgana in the family?”
“Aunt.” Ginny smiled at him, slightly warmer this time, and Brendon smiled back.
“Third cousin once removed. I knew we had a Weasley connection somewhere.”
“I’m Walker,” the strange boy said, letting go of Ginny’s hand and shaking Brendon’s. “Jonathan, if we’re sharing first names as well.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m Brendon.” Brendon blushed, feeling stupid. “I was just pleased I wasn’t at the very end of the line.”
“No, that’s me,” Ginny said, and she was back to looking scared. Jonathan grabbed her hand again and squeezed it.
“You’ll be fine.”
“My brothers said the Hat asks you a lot of questions, and if you answer wrong, you aren’t allowed in at all.”
“You shouldn’t trust older brothers,” Jonathan said stoutly. “They lie all the time, because they’re prats. If I’d trusted mine, I’d have thought there was no such thing as magic.”
“You’re Muggle-born?” Brendon asked, interested. There were very few Muggle-borns in his family, although there were a couple of Muggle in-laws and one or two Squibs. Jonathan shrugged.
“Yeah, but I figured it’d be all right.”
“It’s no different, really,” Ginny told him earnestly. “You met Hermione on the train-the girl who sat in the compartment with us? She’s Muggle-born and the best witch in her year. And I’m sure you’ll be in Gryffindor as well with us, so you’ll be able to ask her things all the time.”
Jonathan brightened up at the mention of this, and turned his attention back to Brendon, asking what House his family was mostly in. Brendon was still trying to figure out how to answer-it was a question that needed a very long answer or none at all-when there was a very audible cough from behind him. He turned to realise that it was his turn, and that the stern professor was holding up the Hat for him with a very displeased look on her face. Face burning, he hastened forward, somehow managed to avoid tripping over his own robes, placed himself on the stool and felt the soft material of the Hat settle over his ears.
Cheers, said a small voice in his ear, and Brendon gasped. He had been so concentrated on his discussion with Ginny and Jonathan that he hadn’t paid very close attention to the rest of the Sorting. He had noticed that people seemed to be sitting for a longer or shorter period of time with the Hat over their head before the house was called out, but hadn’t attached importance to the matter. Suddenly he remembered what Ginny had said about the Hat asking questions, and he realised that she had been serious about the Hat actually talking.
How are we feeling today, then? the voice continued, sounding cheerful and slightly fuzzy, the way Matt sounded when he came home from an evening out with the other Hogwarts graduates. About to throw up, I shouldn’t wonder. Well, let’s look at you-oh, what a pretty little mind you have. Sort of makes me think of puppies, you know? Loyalty abounds, honesty astounds, love... is all around...s. See what I did there? Kind of poetic, right?
Brendon didn’t know if he was supposed to answer this one, but he whispered yes, sir very quietly into the brim of the Hat, anyway. It giggled.
It’s adorable, it wheezed, in between giggles. OK, I’ve decided. You, sir, are an obvious, quintessential and all around perfect... SLYTHERIN!
Brendon felt the Hat be lifted off his head and realised the last word had been shouted out loud. He looked up at the professor-McGonagall, he recalled now-who nodded curtly at him and pointed the way to one of the students’ tables.
Realising that the terrible ordeal was over and that he was now a real student of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he couldn’t stop grinning as he made his way over to the table and found a vacant spot near the middle.
“Hello,” he said to the people on either side of him, and then to the ones on the opposite side of the table as well as a couple of places away, to be on the safe side. “Hello, I’m Brendon. Urie. Hello. Hello, nice to meet you, hello.”
“Hey, you,” said a boy nearly opposite him. He had blond hair, slicked back, and looked a bit like he had just found something brown and sticky under his shoe. “Urie, right? Did they really tell you Slytherin? Because-” He stopped suddenly and blinked as Brendon beamed at him.
“Yeah, they did!” he said. “It’s amazing, I had no idea where I was going to end up, so I’m really excited. Someone told me your Common Room is actually under the lake, is that true? It must be so, so cool.”
There was a pause, and then the boy just opposite Brendon laughed, turning to his neighbour and muttering something that could have been “he’s good” and could have been “new food”. Brendon wasn’t sure how he should take it, but then the boy turned back to him and gave him an appreciative smile, so he thought it was probably fine.
The boy to Brendon’s right had been very quiet so far, but as the conversation eventually resumed around them, he nudged Brendon’s shoulder with his own and stuck out his hand when Brendon turned to face him.
“I’m Spencer Smith,” he said. “I’m in Year One, too. Seems like we’re going to be class mates-I’m looking forward to it.” He glanced briefly past Brendon as he spoke, but he had the nicest smile Brendon had ever seen.
“Me too!” Brendon said happily, shaking Spencer’s hand. “It’s really nice to meet you. I can call you Spencer, right?”
This was something Kara had been quite insistent about, telling him that it was rude to simply assume a first-name familiarity. Kayla had agreed to this, but mentioned that this was mostly the rule when speaking to people from other Houses, and this has sparked a debate between the sisters on whether addressing people by their last name was proper form or not (it seemed that things were done somewhat differently between Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff). The sisterly spat had not done anything to relieve Brendon’s confusion, but he had decided to at least try and ask first. He’d slipped up several times already, though. It felt unnatural to introduce himself as Urie-his last name was pretty strange, if nothing else-and he felt like it didn’t come off as very friendly.
Spencer didn’t have time to reply to the question, since the very old guy at the Head Table stood up at that moment and introduced himself as headmaster, so Brendon decided to assume it would have been yes.
The headmaster spoke for quite some time about school values, changes in rules and, for some reason, the relative merits of asparagus, and when he eventually finished, Brendon was more than ready for the food that materialised in front of him. The rest of the Welcoming Feast was spent making up for the very long train ride with only sandwiches for nourishment-Brendon’s mother didn’t believe in eating sweets on weekdays, so he’d had to say a polite “no, thanks” to the lady with the food trolley-and he didn’t manage to catch anybody else’s name until the Feast was over and the Prefect calling himself Bletchley called all the first-years together. Bletchley led them from the Hall and down one level, telling them on the way about curfews, general rules and password for the Common Room entrance. Brendon caught about half of it. There was too much to see to be able to concentrate on just one voice.
All of what he’d seen so far paled, however, in comparison with his Common Room.
“Wow,” he said, stepping into the middle of the room with Spencer at his shoulder, “wow, this is amazing. Look at the light, Spencer! Isn’t it amazing? I’m so glad I ended up in Slytherin and not anywhere else.”
“Hey,” said someone, tapping him on the shoulder. It was the boy with the hair gel, and he was grinning at Brendon. “Just wanted to make sure you didn’t take offence or anything by my question before, at the Feast. And to introduce myself-Draco Malfoy. I’m in Year Two. If you want help with anything you can always ask me.”
He held out his hand. He didn’t have quite as nice a smile as Spencer-but then, thought Brendon, probably no one in the entire world had as nice a smile as Spencer.
“Thank you!” he said, shaking Draco’s hand. “I’d love to be friends with you. I’m Brendon and this is Spencer.”
“Smith,” said Spencer, holding out his hand for Draco to shake, too. Draco did so, watching Spencer’s face carefully.
“I think there are some Smith connections in our family,” he said thoughtfully. “Think I remember seeing you out on the far right of the family tree.”
Spencer smiled at him. “Yes, I thought you seemed like the family tree type,” he said pleasantly.
Brendon looked from one boy to the other, confused. They were both smiling, and they both sounded nice, but he got a weird impression from them, nonetheless.
“So do you know where your dormitory is?” Draco asked, breaking the eye contact.
“Yes, thank you,” Spencer replied, very politely. “We’d better go see that our stuff made it here all right. Thank you so much for your help.”
“Nice to meet you both,” Draco said lazily, now looking a bit bored as he started gazing around the rest of the Common Room.
“Bye, Draco! See you later.” Brendon pondered a hug, but remembered what his sisters had taught him about personal space and contented himself with a short wave before running after Spencer.
“He’s nice, isn’t he?” he said, and Spencer mumbled something in reply. It was probably a yes, Brendon decided.
Their dorm contained three beds apart from their own, but no one else was there yet. Brendon didn’t mind, quickly filling up the space with talk and stories from home, occasionally punctuated by Spencer’s laugh. His clothes were already in the closet, and someone had folded all his socks before putting them in a drawer. All that remained for him was to place out all his family photos, something that took longer than expected. Partly because he had to tell Spencer about the people in every photo before placing it in its proper place, and partly because he found that his night stand was only just large enough. In fact, for a while it seemed as if it was just a couple of inches short, but Brendon patted the side of it pleadingly and was delighted to have it stretch itself out to just the right size. Spencer blinked at him, looking surprised, then looked at his own night stand with a look of such comical and exaggerated consideration that Brendon laughed.
Brendon finally went to bed with his head still in a whirl, thinking that he couldn’t have got off to a better start. He had two friends already, as well as the two Gryffindors (maybe) who had seemed so nice. Hogwarts was a wonderful place.
ogwarts was a horrible place, Ryan Ross thought bitterly. He was supposed to be answering a mind-expanding riddle-like question for an elegant eagle door knocker, not this.
“Well?” said the Fat Lady, tapping the frame of her painting impatiently. “Do you have the password or not?”
“Have you ever thought that maybe it would be a good idea to choose passwords that aren’t easier to crack than a pane of glass as well as utterly inane?” Ryan asked her, rolling his eyes.
“None of your cheek. Give me the password, or you’ll just have to stay the night here.”
“Captain Farrell,” Ryan said, sighing.
“Right you are, love,” the Fat Lady said as she swung forward to admit him. “And I would work on that attitude of yours, if I were you.”
Ryan made a face, but was careful to do it after he passed from under her eyes. He had no doubt she would close the passage against him entirely if he got on her bad side.
Someone was calling him from the fire, but he ignored them and made his way up to his dorm instead. Once there, he sat down on his bed and looked around himself. There were six other beds in the room, and three of them had Quidditch posters or banners pinned up beside them. The fourth had a framed photograph of three teenage boys standing in front of the Slytherin crest on its night stand, which was a little confusing since most families after all often got Sorted into the same House. (Then again, Ryan was living proof that that did not have to happen.) The fifth night stand had a large camera in the same place of honour and the sixth lacked any obvious declarations of interest or loyalty.
Ryan’s night stand carried four encyclopedias of spells, potions and plants, as well as Hogwarts: A History and two more books on magical theory. He picked up one of these, Spell Residue: A First Aftertaste of Magic, and opened it, looking sadly at the inside of the cover where Jennifer Ross, Ravenclaw was written in careful, elegant script. He sighed deeply, thinking back on the previous night’s unending Quidditch discussions with contempt. His attempts to switch the subject to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the obvious magic knowledge hinted at therein had not been appreciated, and he was sure that he had heard one of his dorm mates laugh at his lavender scarf.
They would totally have liked his scarves in Ravenclaw.
pencer laid the last of his pens and scrolls of parchment in his night stand, turned and jumped, startled. The boy who had sat opposite Brendon the night before was leaning in the doorway, grinning at him.
“Ever heard of maybe letting people know you’re there?” Spencer asked, sharper than intended.
“Sorry,” said the boy, not looking sorry at all. “But I wanted to introduce myself. Blaise Zabini.” His grin widened a little more, but he didn’t uncross his arms, and Spencer didn’t move towards him. Someone who didn’t bother with unnecessary handshakes, it seemed.
“Spencer Smith,” he said.
“Well, I knew that, of course,” said Zabini. “Wasn’t there another Smith, as well? The one who ended up in Hufflepuff. Any relation of yours?”
“Third cousin,” Spencer replied, frowning a little. He’d been surprised not to have Zacharias join him in Slytherin, actually.
“Well,” said Zabini, “this is going to be interesting. Draco Malfoy’s been king of the hill here since we started-money can buy a lot of respect and awe, even when it is,” he made a delicate pause, “new. I wonder how he’ll react to suddenly having not just one, but two Smiths to reckon with. And she was a Grey, wasn’t she, the girl who was sitting next to you at the Feast?” He laughed. “It seems we’re simply drowning in nobility this year.”
Spencer shrugged. He was descended from a family that in the Muggle world was indeed called noble, but his father had early on instilled in him the knowledge that this nobility did not extend to the wizarding world. There was no such system in place there, and Spencer had been taught never to flaunt his title. Still, it was stupid to pretend ignorance of the fact that many people in the wizarding world, too, still deferred to the noble families.
Zabini laughed again, seemingly very amused by Spencer’s casual acknowledgement. “And modest as well,” he said ironically. “Like I said, just wanted to say hello. Give promise of my support, and all that. I’ll see you around.”
He waved and left, and Spencer smiled to himself. In a way, people like Zabini were easy to predict. He had no doubt at all that the promised support was about as real as a marsh-light, and Zabini certainly gave off an impression of “eel”, but his treacheries were foreseeable-his unpredictability predictable. His motives were as clear as anything, not least because he more or less paraded them for the world to see. I care about myself and, yeah, that’s about it.
Not like Brendon. Spencer frowned again. He wasn’t sure what Brendon was all about.
rendon’s first week passed in a happy daze. People were nice to him all the time, lots and lots of his House mates had talked to him and seemed to want to be friends with him, and his first owl home had arrived back with a gently bemused but mainly congratulatory missive from his mother:
We were surprised at first, I have to admit, because we are after all mostly Huffles and Ravens in the closest family-except for Matt, but we all knew from the first time he climbed the apple tree where that one was headed, didn’t we? But then we remembered your father’s cousin George, and of course, as you know, we’ve always said his wife would make such a good Slytherin as well if she wasn’t so very Muggle. And you always did resemble Georgie closer than the rest of us, I always said so. There’s the whole Lancashire branch of the family, too-they’ll be so pleased to hear there are more Slytherins at last. We should invite them over for dinner, shouldn’t we?
Brendon had been a bit disappointed when he realised that he was supposed to sit with his House at every meal time. He could see a whole row of third cousins over at the Gryffindor table, as well as his two sisters over at Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff, respectively, and he couldn’t see why he shouldn’t be allowed to spend some time with them, as well. Then again, he was having such a wonderful time with all his new Slytherin friends that he only had time for a vague regret about the matter. Hogwarts people were all so very nice.
During his first Herbology class he was pleasantly surprised to meet up again with Jonathan Walker, who had been behind him in the Sorting line. They quickly paired off to work together, Brendon giving Spencer an apologetic smile and a mutter about “old friend” first.
They got to work quickly on replanting pots of honking daffodils and spent the best part of the lesson sharing first impressions and descriptions of their respective Houses. Jonathan had been Sorted into Ravenclaw and was thrilled with the view from his Common Room, although not so much with the very long, winding walk up the stairs to reach it.
“I thought you were a sure Gryffindor?” Brendon asked him. Jonathan shrugged.
“I don’t know, that was just what Ginny said. I didn’t really know anything about any of the Houses, so for me Ravenclaw didn’t sound much weirder than anything else, you know?”
“What did the Hat tell you, then?” Brendon asked, curious to hear other stories about how the Sorting worked.
Jonathan frowned. “I was pretty confused about that,” he admitted. “Professor What’s-her-name-something Scottish-anyway, you know her, she put the Hat on my head and it just sort of started laughing. It did that for a while, and then it said I know, I know, this is great. You’ll be a RAVENCLAW! And that was it. I didn’t really get it.”
“It told me a poem,” Brendon said. “And something about puppies. I guess it has a really advanced and magical way of telling where you belong,” he added, but without much conviction.
“Maybe.” Jonathan didn’t sound all that convinced, either. “Ginny ended up in Gryffindor, anyway. It’s a bit of a bummer, because we only have Astronomy with them. And I haven’t made any friends as good as her in Ravenclaw yet.”
“Oh, you know what we should do?” Brendon said, his eyes lighting up. “We should start a study group or something-that way we could all still hang out! Good, right?”
“Oh yeah, that’d be great!” Jonathan grinned, looking delighted with the idea. “Then I wouldn’t have to be with only Ravenclaws all the time-I mean, they’re nice and stuff, but it gets kind of boring with only the same people all the time.”
The bell for the next class rang much too early for both of them, but they agreed to meet up in the library after Brendon’s final class on Friday.
“Who was that?” Spencer asked Brendon, coming up behind him as he was waving goodbye to the Ravenclaw boy.
“That’s my friend Jonathan Walker!” Brendon said, grinning enthusiastically. “He thought he was going to be in Gryffindor but he’s in Ravenclaw and their Common Room is right in the top of a tower. Kara never told me that before but it sounds like it’s amazing. He’s Muggle-born so there are lots of things he doesn’t really get yet but apparently Professor Flitwick helps out a lot. We’re having him for Charms now. I’m really excited, Jonathan says he’s nice.”
Spencer blinked, a bit dazed by this onslaught of information but still managing to pick up on the most relevant part. “A Muggle-born?” he asked. Brendon nodded.
“I know, isn’t it interesting? We only have four of them or something in our entire family. I thought they were really rare, but apparently there are more of them every year. Jonathan says there are two in the year above him, and that’s only in his House.”
Spencer sighed. “Well, at least he isn’t a Gryffindor,” he muttered.
“Oh, yeah, I’m glad you said.” Brendon grinned at him. “We’re starting a study group, me and Jonathan and some other friends. You should come! It’s going to be great.”
hat kind of study group?” Ron Weasley asked.
“Just a study group,” said Ginny. “I don’t know, I think we’ll go over homework together and things.”
“Well, as long as you’re not just copying each other’s work,” Ron said, shrugging. Ginny saw Hermione look up from her work and give him a look of complete disbelief.
“It sounds like a great idea,” she said. “Who thought of it?”
“That boy I met on the train.”
“Jonathan?” asked Hermione. “He seemed nice.”
“He is,” said Ginny, warming to the subject. “So far it’s him and a friend of his from Ravenclaw and a boy who was Sorted just before us. Brendon.”
“Brendon?” That was Harry. Ginny blushed. “Brendon Urie?”
“You know him?” asked Ron, saving Ginny from having to answer. Harry frowned.
“No,” he said, “but I overheard Malfoy talking about a Brendon Urie in class today. Sounded like it was his new best friend or something.”
“But Brendon’s nice,” said Ginny, then bit her tongue.
“Yeah, Harry, the Uries are cool,” Ron filled in. “Bit weird, but nice people. I think our aunt married into them a while back, right, Ginny?”
“Still a Slytherin,” Harry mumbled, but then he shrugged and smiled at Ginny. “Just be a bit careful with him, OK?”
Ginny nodded dumbly, wishing she could come up with something clever in reply but not able to think of a single word to say. She turned away instead to hide her face, stumbled against one of the armchairs and would have fallen flat on the floor if she hadn’t managed to catch hold of the chair’s back. She ended in a weird half-sitting, half-standing position, hugging the chair for support. As she straightened up and hurried towards her dorm, head low and face and neck burning with shame, she heard Ron snorting back a laugh.
She wished she knew how to turn herself invisible.
pencer had been looking forward to Potions. The professor for the class was their Head of House, a former Slytherin, and so far Spencer had noticed that professors seemed to favour the students of their own House. Whether unconsciously or by design Spencer didn’t know, but it was a fact that while Brendon had told him that his Ravenclaw friend had received two House points for pointing out the constellation known as Cassiopeia in Astronomy, Spencer and Brendon’s class mate Margaret Grey had received no similar reward when she managed the same feat for their first Astronomy lesson. Hopefully now in Potions the scale would be tipped even again. Otherwise it just wasn’t fair.
“Colin!” Brendon waved suddenly to a boy in the other end of the class room. “Hey, hey, Colin! Spence, me and Colin met in the boats. Hi!”
The boy called Colin smiled a smile that flickered between delighted and uncertain. The former seemed to win out, and he waved back, faltering as eleven pairs of Slytherin eyes looked him up and down in a very assessing manner.
“You know people everywhere, it seems,” Spencer said, filing the information under “watch and learn”. He had looked on as Brendon chatted happily to a pair of Hufflepuff twins during the theoretical Astronomy class the day before (“Jeff and Douglas, old neighbours”) and had seen him walk through the library, grinning like an idiot and waving to a Ravenclaw here and a Gryffindor there with every semblance of innocent joy (“met on the train”).
He was growing steadily more impressed. Brendon obviously took manipulative to a whole new level. He somehow managed to pull off an act of complete, honest innocence, and he made everyone around him believe that he liked them.
Spencer couldn’t deny that he was good at it, too. But he overdid his act sometimes-seguing over from cute to annoying, and from believable to caricature. No one could be that energetic and bubbly.
Someone was pulling on his sleeve.
“Spencer,” said Brendon, looking apologetic, “is it OK if I work with someone else in this class, too? That’s Ginny-over there, see? She’s great. And I haven’t got to talk to her since the Sorting.”
“Of course,” said Spencer, seeing out of the corner of his eye how two of the remaining Slytherin boys almost visibly perked their ears. “I’ll just work with... Harper,” he decided, turning to the same. “That’s all right, isn’t it?”
Ian Harper nodded enthusiastically. Both his and the other boy’s families were from Spencer’s county and had grown up with a deep-seated respect for the Smith family. At Hogwarts, it was up to Spencer to maintain the good inter-family relations, perfected over generations, and he made sure to spend time with them now and again.
Brendon beamed at all of them. “Great! I’ll see you guys for lunch.”
Spencer watched him hurry across the room and set up his cauldron next to Ginny-Weasley, obviously; nature couldn’t have been cruel enough to gift more than one family with that hair. He watched how Brendon unloaded his equipment, placing his ornate silver knife next to Weasley’s old, notched one and dropping Potions ingredients in her lap. Within a minute of his sitting down, they were both giggling together.
He wondered what Brendon’s agenda was. The Uries were too altogether odd to make it onto the pure-blood map, and all he knew of them was that they were neither strictly traditional nor successfully integrated into the Muggle world, but some kind of culture all to themselves. From what he’d heard of them so far, they were at least not another bunch of Malfoys, although they shared a couple of fourth cousins here and there-but then, the Uries shared at least a couple of fourth cousins with just about everyone. If Spencer had been asked to give an assessment, he’d have said that the Uries were a bunch of oddballs with little influence in the greater scheme of things.
And out of this rose Brendon, a Slytherin son who seemed to be slowly infiltrating every other House by dint of careful networking and a very well thought-out, cute front. But why? What was his goal? Brendon confused Spencer terribly. It was probably best to keep an eye on him.
nd this is Luna,” said Jon, presenting his House mate to Brendon and Ginny. She was one of the first people he’d got to know in Ravenclaw, and he was sure she’d get along with the other two, as well.
Luna smiled vaguely. “Your brother received a Howler this Tuesday,” she told Ginny, who flushed.
“I know he did,” she said shortly. “There’s no need to rub it in.”
“I thought it was very interesting,” Luna continued, as if Ginny hadn’t spoken. “They’re very loud, aren’t they?”
“The Howlers?” Brendon asked.
“That’s kind of the point,” said Ginny.
Luna looked from one to the other, gently perplexed. “No,” she said, “screech owls. Very loud, I think. I would like to start with Charms.”
“She’s a bit weird,” Jon told Brendon, as the four of them placed themselves around one of the smaller tables in the area of the library reserved for group work. “I like her, though. She tells funny stories. What happened to your friend, by the way?”
Brendon had brought a class mate from Slytherin, Spencer. He had chatted with them for a while until Ginny arrived, when he’d unfortunately had to go.
Brendon frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “He said something about limits. I guess he was busy after all.”
“He seems nice,” Jon said. He and Spencer had discovered that they shared a common interest, both being very fond of dogs, and they’d talked about retrievers and setters and Crups (Jon wasn’t sure what the last one was, but Spencer seemed to like them) until Spencer had to leave. “You should invite him again. If he has time. What did you get for Charms?”
It quickly turned out that Jon was the best teacher among them. Brendon was definitely very good at magic, and he’d had no trouble at all during practical lessons, but when asked how exactly he had managed to make his goblet turn around in Charms, he only responded with an uncertain “You just tell it to,” and could not be persuaded to elaborate. Luna had grasped some of the introductory magic very well, too, but was if possible an even worse instructor than Brendon (“It’s like imagining you’re lavender in colour, and then you have to do that thing-like breathing, but more deliberately”). Jon wasn’t as instinctively good at magic as either of them, he knew, but he was much better at explaining the process than any of the others.
“You have to find the part in the matchstick that wants to change,” he said patiently, as Luna and Ginny waved their wands ineffectively at their respective match. They had abandoned their real homework some time back in favour of practical lessons, and had decided to concentrate on the girls’ main difficulty so far: Transfiguration. Brendon, having mastered turning his match into a needle long ago and already bored with the basics, was turning his own into a small matchstick man. He had managed to make the match stand up on two legs already, and was now trying to convince the wood to split into arms.
“It’s like, um,” Jon continued, distracted for a second by Brendon’s small whoop of success as the matchstick man acquired an arm. “Look at how the light looks, shining on the wood, right? And then you have to imagine how it would shine if that was metal instead, and concentrate on that...”
There was a gasp from Ginny; her match had just turned silvery.
“Ginny, that’s fantastic!” Brendon exclaimed enthusiastically, looking up from his own work. His little matchstick man wobbled, waved its new arm frantically and then fell over, turning back into a regular match as it landed.
Ginny blushed, and her smile faltered. “I know you’ve done it several times already,” she said defensively. Brendon blinked at her, uncomprehending.
“Yeah, but you haven’t, right?” he asked. “That’s amazing-you got it so quickly when Jonathan started explaining.” He beamed at her.
Ginny still looked as if she was on her guard, waiting for the sting to come. But Brendon only returned to his own match and started the labour of making it stand again, now and then throwing her and Luna admiring as well as encouraging glances. The suspicious look left Ginny’s face, and she grinned, huge and satisfied.
They finally left the library when Madam Pince started to make pointed comments about curfews, staying for a moment outside the doors to agree that it had been very nice and that they should definitely meet up again next Friday. Ginny was off first, hugging Jon quickly and waving at the other two before dashing to catch up with her brother, who had just passed on his way to the Gryffindor tower.
“So I’ll see you in Herbology,” Brendon said. His fingers were plucking at the straps of his school bag restlessly, and Jon recalled that he had looked kind of wistful when Ginny ran off.
“Yes, looking forward to it,” he said. He held up his arms, pleased to have his theory proved right when Brendon all but threw himself into the hug. Brendon hugged Luna next, then stepped back quickly, blushed and mumbled a confused apology.
But Luna only smiled serenely. “I like you,” she told him. “You’re like a Billywig.”
rendon’s first flying class turned out to be a bit of a chore. The first fifteen minutes had consisted of mounting their brooms and hovering, then sinking back to the ground slowly and landing “in a controlled and proper manner”. He was growing steadily more bored, but knew from his brother Matt what happened to kids who didn’t keep to the rules. (Matt had been forced to wait until his fourth year to try out for the Quidditch team, and even then it was only because Charlie Weasley had gone to Professor McGonagall and begged.) However, even Spencer-whose flying experience so far had consisted of a couple of very slow laps around his country house-had muttered that this was excessively cautious.
Brendon started to look around at the rest of the class. Ginny had grown up in a Quidditch family just like him, and she caught his eye, giving him a resigned shrug of the shoulders. He rolled his eyes in reply, and she giggled. His gaze moved on, coming to rest on a boy who was hovering by himself a little off from his House mates.
It was the boy from the Sorting. He was staring intently at the handle of his broomstick, looking as though he wished himself anywhere but there. He was good, though-a lot of the other students were still wobbling a little or weaving from side to side, but he was hanging calmly in the air, just high enough that his toes didn’t touch the ground.
He looked lonely, Brendon thought.
“And land!” Madam Hooch shouted. Brendon had once been to a Quidditch match where the commentator had used a charm Brendon’s dad told him was called “Sonorus” to make himself heard. He now thought that if they’d just hired Madam Hooch, they wouldn’t have had to bother.
He was still looking at the strange Gryffindor when her order came, and his landing was too hasty, making him stumble. Thankfully, Madam Hooch didn’t have time to see it. Brendon had a sneaking feeling she would assign students extra hovers if she caught them messing up their landing.
“All right,” she called, fishing her wand out of her boot and conjuring up a set of large, brightly coloured bubbles that hovered about six feet above the ground. She waved them away, one after the other, until they had placed themselves in a circle fifty feet across. “You will fly around this circle until I tell you to stop. There is to be no racing. You will fly in a slow walking pace, never straying more than eight feet above the ground. If you need to overtake one of your fellow students, you will do so on their right side with a safety margin of at least three feet, first calling out to let them know you’re coming. Anyone who breaks these rules will spend their next two weekends clipping bent tail twigs from the school brooms. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Madam Hooch,” they chorused demurely, at least half of them deciding on the spot that rules were made to be broken and resolving to see how far they could bend them before Madam Hooch snapped.
“Right then. Mr Ross, you will lead, and the rest of you follow him in order. I want a nice, orderly flight. Up you go.”
She blew her whistle and the boy Brendon had been watching kicked off, gliding calmly through the air and settling into steady orbit of the newly constructed track. One by one, the other students followed, and Madam Hooch soon had her hands full, shouting at Harper that if that was his walking pace, she expected to never see him late for her classes, and that if Miss Claque didn’t stop scraping her knees along the ground, Madam Hooch would spell a scythe to her broom and employ her as lawnmower. Brendon felt pretty safe in setting a pace slightly faster than most other students, and spent five minutes slowly edging past student after student in front of him. (Spencer, meanwhile, was flying along at a sedately pace and would not be persuaded to go any faster.)
He slowed his pace as he started to catch up with the Gryffindor called Ross, watching how steady his flying was and how his bronze-and-blue scarf fluttered gently as he swerved to stay on track. Blue and bronze were Ravenclaw’s colours and not Gryffindor’s, Brendon knew, but they seemed to fit Ross better than the red and gold would have. The blue was nice against his hair.
Eventually he called out softly, Overtaking, and edged forward while Ross drifted gently left. Brendon slowed his pace again as he came up alongside Ross, clearing his throat nervously. “Um,” he said. “Hi.”
“Hi,” said Ross non-committally, looking sideways at him.
“I just, er, I thought,” Brendon began, faltered and continued, “I like your scarf. It’s nice. Pretty. I like that it glitters.”
Ross stared at him, a small frown creasing the space between his eyebrows.
“You’re really good at flying,” Brendon continued, now somewhat desperately. “Have you flown much? You look like you’ve flown really a lot. You’re good.”
Ross was still staring at him, and before Brendon could attempt to fill up the silence further there was a shout about “and no side-by-side, Mr Urie, stop taking up space” and he felt obliged to complete his overtaking after bidding Ross an awkward, “Bye, I guess.”
He had barely settled into orbit when a voice called out about overtaking in measured monotone, and Ross nudged his broom alongside his. Brendon slowed marginally, assuming that Ross wanted to get his spot back and avoid him, but Ross slowed to match his speed.
“I’ve never flown before,” he said, as if there had been no break in their conversation. “It’s OK, I guess.”
“Really?” It was Brendon’s turn to stare. “You’re very good!”
“You mentioned,” Ross said dryly, but there was a hint of a smile on his face.
“I’m Brendon,” said Brendon. “What’s your name?”
“Ryan,” Ross said.
Brendon grinned happily. Ryan. “That’s a nice name,” he offered, before Madam Hooch’s voice called out a sharp “Mr Ross!” and his new-found friend swerved in front of him.
They spent the remainder of the exercise overtaking each other by turn and sharing snippets of information about their respective knowledge of flying and Quidditch-Ryan sometimes listened to Appleby Arrows games on the WWN, but had never owned a broom or even wished to, while Brendon had ridden his first one on his fourth birthday and nursed a fervent but not very hopeful wish to become a professional Quidditch player since the same day.
Madam Hooch eventually put an end to their fragmented conversation by declaring that since Mr Ross and Mr Urie were so keen on slalom, they could lead the way for the next exercise. She quickly rearranged the floating bubbles into a straight line and instructed them to fly a slow slalom between them, all the way to the end of the line and then back, one at a time. Brendon started, happy to finally do something that at least resembled real flying, only to realise that once he’d finished his round, he had to wait in line while the rest of the class did their turn before going again. His disgust over the slow tempo evaporated, however, as Ryan finished his round and came to rest in the line right behind him, mumbling that if he-being on a broom for the first time-found this embarrassingly easy, he didn’t even want to imagine what it was like for Brendon.
By the end of the lesson, when they had each had time for two more rounds of the slalom course but nothing else, Brendon was inclined to agree. Right about then, however, Madam Hooch earned his unending respect and love.
“I want the following students to gather around me,” she said, then rattled off a handful of names, among which Spencer’s was to be found but neither Brendon’s nor Ryan’s. “I will go through a couple of things with you. The rest of you are free to take a short round of the grounds-where I can still see you, of course. And the threat about detention still stands if I see you above fifteen feet. All right, off with you. Or back up to the castle, of course, if that’s your cup of tea.”
She waved her wand at the slalom course, making the bubbles disappear in a series of wet pops, and then turned her back on Brendon and the others, addressing her selected students, “So, grip technique...”
Ryan stepped off his broom and shouldered it, turning towards the castle.
“What-wait!” Brendon exclaimed, grabbing his arm. “Don’t you want to fly with us?” He indicated Ginny, who had hurried up to Brendon as soon as Madam Hooch turned her harsh eye from them. “We’re going to fly around the lake. Come on, it’s a lot more fun when you don’t have to keep so close to the ground you’re afraid to catch your foot on something.”
Ryan hesitated, looking from him to the expectant Ginny, and then gave in, looking resigned.
“Fine,” he said. “One lap.”
pencer watched, bemused, as Brendon set off together with the Weasley and that other Gryffindor-Ross, something or other. Networking was all fine, but to hang that much with Gryffindors? Gryffindors, who were generally known as loud-mouthed sports nerds with about as much foresight as a Divination teacher at, well, Hogwarts actually. (Spencer’s father had snorted, very unimpressed, as he read through the teacher lists for their later courses.) Spencer had to admire Brendon’s perseverance, if nothing else.
Then again, the Ross guy seemed unusually quiet for a Gryffindor. Not even Brendon, who could probably enthuse a rock, had managed to coach more than a smile out of him so far. It was intriguing to see someone so clearly not cast in usual mould.
He received additional information on Ryan Ross-the full name-as he and Brendon made their way back up to the castle after locking their borrowed Cleansweeps in the school’s broom locker. As far as Spencer could tell, Ross was an Astronomy nerd with a bit of an unhealthy love for books, apparently inherited from his mother. Spencer had immediately drawn up the wizarding bloodlines in his head, finding Ross in the “mixed” part of the map, a family that had married several times with Muggles throughout their history. The greater part of their actual wizards and witches were Ravenclaws, just like Ross’s mother.
It was difficult to tell with people sometimes, Spencer thought. Ross probably had strong Gryffindor characteristics under that quiet surface-from what Spencer had heard, the Sorting Hat otherwise usually followed family tradition when someone was between two Houses.
He and Brendon, along with the rest of their class mates, arrived back in the Common Room just before a storm of second-years entered, complaining loudly about the greenhouses’ dampness and the idiocy of working with Mandrakes anyway. Loudest amongst the complainants was, not surprisingly, Draco Malfoy. Spencer rolled his eyes.
“It’s freezing in here,” Malfoy said petulantly, throwing himself in one of the sofas close to the fireplace. “Why haven’t the House Elves set the fire yet? Slacking off, probably, the little-”
The rest of his words were drowned in a sudden fwoosh as the fire leapt to life.
There was a stunned silence for a few moments, and then Blaise Zabini started laughing. “Looks like they heard you,” he said. “Wish for pudding next, come on.”
The rest of the first- and second-years gathered around Malfoy, giggling and theorising about how the House Elves had managed it, what else they were capable of and what kind of sweets one could, possibly, make them bring. But Spencer remained where he was, frowning to himself.
Maybe he was being stupid, but he could have sworn he’d seen Brendon snap his fingers just before the logs burst into flames.
ey,” said Ginny carefully, setting her books down gingerly in front of Ryan. He had chosen a table in a secluded corner of the Common Room, and while he didn’t glare at her as she arrived, she got the impression that interrupting his study time was a grave offence in his book.
“Hey,” he replied, glancing up at her briefly and then back down into his book.
“You were very good at flying yesterday,” Ginny said, encouraged by the lack of Go away and sitting down. “Do you play Quidditch at all?”
“No. And I don’t plan to.” Ryan flipped a page casually, without looking up at her at all.
Ginny was a bit daunted, but decided to plunge bravely on. “Listen, I was thinking,” she said, “that you might like to join our study group. Maybe? It’s nice, we help each other out with homework and things like that.”
“I study well on my own,” Ryan replied, pushing the book a little to the side and starting to scribble on the near-lying parchment.
“I guess...” Ginny sighed inwardly. She’d been hoping it’d go easier than this. Brendon had asked her to invite Ryan to join them, and she agreed with him in that Ryan seemed a bit lonely. She’d try to spend more time with him, she thought, especially during lessons. She’d been picked last when they were asked to pair off for practical work once and knew how mortifying it was, and she’d seen that happen to Ryan several times already.
“It’s nice to meet people from other Houses as well, though, don’t you think?” she went on, making one last attempt. “Apart from me and Brendon there’s Jonathan and Luna from Ravenclaw so far, and I think it’s great to be able to meet people that aren’t in Gryffindor sometimes. Apart from lessons and stuff.”
Ryan’s quill stopped moving. “You know people in Ravenclaw?” he asked.
“Yes, I met Jonathan on the train here,” Ginny explained, “and we both got to know Brendon while we were waiting for the Sorting. And then Jonathan brought Luna along last Friday. She’s-nice, too.” She grimaced inwardly, but Ryan seemed not to have noticed the small hesitation.
“It does sound like a good idea to spend time with people other than Gryffindors,” Ryan said slowly, as if trying out the idea in his head. Ginny could understand his hesitation. Mixing with other Houses was not something they were usually encouraged to do. “Fine, I’ll come.”
“Great!” Ginny smiled happily. Brendon would be delighted.
***
Brendon was so delighted that he broke his own rule about talking to people more than three times before hugging them. Ryan was not entirely comfortable with this, but considered it a necessary evil. He’d get to meet Ravenclaws, after all. Maybe it would even be possible to eventually find a way to switch Houses.
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