“D’you reckon it’s true this year’s going to be really tough? Because of the exams?”
“Oh yeah,” said Ron. “Bound to be, isn’t it? O.W.L.s are really important, affect the jobs you can apply for and everything. We get career advice too, later this year, Bill told me. So you can choose what N.E.W.T.s you want to do next year.”
“D’you know what you want to do after Hogwarts?” Harry asked the other two, as they left the Great Hall shortly afterward and set off toward their History of Magic classroom.
“Not really,” said Ron slowly. “Except . . . well . . .”
He looked slightly sheepish.
“What?” Harry urged him.
“Well, it’d be cool to be an Auror,” said Ron in an offhand voice.
“Yeah, it would,” said Harry fervently.
“But they’re, like, the elite,” said Ron. “You’ve got to be really good. What about you, Hermione?”
“I don’t know,” said Hermione. “I think I’d really like to do something worthwhile.”
“An Auror’s worthwhile!” said Harry.
“Yes, it is, but it’s not the only worthwhile thing,” said Hermione thoughtfully. “I mean, if I could take S.P.E.W. further . . .”
Harry and Ron carefully avoided looking at each other.
History of Magic was by common consent the most boring subject ever devised by Wizard-kind. Professor Binns, their ghost teacher, had a wheezy, droning voice that was almost guaranteed to cause severe drowsiness within ten minutes, five in warm weather. He never varied the form of their lessons, but lectured them without pausing while they took notes, or rather, gazed sleepily into space. Harry and Ron had so far managed to scrape passes in this subject only by copying Hermione’s notes before exams; she alone seemed able to resist the soporific power of Binns’s voice.
Today they suffered three-quarters of an hour’s droning on the subject of giant wars. Harry heard just enough within the first ten minutes to appreciate dimly that in another teacher’s hands this subject might have been mildly interesting, but then his brain disengaged, and he spent the remaining thirty-five minutes playing hangman on a corner of his parchment with Ron, while Hermione shot them filthy looks out of the corner of her eye.
“How would it be,” she asked them coldly as they left the classroom for break (Binns drifting away through the blackboard), “if I refused to lend you my notes this year?”
“We’d fail our O.W.L.s,” said Ron. “If you want that on your conscience, Hermione . . .”
“Well, you’d deserve it,” she snapped. “You don’t even try to listen to him, do you?”
“We do try,” said Ron. “We just haven’t got your brains or your memory or your concentration — you’re just cleverer than we are — is it nice to rub it in?”
“Oh, don’t give me that rubbish,” said Hermione, but she looked slightly mollified as she led the way out into the damp courtyard.
A fine misty drizzle was falling, so that the people standing in huddles around the yard looked blurred at the edges. Harry, Ron, and Hermione chose a secluded corner under a heavily dripping balcony, turning up the collars of their robes against the chilly September air and talking about what Snape was likely to set them in the first lesson of the year. They had got as far as agreeing that it was likely to be something extremely difficult, just to catch them off guard after a two-month holiday, when someone walked around the corner toward them.
“Hello, Harry!”
It was Cho Chang and what was more, she was on her own again. This was most unusual: Cho was almost always surrounded by a gang of giggling girls; Harry remembered the agony of trying to get her by herself to ask her to the Yule Ball.
“Hi,” said Harry, feeling his face grow hot. At least you’re not covered in Stinksap this time, he told himself. Cho seemed to be thinking along the same lines.
“You got that stuff off, then?”
“Yeah,” said Harry, trying to grin as though the memory of their last meeting was funny as opposed to mortifying. “So did you . . . er . . . have a good summer?”
The moment he had said this he wished he hadn’t: Cedric had been Cho’s boyfriend and the memory of his death must have affected her holiday almost as badly as it had affected Harry’s. . . . Something seemed to tauten in her face, but she said, “Oh, it was all right, you know . . .”
“Is that a Tornados badge?” Ron demanded suddenly, pointing at the front of Cho’s robes, to which a sky-blue badge emblazoned with a double gold T was pinned. “You don’t support them, do you?”
“Yeah, I do,” said Cho.
“Have you always supported them, or just since they started winning the league?” said Ron, in what Harry considered an unnecessarily accusatory tone of voice.
“I’ve supported them since I was six,” said Cho coolly. “Anyway . . . see you, Harry.”
She walked away. Hermione waited until Cho was halfway across the courtyard before rounding on Ron.
“You are so tactless!”
“What? I only asked her if —”
“Couldn’t you tell she wanted to talk to Harry on her own?”
“So? She could’ve done, I wasn’t stopping —”
“What on earth were you attacking her about her Quidditch team for?”
“Attacking? I wasn’t attacking her, I was only —”
“Who cares if she supports the Tornados?”
“Oh, come on, half the people you see wearing those badges only bought them last season —”
“But what does it matter?”
“It means they’re not real fans, they’re just jumping on the bandwagon —”