James waited a beat and then raised his eyebrows patiently. “Are you done giving me a hard time? Because I’m not going to miss tryouts this year. It’s my last chance to make the team and I won’t miss it for anything.”
Deirdre nodded and returned her attention to the handwritten roster. “That’s good, because see this empty spot right here?” She tapped the bottom of the parchment. “That’s where Geoffrey Rook should be, only he graduated last year, and he was the best seeker in a decade. You up for filling his giant shoes?”
James nodded and firmed his chin. “I am. I’ve been practicing all summer. And I’ve spent the last two years keeping at the top of my game on the Night Quidditch League.”
“Oh, don’t remind me!” Graham exclaimed, drawing a hand over his face in annoyance. “You and that gang of midnight hooligans are a total embarrassment to the sport. I hear they let you ride one of those idiotic American scriff things when you play!”
James had forgotten how much Graham hated the marginally secret nighttime Quidditch matches. “It’s called a skrim, actually—”
“Not another word!” Graham’s eyes blazed. “I swear, I’d report the lot of you if I didn’t think most of the teachers already know about it and just pretend not to.”
“Longbottom’s gone to a few of the matches,” Deirdre commented with a shake of her head. “He’s the one what grows the herb they all take so as to skip a night’s sleep. Somnambulis, it’s called.”
“Discipline,” Graham declared, perking up in his seat and meeting Deirdre’s eyes fiercely. “That’s what’s missing from this school these days! Some good old-fashioned discipline! Squash all this Night Quidditch nonsense. Distracts everybody from the real thing, it does.”
James shrugged and bobbed his head, knowing it was best just to keep quiet.
Thankfully, at that moment Walter Stebbins and Xenia Prince chose to interrupt the discussion, slipping into two chairs side by side.
“What do you all think of the new Charms teacher?” Xenia asked in a hushed voice, leaning over the table and brushing her short dark hair out of her face.
“Looks like he’s barely older than I am,” Graham said, still bristling. “If he’s old enough to buy a Firewhiskey at the Triple Sticks I’ll eat a bludger.”
“He’s twenty-five,” Deirdre sniffed. “I asked Professor Shert.
He graduated the year before we started. That means Ted, Damien, and Sabrina all knew him. At least a little.”
“We should ask them about him next time we see them,”
Graham suggested darkly. “Maybe they’ve got some dirt on him. Can’t hurt to know a few dark secrets about any new teachers if they come in all eager to prove their mettle.”
James shrugged. “He seemed decent enough to me. I don’t get the idea that he plans to make life hard on anyone. Seemed to me like he’s still figuring out how to look like a teacher, much less be one.”
“I’ll miss old Professor Flitwick,” Xenia said with a sigh, glancing sadly down at the table. “He was my favorite.”
Next to her, Walter nodded solemnly. James tried not to roll his eyes. He had a suspicion that Walter would respond the same way if Xenia suggested there were a flock of fuchsia ducks living on the moon.
Slightly less than an hour later, James, Rose, and Scorpius met Ralph and Albus beneath a torch in one of the older sections of the castle. It had been a dour, if confusing walk through the nighttime halls. Rose and Scorpius, James now knew, were officially seeing each other again, although, as always, it was a brittle and tempestuous union.
At the moment, for reasons James couldn’t guess, they were once again not talking to each other, leaving him to walk in chilly silence between them. It was probably for the best, since they were not really supposed to be out of their dormitories this late, although curfews didn’t formally begin until the next night.
“We tried to open it,” Ralph whispered as James finally, gratefully, joined him and Albus, “But it never works for us.”
“It never works for you,” Albus corrected. “It works for me just fine, but it always opens on a room full of chamber pots.”
“Step aside,” Rose said stiffly. “Your problem is that you don’t have enough imagination.”
Ralph backed away obediently, giving Rose room to stalk purposely along the corridor before him. She turned after a few paces, retracing her steps.
“What I need,” she said with careful emphasis, “is a room to meet in secret, where nobody like Filch can get in, where no one can overhear us, including any disguised portraits, and where nothing we say can ever be repeated.”
She turned again, following her steps a second time.
“What I also need,” she added, dropping her voice to a seething stage-whisper, “is a boyfriend who doesn’t trip over himself every time Fiera Hutchins so much as glances in his direction.”
“And here we go again,” Scorpius drawled wearily. “You can give it a rest any time, you know.”
Ralph looked mildly perplexed. “I don’t think that’s the sort of thing you’re going to find in the Room of Requirement.”
As Rose finished pacing, a door suddenly appeared where only blank stone wall had been a moment before. She glanced challengingly from Ralph to Scorpius, and then turned to the door, pushing it open and breezing inside.
As Scorpius entered, she glanced back with mock disappointment. “I guess Ralph is right after all,” she said archly. “The Room of Requirement can’t provide everything I need. Because here you are.”
“Honestly, Weasley,” Scorpius said, glancing languidly around the small room, and James could tell by the use of her surname that this wouldn’t end well. “I was merely being friendly to Fiera when I met her in the Great Hall. But if you’re jealous of her, you could always just ask for her help with, say, a little makeup and a new hairstyle.”
Rose’s cheeks went brick red. “A little makeup!? She wears enough for the two of us! For the whole school! But if that’s what you like… some haughty, made-up, Slytherin drama queen…!”
“I think I liked your angry silence better,” James muttered, unslinging his knapsack onto the small table in the centre of the room.
“Why’s it always either cold shoulder or heated words with you two?”
Albus plopped into the chair furthest from the door, beneath the broad silvery frame of a Foe-glass. “Reminds me of why I continue to prefer the life of a free-wheeling bachelor.”
Fuming, the set of her face indicating that she had, for the moment, righteously burned off the excess of her anger, Rose lowered herself into the chair next to Albus. “You’re a bachelor,” she offered, “because no self-respecting girl can bear that you constantly smell like toad putty and swamp boot.”
“I have a natural musky scent,” Albus shrugged breezily.
“Comes from being too busy at the manly arts to worry about primping in a mirror all day.”
“It also comes from sleeping in the same clothes for a week straight through the summer,” James suggested.