“Gravity wells? Bonefuse hexes?” Lily frowned. “Those aren’t in the Caster’s Lexicon.”
Coming alongside his team captain, Stanley Jasper nodded, warming to the idea. “Yeah, I’ve heard of that! Spells invented only for sporting matches! I’ve used magic during scratch games back home, playing against my older brothers, although it was never legal or anything. Just a way to keep things interesting.”
“You’re just looking for an unfair advantage,” Julien suggested, narrowing her eyes at James. “You’re already good at those spells. We’d all still have to learn them.”
James shrugged, switching his skrim to his other arm. “Game magic isn’t hard to learn. Most of it’s just variations on traditional dueling spells. But if you don’t feel like you’d be up to facing off against me…” He blinked up at the dark sky mournfully.
Julien frowned. “You’ll have to try harder than that to bait me, Potter,” she said, poking him in the stomach with her broom handle.
“But if you want game magic, we’re more than a match for you. You get us a Clutchcudgel rulebook with approved spells and watch what happens. You want gravity wells? We’ll give you gravity wells deep enough to suck the paint off your skrim.”
James grinned. “Now you’re talking!” He realized as he said it that Zane Walker seemed to have rubbed off on him over the years, at least a little.
The only class James had any serious difficulty with—apart from his usual lackadaisical attitude towards studying and essay deadlines— was Apparition. Despite its only being a twelve-week optional course offered by the Ministry of Magic for qualifying seventh years, he’d become so bored with the class that he wished he’d never asked his parents for the nine Galleon laboratory fee to sign up. This was because the first ten weeks of the course, much to his disappointment, were devoted to an intensive study of Apparition technomancy, its myriad dangers, and the seemingly endless legal ramifications of improper use.
The instructor, a Mr. Wilkie Twycross, was a very old man with white hair as fine as dandelion fluff and glasses so huge and thick that James feared an errant sunbeam might cause the man’s eyebrows to burst into flame. He insisted, in his high, tremulous voice, that Apparition was “a binary process, allowing no luxury of a learning curve. You will either do it perfectly and properly, or you will fail abominably. There is no in-between. Apart, of course, from the very real possibility that you may Reapparate in-between two floors, or much worse.”
He eyed James as he said this, his pale blue pupils magnified to the size of eggs behind his bulbous eyeglasses. James pretended to take notes. On the top of his parchment were the words Destination, Determination, and Deliberation. He had foregone any further note-taking, choosing instead to studiously apply more and more emphasis to Twycross’ initial “three Ds”, adding multiple underlines, quotation marks, circles, and arrows. As Twycross droned on, beginning again his prescribed pre-Dissaparation checklist, James sighed and lay down his quill.
He knew he’d be excellent at Apparition when the time came.
He longed to try it for the first time, even considered attempting it on his own, outside of class. He sat up again at the idea, telling himself he could recruit Millie and Ralph to do it with him. Ralph was less eager to attempt Apparition himself, but he would probably be glad of the chance to practice it first without an audience.
He picked up his quill again and, underneath the Three Ds, wrote: Who’s ready to bunk all this and just try it?
Keeping his eyes on Twycross, he nudged Ralph on his right and slid the parchment toward him. Ralph read the note and shrugged a little uncertainly. James repeated the gesture on his left, for Millie’s benefit. He half expected her to give him one of her eager, precocious smiles, but she merely blinked at him in awed surprise, and then scribbled a note beneath his.
Apparition scares the hair off me! I would pay NOT to do it!
James was mildly surprised, but didn’t press it. He supposed it was possible to be frightened of Apparation, especially in light of Twycross’ hectoring warnings. But James knew it was mostly quite safe, if you understood what you were doing. He’d side-along Apparated with his mum and dad on many occasions, and they’d never been splinched, skunched, contrasected, unverted, or any of the other dire things Twycross warned about. They’d never left behind even a single fingernail or had so much as a sock turned inside-out.
At dinner, James suggested to Rose that the three of them sneak back to the classroom that evening to give it a try.
“Fine,” Rose agreed, “But don’t tell Scorpius. For once, I want to know how to do something before he does.”
“You know how to do everything before everybody,” James blinked at her, but Rose shook her head, glaring down the table toward her on-again, off-again boyfriend, with whom she was apparently back off-again.
“His parents hire tutors for him every summer to ‘prepare him for the rigours of the next scholastic term’.” This time she implied the quotes with a snarky tone, but James heard hurt more than nastiness in her voice. “But I doubt even he’s been allowed to practice Disapparation before he’s of legal age.”
Regardless of Rose’s reasons, James was glad of her accompaniment.
Seated a little further down the table from Scorpius was Albus, once again joining the Gryffindors to accompany Chance Jackson, whose crush on Albus was finally, apparently, being reciprocated. He allowed her to feed him strawberry slices with her fingers while he regaled her friends with some story or other. As James watched, the group dissolved into laughter and Chance threw an arm around Albus, leaning her head onto his shoulder.
“Ugh,” James shook his head, turning away.
“Now you know how the rest of us feel whenever you bring Millie Vandergriff over for a snog,” Graham commented.
“We study, that’s all!” James insisted, surprised. He’d been very careful not to let anyone see him kissing Millie.
Deirdre rolled her eyes. “You two are snogging even when your noses are buried in books. It’d be adorable if it was a bit less painfully obvious.”
James’ face heated and he knew he was blushing fiercely. The truly embarrassing part was, deep down, he knew he wasn’t as infatuated with Millie as everyone thought he was, probably even her.
As he gathered his things and left the Great Hall, he realized that he felt, more than anything, like a total clod. After all, despite the heady thrills of kissing Millie and the tremulous mystery of dating her, he knew he was mostly using her as a sort of human shield, a distraction from the hopeless, doomed love that he felt for Petra.
He determined it couldn’t go on. It wasn’t fair to her.
But he also didn’t want to break her heart. Not yet, at least.