Freshly Minted
Summer failed to clear up either Johnny Lupin’s raging personality defects or Hazel’s annoyance with him.
She hadn’t seen him on the train so the trip from London had been blissfully calm, though given the commotion from the compartments in the front of the train, she knew he was up there somewhere. Once the train stopped, however, there was no avoiding getting a look at him. As they emerged from the train, Johnny was surrounded by a cluster of students who Hazel recognized as fifth and sixth years. His ginger hair flashed in the sunlight, coppery gold highlights and just a bit too long. His hair had a bit of wave to it, and it was long enough now that it formed a perfect curl next to his ear.
Surely it was illegal for any boy to be both that handsome and that annoying. He’d obviously grown even taller over the summer, and filled out a bit too. He didn’t look quite so skinny as he had last year. He was smiling and laughing and they were all giggling. It put Hazel in a state of high dudgeon just watching it, and she shook her head in disgust at the crowd of girls following behind him like ducklings to the magical carriages.
She knew the carriages weren’t really drawn by magic. There were invisible creatures pulling them. Tink had told her about it in third year. After reading up on them, she knew quite a bit about thestrals, though she couldn’t see them herself. She’d watched Tink several times, and could tell where the creatures were from the way Tink’s eyes followed them.
Johnny climbed into a carriage next to a few of his admirers, who were all giggling at him still, but his eyes strayed to the front of the carriage, flicking over the empty air in a very deliberate way. Hazel drew back in surprise, sitting down hard in her seat in the carriage with Tink and two other Ravenclaws.
He could see the thestrals, too. And he’d never said anything about it, because she would have heard if he had. That seemed out of character for him, not to brag about something unusual he could do.
Tink leaned forward and patted the creature on its invisible rump, then turned back to Hazel. Tink was very sanguine about the bloody things, and had once told Hazel calmly, “It’s just a different sort of horse.”
“One of my father’s mares had a new foal this summer,” Tink said brightly. “She’s a real beauty and that’s a champion bloodline. Everyone was ever so chuffed.”
Hazel, unlike her friend, could not care less about horses. She knew how to ride, thanks to visits to Tink’s place during summers, but she wasn’t very good at it, and she wasn’t in love with the stupid animals like Tink was. Tink would happily talk horses for hours on end, usually with her mother. “That’s nice. Did you go anywhere fun this summer?”
That set Tink off on a monologue, because her family always went somewhere on the water over the summer: Italy, Greece, the south of France. One of her brothers was apparently racing a boat these days, so she’d been in the Riviera for the sailing. Hazel listened with half an ear, glad to be off the topic of horses, and instead wondered how a perfectly nice, slightly too wealthy upper class girl like Tink had managed to be born a witch when everyone else in her family were Muggles. They all thought Tink was away at boarding school in Switzerland. Only her parents and one older brother knew about magic. Tink had also somehow contrived to be born the only girl amidst four brothers. A nonconformist from birth, she was.
Hazel didn’t have anything like Tink’s background, and was far more introverted than Tink tended to be. She never would have met and befriended her if not for Hogwarts and their shared experience of Muggle relatives who had no idea about magic. And now here they were, years later, Ravenclaws and roommates and good friends.
“What about you?” Tink asked, apparently finished with rating the attractiveness of her brother’s fellow competitive sailors.
“Oh, Mum and I went to Brighton,” Hazel told her. Brighton was probably much less posh than anywhere Tink had ever been, but Hazel had always liked it. She spent a lot of time reading during their annual holiday trip to the seaside, curled up in the aged mattress of the creaky old cottage her mother always rented. It hadn’t changed in all the years they’d been going, something Hazel found comforting.
She liked having that sense of nostalgia and continuity when they went to Brighton. It felt familiar, like a worn old blanket, the smell of the seaside and the ocean air enveloping her. Spending her summer holiday in Brighton let her face another school year without losing her mind from the stress.
Hazel sometimes wished she didn’t spend so much time stressing over her marks at school. If only she could be a genius without putting the work in. But she had to work for it.
Tink was distracted by a carriage speeding past them and didn’t comment on Brighton. “Is he trying to whip the thestrals? Tommy! Stop that at once!”
The Slytherin boys in the carriage laughed and continued past, and Tink subsided with a grumble, her arms crossed tightly over her chest.
“I’ll have a word with the gamekeeper about them, just see if I don’t.”
At the castle, Hazel and Tink found a spot in the middle of the Ravenclaw table where they had a decent view of the Sorting Hat on its stool, awaiting the Sorting ceremony. Tink had one eye on a handsome Gryffindor seventh-year boy she’d been lusting after last year as well.
And as always when he was around, Hazel’s eyes were drawn to Johnny Lupin. He came into the Great Hall surrounded by a crowd of students, who all seemed to be hanging on his every word. Hazel sighed quietly in dismay. Johnny always had a crowd of admirers around him. He really was a burgeoning cult leader.
Johnny dispersed his followers to their own house tables and sat down toward the front of the Gryffindor table, where he sprawled on the bench and leaned back against the table, a picture of ease with himself and the world, and smiled confidently at the students around him before throwing a wink at his Head of House. Professor Bartlebaugh smiled at him rather indulgently.
Hazel had the urge to hex him.
The ceremony began, with the Assistant Headmaster leading the new students into the Great Hall, and Hazel wished she were the sort of person who could just pull out a book and read rather than watch the Sorting. Or sit and chat loudly with friends, as several students in the back of the hall were doing.
The crowd of firsties were even younger looking than Hazel remembered in prior years, like a crowd of toddlers waiting to be told what to do. Some of them looked a bit scared, and others confused. A few were obviously not from Muggle households, because they seemed more bored waiting their turn than anything.
Hazel was ignoring the ceremony in favor of watching a group of fifth and sixth year Hufflepuffs playing Exploding Snap halfway down their table, when a name called for Sorting caught her attention.
“Lupin, William!”
Oh Lord, she thought. Another of Johnny’s siblings, obviously. She glanced over at Johnny, who’d been watching the ceremony much more closely than he usually did, and then examined the latest Lupin sibling to reach Hogwarts. Standard issue Weasley ginger hair and freckles, otherwise mostly unremarkable. He didn’t seem to be reveling in the attention of Sorting, and instead had a look on his face of a deer caught in headlights. He must be a stealth Lupin like Remus, rather than an ostentatious Lupin like Johnny and Dora.
William Lupin walked quietly up to the stool and pulled on the Sorting Hat, whereupon he was promptly sorted into Hufflepuff.
“What the devil?” Johnny exclaimed loudly. He looked genuinely astonished. “He’s not in Gryffindor?”
“Apparently not,” Hazel muttered.
He didn’t hear her, of course, and had turned down the table to call to his sister. “Dora. Dora!”
One of the prefects at the Slytherin table next to them shushed him. Dora Lupin, in a crowd of third-years further up the Gryffindor table, turned to give her brother a look of disdain. “What?”
Hazel had always rather liked Dora Lupin. Dora seemed to be the only other person at Hogwarts who found Johnny as annoying as Hazel did. Their older brother Remus had usually just heaved a sigh and shook his head in resignation at Johnny, but Dora very openly considered her brother an utter twat.
“Did you just hear our Liam get sorted into Hufflepuff? Our Liam!” Johnny gestured to the Sorting Hat, though by now Liam Lupin had made it to the Hufflepuff table and appeared to be introducing himself quite happily, completely oblivious to his siblings. “Bloody hell, Dora.”
Dora didn’t look at all concerned. “Bugger off, so he’s a Hufflepuff. Who cares? Dad was a Hufflepuff.”
“How are we supposed to take care of him if he’s not in our house?” Johnny demanded.
Dora rolled her eyes. The Slytherin prefect shushed Johnny again. He subsided, looking exasperated with both of them, but his attention turned back to the first years. Hazel scanned the lot of them; Johnny wasn’t normally so very interested in the fates of the new students. Was another of his relatives in there?
There were two more gingers in the small crowd still waiting to be sorted. Hazel examined both of them, but ‘Peabright, Algernon’ was soon sorted into Slytherin, leaving only one possible ginger left, a small boy with a rather pointy chin. Hazel watched the boy until the W’s were reached, when sure enough, ‘Weasley-Malfoy, Ramses’ was called up and the second ginger-haired boy headed for the Hat.
“Weasley-Malfoy?” a fourth-year girl sitting nearby repeated in surprise. “Didn’t realize any of those lots had got together.”
Hazel didn’t bother to acknowledge her. Obviously one of the scions of the Weasleys had married the current heir to the Malfoy family, and here was their young son, looking nervous as the Sorting Hat was placed on his head. The entire school seemed to hold their breath, awaiting the Hat’s verdict. Would he be in Gryffindor or Slytherin?
After barely a moment, the Hat called out quite cheerfully, “Hufflepuff!”
Johnny threw up his hands, affronted. “What, both of them? Come on!”
Hazel smirked at him. Disappointment could only be good for Johnny. He so rarely suffered it.
After the feast, Hazel and Tink hung around the Great Hall a few extra minutes to give Tink time to ogle the Gryffindor boy she fancied. Everyone else was clearing out, and as Johnny passed her surrounded once again by his usual cloud of admirers, he flashed a smile at Hazel. Her lip curled involuntarily, and she turned her back on him with a roll of her eyes.
He was such a bloody git.
*
Johnny Lupin was accustomed to being popular. He’d been the most popular boy at school since his first day at Hogwarts, and not just by his own reckoning. Everyone said so. It didn’t take any special effort on Johnny’s part to achieve this. It came naturally to him. Almost everyone loved him and thought he was something special.
Not everyone, but almost.
Johnny liked being popular. It gave him an ever-present audience, and he really loved having an audience. He loved telling stories, but above all what Johnny loved most was seeing the reactions. Making people laugh, or gasp, knowing he’d told a story in such a way that it made them feel something. That was a feeling like no other.
Most people loved his stories, but not everyone.
Good or bad, people paid attention to Johnny, quite naturally and with very little intervention on his part. He’d discovered during his fourth year at school that girls in particular paid attention to him. It wasn’t quite on the level of his uncle, but he definitely had something. Charisma. When he told girls stories, they laughed in a way that gave Johnny an extra boost of that exhilarating feeling, their eyes on him with an admiring sparkle. He didn’t know what to do with it, but he kept talking to them and telling them stories and making them giggle. Uncle Louis stories worked wonderfully for that.
Whatever it was that got girls’ attention, Uncle Louis had it in spades. He couldn’t even stop himself. Johnny had finally been old enough to understand the Uncle Louis stories somewhere around age twelve, and he really grasped them now that girls were paying extra close attention to him. Women loved his uncle. Louis didn’t have to do anything but smile at them and they fell all over themselves to get with him, and occasionally to rob him blind or convince him to commit petty crimes for them.
Johnny couldn’t do all that (not yet, but he still had hopes for someday). But he could tell Uncle Louis’s antics in a rollicking way.
Most girls loved it. Johnny knew all the stories by heart, and he loved to tell them and watch people react. He knew a lot of family stories. They were his favorites to tell. And any details he might have forgotten, or stories he sadly hadn’t witnessed, he filled in with his own imagination. It came to him easily, and sometimes his added details blended in so well that he forgot where the story ended and where Johnny began.
The only girl that didn’t love his stories (aside from his sisters, who all thought he was a right git, even the twins and they were only four) was Hazel McGregor, the pretty Ravenclaw in his year. She always seemed to have a skeptical look on her face when she watched him, though lately the skepticism had changed to what he thought was disgust.
He didn’t like that one bit. And he wasn’t even sure why.
There were plenty of other girls. Lots of them, in fact, who would have happily gone out with Johnny, he was sure of it. At least six of them had kissed him at various times last year, each pretty and memorable in their own way.
So it wasn’t as if he didn’t have options. But for some reason, it bothered him that Hazel McGregor didn’t like him.
His relatives sometimes joked about him having a fan club. Dora especially liked to mock him about that. If he had one, Hazel wasn’t a part of it. And he wasn’t sure he actually wanted her to be.
She wasn’t one of those giggly types that usually flocked around him, flirting and hanging on his every word. Hazel was smart, and studious, and the president of the Charms Club, and a straight-O student. Johnny was… none of those things. He never failed a class, his marks were E’s and the occasional O, but he cared more about Quidditch than he did about school. He’d never thought school actually mattered; there was more to life than what happened at Hogwarts. People died, quite suddenly and for no reason, and no one cared what they’d done at school, only what they’d done in life. Who they were. Who they’d loved. Their stories lived on, not their OWLs and NEWTs.
Johnny didn’t care about school, not the way Hazel did, he knew that. He wanted to get past school, fun as it was at times, and out into life as soon as possible. She wanted high marks, and was particular about her classes and her studying.
And about the boys she liked, it seemed.
The fact she didn’t like him was like a loose tooth that he couldn’t stop poking. He didn’t enjoy the feeling, but he couldn’t leave it alone, either. Why on earth didn’t she like him? Hardly anyone at school disliked him. A handful of Slytherins, mostly. And his sister Dora, but she didn’t count, especially now that Liam and Ramses were here and they both thought Johnny could do no wrong.
He didn’t understand it. Hazel McGregor made the same face at him that his sister occasionally did, the one Dora made when she was about to explain all his faults to him, and he didn’t like it at all. He didn’t mind when Dora did it.
Why should it bother him when Hazel did?
*
Hazel had been president of the Charms Club since the beginning of her fifth year. It was a democratic society, so this had been by popular vote. She was well aware it was one of the smallest and nerdiest of the clubs at Hogwarts, since it was entirely populated by Ravenclaws and a small number of Hufflepuffs. The only Slytherin in the club was Alcide Dubois, and it was his final year at school, so she’d have to find a way to appeal to some other members of his house. Maybe they’d have a few new members this year.
They hadn’t had anyone from Gryffindor in the past two years. Not an adventurous enough club for them, it seemed. They were all in that bloody Duelling Club, though.
She was pinning a sign advertising the first meeting of the club onto the notice board outside the Great Hall, where all twelve of the existing Charms Club members would see it, when someone loomed over her, blocking the light. She already knew who it was before she looked up, because it just felt like that sort of day.
Johnny Lupin leaned against the notice board, crumpling a flyer from the Gobstones Club under his shoulder, and smiled at her with that charming, toothy grin of his.
“What d’you want?” she demanded, pushing him off the Gobstones Club flyer and smoothing it back out. He had no manners, honestly.
“I was just looking at the notices and thought I’d say hello.”
“Why would you say hello to me?”
This seemed to flummox him. “Why wouldn’t I, Hazel?”
She stared up at him with a frown, caught for a moment by the intensity of his blue eyes, the reddish-brown eyelashes fringing them (why did boys always get such long eyelashes?), and then she blurted out, “I have to go.”
Johnny cocked his head, watching her go with a faintly confused expression on his face. If he hadn't called her by name – another thing he was annoyingly good at was knowing everyone's names and a few basic facts about them – she would have thought he was trying to place her. Since he did know who she was, she could only conclude he didn't know what to make of someone who didn't worship the ground he walked on.
Ha.
She hoped it annoyed him.