Johnny’s Girl

Johnny met Hazel outside Ravenclaw tower the next morning, and was a little amused at how startled she looked to see him there. Her eyes widened, the morning sunlight bringing out the green in her eyes. Usually he thought of her as having brown eyes, but up close in the bright light, he’d noticed there was green and gold there as well.

“Good morning,” he said cheerfully before she could ask him why on earth he was there. He could practically feel the words hovering on the tip of her tongue.

“Oh,” said Hazel, disconcerted. “Good morning.”

“Breakfast?”

She seemed unable to muster a response that felt acceptable, and gestured at him toward the staircase. Johnny fell into step beside her as best he could, but Hazel was shorter than him and he had to shorten his stride a bit. The top of her head was level with his nose, which seemed like a rather nice height difference in Johnny’s opinion.

Hazel was quiet as they descended into the main part of the castle. Here one of the staircases began to move as soon as they were on it, and they had to hold still to keep balance. Johnny was actually rather good at staying upright when the staircases moved and usually kept walking throughout the staircase rearranging itself. He had even done a cartwheel down one of them in third year, but Hazel had grabbed onto the balustrade at the first jerk of movement, so Johnny stood still next to her.

While they were waiting for it to settle into a new position, he asked, “So, what are we doing today? For life coaching.”

“Right.” Hazel looked more decisive now, like she felt on firmer ground despite the stone staircase moving under their feet. “Step one is going to be you telling fewer stories so you can learn to actually listen to someone else for a change.”

“Step one?” Johnny echoed. He couldn’t help breaking into a wide grin. “Have you got a twelve-step program for me?”

“You’d better not need twelve steps, you git.”

The staircase had reconnected again, and they hurried off before it could change its mind and move again. Hazel glanced up at him, her expression thoughtful now. “Do you understand what I mean? About listening.”

He was pretty sure he didn’t understand, because he thought he already did that, but she wouldn’t be saying it if she didn’t think it was true. “I listen all the time,” Johnny told her. “How do you think I know so much about everyone?”

“You catalog facts,” Hazel informed him. “You don’t listen really. You just wait for your turn to say something. To tell a story.”

Johnny stopped short, and Hazel took a second to realize it, turning back to him a few paces ahead.

“Do I?” he asked, feeling a little bewildered.

“Yes,” she told him. Her voice and expression were dispassionate, like a Healer diagnosing a mild illness. “It’s very twattish of you.”

He stared at her for a moment, thinking of all the times he’d jumped right into a conversation with a story without even thinking about what they’d all been talking about before he got there, and how everyone had always seemed to enjoy his stories no matter when he told them, then said, “Huh.”

Hazel cocked her head at him. “That’s lesson one to stop being a twat. Start listening to what other people say.”

Johnny nodded slowly, his eyes still focused on Hazel’s face. Start listening. She probably had a point, and he was pretty sure she was smarter than him, so listening to her was a good idea. He’d asked her to tell him what to do, and he meant to try. If it got Hazel to like him and be his friend, that had to mean he was improving himself. “I’m listening to you.”

“Good,” she said simply. “Let’s eat breakfast.”

*

Tink was waiting for Hazel outside of History of Magic a few days later when she emerged from the classroom. She looked ready to burst, and grabbed Hazel’s arm, pulling her away until they could duck behind a suit of armor halfway to the girls’ lavatory. Her dark blonde hair was in disarray, as if she’d been raking a hand through it too many times throughout the day.

“Oh, Hazel, it’s all over the school,” Tink said with wide-eyed excitement. “Everyone’s talking about it.”

Hazel had a sudden and overwhelming sense of dread. “Talking about what?”

Tink gestured vaguely at her. “You. And Johnny. That, you know, you’re his girlfriend now. They’re all calling you Johnny’s girl.”

“Oh my god, I am not Johnny’s girl!” exclaimed Hazel in horror. She hated the thought of everyone gossiping about her, and about something that wasn’t even a little bit true. At all. “I’m his life coach.”

Tink looked at her skeptically. “Hazel, he’s been sitting with us at dinner all week. And I heard he had breakfast with you again this morning. That’s three times now. Are you sure you don’t have feelings for him?”

Hazel squirmed a bit, thinking about Johnny smiling at her in the library when he’d said they were friends. “No,” she insisted, hoping her voice wasn’t too loud. It sounded too loud. Oh bugger, she thought wildly. “Honestly, I’m just going to be his friend and coach him to act like a normal human being.”

Tink hadn’t seemed to notice her volume issues, though, just rolled her eyes and said, “Please yourself. I thought you ought to know. I’ll start telling people you’re just friends with him, that’s all. I’m off to Defense. Shall I tell Johnny you said hello?”

“Ugh.” Hazel shooed her away with a disgusted groan. Tink disappeared down the corridor, leaving Hazel to sag against the wall behind the suit of armor. Bloody hell. And after lunch she had Transfiguration, where Johnny would probably want to sit near her. He was a terrible bloody distraction in class.

Bugger, bugger, bugger.

Nearly the moment he walked in to Transfiguration that afternoon, he caused a commotion. Johnny swept into the classroom with robes flying, a wide grin on his face and absolutely no textbooks or parchment in hand, and people began calling greetings to him. Johnny waved and smiled at people and came to a halt at the desk next to Hazel’s, where he did not normally sit.

Well, if they were friends now, she supposed she was going to have to get used to that. Maybe he’d be easier to control if he was closer at hand.

Johnny started in some elaborate story to the girl who sat in front of Hazel, a Hufflepuff named Vesper, and two other students drifted over to listen in avidly. Hazel listened to him talking about a magical circus he’d seen in Paris with half her attention, while the other half evaluated him critically.

This was the problem with Johnny. Everyone else was supposed to be taking their seats by the time class began, and Johnny regularly delayed that with his bloody stories. This one she’d heard last year, and he’d added a bit to it since then from her recollection. She was sure he embroidered every tale he told, not that anyone seemed to mind (aside from her). He was still talking about the trapeze artists, and how his sister Fleur wanted to join the circus, when their professor arrived.

Professor Malachite had never treated Johnny with the sort of indulgent affection that he received from Professor Bartlebaugh, though she rarely did more than snap at him when he was being a show-off and disrupting her class. She frowned at him as she stalked to the front of the classroom. “Mr. Lupin. You’d better be in your seat by the time I reach that blackboard.”

Hazel leaned over and grabbed a handful of Johnny’s robes, yanking him down into his seat.

“You’re being a twat,” she informed him as the other students hurried to their seats, Johnny’s pull over them broken now that he’d turned off the storytelling charm.

“Am I? Sorry, Hazel.” He sprawled in his seat, legs stretched out in front of him, pulled a wadded-up sheet of parchment from his pocket, and focused on their professor. A moment later he turned back to her.

“Can I borrow a quill?”

With a sigh, Hazel fished a spare quill out of her bookbag and passed it to him.

About ten minutes into class, the edge of Hazel’s parchment glowed gold, and in the margin beside her notes was Johnny’s handwriting.

People like when I tell stories. Is it still twattish?

Hazel glanced over at him, then up at Professor Malachite. Mirror spells like that weren’t allowed in school, and he was going to get her in trouble, even if it had only been cast on the margin of the paper.

It’s not the storytelling that’s twattish, exactly. It’s how you do it. And when you do it - you know they’ll get in trouble for not being in their seats when class begins, even if you never do. Now pay attention.

She tapped her wand against the parchment to stop the mirror spell, Vanished their little exchange to hide the evidence, and went back to taking notes about human Transfiguration.

Johnny was quiet for the rest of class, and she thought he might have actually paid attention. He never took notes, something she’d never understood since her class notes were detailed, organized, and color-coded. She wrote outlines for them afterward when she was studying. She’d never seen Johnny jot anything down in any class she’d ever had with him. She knew he generally got E’s on everything, so she didn’t know how he did it.

She was beginning to suspect he had a photographic memory. It would explain how he remembered so much, and how he didn’t take notes even when he did the reading assignments or read the board in class. And of course he would have a photographic memory, it seemed absolutely in character for Johnny. He was always good at everything, so it checked out.

After class, he once again fell into step beside her as she headed for the library.

“If you thought I was being twattish, why didn’t you tell me before Malachite arrived?” He looked rather confused now. Hazel stopped walking and drew him aside, ducking behind a tapestry so she could speak to him in private. Not that Johnny ever seemed to mind saying anything that was on his mind in front of anyone he happened to be around.

“Because that would have been rude. Everyone would have heard me, anyway.”

“I don’t care if you’re rude,” Johnny told her quite matter-of-factly.

“We’re friends now,” she reminded him. “You shouldn’t be rude to your friends.”

“Hazel, I’ll still be your friend. Just tell me when I’m being a twat, even if it’s in front of other people. Don’t be afraid of hurting my feelings. Promise. Whatever you want to say, I promise Dora has said worse to me.” He set his shoulders and made a little come on wave of his hand. “Hit me with it.”

“All right,” she said slowly. She hadn’t thought she was afraid to hurt his feelings, because up until she’d called him obnoxious she hadn’t really thought anyone could get to him like that.

But he was asking her to say it this time, so what the hell.

“It’s the showing off,” she told him. “You’re always showing off. How many other students have you ever seen stand on the tables in the Great Hall? Aside from your sister,” she added swiftly when he opened his mouth to answer. “You interrupt people constantly. You were terrible about it to your brother Remus, it’s a wonder he never hexed you for it.”

“Oh, he did,” Johnny assured her with a grin. “Just not at school.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “I’m sure you deserved it. I remember you snatching food off his plate just to bother him. You cut lines so you can be first everywhere. You monopolize any conversation you get into. It’s all very obnoxious, Johnny.”

His face had gone a little blank, but his eyes looked intense, focused on her face. Hazel raised an eyebrow at him, and he nodded slowly.

“I like people to pay attention to me,” he admitted. “I like telling stories, and I like to be first at everything. But I think I see what you mean.”

“It’s not bad to like attention. You just can’t make everything about you every time. It’s about empathy, Johnny. You’ve got to learn some.” She sighed, tilting her head as she looked up at him.

“I have empathy. Maybe it’s acting like it that’s the problem.”

He was still looking into her eyes, and for a few moments they just stood in silence, eyes locked. Hazel’s mind wandered, looking at those blue eyes and long lashes, and then Johnny blinked a few times, seeming to shake it off.

“So, showing off, interrupting, storytelling. That’s all part of step one? Stop doing that stuff?”

“Well, you don’t have to stop telling stories altogether. Just make sure you’re not ignoring everyone else so you can tell your story.” That was a little difficult when he had such charisma that everyone usually hung on his every word like he was a cult leader imparting divine wisdom. He didn’t even need to interrupt most of them, they were happy to shut up and listen to him. But maybe if he could slow down on his showing off, his minions might be able to interact with him as if he wasn’t the Supreme Mugwump. “And make sure the story is a real story if you’re telling it like one. For example. That story you were telling earlier about the wizard circus in Paris. Was any of that true?”

Johnny gave this due consideration. “I mean, mostly, yeah,” he said eventually, but he seemed to have grasped her point. “Look, adding color isn’t the same thing as lying.”

“I didn’t say you lied. I don’t think you do. I do think you have a tendency to exaggerate.”

“It’s not… Well. I can’t just give the dry facts, can I? If I’m going to tell a story, I want it to be in an entertaining way.”

“Why?”

He looked taken aback. “Bloody hell. I dunno. Because it’s more fun?”

Hazel tilted her head as she examined him and reviewed the facts about Johnny as she knew them.

He was a middle child. He had half a dozen younger siblings and a million cousins, most of whom resembled him to some degree. Most people looked on Weasleys as rather interchangeable, even the Lupin variety of them. And, he was a Leo. Of course he’d always be bucking for some extra attention.

What was it he’d said his uncle called him? Catastrophically charismatic, that was it. Maybe he’d just been born this way and he couldn’t help it. Maybe being born a middle child had made him this way. Maybe it was being born in Leo. Or some weird genetic quirk from his non-Weasley side.

“Okay, color is fine, and I get being a good storyteller - that’s not a bad thing, you could write novels - just when you tell true stories make sure they’re… true. Accurate.”

Johnny nodded. “Accurate. True. Got it. Thanks, Hazel, you’re a good coach.”

“Okay,” she said again, thinking about how she’d realized he had no actual friends. “I’m off to study. Did you want to come along?” she asked, a little cautiously.

Johnny looked surprised. “Study with you?”

“And Tink. But you have to be normal, don’t be a twat in front of her. Just… relax, okay?”

“I will.” He got a sheepish look again. “I don’t usually study. I don’t think I know how.”

She stared at him. “What do you mean, you don’t study? You just… take the tests cold?”

He shrugged. “I have a really good memory.”

Astonished and a little horrified, Hazel couldn’t decide if that made him more or less annoying. His marks were all passing ones, but nothing spectacular. Still, he got those marks without making any effort. And he wasn’t even trying to do better. The idea of not studying at all was completely alien to her. “Doesn’t that stress you out?”

“Nah. Want me to teach you how to stress less about your marks?”

She couldn’t even imagine that. “I’m a Ravenclaw. I think they’d kick me out of the house if I didn’t stress over my marks. If I didn’t have an O on everything, I’d be so upset.”

“You teach me to study, and I’ll show you how to be more zen about not getting an Outstanding.” Johnny gave her a silly grin. “Honestly, I tried to tell my brother this, but Remus was obsessed with getting an O on everything too.”

Hazel was a little bewildered still by the very idea of it. All she could get out was, “How?”

Johnny’s face grew serious. “If you were killed tomorrow, would it matter that you’d had an O instead of an E?”

She was completely taken aback. “What?”

“It wouldn’t matter. It won’t matter in twenty years, either. No one really cares once you’re out of school. Almost any job you can have will take you with E’s just as well as O’s, too. So if it won’t matter in twenty years, why does it matter today?”

Hazel could feel her jaw dropping. My God, Johnny actually had perspective on something. A reasonable perspective, too. She couldn’t have been more surprised if her pet frog suddenly started speaking.

“I care,” she said finally. “It matters to me. I want to do well.”

“Sure. But if you don’t do perfection, don’t stress out.” He grinned at her then. “Promise you’ll just tell me if I’m being obnoxious?”

She smiled despite herself. “Fine. I will. I would never say that to Tink, though. She’s my best friend.”

“But not all friendships have to be exactly the same, right?”

“That’s true,” she allowed. “Are you coming along to study or what?”

“Yeah, let’s go study with Tink.” Johnny pulled the tapestry back and gestured for her to lead the way.

*

Johnny slid onto the bench beside Hazel and Tink in the Great Hall the next morning at breakfast and immediately helped himself to some bacon from the platter in front of Hazel. She gave him an exasperated look and he smiled at her.

“Good morning, ladies,” he said cheerfully.

“Good morning, Johnny,” said Tink with a big grin.

Johnny was rather fond of Tink, actually. She was one of the most even-tempered girls he’d ever known. Tink spent most of her life in a good mood, always jolly and chipper. Unless she saw someone mistreat a horse, including the magical varieties of horse like thestrals, that was the only thing so far that he’d seen that could break Tink out of her upper-class merriment with life. Johnny knew for a fact that Tink had made sure Tommy Cavendish got a week’s worth of detention at the beginning of the school year for whipping one of the thestrals that pulled the carriages.

Tink was one of the few people at Hogwarts other than him who could even see the thestrals, though unlike him, the entire school knew the story of why Tink could see them. She seemed completely untroubled by it, and enjoyed the thestrals like she did any other horse. Some girls, in Johnny’s experience of the world, really liked horses a rather unnatural amount. Tink was one of them, and in any conversation with her that went on for more than five minutes, she would mention horses in some way.

The other thing Tink reliably loved was gossip. Since Johnny also loved to know things about people, he enjoyed talking to Tink.

“Guess what I heard, Tink,” he began, pouring himself a pumpkin juice. “Minerva Watkins is going out with Gillespie Paperwhite.”

Tink went wide-eyed. “You’re joking. But Gillespie was going out with that fifth-year Hufflepuff girl!”

“Angela Featherbee. I know. She caught them together behind the gamekeeper’s cottage and chucked him.” Johnny winked at her. “Thought you’d like to know.”

“I always like to know,” agreed Tink.

Hazel heaved a sigh. “I don’t know why you care, Tink, you don’t even know any of them.”

“Because it’s interesting.”

Johnny grinned at Hazel, who was giving her best friend a long-suffering look. “Don’t you like to know what’s going on?”

“In other people’s love lives? No.” She slid a look at Tink. “I already know about other people’s love lives, anyway.”

Tink smiled mysteriously at her and took a bite of toast.

“How are things going with you and Lucas?” Johnny asked her, since she very clearly had something to tell.

“I smuggled him into our common room last night,” Tink told him with a smug grin.

Well, that explained Lucas’s excellent mood when Johnny had run into him on the dormitory stairs last night. He’d been looking a little smug himself.

Hazel shot an amused look at Tink and then reminded her, “You’re going to be late for class.”

“Right. See you lot later.” Tink wiggled her fingertips at them and dashed off out of the Great Hall.

“Can I walk you to class?” Johnny asked as soon as Tink was gone.

She gave him a look he was becoming very familiar with, the exasperated face that said she didn’t really know what to do with him but wasn’t giving up. He rather liked that expression of hers. Hazel didn’t back down, not when she was annoyed, not when she was flustered, not even when she was uncertain. Johnny liked that about her.

He walked beside her down to the History of Magic classroom, since she inexplicably continued to study the subject and even seemed interested by it. Johnny had never cared for the class. Oh, he liked stories, and history was full of them, but pinning them down in a textbook dried them out and made them boring. Johnny preferred his stories fluid and colorful, changing with each retelling as they evolved and breathed with new life. Stories became stale when told in the same way too many times, and textbooks were the epitome of that. History textbooks were where stories went to die.

But Hazel had told him to stop embellishing his stories when he told them. You could write novels, she’d said. He wondered if she would read one if he did. Maybe it would be fun, to tell stories in a way that kept them the way he liked to tell them, but on the page. It might be a challenge to see if he could still get reactions out of people using writing instead of his voice. A novel sounded long, though. Maybe he could publish short stories in the school paper.

He shelved the idea for later, since they’d reached the classroom. Hazel stood to the side of the door as the other students (not many of them at this level of study) filed past them. Most of them waved to Johnny as they passed, and he tried not to loom over Hazel too much so he didn’t look like her boyfriend. Rumors were already flying about that.

Hazel ignored her classmates as they went past, though she did roll her eyes when Veronica Agnelli threw a flirtatious smile at Johnny.

“Before you go, I wanted to give you a bit more coaching,” Hazel told him. She sounded a little more sure of herself about the coaching now, which probably meant she’d actually made a plan for it. “I have something else for you. Call it step two of Not Being A Twat. It’s called affirmations. It means you tell yourself positive statements to reinforce-”

“I know what affirmations are, Hazel,” he interrupted her, and she frowned at him, her dark brows drawing together.

“Interrupting people is twattish,” she reminded him.

She was really cute when she frowned at him. “Is it? I really do need to write this stuff down.”

“Oh please, we both know you have a photographic bloody memory.” She heaved a dramatically long-suffering sigh and went on, “You could tell yourself things like ‘I choose to think about others’ and ‘today I am going to be less twattish’.”

He nearly laughed but thought she might take offense to that and smothered it quickly. “‘I get less twattish every single day’, maybe.”

“Yes, that would do.” Hazel’s lips pressed together and her cheeks went a little pink. He thought she was trying not to laugh now, too. But she’d started this and of course she wasn’t backing down. “You could try ‘I am not a twat’ or ‘I believe in my ability to not be a twat’.”

“‘Anything is possible’,” he said, and her smile that time was genuine, making her eyes sparkle with amusement.

“All right, get out of here and work on not being an utter twat, all right?” She shooed him away with one hand and ducked into the History classroom.

Johnny whistled to himself as he set off down the corridor. He didn’t have a class to get to, so he thought he’d go back down to the Great Hall for a little more breakfast. The look on Hazel’s face when she smiled at him with cheeks pink from laughter stuck in his mind pleasantly. And he hadn’t got her to smile like that by telling a story, just by talking to her.

He thought he’d finally convinced her to stop worrying about his nonexistent tender feelings and simply tell him when he was being an idiot. If he hadn’t already had thick skin, having a bunch of sisters would have toughened him up. No one could get under your skin like your sister could, and Johnny had four of them. He didn’t think Hazel could say anything that would genuinely upset him at this point.

Not when she was his friend and saying it. Not when her eyes sparkled and her cheeks flushed with emotion. She could say anything she liked to him then.

*

The seventh-year NEWT class met for Herbology immediately before the sixth-years, so Hazel probably shouldn’t have been surprised to see Tink hovering outside the door as she arrived for her own class.

“Suddenly interested in plants, are you?” she drawled to her best friend.

Tink grinned. “Oh, shut it. You know Lucas is in there. I told him I’d meet him and we’d have a walk down to the forest and try to see the thestrals.”

“Can Lucas see them?” Hazel asked in surprise. She hadn’t thought it was that common of an ability.

“No, but it’ll get us alone,” Tink said cheekily. “And I’ll tell him all about why I can see them, so he’ll want to comfort me.”

“Oh, please, you’ve never been sad about it a day in your life,” retorted Hazel.

“I mean, it was rather sad, because I wasn’t allowed to go riding the rest of that week. The house was in mourning and we all had to stay inside. It was only an accident. Poor bloke stepped right out past the skeet shooting, what did he expect? At least his horse wasn’t injured.” Tink brushed off the death of one of her father’s distant relatives as she’d always done. “Anyway, setting aside Cousin Archie dying like the imbecile that he was-”

“Oh, that’s very nice,” said Hazel, amused.

“Lucas and I were talking earlier and you’ll never guess.” Tink didn’t wait for Hazel to guess and instead exclaimed, “His grandfather breeds Aethonan horses!”

Hazel snorted. “Lucas is a horse lover too, I take it?”

“They’re winged horses, dear, just marvelous,” Tink drawled excitedly. “I wonder if his grandfather would let me ride one.”

“You’ve never ridden a flying horse before,” Hazel pointed out, but her best friend didn’t look at all concerned about that.

“A horse is a horse,” said Tink, but then the seventh years began emerging from the greenhouse, and a moment later Lucas appeared.

He got a big, rather stupid grin on his face when he saw her. “Hey, Tink.”

Tink dimpled at him and then waved to Hazel briefly before seizing Lucas’s hand and setting off for the edge of the Forbidden Forest. Lucas appeared very enthusiastic, probably guessing he was about to get a good snogging out of the afternoon.

Hazel ducked inside then, breathing in the warm, humid air of the greenhouse. It was always blissfully warm in the greenhouses, even when it was cold outside as it was today. She took her usual spot down the end, brought out some parchment for notes, and sat down on the stool with a sigh of happiness.

Herbology was one of her favorite classes. She liked the subject, liked the greenhouses and the plants, and she liked the professor. It was also nowhere near as difficult as the other classes she was taking. It was a relaxing point in her day.

By the time she came out of Herbology an hour later, she’d had to scoop her hair into a ponytail, since they’d had an unusual lesson removing Flesh-Eating Slugs that had got into the mandrakes. It was the second time that year for a breakout of slugs in the mandrakes. The adult mandrakes were rather polyamorous, so once one of them got an infestation of the slugs, it spread quickly and was hard to eradicate what with the mandrakes re-infesting each other by climbing in each other’s pots every night. Hazel had begun sweating halfway through class, because the mandrakes were heavy and uncooperative. The warmth of the greenhouse had felt a little too warm by the end.

Stepping out into the cold November air, she drew a deep breath and rubbed at the sweat on her neck.

“Hazel!”

Oh, bugger, she thought, turning. Johnny was approaching down the path from the courtyard. Her classmates waved and called out to him as they dispersed to their next lessons, and Johnny grinned at them.

“You don’t have to follow me to all my classes,” she told him, pulling her hair out of its haphazard ponytail and smoothing it down.

Johnny assumed a very innocent expression. “I was just coming to report to you that I went to Care of Magical Creatures on time and I listened quietly. I didn’t tell any stories at all.”

Hazel wanted to laugh, but hung onto the stern look she’d been giving him. “That’s good. Now let’s see if you can keep it up all day. You didn’t have to come all the way down here to tell me that, either.”

“I wanted to.”

“You need a hobby,” she informed him.

Professor Longbottom emerged from the greenhouse behind the last of the sixth-year students. He wiped some sweat from his brow and smiled at the two of them still lingering near the door.

“Oh, hello, Johnny,” he said gamely. “I didn’t realize you and Miss McGregor were friends.”

“Hazel is my new life coach,” Johnny told Professor Longbottom.

Oh, he just had to go and tell the professors about that when there was already rumors around the school about the two of them. Hazel went a bit red and exclaimed, “Merlin’s beard, you’re annoying.”

Johnny gestured to her, smiling at Professor Longbottom. “You see? And I don’t even have to pay her for it.”

“You have a life coach to tell you when you’re annoying?” Professor Longbottom’s bushy gray eyebrows knit together. “Does your mother know this?”

“I’m going back to Ravenclaw Tower,” Hazel told Johnny. “I want you to go to the bathroom, stare in the mirror, and tell yourself to stop being a twat until you believe it.”

“Oh, right. Affirmations.” Johnny saluted her and then jogged away, leaving Professor Longbottom staring at Hazel in awe.

“What?” she asked nervously.

Professor Longbottom fished around in the pockets of his robes and then handed her a Galleon.

“What’s this for?”

“Seems like someone ought to be paying you for that.” And with that he returned to the greenhouse.

Hazel looked down with astonishment at the Galleon in her hand, pocketed it, and headed off to her common room.