In Many Forms

The first Defence Against the Dark Arts class, which was held later that same afternoon, was horrendously dull. Instead of having the students practise wand movements or learn incantations, Professor Sulsus, a gnarled-looking old man with a nostril that whistled on every exhale, made them sit quietly for the entire hour and read a chapter on imps out of their textbooks. That might have been interesting had Anna not already read about imps in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them several days ago. 

Still, she had reread the passage just in case there was any new information in this book—there wasn’t—then spent several minutes tracing her fingertips over the drawing of an imp that covered only one quarter of a page. She then took a while to stare about the room and commit her classmates’ faces to memory. The Hufflepuffs had been paired with Ravenclaw house for this class as well, so their faces were already somewhat familiar to her. 

After she’d grown bored of staring around, Anna took it upon herself to flip to an entirely new chapter of the textbook and read that instead, as she was sure it would be more interesting than reading about imps for the third time. 

At two o’clock precisely, the rang loudly, startling Profesor Sulsus. He told the class to finish reading the chapter as their homework assignment and dismissed them with a have of his gnarled hand. Anna and Cedric, along with the other first-year Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws, all scrambled to leave the classroom. Some of them didn’t even bother closing their books before darting out of the room. 

Despite only having two classes that day, Anna felt utterly exhausted as she and Cedric walked through the winding third-floor corridor where the classroom was located, down the moving stairs, past the Great Hall, and towards the Hufflepuff common room. Anna suspected that Professor Sulsus had magically sucked all energy out of his students. For what purpose, she wasn’t sure, but that didn’t quell her suspicions. 

Anna and Cedric made it back to their common room and lazed around for a while in front of the fire, until everyone began filing out for dinner. Anna claimed she wasn’t hungry and, shrugging, Cedric went off to the Great Hall with a group of other first-years. Anna didn’t bemoan him having other friends. Not at all. Though, perhaps she was a bit envious. 

The next morning Anna overslept. She’d expected that Patricia and Theo’s usual morning bickering would wake her, but when she opened her eyes their beds were empty and their school bags were gone. 

“Bollocks!” 

She stumbled out of bed and yanked her robes on right over her pyjamas. Anna jammed her feet into a pair of shoes, not bothering with socks, snatched up her bag, and ran out of the dorm. 

The common room was empty save for a couple older students. A large clock above the entryway read nearly 10. 

Anna rushed through the castle, only half-looking where she was going as the rest of her attention was focused on rooting around in her bag. She finally dug out her class schedule and had to pause a moment, both to catch her breath and be able to read the timetable. 

Transfiguration started precisely at 10. Where on earth was Transfiguration?

Anna lowered the time table and raised her attention to the staircases that wound up and up and up above her. A few of the staircases broke off from their landings and began to shift. Anna’s eyes watered. How would she ever get where she’s meant to be when the staircases had a mind of their own. The two rickety staircases back at All Saints had never moved a day in her life. 

Cedric’s face flashed through her mind and, while she wished he was there to show her where to go, she couldn’t help the bolt of jealousy that ran through her. When they’d gone exploring over the weekend, not once did Cedric get lost, despite him being as new to the school as she was. Cedric took all the quirks of the castle in stride. He’d laughed when they opened doors to nowhere and hardly jostled each time a staircase suddenly swung away from where they’d been heading. 

Tamping down the overwhelming need to cry, Anna started up the stairs. Her attention was fixed on the upper landings, hoping that something, anything, from their weekend explorations would strike her familiarity. Nothing did. 

Anna rushed up the stairs and was nearly at the first-floor landing when the staircase rumbled. She jostled and fell, landing hard on the stone steps. Her knees throbbed painfully and a couple quills went rolling out of her bag and tumbled through the gaps in the stairs. 

“Double bollocks,” she muttered. 

Anna plopped down on the stairs and waited for them to finish moving. Tears ran down her cheeks just as the staircase locked into place. She didn’t get up. Anna pressed her face against her aching knees and cried. The only thing that could make the morning any worse was if Peeves came along and began yanking her hair. 

“Shouldn’t you be in class?” a voice asked from somewhere above. 

Anna looked up but didn’t see anyone. 

“Over here.” 

Her head swung to the right and there on the wall was a portrait of a man dressed in bright red robes and a squashed little hat. He sported a large moustache and thick eyebrows. 

“No need for tears,” the man in the painting said, “where are you heading, dear?” 

Anna sniffled. “Transfiguration. I’m late.” 

The man tsk’d but below his moustache he was smiling. “You ought to be heading the other way. Transfiguration is on the ground floor.” 

“Oh.” Anna’s lip wobbled. 

“Go down the stairs, through the Middle Courtyard, down the hall, and it’ll be on the left.”

She shook her head miserably. “I’ll still get lost. It’s the only thing I’m good at.” 

“Hm, very well.” The man twisted one end of his moustache between his fingers. “Then follow me.” 

The man stood up in his frame, smashed the little hat flatter atop his head, and took off. He darted through different paintings along the wall, throwing out swift apologies to the painted people he disturbed as he passed. 

“Come along!” he shouted to Anna. 

She gathered her things and rushed after him. Together they ran through the castle. Anna panicked a bit when she entered a courtyard and there were no paintings in sight, but he called for her from one of the hallways ahead and she followed his voice. The red-robed man finally skittered to a stop inside of a nature scene, complete with swaying trees and a bubbling brook. 

“Here we are, Transfiguration.” He pointed to a door at the right of the painting. 

Anna panted out a grateful “thank you” to which he bowed low and darted off back the way they’d come. 

Sucking in a deep breath and straightening her hair and robes, Anna pushed open the door. 

Light streamed into the classroom from the tall windows that lined one wall. Large cages around the room held exotic animals. The heavy door creaked as she entered and four rows of students turned to look at her. At the front of the room Professor McGonagall paused mid-speech, her hand still pointing to the diagrams drawn on a chalkboard beside her. 

“Miss Alsaint, you’re late. What is your excuse?” 

Anna opened her mouth to tell McGonagall she’d overslept but thought better of it. 

“I don’t have an excuse. I’m sorry, Professor.” 

McGonagall stared her down, as did all the students. Her face flushed red with embarrassment. She spotted Cedric at the front of the room. He cast her a sympathetic look. 

“Very well. Take a seat next to Mr. Mackay.” The Professor pointed to an empty spot in the classroom and turned back to the chalkboard. “I trust you won’t be late again.” 

“Yes, Professor,” Anna mumbled as she shut the door behind her with a click and quickly slid into the empty seat beside a Hufflepuff boy she hadn’t really met yet. 

“Hi,” the boy whispered. “I’m Thomas.” 

“I’m Anna.” She quickly pulled an inkwell and parchment out of her bag. She reached in for a quill and came up short. 

Anna stifled a groan, remembering bitterly that her quills had fallen out on the staircase. 

“Here, I’ve got a spare.” Thomas slid a bright orange quill and a sheet of notes over to her. “Might want to copy these down too.” 

Anna turned to face Thomas and gave him a grateful smile. “Thank you.”

“Sure. Gotta help our housemates, right?” 

After Anna copied down the Transfiguration alphabet from Thomas, which was a series of odd little shapes vaguely corresponding to the English alphabet, the class went rather quickly. They hadn’t done any magic yet, but McGonagall had demonstrated a few spells using the animals in the cages. Anna nearly fell out of her seat when a large anteater suddenly became an armoire. She had no idea what that would ever be useful for—and she felt quite bad for the anteater—but it was impressive nonetheless. 

As they packed up their things at the end of class, Anna handed Thomas back his quill before he left with his friends and checked her timetable. She had only one other class scheduled for the day: History of Magic, scheduled right after Transfiguration. 

“C’mon, we don’t want to be late,” Cedric teased as he came up beside Anna. 

“Very funny.” She rolled her eyes at him as they left the room together. 

Cedric took the lead, walking them down the hall and through the Middle Courtyard. “Really though, why were you late? I waited in the common room as long as I could and I tried to go get you but the girl’s door wouldn’t let me through, kept slamming shut in my face.” 

Anna looked down sheepishly and noticed that her trainers didn’t match. “I overslept,” she mumbled. 

“Theo and Patricia didn’t wake you?” 

“No. I suppose they didn’t have their morning argument today. That’s what usually wakes me.” 

The corner of Cedric’s mouth pulled down. “Sorry you’re having such a go of it. Things will look up soon.” 

The sentiment was kind and Anna smiled at her friend, though she wasn’t sure she believed him. Being in the wizard world was more difficult than she had anticipated. To be frank, when she’d sat crying on the staircase just a couple hours ago, Anna had wished she wasn’t a witch at all. 

“Here it is,” Cedric announced. 

They were on the first floor—Anna made sure to note that in her mind—in a large classroom that had only one window, several skewed rows of desks, a table at the front piled with open books and loose parchment, and a large blackboard set behind it. 

Anna and Cedric sat down together near the back of the class as other students filed into the room. Anna was surprised to see that instead of the Ravenclaws, who they’d been paired with for all their previous classes, the other half of the class were Gryffindors. Students in red and yellow ties filed in alongside the Hufflepuffs, chattering loudly. It was nice to see some new faces, though the thought of having to memorise more names was daunting. 

Cedric had already set up his half of the desk with parchment, ink, and quill, and Anna was just about to ask if he had a spare quill when two red-haired boys slid into the desk in front of them. 

Fred and George Weasley plopped down in their seats, threw their bags onto the desk, and promptly turned to face the two Hufflepuffs behind them. 

One of the twins opened his mouth to speak when a ghost came floating through the blackboard. Several students shrieked, a few others laughed, Anna simply gaped as the ghost floated over to the teacher’s table and took a seat in the chair. 

“Everyone open your books to the first chapter. I am Professor Binns, this is—” he squinted at the translucent pocket watch in his hand, “—First Year History of Magic. Let’s begin.” 

Reluctantly, Fred and George turned the right way in their seats. 

The most exciting part of Professor Binns’ teaching was his ghostliness. But after the students grew accustomed to that, the lesson was unbearably dull. Anna had hoped that learning the history of wizard-kind might be more interesting, but that hope was dashed as soon as Binns opened his ghostly mouth to speak. 

In the middle of Binns’ lecture about Uric the Oddball—a wizard who would’ve been terribly fascinating to learn about from anyone else—the twins once again twisted around in their chairs to face Anna and Cedric.  

“Hey Diggory,” one of the twins whispered. 

“Hello Fred, George.” Cedric nodded politely at them. 

“I’m Fred, he’s George.” 

“Honestly Diggory.” The second twin rolled his eyes. “Neighbours all our lives and still you can’t tell us apart. That’s just insulting.” 

Cedric flushed red and focused on his notes. 

Anna squinted at the twin on the right. He was supposed to be George, but he didn’t have the cluster of freckles under his eye that he had last time they talked, when she was looking at his wand. With a glance to the twin on the left, Anna found the freckles she’d been looking for, along with a silly smirk on his lips. 

“You should turn around,” Anna whispered coldly. She didn’t like that they were teasing Cedric when he’d been right in the first place. 

“But we don’t wanna.” The real Fred grinned at her.   

Real George folded his arms over the back of his chair and laid his chin down on them. “Yeah, we wanna keep talking to you.” 

“You’ll get in trouble with the teacher.” 

“He’s a ghost! What’ll he do—”

“—float through us?” 

Fred and George bounced conversation off each other with a speed Anna had yet to see before. 

“D’you think you die if a ghost floats through you?” Fred mused. 

“Only one way to find out—”

“Stop!” Anna hissed and grabbed George’s sleeve when he made to stand up onto his chair. 

“Settle down,” Professor Binns mumbled from the front of the classroom, not even glancing up from the blackboard. 

“Yeah, Anna,” Fred said, holding back a laugh. “Settle down.” 

“How rude to go disrupting the whole class.” George shook his head at her the same way Miss Frethey did when she caught Anna doing something she shouldn’t. 

Anna shot them a glare and the twins grinned as they turned back in their seats.  

It was a while later that Anna, along with most of the class, dozed off, lulled to sleep by Professor Binns’ voice. The quill she’d been holding—borrowed from Cedric—tumbled out of her fingers and hit the floor, rolling away from her. 

The clatter of the quill on the stone floor woke a few others in the class, including the Weasleys. George looked around him, though his eyes remained glazed over and he set his head back down not a second later. 

Fred reached down to grab the quill that had rolled and hit his foot. He came back up with a funny expression. He set the quill on her desk and leaned in as close to her as he could, like he had something incredibly important and secret to tell her. She leaned forward to listen. 

"Are you wearing pyjamas?" he asked. 

Anna's face flushed and she tugged on the edge of her robes to cover the exposed hem of her pyjama pants. 

Fred had a goofy smile on his face but didn’t say anything else as Anna sat completely still and tried to swallow her embarrassment. 

The rest of the class—which thankfully didn’t last much longer—was uneventful. Nearly everyone was bored to sleep at one point or another by Professor Binns' droning. Still, it was a bit more interesting than Defence Against the Dark Arts, because at least the room wasn’t completely silent. 

After class, Fred and George had tried to pull Anna away from Cedric to sit with them at lunch but she'd politely declined, stating that she'd like to go get some homework done. It was an obvious lie, seeing as it was the second day of classes and no real homework had been assigned yet. Cedric had given her a funny look and the twins seemed a bit disappointed, but they all let her go regardless. 

That Wednesday the Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors had their first Herbology lesson together. Fred and George ran into the greenhouses, barely on time, and took up the empty spots across the potting table from Anna. 

When she reached under the table to scoop up some fresh soil to dump into her pot, Anna spotted striped pyjama pants poking out from underneath Fred and George’s robes.