Unmasked

Not long before noon the next day, Harry, Ron, and the other were hanging out in their dorm. Harry sat in the window ledge, while Seamus sat on Dean’s bed, and Ron on Neville’s. They were chatting while simultaneously trying to help Neville name his new plant. Dean had suggested Neville Jr, to which he had scowled. Harry, however, snorted, shaking his head. “That’s awful, Dean.”

“What? It even looks like him!”

“It’s a bloody plant,” Ron roared. “How… how can it look like him?”

“Well you see this,” he took the plant and held it up beside Neville. “This could be his head… and it’s not spikey like the last one, so it’s all soft like him.”

“Hey!” Neville smacked Dean in the gut with his pillow. Dean cracked up, jogging to the other side of the room to avoid being smacked again. Neville went after him. “Give the plant back or you get the pillow!”

“I’m quaking in my little space boots!”

Behind Dean, the door flew open, revealing Hermione, who instantly took a step back. The boys were yelling “don’t you knock,” and “if we can’t go in your dorm you can’t come in ours,” or “What the hell, ‘Mione!”

She raised her brows at the sight before her. “Neville?”

He narrowed his eyes at Dean before looking at Hermione. “He said the plant looked like me.”

She considered it for a moment, before biting her lip to keep from laughing. “It doesn’t look like you at all.”

“Really?” Neville groaned as she strode past him into the room and sat on Harry’s bed. “You too?”

The other boys laughed as she shrugged. “Have you decided on a name yet?”

“No,” Seamus chortled. “Neville Jr was a bust, too.”

Hermione shook her head. “How about Snape?” She shrieked and rolled off the bed, ducking behind it as the pillow flew over her head. “Love you, Nev!”

Harry chortled as he approached Hermione, leaning over his bed to look at her. “Why are you in our room, ‘Mione?”

“We have to meet Draco and Pansy in the library after lunch. I was wondering if you had some extra pens in your trunk, or pencils, or regular paper or anything?”

“Uh…” He went to his trunk and opened it up, pushing things around inside. He pulled out a few pens and a legal pad and handed it to Hermione. “Have you figured out how to work the website to find our courses?”

“Not completely,” she said, opening her phone and showing it to Harry, ignoring Ron and Seamus’ stares. “So I found the school’s website, and I figured it’s under the ‘Guidance’ tab right, cuz that would make sense.”

“Yeah. Is it not there?”

“No, I think it is. But I don’t understand it. Their school system is much different than ours in England, Harry.”

“What do you mean?”

“In their system, technically we’d be in what they call the eleventh grade. But, because England’s school system is a year or so ahead of them, we will be taking their twelfth grade classes. And that’s their last year of mandatory schooling, kinda like next year will be for us here. So we’ll be in classes with 17 and 18-year-olds.”

“Okay… what else?”

“They have these weird abbreviations I don’t understand. All of the classes we have as options end in either 4U, 4C, or 4E. And I have no idea what the difference is.”

Harry furrowed his brows. “Can I see?” She handed over her phone and he opened a new google search. What’s the difference between U C and E in the Canadian school system?

“Why didn’t I think of that?”

Harry laughed as he clicked on a link. “Because you’re used to only being able to use books while you’re here?” She rolled her eyes at him. “Here, look. U stands for university, c for college, and E for… workplace? Okay… Canada, that doesn’t make sense, but alright.”

“Oh! So U must be like higher evel classes, getting people ready to go to university. C for going to college, and E for no school after high school. I guess that makes sense.”

Harry handed her phone back. “But how are Ron, Draco, and Pansy going to take anything, really? They have no knowledge of most of this stuff.”

“Honestly, I don’t think it matters. It’s not like they’re trying to graduate or go to university. They can come to U level classes with us.”

“Bold of you to assume I’d go to university.”

She gave him a look. “I know about your muggle summer school, Harry.”

“What? How?”

She laughed. “Because we did them at the same school. You took some of the same classes as me. I saw your name on the roster. You were just at a different time.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “Oh. Well… I guess I rathered be at school all summer than with the Dursleys.”

She smiled. “Fair enough.” She turned to look at Ron. “Ready to go down for some lunch?”

He jumped up. “Am I.”

*

Harry and Ron sat at a secluded table in the library, across from Hermione, Pansy, and Draco. Hermione held her phone in front of her, swiping through the course calendar until she got to the 12^th grade courses. Harry sat with the legal pad in front of him, divided into five sections, one for each of them. He twiddled a pen between his fingers, waiting for Hermione.

“Alright, got it,” she said finally, looking up at them. “Who wants to go first?”

“How about you, since you have it in front of you,” Ron suggested. Harry nodded.

“Alright, uh… first I’ll take English, because we all have to take that.”

“What’s the course code?” Harry asked, pen poised.

“ENG4U.”

“Alright…” he said, jotting it down. “What are your other three?”

Hermione hummed to herself. “It’ll have to be biology and chemistry. SBI4U and SCH4U.”

“Alright… and your last one?”

“Well, seeing as I’ve continued my maths in summer school I think I’ll take calculus. MCV4U.”

“Who takes calculus for fun, Hermione… seriously…” Harry groaned as he wrote it down.

Pansy tugged on Hermione’s sleeve. “What’s calculus?”

She smiled. “Advanced math.” She continued upon seeing their confused faces. “So obviously you guys know like 2+2=4 and stuff like that.” They nodded. “Okay… how about times tables?” They nodded, but seemed less sure. “Like 2X4=8, so two groups of four is eight. Or 12X12=144. Twelve groups of twelve is 144. Stuff like that. Well we do that in primary school, and as we get older it gets harder. You learn graphing and quadratics, which is like… parabolas and the quadratic formula. Then you get into polynomial equations and trigonometry, which is finding angles and stuff. I’m just doing the highest level you can do in high school.”

Pansy and Ron nodded. Draco furrowed his brows. “What the fuck is the quadratic formula?”

Hermione groaned, and put her head on the desk. “Wizards…”

Harry laughed, then turned to Draco. He drew it out on another sheet of paper. “-b plus minus the square-root of b-squared minus 4ac, all over 2a.”

Draco stared at it with wide eyes. “What the fuck…”

Harry chuckled. “Alright, who’s next?”

“Ou, me!” Pansy chirped. “What are my options?”

“Well, you have to take English…” Harry said, jotting down the course code under Pansy’s name. “Hermione, what else does she have to choose from?”

“Well… are you interested at all in learning about the way people work and how they think and stuff like that?”

“Hmm… that sounds cool. Better than that calculus stuff. What class is that?”

“It’s called challenge and change. Wanna give it a try?” She nodded. “HSB4U. Now let’s see… there’s one about how business and companies work around the world. It would be a cool way to learn about the muggle world. Ad from what I’ve heard from my cousins, it isn’t hard.” Pansy nodded again. “Perfect. Harry, BBB4M. I assume that means mixed level. Now, you don’t have to take another class if you don’t want to. You can take a spare period.”

“Sounds good to me,” Pansy said, smiling.

“Perfect,” Harry said. “Ron, how about you?”

“I’ll take that one Pansy has… the business one? Maybe I can help Fred and George.”

“Good idea,” Harry noted, jotting down the course code again. “What else can he take, ‘Mione?”

“How about PE? You’re athletic.”

“Yeah! Sounds good! And I’ll take a spare, too.”

“Alright. Harry, PPL4O.”

“Alright… Draco?”

“PE sounds like fun! I’ll definitely take that. Hermione what are the other two you took? Bilogy or something?”

Hermione chuckled. “Biology? That’s a science. It’s the study of living things and their bodily processes. How the body works. That kind of stuff.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Okay, I’ll take that. And the other one?”

“You don’t want to take a spare,” Harry asked.

“No… I’d rather keep my brain occupied.”

Harry nodded as Hermione spoke to him. “Chemistry. That’s about matter, which is anything that has a mass or takes up space. It’s broken down into atoms and molecules and different substances called elements. They make up literally everything that exists. It requires some math, but not quite as complicated as the stuff I’ll be doing I don’t think. Wanna give it a try?”

“Yeah… yeah. I think I will.”

Harry smiled at his ambition and jotted it down. “Alright, my turn. I’ll for sure take PE with Ron and Draco. And I’ll take a spare… but I dunno what my other class would be…” He looked up at Hermione. “No, ‘Mione don’t give me that look.”

“Come on, Harry. You’ve come this far with your maths. You should continue!”

“But maths are hard!” She gave him a look that reminded him very much of Professor McGonagall. “Fine, fine. What’s it called and what’s the course code?”

She smirked. “Advanced functions—basically pre-calculus. MHF4U.”

After shooting her a glare he jotted it down under his name, completing their list. “Alright, we’re done. How’s everyone feeling?”

Pansy was smiling, Draco was worrying his bottom lip between his teeth, and Ron seemed to not know how he felt. Draco stared at the table as Pansy spoke. “I’m actually really excited. It will be really cool to see how muggles live and everything.”

“We don’t even know if we’re going…” Draco mumbled.

“I know, Dray,” she said, resting a hand on his arm. “But think about it, if we do go I mean. It will be so new to us, and Ron, too. And I know you and I have been raised to think muggles are, sorry guys, disgusting, but you and I both know we don’t believe that. Don’t you think it will be cool?”

He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “Yeah… I just… it represents something so awful…”

“Draco,” Harry said softly, drawing the other boy’s attention. “It can be something more than that.”

“How do you figure?”

“Like Pansy said, this will be entirely new to you. And that’s not a bad thing! You get to go to another continent with your friends. Make new friends, try new foods, experience new things… can we try to think of it more as an adventure than a punishment?”

Draco nodded. “You’re right. I’ll try and see it that way. Plus, I’ll be a lot safer that way, right?”

“Absolutely,” Hermione added. “And what about the actual trip itself, huh? We have to take a car and a plane!”

Harry grinned. “I’m excited. I’ve never been on a plane.”

Draco stopped biting his lip momentarily to look at Harry. “What’s a plane?”

Harry and Hermione gave him an incredulous look, before Harry chuckled. “Oh boy.”

*

Later that afternoon the group split up, due to various activities. Harry and Ron had quidditch practice and Pansy went back to the dungeons to get her essay finished without distraction. Hermione asked Draco if he’d like to hang out in Gryffindor tower, to which he said yes, a smile plastered on his face.

The two sat in armchairs side by side. Hermione held a book in her lap, her phone on top of it. Draco had curled up in the soft leather, sitting facing her instead of straight ahead. He twirled his wand between his fingers absentmindedly, listening to Hermione’s concerns about their latest ancient runes assignment. She picked at the edge of her phone case, the blue silicone slipping on and off of the metal underneath. After she finished explaining what was tricky about this particular assignment, he said, “I haven’t started it yet, but have you tried reading the symbols backwards? Sometimes that’s the trick, I find.”

She contemplated it for a moment. “No, actually, I haven’t. But I will. Thanks.”

“No problem.” They sat in silence for a moment. “Say, Hermione, do you think you could teach me some basics of chemistry?”

She sat up straighter in the chair and crossed her legs, her book in her lap. “Sure. Caught your interest, has it?”

“It’s just not something I’ve ever heard of, but from what you told me it’s really important. How can we go our whole lives without learning this stuff?”

She chuckled. “Well, some magic can break some of the rules of things like physics, which is another science that involves a lot of math, so I suppose a lot of wizards just don’t bother with it. But, yes, I can show you some basics.”

“Alright. Where do we start?”

Hermione twisted her mouth in thought. “Well, earlier I told you that everything is made up of matter. Do you remember what matter is”

He nodded. “Yeah. Anything with mass or that takes up space, right?”

“Yes. So the first thing we are taught is that everything is made up of the microscopic subunits of matter called atoms. It’s like… a building block, essentially, and it is made up of three sub-atomic particles, protons, neutrons, and electrons. Protons and neutrons are in the middle of the atom, which we call the nucleus. Protons have a positive charge, and neutrons have no charge. Now electrons orbit around the nucleus… kind of like ripples in water around where someone dropped a rock, and it has a negative charge. Does that make sense?”

He thought about it for a minute. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Okay, perfect. So, there are different kinds of atoms, depending on how many protons and electrons they have.”

“Why?”

“Because they have different properties. Each different atom is a different substance. We call them elements. An atom with one proton is called hydrogen, whereas one with 8 protons is oxygen.”

“Oxygen is an element? It’s made up of atoms?”

“Yes.”

“Then how do we breathe it?”

She chuckled. “Because they’re so tiny. You can’t see them with the naked eye, Draco. We have trillions and trillions in our bodies. But those aren’t the only two. Atoms can have upwards of one hundred protons.”

His brows raised. “How the hell do you keep track of all of them?”

“The periodic table of the elements.”

“The what now?”

Hermione laughed and pulled up a photo on her phone. He wrinkled his nose at it. “This is the periodic table. We use it for most things in chem. See these numbers?” He nodded. “That’s their atomic number, or how many protons they have. And this one… the charge. Some are positive, some negative… it’s split into three parts. See this part that’s green?” He nodded again. “That’s the metals. And the orange part? They’re non-metals. And the blue part, thise are metaloids.”

“What the fuck are metaloids?”

“They’re kinda both… they can act as both. They’re kinda complicated.”

“Okay… and so you have to memorize all of their individual charges?”

“No, no. Sorry, I phrased that wrong. Every element, in a single atom, is neutral. However, when you make an ionic bond, which is joining a metal and a non-metal, then they will have charges.”

He looked up at her with both fear and wonder in his eyes. “And these tiny, confusing little shits make up everything in the world.”

She laughed. “Yes, Draco. These tiny, confusing little shits do make up everything in the world.”

“What the fuck.”

She broke up laughing, tilting her head back against the chair. Just then, the portrait hole swung forwards and Draco’s gaze snapped to Harry as he emerged, Ron following behind him. Hermione watched as Draco’s eyes lit up at the sight of him, and how he turned his head immediately after Harry said hi and left to change, pink tinging his cheeks. She smirked at him. “Your skin tone isn’t the best to hide a blush, Draco.”  

He hid his face behind his arms. “I’m not blushing…”

She smacked him with a pillow, smiling ear to ear. “You like Harry!”

“Shh!” Draco laughed, hitting her back. “Not so loud. And, I don’t know what this feeling is. It’s so… weird.” He rested his head in his hands, smiling.

“Weird good or weird bad?”

“Weird good,” he admitted.

“Have you like a guy before?”

He ran a hand through his har, looking around them to make sure no one was in earshot. “I’m gay, Hermione.”

“Oh. Oh. So yes, then. You have.” He nodded. “Then why does it feel so weird?”

“I dunno… because there’s so much going on and I usually feel so awful… but then I randomly get this feeling… and I don’t know. I don’t know. He probably doesn’t feel the same way back. After all, he’s just trying to support me, and I should just take it and leave it at that Plus, it’s Harry Potter. I’m a Malfoy. It’s not supposed to be this way.”

“Says who?”

“Says… I don’t know.”

She smirked. “See. And just because he’s being supportive with everything that’s happening doesn’t mean he can’t like you… or that he didn’t like you before.”

“You think so?”

“I do. And, according to Pansy, she thinks you’ve liked Harry for a long time, too.”

“I—”

“Hermione, you’ll never guess what Harry did at practice!”

Harry groaned as he walked over to the couch behind Ron, sinking down into the leather. “Ron, do you really need to tell her?”

“Of course I do! As your best friend it’s my job to make sure your other best friend knows all of the embarrassing things that happen to you.”

Harry groaned again, as Hermione laughed. “What did he do now?”

“He got his broom stuck in the dirt again and went flying! Merlin, you should’ve seen him, both of you!”

“Ron, it tore out the arse of my trousers. I had to hide it with my robes through the grounds and all the way up here!”

“That just makes it better!”

Draco’s eyes widened, and cheeks tinged pink once more, which he tried to hide by resting his cheek on his knee. “Are you alright?”

Harry went to answer, but Ron beat hm to it. “He’s fine. Didn’t get more than a few scrapes, isn’t that right?”

Harry rolled his eyes, showing the scrapes up the outside of his right arm. “Yeah, yeah. But seriously though, I’m fine, Draco.”

“Good,” he said, shooting Harry a smile. “Wish I could’ve gone flying.”

“Well why don’t we?”

“What?” He raised his head from his knees.

“Come flying with me.”

“Right now?”

“Of course, right now,” Harry grinned. “Let’s go!”

Draco glanced at Hermione , who winked once Harry had gotten up from the couch. “O-okay.”

Harry grabbed the crook of Draco’s arm and pulled him from the chair. “We’ll be back later!” And with that he pulled Draco across the room to the portrait hole, Draco looking back at Hermione with red cheeks and a barely concealed look of awe.

Hermione smirked at him, then turned to Ron, who rolled his eyes. “Can they just kiss already?”