That afternoon after classes, I caught up with Courtney on my way to the library to meet Hermione.
“Hey!” I said, running to meet up with her. “How’d your first day as a third year go?”
“Great, thanks,” she replied with a wide smile. “What about yours?”
“Fine, except that Snape assigned us a four-foot essay that’s due on Friday,” I replied, smirking at her shocked appearance.
“How is that even humanly possible?” she asked. “Plus he’s always so picky about writing structure.”
“I guess we’ll just have to do as best we can,” I shrugged. “I was on my way to the library to work on it with Hermione Granger.”
“Well, before you go, I wanted to talk to you a few days ago, but I never got the chance,” Courtney said.
“Why? What happened?” I asked. We stopped walking and instead stood against the wall.
“Well,” Courtney said hesitantly, “I just wanted to tell you that, um, Draco is still dating Pansy. They were holding hands the first night we got back, and they’re awfully ‘lovey’ together…”
“Aw, I’m sorry, Court,” I said sympathetically.
“No, don’t be,” she said. “I think I just like him as a friend for the most-part, anyway.”
“Really?” I asked, surprised. “But on the train—”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. I just wanted to sit with him, and I sort of had a crush on him, but not that badly.”
“Oh,” I said, not sure what else to say.
“I think I like Ron better, anyway,” she said with a slight grin.
“But Courtney,” I said, trying to be stern and gentle at the same time, “I don’t think Ron really even knows who you are.”
“Yes he does,” she said defensively, looking extremely uncomfortable but indignant at the same time. “I was in the same compartment as him last summer, when we were coming home from Hogwarts, remember?”
“Courtney, you’re great and all, but I don’t know if that’s quite enough to go off of. Plus, and this is going to sound really awful,” I warned her, “you’re a Slytherin. Ron is pretty narrow minded, so he’s got it in his head that all Slytherins are evil. It’d take a lot of convincing to get him to think otherwise.”
“I’m willing to do that,” she said.
I sighed. There was simply no convincing her… without being extremely hurtful, that is.
“All right,” I said after a moment. “Good luck with the whole Ron thing then, Courtney.”
“Thanks,” she said, somewhat stiff from my slight sarcasm. “I guess you should probably go meet up with Hermione.”
“Yeah,” I said. “See you later.”
We went our separate ways, and I still couldn’t believe that she’d come so close to having Malfoy, then backed off and let him take Parkinson just because she liked Ron a bit more. Realistically, I decided sadly, Ron would never really be interested in her, simply because she was a Slytherin, not to mention she was very quiet and soft-spoken, where he seemed to like a bit more vibrant personality. I was sure, also, he had no idea that a little third-year girl was admiring him from afar. With these thoughts still floating in my head, I entered the library and sat down across from Hermione. She already had a book open and several others stacked nearby, and she was writing furiously (but somehow dreadfully neatly) on a crisp scroll of parchment.
“You’re late,” she said.
“Sorry, I was talking to Courtney,” I replied, setting most of my stuff on the floor and pulling out a scroll of parchment.
“Fine, but keep it shorter next time,” Hermione said stoutly, not removing her eyes from her frantic scrawling.
I rolled my eyes as I took one of the books from the stack. “Whatever you say, Professor Granger.”
Her eyes shot up at me in a quick glare before returning to her paper. Her being somewhat hypercompetitive, she was always a bit intense around me when it came to potions, as this was the only subject in the entire school where anyone stood as an academic equal, and she didn’t like sharing the limelight.
After a bit of this tenseness between us, we eventually warmed up to each other and began discussing potions ingredients. At about this time, the silence in the library was disrupted by an eruption of giggles coming from behind a nearby bookshelf. Hermione and I both looked up, irritated, to see what the noise was all about. We could see past the books that there was a gaggle of girls, representing several different houses, even a few Beauxbotons girls, who appeared to be fifth or sixth years. They continued whispering to one another, and it didn’t take long for us to see what it was.
“Look, there he is!” a Ravenclaw girl hissed, and fits of giggles could be heard again. Viktor Krum stepped out from a different bookshelf, staring at the pages of a book with intense concentration. He glanced up from the pages, then down again, and repeated this several times before I finally realized something.
“Hermione,” I hissed, “he’s staring at you.”
“Who?” Hermione asked, although I knew she knew who I was talking about.
“Viktor Krum!” I whispered.
“No he’s not,” Hermione said, but she went pink as she dove deeper into her studies.
I glanced back up at Krum, who was looking at Hermione again. But when he caught my eye and saw I was watching him, he quickly looked down at the book again and walked away. The flock of adoring fan girls followed closely behind him.
“He was definitely looking at you,” I said in a more normal voice, now that he was gone.
“You’re reading too much into it,” Hermione said, flushing. “Just because he happened to look at me doesn’t mean he was, you know… looking at me.”
“He didn’t happen to look at you,” I said. “He stared intently at you.”
With a slight mumble, Hermione brushed this off and went back to her studies. After a few moments, seeing that Krum wasn’t returning, I did the same.
