Chapter 8
Waking up the next morning, I finally found the energy to get to know the guys who shared a bedroom with me.
Namely Adrian Pusey, Uchi Akimbo, Miles Bletchley, and Graham Montague. Of all of them, only Graham belonged to a family of pure-blooded wizards. Not that it meant anything to me, but his family's status, though not at the top among other families, still carried enough weight to make me at least pay attention to their heir. From the very morning I realized that they were nothing, because while I was dressed and ready to go to breakfast, these lazy people were still sleeping, not wanting to go to class. So I decided not to pay any more attention to them, so I went to breakfast, and after it I went to classes. But my lazy neighbors had to go to them with hungry stomachs, and I did not feel sorry for them at all.
I had originally assumed that all of our lessons would be related to all things magical, but unfortunately for me, most of them were the same as in Muggle schools. There was a certain logic to that, though. After all, not all students get jobs in magical society after graduating from Hogwarts. And even if they did, they would also need the usual knowledge. So after a little thought on the subject, I pushed the sad thoughts aside.
As it turned out, there were one hundred and forty-two staircases in Hogwarts. Some of them were wide and spacious, while others were narrow and rickety. There were staircases that had a few steps suddenly disappear the moment I went down or up them. So when walking on these stairs, I had to jump. And there were some that at some point turned in a completely different direction, and I had to make big circles to get to the right place.
There were enough problems with the doors too. Some of them wouldn't open unless politely requested. Others would only open if you touched them in a certain place. Still others turned out to be fake, when in fact there was a wall.
Memorizing the location of stairs, doors, classrooms, corridors, and bedrooms was difficult, even though I had a special map. It seemed like everything at Hogwarts was constantly changing, and everything was different today than it was yesterday. The people in the portraits were visiting each other. And I even saw the knights' lats standing in the corridors running around a few times.
Adding to the trouble were the ghosts. It always took me by surprise when a ghost would suddenly fly sharply through a door I was trying to open. Especially when an intangible neck stump would fly in, accompanied by a nasty laugh. But the Peeves poltergeist was the most dangerous. And you'd be very unlucky if you met him in your hurry not to be late for class.
Peeves dropped laundry baskets on freshmen's heads, yanked carpets out from under them, pelted them with pieces of chalk, or thanks to his invisibility, crept up unnoticed and suddenly grabbed them by the nose with a hoarse cry: "Gotcha!" The girls and those who were near them at the moment of their frightened shrieks suffered the most from the latter.
It seemed that nothing could be worse than Peeves, but it turned out that this was not quite so; Argus Filch, the school superintendent, was a much more unpleasant person. He would lash out at students, whether they were freshmen or not.
Filch also had a cat named Mrs. Norris, a scrawny, dusty-gray creature with bulging, burning eyes almost identical to Filch's.
She patrolled the corridors alone. Whenever she saw someone breaking the rules, she would disappear. A few seconds later, Philch would appear, sniffling heavily, ready to punish the offenders.
Filch knew all the secret passages better than anyone else in the school-except maybe the Weasley twins, who were always bragging to me about how they'd found the next secret passage.
The students hated Filch, and for many of them the ultimate dream was to dare to kick Mrs. Norris.
But finding the right room was only half the battle, for the lessons were sometimes much more difficult than finding the right room. As it quickly turned out, much to the disappointment of all the sleep-loving freshmen, in addition to the usual magic and spell study, every Wednesday at midnight we had to stick to telescopes, study the night sky, write down the names of different stars, and memorize how the planets moved.
Three times a week we were taken to the greenhouses behind the castle, where a short, full-bodied lady, Professor Sprout, taught us herbology, the science of plants, and told us how to care for all these strange plants and fungi and what they were used for.
The most tedious subject was the history of magic - those were the only lessons the ghost taught. Professor Beans was very old when he fell asleep one day in the teacher's lounge right in front of the fireplace, and the next morning he came to class without his body. Bins spoke in a horrible monotone and also without stopping. The students hastily wrote down names and dates after him and confused Emeric the Evil with Uric the Weird.
Professor Flitwick, who taught spells, was so tiny in stature that he stood on a stack of books so he could see his students from behind his desk. But his classes were interesting, and after Professor Beans' lectures, the energetic voice of a professor who was truly passionate about his subject and tried to interest his students was like Merlin's gift to the students.
Professor McGonagall, on the other hand, was quite different. I was right when I saw her and told myself that it was best not to mess with her. Smart, but stern, she gave a very stern speech as soon as the first year students came to her class and settled into their seats.
- Transfiguration is one of the most difficult and dangerous sections of magic you will study at Hogwarts. - She began, like all the other professors, to praise her subject.
- Any indiscipline in my classes and the offender will be out of the classroom and never come back. I've warned you.
Everyone felt a little uneasy after that speech. Then Professor McGonagall went into practice and turned her desk into a pig and then back into a desk. Everyone was terribly amazed and began to pine for more practice themselves, but soon realized that they would not be able to learn how to turn pieces of furniture into animals for a very long time.
Then Professor McGonagall dictated some very obscure and confusing sentences for us to learn by heart. Then she gave us each a match and told us to turn the matches into needles. By the end of the lesson, only my match had changed shape and then material, becoming a completely silver needle, and that was due to the fact that I had been studying magic all along, unlike the others.
Professor McGonagall demonstrated the resulting silver needle to the entire class and smiled at me, crediting twenty points to the Slytherin account. This smile amazed everyone as much as turning the table into a pig, because it seemed that Professor McGonagall didn't know how to smile at all....
Everyone was especially looking forward to the professor's lessons on Defense Against the Dark Arts. Patricia Reykpick was a rather beautiful woman of about thirty-five with red hair. Everyone was expecting her to be professional and interesting, but to everyone's disappointment she spent the whole lesson babbling about some vaults and cursed treasures that had nothing to do with our lesson. And for some reason she was disliked by many professors, including our dean, Professor Snape.
Snape's office was in one of the dungeons. It was cold - much colder than the castle itself - and quite scary. All along the walls were glass jars that held ingredients, and the ones that held the most creepy were the ones that had floating in them specimens of various fauna, or even whole animal carcasses.
Snape, like Flitwick, began the class by opening the magazine and introducing himself to the students.
After he finished introducing himself to the class, Snape looked around the audience with an attentive gaze. His eyes were as black as Hagrid's, only they didn't have the kindness that the giant's eyes had. Snape's eyes were cold and empty and somehow resembled dark tunnels.
- You are here to learn the science of making magical potions and potions. A very precise and subtle science! - He started to go on and on about how his item was the best and the others were crap.....
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