The Hogwarts Lonely Hearts Club

So Many Questions

The last lesson on Friday afternoon for the Gryffindors was Charms. They took this particular class with the Hufflepuffs, which always caused a little bit of consternation, because all any of them wanted to talk about was Super Cedric Diggory, giving a blow-by-blow account of his performance in the Triwizard Tournament so far, forgetting that the rest of the school had all seen his display in the First Task for themselves.

But their exuberance could be forgiven. After all, Hufflepuff House rarely had anything to toast in terms of sporting success, so they were rightly proud that a student from their House had been chosen as the Hogwarts Champion. Though they didn't half bleat on about it. This wasn't such a bad thing if you were sat with Hannah Abbott, who was a bit shy and didn't talk much, but if you were saddled with Ernie MacMillan you could expect an hour of tales about Cedric the Dragon Conqueror, Cedric and the Golden Egg, and Cedric the Champion of the Meek, and so on.

So Hermione was understandably in a hurry to reach the Charms classroom early, in order to grab a desk and hope that Fay or at least one of the other Gryffindors would join her. Her mood wasn't helped by the boisterous behaviour that tended to infect the student populous, as the week's classes came to an end. They were racing along the corridors, shouting, misbehaving and generally getting on Hermione's nerves.

And her nerves were pretty frayed as it was. She hadn't heard from Harry for a couple of days, had barely even seen him in fact. She thought he would be as fevered as she'd been to share his thoughts about their Yule Ball agreement ... Hermione still felt shy about calling it a 'date' ... and had expected a letter from him the very next day.

But it had been a couple of days now and Harry still hadn't replied. If Hermione hadn't known better, she'd have thought that Harry was teasing her, increasing her anticipation for his next words through suspense. But that made her think of the ways that courtship often took place in her favourite Jane Austen novels, a thought that caused her mind to flutter in such silly ways that she had to sit down before she fell down.

So by that afternoon Hermione was in a very agitated state. She'd been late down to breakfast and hadn't seen Harry anywhere in the Hall, which disappointed her. She was reluctant to think just how much she was rating the quality of her days now by how often she saw Harry, as that was a perilous path to tread, but she firmly accepted this new metric for her life when she found him facing in her direction at lunch, and he gave her a little smile as their eyes met.

Because the fleeting look seemed to make the bottom of Hermione's stomach fall out.

But then she was forced to sit with her back towards the Ravenclaw table, and more importantly towards the only member of that House that Hermione had any interest in at all, which frustrated her greatly. She lost her appetite with the disappointment and simply nursed a cup of Earl Grey and ate almost nothing, until it was time to attend her last class of the day.

And so by the time she was stomping along the Charms corridor, Hermione was in a pretty foul mood. And it was all Harry Potter's fault. He was doing this to her. What did it matter that Hermione had seen him only briefly during lunch? That shouldn't be a marker of how good or bad her day was. This wasn't the sort of thing that Hermione Granger would ever think to include on her 'to do list' for an average twenty-four hours.

The usual sorts of things she'd already done. She'd earned good House points for the Arithmancy essay she'd gotten back that morning, for combining quadratic equations with magical numerology to better predict weather cycles, and Professor McGonagall had given her twenty points for turning a thimble into an almost exact replica of the Goblet of Fire in Transfiguration.

This would usually make Hermione feel that her day had been profitable and productive. But those things could all go and burn in the Goblet of Fire for all she cared, because she'd only seen Harry for five seconds or less, and that counted as a waste of a day in her book. It was barely worth getting out of bed for.