A Hogwarts Legend: Changing Paths [3]

Chapter Fourteen

Unedited

Chapter Fourteen - "I don't think I meet the height requirement to ride your emotional roller-coaster."

Madam Pomfrey insists on keeping Harry and I in the hospital wing for the rest of the weekend. We don't argue or complain, but Harry won't let her throw away the shattered remnants of his Nimbus Two Thousand.

I have a stream of visitors, all intent on cheering me up. Hagrid sends me a bunch of earwiggy flowers that look like yellow cabbages, and I get a gift delivered to me on Saturday evening, consisting of a box of chocolates and a note which says:

I hope you feel better soon. I would of come to visit you but as Potter is in the Hospital Wing with you, I think it would look a bit suspicious. I know I'm not doing well at proving I want to be your friend, but I want to let you know, I am trying, even if it is hard to believe.
Draco Malfoy

The Gryffindor team visit again on Sunday morning, the time accompanied by Wood, who tells Harry, in a hollow, dead sort of voice, that he doesn't blame himself in the slightest.

It's puzzling to me about how Harry and I react to the Dementors. I feel sick and humiliated every time I think of them. Everyone says the Dementors are horrible, but no one else collapses every time they go near one ... no one else, not even Harry, from what I know, hears echoes in their head of they dying parents.

I hear the screams over and over during the night hours in the hospital wing while I lie awake, staring at the strips of moonlight on the ceiling ... I doze fitfully, sinking into dramas full of clammy, rotted hands and petrified screaming, jerking awake only to dwell again on what I've been hearing.

*

It's a relief to return on Monday to the noise and bustle of the main school, where I'm forced to think about other things, including Malfoy's taunting. Malfoy is almost beside himself with glee at Gryffindor's defeat. He's finally taken off his bandages, and celebrated having the full use of both arms by doing spirited imitations of Harry falling off his broom. He made sure to tell me he would never make fun of me, because apparently Harry and I look completely different falling off our brooms.

Malfoy spends much of our next Potions class doing Dementor imitations across the dungeon; Ron finally cracks, flinging w large, slippery crocodile heart at Malfoy, which hits him in the face, causing me to laugh and Snape to take fifty points from Gryffindor.

"If Snape's taking Defence Against the Dark Arts again, I'm going off sick," Ron says, as we head towards Lupin's classroom after lunch. "Check who's in there, Hermione."

Hermione peers around the classroom door.

"It's okay!"

Professor Lupin is back at work. It certainly looks as though he's been ill. His old robes are hanging more loosely on him and there are dark shadows beneath his eyes; nevertheless, he smiles at the class as we take our seats, and we burst at once into an explosion of complaints about Snape's behaviour while Lupin has been ill.

"It's not fair, he was only filling in, why should he set us homework?"

"He was a dick to Hermione."

"We don't know anything about werewolves -"

"-two rolls of parchment!"