At the beginning of the year, Allie was no one
Now she's infamous
**
Until her eleventh birthday, Allie didn't believe in magic. How could she when her mother had died when she was barely two and her father had never been around. Her life wasn't ver...
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It took me a while to catch up with Lupin. I almost lost him a couple of times. He was practically running through the halls, glancing down at the map every couple of minutes. He grasped that map so tightly, his knuckles were white.
He strode right through the castle and out onto the grounds. Where on earth was he going? Hagrid's? I stopped at the end of the corridor. It was getting dark. The sun was only just poking out from behind the tops of the trees in the forbidden forest. There was a warm orange glow of dusk washing over the rolling fields of the school grounds. It was almost certainly past curfew. I could get in serious trouble for this, and I would never hear the end of it from Maddie. But I might never hear who my father is from Lupin if I didn't go through with my incredibly crazy plan. It was now or never. Come on, Allie, be brave.
I followed Professor Lupin as he strode across the grounds. I kept my distance, trying to hide behind anything that was big enough to hide me so that he didn't see me following him but he was much more concerned with looking at whatever it was on that map.
I hesitated, crouched behind a shrub as I watched Lupin carry on walking. What the hell was he doing? He was walking right at the Whomping willow! Every year we heard from our Hufflepuff prefects not to go near that tree. Almost every Hufflepuff was good at herbology and lots of them found it fascinating. At least one student every year thought they were the one to get close enough the Whomping willow to get a sample to study or, if they were crazy enough, plant and grow a whole new tree. But they all failed. And they all ended up in the hospital wing. It was now student policy for every prefect to warn as many first years, and older, as they could not go near that tree. So what was he doing going near that tree? Was he mad?
I held my breath, poking my head out from behind the shrub as I watched Lupin walk straight up to the Whomping Willow. He paused briefly, bending down slightly to poke something on the floor and then he carried on walking. He just walked right up to the Whomping willow unharmed. And then he just disappeared.
I stood bolt upright, gaping at the now empty scene before me. The Whomping Willow was not whomping and Professor Lupin was nowhere to be seen. What the hell had just happened?
I cautiously walked forward and stopped right where Professor Lupin had stood. I was now inches away from the Whomping Willow. I could very well die at any moment, or at least be maimed or seriously injured. I looked down on the floor, trying to find what it was that Lupin had found so fascinating. There was literally nothing. There were just a few patches of yellowing grass, twigs and roots that had poked up through the earth. The only thing remotely interesting, if you could call it interesting, was a particularly knotted root. I sighed and, thinking I had definitely lost my mind, reached down to press on the knot. The willow seemed to relax. Its branches drooped slightly and the trunk creaked as if it had sunk lower into the ground like I sunk into the armchairs in the Hufflepuff common room after a particularly long day of lessons. Thinking I was now definitely out of my mind, I walked right up to the willow's trunk. And yet I didn't get beaten by a tree. I was perfectly fine. All I had to do to disarm a lethal tree was to press on a root? Was that it? Was that seriously it?
