Falling Out

Day One - Monday

"Hey, Rose!"

Rose Weasley walked faster, catching up to Albus and linking her arm through his.

"Rose! Albus!"

Albus started to turn at the sound of his name, before his cousin jabbed him in the side with a sharp elbow.

"Why are we ignoring Scorpius?" Albus whispered out of the corner of his mouth, keeping his gaze forward.

"Because I—we—are not speaking to him," she replied, as they turned the corner into the Charms classroom.

"Hang on. I thought you fancied him!" Albus said, forgetting to be quite so quiet.

"I will have nothing to do with Scorpius Malfoy!" she hissed, slamming her books on the desk with a heavy thump.

"Miss Weasley!" Professor Flitwick turned from writing on the board to face her. She looked up at him sheepishly. "If I may make a suggestion—the better you treat your books, the better they will treat you."

Rose's cheeks coloured. She heard someone laugh in the back of the classroom, though she couldn't tell who it was. Albus looked at her as if she ought to have an explanation. She did.

It was all Malfoy's fault.

But Rose did not say that. Instead, she sat down and pretended not to notice when Scorpius himself sat on her other side.

She did not even turn to make sure he had seen that she mastered the Summoning Charm before he did. Since their first days at Hogwarts, Rose and Scorpius had engaged in a friendly rivalry for the best marks, and the quickest comprehension, but the amiable competition could not continue, for Rose had vowed to herself that she would never speak to Scorpius again.

Rose had often been told she was stubborn. Each of her parents blamed the other for the inherited attitude, which had led Rose to conclude at a very young age that both of her parents were stubborn as well. She was quite proud of her stubbornness. She was quite certain that she was the most stubborn person she knew.

Still, when she had returned to her dormitory and was settling into her bed that night, she had to admit that not talking to Scorpius was going to be difficult. She would have to watch Albus go with Scorpius to Hogsmeade as they'd planned, while she stayed at the castle, or tried to avoid them on High Street. She would have to avoid smiling at things Scorpius said. She would have to stop liking him altogether. She might even have to avoid the Hallowe'en ball in order to maintain her distance from him. That was the most disappointing consequence of all.

Rose's mother had sent her a dress for the occasion, which had come that morning over breakfast, but she had tucked it away under her bed without even trying it on. She couldn't tell her mother that she wouldn't get to wear it. Mum would be too disappointed. The dress had been hers, and she had worn it at her first ball, in her fourth year at Hogwarts, when balls were rare occasions, and not held every year.

And she certainly couldn't tell her mother why she wasn't going to the ball. That would mean saying that she had stolen her mother's Hogwarts diaries from a box in the attic that summer and had been reading in her spare time since she'd been back at school. The first volume—the chronicle of Hermione Granger's first year at Hogwarts—had roused Rose's suspicions of the Malfoy family, as it was riddled with references to how awful Scorpius' father had been to her mother, father, and Uncle Harry. However, it was the contents of the second volume which had led to her decision to stop speaking to Scorpius.

His father had called her mother a "Mudblood," and if that was the kind of family Scorpius had, she wanted nothing to do with any of them.

The second-year diary was full of things like that. Her mother had written down all the reasons why Draco Malfoy was logically the heir of Slytherin. It didn't help that Rose knew, vaguely, what had really happened that year at Hogwarts. It was enough that there was so much evidence that pointed to Malfoy—enough that her mother, who seemed always to follow the rules, had brewed a Polyjuice Potion to try and catch him.