Harry Potter and the Lost Half-Bloods. *1*

Annabeth

"Ah, whatever." He smirked, seemingly satisfied with her annoyance. "Uh, hey blondie, you alright?"

There it was, making its way down the desk. It's eight spindly legs creeping along with every step.

Leo followed my gaze to the desk, then laughed.

"Perificus totalus." He pointed his wand at the spider. It immediately froze. He blew it off the desk, out of sight. "Arachnophobia?" He guessed.

"Yeah. Just a bit." I answered. Spiders had always made me uncomfortable. This time was different. I didn't understand. Suddenly it was as if they had been my biggest fear. Had they?

"Thanks." I mumbled. An awkward silence passed over our trio.

"Allow me to introduce myself! I'm Leo Valdez, Slytherin extraordinaire. Lover of sarcasm and Spanish cuisine. This is Piper McClean! Lover of a sassy, over-dramatic attitude," Piper glowered at him. "And you are Annabeth Chase! Enemy of spiders."

I thought it should have been the other way around. Spiders seem to be my enemy. I wasn't an enemy to anything.

I continued to work on the potion while Piper and Leo mostly glared at each other. Piper did most of the glaring, actually. Leo mostly smirked in response which made Piper glare even harder.

The end of class came quicker than expected. I guess time flies fast when you're doing all of your group's work. Snape trudged along, inspecting the potions. He glanced at ours without a word and walked away. That was a good thing. The thing about Snape was that he never failed to supply negative remarks. If he didn't say anything about your work, that meant he had nothing negative to say about it.

Piper seemed to be in a hurry. She left as quickly as possible. Leo chuckled to himself, but I could tell it bothered him.

"What's up with her? Sorry, that was a bit rude of me." I added.

"Ah, it's alright." He sighed. "Her and I are best friends."

I raised a brow in confusion. I didn't think that was how best friends acted.

"We were, I guess. She's mad at me because I offered my friendly advice. That friendly advice was to stay away from the crowd she's gotten herself in with," he shuddered. "They're bad news."

"Oh, I'm sorry. I hope everything works out."

He shrugged.

"I've tried to get through to her since last year. Piper is the one who has a way with words, not me." He shook his head. "But it's okay! I'll keep trying, I guess. All I can do is annoy her. Maybe that will get through to her."

He smiled at me.

"I'll see you around, Chase. And great job on the potion. That'll be the first decent mark I've gotten on any on Snape's assignments in years!"

All I could think was at least he had the decency to say thanks after I did all of the work. Piper seemed distracted with her own problems. I didn't quite have an opinion on her yet. She hadn't been unpleasant to me yet. But Leo saying she was in with the wrong crowd made me nervous. It wouldn't be long before she'd start complaining about her 'mud-blood' partner. It made me sick to my stomach to think about.

During my free period I didn't really know what to do with myself. My only house mates were off doing their own things. Hazel wasn't even in the same house as me. I decided to use my free period to study different subjects, and re-learn anything that may have been fuzzy because of the summer months I hadn't been at school.

Usually, I didn't have a hard time focusing. Especially in the Ravenclaw common room, where our house students knew better than to be obnoxious while others were focusing on school work. Our house has always been more mature and civilized than the others, I'd imagine studying in any other common room would be horrendous.