"Hey," I said to Harry as me, Fred and George come to join him, Ron and Hermione.
"Ginny's had a word with us about you," Fred said, stretching out his legs on the table in front of him and causing several booklets on careers with the Ministry of Magic to slide off onto the floor. "She says you need to talk to Sirius face to face?" I had offered him the mirror but he wanted to talk to Sirius properly in person.
"What?" Hermione said sharply, freezing with her hand halfway toward picking up make a bang at the department of magical accidents and catastrophes.
"Yeah" Harry said, trying to sound casual, "yeah, I thought I'd like"
"Don't be so ridiculous," Hermione said, straightening up and looking at him as though she could not believe her eyes. "With Umbridge groping around in the fires and frisking all the owls?"
"Well, we think we can find a way around that," George said, stretching and smiling. "It's a simple matter of causing a diversion. Now, you might have noticed that we have been rather quiet on the mayhem front during the Easter holidays?"
"What was the point, we asked ourselves, of disrupting leisure time?" continued Fred. "No point at all, we answered ourselves. And of course, we'd have messed up people's studying too, which would be the very last thing we'd want to do." He gave Hermione a sanctimonious little nod. She looked rather taken aback by this thoughtfulness. "But it's business as usual from tomorrow," Fred continued briskly. "And if we're going to be causing a bit of uproar, why not do it so that Harry can have his chat with Sirius?"
"Yes, but still," Hermione said with an air of explaining something very simple to somebody very obtuse, "even if you do cause a diversion, how is Harry supposed to talk to him?"
"Umbridge's office," Harry said quietly.
"Are you insane?" Hermione said in a hushed voice. Ron had lowered his leaflet on jobs in the cultivated fungus trade and was watching the conversation warily.
"I don't think so," Harry said, shrugging.
"And how are you going to get in there in the first place?" Harry was ready for this question.
"Sirius's knife," he said.
"Excuse me?"
"Christmas before last Sirius gave me a knife that'll open any lock," Harry said. "So even if she's bewitched the door so Alohomora won't work, which I bet she has"
"What do you think about this?" Hermione demanded of Ron.
"I dunno," Ron said, looking alarmed at being asked to give an opinion. "If Harry wants to do it, it's up to him, isn't it?"
"Spoken like a true friend and Weasley," Fred said, clapping Ron hard on the back. "Right, then. We're thinking of doing it tomorrow, just after lessons, because it should cause maximum impact if everybody's in the corridors. Harry, we'll set it off in the east wing somewhere, draw her right away from her own office I reckon we should be able to guarantee you, what, twenty minutes?" he said, looking at George.
"Easy," George said.
"What sort of diversion is it?" asked Ron.
"You'll see, little bro," Fred said, as me, him and George got up again. "At least, you will if you trot along to Gregory the Smarmy's corridor round about five o'clock tomorrow."
At 5 o'clock the next evening he unmistakable sounds of a diversion going off in the distance. There were screams and yells reverberating from somewhere above them. People exiting the classrooms all around us were stopping in their tracks and looking up at the ceiling fearfully just as Umbridge came pelting out of her classroom as fast as her short legs would carry her. Pulling out her wand, she hurried off in the opposite direction to the twins. I gave Harry a nod before going to find the twins. It was just like the night when Trelawney had been sacked. Students were standing all around the walls in a great ring some of them, covered in a substance that looked very like Stinksap; teachers and ghosts were also in the crowd. Prominent among the onlookers were members of the Inquisitorial Squad, who were all looking exceptionally pleased with themselves, and Peeves, who was bobbing overhead, gazed down upon Fred and George, who stood in the middle of the floor with the unmistakable look of two people who had just been cornered.
"So!" said Umbridge triumphantly, she was standing on one of the steps once more looking down upon her prey. "So you think it amusing to turn a school corridor into a swamp, do you?"
"Pretty amusing, yeah," Fred said, looking back up at her without the slightest sign of fear. Filch elbowed his way closer to Umbridge, almost crying with happiness.
"I've got the form, Headmistress," he said hoarsely, waving the piece of parchment. "I've got the form and I've got the whips waiting. Oh, let me do it now."
"Very good, Argus," she said. "You two," she went on, gazing down at Fred and George, "are about to learn what happens to wrongdoers in my school."
"You know what?" Fred said. "I don't think we are." He turned to his twin. "George, I think we've outgrown full-time education."
"Yeah, I've been feeling that way myself," George said lightly.
"Time to test our talents in the real world, d'you reckon?" asked Fred.
"Definitely," George said. And before Umbridge could say a word, they raised their wands and said together,
"Accio Brooms!"A loud crash could be heard somewhere in the distance. Fred and George's broomsticks, one still trailing the heavy chain and iron peg with which Umbridge had fastened them to the wall, were hurtling along the corridor toward their owners. They turned left, streaked down the stairs, and stopped sharply in front of the twins, the chain clattering loudly on the flagged stone floor.
"We won't be seeing you," Fred told Professor Umbridge, swinging his leg over his broomstick.
"Yeah, don't bother to keep in touch," George said, mounting his own. Fred looked around at the assembled students, and at the silent, watchful crowd.
"If anyone fancies buying a Portable Swamp, as demonstrated upstairs, come to number ninety-three, Diagon Alley Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes," he said in a loud voice. "Our new premises!"
"Special discounts to Hogwarts students who swear they're going to use our products to get rid of this old bat," added George, pointing at Professor Umbridge.
"STOP THEM!" shrieked Umbridge, but it was too late. As the Inquisitorial Squad closed in, Fred and George kicked off from the floor, shooting fifteen feet into the air, the iron peg swinging dangerously below. Fred looked across the hall at the poltergeist bobbing on his level above the crowd.
"Give her hell from us, Peeves." And Peeves swept his belled hat from his head and sprang to a salute as Fred and George wheeled about to tumultuous applause from the students below before both shouting.
"We love you Aurora Potter"
"I love you too" I called back as they sped out of the open front doors into the glorious sunset just as Umbridge turned to me.
"You, detention my office now" I followed her still smiling at my bestfriends antics not caring in the slightest about the detention.
The story of Fred and George's flight to freedom was retold so often over the next few days that I could tell it would soon become the stuff of Hogwarts legend. The more I heard them being mentioned the more I missed them. Within a week, even those who had been eyewitnesses were half-convinced that they had seen the twins dive-bomb Umbridge on their brooms, pelting her with Dungbombs before zooming out of the doors. In the immediate aftermath of their departure there was a great wave of talk about copying them, so that I frequently heard students saying things like, "Honestly, some days I just feel like jumping on my broom and leaving this place," or else, "One more lesson like that and I might just do a Weasley." Fred and George had made sure that nobody was likely to forget them very soon. For one thing, they had not left instructions on how to remove the swamp that now filled the corridor on the fifth floor of the east wing. Umbridge and Filch had been observed trying different means of removing it but without success. Eventually the area was roped off and Filch, gnashing his teeth furiously, was given the task of punting students across it to their classrooms. Harry was certain that teachers like McGonagall or Flitwick could have removed the swamp in an instant, but just as in the case of Fred and George's Wildfire Whiz-Bangs, they seemed to prefer to watch Umbridge struggle. Then there were the two large broom-shaped holes in Umbridge's office door, through which Fred and George's Cleansweeps had smashed to rejoin their masters. Filch fitted a new door and removed Harry's Firebolt to the dungeons where, it was rumoured, Umbridge had set an armed security troll to guard it. However, her troubles were far from over. Inspired by Fred and George's example, a great number of students were now vying for the newly vacant positions of Troublemakers-in Chief. In spite of the new door, somebody managed to slip a hairysnouted niffler into Umbridge's office, which promptly tore the place apart in its search for shiny objects, leapt on Umbridge on her re-entrance, and tried to gnaw the rings off her stubby fingers. Dungbombs and Stinkpellets were dropped so frequently in the corridors that it became the new fashion for students to perform Bubble-Head Charms on themselves before leaving lessons, which ensured them a supply of fresh clean air, even though it gave them all the peculiar appearance of wearing upside-down goldfish bowls on their heads. Filch prowled the corridors with a horsewhip ready in his hands, desperate to catch miscreants, but the problem was that there were now so many of them that he did not know which way to turn. The Inquisitorial Squad were attempting to help him, but odd things kept happening to its members. Warrington of the Slytherin Quidditch team reported to the hospital wing with a horrible skin complaint that made him look as though he had been coated in cornflakes. Pansy Parkinson, to Hermione's delight, missed all her lessons the following day, as she had sprouted antlers. Meanwhile it became clear just how many Skiving Snackboxes Fred and George had managed to sell before leaving Hogwarts. Umbridge only had to enter her classroom for the students assembled there to faint, vomit, develop dangerous fevers, or else spout blood from both nostrils. Shrieking with rage and frustration she attempted to trace the mysterious symptoms to their source, but the students told her stubbornly they were suffering "Umbridge-itis." After putting four successive classes in detention and failing to discover their secret she was forced to give up and allow the bleeding, swooning, sweating, and vomiting students to leave her classes in droves. But not even the users of the Snackboxes could compete with that master of chaos, Peeves, who seemed to have taken Fred's parting words deeply to heart. Cackling madly, he soared through the school, upending tables, bursting out of blackboards, and toppling statues and vases. Twice he shut Mrs. Norris inside suits of armor, from which she was rescued, yowling loudly, by the furious caretaker. He smashed lanterns and snuffed out candles, juggled burning torches over the heads of screaming students, caused neatly stacked piles of parchment to topple into fires or out of windows, flooded the second floor when he pulled off all the taps in the bathrooms, dropped a bag of tarantulas in the middle of the Great Hall during breakfast and, whenever he fancied a break, spent hours at a time floating along after Umbridge and blowing loud raspberries every time she spoke. None of the staff but Filch seemed to be stirring themselves to help her. Indeed, a week after Fred and George's departure Professor McGonagall was walking right past Peeves, who was determinedly loosening a crystal chandelier, and I could have sworn I heard her tell the poltergeist out of the corner of her mouth,
"It unscrews the other way." To cap matters, Montague had still not recovered from his sojourn in the toilet. He remained confused and disorientated and his parents were to be observed one Tuesday morning striding up the front drive, looking extremely angry.