I watch him. I can't help it.
Those silver grey eyes; that white-blond hair. It's almost like I'm hypnotised.
I spend the whole of my first year at Hogwarts not thinking about much else.
He liked to think he was smart, you could literally see the cockiness oozing off of him in waves; it was there in every word he spoke and visible in every swaggering step he took.
But there were times when he was searingly blind to what was right in front of him, and I was amazed at how he literally couldn't see it.
Pansy and I stayed on at Christmas due to our parents going on a skiing holiday. To my delight, Draco was staying on too, along with Crabbe and Goyle. We were the only Slytherins in the castle for those two weeks and I revelled in the fact that it meant I got to spend more time in Draco's presence.
Not that he ever really spoke to me.
It was during one of those evenings when I witnessed one of Draco's moments of stupidity.
I had been walking a little way behind him as I made my way down to the dungeons; my eyes lingering on his sleek white-blond hair which guided the way ahead almost like a beacon.
"Ah - Crabbe, Goyle, there you are," Draco drawled as he turned down into the corridor of the Slytherin entrance. "Thought you'd been pigging out in the Great Hall again."
Crabbe and Goyle were indeed loitering outside, looking a bit lost.
As we neared, I noticed instantly that there was something very odd looking about Goyle.
He was wearing glasses. Glasses very much like those of Harry Potter.
To be fair on Draco, this didn't actually go unnoticed by him.
"Why are you wearing glasses?" he squinted, looking at him suspiciously.
"Er... they're for reading." Goyle stuttered and, quick as a flash, he ripped them off of his face, in a very un-Goyle like fashion.
Draco frowned, studying him curiously. "I didn't know you could read."
I couldn't help it; I snorted. Draco whirled round and his eyes widened in surprise at seeing me standing there.
"Oh, it's you," he muttered, wrinkling his nose slightly as if he disapproved of my existence. "Well, come on then," he said impatiently, turning back to Crabbe and Goyle without giving me any further acknowledgement, "say the password."
There was definite panic written all over Crabbe and Goyle's faces.
"We uh- don't remember," Crabbe stammered nervously, rubbing the back of his neck.
Now, I know they could both be stupid, but how they could forget the password on the same day at the same time after we'd been using it all week struck me as very suspicious indeed.
Draco, however, did not seem to find this in the slightest bit odd and instead lead the way through himself.
He ordered them to wait by the fire as he disappeared to get something from his dormitory.
I sat nearby, slipping out a book from my bag and pretended to read.
Crabbe and Goyle were hissing frantically at one another, seemingly not even realising I was there.
"I'm telling you, he's going to tell us something about the chamber!" Goyle whispered excitedly. "I've got a good feeling!"
This behaviour was quite frankly, baffling. Usually they would just sit around with gormless expressions on their faces, every now and then issuing a grunt or two.
And when Draco returned with a newspaper clipping about Arthur Weasley and preceded to mock his Muggle-loving ways, Crabbe reacted as if it was his own father being insulted.
And that's when I clicked. It was his father. This wasn't Crabbe and Goyle; this was Ron Weasley and Harry Potter.
Draco remained completely oblivious though, even when they unsubtley questioned him about the Chamber of Secrets and then got upset when he referred to Hermione Granger a Mudblood.
And when Crabbe's hair started to rapidly turn red and they both jumped up and legged it after blaming a stomachache, Draco still didn't seem suspicious.
"What are you looking at?" he spat as I stared incredulously at him over my book. "Go and find yourself some friends you little freak. Bloody first years."
I tried not to let his nasty comment get to me, but I couldn't deny it didn't sting.
But I took his advice and eventually made friends of my own: Ginny Weasley as well as Luna Lovegood.
"What is wrong with you?!" Pansy yelled at me when I came back into the common room late after a study session with my new friends. "Do you know how embarrassing it is having a sister who hangs out with blood traitors and lunatics? You're a Slytherin, not a stupid Hufflepuff!"
"Don't call them that!" I cried as Daphne and Millicent sniggered behind her on the sofa.
I didn't like her calling them names. It was like she was insulting me. And also, I loved them; they didn't seem bothered that I was a Slytherin in the slightest. Ginny even confided to me that she had found a special diary.
"I tell it everything," she sighed dreamily, "all my secrets and about how the boy I like doesn't even notice me."
"Which boy?" I asked, my heart giving a little twist as I thought about the white-blond haired Slytherin, knowing exactly what she was going through.
"Harry Potter," she whispered, going beetroot red. "I love him."
I thought about sharing my own unrequited love story, but somehow I found I couldn't say the words out loud; I was too embarrassed by it.
When Ginny was kidnapped and taken down to the chamber at the end of the school year, I couldn't contain my worry.
"I don't know why you're so worried," Pansy sneered as we gathered in the common room after Snape declared that the school was being shut down because of it. "The little blood traitor deserves what she gets."
It was the first time I had ever slapped someone.
Unfortunately, it meant that after that, I was very much ostracised from the rest of the Slytherins; in their eyes I was as much of a traitor as a Weasley.
"Never mind," Luna said serenely as we made our journey home. "Perhaps you can ask Professor Dumbledore for a house transfer? He seems like a nice old man."
But of course I didn't want that.
Not when it took me away from the Slytherin Prince.
*****