academic curiosity

Lily shrugged off a cool breeze and pulled down the sleeves of her red and yellow argyle sweater.

"Gryffindor colors!" she pointed out to Debra Skitter who was glinting at her dangerously, wand in one hand, a small tin of gold paint in the other.

There was a distant roar and stomping from the pitch, which was usual just before a Quidditch match.

"Are you ladies going to stand here and block the gates, or are you going to get inside before the match starts?" Frank Longbottom asked loudly as he tried to fight past the hovel of fifth and sixth year girls. He had on head to toe red and gold colors, a huge, vicious lion head emblazoned the back of his cloak. Lily felt a furtive movement by her ankles and found that Peter Pettigrew was crawling through the crowd on all fours. He was quite deft at it.

"We each have a player," Debra said nonchalantly to Lily, edging closer. "You´re our seventh and we´ve saved the best one for you..."

Lily chose to interpret this as bad tidings for the rest of the evening. As if to answer this, a huge dark cloud erupted from the east and came billowing towards them. It must have been traveling at sixty or seventy miles per hour and it blighted out all the bright blue sky and sun in a matter of a minute.

Everyone stopped and fended off the sudden onslaught of darkness in the sky with their arms over their faces, running pele in every direction.

As her friends followed suit, Lily, a little relieved to have an excuse to avoid the festive face painting (a concept that always made her queasy along with circus clowns and very confined spaces), called after them, "Don´t panic!"

Sharon Wiggins stopped running and spun around to say, "Make for aisle 42 on the Gryffindor end! I forgot the banner back by the lake!" The girls watched Sharon skip back towards the lakeside, the last place one would want to go in the middle of a rain storm.

"Oh, Sharon!" Debra scolded and for some reason the whole thing made Lily laugh all the way to aisle 42.

The rain pelted everyone, it felt like millions of small pebbles being hurled at them. The golden letters PALMER were melting beautifully off Debra´s face as she tried to cower under some of the taller girls.

"Oh, that´s nice!" Alice Milton, all five foot eleven of her joked. "Shove off, Skitter I don´t need-"

"No!" Debra sighed plaintively. "This can be a symbiotic relationship!"

"Oh?" Alice responded airily. "And how´s that then?"

"Well," Debra said thoughtfully, touching her finger to her chin. "I could pick the lint balls off your cloak."

Lily watched the argument from under a perfect umbrella-shaped charm her wand was expelling over her head.

Because of the heavy rain and all the distractions no one could be bothered to notice that it was not a real umbrella and so no one was able to exclaim over a very impressive bit of magic.

Lily felt a little sorry for her mates as they held out their soggy banner and wiped gold paint off their chins.

"Just curious," Lily yelled into Sharon´s ear when they all became situated enough to all face the right direction and then unfold the huge banner. "What player were you all saving for me?"

"I forget," Sharon yelled back.

"Debra!" Sharon said loudly down the line, where a figure was huddled at Alice Milton´s side defensively.

"What´s up?" came a a faint, downtrodden voice.

"What play-"

"WHAT?" came the voice again.

"I SAID!" Sharon cried a bit miffed to be asked to repeat what she had said before she could say it, "WHAT PLAYER WAS LILY SUPPOSED TO HAVE PAINTED ON?!"

"I DON´T UNDERSTAND!!!" came the reply. There was crack of thunder and a collective groan of a thousand students.

"WHO. WERE. YOU. GOING. TO. PAINT. ON. LILY??!!!"

There was a long silence on the opposite end of the line and by the time the answer was bellowed back Lily had stopped caring.

"OH!" came Debra´s voice. "JAMES!"

Lily heard this clearly as a bell and rolled her eyes. But apparently Sharon hadn´t heard clearly as a bell and so this is why Sharon and Debra screamed Lily and Potter´s name in conjunction to each other for five to ten minutes. By the time Sharon was quite positive of the information, so was everyone on their side of the Quidditch pitch.

"So," Sharon yelled in Lily´s ear helpfully, "She says you were to do James Potter... Too bad the paint won´t stick in all this rain!"

"Yes, a great pity!" Lily replied in a solemn tone.

"Hey..." Sharon suddenly narrowed her eyes at Lily´s wand. "Is that magic..."

"... WELCOME AGAIN TO THE 1975 HOOOOOGWARTS QUIDDITCH SEASON--- FIFTH MATCH OF-"

The announcer of the games this year was a third year that the Quidditch players had nicknamed Moondoggie. He had a very good radio voice, unfortunately they couldn´t always pick up all that he was saying, especially when the wind blew up from behind and towards the staff box where he held his magical microphone.

Lily could make out some of their players circling the pitch and then a few orange robes flapping after them, belonging to the Hufflepuff team who would probably lose tonight as Gryffindor hadn´t lost a single match in two or three years, Lily had lost count.

You would think that they were not the officially undefeated team of the school, the way the line of Gryffindor boys stood stalwartly along the edge of the stands, arms crossed stoically and glaring hither and yon as various sources of their displeasure and pride swooped back and forth into the low hung rain clouds.

"I never understood why Sirius Black didn´t take up with the team for good!" Lily heard Sharon yell to another girl.

"THE FIRST GOAL-" Moondoggie´s voice faded in and out but then there was rumblings from the opposing houses, "POTTER SCORES! POTTER SCORES! TWICE-"

"He´s a very odd person in my opinion," the girl was replying to Sharon, cupping her mouth so that her yells wouldn´t float down to the subject of the conversation, who was standing three rows directly below. "He doesn´t play Quidditch! He doesn´t have a girlfriend to speak of, nor has he ev-"

"OH! THAT´S A FOUL ON GRYFFINDOR´S SIDE!" Very loud boos came from the Hufflepuff stands, complimented by wild, victorious laughter of the Slytherin´s end of the pitch.

Lily could just barely make out a tartan clad figure hanging over the edge of the staff box, clutching a long pointed hat and yelling down at a few of the red robed players.

She wished she hadn´t missed the foul.

"Well, didn´t he go with Tuwanda Georgemichael?" Sharon answered.

"No, that´s just made up!" the girl yelled back, shocked that Sharon had resorted to such base gossip and rumor.

Lily snickered happily, looking at the back of Sirius´ shaggy black head. He seemed to not notice the wind and rain at all. He suddenly clapped the side of the stands below him and howled very loudly about something on the pitch and the other boys in the front row followed suit immediately.

"GRYFF-" the announcer was breaking up as there was another clap of thunder, "SCORE!"

Lily strained to hear, she could see their players swooping in victory.

"-AHEAD BY--- GRYFFINDOR!"

She couldn´t see the scoreboard, she couldn´t see the match, she had been forced to give up the umbrella charm ages ago as it took a lot of attention and energy to keep up with it for very long. She crossed her arms and frowned after the vague figures of the players in the sky.

"No, no, no... I heard that he did date Tuwanda Geo-" Sharon carried on.

"THAT´S MADE UP I SAY!" The girl cried.

"No it´s not!"

"Yes it is," Lily butted in with a faint smile.

"OH?" Sharon said looking at Lily doubtfully.

"And how do you know that?" The other girl leaned over and said nastily as if she had been arguing in favor that the rumor was true and not the other way around.

"Well," Lily bellowed over the wind. "For one thing there is no such student as Tuwanda Georgemichael, and second because I made it up." She had been helped by Ada Mac Fusty, back in their first year. Gossip was easy to get going when it was about good looking people.

"Oh!" Both girls replied and that was the end of the debate once and for all, though Sirius was often asked after Tuwanda for the rest of his days at Hogwarts until finally he was forced to fabricate a story in which she had set sail for Holland and died in a tragic sea voyage and that if he heard her name mentioned one more time he would die of the grief.

Lily began to see a spot of peaceful blue on the horizon in the south east. "The storm is beginning to break!" she called and pointed upwards.

"JONES CATCHES THE SNITCH! THAT´S THE END OF THE MATCH! GRYFFINDOR WINS! GRYFFINDOR WINS! GRYFFINDOR WINS!"

The wall of Gryffindor boys broke into a melee that ended up on the pitch and amongst the players.

Lily considered her surroundings and then walked back to the castle by herself, ringing the water out of her shoulder-length hair.

"Hey!" Remus Lupin peered over the top of a chintz arm chair placed before a roaring fire of the Gryffindor common room. Roaring fires were quite easy to make in emergency storms when you had magical powers.

"Hullo," Lily said back politely. "You didn´t go to the match?"

"Nah, I´m still feeling under the weather. We won?" The question hardly had a question mark at the end.

"Yeah."

"That´s good!" He looked a bit wistful. Remus was either sick or attended a family illness every time there was some exciting event. He missed at least half of all the fun things that happened in the school year.

Lily had summed up the situation a while back. Remus was a werewolf. Any time she felt doubt about the matter her eyes wandered over a few silver-white scars that peeped out of shirt sleeves and neck holes.

"You´re feeling better?" she asked.

"Huh?" he looked away from the window facing the pitch and smiled.

"Do I look a mess?" she asked, spreading her arms out.

"Uh," he responded, looking profoundly confused. "Er... Yes- I mean, no!" he looked up at her in horror, "What´s the right answer?!"

"Whatever the truth is," she replied.

"Um..."

The portrait flew open and in poured hundreds of people, being noisy and smug.

"Oh good!!!" Remus cried and ran to the safety of his mates.

Debra Skitter detangled herself from the crowd first and found Lily. She tripped over a crawling Peter Pettigrew and shook her fist after him. "Damn it!" she bellowed. "The rain stopped as soon as I stepped foot in the castle!" She flung down a torn remnant of the drenched banner.

"Bad luck, mate," Lily said.

"Know what I just heard?" Debra suddenly brightened and whispered at her. Lily took in the other girl´s soaked dark brown hair, pale freckled face and thin arms and legs flailed out all over the place. Her cloak was filthy. When Debra saw her own reflection in the mirror upstairs she would probably be horrified.

By the time Lily opened her mouth to respond they were joined by a couple of the Quidditch team, much to the girl´s surprise. The players were a hot commodity, especially just after a match. Alia Bashir, a Beater for the team, was at that moment being hoarded by dozens of Gryffindors at a table on the other side of the room, along with a few other players, praising their skill and speed, begging them for first hand details, or their opinions on various things that probably were not important.

Lily watched Potter and Robert Jones, the new Seeker, stand a few feet by her sofa out of the corner of her eye.

"Good game," Debra offered to them.

"Thanks," Jones grunted.

There was a long silence that everyone but Lily found uncomfortable. Lily liked Potter best silent, so she cherished these moments.

"That was brilliant!" Debra said. "Your catch... You caught the snitch right under whats-his-face´s nose!"

"Whats-her-face," Potter said.

"Huh?" came Debra with a look of confusion.

"Whats-her-face: Angela Usher."

Jones scowled instantly at the mention of the Hufflepuff´s Seeker´s name. "I despise that evil hag!" he hissed quietly to Potter.

Lily was delighted.

"Oh, me too!" Debra agreed earnestly. "She´s always got that nasty smile on, it worries me every time I happen to glance over at the Hufflepuffs. You´d think the Sorting Hat would have had the common decency to throw her in with the rest of her kind!"

Lily was left to assume Debra meant the Slytherins. Lily believed that Angela Usher was a Voldemort-supporter. Mainly because Usher always said so and glared at muggleborns and laughed whenever something bad happened to a non-pure blood.

"Oh, but don´t you think it´s more interesting this way?" Potter suggested with a smirk. "The fight would be hardly worth anything if the enemy was neatly categorized."

Jones thought this was amusing and nodded.

Lily wondered why they were standing over here. Was it the warmth of the fire? Well, if so, wouldn´t they be much better off standing closer to it rather than to her chesterfield sofa, which gave off no heat whatsoever? Not that she was complaining, she enjoyed turning her head and smiling at the annoyed glances the other Gryffindors were shooting at her and Debra for hogging two whole players. The sofa and arm chairs made a nice little cove that would only admit a few people, so the envious couldn´t barge in on them.

"How perfectly ridiculous," Lily sighed to herself. It was this sort of thing that kept her going sometimes, especially during fifth year´s strenuous exam studies.

"What?" Potter asked, examining Lily from where he stood. He looked like he had been hastily dried off, he was still wearing the drier parts of his uniform. Why was he standing by this random sofa when he could be basking in the glow of his fans or at least in a hot shower?

At the thought of a hot shower, Lily´s thoughts inevitably turned to the luscious prefect´s bathroom. She wanted to dive into green bubbles. She wanted to say dirty things to the portrait of the mermaids and make them sad. She wanted to do this now, but the bathroom would be crowded for at least a couple more hours...

"-you didn´t get drenched," Potter was saying and Lily glanced up and saw that he had been saying some sort of thing or other to her.

"Oh, sorry, what?"

"Um," he began. "Nothing." He crossed his arms and the fact that he must be uncomfortable in his damp clothing and wet mess of hair was undeniable.

Debra had somehow convinced Robert Jones to sit next to her and they were in some conversation about nifflers, which is what the fourth years like Robert were studying in Care of Magical Creatures.

Lily noticed that there was some sort of blue spot on Potter´s head. "Did you get biffed on the head right there?" she pointed at the bruise.

He felt the side of his face self-consciously and then nodded. "I forgot about that... Yeah, now it hurts again."

"Hmm..." Lily said, not sure if he was unhappy with her now.

"That fabulous lout Hector Gala slammed his bat into it," he said fondly, rubbing the side of his head.

This got her attention. "Really? Wow, that´s not the truth! Why did he do that?"

"Probably because I forced his girlfriend to fly into a goal post," Potter replied with relish.

"Why did you do that?"Lily asked with curiosity.

"Because she´s one of their Chasers," he answered, still smiling at the thought of it. "She said words to me after that, that I will always remember and cherish to my dying days..." he sighed.

"What sort of words were they?" Lily asked. She liked rude language.

"Oh, nothing I could repeat to you," he said quickly. He even looked slightly embarrassed.

"I hope you´re joking," she muttered impatiently. It was like he wanted to make this interaction last longer than it needed to be. Her mind began to wander to more important matters like food and green bubbles and offended mermaids.

"I don´t want to corrupt your innocent mind, Evans," he said with a paternal smile.

"That´s a load of rubbish... Especially from you. You were pale as a ghost the rest of the day after that tentacula ate the mandrake in Herbology last year!" Lily declared.

"Well, it was very disturbing."

"Oh please," Lily moaned as she pushed herself off the sofa. "Out of my way Potter, I need to go ralph my lunch now."