Cover Girl

Hours later, Hermione was standing in line in the foyer outside the Great Hall waiting for her turn to be fitted by Madam Malkin. She had had her pores steamed, her face exfoliated and her eyebrows plucked. Her entire face was quite pink and very tender and she was exhausted.

"Don't touch it!" Ginny said as she smacked Hermione's hand away from her face for the third time in 10 minutes.

"But it hurts," Hermione said, a little whiny. "When does that go away?"

"I told you," Ginny explained. "If you had been a little more cooperative and held still I would have had time to apply the cool towels. As it is," Ginny looked at her watch, "we're lucky she's running over."

At that moment, a small, harried-looking man with thick glasses and a clipboard opened the door. "Weasley, Ginny!" he called.

"My turn!" Ginny said happily and hurried forward, disappearing into the room.

Hermione stood nervously against the wall, grateful that she could lean against it. Sooner than she expected, the door opened again and the man reappeared. "Granger, Hermione!"

"Oh!" Hermione said in shock and her mind went immediately numb. Luckily the girl behind her gave her a shove and she felt herself moving towards the small man. He shuffled her into the room and onto a round platform. Madam Malkin appeared quickly beside her and began circling her with a tape measure, lifting her arms occasionally and calling out numbers to the man.

When the final measurement had been made, the man pulled Hermione off the pedestal and shoved a pile of small items into her arms. "Now be sure to send me your fabric and shade choices before next Saturday so I can get it to you by Christmas Eve," Madam Malkin called to her.

Hermione nodded, her arms full of swatches of material and booklets sprouting every imaginable color. She stumbled back into the foyer and looked around desperately for Ginny. She found her talking excitedly to a group of fellow third years. Hermione sidled up to her and whispered, "I'm going upstairs, Ginny. I'll see you later."

Ginny reached out and grabbed Hermione's arm, causing her to let out a small squeak and drop all of her items. "No you aren't," she said forcefully. She turned back to her other friends and said, "I'll see you later." Bending down to pick up the dropped booklets, Ginny looked up at Hermione and asked, "Don't you still want to do this?"

Hermione thought of all the pain she had felt in the last several hours, looked at the seemingly endless number of colors to choose from and stopped on Ginny's eager face.

"I honestly don't know," she said in a small voice. Tears began to well up in her eyes again.

Sensing her friend was about to have another breakdown, Ginny steered Hermione out the front doors and onto the vast lawn surrounding the castle. When she got to the edge of the lake, she conjured a bench and pulled Hermione down next to her. She let her sniffling calm down before saying, "Come on, Hermione. Is it really that hard?"

"I don't know!" Hermione said hysterically. "I know we only have two weeks to do this properly, but I've still got a whole week left of classes and when I look at all of these fabrics and colors and hairstyles I can't breathe or think... my mind goes blank. It's worse than that boggart last year!"

At this Ginny burst out laughing. This only seemed to upset Hermione even more. Her face flushed a deeper shade of pink and she said wildly, "It's not funny! I can't even let myself think about Viktor! What if he wants to hold my hand? What if he tries to kiss me? I don't know how to dance! What if I throw up on him?"

Ginny was quiet for a few minutes, thinking hard. I've got to get her to relax somehow, she told herself. Suddenly an idea came to her. "Hermione," she said, "how many times have you read 'Hogwarts, a History'?"

This seemed to focus her immediately. "Straight through?" Hermione asked. "Only about four times, I think, though if you count re-readings of specific sections, it could be dozens...."

"And why would you do that?" Ginny interrupted.

"Are you kidding?" Hermione actually laughed. "It's fascinating! You probably couldn't understand because you grew up around it, but when I found out I was a witch, literally a whole new world was opened to me! I had years to catch up on and so many things to learn! I read everything I could and studied it like mad so that I could really feel like I understood what was going on around--" Abruptly she stopped what she was saying and her eyes glazed over as she stared unseeingly out across the lake. Slowly her eyes came back into focus and she said with a determined look on her face, "You know Ginny, you're a lot smarter than I gave you credit for. Where are those magazines you had earlier?"

"That's my girl," Ginny said happily. "I knew you'd come around. Now let's go upstairs and really get to work!"