An Unexpected Gift

Dumbledore holds a party at the beginning of the year for all the sixth– and seventh–year students. Draco Malfoy is in his seventh year and Ginny Weasley is in her sixth. There is red currant rum and mulled mead at the party, so both get a little tipsy. When the band strikes up a slow song, Ginny leaves her boyfriend, Dean Thomas, and heads (a little unsteadily) to the refreshments table to get more to drink. She meets Draco and, while neither knows who the other is, the take a walk. Ending up in one of the greenhouses brings more than either would have expected.

When Draco wakes up in the greenhouses after his unknowing night of fun with Ginny, he realizes who he was with and what happened and shoots off to the castle before she can awaken. Ginny wakes up alone, doesn’t realize anything was has happened, and heads off to the castle as well. Ron, Harry, and Hermione grow worried about her after some strange behavior on her part and, together, Hermione and Ginny uncover something about herself that will drastically change her life forever.

After Ron’s tirade and stomping off, Ginny and Hermione walk the corridors together on their way to Gryffindor Tower. A mid-corridor talk reveals to Ron some details about the situation that Ginny would rather him not have known, causing him to blow up at her again. A common room talk with Hermione afterwards, which the two had thought was private, turns out not to be, and Ginny has to figure out how to explain the horrible situation she is in to her boyfriend of over a year, Dean Thomas.

At five months pregnant, Ginny is now showing. Her morning sickness has stopped, but the relentless teasing from her fellow schoolmates had not. She has few supportive friends, and one very unsupportive teacher (guess who). Dean shows a slight sign of not wanting to continue the relationship, which worries Ginny, but she doesn’t think too much into it.

The teasing gets to be too much for Dean, as he catches his best friends throwing horrible insults at his girlfriend, unknowing to his eavesdropping. The relationship ends in a tirade of embarrassment for Ginny and with two months of detention from McGonagall for Dean. Ginny gets verbally tortured even more when everyone else finds out that Dean is not the father of her child, and Ginny gets a verbal slap in the face by Pansy in the form of something her brother has said about her. Malfoy gets verbally attacked as well for not stepping “up to bat,” as the saying goes, when the opportunity arises. This young Malfoy is changing, and no one – not even himself – knows why.

A week after the breakup, Ginny finds out just how despicable Dean Thomas really is. She goes into labor at eight-and-a-half months, the moment unfortunately coming right in the middle of a Potions class, and leads to her having to be carried on a stretcher to the hospital wing by Snape. Ron expresses his feelings that he has no faith in his sister at all to succeed now that she has “ruined her life,” as he says. Ginny has the baby, but there is something about him that Madam Pomfrey and Hermione do not want to tell her.

Ginny learns the identity of her child’s father, and everything about the night of the party comes rushing back to her – she remembers everything. When Ron finds out, he blows up and goes to look for Malfoy, who he plans to kill. Dumbledore sends Hermione after him, and Dumbledore uses the fireplace in Madam Pomfrey’s office to send a message to a certain Potions master (note: message doesn’t come until next chapter).

Snape is instructed by Dumbledore to get Malfoy and come to the hospital wing, but doesn’t tell Snape why. We are brought back to earlier in the day, and find out how Draco finds out about Ginny going into labor, which results to him retreating to the Slytherin common room to pace back and forth. He is retrieved by Snape, and the two head down to the hospital wing.