Goodwill

The late autumn sun was giving it all. Dipping the grounds of Hogwarts into a soft glow unusually warm for the season, it was as if it were trying to leave people with the best possible impression before it would inevitably give way to the grey of winter.

Professor Grubbly-Plank took off her boiled wool cloak and tossed it over her shoulder. She relished her Saturday morning walks in this part of the forest, just far enough to be off limits for students but not so far into the woods that the density of the shrubbery, not to mention the some of the less convivial creatures that called it their home, would make walking a nuisance. Lights were dancing in the crowns of the trees, and here and there one could see rabbits chasing each other. A woodpecker was doing nest improvement.

The professor took a pipe out of the pockets of her jodhpurs. It would be her last walk here for a while. Hagrid was on his way back. Not that she wished he weren't - she knew full well that he had not been out on a pleasure cruise. Yet she would dearly miss Hogwarts. All the more so as "good morning, Professor Grubbly-Plank" had finally come to replace "where's Hagrid?" as the standard greeting formula.

One last pipe with the Unicorns, in all peace and quiet, then tactfully break the news of the imminent departure to the cat and start packing.

"Aaaaaaaargh!"

Professor Grubbly-Plank nearly dropped her tobacco satchel at the sound of a young voice carrying over from the clearing. What the hell..? She picked up speed and strode briskly along the narrow path, over to the place where she had built a paddock for her Unicorn mare and foal to shelter them from the hundredfold curiosity of her Hogwarts charges, especially those of the pubescent female variety with a deplorable preference for the higher octaves.

In vain, it appeared. Right next to the paddock, under the oak where she had intended to smoke her good-bye pipe, there were two students, rolling in the grass in what was quite obviously not a friendly embrace.

"What in Merlin's name is going on here?" she roared, gripping the nearest collar that presented itself. It belonged to a girl, one that was only too familiar to her. Dark brown curls, the shortest you could find in a Hogwarts girls' dorm, freckles, and fierce, brown eyes. A red and gold jumper over grass-stained khakis made her the Gryffindor-coloured mirror image of a young Hufflepuff she once knew.

"Explain." The vexation with what she saw made it hard to keep her hand steady and resist the urge to shake the answer out of the culprit. There was no need, anyway. Before the girl could say a word, something stirred on the ground. A light blond head, not at all its usual sleek self, rose from the moss.

"She started it!" The lanky boy coughed and spat out.

"I'll deal with you later. Miss Robertson?"

The girl turned her head, not quite as spitefully as it might have been intended, and bit her lip.

"Very well." Professor Grubbly-Plank let go of the girl's collar and turned to the boy by her feet. "You may go, Mr. Malfoy. If you hurry up, you'll be in time for Professor McGonagall's O.W.L. review session. Might do you good."

"How do you..." What had started as a question ended in a whimper as Draco Malfoy tried to stand up. "Ouch!"

"What?" Professor Grubbly-Plank barked.

"My ankle! The bloody tomboy broke my ankle! I want to be taken to the hospital wing."

"Might I suggest that calling other girls tomboys comes across ever so much more convincingly if you don't behave like a proper nancy yourself?" Professor Grubbly-Plank asked coldly. "Your ankle looks fine from up here. Now off to the review session, and no splitting to anyone or you'll be spreading Hippogriff manure with me tomorrow, for trespassing in the Forbidden Forest."

"But..."

"Off!"

Muttering under his breath, Draco limped away, dramatically pulling one leg behind him. It occurred to Professor Grubbly-Plank that the scene would have looked rather more effective if it had been the same leg he had held in pain just a minute before.

When he was out of sight, she sat down heavily under the giant oak and began filling her pipe. She did not speak, nor look at the girl who had knelt down quickly to pick up a thin, black book but otherwise remained quite motionless, her head still turned the other way.

"That your diary, Kate?"

No answer.

"Did he see it?"

No answer.

Professor Grubbly-Plank sighed, something she did not usually do in front of students. "Kate, I'm not sure if you understand the trouble you've got yourself into. You're in the Forbidden Forest, having just beaten the pulp out of a boy one year above you. Quite apart from the fact that you have no right to be here, you can't resolve a conflict by trying to break people's bones. It is not done among civilised humans." She extracted a pack of matches from the pocket of her shirt and took her time lighting the pipe. What to do?

"I should inform your head of house, but frankly, I'd much rather keep this between us. I only ask that you help me understand what made you lose your temper like that." She took a deep draw on her pipe. "Come and sit with me."

It took Kate a while to react. Then, slowly, she turned to face Professor Grubbly-Plank, took a few steps, and sat down. Just out of the professor's reach, just close enough not to be impolite, the small book still clutched between her hands.

Professor Grubbly-Plank was an animal person. She knew her creatures, how to get to the bottom of their behaviour through close observation and careful attention. Aggression was not always due to what some called dominance. In fact, it seldom was. Sometimes it was even the exact opposite. Draco was older and taller, and he had a strong and unchallenged standing. No creature in his, her or its right mind would take on an alpha like that from Kate's position, unless it was for blind, raging helplessness.

That book was a diary, no need to look inside. The diary of a fourteen-year-old with secrets so disconcerting that no mother, no aunt, no best friend could be trusted. Professor Grubbly-Plank remembered the little black books that young Wilhelmina had kept in the pockets of her own grass-stained khakis, and burned at regular intervals, some seventy years back, right here at Hogwarts. And much like Kate, she would not have answered, had someone put the same questions to her.

Little, black books to help through the sentiments budding in a chest that is no longer a child's and not yet a woman's. Little books with tales of first love, unhappy and unrequited, and so utterly impossible to cope with. Secret crushes on dormmates who would never return the affection. Or teachers. It was often teachers with those girls. Perhaps Madam Hooch, as the most obvious choice, touchy, sporty, outgoing, and seemingly oblivious of the crushes of dozens of girl students and probably a few teachers, too. Or graceful and mysterious Professor Sinistra, with her gentle curves accentuated by perfectly cut garments. Professor Grubbly-Plank blew out a small cloud of smoke, remembering Miss Lewisham, in her starched, high-cut robes, with a pince-nez that spent more time on the floor than on the nose of its owner and blond curls that were about the only pockets of resistance her austerity ever encountered. Miss Lewisham, sweet in her very own way, died a spinster well before her time. She never knew of the sleepless nights a scared and confused fourth-year Hufflepuff had had on her behalf.

"Did he read it?"

There was a nod.

Bastard, Professor Grubbly-Plank thought. Would that Hufflepuff have resisted the urge to land her fist in the boy's face? Would she have had any capacities for self-restraint to spare, with so much of it already being consumed keeping up appearances every day?

The professor turned to watch the paddock, where the mare and foal had begun to play.

"So now Slytherin House knows your innermost feelings. That's humiliating. But if you think about it, isn't that better than carrying around the weight of a secret with you, and letting it ruin all those years you spend here?"

Kate gave a snort and ripped out a blade of grass.

"I'm right if I think I have a general idea what it might be, aren't I?"

Pieces of the blade of grass fell to the ground. No answer was an answer, too.

"We always think that we're the first to experience what it's like to feel something we don't understand and both do and don't want to happen to us. Truth is, Kate, we aren't. There have always been others before us. And there are always people who like you for who you are, not who you think you should seem. We only never learn that if we always keep our secrets."

Professor Grubbly-Plank got up.

"Come. I'll see you out of the Forest."

Side by side, they left the clearing and walked back to the grounds, past the rabbits, past the busy woodpecker, up to the belt of elm trees that marked the end of the forest.

Just before they left the underwood, Professor Grubbly-Plank stopped.

"Think he's going to have a black eye?"

Kate turned to her. Slowly, the surprise in her face gave way to a mischievous dimple, then another one.

"Bad girl."

If anyone had asked, Professor Grubbly-Plank would have stated most forcefully that the muscles around her left eye had twitched entirely out of their own accord.

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