When there is something to do, time flies by – a proverb. For the first few days, I settled into the castle, putting Hermione on my tail. The girl initially showed resistance but gave up on the argument that it is necessary to know precisely the place where you plan to live for another seven years. Therefore, she fought with her desire to sit in the library. We walked around the castle most of our free time. Drawing up an approximate plan in our head without considering various secret corridors and other things – we did not know them.

Percy Weasley quite often left the first years on their own, rather than escorting them to the offices, as he should. Therefore, the guys were often late for the first classes, but we were not because we already knew where to go. ​​

The classes themselves were nothing special. McGonagall was strict and immediately proved herself to be the guardian of rules and discipline. She gave a lot of theory and magic formulas for memorizing and only then moved on to practice. For the almost complete transformation of a match into a needle in the first lesson, Hermione received points because, although imperfect, she is the first to achieve a result. After a couple of minutes, I performed a complete transformation, using willpower and detailing the visual transformation process, but I got half the score.

The charms lesson with Professor Flitwick was interesting. The professor himself, a short man in a black tailcoat and green robe turned out to be quite cheerful and optimistic, often brightening up a boring theory with stories from life. It does not matter – fictional or not. In the classroom, we learned different movements, their components, wrote down the magic theory, which never revealed its essence or work mechanism. But we recorded and taught.

During Potions making, Professor Snape was serious and formidable, bombarded Potter with questions, did not talk about safety. Preparing ingredients and brewing a potion was more like preparing food, but there were some nuances. Suppose you carefully monitor the cauldron’s situation and the reaction to stirring. In that case, we can conclude that everything is individual for each wizard. If Hermione needs to stir it two times clockwise to bring the potion to a specific state, then for me – a little less, a tenth turn. It is interesting. And yes, Neville blew up the cauldron, but there were no casualties besides him. The professor sent the whimpering guy to the hospital wing and took points from Potter. Why? Because he could. I understand that. Fuck them and the intrigue around the guy – I need to learn.

And I studied. Herbology is a magic garden with all that it implies. In addition to gardening, this lesson can help you gain knowledge about specific properties of plants that are not described in books on potions in the section on compatibility and properties of ingredients.

Astronomy is astronomy. Everything is in the title of the lesson. Celestial bodies and their movements in the sky are studied.

The History of magic is the monotonous muttering of the ghost of Professor Beans. Everything he tells is literally written in the textbook, and a constant topic of lectures is the goblin uprisings.

A subject like Defense Against the Dark Arts was no less farce than History. Especially when you consider Quirrell – a stutter, always stinking of garlic and a slight cadaveric smell that for some reason no one can smell. He, like Beans, decided that quoting the textbook was a great idea! Here I disagree, but what can I do?

Even the first lesson of flying on brooms did not interest me, mainly because we didn’t have a chance to fly – Neville still fell off his broomstick. Malfoy provoked Potter, and the latter eventually became a seeker on the house Quidditch team. But this is a big secret that, perhaps, everyone knows about.

Hermione and I don’t get involved in anything at all. At first, the girl was shocked that no one wants to study. Everyone is just having fun and looking for adventure and trouble. I, if you dig a little deeper, by and large, do not care. Still, her irrepressible energy, aimed at bringing order to the house’s chaos, causes an adverse reaction. So I decided to talk to her about this.

We sat in the far corner of the library, finishing our Transfiguration homework.

“Listen, Hermione…”

“Yes?” the girl put the last point in the parchment and set the writing materials aside, looked at me.

“Do you have to always correct and help everyone in everything when they don’t ask?”

“Of course! After all, if the guys are doing something wrong, you definitely need to tell and show how it should be” she nodded significantly.

“Don’t you notice that nobody likes it?”

The girl frowned at me defiantly.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t be offended, but you are considered an incredible nerd and boring.”

“Really?”

And where does she get so much confidence in my words?

“Yeah. If somebody asked for help, then it’s okay. Otherwise, you only put yourself in a bad light.”

“But the house is losing points, and this is unacceptable!” Hermione spoke softly but with such emotion as if she was about to scream. I, as always in such cases, involuntarily smiled.

“And why do we need these points, competitions, cups, and so on? It won’t even be noted in the personal file, I found out. This is senseless competition and enmity of houses out of the blue. And do not be eager to answer that way at every lesson. Well, I mean, just raise your hand calmly if you want to. Half of the teachers don’t ask you because they already understood that Granger knows everything. But they also need to work with other guys to see how they can formulate their thoughts. Can I have your essay?”

The girl began to think over my words and pushed the essay in my direction, and I plunged into reading this opus, which is at least three times more than mine. A bunch of quotes and just a couple of lines of her own conclusions. It’s sad. I returned the parchment to Hermione.

“Hermione… Tell me why you again quoted everything from the textbooks and that couple of books we took the other day?”

“But there is so much you can write…”

“And it doesn’t make sense at all. Teachers hardly want to see clippings from books because understanding the subject is much more critical. We’ve already talked about this.”

From that day on, we started studying thoroughly. Hermione struggled to formulate her own thoughts and conclusions on paper. I severely rejected her quotes. The girl sulked, puffed, but regularly overcame life’s difficulties. Having thought about it, I came up with an exercise for her. Describe your thoughts about a paragraph of text without quoting or using terminology. Use only the information in front of her, only simple everyday words. But I, to some extent, got it from her. It turned into a kind of organizer that always reminded me of the most different tasks we face for the day. What cannot be taken away from her is her incredible ability to rationalize available time. At the same time, she is quite capable of taking into account the interests and needs of another person. But idleness is not for her. And not for me. Perhaps that is why there was no conflict of interest?