"Granger, I've got a bone to pick with you."
A cold, unwelcome voice interrupted Hermione while she was in the middle of typing in a citation link that was three lines long. She pointedly refused to turn until she finished typing in the string of numbers and hit enter.
A paywall filled the screen.
She sighed and with an inward curse of exasperation, shifted in her chair to deal with the unwelcome distraction on her hands.
Draco Malfoy was standing behind her, scowling.
"What do you want, Malfoy?"
He raised his right hand to show a thick stack of papers gripped in his hand. "The study guide you wrote. The answer to twenty is wrong."
Hermione's shoulders stiffened, but she kept her expression impassive as she tried to remember what question twenty even was.
Professor Snape had emailed the class a study guide with well-over three hundred broadly-phrased questions that "might" appear on the final exam. Hermione had spent a night filling out the study guide questions with exhaustively detailed answers, quotes, and references. She'd emailed a copy to the private study group she participated in, hoping to encourage the other members to share theirs as well so everyone could compare notes and develop even more comprehensive answers.
Instead, no one else in the study group bothered to write any answers for the study guide at all; and, to add insult to injury, someone whom Hermione intended to murder once she discovered their identity, had forwarded it to the entire class. Everywhere she went, she'd hear her fellow freshman classmates quizzing each other and reciting her answers verbatim.
She stared up at Draco Malfoy, who was notably not a member of said study group, standing with her painstakingly compiled study-guide gripped in his unworthy hands.
"What's wrong with the answer?" she asked.
Malfoy glanced derisively down at the papers in his hand and turned his wrist to show her an extensively annotated and highlighted copy of her answer. There was a large section that had been slashed through with a red pen. "This whole section here, it completely leaves out Bourne's commentary. Are you trying to sabotage the entire class by sending everyone shit answers?"
Hermione's chest tightened and heat rose on her cheeks.
Malfoy stepped closer, and he leaned over her, smirking.
"Is that your plan then?" He quirked a pale eyebrow. "Think you'll be the one to get Snape's coveted A+ on your paper if you get the rest of the class to fail the final?"
Hermione's hand itched to slap him across the face or possibly deck him right there in the library.
Snape's required freshman class was renown at their school for its tendency to destroy GPA. Everything hung on the final exam and paper. There were more than a few stories of students losing their merit scholarships and having to leave the school because of it. Snape never gave more than one perfect grade on final papers per year, and rumor had that it had been more than four years since anyone had achieved it.
Malfoy had announced during orientation week that he was going to be the one to earn it and it seemed that everyone believed he would.
Draco Malfoy was one of those people that everyone seemed to know about. It was impossible to go anywhere without hearing stories about him. According to the aggressive rumor-mill at the school, he'd gotten a perfect SAT score and been inundated with acceptance letters and full-ride scholarships from prestigious universities across the country, but had decided to attend a "less known" school because his mother was close friends with the president and agreed with school's academic philosophy.
