Cherry Lips // s. black

-OCTOBER. 3.-

"Okay, let's get down to business."

"What is this business? You labelling my herbology diagram?" June asked, making a sandwich with enough peanut butter to feed an elephant.

Carmilla couldn't blame her, though. Lunch was a very nice meal. There was much more casual food and students could sit wherever they liked, not that Carmilla had anyone else to sit with. It was a bit like a giant picnic. It reminded her of the picnics Mistress Theeny took the girls on in the meadow with the lake and the daisy's just out of town. There were always a lot of dragonfly's. 

"Quidditch!"

"I thought the trials were like, ages away?" Carmilla asked Ace through a mouthful of dumplings she had grabbed from further down the table.

They had become her favourite food very quickly. Apart from raspberry tarts. And the bitter lemonade from the end of the Hufflepuff table that Ophelia and Heather brought over sometimes when they had new gossip.

"Actually, my fellow dumpling, they are on Friday." When Ace got no response from either girl, she huffed and repeated herself. "This Friday."

It was Tuesday. Carmilla choked on her dumpling. "Huh?"

"Exactly. Which means you aren't allowed anymore detentions. We have to practise." Ace said seriously. "I am making the team"

Carmilla could see the wideness of her eyes and the set of her mouth when she talked about Quidditch. It was like Flitwick with his students and Angela with boys and statistics and Hagrid with his pets and pumpkins and Sirius with the music he ranted at her about for forty minutes straight in detention. She had checked the clock. It was forty minutes.

June was side eyeing someone behind them.

"I can't make any promises" Carmilla mumbled into her bowl of soy sauce and floating vegetables. She didn't want to agree to anything along those lines, because if she met those Hufflepuff boys again, she knew it would be incredibly hard to restrain herself from punching their noses and breaking that guy's other wrist.

"Carmilla?"

She turned around, putting her dumplings down. Her mood brightened considerably once she realised her possible dumpling eating time was not going to be wasted on some loser.

"Charlie. Hey, how are you?" she asked him.

June and Ace hadn't seemed to be finished sending him not quite unfriendly but not quite friendly looks at the Slytherin boy, so Carmilla grabbed her bag of books from under her seat. "We've got Care of magical creatures together next, right?"

Charlie seemed thankful for the chance to escape the glares, so the two of them left the hall in search of the warm sunshine and easy double period ahead of them, thoughts of dumplings quickly forgotten.

"Have you had this class yet?" the brown-haired boy asked her.

"Nope, it's my first elective ever," Carmilla said. She'd given McGonagall her elective slip a few days ago after ticking off the interesting ones. Care of Magical Creatures, Divination, and Muggle Studies. The latter was mainly so she could learn how to act like a muggle. In the least creepy way possible.

"Well, you picked a good one. It's pretty easy, if animals like you. That's including the teacher."

"Professor Slug likes me, so I should be good." She chuckled quietly. Then she heard a strange whistling behind her, a bit like the sound of the tinfoil snitches she and Ace had practised with.