Harry Potter's Coolest Aunt

First week of hogwarts

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"There, look."

 "Where?"

"Next to the tall kid with the red hair." 

"Wearing the glasses?" 

"Did you see his face?" 

"Did you see his scar?" Whispers followed Harry from the moment he left his dormitory the next day. People lining up outside classrooms stood on tiptoes to get a look at him or doubled back to pass him in the corridors again, staring. Harry wished they wouldn't, because he was trying to concentrate on finding his way to classes. 

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then some doors wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also tough to remember where anything was because it all seemed to move around a lot. The people in the portraits kept visiting each other, and Harry was sure the coats of armour could walk. The ghosts didn't help, either. It was always a nasty shock when one of them glided suddenly through a door you were trying to open. Fat Friar was always happy to point new Hufflepuff in the right direction, but Peeves the Poltergeist was worth two locked doors and a trick staircase if you met him when you were late for class. He would drop wastepaper baskets on your head, pull rugs from under your feet, pelt you with bits of chalk, or sneak up behind you, invisible, grab your nose, and screech, "GOT YOUR CONK!". He tried to prank percy which backfired and made him scared of the woman.

 Even worse than Peeves, if that was possible, was the caretaker, Argus Filch. Harry and Ron managed to get on the wrong side of him on their very first morning. Filch found them trying to force their way through a door that unluckily turned out to be the entrance to the out-of-bounds corridor on the third floor. He wouldn't believe they were lost, was sure they were trying to break into it on purpose, and was threatening to lock them in the dungeons when they were rescued by his mom, who was passing by to head to DADA.

Filch owned a cat called Mrs Norris, a scrawny, dust-coloured creature with bulging, lamp-like eyes just like Filch's. She patrolled the corridors alone. Break a rule in front of her, put just one toe out of line, and she'd whisk off for Filch, who'd appear, wheezing, two seconds later. Filch knew the secret passageways of the school better than anyone (except perhaps the Weasley twins) and could pop up as suddenly as any of the ghosts. The students all hated him and Mrs. Norris although she feared his mom and ran off when she was near for some reason.

And then, once you had managed to find them, there were the classes themselves. There was a lot more to magic, as Harry quickly found out, than waving your wand and saying a few funny words. They had to study the night skies through their telescopes every Wednesday at midnight and learn the names of different stars and the movements of the planets. Three times a week they went out to the greenhouses behind the castle to study Herbology, handled by Professor Sprout his house head, where they learned how to take care of all the strange plants and fungi, and found out what they were used for. 

Easily the most boring class was History of Magic, the only one taught by a ghost. Professor Binns had been very old indeed when he had fallen asleep in front of the staff room fire and got up the next morning to teach, leaving his body behind him. Binns droned on and on while they scribbled down names and dates, and got Emetic the Evil and Uric the Oddball mixed up, Percy wondered why he was not yet replaced when Harry told her about the ghost. 

Professor Flitwick, the Charms teacher, was a tiny little wizard who had to stand on a pile of books to see over his desk. At the start of their first class, he took the roll call, and when he reached Harry's name he gave an excited squeak and toppled out of sight. Professor McGonagall was again different. Harry had been quite right to think she wasn't a teacher to cross. Strict and clever, she gave them a talking-to the moment they sat down in her first class. "Transfiguration is some of the most complex and dangerous magic you will learn at Hogwarts," she said. "Anyone messing around in my class will leave and not come back. You have been warned." Then she changed her desk into a pig and back again. They were all very impressed and couldn't wait to get started, but soon realized they weren't going to be changing the furniture into animals for a long time. After taking a lot of complicated notes, they were each given a match and started trying to turn it into a needle. By the end of the lesson, only Hermione Granger and Harry Potter had made any difference to their match; Professor McGonagall showed the class how it had gone all silver and pointy, in Harry's case it was blue and decorated with shells, and gave them a rare smile.