Patrick Stump and the Flying Car Brigade

Chapter 38

Chapter 38

Over the last several weeks, the Quibbler and the Daily Prophet had been writing a number of nasty articles about each other, with the Prophet criticising emo and the Quibbler defending it. As the articles became more and more vicious, the resistance towards the Daily Prophet grew. Professor McGonagall was still a little bit confused as to why nearly every student at Hogwarts had cancelled their Daily Prophet subscription, but it was for a good cause.

When I got that message from Gerard, I knew that the day of the protest against the Daily Prophet had come. I threw on a black dragon hide jacket, adjusted my fedora, and left the common room to find my fellow emos.

Miss Jackson and Teddy were in the common room with me, so I simply took them with me when I left. Joe was rather easy to find as well. He was in the library rereading Quidditch Through The Ages. "Joe!" I exclaimed. "Gerard said that it's time to protest at the Daily Prophet offices! We're going to take the world back from the heart-attacked!"

"We have to go soon then," Joe said. "I think Pete, Tyler, and Josh are in the Gryffindor Common Room. You can go find Mikey and Andy."

Mikey was studying in the Great Hall, but I couldn't find Andy, so I told Dallon to look in the Ravenclaw Common Room. He returned a few minutes later with Andy, and we all went out to the lake to find Gerard.

"Are you ready to go?" he asked us as we approached him. Frank and Ray were waiting by the lake as well.

"We're ready," Pete said. "Patrick, you should get some eyeliner. This ain't a scene, it's a goddamn arms race!"

"It's not my style," I said.

"I think enough of us have eyeliner that we're okay," Gerard said, fixing his own makeup at that very moment. "Let's take the Floo Network. Trying to use Side-Along Apparition with all of these people would take too long."

"The Floo Network never understands me!" I argued, but everyone else thought that it was a good idea, so we went into the village to find a fireplace that we could use.

After searching for about ten minutes, we agreed to use the fireplace in my house. I knocked on the door, and explained the situation to my mum, and thankfully, she let us use the fireplace and her Floo Powder.

Everyone else went before I did, and to my knowledge, all of them made it to Diagon Alley on the first try. However, despite my best efforts, I ended up in St. Mungo's, Professor Howell's office, Battery City, Castelobruxo, Bianca Jagger's new yacht, and what seemed like all the gin joints in all the world before finally making it to Diagon Alley. Needless to say, I was a little bit late.

By the time I got there, Andy was in Flourish and Blotts reading a copy of the Quibbler. "Look at this, Patrick," he said. "There's a whole article about the best emo bands in Britain, and we're in it!"

"That's so cool," I said.

"The Daily Prophet will hate us now, but it's all worth it," Andy said. He set the magazine down and smiled. "Come on. Let's go pester those imbeciles."

I followed Andy into Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, where the rest of the emos were goofing around. "Patrick's here," he said.

"Finally!" Pete exclaimed.

"The main Daily Prophet office is over on the South Side," Ray said. "It's next to Ollivander's."

"Let's do this!" Frank screamed, and we all ran to the Daily Prophet office. Once we got there, Frank gave each of us a huge piece of parchment so we could make signs. I took out a quill and wrote "SAVE ROCK AND ROLL FROM THE PROPHET!" Everyone else wrote similar slogans on their signs and as Gerard held up his sign, all of the rest of us followed. We screamed and sang it for the ones who would hate our guts, and eventually a bespectacled reporter with tightly curled blonde hair, a notebook, and an acid green quill came out to see us. I couldn't quite remember her name, but I thought that I recognised her face. "What do you want?" she said, looking over our extraordinarily emo group.

"Not Rita Skeeter again," Gerard said under his breath. "We'd love it if you'd stop writing those false and terrible articles about our band. You clearly don't know anything about emo anyways."

"We'd love it if you and your little friends would leave," Rita said, her quill writing notes in her notebook as she spoke. "Barnabas Cuffe is going to be furious when he sees this."

"Oh no, we won't go!" Pete screamed. "'Cause we don't know when to quit, oh oh!" The rest of us repeated after him, and it became a sort of chant while we continued to stand in front of the Daily Prophet office. The woman went back into the building, but the crowd was growing.

"Come on, Hermione!" I heard someone say. I turned around and saw Ron from Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes standing right next to me, along with his wife, the Deputy Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement at the Ministry, Hermione Granger-Weasley. "These boys need some help."

"I agree, but we can't get involved," Hermione replied. "Your sister works here!"

"Yes, but the Daily Prophet is writing these horrible articles about emos," Ron argued.

Hermione sighed. "I suppose we can help them. It's not as bad as getting expelled." The two of them joined in our chant, and our previously tiny group grew to fill up the whole street.

The protests continued well into the night, and while other people came and went, we stayed until the bitter end. Once the Daily Prophet closed, we all returned to the castle. Thankfully, I got to use Side-Along Apparition with Pete to avoid having to use the Floo Network again.

When we returned to the castle, I went to bed almost immediately. I was exhausted, and I could only hope that the Daily Prophet had listened to our complaints. That would make everything that we had done worth it.

The next day, the Daily Prophet wrote an article about the protest. It was all anyone could talk about that morning: after all, we were on the front page of wizarding Britain's largest newspaper. That was huge for a group of Hogwarts students. As expected, it wasn't exactly a positive review, but it didn't seem to matter. We were in love with our own sins.

All that week, we expected the Daily Prophet to follow their coverage of our protest up with another article attacking emo, but it never came. It seemed that we had actually made some meaningful change, and brought an end to the newspaper wars. Everything was back to the status quo, at least in the world of wizarding journalism, and that was how I liked it.