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ONE AND A HALF HOURS into Quidditch practice, Oliver kicked them off the pitch for a break.
Since it was a Saturday, breakfast would be served at a later time, so they still had room in their tight window of opportunity for a fifteen minute interlude before Oliver forced them onto the pitch again for another hour. One-by-one, students rose with the sun rays splaying over the lush hills surrounding campus. Sawyer could see clusters of them milling about the lake, skipping stones and rousing the birds nesting in the trees, indistinguishable in their homogenous Hogwarts uniforms.
Six forty-five in the morning and the sky was already bleeding light. The sun glowered at them from its shelter behind a tiny, pathetic excuse of a cloud. Basking in the rare warmth, Sawyer, Violet and Harry sat on the grass, stretching their legs and resting. Face flushed from practice, Violet had her knobby knees hugged to her chest as she watched the clouds float by in the sky. Harry mirrored her stance. Sawyer gazed at the silhouette of the Whomping Willow somewhere in the distance, legs splayed out before her as she braced her palms behind her, fingers digging into the grass.
Instead of going over more plans and tactics, Oliver had flown over on his broom to the stands to sit with Wyatt, leaving the two Hufflepuffs and the small Seeker to their own devices. Until then, Sawyer had almost forgotten her brother had come to watch. She wondered what could possibly have possessed him to be able to wake up this early and drag himself to a practice he wasn't even a part of. But then she remembered that Wyatt had always been a morning person just like her parents, and he was always the more active one out of the two of them.
"It's not true, is it?" A voice at her elbow spoke, tinged with curiosity.
Sawyer turned to face Harry, whose eyes seemed to bug out behind those round spectacles. "What is?"
"What they say about you," Harry explained, and then held out a hand to which he began to tick off the incidences and rumours on his fingers, "that you nearly shattered someone's skull in your first year. That you have uncontrollable anger issues. That you broke a teammate's arm because they body-checked you in practice. There are way more, but they start to sound a little ridiculous from there."
Sawyer gave it a moment's thought.
"The first one is true," she said, mildly aware of Violet's pressing stare, the widening of her doe eyes in abject horror. Sawyer decided to save recounting the gory details. They didn't need to hear the entire story. "It was one of you Gryffindors. But the annoying git deserved it, honestly. Second one is also true. I do have anger issues. Dumbledore says it's not an excuse for my behaviour, which is, like, fair, but I've given up trying to fix it. Third one is just a rumour, but I'll tell you something. I hit your team captain in the head with a bludger during his first game. Knocked him out cold. Did he ever tell you that story? Not yet? Shame. It was a glorious moment."
