enigmatic || potter

1.02 | the friends

the friends //
September 1, 1993

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"Bloody hell, Alexa, close the damn book. You don't need to be learning fifth year spells!" Alexa Weasley's best friend, Seamus Finnegan exclaimed, exasperated. Alexa glared up at him through a curtain of long, dark hair as she slammed the book shut. "Honestly, you'd think she's studying for her OWLs over there!"

This squabble happened on every train ride to and from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The dispute always happened the same way: Seamus would get bored of Dean talking about football (soccer) or any other muggle thing and start complaining about Alexa's lack of sociability; Dean would then make a snarky comment about Alexa's reluctance to close her book, and then Alexa would finally take the bait and then be forced to make up some excuse as to why she's reading before the term has even started. Dean and Alexa would bicker back and forth for a while until Seamus intervenes. Then, the three Gryffindors would find a way to change the topic to something more neutral.

"Argh, finally! Good work, Seamus," Alexa's other best friend, Dean Thomas gave Seamus a high five. "She likes books more than she likes us!"

"Damn right I like books more than you, Dean. Anyway, I'm not learning fifth year spells, that's ridiculous," Alexa rolled her eyes at the boys. "Fred, George, and Lee are all paying me a galleon each to read it and then write out the spells for them... But I'm also reading them over so I can be prepared for when we learn them. We are third years after all."

"Well it's not like you're one of the top students of the year anyway," Dean said sarcastically.

"Well it's not like I-" Seamus covered Alexa's mouth with his hand before she could retort— she was going to proclaim that her hard work benefitted all of them, because her friends always asked her for help with their work.

"Don't you dare lick my hand," Seamus warned, knowing his best friend would do exactly that. "Anyway, tell us about your trip to Egypt! We saw you in the newspaper!"

The girl's face lit up at the mention of her summer holiday. "It was incredible over there! As you know, Dad won the Daily Prophet Draw and got seven hundred galleons. We visited Bill and we did a bunch of tourist stuff and looked in a bunch of creepy pyramids with dead bodies. I talked to loads of cute Egyptian boys and then when any of them asked for my telephone number, I made a silly excuse that I went to a private school in Scotland and that I'm completely cut off from the rest of the world," Alexa giggled at the memory.

"And I tried to spend a lot of time with Ginny because of... you know... last year. We tanned a bunch and swam a little and got killer sunburns... Oh, and we finally bought Ron a new wand. Anyway, how were your summers?" She said all of this very quickly.

"What, that's it?" Seamus asked. "You're not going to tell us anything else? What about the sites you saw?"

"You're a nerd, wasn't there a lot of nerdy stuff for you to do? Wasn't there a bookstore somewhere?" Dean snickered.

Alexa disregarded this comment and then groaned, as she was hoping she wouldn't have to explain further. "I was sick for a lot of the summer. Headache, dizziness, nausea- Mum said it was probably the food, but I know for a fact that Fred and George have been working on some sort of sweet that could make you ill. They were probably trying to slip one into Percy's food and it ended up in mine instead. When Mum finally allowed me to leave the hotel room, there was a week left in our trip. We visited loads of pyramids, but Ginny wasn't old enough to go into a few, so I waited with her... and I only went into one bookstore so bugger off, Dean."

"Sounds like you had quite the summer," Alexa's close friend and roommate Parvati Patil said as she opened the compartment door. Parvati's best friend Lavender Brown followed close behind.