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HAVING WRITTEN OFF GILDEROY LOCKHART AS MORE OF A PREDICAMENT THAN ANYTHING WORTH HER TIME, Sawyer sits in the back of her Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom watching Quinn add cartoon monsters to the piece of scrap parchment they've been doodling on for a good portion of the past half an hour since class started. As Professor Lockhart went on his long spiels about the fancy places he'd visited and saved from imminent danger of darker powers and beasts lurking in periphery, the two girls passed the parchment between them, taking turns making additions—Sawyer would cobble together a childish drawing of something, and Quinn would pencil in a speech bubble and amusing dialogue—to pass the time. The moment Lockhart concluded the lecture, however, Sawyer knew Quidditch tryouts would be awaiting her. She was just running from the vice-like chokehold of one unbearable thing to another.
In the beginning, Lockhart had started them off with a short quiz, the questions of which were no short of self-absorbed, casually revolving around himself and his many published, best-sellers. Equal parts horrified and perplexed, the entire class of sixth year students—save for the girls who were still bedazzled by Lockhart's frivolous charm and winsome, toothpaste-commercial-worthy grin—had begun to stress out about the year's turnout of results, already drawing negative conclusions.
Somewhere in the middle rows, Oliver Wood sat with one of his Gryffindor friends, Ashton. Loudly and without ceremony, he'd already established Lockhart as useless, that the time was better allocated to researching new Quidditch tactics, or even better, playing Quidditch before the pitch got booked out and left in a state of unrest by the Slytherins. Like most student athletes—at least two-thirds of the class were on the Gryffindor or Hufflepuff Quidditch teams, both reserve and first string members—Sawyer had taken DADA because it was an easy, guaranteed pass, and the exams had minimal writing involved, which meant less revising, more intuition, and more time allowed for Quidditch practices. But the immediate consensus was this: Professor Lockhart was a dumbass who peacocked his accomplishments around rather than taught, and this class was nothing but a waste of time.
Not all that distressed about Lockhart's evident misgivings, Sawyer had taken to watching the other students sleep, scribble notes into their own parchment paper, fiddle with their quills, make valiant attempts to listen to Lockhart's fables, and pass notes folded into origami birds charmed to flutter over to the respective recipient's desk. Not surprisingly, they failed to hold her interest for long as her mind went oblivion, blanked in the drug-induced fog shrouding her brain. She still couldn't decide if she liked the feeling of not feeling every single noise in the world digging into her nerves and setting her skin ablaze with irritation, keep her pulled so taut she might snap at any given moment, or if it was just a foreign, palpable absence of the agitation she had to get used to.
Either way, she let her gaze drift past the backs of the other students' heads, past Professor Lockhart's tasteless slideshow of himself in different outfits, supposedly in different parts of the world, holding different invaluable artefacts and shaking hands with different important people projected on the screen at the front of the classroom, past the window where a blue strip of sky lay, a rare, already diminishing sight for this side of Scotland—the perfect weather a monotonous reminder of perfect Quidditch condition—and past the faint outline of the forbidden forest. Past everything.
