Cast yourself (you are the spell)

Chapter 28

Hope walks into her dorm room beyond tired, the rain still seeping into her clothes despite the several drying charms she had casted.

She quickly sees that all her dormmates are awake. In fact, Maya runs up to her the second she flings the door open.

Hope's jaw goes slack when she sees her.

Her skin's rough green like the skin of a snake. Hope raises her eyebrows, trying desperately not to laugh. A small smirk slithers onto her face.

"You have scales," she observes.

"So nice of you to notice!" Maya spits out, practically foaming at the mouth. "Gryffindor settled the score during dinner. Got the whole lot of us Slytherins, they did..."

She continues to vent, but Hope doesn't hear any of it.

"How do you know it was Gryffindor?" she asks over her rant. Maya pauses as she realizes that Hope said something.

"Because they didn't attack Sebastian," she states, matter-of-fact, before grumbling again. "That arrogant git. His girlfriend was laughing the entire time. You have no idea how much I long to hex the smirk off of her face..."

Hope ignores her words. She would deal with Sebastian tomorrow if he still hadn't broken up with Elizabeth.

"Wow." She reaches out and pets her friend's arm. "It even feels like snake skin."

Maya pulls her arm back quickly and smacks her as Hope laughs at the girl's expense. "We're going to get them back right?"

Hope frowns, searching for the right words. She doesn't think she can handle the prank war on top of everything else she's dealing with. She could barely get her homework done over the past few weeks, and she still needs to schedule quidditch practices for next week's game against Ravenclaw.

"I don't know, M," she sighs, exhausted. "Maybe we should stop this here."

As if hearing something incredibly shocking, her other dormmates grow quiet and turn to look at Hope. The silence in the room is so stark that Hope can hear the patter of rain against the windows.

Maya even stares at her in deep disbelief for a long couple of seconds before breaking out into laughter. She breathes out a sigh. "Whew. That was a good one. You really had me for a moment there."

She slaps her hand on Hope's shoulder, still panting slightly from the exertion of laughing. "Tell me when you think of something. I'm going to sleep."

Hope purses her lips but doesn't say anything, taking a quick shower and then going to bed herself.

In the morning, she goes to breakfast early with her friends, and stays longer than she usually does. She bends her head in odd angles at an attempt to peek at Josette who routinely sits at the Gryffindor table, but she never sees her. Elizabeth is absent as well, and Hope automatically searches for Sebastian, who isn't at his normal spot at the Slytherin table.

The fact that the three of them aren't present sounds warning bells in Hope's head, but she ignores it and tries to make herself eat. She's not very successful, however, and barely picks at her food as she continues to send confused glances to the Gryffindor table.

Hope doesn't see Josette in any of her classes. She's forced to make a potion by herself in Slughorn's class, forced to go through a Transfiguration lesson without Josette whispering in her ear, forced to answer all of Professor Vector's arithmancy problems with no competition.

She stays behind her last class of the day, as if expecting Josette will appear even though the class has already ended.

"Are you waiting for someone?" Rose asks her, leaning against a wall outside the classroom door so they can go to lunch together. Hope notices that the other girl is still slightly green from Gryffindor's prank, but at least the scales have disappeared.