An American at Hogwarts: Book Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

I managed to keep up my early morning running routine, despite all my friends making different bets about when I'd finally give it up. I sat down to breakfast that morning to George looking somber (he bet I would quit Monday morning. He lost) and started buttering my toast.

George was quickly distracted from his sour mood by the owl post, which came swooping into the Great Hall with a disruptive noise I hadn't quite managed to get used to yet. Every one of my friends was scanning for a little red letter, all of them excited by the possibility of another crazy letter from my crazy family. A tawny owl was coming straight for me, but to my friends' disappointment, it carried a normal letter in its beak.

"Dang Alexa, that's a lot of mail for barely a week into the year!" said Lee as I pulled the letter from the owl's leg.

"I know! I don't really get it, but I like it," I joked. I opened the letter to see the same messy scrawl that had been written on regular messages in the Common Room last year, and on the whiteboard in the Quidditch lockerrooms.

Oliver had written me back.

Alexa,

That sounds perfect! Practicing Keeping with someone who actually has superspeed will give me just the competitive edge I need. I'm free to start training this weekend, and I can do two hours a day from there. Let me know. Thanks for the help, Assistant Captain.

Oliver

"Who's it from Alexa?" asked Angelina.

"It's Oliver. I told him I have a family member with superspeed who can help him practice his Keeper reflexes, and apparently he wants to start this weekend. I gotta write him back real quick, I need to tell him I can't do it before Christmas before he clears his entire schedule."

I wrote Oliver a quick note explaining that I still had school, but that we could get some good Keeper practice in over break in December. I hated to crush such intense excitement, but I couldn't make an earlier time work, and there was no way I was letting Pietro go anywhere in the magical world unsupervised.

Once the owl was off, my Gryffindor friends and I met up with Cedric and the rest of the Hufflepuffs to head to Charms. Muggle school officially started today, and while it would be easy for at least the first week, it was junior year. The year of AP tests and SATs. Classes today were going to be mixed with a new level of stress.

Fortunately for me, I had the perfect free period at the end of the day to take care of things. Jackson tried to convince me it would be a good idea to multitask and work on things in potions, but despite my slightly-reckless nature I didn't actually have a death wish. I told him no, and that it was a bad idea, and then I spent the rest of the period fighting to keep him from pulling out his laptop to prove me wrong.

Potions was a fairly interesting subject last year, but this year it was on a whole other level.

We walked up from the dungeons after Potions for lunch, and I was starving. I basically had to wrestle Jackson to stop him from opening his laptop in the middle of Snape's class, and even with Nat's training I wouldn't have been able to stop him without Adrian's help. It was a hell of a workout, and now I wanted to eat a bunch of food and relax with Jackson far away on the opposite side of the Great Hall.

"Alexa!" I was stopped just outside the doors to food by someone calling my name. I stopped, waving for my friends to carry on, and turned around to see Cassidy bouncing excitedly towards me.

"Hey Cassidy!" I said, smiling as she came to a stop in front of me. "How was your first week of the year?"

"Good! It's nice not being a first year anymore," she said with a laugh. "But I wanted to come and ask if we were going to do WWHRS again this year!"