An American at Hogwarts: Book Two

Chapter Thirty-Six

I managed to finish the essay around midnight my time. I turned it in with five hours to spare, then went immediately to sleep.

My Friday nights were just so much fun sometimes.

A few days passed without any big incidents, and I was just starting to get used to all the increased attention when of course something had to happen again to shake things up. Rita Skeeter's article on the Triwizard tournament dropped, and it felt like everything went flying off the rails.

Her article was more about Harry than anything else. She made up a bunch of utter bullshit about him and his past just for the drama of it, and I honestly almost flipped a table when I first read the article. A few misquotes or taking something out of context was bad enough; this woman just wholesale made up an entire article about Harry! She put an entire page worth of words in his mouth, and she was still being hired by a major wizarding newspaper! It was just wrong!

Poor Harry was taking a lot of heat for it too. People (mostly Slytherins in his year) kept quoting the article at him wherever he went, although they stopped doing it around me after I yelled at someone in the middle of the entrance hall. I wanted to sit Harry down and give him the advice my dad had given me: "Just ignore them, they don't matter. All the people who do matter know you and know the truth, and they love you no matter what. The people who matter stand with you, and everyone else is insignificant."

But I couldn't say that to him! Ron was stubbornly standing with the rest of the school on the issue of Harry putting his name in the Goblet, and it just didn't seem like my place to have a deep conversation with Ron about his friendship with Harry. I tried to do my best to stick up for Harry when I could, but it didn't feel like enough.

I should've annihilated that horrible woman when I had the chance.

Even worse for Harry, Rita's article had basically skipped over all the other champions. Fleur, Marc, Viktor, and Milena had all been mentioned briefly in the last sentence of the article, and Cedric and I hadn't been mentioned at all.

I, obviously, didn't mind not having my name in the paper. Rita had actually done me a favor there. But Cedric was more excited about the press side of things than me, and although he was trying not to show it, I could tell he was seriously disappointed. I did my best to cheer him up, and I resolved to find a way to finally get him some of the attention he deserved. I had no idea how I was going to do that yet, but I would find a way.

When I went for my morning run with Viktor after the article broke, I decided to see how he felt about it. He seemed a little more like me and Harry when it came to media stuff, but I wanted to know for sure.

"Hey, so did you read Skeeter's article yesterday?" I asked as our first lap got underway.

"Da. She seems very strange."

"Ha. That's an understatement. She's a liar and a horrible journalist. But anyway, what did you think of what she wrote?"

"I do not think it was an article about the tournament." Well, he was sure write about that. He glanced at me briefly as we ran, then spoke again. "I cannot say I am sad I was not the focus of the article."

"Same. I feel bad for Harry, especially since this article's made life so hard for him lately, but I literally couldn't be happier about the fact that I wasn't in it."

"I agree. I do not need more press."

"Yup. And I don't need any press here. This is like a vacation for me."

"How do you mean?"

"You know how if you went into the muggle world, none of them would recognize you or get all excited or anything? They would just see you as a normal person and go from there?"