Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
.
IDEALLY, the best way to spend one's seventeenth birthday is to have a party until one o'clock in the morning in their common room. After all, you only turn seventeen once and you're finally of age, but that wasn't the case for Ron at all.
"So, all in all, not one of Ron's better birthdays?"
I let out a watery sigh at Fred's words and squeezed Ron's hand gently as if to assure myself.
Hours had passed as daylight wasted away. It was already night-time, probably passed dinner too, as the halls were quiet and the torches were lit to illuminate the Hospital Wing.
The day was not what I was expecting at all. I had come down to breakfast and joined Ginny and Hermione at the Gryffindor table, ready to greet him a happy seventeenth. But instead, the three of us got an urgent visit from a distraught-looking Professor McGonagall who explained what had happened: Ron had been poisoned.
If it weren't for Harry and his bezoar. . .I didn't even want to think about it. The four of us had spent the whole day outside the Hospital Wing until we were finally allowed in, and once I saw Ron's sickly pale figure on the bed, I almost broke down crying.
"This isn't how we imagined handing over our present," George said grimly before placing said present on the foot of the bed.
"Yeah," Fred agreed, "when we pictured the scene, he was conscious."
"There we were in Hogsmeade, waiting to surprise him—"
"You were in Hogsmeade?" Ginny cut in, finally breaking away from her disconnected state.
"We were thinking of buying Zonko's," Fred replied in a somber tone. "A Hogsmeade branch, you know, but a fat lot of good it'll do us if you lot aren't allowed out at weekends to buy our stuff anymore. . .but never mind that now. How exactly did it happen, Harry?"
Sighing again for the umpteenth time, I tried my best to distract myself from listening to Harry's story again, finding it too disturbing to hear the details over and over.
"Blimey," George muttered, "it was lucky you thought of a bezoar."
"Lucky there was one in the room," Harry said.
"Extremely," I said in a brittle voice.
Hermione, who was at the very head of Ron's bed, gave a gentle sniff. It was she who had been quiet the whole day and perhaps took Ron's condition the hardest. I would never forget the look on her face when McGonagall told us the news: void of color with frightened eyes that looked like she have seen the depths of hell herself.
