Potions 101

Slughorn sighed as the bell rang. "Everyone put you potions in viles and I'll tell you the winner tomorrow. Your homework is to study a little more of this spell for a go around the room question-quiz tomorrow. Nothing drastic. You are dismissed."

Amanda put her vile on his desk and was then cornered by Slughorn. Sh*t... Luckily, he didn't say anything so she could go back to her table. "Liv, to DADA?"

Olivia set a vial of her potion on the desk. It didn't look at all like the example. "Yeah."

"Awaaaaaaay!"

Olivia was sitting at a desk, staring at the second page of the assignment. She could barely understand half of what it said, let alone what the questions were talking about.

[Oh. They're in potions? Wrong period I thought of Amanda's there then]

Amanda was barely hesitating on some of the questions, but she still was stuck on this one on the second page.

"You have twenty more minutes to complete the assignment," said Professor Slughorn crisply, who was grading the same assignments from a previous period.

Amanda stared at the question. "Liv? Have you done question 40?"

Olivia had been tapping the metal tip of her quill on the parchment in the pattern of a song she knew, leaving a few speckles of ink. "I'm stuck on question one."

"Oh."

Olivia began tapping the quill to "O Fortuna".

"Hmmm."

"Ten minutes left!"

"Ohcrap." Olivia started writing down random lines from the book.

Amanda finalled cracked that problem.

Olivia was now on number twenty. Unable to find any other relevant sentences on the page she was on, she wrote "domo arigato, mr. roboto".

"Okay, pass up your papers forward! Since this is a small period, I'll be able to grade them and pass them back to you this class. For now, just turn to the the new chapter, 'Basics Of Internal Organ Healing Potions' and read the first section."

Amanda passed up her paper and opened her book, relieved to be able to relax her brain.

Olivia handed her paper in and flipped ahead in the book to the section on Advanced Emotion Elixirs.

About twenty minutes later, he passed back all the papers too the class, all of them marked up with red ink somewhere, except Olivia's.

Olivia's simply had a giant bright red T next to her name.

Olivia sighed, folded up the paper, and stuck it into a random page of the book. She wondered how she had even gotten into any classes that year anyway.

Amanda smiled at her A, deciding that she'd take it. This class was pretty hard. Not caring about any of the red marks, she stufed it in her pocket then thought about Olivia and how in the world they had most classes together.

Olivia was sitting in class, head resting on the desk. She was thinking about her most recent grades, and wondering how she even got into advanced potions in the first place. Maybe it had been the Slytherin bias. Maybe she had a significant increase in luck the day of the OWL last year.

She yawned, and switched her train of thought to an inner complaint about how early classes started.