‘Oh come on,’ said Hermione, looking at Ginny, ‘I'm sure it wasn't that—’

‘Oh come on,’ said Hermione, looking at Ginny, ‘I'm sure it wasn't that—’

‘Yes, it was,’ said Ginny. ‘It was appalling. Angelina was nearly in tears by the end of it.’

Ron and Ginny went off for baths after dinner; Harry and Hermione returned to the busy Gryffindor common room and their usual pile of homework. Harry had been struggling with a new star-chart for Astronomy for half an

hour when Fred and George turned up.

‘Ron and Ginny not here?’ asked Fred, looking around as he pulled up a chair, and when Harry shook his head, he said, ‘Good. We were watching their practice. They're going to be slaughtered. They're complete rubbish

without us.’

‘Come on, Ginny's not bad,’ said George fairly, sitting down next to Fred. ‘Actually, I dunno how she got so good, seeing how we never let her play with us.’

‘She's been breaking into your broom shed in the garden since the age of six and taking each of your brooms out in turn when you weren't looking,’ said Hermione from behind her tottering pile of Ancient Rune books.

‘Oh,’ said George, looking mildly impressed. ‘Well—that'd explain it.’

‘Has Ron saved a goal yet?’ asked Hermione, peering over the top of Magical Hieroglyphs and Logograms.

‘Well, he can do it if he doesn't think anyone's watching him,’ said Fred, rolling his eyes. ‘So all we have to do is ask the crowd to turn their backs and talk among themselves every time the Quaffle goes up his end on

Saturday.’

He got up again and moved restlessly to the window, staring out across the dark grounds.

‘You know, Quidditch was about the only thing in this place worth staying for.’

Hermione cast him a stern look.

‘You've got exams coming!’

‘Told you already, we're not fussed about NEWTs,’ said Fred. ‘The Snackboxes are ready to roll, we found out how to get rid of those boils, just a couple of drops of Murtlap essence sorts them, Lee put us on to it.’

George yawned widely and looked out disconsolately at the cloudy night sky.

‘I dunno if I even want to watch this match. If Zacharias Smith beats us I might have to kill myself.’

‘Kill him, more like,’ said Fred firmly.

‘That's the trouble with Quidditch,’ said Hermione absent-mindedly, once again bent over her Runes translation, ‘it creates all this bad feeling and tension between the houses.’

She looked up to find her copy of Spellman's Syllabary, and caught Fred, George and Harry all staring at her with expressions of mingled disgust and incredulity on their faces.

‘Well, it does!’ she said impatiently. ‘It's only a game, isn't it?’

‘Hermione,’ said Harry, shaking his head, ‘you're good on feelings and stuff, but you just don't understand about Quidditch.’

‘Maybe not,’ she said darkly, returning to her translation, ‘but at least my happiness doesn't depend on Ron's goalkeeping ability.’

And though Harry would rather have jumped off the Astronomy Tower than admit it to her, by the time he had watched the game the following Saturday he would have given any number of Galleons not to care about Quidditch

either.

The very best thing you could say about the match was that it was short; the Gryffindor spectators had to endure only twenty-two minutes of agony. It was hard to say what the worst thing was: Harry thought it was a close-run

contest between Ron's fourteenth failed save, Sloper missing the Bludger but hitting Angelina in the mouth with his bat, and Kirke shrieking and falling backwards off his broom when Zacharias Smith zoomed at him carrying

the Quaffle. The miracle was that Gryffindor only lost by ten points: Ginny managed to snatch the Snitch from right under Hufflepuff Seeker Summerby's nose, so that the final score was two hundred and forty versus two

hundred and thirty.

‘Good catch,’ Harry told Ginny back in the common room, where the atmosphere resembled that of a particularly dismal funeral.

‘I was lucky,’ she shrugged. ‘It wasn't a very fast Snitch and Summerby's got a cold, he sneezed and closed his eyes at exactly the wrong moment. Anyway, once you're back on the team—’

‘Ginny, I've got a lifelong ban.’

‘You're banned as long as Umbridge is in the school,’ Ginny corrected him. ‘There's a difference. Anyway, once you're back, I think I'll, try out for Chaser. Angelina and Alicia are both leaving next year and I prefer goal-scoring

to Seeking anyway’

Harry looked over at Ron, who was hunched in a corner, staring at his knees, a bottle of Butlerbeer clutched in his hand.

‘Angelina still won't let him resign,’ Ginny said, as though reading Harry's mind. ‘She says she knows he's got it in him.’

Harry liked Angelina for the faith she was showing in Ron, but at the same time thought it would really be kinder to let him leave the team. Ron had left the pitch to another booming chorus of ‘Weasley is our King’ sung with

great gusto by the Slytherins, who were now favourites to win the Quidditch Cup.
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