Harry Potters Twin Book Five

Toad Lady

The one good thing to be said for this lesson was that it was not a double period. By the time we had all finished reading the introduction of the book, wee had barely ten minutes left for dream interpretation. I had been paired up with Dani, who seemed bored.

"You want me to say a dream first, or do you want to tell me?" Dani said, resting her chin in her hand.

"You tell me," I said, not wanting to share my dreams with her.

I already knew why I was dreaming of a graveyard that baithed in green light. What I didn't know why I was dreaming about a long corridor with a door that I never seemed to be able to reach, but I didn't feel like sharing that one either. My dreams are private.

"Well. . ." Dani looked thoughtful. "I had a dream that I was flying over London. . . what is that supposed to mean?"

I turned the pages of the Dream Oracle. "It says here you will enter a fight to the death and you will win, but without an arm."

"Ouch," Dani looked amused.

"Yes, ouch," I said, rolling my eyes at the page. "Golly, this is useless. If you win then that means you killed the person you were dueling. Are you capable of murder?"

"Maybe," Dani said, a mischevous glint in her eye.

I laughed.

At the end of class Trelawney told us that we had to write a dream diary every month for homework.

"D'you realize how much homework we've got already? Binns set us a foot-and-a-half-long essay on giant wars, Snape wants a foot on the use of moonstones, and now we've got a month's dream diary from Trelawney! Fred and George weren't wrong about OWL year, were they? That Umbridge woman had better not give us any…"

When we entered the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom we found Professor Umbridge already seated at the teacher's desk, wearing the fluffy pink cardigan of the night before and the black velvet bow on top of her head. It looked like a giant fly that had sat unwisely on a toads head.

The class was quiet as it entered the room; Professor Umbridge was, as yet, an unknown quantity and nobody knew how strict a disciplinarian she was likely to be.

"Well, good afternoon!" she said, when finally the whole class had sat down.

A few people mumbled "good afternoon" in reply.

"Tut, tut," said Professor Umbridge. "That won't do, now, will it? I should like you, please, to reply 'Good afternoon, Professor Umbridge'. One more time, please. Good afternoon, class!"

"Good afternoon, Professor Umbridge," we chanted back at her. I couldn't help but feel like I was back in Grade school.

"There, now," said Professor Umbridge sweetly. "That wasn't too difficult, was it? Wands away and quills out, please."

Many of the class exchanged gloomy looks; the order "wands away" had never yet been followed by a lesson we had found interesting. I shoved my wand back inside my bag and pulled out quill, ink and parchment. Professor Umbridge opened her handbag, extracted her own wand, which was an unusually short one, and tapped the blackboard sharply with it; words appeared on the board at once:

Defense Against the Dark Arts A Return to Basic Principles

"Well now, your teaching in this subject has been rather disrupted and fragmented, hasn't it?" stated Professor Umbridge, turning to face the class with her hands clasped neatly in front of her. "The constant changing of teachers, many of whom do not seem to have followed any Ministry approved curriculum, has unfortunately resulted in your being far below the standard we would expect to see in your OWL year.