Chapter Three: The Hat Has Opinions

The boats were a mistake.

Electra had formed this view approximately four seconds after getting into one, and she had revised it upwards to a catastrophe by the midpoint of the lake, and by the time the castle came round the headland she had arrived at the final position, which was that whoever had designed the arrival of first years at Hogwarts had done so with the specific intention of humiliating her personally.

The problem was that the boats held four, and that Crabbe and Goyle together displaced roughly the volume of a small cow, and that the fourth place in hers had been taken, without permission or warning, by Pansy Parkinson.

"I love your hair," said Pansy Parkinson, within eleven seconds of sitting down.

"Thank you."

"It's so pale."

"Yes."

"Is it naturally that pale?"

"It is naturally the colour it is," said Electra, "because that is what naturally means."

Pansy laughed as though this were the funniest thing that had been said in several years, and Electra discovered, with a certain grim interest, that she had just acquired a friend and had not been consulted about it at any stage of the process.

The lake was black and the night was enormous and the castle came up out of the dark with every window lit, and for one unguarded moment Electra Lucia Malfoy forgot to have an opinion about anything at all, and simply sat in a boat with her mouth slightly open like a tourist, which she would have denied under oath.

Then she heard, from the boat on the left, a voice saying, "Wow," in a tone of total and undefended wonder.

She turned her head.

Harry Potter was sitting in a boat with the Weasley, holding on to the side with both hands, looking up at the towers with an expression of such complete and unguarded happiness that Electra had to look away from it immediately and study the water.

"Honestly," she said to nobody. "It's a building."

"It's a really big one, though," said Goyle.

"Yes, Gregory. Thank you. That was the observation I was fishing for."

Four boats along, a round-faced boy announced that he had found his toad, and a girl with an extraordinary quantity of hair informed the entire flotilla that she had read about the enchantments on the ceiling of the Great Hall in Hogwarts: A History, and that she had tried out a few simple spells at home and they had all worked, and that she did hope it was enough.

"Who is that?" said Pansy.

"I have absolutely no idea," said Electra, who had already decided several things about her and would be revising every single one of them by Hallowe'en.

They came up out of the boats into a corridor and then into a chamber off the entrance hall, and the chamber was too small for the number of children in it, and the number of children in it was too frightened to spread out, and the result was that everybody stood in a single dense clump in the middle like a nervous herd.

Harry Potter and the Weasley came in near the back. Electra positioned herself with great care so as to be approximately eight feet away and facing in a different direction, which required two separate adjustments of position that she executed with the skill of a professional and which Pansy Parkinson noticed both of.

"Are you looking at Potter?" said Pansy.

"I am looking at the door."

"The door's over there."

"There are two doors, Pansy."

Professor McGonagall arrived, and was tall, and had a face like the north side of a mountain, and informed them that the Sorting would take place in a few minutes in front of the entire school, and that they should smarten themselves up while they were waiting. Several people attempted to smarten themselves up. The round-faced boy's cloak was fastened under his left ear. The girl with the hair was whispering spells at a frantic speed under her breath, going through what appeared to be an alphabetised list.

Electra did not smarten herself up, because she had been smart since seven o'clock that morning, but she did put her chin up, which served the same function.

"I say we shall be sorted by combat," said a Slytherin-shaped boy somewhere behind her, who turned out to be Theodore Nott and who would say approximately four hundred words over the course of the next seven years, all of them strange.

"It is not combat," said Electra. "My father told me exactly what it is."

"What is it?"

"It is a hat."

There was a pause of considerable length.

"A hat…?" said Nott.

"A hat," said Electra, "and I am not going to explain the mechanism, because the mechanism is tedious, and because the whole thing takes eleven seconds in my family and is essentially a formality."

Then roughly twenty ghosts came through the wall and a great many people screamed, including, she was prepared to admit under no circumstances whatsoever, herself, and when she had finished not screaming she found that she had somehow relocated approximately three feet to her left, and that the three feet to her left contained Harry Potter, and that she was standing closer to him than she had been since the robe shop.

He glanced sideways at her.

"All right?" he said.

Which was, Electra reflected afterwards, the single stupidest question anybody had ever asked her, and which she had answered, in the moment, with absolute composure, by saying, "Obviously," in a voice that had gone up by roughly an octave and a half.

Then they were going into the Great Hall.

The ceiling was velvet black and scattered with stars and the candles floated in their thousands, and four long tables stretched away under them full of faces, and the staff table sat at the far end like a verdict. Electra walked in with her hair up and her chin up and her hands perfectly still at her sides, and she looked straight ahead, and she was aware of several hundred people looking, and she discovered that she did not care about a single one of them, because she had spent the entire walk from the chamber attempting to establish by peripheral vision alone whether Harry Potter was nervous.

He was. He had gone slightly grey around the mouth. He kept pushing his glasses up his nose.

Electra filed this away with an entirely unjustifiable sense of personal triumph.

The Hat sang. It was a long song, and it rhymed about half the time, and it informed them in a tuneful shout that Slytherin produced people of cunning and determination who would use any means to achieve their ends, and that Gryffindor produced the brave at heart.

"Any means?" said Pansy Parkinson happily.

"Yes," said Electra, who had been listening to the other verse.

Professor McGonagall unrolled a scroll.

"Abbott, Hannah."

HUFFLEPUFF.

Electra stopped listening in any serious way after that and permitted the names to go past her like scenery, and she only came back to full attention twice. The first time was at Granger, Hermione, who ran at the stool, which was unspeakable, and sat on it with the Hat jammed down over her eyes for about forty seconds before it shouted GRYFFINDOR, and who then got up and went to the table at a speed that suggested she was worried it might change its mind.

The second time was at Longbottom, Neville.

"Longbottom," said Pansy. "That's the one whose parents went mad."

"Yes," said Electra, who had been told this at a dinner party by a woman with a laugh like a cracked bell, and who had thought about it for three days afterwards and had never mentioned that either.

The Hat took a very long time with Neville Longbottom. Electra watched him sitting up there with his knees pressed together and his cloak still fastened under his ear and his face the colour of porridge, and she heard somebody at the Slytherin table snigger, and she experienced a flicker of something extremely inconvenient that she identified later as sympathy and was deeply ashamed of.

GRYFFINDOR, said the Hat, eventually.

And Neville Longbottom ran off still wearing it, and had to run back amid a great deal of laughter to hand it to Morag MacDougal, and Electra laughed along with everybody else because that was what one did, and found that she did not enjoy it very much.

"Malfoy, Electra."

She went up.

She went up in the full confidence of eleven years, with every eye on her and her footsteps perfectly even on the flagstones, and she sat down and lifted her chin and permitted the Hat to be lowered over her head in the manner of a crown.

The Hat did not touch her hair.

"Oh dear," said the Hat.

Electra went absolutely still.

"I beg your pardon," she said, inside her own skull, with enormous dignity.

"Not you. Well, you. Mostly you. Hm."

"My entire family," said Electra, "every single one, going back to the fifteenth century at minimum, has been placed in Slytherin, and the placement has in every single case been accomplished before the Hat was fully seated. My father has mentioned this to me on numerous occasions. The record stands at four seconds. I believe it is held by my great-grandfather."

"Yes, I remember him," said the Hat. "Appalling man. Loved him. No, I'm looking at something else. What's all this?"

"All what?"

"This," said the Hat.

And it showed her, with the casual brutality of an object that had been doing this job for a thousand years and had long since stopped pretending to be tactful, a boy on a footstool in a robe shop in Diagon Alley saying that a ball enchanted to kill people sounded all right, actually, and smiling about it.

Electra Lucia Malfoy sat on a stool in front of the entire school and turned the colour of a Gryffindor banner.

"That," she said, "is nothing."

"Mhm."

"That is a boy I met in a shop and he was extremely rude to me, and I have thought about him on approximately four occasions, all of them with contempt, and I would be grateful if you would get on with it."

"Four occasions."

"Possibly five."

"Because what I'm actually looking at," said the Hat, in a voice of mild professional interest, "is a girl who walked the full length of a train this afternoon."

"I was inspecting the train."

"For two hours."

"It is a long train."

"And there is a quantity of courage in here," said the Hat, "that I don't think anybody has ever told you about, and a really quite remarkable stubbornness, and a thing underneath it all that is going to get you into a very great deal of trouble in about six years, and if I put you in Gryffindor you would be extremely happy within three weeks and you would never forgive me for it."

Electra's hands tightened on the edge of the stool.

"If you put me in Gryffindor," she said, with all the composure she could assemble, "I shall take this hat off, and I shall walk out of that door, and I shall walk down to the village, and I shall take the train home, and I shall never return."

"There isn't a train till June."

"I am aware of that."

"There's an inn, though," said the Hat, kindly. "You'd be all right at the inn."

And Electra, sitting on a stool in front of four hundred people with a thousand-year-old hat over her eyes, felt her face do something entirely outside her control, because that was the second time in a fortnight that somebody had met the single most dramatic threat in her arsenal with practical advice about accommodation, and the first time had been in a robe shop, and she had never once in her life been so comprehensively unimpressed by two separate parties on the same subject.

"Put me in Slytherin," she said.

"Why?"

"Because it is where I belong, and because my father will hear about it if you do not."

"That," said the Hat, "is the first thing you've said to me that you didn't mean."

There was a pause.

"Put me in Slytherin," said Electra, "because my mother cried when I got my letter and pretended she had something in her eye, and because I have a bedroom at home with a green rug in it that she had put down in July, and because if I go anywhere else my father will be perfectly polite about it for the rest of my life."

"Ah," said the Hat. "There it is. Yes. All right."

And then, out loud, to the hall: "SLYTHERIN!"

The Slytherin table made a noise like a small war. Electra put the Hat down on the stool with great care and walked to her seat with her chin up and her face entirely composed, and she sat down in the middle of a great deal of congratulation, and she accepted it the way a monarch accepts flowers, and the whole time there was a voice in the back of her head saying four seconds, that was not four seconds, that was closer to ninety, and she was going to have to decide what to write home about it.

She looked up the hall.

"Potter, Harry."

The entire room made a noise.

It was not a cheer and it was not a gasp. It was the noise of four hundred people all turning their heads at once and all beginning to whisper at once, and Electra watched the back of a small untidy head go up the aisle through it with his shoulders round his ears, and she thought, quite clearly and without any permission from herself, oh, he hates this.

She was right. He did. He hated it enormously. But Electra Lucia Malfoy, aged eleven, sitting at the Slytherin table with her hands flat on the wood, had arrived at a true and entirely accurate reading of another person's internal state, and she did not know what to do with it, and so she leaned over to Pansy Parkinson and said, "He walks like a duck," and Pansy shrieked with laughter, and Electra felt immediately and obscurely worse.

The Hat took a very long time with Harry Potter.

It took so long that the hall began to shuffle. It took so long that Electra, without ever deciding to, found that she was gripping the edge of the table, and that there was a thought in her head, unformed and entirely treasonous, with a shape something like: he could. He actually could. There is nothing stopping him. He came from nowhere, he has nobody, he has no family in it at all, he could go anywhere, and he could be sitting at this table in eleven seconds and I would see him every single day at breakfast.

She had got as far as working out where he would sit.

"GRYFFINDOR!" shouted the Hat.

The Gryffindor table went up like a firework. The Weasley twins were standing on the bench screaming that they had got Potter, and the ginger prefect was shaking his hand, and Harry Potter went down the aisle looking as though the entire building had been lifted off his chest, and sat down next to a ghost in a ruff, and laughed.

Electra Lucia Malfoy watched all of this with an expression of magnificent boredom.

"Good," she said.

"What?" said Pansy.

"I said good. Obviously. He would have been intolerable."

"You were holding the table."

"I was steadying the table. It is an old table and it rocks, and I was steadying it, and if you say one further word about it, Pansy, I shall tell everybody what you said about the ghosts in the boat."

Pansy Parkinson said nothing further about it, and did so with an expression of such enormous and delighted comprehension that Electra had to look away.

The feast arrived.

It arrived all at once, the entire length of every table, roast beef and roast chicken and chops and sausages and bacon and steak and boiled potatoes and roast potatoes and chips and Yorkshire pudding, and for about ninety seconds nobody in the Great Hall said anything at all.

Electra took three potatoes and pushed them around her plate.

The thing about being eleven and having had a long day is that it catches up with you somewhere between the main course and the pudding, and the thing about the Slytherin table is that it is on the far side of the hall from the Gryffindor table, which meant that she had an unobstructed view at a distance of about sixty feet, which was exactly the distance at which one can watch somebody without being obvious about it and exactly the distance at which one is in fact extremely obvious about it.

She watched him eat. He ate the way a person eats who is not certain the food will still be there in five minutes, which she noticed without having any framework at all to understand it, and he took a second helping and then looked around first to see if that was allowed, and she noticed that too.

The ghost in the ruff said something and the whole end of the table laughed and Harry Potter laughed with them, with his head back, properly, and Electra Lucia Malfoy put down her fork.

"Are you all right?" said Pansy.

"Perfectly."

"Only you've gone a bit funny."

"I am tired. It has been an extremely long day and there were boats."

She picked the fork back up. She ate a potato. She made a remark about Gryffindors to the general vicinity, which was received extremely well, and which had in it a line about people who clap for themselves that four separate people repeated over the following week, and she felt approximately nothing at all about the success of it.

Up at the staff table, a man in black with a curtain of dark hair looked across the hall at the Gryffindor table for rather a long time, and then looked down the Slytherin table, and let his eyes rest for one moment on a very straight-backed girl with silver hair who was pretending with great conviction to be interested in a potato while facing entirely the wrong direction.

Severus Snape had known Narcissa Malfoy for more than twenty years, and he had been present at the christening of the child, and he had a fairly comprehensive understanding of what was coming.

He put his hand briefly over his eyes.

"Headache, Severus?" said Professor Quirrell, with a stutter.

"A forecast," said Snape.

The feast ended. Dumbledore said a number of things, including several words that were not words, and everybody sang the school song to whatever tune they liked best, which Electra found barbaric and which she was unable to stop thinking about for three days. The Weasley twins finished last, singing a very slow funeral march, and Dumbledore conducted the last few lines with his wand and dabbed at his eyes when it was over.

Then the prefects were calling and everybody was standing and the hall was emptying, and in the crush at the doors Electra found herself for one moment within arm's reach of a boy in a Gryffindor tie who was yawning so hard his eyes had shut.

"Enjoy the tower, Potter," she said. "I hear it's draughty."

He opened his eyes. He looked at her for a second. Then he said, "Night, Malfoy," in a perfectly friendly voice, and was swept off down the hall by a wave of Gryffindors before she could do a single thing about it.

Electra stood in the doorway of the Great Hall.

"Night," she said, to nobody, approximately four seconds too late.

Then she turned round and swept off to the dungeons and informed Pansy Parkinson at length that Harry Potter was the single most arrogant person she had ever encountered, and that she intended to make his life extremely difficult, and that she gave him until Christmas.

She lay awake for a while in a green room under the lake, listening to the water, in a four-poster with her trunk at the foot of it and her name on the trunk.

Four seconds, said the back of her head. Ninety.

"Shut up," said Electra Lucia Malfoy, out loud, into the dark.

Pansy Parkinson, three beds along, sat up slightly.

"I didn't say anything," she said.

"Go to sleep, Pansy.”

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