Chapter Five: The Remembrall Problem

The flying lesson was announced on a Tuesday, and Electra Lucia Malfoy spent the following thirty-six hours in a state of barely contained glee that she presented to the world as mild indifference.

This was, at last, the thing. This was the one area of the entire curriculum in which she was not merely competent but genuinely, demonstrably, unarguably excellent, and in which the excellence could be observed from the ground by anybody who happened to be standing on it. She had been riding since she was four. She had her own broom at home, a very good one, which she was not allowed to bring and which she had mentioned to approximately forty people. She had been flying over the paddock at the Manor every summer evening for seven years, mostly by herself, and on a few occasions she had gone so high that her mother had come out of the house and stood on the terrace without saying anything until she came down.

"It's only one lesson," said Pansy.

"It is the foundation of the entire discipline."

"You've mentioned the broom at home."

"Have I?"

"Four times today," said Pansy Parkinson. "Once at breakfast and three times in Herbology."

Electra began mentioning the broom at home to other people instead.

She mentioned it in the common room to Theodore Nott, who said, "Mm," and continued reading a book about fish. She mentioned it at dinner to Crabbe and Goyle, who were a far more satisfactory audience and who asked follow-up questions about how fast it went, to which the honest answer was that she had never actually found out and the answer she gave was a number.

And on Thursday morning she mentioned it in the entrance hall, loudly, in the general direction of the Gryffindor table, in a story about a helicopter.

The helicopter story was a good story. In it, she had been flying illegally over Muggle country and had very nearly collided with a helicopter and had executed a manoeuvre that had saved both her life and, by implication, the lives of everybody aboard the helicopter. She had told it twice at home and her father had looked pleased and her mother had said, "Mm," in a tone that suggested she knew precisely which paddock Electra had been in on the day in question and precisely how high the fence was.

She delivered it at volume, at a range of about twenty feet from the Gryffindor table, with gestures.

The Weasley said, "She's at it again."

The Granger girl said, from behind a book called Quidditch Through the Ages, which she had taken out of the library that morning and which she was reading in a manner that suggested she intended to pass an examination in it by lunchtime, that she thought a great deal of it sounded physically impossible.

And Harry Potter, who was eating toast, said, "Can you actually do that? Go that high?"

Electra Lucia Malfoy stopped mid-gesture.

He was not being sarcastic. She had, over the preceding ten days, developed a fairly sophisticated instrument for detecting sarcasm in that particular voice and it was reading nothing at all. He had asked a question. He had asked it with his head slightly on one side and his eyebrows up over the top of his glasses, in exactly the tone of a person who had recently learned that there was a game played on brooms with a ball enchanted to kill people and who had been thinking about it ever since.

"Yes," she said.

"Isn't it freezing?"

"It is extremely cold," said Electra, "and the air is thinner, and your hands stop working properly after about four minutes, and you have to come down before you can feel your fingers again or you cannot grip."

"Right," said Harry Potter, nodding slowly. "That makes sense."

And he went back to his toast.

Electra stood in the entrance hall for a moment with her entire helicopter anecdote abandoned somewhere around the second act, and then turned round and walked off to Transfiguration at considerable speed with her ears burning, because she had just answered a question honestly and usefully and had found it to be the most intensely satisfying thirty seconds of her academic career to date, and she was not at all happy about what that implied.

"You told him the truth," said Pansy, catching up.

"I did nothing of the kind."

"You told him about your fingers."

"I was establishing my expertise."

"You looked like you were going to offer to show him," said Pansy Parkinson, and had to run the last fifteen feet.

The lesson was at three thirty on a clear windy afternoon on a smooth lawn on the far side of the grounds, and twenty brooms were lying in two neat rows on the grass, and the brooms were terrible.

Electra could tell from forty feet. She could tell from the way the twigs sat. She had an entire speech prepared about the brooms and she deployed it immediately, to general Slytherin approval, and in the middle of it she looked round and discovered that the Gryffindors had arrived.

Madam Hooch had short grey hair and yellow eyes like a hawk and told them to stop talking and stand by a broom.

"Stick out your right hand over your broom," she barked, "and say up."

"UP," said everybody.

Electra's broom came into her hand immediately, which she had expected, and which she permitted herself one small moment of satisfaction about.

Harry Potter's broom came into his hand immediately too.

She saw it happen out of the corner of her eye and her head came round before she could stop it. He was standing there holding a school broom with a look of mild surprise on his face, and he had not even said it properly, he had said it in an ordinary voice as though addressing a dog, and the broom had jumped.

Hermione Granger's broom rolled over on the ground. Neville Longbottom's did not move at all. Electra noted both of these facts and found that she had no interest in either of them.

She was watching a boy in a Gryffindor tie turning a broom over in his hands, looking at the handle, and then along the shaft, and then at the twigs, in the specific order that a person looks at a broom when they have never seen one before and have just discovered that they want to.

Madam Hooch showed them how to mount without sliding off the end, and went down the rows correcting their grips.

"Potter. Grip's fine."

She reached Electra.

"Malfoy. You've been doing it wrong for years."

The lawn made a noise.

"I beg your pardon….?" said Electra.

"Hands too far apart," said Madam Hooch, moving them. "You've been riding something with a long grip at home, haven't you? Good for a dive, no use to you on a school broom. There."

And she moved on, leaving Electra Lucia Malfoy standing on a lawn in front of twenty people with her hands eleven inches apart, which was the correct distance, and which she had just been told she had been getting wrong since the age of four, and which her father had taught her personally.

She did not look at the Gryffindors. She did not look at them with such determination that her neck hurt.

"On my whistle," said Madam Hooch. "Kick off hard. Three. Two—"

Neville Longbottom kicked off before the whistle.

What followed happened fast and was, by common agreement afterwards, extremely difficult to watch. He rose straight up like a cork out of a bottle, twelve feet, twenty feet, with his face white and his mouth open, and his broom gave a lurch and he slid off sideways, and there was a nasty crack and a crumpled heap on the grass, and his broom went drifting off over the castle towards the forest.

Madam Hooch was bending over him.

"Broken wrist," she said. "Come on, boy. It's all right. Up you get. None of you is to move while I take this boy to the hospital wing. You leave those brooms where they are or you'll be out of Hogwarts before you can say Quidditch."

They went.

There was a silence of perhaps four seconds after the two figures disappeared round the corner of the castle.

Then somebody at the back laughed, and the field reorganised itself along entirely predictable lines, and Electra Lucia Malfoy found herself at the centre of a group of Slytherins who were waiting for her to say the funny thing, because she had been saying the funny thing for eleven days and the arrangement was now established.

She looked at the place on the grass where he had been lying.

"Did you see his face, the great lump?" said Pansy.

And the dreadful thing, the thing Electra was going to think about on and off for the next six years, was that she had opened her mouth to say nothing of the kind. She had opened her mouth to say that Longbottom had panicked and that panicking was what happened to people who had been told their whole lives that they were going to be bad at things, which was a thought she had been having with increasing frequency and which she had nowhere to put.

What came out instead was, "If he'd given his grandmother's handkerchief a squeeze he might have remembered to fall on his other side."

It got a very large laugh.

And then she saw the thing in the grass.

It was glass, about the size of a large marble, full of white smoke, and it caught the light, and she knew exactly what it was because one of her aunts had sent her one when she was eight with a note about how useful it would be.

"Look," said Electra, picking it up. "It's that stupid thing Longbottom's gran sent him."

She held it up. It glittered in the sun.

"Give that here, Malfoy," said Harry Potter, quietly.

Everybody stopped talking.

Electra Lucia Malfoy turned round with a Remembrall in her hand and looked at him across eight feet of grass, and in the instant before she said anything at all she had a thought of total and crystalline clarity, which was: there it is.

Because he was looking at her. Properly. For the first time in eleven days he was looking at her with his entire attention, with his chin down and his shoulders square and his eyes absolutely on her face and nowhere else, and she could feel it going through her like a cold drink on a hot day, and she understood in that moment, with a precision that would have horrified her if she had let it finish forming, exactly what the price of it was and that she was going to pay it every single time.

She smiled nastily.

"I think I'll leave it somewhere for Longbottom to find," she said. "How about up a tree?"

"Give it here!" shouted Harry.

And she was on her broom and in the air.

It was, she would admit under torture, the best moment of her life so far. She went up twenty feet in a rising curve with her hair coming loose and the wind in her ears, and she hung there over an oak tree looking down at a lawn full of upturned faces and at one face in particular, and she called down, "Come and get it, Potter!"

She had not expected him to.

That was the part she had got wrong, and she had got it wrong because she had been thinking of him as the boy from the robe shop who did not know what Quidditch was, rather than as the boy who had said give that here in a voice like a closing door, and the two of them did not fit together and she had not yet done the work of making them fit.

He got on the broom.

"No!" shouted Hermione Granger. "Madam Hooch told us not to move, you'll get us all into trouble!"

He kicked off.

And Electra Lucia Malfoy, hanging over an oak tree at a height of twenty feet with a glass ball in her hand, watched Harry Potter rise up through the air towards her with the wind tearing at his hair and his robe streaming out behind him and an expression on his face of such enormous, shining, undiluted joy that she entirely forgot to say the next thing she had prepared.

He had never been on a broom. He had said so in a shop. He had said it to her face in August and she had laughed at him for it.

He came up level with her and stopped dead, hovering, perfectly steady, with one hand on the handle, as though he had been doing it for a decade.

"That's not fair," said Electra.

"What?"

"Nothing. Give me that, I mean, no. Give it to me." She shut her mouth. "You cannot possibly have never flown before."

"I haven't."

"Then explain that."

"Explain what?"

"That," said Electra, gesturing at the entire arrangement of him, the hover, the hands, the ease, the look on his face. "That is not a first time. That is four years. People fall off. People go sideways. Longbottom went sideways eleven minutes ago and he has been in the magical world since birth, and you have been in it since July, and you are sitting up here like a bird, and it is appalling."

Harry Potter blinked at her through his glasses.

"Thanks?"

"It was not a compliment."

"It really sounded like one."

"It was a complaint," said Electra, going a dangerous colour, "and you have no business taking a complaint and deciding it is a compliment, and give me my broom, no, this is my broom. Give me the thing. I mean, I have the thing."

She looked at her hand. She did, in fact, have the thing.

Below them, a lawn full of eleven year olds was watching this exchange with great attention and no audibility whatsoever, which was a mercy she did not appreciate until considerably later.

"Give it here," said Harry, "or I'll knock you off that broom."

"Oh, yeah?" said Electra, retreating into the one register she could still operate. "No Weasley and Granger up here to save your neck, Potter."

"And where exactly," he said, "are your lackeries going too, about it from down there?"

Electra opened her mouth and found that she had no answer to this, because there was none, because she had said the line without checking it first, and because he had taken it apart with a single mild question in the tone of a person genuinely interested in the logistics.

She did the only thing available.

"Catch it if you can, then!" she shouted, and threw the Remembrall as hard as she could into the sky.

And then she watched.

She watched him go after it, and she watched the dive, and she was the only person on that entire lawn in any position to understand what she was looking at. Fifty feet, with the ground coming up, leaning forward over the handle, with the broom going absolutely flat out and a glass ball falling in front of him, and he put out one hand at about four feet off the grass and pulled up and rolled onto the lawn with the Remembrall held over his head.

He had caught it.

Electra Lucia Malfoy hung in the air over an oak tree with her hair all over her face and her heart going like a drum and her hands cold on the broom, and she said, out loud, to nobody, in a voice of total and furious wonder, "That was a Wronski Feint."

It was not a Wronski Feint. It was an eleven year old falling in a controlled manner at an object. But it was going to be a Wronski Feint in approximately three years, and Electra, who had been raised on the game and who had an eye for it that her cousin had once called frightening, had seen it from above and had known it instantly.

"HARRY POTTER!"

Professor McGonagall was running across the grounds.

Electra came down on the lawn in a slow neat landing that nobody looked at, which was the correct and traditional punishment for her entire afternoon, and she stood beside her broom with the wind blowing her hair and she watched Harry Potter being marched away towards the castle with his head down.

"He's expelled," said Pansy, with relish. "That's it. That's him finished."

"Yes," said Electra.

"You did that."

"Yes," said Electra.

She did not feel the way she had expected to feel, which was triumphant. She felt instead a cold, sliding, unfamiliar sensation at the bottom of her stomach, and she identified it with some difficulty as the specific horror of having got exactly what she asked for.

She went up to the castle. She did not go in to dinner for twenty minutes, which she spent in an alcove on the first floor, and then she went in, and she sat at the fourth seat from the end, and she looked at the doors.

He came in.

He came in with the Weasley and he was not expelled, and he sat down at the Gryffindor table and within four seconds the entire table was shouting, and the Weasley twins were on their feet, and somebody dropped a jug.

Electra put down her fork.

She got up and went across the hall with Crabbe and Goyle because she had to know and because there was no other instrument available to her for finding out.

"Having a last meal, Potter?" she said. "When are you getting the train back to the Muggles?"

"You're a lot braver now you're back on the ground and you've got your little friends with you," said Harry Potter calmly.

There was nothing remotely little about Crabbe and Goyle, who were standing directly behind her and whose shoulders were at roughly the level of her ears, but Electra had stopped hearing the sentence at the word braver, because she had spent eleven days attempting to be interesting to this person and had just been called a coward in front of two house tables, and she wanted, with her entire body, to tell him exactly how high she had been over that paddock in August.

"I'd take you on any time on my own," she said. "Tonight, if you want. Wizard's duel. Wands only, no contact. What's the matter? Never heard of a wizard's duel before, I suppose?"

"Of course he has," said the Weasley. "I'm his second, who's yours?"

Electra looked at Crabbe and Goyle, sizing them up.

"Crabbe," she said. "Midnight all right? We'll meet you in the trophy room, that's always unlocked."

She walked away.

She walked away and sat down and ate four forkfuls of something and said nothing at all for the remainder of dinner, and when Pansy asked her what the plan was, she said that the plan was obvious.

The plan was obvious. The plan was that she was not going to go, and that she was going to tip off Filch, and that Harry Potter and the Weasley would be caught out of bed at midnight and would lose Gryffindor approximately fifty points, and she had thought of the whole thing on the walk back to the table, and it was an excellent plan.

It was an excellent plan, said Electra Lucia Malfoy to herself, lying in the dark under the lake at eleven o'clock, with her eyes wide open and her hands flat on the covers.

It was an excellent plan, and the only difficulty with it, the single small structural flaw in an otherwise elegant construction, was that she had just arranged for the only person in this castle who had ever looked straight at her to stand in an unlocked room at midnight waiting for her, and she was not going to be there, and he was going to know it.

"It is an excellent plan," she said out loud.

"Go to sleep," said Pansy Parkinson, from three beds along.

Electra turned over and put the pillow over her head and did not sleep until well after one, by which time, in another part of the castle, four Gryffindors and a very large dog had already made her evening considerably more complicated than she had designed it to be.

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