The Great Hall was mostly unoccupied. There were around fifteen Ravenclaws and two Hufflepuffs, but that was it.

    I felt a little awkward as I was the only one already in robes, but I dismissed that and sat at the Slytherin table. The table only had a few plates out at this hour, sparsely scattered through the dining tables. A few dishes for the early birds were laid out in small clumps. I scooted over my dishes to the nearest cluster and spooned myself some pudding. Normally, I didn’t like cold food in the morning, but something told me today was going to be different. Pausing in between slurps, I remembered what had happened before I went back to the dorms last night. I blushed in between a bite.

    I remembered the way the weird canned things in Professor Park’s office had glinted their reflections across the room, making Youngjae’s eyes sparkle… the way his face lit up when he smiled…

    I quietly told myself to stop and, grabbing a bottle of syrup on the table, dug into some stacked waffles.

    Once a few more robed people started to file in, I got up, grabbing my bags and started walking out the door, unfortunately without most of my waffles. When a few Gryffindor girls passed me, I could hear them snickering. I tried to brush it off, but it really bothered me.

    I hated how Gryffindor always got away from everything as they were the “noble, courageous, nice, valliant, and good people”. I often thought. What did that make me? What did that make the other houses? Not all of those virtues were in the house description, let alone true. It was all because of that stupid Harry Potter and his friends, which I had nothing against. I just had something against the people who called the Slytherins evil and the Gryffindors good. I knew from plenty of experiences that Slytherins could be good, and Gryffindors bad.

    I wandered around the halls a bit to waste time before heading to Defense Against the Dark Arts.

    The classroom was dark, and the professor was definitely in his office. I pulled out my wand and pointed it at the candles on the oxidized chandeliers.

    “Incendio” I whispered, and the candles lit one by one.

    I’ll admit, the room had grown on me over the years. What I had once thought of as creepy decoration was now norm and cool.

    I sat at a gnarly old desk at the back of the room and took out the textbook for DADA. I breifly skimmed over the homework that I hadn’t ever done. I had my doubts about being put into Slytherin, but Ravenclaw had never been an option.

    My wand sat on top of my textbook, my black quill beside it with a small pot of ink.  I ripped off a small peice of parchment from my bag and started folding it. When I had finished folding a paper crane, there were still a good fifteen minutes before the beggining of class. My stomach growled: I had only had a few spoonfuls of pudding and maybe a few bites of waffles before I had left the dining hall. I mused about food for a while, but tried to keep my stomach growling to a minimum. I knew people would begin arriving soon.

    Sure enough, sounds of chatter soon enveloped the room as people began to flush out of the dining hall. The noise covered the sound of my growling stomach. The huge mahogany door to the classroom clattered open and shut as each person entered, until someone put a charm on it to keep it open. I watched from my corner as the Slytherins shifted into seats on my side and the Gryffindors to the right. I didn’t even blink when the jocks and popular spoiled pure-bloods all sat together near the front, the rest scattered around in their respective groups. I didn’t think to pay attention as the classroom silenced, the huge door closed, and a certain Professor Park entered the room from his office, slowly walking down the stairs, his scarlet robes swishing dramatically.

    Professor Park would have been the head of Gryffindor house, had he been more responsible.

    The professor sat on a tall stool at the front of the room and grinned at us all. While he loved Gryffindors best, I noticed that he was not privy to the common perception that Slytherins were evil. He treated everyone who wasn’t in Gryffindor with equal respect, except he was nicer to girls rather than boys. I think that was the only reason why he was nicer to me rather than Yugyeom whenever I did something right.

    I looked up from my textbook when Professor Park tapped his wand against a chalkboard. A few words scrawled themselves in horrible handwriting across it.

    Hex Deflection, it read. I was about to turn my textbook to the chapter which contained what we would be learning when the closed huge door behind me opened.

   "Ah, come in you two," Professor Park grinned from the front. I didn't even bother looking at who was late. I figured they would sit with the others in their respective houses.

   I was jarringly forced out of my finding the correct texbook pages when someone slammed their books onto the desk next to mine. I didn't look at them as another person sat to their right. I feircely gripped the textbook cover as I looked around the room to figure out who was sitting next to me without directly looking at them. My hands went limp and I gave up on life when I realized who had sat to my right.

   "Glad you could join us, Bhuwakul, you haven't been attending class lately," Professor Park commented. I wondered how he had pronounced Bambam's last name perfectly. I heard Bambam laugh uncomfortably from the other side of the person sitting next to me. I slowly turned until I could see Yugyeom from the corner of my eye, sitting directly to my right. He looked way too complacent for my own comfort. He was not supposed to have sat there, he and Bambam were Gryffindors. I knew that there were seats on the other side of the room, in the back rows opposite of mine, so he couldn't have been forced to sit by the Slytherins. I heard some muttering throughout the room as people turned to see the two Gryffindors at the back of the Slytherin pack.

  Yugyeom must have been late because he was dragging Bambam to class. That must have been why Professor Park wasn't mad.

   I sank in my seat. I was a little pissed. First off, I didn't like Yugyeom very much; he always glared at me and tried to kill me several times on the quidditch pitch. I didn't want people like Olivia accusing me of stealing Yugyeom or being a again. I knew even Slytherins liked Yugyeom, and that there was even a fan club with a muggle webpage for it. I didn't get how even though a lot of the English people hated the Asians for moving in, they loved Yugyeom. I guessed hot guys were exempt from all blame.

   Yugyeom and Bambam opened their textbooks and flipped to the page I had flipped to. I muttered curses under my breath, hexes and jinxes that I would probably never get to use but we had learned over the past few years. I rested my head on one of my hands and glared at the walls and thought of ways to kill people.

   My ideas were worth putting in the restricted section, but they were abolished and forgotten when a certain idiot interrupted my thought process.

   "Izara," Bambam whispered way too loudly, "how's Miriam doing? I didn't see either you or her at breakfast today," he said, and I noticed he was fiddling with a quill like the way I used to fiddle with pencils. I looked over and glared at his beautiful face.

   "I don't know, Bambam, I got up really early," I muttered back. I'll admit, I was a little worried if Miriam had gone missing. I hadn't ever really had a friend at Hogwarts before. Yugyeom looked awkward. He scooted to the back of his chair and tried to give us room to talk. I heard him murmer a death threat to Bambam, which, of course, Bambam didn't hear.

   "Don't you have a class with her later?" I offered. I knew they were both in Magical History together. Bambam nodded but didn't look very assured. I thought about what Youngjae had said earlier, about getting Miriam a date for the Yule Ball. I wondered if he had asked Bambam, and if Bambam was going to ask her today. I nodded to myself.

   Bambam turned back to his textbook and I blocked him and Yugyeom out of my peripherals. Professor Park began speaking and gave an introduction to the chapter we were studying, then told us to read it before we went onto the next activity. 

   After a period of about ten minutes, something broke my concentration again.