Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J. K. Rowling [123]
I am sorry that I was unable to see more of you over the summer. It pains me to criticize our parents, but I am afraid I can no longer live under their roof while they remain mixed up with the dangerous crowd around Dumbledore (if you are writing to Mother at any point, you might tell her that a certain Sturgis Podmore, who is a great friend of Dumbledore’s, has recently been sent to Azkaban for trespass at the Ministry. Perhaps that will open their eyes to the kind of petty criminals with whom they are currently rubbing shoulders). I count myself very lucky to have escaped the stigma of association with such people — the Minister really could not be more gracious to me — and I do hope, Ron, that you will not allow family ties to blind you to the misguided nature of our parents’ beliefs and actions either. I sincerely hope that, in time, they will realize how mistaken they were and I shall, of course, be ready to accept a full apology when that day comes.
Please think over what I have said most carefully, particularly the bit about Harry Potter, and congratulations again on becoming prefect.
Your brother,
Harry looked up at Ron.
“Well,” he said, trying to sound as though he found the whole thing a joke, “if you want to — er — what is it?” (He checked Percy’s letter.) “Oh yeah — ‘sever ties’ with me, I swear I won’t get violent.”
“Give it back,” said Ron, holding out his hand. “He is —” Ron said jerkily, tearing Percy’s letter in half, “the world’s” — he tore it into quarters — “biggest” — he tore it into eighths — “git.” He threw the pieces into the fire.
“Come on, we’ve got to get this finished some time before dawn,” he said briskly to Harry, pulling Professor Sinistra’s essay back toward him.
Hermione was looking at Ron with an odd expression on her face.
“Oh, give them here,” she said abruptly.
“What?” said Ron.
“Give them to me, I’ll look through them and correct them,” she said.
“Are you serious? Ah, Hermione, you’re a lifesaver,” said Ron, “what can I — ?”
“What you can say is, ‘We promise we’ll never leave our homework this late again,’ ” she said, holding out both hands for their essays, but she looked slightly amused all the same.
“Thanks a million, Hermione,” said Harry weakly, passing over his essay and sinking back into his armchair, rubbing his eyes.
It was now past midnight and the common room was deserted but for the three of them and Crookshanks. The only sound was that of Hermione’s quill scratching out sentences here and there on their essays and the ruffle of pages as she checked various facts in the reference books strewn across the table. Harry was exhausted. He also felt an odd, sick, empty feeling in his stomach that had nothing to do with tiredness and everything to do with the letter now curling blackly in the heart of the fire.
He knew that half the people inside Hogwarts thought him strange, even mad; he knew that the Daily Prophet had been making snide allusions to him for months, but there was something about seeing it written down like that in Percy’s writing, about knowing that Percy was advising Ron to drop him and even to tell tales on him to Umbridge, that made his situation real to him as nothing else had. He had known Percy for four years, had stayed in his house during the summers, shared a tent with him during the Quidditch World Cup, had even been awarded full marks by him in the second task of the Triwizard Tournament last year, yet now, Percy thought him unbalanced and possibly violent.
And with a surge of sympathy for his godfather, Harry thought that Sirius was probably the only person he knew who could really understand how he felt at the moment, because Sirius was in the same situation;