Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J. K. Rowling [163]
“Don’t ask,” Harry muttered to Cho as she opened her mouth, looking puzzled. She giggled.
“Hey, Harry,” Hermione called from the other end of the room, “have you checked the time?”
He looked down at his watch and received a shock — it was already ten past nine, which meant they needed to get back to their common rooms immediately or risk being caught and punished by Filch for being out-of-bounds. He blew his whistle; everybody stopped shouting, “Expelliarmus!” and the last couple of wands clattered to the floor.
“Well, that was pretty good,” said Harry, “but we’ve overrun, we’d better leave it here. Same time, same place next week?”
“Sooner!” said Dean Thomas eagerly and many people nodded in agreement.
Angelina, however, said quickly, “The Quidditch season’s about to start, we need team practices too!”
“Let’s say next Wednesday night, then,” said Harry, “and we can decide on additional meetings then. … Come on, we’d better get going. …”
He pulled out the Marauder’s Map again and checked it carefully for signs of teachers on the seventh floor. He let them all leave in threes and fours, watching their tiny dots anxiously to see that they returned safely to their dormitories: the Hufflepuffs to the basement corridor that also led to the kitchens, the Ravenclaws to a tower on the west side of the castle, and the Gryffindors along the corridor to the seventh floor and the Fat Lady’s portrait.
“That was really, really good, Harry,” said Hermione, when finally it was just her, Harry, and Ron left.
“Yeah, it was!” said Ron enthusiastically, as they slipped out of the door and watched it melt back into stone behind them. “Did you see me disarm Hermione, Harry?”
“Only once,” said Hermione, stung. “I got you loads more than you got me —”
“I did not only get you once, I got you at least three times —”
“Well, if you’re counting the one where you tripped over your own feet and knocked the wand out of my hand —”
They argued all the way back to the common room, but Harry was not listening to them. He had one eye on the Marauder’s Map, but he was also thinking of how Cho had said he made her nervous. …
The Lion and The Serpent
Harry felt as though he were carrying some kind of talisman inside his chest over the following two weeks, a glowing secret that supported him through Umbridge’s classes and even made it possible for him to smile blandly as he looked into her horrible bulging eyes. He and the D.A. were resisting her under her very nose, doing the very thing that she and the Ministry most feared, and whenever he was supposed to be reading Wilbert Slinkhard’s book during her lessons he dwelled instead on satisfying memories of their most recent meetings, remembering how Neville had successfully disarmed Hermione, how Colin Creevey had mastered the Impediment Jinx after three meetings’ hard effort, how Parvati Patil had produced such a good Reductor Curse that she had reduced the table carrying all the Sneakoscopes to dust.
He was finding it almost impossible to fix a regular night of the week for D.A. meetings, as they had to accommodate three separate Quidditch teams’ practices, which were often rearranged depending on the weather conditions; but Harry was not sorry about this, he had a feeling that it was probably better to keep the timing of their meetings unpredictable. If anyone was watching them, it would be hard to make out a pattern.
Hermione soon devised a very clever method of communicating the time and date of the next meeting to all the members in case they