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Mark dreaded Wednesdays. Why, you ask? Wednesdays’ supposed to be fun?
Reading time in the morning, then care of magical creatures, then lunch, then muggle studies, then divination, an hour of arithmancy and finally three hours of potions.
Potions, you pinpointed. Must be potions. Because the rest of Wednesday’s classes are just… filler at worst and personal passion at best. But no. Mark loves potions class. He adores Professor Nettlewick and Professor Nettlewick adores him too. Somehow.
Because being the only student who could keep their eyes open by the end of the exhausting three hour lecture-lab will surely put someone on a teacher’s ‘special students’ list.
Unfortunately for him, being the best student means something more than just getting the coveted seat right in front of Prof. Nettlewick’s cauldron.
If in his first four years as a student Mark was free to choose his lab partner as he wished (another perk for being a ‘special student’), this year he was given a task. A mandate.
“Dear, I ask you to please help him out,” Prof. Nettlewick, or Miss Nettie, as she prefers to be called, smiled to Mark as she pushed forward the scrawny looking Hufflepuff.
It felt like she was getting rid of a tick. A sad and hopeless tick.
Their first lab together was a disaster. This Huang boy managed to burn water. Water. He burned water.
Not the kind where you boiled down a pot of water too much that there was some kind of burned mineral residue at the bottom of the pot, no. The boy set water on fire.
When Mark was just starting to think about how on earth could something like that happened, the boy already managed to sprint past his attempt to salvage the wreckage and ruined two other ingredients needed for something at least five steps down the recipe.
“Maybe he was jinxed by something when he was born?” Jeno, Mark’s roommate and his old lab partner (which he so very much missed, because however awful Jeno was at handling knifes, he was still in the very least salvageable) finally spoke up after they survived their second potions class, after the Hufflepuff boy somehow turned what was supposed to be a bright pink decongestant potion into a pungent tar-like substance with just a stir of a wooden spoon. “Like… bad-luck-fingers. I don’t know.”
Mark just grunted an answer with his face buried in his pillow. He had just been through almost an hour of arguments that devolved into desperate pleadings in the last few minutes as he begged Miss Nettie to let him switch his lab partner. But she only grabbed him by the shoulders and looked him straight in his eyes while she gravely said, “I believe in you.”
He almost believed it. Mark almost believed Miss Nettie’s lie, if not for when she accidentally let out a very apologetic sigh before she closed the door to her class in front of his face.
“The only thing I know is if this Huang boy jeopardise my potions grade, I’ll be the one jinxing him to hell and back.”
Wednesdays. Why does the week have to go by so quickly? Five times have he wished for the week to end on Tuesday, because even after five weeks of trying his best to adapt to his new extreme environment, Mark still hates Wednesdays.
The Huang boy would wave at him from his seat, (their seat, Mark couldn’t believe he was living in a nightmare) and he always looked so excited with the prospect of… what. Destruction? Chaos? Very poor mise en place?
Before anything could've started, Mark’s mood was soured even further when he sat down and was hit by a strong whiff of sweet milk and clean linen sheets. ‘Is this boy serious,’ he scrunched his nose and tried to busy himself up with taking out his notes and pens because he was feeling his face heating with something rather peculiar. Something stronger than his usual annoyance but far less severe than hate that he couldn’t point his finger on.
“I asked Professor Nettlewick, she said we won’t have any individual practical today.” There was a twinge of disappointment on the boy’s voice but for Mark, the words flowed out like a good news from the heaven up above.
“What are we going to do then?”
As if to answer his question, Miss Nettie walked into the still filling carrying a cauldron filled with a silvery, bubbly liquid. He could hear some kids murmuring behind him, giggling and discreetly pointing at the cauldron and speculating on what potion Miss Nettie might be introducing to them that day.
From the colour, Mark had a sort of idea of what the potion might be. It might be an Always Shine, his mother’s favourite treatment for porcelain plates. Or it might be Euphoric tonic, from the way it kind of gurgled and rolled from underneath the surface. Mark was hoping that if he were to guess the mystery potion correctly, Miss Nettie would give Ravenclaw some extra points or she’ll finally realise that she’s wasting her best pupil’s time with the task of guiding her worst.
The main problem is, to make sure of his speculation, he needed to find out how the potion smelled, because Euphoric tonic has a very distinct scent of singed hair. But even when the wind from the door being opened and closed with the incoming stream of kids, Mark couldn’t get a good whiff of that tendrils of steam rising from the brim of the cauldron.
His nostrils were just filled with the unusually distracting smell of the Huang’s boy’s choice of body soap.
“Did you fail to wash yourself thoroughly in the shower this morning...”
Mark meant to keep those annoyed grumbles to himself, so he was understandably surprised when his lab partner seemed to hear them and was looking at him with those obnoxiously wide eyes of his. The boy’s eyebrows were raised, as if they were saying ‘pardon?’ But before his mouth could open to audibly convey his question, Miss Nettie clapped her hands and came to the rescue.
“Today we’re going to have a bit of fun kids!” The gleam she has in her eyes looked exactly the same as the those she has in her cauldron. Mischievous. Wild. Maybe it’s Angel’s Trumpet. “Something much more advanced than you’ll ever get from our class here in Hogwarts. Much, much, much more advanced.”
“Is it Liquid Luck miss?” Someone from the back of the class shouted out with excitement. Mark hoped it wasn’t Jeno. Because he still has faith that Jeno couldn't be that stupid.
“Well, can’t you see that’s it’s silver in colour?” She said while tipping the cauldron a bit to show the rest of the class. “Will someone please tell me what’s the colour of Felix Felicis?”
“Gold, miss?” The Huang boy put his arm up and gave her the answer before Mark could’ve blinked his eyes.
‘Unbelievable.’ ‘He got to it before Mark again.’ ‘Wow.’ Sitting there at the front of the class didn’t stop Mark from catching a few of the murmurs, and it only made his ears heat up. ‘It was just a simple question. It was just a simple question,’ Mark kept telling himself, ‘I’ll have my payback with something way more worthy.’
“Correct!” Her smile was beaming when she clapped her hands once more, a small nod directed especially to Mark and he could hear her voice saying ‘I believe in you’ bouncing inside his skull.
“I’m going to recreate this potion I have right here and all you need to do is try to identify at least ten out of twenty ingredients I’m using. Easy, right?” The opinion of the class was split in half. Some let out a happy ‘yaay’, while the rest let out a dejected ‘nooo’. Mark was, of course, a part of the first half. “Don't forget to guess what the name of this potion too!”
And with that, Miss Nettie suddenly transformed into Professor Nettlewick right in front of their eyes. It wasn’t like… a glamour falling off and revealing a harpy-like creature or something like that. It was as if she set aside her nice-teacher demeanour, and with her agile hands who were chopping, peeling, macerating, mashing, and whisking the ingredients to an empty cauldron, picked up her title of ‘2016’s best potion master in the wizarding world’ that she always dropped when she adopted her role as a teacher.
Mark was mesmerised. Correction. He wanted to be mesmerised, but holy heavens that smell. That piercing smell of milk lotion, and of the Huang boy’s unwashed soap was making it so hard for him to concentrate. Who the hell put on milky lotion on their body before potions class anyway? They will all either be washed off or be masked by the fishy smell of horned slug’s slime.
“Huang boy, Huang boy,- can you please shut up?!" The sound of Jeno’s pen clacking against the marble table in their common room caused Mark to stop on his prolonged ramble about how ‘the Huang boy’ was being so annoying and how he would steal house points from him by answering questions and how he wouldn’t stop grinning like a puppy even after their cauldron blew up in front of their faces and how he would always be waiting there, every Wednesday, waving his hand to Mark and patting the empty spot on their shared bench before telling him what potion they were going to cover that day. “One, his name is Renjun and two, if you don’t stop fawning about this kid you bet I will strangle you in your sleep.”
“I never fawn about him.”
With one exagerated eyeroll and a dramatic sigh, Jeno once again was successful in shutting Mark down, “yes. Yes you always do.”
“Mark, pay attention.” He didn’t realise he was dozing off until the Huang boy, until Renjun nudged him in the arm. ‘Since when did he knew my name?’ Honestly, a very stupid question because who doesn’t know Mark Lee.
Never before has he felt potions class to be this much of a drag. Two hours felt like four, and however much he tried to pay attention to Miss Nettie’s movement, all he could see was Renjun taking notes from his periphery. ‘I should probably help him check if he got everything correct.’
However much he tried to listen to one of Miss Nettie’s jokes, all he could hear was just the tail end of it, which was followed closely by Renjun’s laughter. ‘Just what is happening to me right now?’
Miss Nettie said something about ‘keeping it in a stable water bath for a month before curing it for a night under the full moon’ but Mark was so done with everything. Especially after a kid asked if this was going to count for the final grade and Miss Nettie said no. It’s only going to count as extra credit.
Please dismiss us early please dismiss us early please dismiss us early.
“Well, that’s it for today kids. Early dismissal for all!” Much to his luck, his wish was granted. But much to his bad luck, after she’d given an extra fifteen minutes for the kids to tidy up their answers and another five to submit them to her desk, there was one last thing that Miss Nettie wanted to show.
The whole twenty minutes was completely spent by Mark comparing and contrasting his with Renjun’s, and him being surprised that the hopeless boy had grown to be so much less hopeless when he managed to get 15 of his answer correct. One thing that was bothering him was that they got the final potion name different. But Mark was 130% sure of his answer and he found the potion to be too complicated to just be a measly Twilight Moonbeam.
“Have you noticed anything strange throughout all this?” She asked, her voice lowered down into a faux-mystery hush. She was acting like those performers in those cheap, mystery dinner shows and it was making Mark’s head spin even more than it was before.
There was a short period of awkward silence when students were silently sending telepathic messages of ‘no, not me, you’ ‘NO, NOT ME YOU’ until someone from the table next to him raised her hand and said, “is it… the smell, miss?”
“Good observation,” she used one of her smaller pipettes to pick up a bit of the potion before dropping it on a few cut up sheets of clean parchment paper. “What do you smell dear?”
By that point, Mark was sure his nose was failing him. Somehow. Because he just couldn’t pick up any distinct scent from the potion, even when Renjun was holding the dotted parchment paper right in front of his nose.
What he smelled was just that silly milky lotion, even stronger now when Renjun’s wrist was hovering all over his face.
The girl, another sweet looking Hufflepuff (does all Hufflepuffs always look this sweet or…) was visibly blushing when she answered Miss Nettie’s question, “peppermint candy… burned pine needles and... something else, I guess.”
Mark was utterly frustrated. Pine needles where?? Peppermint candy where?? He almost commanded Renjun to get out of the room. Maybe then he could finally get on with what the rest of the class was talking about.
But no need for that, because suddenly Miss Nettie was towering over him, a curious smile on her lips. “You look a bit lost dear.” It was more mischievous than curious but he digressed. “Care to share what the potion smelled for you?”
“Smells like nothing, miss…”
She scrunched her nose and her eyebrows scrunched with it too, “well, that’s odd.” She then turned to the class and asked everyone if they found themselves not being able to smell anything. And when the congregation of a weirded out ‘no’ was heard, Mark was sure he’d lost all of his ability to smell anything but clean linen sheets and milky lotions (and a very, very faint smell of copper cauldron).
“Well then, Renjun. What about you dear, care sharing?”
The boy hesitated for a bit, and Mark could almost hear an audible sound of him gulping down his sense of what, nervousness? Embarrassment?
“It kind of smells of, uh…” in that pause Mark felt like he caught Renjun’s eyes darting to his face and back to the open notebook on the desk, “butter cookies and coconut, and sea salt.”
Poor Mark was so confused. So, so confused and so in over his head (because those things? Those things are the smell combo of his shampoo and body wash but then how? How and why and who and what made Renjun smell those?) that when Miss Nettie once again clapped her hands, he almost jumped off his chair.
“Well then kids, do you think you know what this mystery potion is?”
Everyone was suddenly shouting out their answer and for a few seconds it was nothing but chaos in that potions class, until Miss Nettie pointed at someone at the back, the same someone who stupidly called out the potion as Liquid Luck despite the apparent difference in their external appearance.
“Amortentia miss.”
Oh.
"Correct!"
Oh…
Unfortunately for Mark, the potion was not Angel’s Trumpet.
Mark instinctively turned his head to the side, and of course, Renjun was there, staring at him with those obnoxiously wide eye of his. But right then, he saw some sort of… resignation there.
Resignation. Renjun’s harsh realisation from what smelling nothing truly means.
At the same time, Mark also got his own utter realisation from what Renjun smelling coconut and sea salt truly means.
“So, Mark, dear, do you really smell nothing? Because if so I am deadly afraid for your well being.”
Freshly washed linen and milky lotion. And copper cauldron.
Renjun. It smells like Renjun.
Oh dear.