Chapter Text
The first week of any Hogwarts year was always a crazy shitstorm of bad directions and new things that dumped me way out of my comfort zone, and my fifth year was no different. It was my first year as Ravenclaw Quidditch captain, and I’d already gotten a mix of congratulations and threats from all parties, which I responded to with my usual grace and charm.
“Hey Christian! Whose dick did you have to suck to get that badge?”
“Your mum’s!” I yelled back at Eren Jaeger, a Gryffindor Beater, as he passed by my breakfast spot. Jaeger stopped in his tracks and spun on his heels, eyes bright. Uh-oh.
“Me mum’s dead, hornslug.” Ah, hell.
“Oh, uh, sorry, shite, uh-”
The other Gryffindor Beater and Jaeger’s sewn-on shadow Mikasa Ackerman came up beside Jaeger, radiating rage without changing her face. “Then maybe you should think before you speak.” She whisked Jaeger away before either of us could react, leaving me red-faced, staring, with the kids who were awake enough to notice sniggering at me. I ducked down into my eggs while Armin sighed beside me.
“You know, I could’ve told you not to make ‘your mum’ jokes at Eren.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t.” I scowled at him as the evil little angel spread jam on a muffin. He shrugged. I groaned and slumped forward on the table. “Why am I friends with you?”
“Because I’m the only one who’d put up with you for four minutes, let alone four years,” he said with a smile. “Plus, who else would make your practice schedules?” I kicked his ankle as the mail flew in.
I didn’t expect anything from that – Mère and my sister Angie were caught in a vineyard somewhere in the Loire Valley and wouldn’t get out for a few months, and Dad usually waited at least a week before writing. Which is why I didn’t look up.
Which is why I got hit in the head with an owl.
“Oi!” The owl fluttered around my head with its too-big grey wings, talons digging into my shoulder. “Stop it, you feather-brained creature-”
It took some beating, but the owl settled itself on my shoulder, extending its leg with a low, proud hoot. “I’m gonna kill whoever decided owls should deliver shite,” I muttered as I untied the roll of parchment from its legs. Armin laughed and stroked its wing; it cooed, snapped at my hair a few times, and took off, leaving little tears in my robes. I sneered at its tailfeathers and unrolled the note, Armin reading over my elbow after he magicked away the rips.
If you think you’re cool, come down to the kitchens after dinner tonight. Captains only!
PS – Bring your homework!
It wasn’t signed with a name, but there was a doodle of a rose crossed with a broomstick. Armin hummed.
“Well, can’t hurt to see what Rose Weasley would want with you.”
I blinked at him. “The Gryffindor captain? That Rose Weasley?”
He rolled his eyes. “No, the Rose Weasley that’s Head of Slytherin.” I stuck out my tongue at him, and he smeared jam on it with his knife. Strawberry.
“Hey! Rude!” I licked it away as the bell rang for the first class. I slung my bookbag over my shoulder as breakfast faded away.
“Seriously, though, I think you should go,” Armin said as we followed our fellow Ravenclaws to Charms. “If I’m interpreting that note right, the other captains will be there, too, and it’d be a great chance to scope.”
I wrinkled my nose. Slytherin’s captain was Scorpius Malfoy, a sixth year Seeker who’d been captain the last two years. Hufflepuff’s new captain was an unknown – unlike my stupid house, they knew how to keep their mouths shut, and they didn’t have any legacies on their team.
“Yeah, all right. It’d be worth it just to see a Weasley and a Malfoy willingly occupy the same space.” Armin’s eyes took on that particularly evil glint that made me want to duck behind the nearest suit of armor.
“Oh, I can’t wait to see Eren’s face when you beat him.”
“Aren’t you two friends? Sort of?”
He flapped his hand. “All’s fair in love and Quidditch.”
Classes flew by that day. Before I knew it, Armin was kicking me out of the Great Hall and down the stairs, hissing questions I could ask Weasley in my ear. I tried to get a good look at the other houses’ tables as I went by, but the current Weasley quota at Gryffindor was borderline clannish, a mass of red that was hard to distinguish from this distance. Malfoy was nowhere to be seen, but he had this nasty way of hiding in plain sight that made someone with his body type actually a decent Seeker. He was quiet, for such a lanky bloke.
The noise of the Great Hall fell away behind me as I headed down to the kitchen hallway. Rumor had it that the Hufflepuff common room was right next door, but none of those lucky buggers would confirm or deny. Probably too smug in not having to walk to kingdom come to get to bed at night.
My sister had shown me the way in here as her parting gift before she graduated, in union with her handing me the Quidditch captain title with a hissed ‘You better not fuck this up, Jeannie.’ Merlin, she was gonna kill me if I lost before Christmas.
I tickled the pear and pulled on the handle that it transformed into. The painting swung outward to show a bustling scene of busy house-elves, scurrying about with hundreds of dinner remains. It must have just ended upstairs. I clambered through the portrait hole, stepping in enough that it could close behind me. Most of the house-elves didn’t even blink an eye at me, but a few close to the door turned their green goose egg eyes my way.
“Hey! Little Sister Christian!”
I whirled at the call, and there were Rose Weasley and Scorpius Malfoy, sitting across from each other at a small table shoved in a corner like it was the easiest thing in the world. An odd sort of twirl dipped in my stomach – relief? Anxiety? Gas? I frowned and made my way over, keeping to the borders of the enormous kitchen to stay out of the house-elves’ way. They managed to bump into me anyhow, and I was very ruffled when I finally stopped at the end of their table. “What did you call me?”
Weasley grinned. “Well, Ang was Sister Christian, and you’re the little her, so.”
“It’s Kirschstein.”
She shrugged. “Continental shit. Your sis couldn’t get me to say it right, either.”
Jean raised his eyebrows. “None of this crap about you calling my sister Ang would have anything to do with why she went out of her way to show me the kitchen entrance after recommending me for the captain spot, would it?”
Weasley grinned wider and tapped the side of her freckled nose. “Not bad, Little Sister.” She picked up her quill again. “Go ahead and make yourself comfy, I’ll explain more when the Huff shows up.”
I looked at Malfoy, but he had his nose in a book and that stupid secretive Slytherin grin on, so I sighed and collapsed on the bench next to him. He seemed at least marginally safer than Crazy Miss Weasley.
It was quiet for a while – a nice, easy quiet, that I normally only found with Armin in front of the Ravenclaw common room fireplace. I pulled out my Transfiguration homework and tried to remember where I’d stopped the night before.
I’d just caught up with myself when, typical, someone interrupted. The portrait door swung open, and we all looked up as a dark-skinned boy my age climbed over the sill.
Oh no. Oh, shite.
He looked around exactly like I had – confused, fearful – and Weasley called out to him. “Dottie Bodt!” He jerked, then smiled and weaved through the garden of house-elves towards us.
I curled my lip at her. “How long did you think about these stupid names?”
She stuck her tongue at me, ears red, but Malfoy answered. “Too long.” I glanced at him, and he shook his head with a smile.
The new kid ran up and slid onto the empty seat next to Weasley, panting a bit. “Sorry I’m late! It’s a mite harder to sneak away when you’re a Prefect.” The collar around his shoulders had the thick black band of a Hufflepuff Prefect, the badge pinned at the clasp. Shite, now I was staring at his neck.
Weasley whistled. “Prefect and Quidditch captain? They must like you a lot, Bodt.”
He shrugged, still smiling, and looked up at me. Fuck my face. He grinned. “Hey Jean!”
“Uh.”
“You two know each other?”
He shrugged again. “You spend a few years of classes together, you pick up a few things. Right?”
“Right.” Like a huge, gigantic, troll-sized fancy for the cute Hufflepuff with the freckles and floppy hair that professors loved to pull up to the front of the class as a ‘volunteer’. “Hey, Bodt. Ow!”
Weasley frowned after kicking my shins under the table. “First names only in the Captains’ Corner.”
I snorted. “What kind of name is the Captains’ Corner?” I frowned at her. “Hey, then why’d you get to call me Little Sist-”
“No questions.” I closed my mouth, but kept scowling. Girl could kick. “I get the nickname privileges ‘cause seniority.” Horseshit. “But there will be no Malfoying, Bodting, Christianing-”
“Kirschstein-”
“Or Weasleying here. Got it?”
“Fine, whatever. But, Captains’ Corner? Really?”
“Well, we are all captains, and this is a corner.” Malfoy – Scorpius, I guess? – leant into the corner next to him. “It’s a bit silly, but it works.”
Bodt – Marco – twirled a weird piece of sharpened wood between his fingers. “All right, point taken. So, why’ve we never heard about this before? I mean, I hear pretty much everything that happens in this castle, and I’ve never heard a peep about any secret Quidditch captain meetings, like, ever.”
Both Rose and Scorpius shrugged. “That’s because no one’d ever believe it, I guess.”
I leant back against the wall behind me, stretching my legs and bumping Marco’s in the process. I jerked them away. “So, why? What’s the point?”
“No point.” Scorpius stroked the barbs of his quill. “It’s just a thing we do.”
Marco and I raised our eyebrows at each other. He smiled. “Well, it would be nice not to have to hate you.”
Rose cackled. “That’s the best part, though! We meet up here whenever we can – it’s not often, you know how tight those practice schedules can get – and make up insults about ourselves for the others to say in the corridors! It’s brilliant!”
I snorted. “So, if I said that people like to call me horse-face, then…”
“Hey Kirschstein, where’s your saddle?” Marco said, miming snapping reins. Luckily, Rose and Scorpius were laughing too hard to see anything, ‘cause from how my face felt, I’m sure it was about the color of Rose’s hair. Fuck my face. Marco winked at me – winked, the schmuck.
“I- You said my last name right.”
“Yeah, it’s not like it’s that hard.” He smiled.
“Oh. Yeah.”
Scorpius coughed the last of his laughter away. “So. Before we get too far into this – what’s off limits?”
“No Mudblood.”
Scorpius jerked a nod at Marco, whose normal smile had turned down. It looked wrong.
“No poor jokes for me,” Rose said. “Scorp knows this one-”
“Ow- Rose, why?”
“-but no cracks about the Weasleys and more children than they can afford, right?”
“Family jabs in general. Not a stellar idea,” Scorpius drawled. We all nodded.
“Now.” Rose leant forward. “Who wants to go first?”
We talked until the house-elves kicked us out by means of turning off all the lights, and we had to use our wands to pack up and say good-bye, each going our own way at the painted fruit bowl.
I only realised I hadn’t touched my homework when I got back to my dorm.
And that was the tipping point. Now I was seeing the other captains everywhere. Scorpius liked to make little scorpions appear in my hair and see how long it took me to scream, the smarmy git. Rose had this thing with thorns that I should’ve seen coming, and she’d break out into some old Muggle song about boys not wanting to play no more with you, it’s true, complete with rock band backup. They weren’t in my year, though, Merlin be praised, so I only had to deal with their brand of “good-natured” teasing at meals or breaks.
But Marco.
We’d always been aware of each other – when there are only forty kids in your year, it’s hard not to be – but we’d never really talked about anything important. Which worked just fine for me. The less I spoke to him, the less chance there was of me doing something embarrassing and making him think I’m a barmy idiot and scaring him away forever – or, worse, making him realise that I fancied him so much.
Yeah, I knew that I fancied him – I had since Longbottom had brought him up to do some exercise in Herbology first year and accidentally covered him in purple flower petals – but there was no reason on this green earth I had to act on it.
Now, though. Now, he’d been reminded that I existed, and that we had things in common, and that he could be a fucking tease in public and get away with it because it was expected. After all, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff had a rivalry at least as old as Gryffindor and Slytherin. Right?
“Hey, Kirschstein! Catch!”
I looked up from reviewing my Defense Against the Dark Arts homework just in time to catch the apple Marco threw at my head. Click-click-click… thunk. “Oi!”
He winked – his favorite thing to do, apparently. “Figured you’d want a treat.” The people behind him laughed – Sasha Blouse and Bertl Hoover, the two other Hufflepuffs in our year on their team. On his team.
“Oh, go choke on a dick.”
He planted his hands on my desk and leant in close – too fucking close. “You offering, Kirschstein?”
“Bodt, that’s enough, go sit down like a good boy.” Professor Levi, the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, said from behind The Daily Prophet, feet propped up on his desk. Marco blew me a fucking kiss before walking away. “And stop gaping like a fish, Kirschstein, or I’ll put a hook in your lip.” I snapped my jaw shut and slouched down in my chair, trying to hide from the snickers. Levi slapped his desk with his paper, and they stopped mid-titter. He stood – not that you could really tell – and called for the homework. I passed the stack of them from my row to the left and bit absentmindedly into Marco’s apple.
It was perfect, just the right mix of crisp and juicy with a tart edge. Merlin, just. Fuck him and his freckles.
Tryouts for our teams were that weekend. Mine were Sunday morning, which I hoped meant that I’d only get the truly dedicated to show up and I’d get a nice crew of hard-working, seasoned upperclassmen. Hah. Even I couldn’t kid myself like that.
Most of my sister’s team had graduated with her, leaving the only returning players as me and Mina Carolina, my Seeker. Angie’d been the Keeper – yet another reason she and Rose had gotten along like a house on fire – and the Chasers and my Beater partner had all been year mates. My own year mates were all terrible. Even Armin, as much as he liked Quidditch, couldn’t put a Quaffle through a hoop if he was planted with two feet on the ground and the hoop was the size of a classroom.
Mina and I got there first, so we found a good spot in the center of the pitch to wait. It was overcast and muggy, but it probably wouldn’t rain until that afternoon, right on Marco’s perfect little head.
“I don’t believe it.” Mina’s whisper pulled me out of cursing every one of Marco’s freckles, but she was pointing to one of the stands –
“Is that a Weasley and a Malfoy in the same stand?”
Not just a Weasley and a Malfoy, but all three of the other captains were sitting in the stand, trying not to look like they were chatting up the impending storm. Mina groaned.
“Can’t we kick them out?”
“What’d be the point?” They’d just squeeze it out of me tonight, like we had last night with Scorpius and Rose. I mounted my broom. “Be right back.”
I kicked off and flew up to their stand, already growling. When I got to them, Rose grinned at me. “Problem, Little Sister?”
“Yeah, I got a problem, and it’s called your face at my tryouts.” I bumped up against the front edge of the stand, and slumped my upper body over it, hands dangling. “This is gonna suck spawn.”
“Oh, lighten up, horse boy,” Scorpius said, patting my head. I slapped his hand away.
“You’re jinxing it! Now I’m just gonna get a pile of second-years who’ve never held a broom in their short-ass lives and I’m gonna lose every game to you schmucks and my dad’s gonna kick me out of the house as a disgrace to the Kirschstein family name – Angie’s gonna kill me-”
“Jean.” Marco’s face appeared in front of me. “Breathe.”
I did. And again. He smiled, that soft one he never showed me in public anymore. “It’ll be fine.” He held out a small brown block of something. “Sugar cube?”
I tried to whack him over the head, but he ducked. I snatched the sugar cube from his still-outstretched hand and crunched it while Rose chortled. “Stop feeding me,” I mumbled as I backed away from the stand. After a final glare at all of them, I flew back down to Mina and the few people who had shown up while I was up there.
“So?” Mina asked. I ground the fragments of the sugar cube in molars.
“I’m gonna kill them.”
“…What are you eating?”
I scowled and swallowed. “Nothing.”
Tryouts weren’t as bad as I feared, but they weren’t nearly as good as I hoped. I moaned as I stripped off my gear, sweaty skin reveling in the cold locker room air. I might have some good Chasers in the Scamander twins, and the Boot kid’d make a good Keeper after a few one-on-one training sessions…
I changed into less-awful clothes on autopilot, wanding away extra dirt in a poor excuse for a bath, and slung my broomstick across my shoulders before ducking out of the locker room. Mina’d left already, heading back to the castle for lunch and a rinse. Smart girl. I was feeling that too-light breakfast now – Marco’s sugar cube felt like decades ago.
Oh, right. Marco. Damn.
Instead of turning towards the castle, I walked along the edge of the pitch, empty for the moment. Taking the stairs to the top of the bleachers felt highly unnecessary, so I got on my broom and flew up the back of the stand the captains had been in, dropping down over the rain canopy. Rose jumped, then frowned.
“Jerkface.” Scorpius snorted.
“Now, now, Rosie, there’s no need to call people names.” She wrinkled her nose as I landed and sprawled out over three rows of benches. He raised an eyebrow at me. “All right there, mate?”
“Just go ahead and kill me now, spare yourselves the effort later.” I groaned and knocked my head back against the wood, eyes closed. “Angie’s gonna slaughter me over winter break.”
“Yeah, probably.” We went quiet, just the occasional raindrop hitting the canvas canopy and the growing shouts from the pitch.
I must’ve dozed off, because I was startled awake by one of Scorpius’s scorpions pinching my ear. “Augh, geroff-”
The scorpion vanished, and I glared at him. “You could’ve just poked me or something.”
“What, and missed the show?” He smiled with teeth, and Rose giggled. “If you want to be teased less, Jean, you shouldn’t react like you do.” He jerked his head towards the pitch. “Tryouts are starting.”
“Oh. Thanks, maybe.” I sat up properly and leant forward, watching the black and yellow-spotted crowd below divide and lift off, Marco easy to find as his voice, normally soft, rang out over the assembly. I sighed and rested my chin on the front of the stands, watching his dark head bob twenty meters below.
I was so fucked.
Bugger me being so fucked. All of Ravenclaw was so fucked.
I tugged at my fringe and fell back on the couch Armin had claimed that afternoon, groaning like I’d broken my leg. I wish I had. It’d have hurt less than watching Marco yell through the rain at his potentials, who were all bigger than mine and weren’t on shoddy school brooms and stayed on point even though it was pouring. Even Rose and Scorpius seemed intimidated by the Hufflepuffs – Hufflepuffs!
I still hadn’t bathed since my tryouts, and I knew I was sweating like a boar and smelling like an old sock. I didn’t care. Armin sighed and rested his book on the part of me that had fallen over his lap – my chest.
“That bad?”
“Worse.” I fumbled blindly for a pillow to pull under my head; Armin assisted without a word, sliding one under my grasping fingers. “I mean, our pool’s okay, I guess, but it’s not great. All the people who can actually fly are tiny little pishers who look like one good hit with a Bludger’d knock ‘em dead, and none of the upper years even showed up.”
Armin turned a page. “They hate you that much?”
“I guess so.” Some people just never forgave a bloke whose sister played favorites. “Ar, the Huff team is gonna be so stacked.”
We compared notes for a while – he’d gone in my place yesterday so I could get some actual work done, and knew how the Gryffindor and Slytherin teams might fare. As we talked and plotted, the natural light faded to gold, then grey.
“Shouldn’t you go take a bath so you can get to the kitchens in time?”
I sat up, stretching. “Yeah, I guess.” Armin didn’t even look up from his book as I yawned and stood, but he managed a wave when I grabbed my gear headed up to my dorm to get cleaned up.
My first practice was the last day of September. It was ghastly.
“It’s hopeless. I’m dead,” I complained to Scorpius late that night. It was just the two of us in the kitchens (Captains’ Corner was a dumb name, and I refused to use it). Rose had whatever Weasley business she had; Marco’d jumped in earlier, made his ‘but I have Prefect rounds’ excuse, grabbed a sandwich from the tray at our table, and jumped out again. I didn’t really mind either absence. Rose was an insatiable chatterbox, and Marco…
At least Scorpius knew how to shut up.
Now, he shrugged to my bitching. “You’ll manage. Rose’n I did, our first times.”
“Your teams probably didn’t fail as hard as mine.”
“It couldn’t have been that bad.”
“One of my Chasers went missing at the beginning of practice to chase after Snurgles or some shite and didn’t show up until sundown.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Ah.”
I doodled swirls on the edge of my training plans – fat lot of good they’d do. “Kids can’t focus.”
“Did you when you were thirteen? I know I didn’t.” I glanced up and caught the tail of a smile. “Right prat, I was.”
“Well, what else d’you expect, growing up as you did?” A pause. “Sorry. No offense.”
He shrugged, a sharp shoulder jerk. “I get it.” He poked around the remains of the sandwiches we’d been picking over for the last hour. “Dad doesn’t know about this whole thing, by the by.”
I snorted. “I bet he’d blow a gasket.” He grinned and picked up a roast beef sandwich.
“He’d probably dig out the old thumbscrews in the basement if he knew I’d been associating with a Weasley of my own free will.”
“Thumbscrews?”
“The Malfoys were always a weird lot.”
“You said it, not me.” I stretched. “Well, if he finds out, who cares? You’re almost of age. You can get the hell out of here and move on, then.”
His smile tightened. “It’s not that simple.”
“It could be.” He blinked at me. I sighed and pushed aside my training plans to worry about them tomorrow. “Say, you any good at Arithmancy?”
October wore on, and my kids slowly fumbled from ‘people on brooms at the same time’ into something like a team. The Scamander twins, who I still couldn’t tell apart, were disappointing and useless in that they only played well with a reason to care, but my third Chaser, Sue Samuels, a fourth year with a good eye and a better broom, was picking up the best ways to kick them in the arse. A heavy hand was necessary with those flyheads. My Beater partner, Holly Hardwicke, was new to Quidditch, but her Muggle roots included one of their sports that involved hitting a ball with a bat as hard as they could. If she could just figure out how to stay on her broom at the same time, she’d do just fine. Plus, she laughed at my jokes.
My Keeper, Matthew Boot, was probably the most talented of the new kids, but he was fall-shy – a bad trait in a Keeper, whose moves were built on sudden dives. He kept letting Quaffles past him that he could’ve easily blocked if he just stopped flinching. What he needed was training, but Angie was still caught in Mère’s vortex of grapes and sunshine, and was too busy writing to me about the beauty of cross-pollination to come home and give her replacement pointers. Armin was my saving grace through all this, not only keeping me on track with classes, but coming to all our practices and observing on foot, picking out flaws for me to hammer out later.
“What we need, I think,” he said as we walked back up to the castle after a muddy Wednesday practice, “is to get ourselves blooded in battle.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
He flushed. “Oh, uh, I’ve been reading too much, ah, medieval history lately.” My senses were calling bullshit, but I let it go. “I mean, you need a solid practice game. Training is all well and good, but you don’t really know how a team works until you play seven on seven.”
“Huh. Not a bad idea there, Ar.” We slipped through the main doors, propped open for the last nice bits of autumn breeze. “Let’s see what my friends downstairs have to say, shall we?”
I’d hoped that I could get Scorpius and his adequate Slytherins to do the thing with me instead of the scary Gryffindors or the terrifying Hufflepuffs, so that this wouldn’t end up as a morale killer instead of a wake-up call. Of course, my hopes were nothing in the face of Marco’s deep-rooted need to help anyone and everyone.
“A practice game? Sounds like fun!”
I forced a smile at him that Thursday evening. “Yeah, uh, my kids’ve never really played together really before, and we’re really a new team, and they could really use some, uh, seasoning.”
He laughed. “You just said ‘really’ four times.”
“Well. They really need it.”
He propped his chin on his hand, still smiling. “Well, I’d love to help, if it means we’d get an actually decent game come November.” He winked, then turned to the other two. “Unless one of your teams could use the experience, too?”
Rose grinned. “I want the experience of watching you pound Little Sister here into custard cream.” I gulped.
“Besides, if you two arrange it in public, it’d seem more like a year fight and less like a captains’ conspiracy.” Scorpius didn’t look up from his Potions essay, but he had that stupid little smirk on.
“Oh, good point, Scorp.” Marco lifted his glass of pumpkin juice and gave me A Look over its edge that turned my legs to sun-melted butter. He had to be doing this on purpose. He winked.
“Ready to face the puny little Hufflepuffs, Kirschstein? Ow!” Rose glowered.
No, not really.
I grinned. “You’re on.”
We settled on issuing the challenge the next afternoon. It was a gorgeous day – probably the last one we’d have all year – and everyone was out by the lake during lunch break, enjoying the sunshine. We didn’t pick out a way to do the do, though, deciding just to wing it when the opportunity arose. I was sitting under a tree, listening to Armin mutter about star charts, watching Marco skipping rocks out onto the lake with his friends and seeing if anyone could get past the barrier of the giant squid. I grinned, chuckling, and elbowed Armin.
“You ready for this?”
Armin looked up from his Astronomy book. I raised my wand, jerking my head in Marco’s direction. Armin raised a skeptical eyebrow. “What are you plotting, Jean?”
“Just a little practice.” I gave my wrist a sharp flick, staring at Marco’s arse (that wasn’t hard). He jerked, whipped his head around. Not forceful enough. I flicked harder.
Marco went sailing forward, landing with an ugly splash in the algae-clogged lake. Some people laughed; his friends gasped and took steps forward, but I hadn’t hit him too far. He stood up in the knee-deep water, dripping weeds and spitting water. I collapsed onto Armin, laughing as loud as possible.
Squelching footsteps drew closer. “Think that’s funny, do you, Kirschstein?”
I grinned up at him, ignoring the swoop of my stomach at his honest to God scowl. “A bit, yeah, actually.” He squeezed out his sopping robes over my bookbag. “Hey!”
“You.” He pointed at me with his index. “Me.” A jerk at his chest with a thumb. “Backup.” He gestured to his friends – teammates. “Tomorrow, four o’clock on the pitch.”
I stood, tired of getting yelled at while sitting down. “You’re on, Dottie Bodt.” I smirked my best. “I hope your broomstick can work as a mop, too.” He turned red, gaping like I’d pushed him to the bottom of the lake instead of just off the shore. It was kinda fun, being on the other side of this. I pulled a long piece of lakeweed off his head, tossing it to the side. “Mermaid got your tongue?”
He spun around and stamped away, socks still squirting water. “See you tomorrow, Bodt!” He stuck up a V-sign behind him. I threw back my head and laughed.