The Scars to Prove It

Fred slammed his forehead on the table with a thump. Had this not been occurring every minute for the past hour or so, it may have given Carina a fright. Instead, she calmly held in one hand the sixth year Herbology textbook Professor Sprout had lent her after she finished the fourth and fifth years’. With her other hand, she alternated between affectionately patting George and Fred’s ginger heads.

“Rina,” the latter implored. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Me either,” George moaned, although his dramatics weren’t quite as over-the-top as Fred’s. He gazed about the empty classroom with solemn eyes instead of showing his frustration physically.

“You could start with an apology,” Carina said in a bored tone, flipping the pages between pictures of Fanged Geraniums and Abyssinian Shrivelfigs.

Fred’s lifted his head slowly, his hazel eyes glared over at his friend. “You don’t say? As if we haven’t tried that eight-”

“-or eighty-“

“-times.”

“I wish we had never brought up her appearance to begin with.”

Carina sighed, a small grin spreading across her lips. “Oh, but those were mundane apologies. Those apologies were what you would give any other girl in the school. What she’s looking for is an apology worth more that Merlin’s pants.”

“Worth more than-?”

“Yes, Merlin’s pants, it’s an expression, get over it! My point it, you need to buy her flowers. Maybe a magical pet hamster that shape shifts into a pocket watch. And grovel at her feet. You laugh now, but I mean that quite literally.”

George and Fred stopped snorting and glanced at each other worriedly.

“And, yes, she will want this to be public.”

The twins groaned before picking themselves up and got ready to head out of the classroom.

“Why are you in here anyways, Rye?”

For the first time, Carina looked up from her book. “Because I wanted privacy! If you two insolent boys didn’t have that map of yours I wouldn’t have to change my hiding spot every afternoon!”

“Ah, but Rina, how do you think we found you this afternoon?”

Without hesitation, the girl hurled her textbook at the twin’s heads, and would have hit them both if they hadn’t ducked out the door so quickly. Damn their Quidditch reflexes.



“...and we are perpetually lost without having you as our friend, so please-“

“-we beg you!-“

“-forgive us?”

“And if that’s not enough for you, we have this canary whose feather’s tell time!”

“You see that ring right there? On it’s belly? The blue one is the hour, and the purple one is the minute, so it’s... 11:47 right now, and the yellow one’s are just the rest of the clock! Ingenious, right?”

“Took us forever to pull it off...”

"Chimes on the hour and everything!"

And once again, Fred knelt at Farren’s feet and raised the gift to her, keeping his eyes demurely on her feet. George was standing next to him, his eyes also on the rug underneath him. Neither of them saw Farren’s look of shock and amusement, or the glances she kept giving her sallow friend. Carina was sitting in the window sill, not letting herself laugh yet. The only sign of her delight was the glint of a smile in her pale green eyes. Everyone else in the common room was also trying to contain their snickers, but not to much avail.

“Please accept our offerings and forgive us.”

“We’re so lonesome without our friend!”

With a small grin, Farren snatched the technicolor flowers and the canary’s wire cage from the boy’s grasp and trudged upstairs with them without a word. George and Fred, with slightly bemused expressions headed over to Carina and Lee’s corner of the common room.

“Do you think she forgave us?” Fred asked, sinking into the stone wall at Carina’s feet. At this point, she couldn’t hold her laughter in any longer. Her tinkling laugh echoed off the stone walls, but the common room was already loud with other conversations once more and no one except her friends heard her.

“What’s gotten into you?” George asked, sitting next to her in the sill. “You weren’t sneaking any Firewhiskey without us, were you?”

In between giggles, Carina shook her head. After calming down enough to speak, she looked up at the three boys.

“Farren forgave you both days ago. She told me Tuesday night,” she choked out before doubling over in another laughing fit.

“So you mean to tell us...”

Carina grinned up at them mischievously. “Yes, I lied to you. It was quite worth it, too. That was the best entertainment I’ve had since Hagrid first tried to bake and lit his hut on fire.”

The boys stared at Carina for a long moment in shock before George began laughing too.

“I can’t believe it!” he cried. “We’re finally wearing off on her! She’s starting to prank, just like us.”

And with this, the other boys picked up on their contagious guffaws and the four of them couldn’t find the strength to stop laughing for quite some time.