At the start of the new school year, Émilie Taylor had returned to school.
At the teachers' table during the opening feast, Pomona watched Émilie, seated at the Gryffindor table, with little appetite. She could actually ignore the atmosphere around her completely and eat with perfect composure.
While eating, everyone else more or less kept glancing toward Slughorn's former seat. It had now been taken by a "newcomer," and he was another person who could eat calmly at a time like this.
The new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor sat beside Flitwick. The two of them were engrossed in conversation and had barely eaten. Albus and Minerva raised their glasses together to celebrate Hagrid taking his place at the teachers' table as the groundskeeper. Though his seat was far toward the end, Hagrid raised his own glass in response.
In short, the opening feast and the Sorting Ceremony ended peacefully. The only exceptions were a boy named Quirrell, who fell while wearing the Sorting Hat before taking his seat in Ravenclaw, and a Metamorphmagus named Nymphadora Tonks, whose hair kept changing colors before she was sorted into Hufflepuff. Everything else was perfectly normal. There was also Phoebe, who had cut her hair over the summer, making it easy for people to tell her apart from her twin sister Joy.
No matter how alike two people were, there would always be differences. Even without traveling through space and creating the twin paradox. Though the twin who went to Proxima Centauri would theoretically be younger than the one on Earth, he would also have missed many things. When he returned to Earth, he had already become a stranger.
After washing up, Pomona lay in bed, staring blankly at the canopy of her four-poster bed.
After Snape defeated Slughorn with an exploding