So... does that make you my... senior?
Lockhart picked up a quill and wrote those words on the page.
Yes. I enrolled in 1938. By that reckoning, I really am your senior.
Lockhart scratched his nose with the quill feather. He still asked the question Dumbledore had never clearly answered for him, the one he had even tried to make him overlook with a Memory Charm and a Confundus Charm.
But for all Dumbledore's calculations, he had failed to account for the fact that Lockhart was not entirely useless. In some ways, he was excessively clever.
Otherwise, he would not have plagiarized others' exploits in the wizarding world for so many years without being... well, caught only once.
In short, after leaving the Headmaster's Office and realizing he had been hit with a Confundus Charm, he immediately cast Obliviate on himself, making his brain forget the effects the Confundus Charm had caused. This was also an advanced application of the Memory Charm.
But it had one drawback: it made him recall the terror of being dominated by Hogwarts campus legends.
So much so that he immediately wrote to this senior from a distant time: I heard there is a legend at Hogwarts that Defense Against the Dark Arts professors clash with Alchemy Professors. Is that true? By the end of the term, can only one of the two professors survive safely?
Why would you think that?
Because I am the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, and from the time I was a student until now, I have never seen a Defense Against the Dark Arts professor serve for two consecutive years... And... and last year's Defense Against the Dark Arts professor is already dead. He died before he even took the final exam.
Tom Riddle in the book was