A Christmas Ball Partner

Once December began, Clara felt as though time had been put under a speeding charm.

Three professors had filled her timetable to bursting. McGonagall pushed her to her limits with Transfiguration on Monday and Friday mornings, Flitwick had her practice against spells cast from all sorts of tricky angles on Wednesday mornings, and Snape appeared in the dungeons without fail on three afternoons, chasing her around the room with increasingly fast Nonverbal Spells. The joint training on Tuesdays and Thursdays drained her stamina to unprecedented levels.

But a side effect of this intense training was that Clara began showing up in the common room looking as though she had been "trampled by a Troll"-her hair a mess, her robes dusty, and sometimes bruises on her arms from when her Shield Charm had shattered. Rowle kept quiet about it for about two weeks before finally exploding one Friday evening.

Clara had just returned from the Room of Requirement that evening, drenched in sweat, her hair a bird's nest and a small patch of her robe cuff scorched by a spell. She had barely stepped into the common room when Rowle pulled her onto the sofa in front of the fireplace. She folded her arms across her chest, a smile on her face that sent a chill down Clara's spine.

"Sit," Rowle said.

Clara sat down and carefully placed her wand on the coffee table.

"Talk."

"About what?"

"Clara Albert," Rowle said, enunciating every syllable of her full name. "Every day when you come back to the common room, you look like you've been trampled by a Troll. You've started spacing out at meals, and sometimes you give your Pumpkin Juice this mysterious smile." She leaned forward, narrowed her eyes, and lowered her voice. "And all of this started after you met Harry Potter at the Three Broomsticks. Now the two of you are always going in and out of the dining hall together. So, my dear Lyla, you'd better give me a reasonable explanation in the next thirty seconds."

Clara opened her mouth, her mind racing.

She had been wondering how to explain the special training, only to find that her friend was focused on her and Harry instead. She hardly knew whether to laugh or cry.

"Potter and I are taking classes together."

Rowle blinked.

"Yes."

"Just the two of you?"

"Professor Flitwick is there too. And Professor McGonagall. Professor Snape comes sometimes."

Snape really didn't come "every time"; it was just that Clara lost a layer of skin every time he did come.

Rowle narrowed her eyes and stared at her, plainly not entirely convinced by the answer. She fell silent for a moment, then slowly leaned closer at an intimidating pace until her nose was almost touching Clara's. "Have you talked to him much, then?"

"We train every day. Of course we talk-"

"Not about training!" Rowle nearly sprang off the sofa. Realizing her voice was too loud, she quickly lowered it to an exasperated whisper. "Merlin's beard, Lyla, you two are together all the time now! Do you know how many people at this school can't even get a chance to say one word to Harry Potter? And look at you—not only have you spoken to him, you train with him, get hit by spells with him, and get chased down by Snape with him!"

"Getting chased down by Snape isn't a good thing, Rowle."

Clara buried her face in her hands and let out a muffled laugh. She raised her head and was just about to continue defending herself when footsteps came from the entrance passage. Several members of the Hufflepuff Quidditch Team filed in, with Cedric Diggory at their head. He was wearing his training clothes, his hair a little windblown, with a towel draped over his shoulder. He had probably just come back from the pitch; there was still a thin sheen of sweat on his temples. His steps faltered when he saw Clara, and then he gave her that gentle smile she knew so well.

"Miss Albert." He nodded to her, then his gaze fell on her scorched cuff and the grains of sand she hadn't yet removed from her hair. His smile deepened. "You look like you've just been through a tough battle."

"More or less," Clara said. She was already too tired to care much about her appearance. "I did some physical training."

Cedric looked as though he understood. He pointed at her scorched cuff. "The healing ointment from the Hospital Wing works well. You could try it."

"It's just a scrape. Nothing serious," Clara said.

"Good." Cedric smiled, then a teammate called him away. Clara watched him disappear down the passage to the boys' dormitory.

Since that time in the Owlery, she and Cedric had been seeing a little more of each other. They occasionally met in the corridors, and he would greet her.

Clara looked away and found Rowle staring at her with an inscrutable expression. Rowle's gaze bounced twice between Clara and the passage where Cedric had disappeared. Then she raised one eyebrow, picked up the Pumpkin Juice on the coffee table, which had gone cold, and took a sip. In the tone of someone pronouncing a verdict, she said, "All right. I take back what I said."

"?" Her friend's change of opinion was so sudden that Clara couldn't quite keep up.

"Go to bed, Lyla. You need your rest." Rowle stood up, patted Clara on the shoulder, and headed toward the girls' dormitory. After a few steps, she looked back and added, "I think there was a lot more in the way Cedric looked at you just now than there used to be."

On the second Thursday of December, Harry called her back after training.

McGonagall and Flitwick had already left, while Snape had vanished without a trace the second training ended, as if there were something in the room he couldn't stand. Only Clara and Harry remained in the Room of Requirement, with traces of their maneuvering practice still on the fine sand floor.

Harry looked more uneasy than usual. He had taken off his glasses and was absentmindedly wiping the lenses with the hem of his robes. Then he put them back on, took a deep breath, and seemed to muster a great deal of courage before speaking.

"Clara, can I ask you something?"

"What is it?"

"The Yule Ball-have you found a partner?"

Clara hadn't expected him to ask that. She shook her head. "No."

Clara slipped her wand back into her pocket. "Actually, I was going to ask Diggory, but he asked Cho Chang."

Harry raised an eyebrow when he heard Cedric's name, then gave a wry smile. "We're really in the same boat. I asked Cho Chang, and she turned me down."

"The Champions have to open the ball with a partner. I've asked loads of people, but they either already had partners or ran away screaming." He paused, looking at her with pleading green eyes. "Can I ask you? We can just go as friends, all right?"

Clara looked at how helpless and awkward he was and felt like laughing a little.

"Sure." She thought that if it wasn't Cedric, anyone would do, really, and she could help a friend out of a difficult spot at the same time. "Although I don't know many dances."

Harry was visibly relieved, and a smile returned to his face. "That's all right. We can stand to the side and eat after the opening dance anyway."

When Clara returned to the common room, Rowle was sitting at a table, holding a steaming cup of barley tea. She saw Clara emerge from the passage and was about to speak, but before she could get a word out, Clara's next sentence stopped her.

"Potter asked me to be his partner at the Yule Ball. I said yes."

The barley tea sprayed out in a sparkling arc in the firelight. Rowle coughed violently several times and wiped her chin with the back of her hand, her voice cracking as though someone had cast a voice-changing charm on her. "Say that again?"

"I said, Harry asked me to be his partner at the Yule Ball. He couldn't find anyone, and neither could I."

"Oh, Merlin's Chocolate Frogs! How can you say that so calmly? That's Harry Potter!"

"We're just going as friends..."

"Don't interrupt me!" Rowle took a deep breath and gripped Clara's shoulders with both hands. "Lyla, do you know what this means?"

"It means I need to dance the opening dance at the ball."

"No." Rowle's gaze turned deadly serious. "It means we need to style you."

Before Clara could speak, Rowle pulled her up from the sofa and dragged her all the way into the girls' dormitory.

For the next hour, Clara sat on the edge of the bed and watched Rowle carefully unfold the silver-white, one-shouldered, satin-finish dress robes and spread them out on the bed. Then she rummaged through a jewelry box, found a pair of delicate pearl studs, and held them up to Clara's ears, nodding in satisfaction. Next she took out a fine silver chain and held it up against Clara's collarbone a few times, before finding another with a small moon pendant and hanging that one in the most prominent spot on the jewelry stand, finally satisfied.

She studied Clara's hair for quite a while, curling it up with her wand and letting it down again. In the end, she drew a sketch of a hairstyle on parchment that Clara couldn't make heads or tails of.

She also enlisted Cersei Bones to help. The two stood in front of Clara, whispering together for quite a while, occasionally glancing at her before resuming their discussion. Clara vaguely caught phrases like "light makeup will do," "don't use lipstick that's too red, it doesn't suit her," and "tidy up her eyebrows a little," and felt like an exhibit being carefully arranged by curators.

"Rowle," Clara finally spoke up when Rowle brought out a third pair of shoes with a different heel height for her to try on, "I'm just going to a dance. Not attending the Minister for Magic's inauguration."

Rowle looked up and shook her head, still holding a pair of silver low heels and a pair of black kitten heels.

"You," she said, pointing a heel at Clara, "as Harry Potter's partner, will be dancing the opening dance with a Champion at the Yule Ball. Everyone will be watching you then, and I absolutely won't let you embarrass yourself."

Seeing how excited her friend was, Clara finally gave in. She picked up the silver low heels and began trying them on under Rowle's satisfied gaze.