Quidditch World Cup

Clara kept feeling that the scenes around her were somehow unreal.

It seemed she had missed something, but she couldn't remember what.

Rowle practically dragged her out of bed.

"Clara!!! If you don't get up now!!! We're going to miss the Portkey!!!"

Her feet had barely touched the floor when Rowle hurled a coat straight at her face. Clara caught it and dizzily pulled it on as Rowle dragged her toward the fireplace. She didn't even have time to check whether she'd put her jumper on backward.

"My dad said the Portkey activates at five o'clock, and it won't wait a single second!" Rowle spoke even faster than she dragged the trunk. "Do you know what that means? It means that if we're late, we'll have to stay home and listen to that loudmouth Ludo Bagman yelling his head off on the radio instead of seeing the Ireland Team's Seeker with our own eyes-"

The green flames of the Floo Powder swallowed the rest of Rowle's words.

When Clara tumbled out of the fireplace, she nearly knocked over a flowerpot. She staggered a couple of steps before Rowle caught her, and the two of them stood swaying in an unfamiliar kitchen. It was small but warm enough to make her drowsy. Several pots of different sizes hung on the walls, and beside the sink was a stack of plates that seemed to be scrubbing one another.

Clara stared for a moment before it sank in—this wasn't the Collinses' house.

"This is the Weasleys' house. They live close to the nearest Portkey, and my dad's already here." Seeing Clara's blank expression, Rowle cleared up her confusion.

"Good morning, dears!" A plump, red-haired woman turned from the stove, directing a knife that was spreading butter with her wand. Her smile was as warm as a freshly baked pie. "You're here early. Arthur's still upstairs looking for his socks."

"Good morning, Mrs. Weasley!" Rowle greeted her energetically, clearly well accustomed to travelling by Floo. "My dad said he'd come here first and wait for us. Has he arrived?"

"Only a few minutes ago. He's chatting with Arthur in the sitting room." Mrs. Weasley pointed to a crooked door. "Go on through. The Portkey's in that old boot over there, and it won't activate for a few more minutes. Oh, have you had breakfast? I've fried some bacon-"

"Thank you, Mrs. Weasley! I think Lyla needs some!" Rowle was already charging out, dragging her trunk.

Clara thanked Mrs. Weasley, then followed her through the door into the Weasleys' crowded, warm sitting room.

Every inch of space was crammed with things—a Magic Radio that knitted jumpers, a clock showing the locations of family members, books stacked in crooked piles—but strangely, the clutter wasn't irritating. Instead, it gave her a sense of security, as though she were wrapped up in all that fullness. That sense of security was unfamiliar to Clara. She had grown up in a Muggle home. Her mum and dad were ordinary people, and their house was neat and orderly, utterly unlike this one.

But she didn't envy those who had grown up in magical families. Though her mum and dad couldn't do magic, they had never made her feel any different from anyone else. On the day her Hogwarts acceptance letter arrived, her mum had cried with excitement, while her dad had spent an entire week investigating how the letter had been delivered, finally concluding that the owl must have been a trained carrier pigeon. They didn't understand Quidditch or quite grasp what the Ministry of Magic did, but every holiday they listened attentively as she told them about everything that had happened at school.

"Clara!" A familiar voice pulled her back to the present.

Mr Collins rose from a sofa in the corner of the sitting room that was nearly falling apart and waved to them. He was a tall, thin man with messy hair, and his smile was exactly like Rowle's. Standing together, father and daughter looked as though they had been cast from the same mould, only in different sizes.

"Dad!" Rowle threw her arms around him in a huge hug. "We're not late, are we?"

"Almost," Mr Collins said, ruffling his daughter's hair and giving Clara a gentle smile. "Good morning, Clara. How are your parents?"

"They're both very well, thank you, Mr Collins," Clara answered softly. "Dad asked me to tell you that he finally figured out the rules of Quidditch last week. He said it's 'rugby plus football plus cricket in the air,' and he likes it a lot."

Mr Collins burst out laughing, the sound echoing through the crowded sitting room. "That's a pretty accurate description! I'll have to have a proper chat with your dad sometime. Last time, he said he wanted to see my copy of Quidditch Through the Ages."

"Talking about Muggle rugby?" Mr. Weasley hurried down the stairs, one hand still busy tying his tie, an odd sock clutched in the other. "Aiden, the rules of that Muggle rugby you told me about are really too complicated. I spent two months studying them and still couldn't understand what all those scrums were about. I even tried writing a short paper on it, but it was banned from circulation within the Ministry of Magic."

"I think Clara could explain it to you. Her dad knows quite a lot about it. You two could meet sometime."

Clara couldn't help the smile that tugged at her lips. She smiled and greeted Mr. Weasley. She liked him very much; whenever the red-haired wizard talked about Muggle things, his eyes lit up with an almost childlike excitement. He never considered Muggle things "inferior" or "ridiculous." He genuinely thought inventions that didn't need magic were amazing.

Unlike some people.

Clara remembered the tone some students from Pure-blood families used when they spoke of Muggles at school, the expressions mixing contempt and pity, as though Muggles were a group of clumsy creatures who needed to be pitied. Whenever she heard things like that, she quietly walked away without arguing, though she felt uncomfortable inside. Her mum and dad weren't people who needed pity. They simply lived a different way.

"Is everyone here?" Mrs. Weasley poked her head out of the kitchen, still holding a spatula. "Fred, George, stop stuffing those exploding sweets into Ron's hood! I saw that!"

"But Mum," a voice came from the turn in the stairs, "we're conducting a scientific experiment-"

"-and we need a volunteer test subject."

"Ron volunteered just now."

"I did not volunteer!" another red-haired boy shouted furiously, his voice half muffled by a jumper.

Clara laughed at the Weasley-style chaos, and just then, two more people came down the stairs.

One of the boys wore round glasses and had untidy black hair sticking up, with a lightning-shaped scar just visible on his forehead. He was probably Harry Potter. The girl following him had a mass of bushy brown curls and a pair of extremely intelligent eyes. She already had a book clutched in her hand, as though ready to read a few pages while she waited. That had to be Hermione Granger.

Clara didn't know them well; they had only run into one another a few times at school. Harry smiled shyly at her, while Hermione gave her a serious "good morning," then was immediately drawn into a discussion with Rowle and Ginny about which Seeker was better, the Ireland Team's or the Bulgarian Team's.

Mr. Weasley finally found his other sock, and Mrs. Weasley pressed a last batch of bacon sandwiches into everyone's hands "for the journey." Then the large party finally tumbled out of the Burrow's front door. The morning light was just beginning to dispel the mist, and the whole hillside lay beneath a grey-blue, half-dreaming light.

The air was cold enough to make them shiver, and the grass was covered in dew. Up ahead, the twins were already firing some kind of prank spell that looked like slugs at each other with their wands.

"We're going to Stoatshead Hill," Mr. Weasley said from the front of the group, his excitement unmistakable. "The Portkey's there. Diggory said they'd meet us halfway. They don't live far from here."

When Clara heard the name "Diggory," she stumbled. Rowle glanced back at her, and Clara immediately put on an expression that said, "I stepped on a stone." Rowle mouthed back, "Who'd believe that?"

Diggory? Cedric Diggory? Was he going too?

His name had been a regular visitor to her scrap paper since her first year. She and Cedric were both in Hufflepuff. He was a year ahead of her, so, statistically speaking, their paths should have crossed often enough at school. But the truth was quite the opposite.

He was the most dazzling person in Hufflepuff—a Prefect and Quidditch captain, with a halo that seemed to follow him everywhere. Everyone knew him, and everyone liked him. She, on the other hand, was used to reading in a corner of the common room, used to being a quiet observer in a crowd, used to going unnoticed.

Their actual interactions probably amounted to no more than ten: nods of greeting as they passed in the corridor, the time he had helped pick up a quill she'd dropped in the common room, and another time in the library when he had come over and asked whether the seat beside her was taken—and that was all. Every time, she had acted perfectly normal, so normal that when she told Rowle she liked Cedric, Rowle's mouth had fallen open in an O.

She had spent three whole years admitting to herself that she liked him, then all of her fourth year convincing herself that it was just a crush that would come to nothing. Having a crush on someone like Cedric Diggory was probably much like having a crush on a star: she could look up and see him, but she could never truly touch him. That was fine. It was safe, and it wouldn't disturb anyone.

The path up the hill wasn't particularly steep, but mist curled among the trees, making every step uncertain. The roots of old trees jutted from the ground like raised veins on the earth. Clara walked in the rear half of the group, breathing the crisp morning air and tucking her chin into her coat collar as she tried not to let her thoughts run wild.

It's all right. We'll just happen to run into each other. The Diggorys and the Weasleys already know each other, so it's perfectly normal to meet on an occasion like this. I just need to say hello and smile normally. We won't have any more to say to each other, and I won't stammer.

"We're here, we're here!" Mr. Weasley called from the front. "Boys and girls, start looking!"