How It All Goes Down
Mad-Eye Moody
- The next morning, Harry is disappointed to find that no letter has arrived from Sirius. He's starting to worry.
- The first class of the day for the Gryffindor fourth-years is Herbology with Professor Sprout.
- They're learning to collect pus from Bubotubers, which sounds completely revolting.
- The pus is used in acne medicine (handy, but still – pus).
- Next up, there's Care of Magical Creatures with Hagrid.
- Hagrid is also the Hogwarts caretaker and a good friend of Harry's since his first year at Hogwarts.
- The Gryffindors share this class with the Slytherins, which means more Malfoy.
- Hagrid's assignment is to raise a bunch of Blast-Ended Skrewts.
- These are lobstery-looking things with "stings" and "sorta sucker things on their bellies [...] ter suck blood" (13.36). They also blow up periodically.
- Malfoy asks the snide but still fair question, "Who wouldn't want pets that can burn, sting, and bite all at once?" (13.37).
- Hagrid basically tells everyone to calm down and figure out what the skrewts eat.
- Finally, lunch: Hermione stuffs herself so she can get to the library ASAP.
- Yes, Hermione is keen on her studies, but this is just the first day of school. So this is weird even for her.
- Harry and Ron go up to their Divination (a.k.a. reading the future) class taught by Professor Trelawney.
- Harry hates this class in particular because Professor Trelawney is always predicting that Harry is about to die.
- Even though she seems like an old fraud, there was "that time at the end of last term, when she had made the prediction about Voldemort rising again" (13.88).
- Even "Dumbledore himself had said that he thought that trance had been genuine" (13.88).
- Still, that one true prediction doesn't improve Harry's opinion of Divination as a class.
- At dinner, Malfoy makes fun of Ron again, this time because of a newspaper article.
- Mr. Weasley has made into the Daily Prophet a second time.
- That reporter, Rita Skeeter, criticizes Mr. Weasley for his handling of the Mad-Eye Moody incident: "Unsurprisingly, Mr. Weasley found, upon arrival at Mr. Moody's heavily guarded house, that Mr. Moody had once again raised a false alarm. Mr. Weasley [...] refused to answer Daily Prophet questions about why he had involved the Ministry in such an undignified and potentially embarrassing scene" (13.84).
- After an exchange of criticism of one another's mothers, Harry turns his back to Malfoy.
- Malfoy fires a curse at Harry's back.
- Professor Moody comes limping in, pointing his wand at Malfoy.
- He turns Malfoy into a white ferret and then starts bouncing the ferret up and down against the floor. Excellent!
- Professor McGonagall appears and asks what Professor Moody is doing.
- She's horrified to discover that this is Moody's idea of discipline.
- Professor Moody drags the restored Draco Malfoy off to talk to his Head of House, Professor Snape.
- Ron calls seeing "Draco Malfoy, the amazing bouncing ferret" (13.128) "the best moment of [his] life" (13.131).
- Mysteriously, Hermione runs off to the library again.
- Harry and Ron are really excited about Defense Against the Dark Arts with Moody tomorrow.