Lee’s first few weeks at Hogwarts nearly convince him to toss his wand on the floor and just go home. There’s too much to learn and a lot of words that don’t make any sense. Muggles and Halfbloods and a bunch of other terms that make him wonder why they can’t all just be wizards instead of having to be labeled like that.

He’s used to labels, but he thought maybe this odd magical world would be different. Instead of being a ‘poor black kid’, he’s now ‘that Muggleborn Gryffindor’. It’s funny how those three words can sound almost the same when certain people speak them.

There’s also constant teasing about his hair: dreadlocks that his mum fixes for him and that he’s proud of because she tells him about symbolism and meaning with every twist of his hair. People here act like they’ve never seen a bloke with dreads, which is just strange because he sees blokes with them around his neighborhood a lot. Fortunately, he doesn’t really care because he likes them.

It’s actually his hair, in a way, that ends up changing his mind about just leaving this drafty old castle and going back to Liverpool. A month after he arrives, he finally gets tired of being ‘the brave young man’ that his mum tells him to be by not fighting back. Those two gits who are always charming his dreads to start twisting and turning in weird directions off his head and seem to love spending their lunch time torturing him with ‘Medusa hair’, as they smugly call their trick, inspire him to ignore his mum’s advice.

On this particular day, he sits at the table for lunch and waits. When the food arrives, he drinks his pumpkin juice, which tastes worse than the eggnog his Gran makes for Christmas, and covertly watches them start to eat. Lee waits until they raise their cups to take a drink, in unison like they practice just to freak people out, and then he discreetly aims his wand and murmurs a charm he found after spending hours in the library.

The cups turn to paper and pumpkin juice spills all over them. Lee can’t help the smug smile that crosses his lips at not only performing a more advanced charm properly but also at seeing them drenched in nasty smelling pumpkin juice. They look shocked and are blinking at each other with their mouths hanging up. As one, they turn to look at him and, instead of scowling or hexing him, they smile and start to laugh.

Lee stares at Fred and George for a solid minute before he laughs along with them. Maybe Hogwarts isn’t so bad after all.

End