One Pair of Hands PV

The classroom was empty, well, nowhere really felt empty here, Rowan had learned. Lunchtime meant the Great Hall, which meant everyone else was stuffing their faces while Rowan was here, in the stale silence of History of Magic, trying to do something she was planning on doing from the very first minute of attending this class. The room smelled of old parchment and dust and something faintly like despair, appropriate, given the subject. Oh, she hated this class, hated it with a passion that surprised even her, given how little she cared about most things. It wasn't just the boredom, though the boredom was considerable, hours of listening to a Professor go on about stuff she didn’t care about in the least for hours in a voice that could put a caffeine addict to sleep. It was the pointlessness of it. The way the past was presented as a done deal, a closed book, something to be memorized and recited and never questioned. Rowan had spent her whole life questioning things, she wasn't about to stop now.

So she had bought a dungball. From Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, in Diagon Alley, a little souvenir from one of her trips. She had paid with coins she'd saved from the school’s small allowances, and she had slipped the dungball into a tightly wrapped scarf around her waist, and she had walked out without looking back. It was a good dungball. Professional. Not like the sad, homemade attempts she'd been experimenting with back in her dorm, the ones that smelled funny, funny like a really sketchy drug funny, not funny like a stinky smelly ball. Was I making drugs instead of dungballs?

The ladder was propped against the wall beneath the ventilation shaft. It was old and wobbly and probably not up to any safety codes, but it was the only ladder she could find, and she had dragged it all the way from the third-floor storage closet without anyone noticing. That was the problem with pranks, she was discovering. The planning was tedious, the execution was lonely. She climbed the first few rungs, her knee knocking against the wood, her hands gripping the sides, and she paused. The ladder wobbled, so she steadied herself, tucking her brown hair behind her ear. The ladder wobbled again.

She looked down at the empty classroom, the empty desks and the empty floor where no one was standing, where no one was holding the ladder steady, where no one was watching her fail or succeed or fall.

I wish someone was here, she thought. Not to help or talk, just to hold the ladder. Just to be at the bottom, present, existing, so that the climb felt less like she was trying to get a concussion and go to the hospital but mostly less like something she was doing alone.