“So,” said Sirius. “You hexed Bertha Jorkins.”
“The biggest tattletale in school.”
“And you’re surprised you got a detention, why?”
James sighed and stabbed moodily at his potatoes. They were at dinner, and more than once his gaze had swept the Great Hall in search of Lily Evans…but she had not yet appeared. “I’m not surprised I got a detention, I’m just surprised Bertha took it all the way to Dumbledore. The Headmaster? Really? I mean — okay, I shouldn’t have hexed her, but all I did was momentarily shut her up.”
“It was practically a public service,” agreed Peter with a sympathetic grimace.
“It’s Bertha,” said Sirius. “If she had the option to go directly to the Headmaster to complain every time someone sneezed, she would. Though frankly, I’m more surprised Dumbledore was around to hear it. Your bad luck, I suppose.”
Bad luck, James couldn’t help but feel, was all he had these days, and it was bad luck indeed that though the Headmaster had been conspicuously absent from the castle for weeks on end, he just so happened to be passing through the entrance hall at precisely the moment Bertha’s tongue unstuck from the roof of her mouth. The wretched girl had barely waited the length of a swallow of spit to storm off and make her weepy complaint.
“He put a hex on me, Professor Dumbledore,” she’d whinged so loudly that anyone in the vicinity could easily overhear, “and I was only teasing him, sir, I only said I’d seen him kissing Florence behind the greenhouses last Thursday, and then he put a hex on me! Nearly choked me, he did!”