" Pansy?" Hermione asked beside him. "What are you doing here?"
Harry was wondering that as well. He didn't know much about Draco's little on-again off-again female follower, but what he did know he didn't like.
"I could ask you the same thing, Granger," the pug-faced Slytherin girl scornfully shot back. "At least I belong here. Potter may look at least half-and-half now," Pansy said giving him a brief glance, "but you might as well carry a sign saying 'I'm a muggle.' But if you must know," the girl said self-importantly, "I'm here to see Draco."
"Well don't let us keep you," Harry said, eager to move the rude girl on her way.
"Yes, don't you have a bathroom you should be skulking in?" Hermione said curiously.
Pansy gave a most Draco-like smirk in response before heading for the stairs; once she was gone he turned to Hermione.
"What was the bathroom comment about?" he asked.
"She and some of her friends paid me a visit last year after we had become friends," she replied with a perturbed look on her face. "She didn't think I was worthy of the honor."
"You're plenty worthy," Harry said bracingly. "If anything, I'm the one who's lacking."
"You jumped on a troll for me," she said as if she really shouldn't have to keep reminding him.
"Yeah, but you set Snape on fire," he reminded her.
Hermione already had her mouth open for another rebuttal but in the end closed it with a bit of a pleased smile.
"That's true," she said.
It was certainly something he'd never do. No matter how tempting it was to burn Snape alive, Madam Pomfrey would only fix him up and he'd come back for revenge.
"Why didn't you ever say anything about Pansy?"
"And tell everyone I was jumped by a troll twice in the same bathroom? I wasn't going to give them the satisfaction," Hermione ended with the stuffy way she had when she wanted to imply that something didn't bother her.
"I wonder what she's here to see Draco for," he said, wondering what the odds were of avoiding the blond ponce and if it had anything to do with Dobby's warning.
"I don't want to know," she said, holding her hands out in front of her as if to ward off something unpleasant. It didn't seem to help as she suddenly shut her eyes and shook her head.
Harry chuckled; apparently she was of two minds when it came to snakes. Speaking like Slytherin might be fine in her book but speaking to a Slytherin was too horrifying to think about. Perhaps to put all that behind her, she made her way over to the barman to ask where to find Professor McGonagall.
"I'd say you'd meet her right about there," the gap-toothed man said as he pointed to the base of the stairs. His finger then flicked upwards to point at the teacher in question at the top of them, wearing her typical tartan.
"Ah, there you are, Mister Potter," the transfiguration professor said as she made her way downstairs. True to the barman's estimate they met at the bottom. "Miss Granger, I wasn't expecting to see you here," the woman said with a look saying the surprise was a nice one.
"We were doing our shopping together and Harry invited me along," Hermione said pleasantly as she took his arm.
While normally her doing that was nice, this time it made him feel like he was doing something he shouldn't be. Then again, McGonagall had the uncanny ability to make you remember everything you had ever done wrong in the first place so it could just be that. The other possibility was how it was already getting started by greatly overstating his role in things.
"That's better than following him into detention," McGonagall replied with a look down at them which silently hoped there wouldn't be a repeat of last year when they had been caught out of bed after slipping Hagrid's newest pet, Norbert the Norwegian Ridgeback, out of Hogwarts in the dead of night. Harry was still glad she didn't know the real reason for it or she'd roast them both alive, summer break or not.
"There should be plenty of food to go around," McGonagall continued, "though with so many teenage boys it's hard to say if there'll be anything left by the time we get there," she said with a look at Harry as if he was suddenly going to start eating as much as three people combined. "Some of the older students and graduates couldn't attend, but almost everyone else is here."
"How many people are there?" Harry asked.
"Some of the younger ones have parents with them," McGonagall replied "but if you're asking about the Hopefuls program as a whole, there are four graduates, fourteen current students, and three prospective students - including Miss Weasley, who couldn't attend."
Harry hadn't known Ginny had been invited let alone been kept home because he had asked Molly to try to keep her away from him. It had seemed a good idea at the time when all she was doing was sulking and constantly staring at him but now it seemed a really big price to pay just for her to go to school.
Who knows, if she had come she might've actually made some friends and forgotten about him, even if it meant her being in the same room as Hermione for a while. That self-disgusted squirmy feeling in his stomach told him he'd have to find some way to make it up to her, without getting her hopes up and stringing her along. But how was he even supposed to do that?
Hermione had been thinking of something else entirely though. "Harry's been paying for twenty-one people to go to Hogwarts?" Perhaps sensing a bad turn in the conversation, McGonagall had given her wand a flick before Hermione was even halfway through her appalled realization.
Before their professor could respond, something clicked in his mind.
"The transfer to the Hopefuls we stopped was for twenty-one years of tuition," Harry remembered. "My rent at the Burrow is covering Ginny's for this year, but what are the rest of them going to do?"
"That's still too much, Harry," Hermione interjected. "You don't have to pay for people who've already graduated, so that transfer was for way more than what they'd need - unless…" her eyes popped and she stopped, staring at McGonagall as if she couldn't believe what her brain was telling her.
McGonagall sighed and seemed to gather herself for a moment.