Jaime has ‘history of maleficing’ at 11:45. This does not surprise her; the school is well known for sensing and accommodating the interests and proclivities of its students, and also for thinking it’s very funny.
She arrives with three of her adolescent mice tucked into her pockets, held under a weak sedative spell that nevertheless ‘suffices for mices’. The spell includes that precise turn of phrase, accompanied by four entrechats and a little spin; it had seemed cleverer when she had been nine.
She arrives first, checks the room, and sits down, left in anticipation of the arrival of death eater dropouts and wannabe ringwraiths. She flips through the textbook; it swings wildly between gruesome horror stories, thinly veiled ‘this is exactly what you should never ever do’ guides for conveniently freshman-tier spells and for the process of drawing and managing malia, thinly veiled animal husbandry guides, and long, tedious stretches of names and dates and facts and figures.
Their first assignment is a short essay on what, exactly, malia feels like, based on these three written accounts and definitely not on the firsthand experience that they don’t have, no sir, and on how this may have influenced the behavior of this one historical maleficer and this other historical maleficer.