The next day, the mood at the Slytherin table turned downright eerie.
Every little snake in the room had their eyes locked on the same spot. Some whispered behind their hands, others just watched in silence as two supposed "mortal enemies" went about their breakfast.
Kate did her best to ignore the stares. She'd barely taken a bite of crusty bread when the person across from her obligingly pushed over a glass of milk.
She looked up with a strange expression and met Delar's pale gray eyes, brimming with a smile. Now she couldn't take the glass, and she couldn't refuse it either.
What was with this one all of a sudden? Had getting her gender exposed come with a personality change as a side effect?
Kate grumbled inwardly, took a sip of the pumpkin juice beside her plate, and stood up in a hurry, ready to flee this den of gossip.
"Kate!"
Delar called her name out of nowhere.
A flicker of foreboding crossed Kate's mind. She didn't dare look back and just quickened her steps out of the Great Hall.
Left behind, Delar glanced at the neatly cut pieces of meat on her plate, shook her head in disappointment, and slid the plate across to Pansy.
Pansy, now serving as a garbage bin: …
She really wanted to dump it all out.
But one look at Delar's menacingly kind smile, and she could only pretend nothing was happening, spear a piece of meat, and swallow it down in silence.
So full…
Having finally escaped the Great Hall, Kate spotted Cho Chang chatting with a classmate by the door. She ducked her head and dragged Cho off by the arm.
"…Kate?"
Cho found herself hauled into the corridor for no reason she could see. She hadn't even worked out why Kate was in such a hurry when she overheard some students in other house robes walking past, gossiping in low voices.
"Isn't that Shafiq? I heard Malfoy's chasing her! Loads of Slytherins saw the whole thing in the Common Room yesterday, so it can't be fake!"
"Aren't those two supposed to be sworn enemies? How could they…"
"Heh, maybe it was all just flirting disguised as fighting."
Once the students had gone, Cho turned back, still half in disbelief, and caught Kate's sleeve. "What on earth is going on? You and Malfoy…"
The moment Kate heard Cho ask the same thing, she felt her head about to explode. "No! Nothing!"
Cho more or less understood the situation at once. Still, in all the time they'd known each other, this was the first time she'd seen Kate bristle like this, and it was unbearably cute.
With a bit of selfish intent, she reached out and ruffled Kate's hair. "If you don't like him, just turn him down. No need to get tangled up with him."
That wasn't the point…
Kate sighed miserably. "Do you think it's too late to cast a Memory Charm on the entire school?"
Cho actually gave it serious thought. "If he really means to pursue you, wiping memories a few times won't do any good."
True. Every kind of novel wrote it that way: the heroine loses her memory, falls for the male lead all over again, and then it's one stomach-churning plot after another.
But she wasn't the male lead, and Delar wasn't the heroine.
Kate covered her face with a pained groan and let out a heavy sigh. So she had no choice but to refuse flatly?
Setting aside every outside factor, she actually liked Delar quite a bit. The girl was a little prickly, sure, but she was also rather adorable.
But… she was just too young.
A fourteen-year-old girl falling for her could be called a first crush, but Kate's soul was an adult's. How could she lay a hand on a child?
Yet she truly did consider Delar a friend. Otherwise she wouldn't be agonizing like this; she'd have turned her down cleanly, the way she had Amber back in second year.
Kate knew perfectly well that this sort of thing was better dealt with sooner than later. If she dragged it out, dithering and fussing, it would really look like she was stringing the girl along.
How to refuse without hurting the young lady's pride—that was the problem.
"Come to think of it, I still don't know what kind of person you like, Kate," Cho's voice came from beside her.
Kate had no leads at all right now, so the moment Cho threw out a new topic, she eagerly grabbed it to change the subject. "I like people older than me," she said without a second thought.
At the very least, older than this body she was in now. Just to even things out a little.
She turned her head and noticed Cho's expression looked a bit odd. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing." Cho's lips curved, her smile even brighter than usual. "I just remembered I'm four months older than you."
"Of course you are," Kate nodded, as if it were obvious. "I was born in December. There aren't many people born in the same year who are younger than me."
Cho raised an eyebrow slightly and leaned in closer, lowering her voice. "Then… besides age?"
"Hmm, I really haven't thought about it." Kate stroked her chin and stared thoughtfully at the corridor's wall bricks. "I don't have many requirements, really. If they catch my eye and I like them, that's enough."
That kind of standard was the most arbitrary of all. Nobody knew what sort of person they'd like until they met the one they truly did.
Even Kate herself had, in a short span of time, felt her heart flutter for two friends of very different types and personalities.
It was just that she knew neither Cho nor Hermione could ever be hers. The original works had marked both of them as thoroughly straight.
So thinking about it now and then was fine. Barging in to pester them would just be rude.
She didn't have Delar's nerve, launching an offensive without so much as a word of warning, without even considering whether she could still be friends if it failed.
For a Slytherin, Delar could be so reckless that even Gryffindors would be put to shame.
"Honestly, I'm a little envious that one got to be that reckless," Kate murmured without thinking.
If it were her, she'd have been bound hand and foot by all sorts of worries and stuck waiting in place, watching the person she liked end up in someone else's arms.
"What did you say?" Cho hadn't caught her murmur and leaned in even closer.
Kate snapped back to herself and collided head-on with Cho's searching gaze. She jumped back several steps. "N-nothing!"
Damn it, why was her heart suddenly racing again?
Guiltily, she looked away and returned to the original topic. "I'll sort this out myself, so you don't need to worry."
"I'm not worried," Cho said, her eyes smiling, and she turned Kate around a little. "But it looks like someone's pretty furious right now. Look."
Following her gaze, Kate saw it: a brown-haired little lion who had stopped the students from earlier and was growing darker in the face with every word she heard.
Cho kept lightly pouring oil on the fire. "I'm guessing you haven't had the chance to tell Hermione about this yet today, right?"
"Uh…" Kate leaned back in a tactical retreat, a awkward smile stretching across her face. "I forgot."
"Good luck," Cho said sincerely, patting her on the shoulder.
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