NICHOLAS FLAMEL
“I’m going to play,” he told Ron and Hermione. “If I don’t, all
the Slytherins will think I’m just too scared to face Snape. I’ll show
them . . . it’ll really wipe the smiles off their faces if we win.”
“Just as long as we’re not wiping you off the field,” said Her-
mione.
As the match drew nearer, however, Harry became more and more
nervous, whatever he told Ron and Hermione. The rest of the team
wasn’t too calm, either. The idea of overtaking Slytherin in the
House Championship was wonderful, no one had done it for seven
years, but would they be allowed to, with such a biased referee?
Harry didn’t know whether he was imagining it or not, but he
seemed to keep running into Snape wherever he went. At times, he
even wondered whether Snape was following him, trying to catch
him on his own. Potions lessons were turning into a sort of weekly
torture, Snape was so horrible to Harry. Could Snape possibly
know they’d found out about the Sorcerer’s Stone? Harry didn’t see
how he could — yet he sometimes had the horrible feeling that
Snape could read minds.
Harry knew, when they wished him good luck outside the locker
rooms the next afternoon, that Ron and Hermione were wonder-
ing whether they’d ever see him alive again. This wasn’t what you’d
call comforting. Harry hardly heard a word of Wood’s pep talk as
he pulled on his Quidditch robes and picked up his Nimbus Two
Thousand.
Ron and Hermione, meanwhile, had found a place in the stands
next to Neville, who couldn’t understand why they looked so grim
and worried, or why they had both brought their wands to the
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