THE FORBIDDEN FOREST
pointed and didn’t trouble to lower their voices as they insulted
him. Slytherins, on the other hand, clapped as he walked past
them, whistling and cheering, “Thanks Potter, we owe you one!”
Only Ron stood by him.
“They’ll all forget this in a few weeks. Fred and George have lost
loads of points in all the time they’ve been here, and people still like
them.”
“They’ve never lost a hundred and fifty points in one go,
though, have they?” said Harry miserably.
“Well — no,” Ron admitted.
It was a bit late to repair the damage, but Harry swore to himself
not to meddle in things that weren’t his business from now on.
He’d had it with sneaking around and spying. He felt so ashamed
of himself that he went to Wood and offered to resign from the
Quidditch team.
“Resign?” Wood thundered. “What good’ll that do? How are we
going to get any points back if we can’t win at Quidditch?”
But even Quidditch had lost its fun. The rest of the team
wouldn’t speak to Harry during practice, and if they had to speak
about him, they called him “the Seeker.”
Hermione and Neville were suffering, too. They didn’t have as
bad a time as Harry, because they weren’t as well-known, but no-
body would speak to them, either. Hermione had stopped drawing
attention to herself in class, keeping her head down and working in
silence.
Harry was almost glad that the exams weren’t far away. All the
studying he had to do kept his mind off his misery. He, Ron, and
Hermione kept to themselves, working late into the night, trying
to remember the ingredients in complicated potions, learn charms
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