Harry Potter 06 - Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

twice Harry considered asking for Hermione’s help, but he did not think he could stand seeing the smug look on her face; he thought he caught it sometimes when Hermione spotted him staring at Ginny, or laughing at her jokes. And to complicate matters, he had the nagging worry that if he didn’t do it, somebody else was sure to ask Ginny out soon: he and Ron were at least agreed on the fact that she was too popular for her own good.
    All in all, the temptation to take another gulp of Felix Felicis was becoming stronger by the day, for surely this was a case for, as Hermione put it, ‘tweaking the circumstances’? The balmy days slid gently through May, and Ron seemed to be there at Harry’s shoulder every time he saw Ginny. Harry found himself longing for a stroke of luck that would somehow cause Ron to realise that nothing would make him happier than his best friend and his sister falling for each other and to leave them alone together for longer than a few seconds. There seemed no chance of either while the final Quidditch game of the season was looming; Ron wanted to talk tactics with Harry all the time and had little thought for anything else.
    Ron was not unique in this respect; interest in the Gryffindor–Ravenclaw game was running extremely high throughout the school, for the match would decide the championship, which was still wide open. If Gryffindor beat Ravenclaw by a margin of three hundred points (a tall order, and yet Harry had never known his team fly better) then they would win the championship. If they won by less than three hundred points, they would come second to Ravenclaw; if they lost by a hundred points they would be third behind Hufflepuff and if they lost by more than a hundred, they would be in fourth place and nobody, Harry thought, would ever, ever let him forget that it had been he who had captained Gryffindor to their first bottom-of-the-table defeat in two centuries.
    The run-up to this crucial match had all the usual features: members of rival houses attempting to intimidate opposing teams in the corridors; unpleasant chants about individual players being rehearsed loudly as they passed; the team members themselves either swaggering around enjoying all the attention or else dashing into bathrooms between classes to throw up. Somehow, the game had become inextricably linked in Harry’s mind with success or failure in his plans for Ginny. He could not help feeling that if they won by more than three hundred points, the scenes of euphoria and a nice loud after-match party might be just as good as a hearty swig of Felix Felicis.
    In the midst of all his preoccupations Harry had not forgotten his other ambition: finding out what Malfoy was up to in the Room of Requirement. He was still checking the Marauder’s Map and, as he was often unable to locate Malfoy on it, deduced that Malfoy was still spending plenty of time within the Room. Although Harry was losing hope that he would ever succeed in getting inside the Room, he attempted it whenever he was in the vicinity, but no matter how he reworded his request, the wall remained firmly doorless.
    A few days before the match against Ravenclaw, Harry found himself walking down to dinner alone from the common room, Ron having rushed off into a nearby bathroom to throw up yet again, and Hermione having dashed off to see Professor Vector about a mistake she thought she might have made in her last Arithmancy essay. More out of habit than anything, Harry made his usual detour along the seventh-floor corridor, checking the Marauder’s Map as he went. For a moment he could not find Malfoy anywhere, and assumed he must indeed be inside the Room of Requirement again, but then he saw Malfoy’s tiny, labelled dot standing in a boys’ bathroom on the floor below, accompanied, not by Crabbe or Goyle, but by Moaning Myrtle.
    Harry only stopped staring at this unlikely coupling when he walked right into a suit of armour. The loud crash brought him out of his reverie; hurrying from the scene lest Filch should turn up, he dashed down the marble staircase and along the passageway below. Outside the bathroom, he pressed his ear against the door. He couldn’t hear anything. He very quietly pushed the door open.
    Draco Malfoy was standing with his back to the door, his hands clutching either side of the sink, his white-blond head bowed.
    ‘Don’t,’ crooned Moaning Myrtle’s voice from one of the cubicles. ‘Don’t … tell me what’s wrong … I