Food For Thought // Open

Mornings and Morgan were not friends. She learned early in her first few years of managing herself at Hogwarts that getting up required a lot of extra work. First, there were no late nights in the common room unless the Gryffindors were celebrating a Quidditch win, or the Harpies had just won, or it was somebody’s birthday, or it was a weekend, or really any day that ended in Y. Okay, so her first rule wasn’t so much a rule but a general guideline that Morgan ignored, luckily her rules about abiding by a proper bedtime were not the only safeguards she’d learned to put in place. Morgan had not one, not two, but four alarm clocks, each set for ten minutes following the last. If alarms going off every ten minute for 40 minutes didn’t wake her up, then one of her dormmates inevitably would, because no one else was sleeping past four bloody alarms. Finally, there was Mab. Mab was a slender black cat that Morgan had picked out from the pet shop just before her first year because she looked like a panther and meowed loudly from the large box inside the shop where she and the other kittens were on display. Loud and looked like it could kill you if it really wanted to, that spoke to Morgan on a level she didn’t understand at the time. It was a good instinct, as Morgan and Mab were partners in crime now, five years together and counting. If Morgan couldn’t be trusted to go to bed at a decent hour, and if somehow her four alarms and her dormmates couldn’t wake her, Mab would get the job done.

Standing on Morgan’s chest and yowling loudly in the witch’s face, Morgan slowly opened her eyes to the morning greeting she was all too familiar with. “Worry about your own brekkie, not mine.” Morgan groaned as she rubbed the heels of her hands into her eyes, trying to force herself awake, then rolled over to her side to be greeted with an even more unpleasant site than a mini panther screaming in your face. Set on Morgan’s pillow, lovingly as could be, was a dead mouse. Morgan shrieked and swatted the thing across the room, Mab bounding off the bed and following after her own breakfast. “Shit on a stick, Mabs. I was bloody joking!” Mab batted the dead mouse around on the floor as Morgan hopped out of bed and proceeded to strip the mattress and pillows of their coverings, making a pile of mouse-touched laundry in the middle of the floor that was sure to cause a tripping hazard for one of her dormmates, though it appeared Morgan was the last to rise today. With the dormitory to herself and a naked bed that ought to be dealt with, Morgan dressed and left the room a mess as she followed her rumbling tummy down to the Great Hall for something to eat.

She had just missed the post rush but Morgan wasn’t expecting anything today. Letters from her parents and youngest siblings had come two days ago and Morgan didn’t order the Daily Prophet. It was just as easy to nick it off someone else when they finished it, and she was really on concerned with the sports section, anyway. Plopping into an empty seat, her back to the Ravenclaw table, Morgan began shoveling food onto her plate, stuffing a piece of toast into her mouth in the process. A sudden realization slapped her hard in the face and she froze, a ladle of scrambled eggs dangling over her plate. “Oh bollocks,” she mumbled aloud, her mouth full of bits of buttery toast and jam. “Exams are starting, aren’t they?” she asked no one in particular. Had she dreamt that they’d finished already? Yes, she must have, unless Madam Chase, the school librarian, had actually interrupted her O.W.L.s to do a strip tease in the middle of the Care of Magical Creatures paddock. A girl could dream, and apparently had been doing so. Morgan groaned loudly for the second time that morning, throwing her head back dramatically as she panicked to remember all of the schooling she had acquired this year all at once. Her theatrics allowed her to spy the Ravenclaw beater sitting behind her, and with the driest sarcasm she could muster, Morgan ordered his assistance. “Wilder, fancy bashing my head in with a bludger right quick so I can skip the exams? You nearly did it at the last match anyway. How’s about a second chance, eh?” She brushed her blue hair out of her face as she awaited the answer she already knew to expect, and did not want to hear.