Private message to Pansy

Harry just asked me to spread a rumour that he didn't put his own name in, and that's why he was so surprised that his name came out. So clearly it was fixed for him, and not for Cedric (like the Ravenclaws are saying it was).

He wants me to get you to help and he doesn't want anyone to know who originated the rumour (I'm pretty sure he doesn't want people to know it was us), which will call for some ingenuity. But every rumour has to have a source even if it's not the REAL source. Maybe we can say that Peeves was watching when he wrote his name? Because Peeves probably won't bother to deny it. On the other hand, will anyone believe it if Peeves is the source?

Actually, hold on, maybe we could get Peeves to repeat the rumour and then no one will know where it came from. We'd need to make it rhyme, though. I expect the twins would be the best ones to get it to Peeves.

Maybe I should ask 'everyone,' and see if they have any ideas.

I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good

So, Harry asked me and Pansy to start a rumour about him. He wants us to spread it around the school that he did NOT put his own name in the Goblet and that it was definitely fixed to spit his name out, not Cedric Diggory's. I think he thinks it might make people harass Cedric less -- I'm not sure he's right, but it's worth a try?

But he doesn't want anyone know this originated with him (or with us), he wants it to be one of those stories everyone just repeats without knowing quite where it came from. Which is harder than he thinks it is, everyone pays attention to what they heard from whom and if it's sufficiently startling they'll work their way back up the chain. ESPECIALLY in Slytherin. And of course for something like this, there's the question of how someone KNOWS -- and if Harry doesn't want people knowing it came from him, the only other way someone would know would be if they saw what he wrote down. Who could've seen it? Peeves, or one of the other ghosts, or an elf.

That got me thinking that if we could arrange for Peeves to overhear it, he might take care of it for us. Especially if we thought up a funny rhyme about it. No one can do anything about Peeves or they would have done years ago. Of course, there's no guarantee he wouldn't spread who he heard it from, but he doesn't usually.

Does anyone else have other ideas? We could just tell Morag and let her tell Padma but we'd definitely need to have a made-up trail to point back to. Also, Padma loves to spread gossip but she'll twist anything about Harry, anyway, and she's already decided it was Cedric who fixed the Goblet somehow. (Never mind that if a student at the school COULD figure out how to jigger the Goblet he'd DESERVE to be the Champion given that this is a powerful and ancient artifact that was specifically designed to resist tampering!)

I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good

Also, I meant to tell all of you about this conversation I had with Justin, the English boy from Beauxbatons. Ron got up a little card party on Monday, before the Feast, and Justin wanted to play Spite and Malice with me, so we were off in a corner and could talk without being overheard.

He wanted to talk about Sirius Black. We'd discussed him in the journals, privately, just a little, but this made both of us nervous so we'd put it off until he got here and we could talk in person. He wanted to know if Sirius was dead -- only he didn't expect me to know, precisely, so he wanted to know if people BELIEVED he was dead or if, after seeing the picture in the press and that journal entry they thought he was actually alive. I told him as clearly as I thought I could get away with that anyone clever knew perfectly well Black was alive but would never say so publicly.

And then he talked about how he thought Black was rather dashing. I mean, he was clever about it because he didn't precisely SAY this but he talked about how he was like some character from a book (a muggle book) about the French Revolution.

Anyway. Here's the thing. Justin has a secret. And it's not that he's sympathetic to Sirius Black, he was quite willing to tell me that (in a very careful sort of way -- he's clever, I don't think he'll get himself in trouble). I don't know what it is, he wouldn't tell me but he is HIDING SOMETHING.

And it's been driving me just a little bit batty trying to work out what it is. I thought maybe it was that he was a half-blood and the other Frenchies thought he was pure, and MAYBE that's it but we talked a little about blood purity and I did my best to lay down an engraved invitation to tell me if that's all it was and he didn't.

He's very chatty but he's also very good at talking about nothing at all. Which is probably just as well, actually, because whatever his secret is there are quite a few people here he'd best not share it with.

Anyway I'd meant to write about this on Monday night but after what happened with the Goblet I was a little distracted.