Hogwarts School - Summer

The cigarette butt bounced off her chest and onto the ground. She wasn't sure what was more infuriating: that, or his most recent insult.

"That's—" not true, she almost said, but he was already pushing his was inside the library before she could get another word in. And perhaps, this was better, for it allowed her to pretend that she'd left it at That's because he'd cut her off, not because he was right and she really didn't have any friends (or at least, no more than a handful).

Regardless of whether his comments were starting to hit painfully close to home, Athanasia Valenti was not one to walk away from an argument, especially not one she started. Shortly after he'd disappeared behind the large doors, she found herself pushing through them as well. It only took but a moment to locate him and take up the same brisk walk by his side.

"Why Peiss picked you as her TA is beyond me." Her voice was quieter now, out of respect for the others working in the library, though it was no less demanding. "I'm pretty sure you're supposed to help the students, not insult them."

It was rare to find people at UPenn (at any Ivy League school, really) that didn't care about being right. The concept was so foreign to her—if it wasn't already obvious, Athanasia Valenti cared deeply about being right—that for a moment, all power of speech left her. She stared at him, silent, as her eyes narrowed slightly and her mouth shifted from a grin to a small, though distinguishable, frown.

Thankfully, for the sake of her appearance, his next comment was enough to push her back into the swing of discussion.

"Obviously, I don't have one. If I did, I wouldn't be an undergraduate." She resisted the urge to roll her eyes at him, for while she was certain she could get away with telling a TA he was wrong—if anything, it showed she had a vast understanding and passion for the subject material—she was not so sure about her ability to get away with former. "And I'm never going to learn enough to get one if you keep providing us with wrong information."

The comment he'd made about Frances Marion's films had been about as irrelevant to the class lecture as she was sure she (and their entire, very one-sided, conversation) was to him. Still, she persisted.

"And also, don't you think that since she wrote over 300 plays, she deserves more than—hey!" She noticed that he had one hand on the library door—obviously, trying to ditch her—at about the same time she noticed the cigarette in the other. Her exclamation was both in protest of the attempt to cut their conversation short and the blatant breaking of the rules.

"You can't smoke in a library." The Duh and dramatic roll of her eyes, though neither were actually expressed, were conveyed perfectly through the tone of her voice.

It was by pure accident—and, she would insist, a massive stroke of luck—that she caught sight of him, Bastién Delacroix, walking in the opposite direction she was headed and looking entirely unapproachable. He was the TA for the Gender History and American Film class that she'd taken partly on a whim, partly because it interested her, and partly because her roommate had raved non-stop about it all of last spring.

More importantly, though, he was wrong.

A few moments later, once she'd caught up to him, she told him so. “You were wrong today, you know.” She fell into step beside him, struggling a bit to match his strides at first, but eventually managing to take up an easy, albeit quick, rhythm. “Frances Marion won an Academy Award for Best Writing, not one for Best Story, for The Big House.” She spared a cheeky glance up at him, a grin on her lips that truly resembled a cat after it’d caught the canary. “I guess someone didn’t do the reading.”

If he knew anything about the reading—and, since he was teaching the class almost half the time, she was positive he did—he would know that there was nothing about which one of Frances Marion’s films had won which award in the textbook. If he knew anything about her—and, since the semester had only just begun, she was positive he knew little to nothing about what she was like (unless, of course, he made a habit of chatting with other TAs, in which case, he might’ve heard that she was an absolute terror)— he would know that she had looked up the information herself just earlier that day.

His mistake had been revealed by a simple Google search, completed frantically in the first moment she'd gotten alone after class and based on the meager hunch that finally, finally, he’d produced a statement that was false. It was just her luck that this time—of course, this had happened before, but each time she’d tried to prove his shortcomings, it was her that came short—she’d actually managed to catch his slip up.

“Maybe I should be teaching the class.”