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Popcorn


The Gryffindor common room was abuzz with nervousness. Everyone was talking about the news in some capacity or another, everyone was afraid of what would happen next. The tension was palpable. Wally, Oliver, Dexter, and Liam were sitting on the couch by the fireplace - the other first years working with Lily Evans and Ali Prewitt on homework across the room but those four were shirking it off because they’d finally managed to get the couch to themselves and they had more important things to talk about than charms homework anyway.

“Can’t believe Sirius Black hasn’t come to tell us to sod off!” Dexter said excitedly, hugging the couch cushions that were their prize. Wally was laying across his cushion, using Oliver as a pillow and kicking his feet into Liam’s side. “He always tells us to sod off by now! And they’re here, too! Frank Longbottom was talking to Sirius Black before.”

“Did you hear Sirius earlier, at dinner?” asked Oliver, “He thinks Minchum’s grand-daughter is dead. But Remus said he didn’t think so.”

“He called You Know Who Moldy Voldy, too!” Wally said. “I reckon Sirius Black is the bravest bloke in the world. Imagine having the gumption to say that about the most evilest wizard in the world?”

Liam laughed, “Is it bravery or idiocy?”

Wally looked up at him, offended for Sirius. “He’s not an idiot.”

“Saying stuff like that’s a good way to get on the Kill List,” said Liam solemnly, “It’s like suicide! You say stuff like that and You Know Who’s gonna come after you. And nobody lives once You Know Who comes after them. They always die.” He stared blankly at his feet a second.

Wally looked at Oliver uneasily. Dexter shifted in his seat, “You alright, Liam?”

Liam nodded. “Spiffing.” He started to get up though, and was standing before the couch, about to say that he was going to bed when there was a funny sound from the stairs…

“What was that?” asked Oliver, looking over at the stairs to the boys dormitories. Everyone in the common room was looking. There was a funny… popping… sound… and shouting…

Lily Evans was on her feet and running toward the stairs, “What in the world --” she was halfway up them when something hit her in the nose. Not anything big, something small… like a snowflake… or… she breathed deeply. That smell… it was just like… like the cinema… like the concession stand, like ---

And suddenly an absolute avalanche of popcorn came rushing down the stairs - like a tsunami, and it burst over the edge of the steps spraying buttery kernels of corn every which way, exploding buttery pops of crunchiness snowing down over the common room, filling the stairwell until very quickly Lily was knee deep in it. She yelled up the stairs, “SIRIUS! REMUS! PETER! … POTTER!!!!! I KNOW YOU LOT ARE BEHIND THIS!”

There was silence from the top of the stairwell.

But the popcorn kept multiplying. It seemed every time a kernel of it touched another, they exploded into at least three more kernels so that it exponentially grew and grew… and the floor was filling up and the girls were running for their dorms and a couple people were going for the portrait hole. The first years were wide-eyed, standing on the couch like it was an island in a popcorn ocean, clinging at one another in amused terror. Wally grabbed a handful of the kernels and started munching on it as Oliver asked, “Can you drown in popcorn?!”

Lily was struggling against the tsunami of popcorn, trying to get up the stairs to find the Marauders. She was actually sort of looking forward to giving Potter a detention… but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get up there, the popcorn just kept multiplying! She shrieked and slipped and went down, the popcorn catching her so she didn’t really fall down the stairs so much as slid down and sank below the yellow kernels at the bottom like a fragile shipping item among packing peanuts.

“Lily!” Oliver cried.

Liam covered his mouth. “Oh no.”

Wally jumped into the popcorn like he was an Olympic swimmer and Oliver cried out in surprise as Dexter just kept muttering “whoaaa… whoaaa… whhhoooooaaa” over and over. Wally waded through the popcorn, which was quickly getting deeper and deeper, nearly up to his ickle first year chest by now, and he found the place Lily Evans had gone under the kernels and felt about ‘til he’d found her and pulled her up by her hand. She came up covered in butter and popcorn grease, her red hair hanging all funny and glistening.

“Thanks,” she said.

Wally nodded and stuffed a few more kernels in his mouth, “It’s good popcorn. Tastes like the movies.”

“Yeah, well it’s gonna taste like detention,” she muttered, glaring up the stairs.

Somebody had gone and gotten McGonagall. The portrait hole swung open and she stood there in the frame of it, her jaw dropped as she looked about the quickly filling common room - the popcorn was now beginning to slope up around the edges and was even climbing the girls’ dormitory steps and Wally was nearly up to his shoulders, the popcorn up to Lily’s chest… Liam, Dexter, and Oliver were balancing on the back of the couch and running out of places to climb before it would start to take over them.

McGonagall’s jaw dropped and she looked about and finally waved her arms, “FINITE INCANTANTUM!” she cried… and the popcorn kernels in the air fell to the floor, but they didn’t duplicate like they had been. Her face was red - either from horror or humor, Lily couldn’t tell. Perhaps a mixture of both.

Lily started, “Professor, I think it’s the work of --”

“Oh I know perfectly well whose done the work, Miss Evans,” Professor McGonagall answered, and she waved her wand, clearing a path through the popcorn for herself, pushing it aside, headed for the stairs. The fist years and Lily watched as McGonagall made her way up the steps toward the boys’ dormitories… She got to the Marauders’ door - saw the etching Sirius had done across the wood and stared at it in horror a moment, then, shaking her head, pushed it open.

So. Much. Popcorn. It was a wall of popcorn. There was no moving for all of the popcorn.

“Mr. Potter!” she called into the wall of kernels, “Mr. Black - Mr. Pettigrew - Mr. Lupin!” There were muffled replies from somewhere in the depths of all of the popcorn. “You are all serving detention. Tomorrow. Now, you will kindly clear all of this mess up.”

More muffled replies that sounded something like they didn’t know the spell.

McGonagall said dryly, “Perhaps you should eat your way out.”

Suddenly Peter’s head poked out of the wall of popcorn. “Even I’m not that hungry, Professor.”

Loud laughter echoed from beneath the kernels. Sirius Black.

McGonagall cleared her throat. “Apagar pipoca,” she declared and waved her wand about… slowly the popcorns started popping in reverse, it seemed. They’d pop and disappear and soon Sirius, Remus, and James’s heads all appeared over the kernels.

“Fancy a snack, Professor Minnie?” Sirius asked. “We’ve got plenty.”

“Clear it up, Master Black,” Professor McGonagall said sternly, and then she turned and left the room.

Sirius grinned, “Did you see her lips twitching? She was trying soooo blooody haaaard not to laugh!”

However, Professor McGonagall left the common room and hurried down the hallway to the stairwell, down to the fifth floor and over to the gargoyles… She could barely wheeze out the password to the statues… When she got onto the moving staircase, she bit onto her knuckles and waited, holding it back…

Finally she got to the top, rapped smartly on the door of the office, and from within came Dumbledore’s voice, “Come in…”

McGonagall pushed open the door.

Dumbledore looked up from where he hovered by the Pensieve, just replacing the cork in a memory marked 1914 and replacing it on the shelf. “Minerva, to what do I owe this visit?” he asked.

“They’ve flooded Gryffindor tower with popcorn,” she said without prelude.

Dumbledore blinked at her uncomprehendingly. “I do beg your pardon?”

“The Marauders,” Minerva McGonagall replied, her voice clipped with her thick Scottish accent. She stared at Dumbledore, her jaw trembling. “They’ve filled - and I do mean filled the entire of the Gryffindor Common Room with popcorn. There were first year students standing on the back of the couch as though they were Robinson Crusoe! I managed to push my way to their dormitory - which they’ve defaced with a burning spell in the wood of their door, might I add. They were absolutely buried in kernels, their room full up to my shoulders. When I call them, their little heads come poking up from among all of that popcorn… and Sirius Black offers me to have some because - and I quote him here, Albus - they have plenty.”

A smile split Dumbledore’s face and a chuckle. “Of course - always so generous, that Sirius Black.”

“It was an excellent bit of magic, really,” McGonagall said, “An excellent duplicating charm, Professor Flitwick will be most proud when he hears how excellently it was executed.”

Dumbledore smiled. “And you, Professor, are you proud?”

McGonagall stared at him very solemnly, “Of the Marauders?” she paused. “Absolutely.”




The tale of the Gryffindor House of Popcorn travelled through the school in record time. James was shaking popcorn out of his robes for days. They’d be in potions or defense and he’d move just right and three or four kernels would fall out and explode into five or six as they hit against each other, falling to the floor. “Bloody hell,” James murmured when it happened nearly a week later, “It’s an infestation.”

“A funny infestation, though,” Sirius grinned.

And the incident with the popcorn was not the only practical joke the boys pulled did. They took to making shows of dancing potato jackets at the dinner table and Sirius magicked the ink pots at the homework table to be disappearing ink so that they’d write the first sentence of their essays and before they could do the second one, the ink would have faded off and there was a lot of frustration and cursing happening at the table before it was realized what may have been happening…

There was a day when the Gryffindors woke to find chains of socks tied together and strung about the bannisters like garlands. “What’s the meaning of it?” Lily asked Remus when he came downstairs.

Remus looked about at the socks, “Sirius says it’s Foot Appreciation Day,” he replied.

“Foot Appreciation Day?” Lily echoed. “What is that?”

Remus shrugged. “Dunno. Sirius doesn’t always make sense.”

Lily rolled her eyes.

But there were a lot of puns about toes and such that day - Sirius made sure to make them every chance he got and he’d give these long dramatic pauses or else follow them up with a drum roll sound with his mouth - “ba dat dah!” - and a wicked grin. The best one of the day, though, was when he was running ahead of the others and Remus grabbed onto his robes and said sternly, “SIRIUS. Heel.”

And Sirius’s eyes sparkled and he fell into step beside Remus, laughing, and grabbed onto his face and licked him like a dog before declaring, “Yes, master.”

Remus turned red.

It came to be that whenever the Marauders walked into a room, heads would turn expectantly, waiting for the joke to become evident so that one day the prank was that they would just walk into a room and Sirius would start laughing as though there was something about to happen and everyone would wait on the edges of their seats for it - looking about, trying to figure out what was coming - but it never would for there was no joke except for there being no joke!

“I feel powerful,” Sirius said, grinning in the corridors after having kept the entire Great Hall on edge like that during an entire dinner, everyone - including the members of staff - just waiting for the punchline. “Like gods of humor and laughter, we’ve bestowed our gifts upon the many!”

“Showered them with good humor!” James agreed.

“Lightened the burdens on their troubled minds!” Sirius continued.

“I told you lot I found our calling -- The Marauders of Hogwarts - purveyors of magical mischief making, entrepreneurs in the business of humor, masters of comedic relief of the castle,” James grinned.

“We’ll go down in history,” Sirius said, tossing his arms around Remus’s waist and James’s shoulders. James pulled Peter into him so he didn’t feel left out, and the four of them went up the hall, other students ducking to the sides to let them pass.