Open Under the Surface

[Abian Hunter]

Abian Hunter was generally a very happy and cheerful kid. Even when he did badly in school in the past, teachers always commended him for his positive outlook. But not many people realized the cheerful attitude didn't entirely come naturally to the boy. He often had to work quite hard for it, especially on days he didn't feel very great. He had learned to act happiest during sad times when his dad got sick, back when he didn't want to be an additional burden on the family and also cheer his sister up. It had helped, as far as he could tell, so he kept it up even after his father's death. In school he did the same thing. No matter how much he struggled academically, he had a blast at school. It definitely made it easier to accept the fact that he wasn't very good at his school work, and it was easier to pretend he didn't really care about that. Having fun was easy, and if he didn't try he didn't look like he failed. But now that he was at school to learn magic and to be a wizard, he was starting to come to the realization that he really did care if he failed or not. It was easy to brush off a bad mark on a math test, but if he did badly at Hogwarts he wouldn't be able to do awesome stuff. So even though everything had seemed fine with him over the past few weeks, under the happy behavior there was a lot of worry. The exams were coming up again, and Abian was nervous about them. Not only that, but the next year would be a struggle too. He had barely passed the exams for the first semester, and he didn't think he would remember that much of what he learned. If he knew anything about school, it was that they tended to assume the kids remembered stuff from the previous years. Rarely did teachers review old things, as they expected students to grasp concepts they had been taught earlier. It was just Abian who often forgot things, or didn't pick them up very fast, which caused him to fall behind.

He was determined not to do so with magic, at least with the spell casting part of it. But he had no idea how to work on that very well. Studying the stunning spell with Phineas hadn't gone very well, and Abian didn't feel like studying for any of the subjects he had this semester. So he had decided to try practicing some of the charms he had learned in the previous semester so he could learn new ones next year. During Charms class he had goofed around a lot, so he hadn't actually practiced that much. The idea of practicing in front of his classmates and failing where they succeeded hadn't been very pleasant. But here at the lakefront he was alone for now, so he felt more at ease. He gathered some stones and put them all in a pile, then he sat down at a small distance and pointed his wand at the pile. He started practicing the levitation spell, one of the first spells they had learned in the first semester. The stone on top hovered into the air, but once he tried to go a bit higher it started to wobble and he lost his focus. The stone fell, landing on top of the others. Abian tried again, focusing as hard as he could. This time, he got it to hover a little longer, but it fell again after only a few more seconds. He sighed, fighting the urge to give up. He took out the frustration on the one rock by throwing it into the lake, then started practicing on one of the others in the pile.