harry potter and the privacy menace

'Seriously,' Ron hisses suddenly into Harry’s ear, 'doesn't he have any friends in his own house?' Harry looks up from the bit of carrot he's been trying to transfigure into a rabbit fur hat (he's got the rabbit part down, but the hat continues to elude him).

'Who?' He squints in the direction Ron is pointing with his chin but can make out nothing but fuzzy black shapes. He adjusts his glasses. Ah, he realises, absently ducking the dinner roll someone is magicking through the air. Zuckerberg.

He's shuffling across the floor like a gimpy troll, all bent shoulders and crooked black robes, a thick leather-bound tome under his arm; he dodges around laughing Gryffindors and revising Ravenclaws until he's at the head of the Hufflepuff table.

The smiley, dark-haired boy next to Cedric Diggery looks up from his conversation to greet him – Edwin or something, or probably more exotic, given his perfectly bronzed skin in the middle of winter: Edwin-o? – and it's like he doesn't even see the shifty way Zuckerberg sways when he talks to him, just keeps on smiling and laughing, reaches out a hand to touch his elbow.

'He's soft in the head, that one. The soft ones always go to Hufflepuff,' Ron mutters into his Cornish pasty as Edmund(o) excuses himself from his table and jogs after Zuckerberg out of the Hall. 'Don't suppose you've heard what they've been working on?'

'For the love of – It's not like Zuckerberg is the head of some sort of espionage network, Ron,' Hermione interrupts exasperatedly. 'He's a prick, yeah, but he's not bad.'

'Sorry, are we talking about the same Zuckerberg here? Mark Zuckerberg, that bloke who created The Face Book, the single greatest threat to the privacy of the wizarding world as we know it since those goo guys created that library index?'

'Hey, don't be evil, now,' Harry quips and is met by soul-splintering glares. Right, lover's spat. Shan't be involved in that, then.

Whipping back to Hermione, Ron demands, 'Do you have a page in The Face Book?'

Hermione rolls her eyes, 'Of course I have a page in The Face Book, Ron; everyone has a page in The Face Book. How else am I supposed to keep up on what all our friends are doing?'

'You could ask them!' Ron insists, to which Hermione retorts, 'What about my other friends, the ones in Beauxbatons?'

'Doesn't anyone owl anymore?' Ron howls to no one in particular because Hermione has pulled out a little blue and white diary from her robes and is flipping through it intently.

'Ooo,' she murmurs. 'Lavendar Brown and Seamus Finnigan are in a relationship again.'

Harry nudges a bit at his mashed peas, which his rabbit has long ago decided to commandeer. 'I don't suppose you have any inclination of turning into a hat for me?' he murmurs glumly. The rabbit's nose twitches.

'Hey, you gonna transfigure that?' someone asks. Harry shakes his head. The rabbit pops into the air and lands a furry trilby on the table. 'Sa-weeet, new hat. Hey, Chris! Look at this sweet new hat I made!'