Padma winced at the forced note in the laugh. "I'm sorry," she offered. She smiled a little. "I suppose they just care. But it can be hard having them them worrying at every turn, especially when you hoped to go do something special like that." It'd made it hard for Padma and Parvati to get any kind of practice with their DA defense and hex charms, too, since most of them weren't the sort of thing they would have to focus on for NEWTs and if their mum had caught them tossing them about, she'd have asked questions. A lot of them.
"Perhaps you'll be able to go next year? We'll all have left school, so I suppose they won't have a lot of say in telling you no?" Padma suggested. Though she wasn't sure she could go against her mother outright, even then. She tended to let Parvati be the one to outright argue. Padma just tried to find ways to work around her parents' edicts, when she had to.