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“I’m putting the Elder Wand,” he told Dumbledore, who was watching him with enormous affection and admiration, “back where it came from. It can stay there. If I die a natural death like Ignotus, its power will be broken, won’t it? The previous master will never have been defeated. That’ll be the end of it.”
Dumbledore nodded. They smiled at each other.
“Are you sure?” said Ron. There was the faintest trace of longing in his voice as he looked at the Elder Wand.
“I think Harry’s right,” said Hermione qui—
Harry opened his eyes, Hermione’s voice still sounding in his ears. The space around him was lit the orange-dark of just-past-dawn, a strip of light from the loose-fitting door striping one wall, a dividing line on a page. He was curled under the thin duvet, knees up towards his chest—he was sure he’d be stiff from sleeping like this as soon as he moved. He didn’t move. Instead he tried to stay with the dream.
It had been such a vivid dream.
He could still feel himself in that office, see the flickers of movement from the portraits out of the corner of his eye, the rich colours of the furnishings. He could feel with a strange intensity how safe he had felt—all enemies defeated, standing in the heart of a homely fortress. More than that, how powerful he had felt in that moment, in that decision. The Elder Wand beneath his fingers, the most deadly of magical artefacts, yet it had no power over him. Dumbledore’s gaze on him like a warm hand on his shoulder, approving. Hermione’s presence at his side, her trust lending strength. Or—
Had that been a sound upstairs?
Hermione? Had that been the woman’s name? All at once he wasn’t sure. The dream was already slipping away. Harry felt a desperate hook pulling somewhere inside his chest. His teeth were clenched tight. It didn’t make sense—why should he feel so strongly about a dream, about events and people in a dream? And yet—
A creak. He definitely heard footsteps above now—someone else in the house was up. It must be later than he’d guessed. He shifted, felt the expected stiffness in his legs. This was normal enough—he’d been growing fast this summer and could no longer stretch out completely in his bed. He had to get up. Dreams always dissipated on waking, lost solidity and detail, vanished into memory—that’s what dreams did. Dream weapons, dream friends, dream castles—none of these were any use for facing concrete reality. And today was going to be a good day, he was sure of it.
He reached out for his glasses, and pushed open the cupboard door.
A few minutes later he was dressed and up, his bed rolled tidily out of the way. He stood staring at himself in the hallway mirror, again taking in the sight of his new uniform. He had hoped it wouldn’t be as bad as he’d anticipated from when he saw Aunt Petunia dying it earlier in the week, but it was pretty bad. The trousers were okay. They were a little too big, but that wasn’t obvious since his belt held them up okay, and they had been close to the right colour to start with. But the polo shirt and jumper hung down way too far, and were even more shapeless than before their stint in Aunt Petunia’s dying pan. The dye hadn’t taken completely evenly, either. There were little grey streaks in a few places, where it had collected in folds in the cloth.
He sighed. It felt so important to make a good impression today—the first day of secondary school, the first day of going to school without Dudley and his gang, without anyone who knew him there. It was a clean slate, a completely new set of people. He didn’t have to be that weirdo kid that everyone despised. But he did think it might be harder to make a good impression whilst wearing such terrible clothes.
Never mind, he told himself, what you look like isn’t everything. He would make up for it by being friendly, by being polite. He wouldn’t bother anyone, so no-one would have any real reason not to want to be his friend.
Harry looked up at the sound of Aunt Petunia’s footsteps on the stairs, in time to see her mouth flatten into an even thinner line than usual at the sight of him.
“Comb your hair,” she snapped, sounding pained. “What on earth will people think of us if we send you to school looking like that, like a scarecrow? Quickly now. Then come and help with breakfast.”
Minutes later, upstairs, Harry gave up the struggle with the comb and stared at his hair in the bathroom mirror. However much he combed it it still seemed to curl off every which-way. If ever he got one bit to lie flat and straight, another bit would have started sticking up again as if it had a mind of its own. There didn’t seem to be much he could do about it.
Luckily, his aunt, uncle and cousin were pretty distracted over breakfast: Dudley’s first day of secondary school, his first day at Smeltings. Aunt Petunia wouldn’t stop fussing, continually making tiny adjustments to Dudley’s uniform or standing back, misty eyed, and saying things like “My Duddykins—so grown up!” Uncle Vernon beamed with gruff pride as Dudley rapped his Smeltings stick across Harry’s knees and demanded Harry go and fetch him another slice of toast. Harry just did as he was told, trying not to show how much his knees smarted as he hobbled over to the kitchen.
He’d got pretty good at avoiding the Smeltings stick over the last couple of weeks but in that second he’d been distracted. For a moment a very different image of breakfast had arisen in his mind’s eye—a vision of a long breakfast table crowded with kids his age, with great vats of steaming porridge, racks of toast, sticky jars of jam with the knives left in them, and everyone serving themselves. He’d never been to such a place. It must have been something from that dream, he told himself. Weird, for images from a dream to come back so forcefully, leave such a strong impression. He wondered if maybe there was a breakfast club at Stonewall High, so that he could leave the Dursleys’ house before breakfast and spend an extra hour at school? He’d heard other kids at his old school mention something like that. In a world where school didn’t mean Dudley and Dudley’s gang, getting to spend more time there might be nice.
Aunt Petunia was driving Dudley to school on his first day, whereas Harry was to catch a school bus from the end of their street. Still, as she reached the front door she turned and saw Harry still in the hall.
“You too, out. Come on,” she snarled. “I’m not leaving you alone in the house, even for a few minutes. Off you go.” So Harry hurried out after them, even though it would mean being early for his bus.
No-one else was there yet when he reached the bus-stop, and he waited in a state of growing excitement and anxiety. Soon he would be meeting new people, his new schoolmates, and Dudley was no-where in sight. It was so important he made a good impression.
When the first figure turned the corner at the end of the road and approached the bus-stop, though, Harry’s heart sank. It was Rich Taylor, who had been in the same class as Harry in primary school. He hadn’t really thought about the fact that lots of people from his primary school would be going on Stonewall High along with him. He’d known it was the case, theoretically, but whenever he’d thought about today he’d only been imagining all the new people, the people who wouldn’t already know about him. What might the kids from his old school tell the people at his new school? He felt himself get even tenser at the thought.
Still, Rich Taylor hadn’t been so bad. He’d piled on the with rest at times, but mostly he and Harry had had nothing to do with each other. And there were lots of tutor groups in every year at Stonewall High—hopefully Harry would just happen not to be in the same class as anyone who knew him from before. When he arrived at the stop, he and Harry didn’t say a word to each other. A few minutes later, Melissa Chivvers walked up to their stop too—another person from Harry’s old class. He gritted his teeth.
On the bus, Harry picked a seat about a quarter of the way from the front. He knew that the cool kids would sit at the back and he didn’t want to seem like he thought he could be one of them, but he also didn’t want to stand out by sitting right at the front. He sank down in his seat and stared as the bus filled up.
After one more stop at the other side of the estate where the Dursley’s lived, most of the kids who got on Harry didn’t recognise. He started to breathe easier again. Most people, at least, wouldn’t know him—he just had to make a good first impression.
The seats were filling up, and the bus was filling with chatter. Lots of older kids knew each other and were catching up for the first time since the summer holidays. Still, Harry could spot some other Year 7s, he thought—kids who looked his own age, who were mostly also quiet, observing the social world around them, not yet contributing much. Harry put his bag on his lap to make it absolutely clear that the seat next to him was free. No-one sat there, but after a while the seat opposite and the one behind that were both occupied by other kids Harry’s age. He watched them strike up a conversation over the seat-back. The one further away was a boy with a narrow face and white-blond hair, and Harry imagined standing, taking his bag, and asking if it would be alright to go and sit next to him. They were all there to make friends, right? And he liked the look of the blond boy’s face, somehow.
“Hey look,” he suddenly realised the two boys were staring in his direction, “what on earth is that kid wearing?” The blond boy’s smiling face had sharpened into a sneer. “It looks like he made his clothes out of a bin bag or something!” The other boy laughed loudly, clearly keen to show how funny he thought the joke was. “Hey you!” The blond boy shouted across the aisle, “You know there’s a uniform, right? They won’t let you just wear whatever grey sack you had lying around.” The two of them dissolved into laughter as Harry’s face burned and he slid lower into his seat.
He hadn’t thought of that. What if the teachers weren’t okay with his clothes? He felt his hands gripping and twisting the edges of his school bag.
“Ew,” he heard the blond boy laugh, “what do you think he’s doing under that bag?” Harry whipped his hands out and stared out the window. If he stayed absolutely still, didn’t even look at them, they wouldn’t have any reason to pick on him. He would be fine. And no, they couldn’t have been right about the uniform—Aunt Petunia cared a lot about what other grownups thought, and about following the rules. Harry could at least be sure that what she’d made him wear would meet the uniform code.
He watching the outside world pass without seeing a thing, and tried not to listen to any of the talk going on around him.
The rest of the journey to school was uneventful. When they arrived, all the Year 7s were ushered to the school hall where they were given a long ‘welcome’ talk. Harry had always hated Assembly and his mind drifted while the Deputy Head droned on about good behaviour, being respectful of the teachers, the importance of keeping the school’s results up for the League Tables. Harry wondered why teachers could never keep things short, they always had to find five different ways to say everything in a row? If he was a teacher, he thought, and he had to talk in front of an assembly, he would just say one sentence—something funny, maybe, and then let them all go.
Suddenly everyone was standing and grabbing their bags from under their chairs. Hurriedly, Harry stood with them. He followed as the crowd streamed out of the hall and across to building opposite—everyone else seemed to know where they were going somehow. Immediately inside the building was a long, wide corridor with open classroom doors at intervals, labelled L10, L11, L12 and so on. He realised at once that the crowd was dividing up as kids disappeared off into the different rooms along the corridor, but he had no idea which one he was meant to go to, or how they knew. Harry stopped in the middle of the corridor, wavering. What on earth was he meant to do? Someone knocked into him from one side as they rushed on past him and he felt his breath catch in his throat.
Then, thankfully, even as the crowd in the corridor thinned, he heard an adult’s voice over the hubbub.
“Come on everyone, chop-chop. Find your own tutor rooms as quickly as you can.” Harry could see the rather stern looking woman wearing a dull green check jacket approaching from the far end of the corridor, so he hurried forward.
“Um, excuse me, miss?” She looked down at him, frowning. “I don’t know which tutor room I’m meant to go to.” She raised an eyebrow.
“It’s at the top of the timetable in your planner.” She had a different accent than Harry was used to—a voice in the back of his head wondered if it was Scottish? But most of his concentration was on that final word. A planner? When had those been handed out? How on earth had he missed it?
“I don’t think I have a planner, either...” The teacher’s frown deepened.
“Your planner and timetable were sent to you weeks ago, along with all the other information for new pupils.” When this didn’t immediately prompt Harry to remember that he had, in fact, received a planned and produce it from his bag, she turned, saying, “Come to my office then. We’ll work out where you’re meant to go.”
As Harry hurried along behind her he tried to keep his mind blank, concentrate on the route they were taking through the corridors, but it was hard not to listen to his thoughts. What a surprise—here he was already messing things up, being different to all the other kids, standing out. Head in the clouds and no sense at all, his aunt had always said about him, but I suppose that’s what you’d expect of Potter’s child. Somehow he was the only new student who had lost their planner, but he supposed that was just what you’d expect from someone with no sense at all.
The stern teacher quickly identified what tutor group he was in—his tutor’s name was Mr Penrose—but made him wait a couple of minutes more while she printed off a copy of the first day’s timetable for him, and one for the normal school week. At the top of the first day’s timetable he saw the Welcome Assembly, followed by Tutor Group for an hour and a half—next to his tutor’s name was printed L13. So that was how everyone else had known.
“If you really have lost your planner already, you’ll have to order another one from the office,” added the stern teacher brusquely, as she shooed Harry out. “But your tutor can help you with that.”
It took Harry a few minutes to trace his way back through the corridors and find L13. All of the classroom doors in empty corridor were closed by this point, so he steeled himself, knocked, and turned the handle.
Inside the classroom every eye fixed on him. The teacher standing at the front was a man wearing a dark suit, with straggly black hair and a long-suffering expression. He raised an eyebrow at Harry’s silence.
“Yes?”
“Um, sir, I’m. I er. I think this is my tutor group?” The man looked down at the register still lying open on his desk.
“Name?”
“Harry Potter.” The teacher’s eyes scanned down the list.
“Ah yes, Harry Potter. Not absent after all then. Well,” he gestured towards one of only empty chairs, at the very front of the class. “You’re very late—not a great start on your first day, I think you’ll agree? Sit down quietly, please.” His eyes—along with the eyes of all the kids in the room—tracked Harry as he crossed from the door. “Oh, and Harry, it looks like you and me are going to have to have a conversation about uniform later, too. The uniform code isn’t just a set of guidelines, you know—we have strict rules about personal appearance at Stonewall High.”
It was, indeed, not a great start. Harry did not feel he had made a good first impression on his tutor, or the other students in his tutor group.
The whole morning was taken up with introductory sessions. A long tutor group, in which Mr Penrose droned on endlessly about the practical workings of the school, followed by a long PSHE session about Being Respectful Towards others and the Being Members of the School Community. After a few minutes, Harry stopped even trying to concentrate on what was being said. His mind was a dismal whirl, the same thoughts repeating again and again. How had he messed things up so quickly? Why was it that he was so much worse at this stuff than anyone else? There was clearly something wrong with him, and they’d all soon be able to see it—they were already starting to. It was not so much Aunt Petunia’s words that rang in his ears but a word Dudley had sneered at him many times, that so many of the kids at Harry’s old school had used—freak.
When lunchtime finally came, he hurried away from the other kids in his tutor group as fast as he could, keen to be out of their sights. He knew he should probably wait and talk to Mr Penrose, both about the uniform and about the fact that he had lost his planner, and the stern teacher had said to ask his tutor about getting a new one. But he couldn’t face revealing to Mr Penrose another way in which he’d messed up, so he put it off. He could talk to him tomorrow.
The lunch hall was bustling and echoing when Harry got there—the older students who he had eyed with interest on the bus now seemed hulking and threatening. He waited in the queue, but when he got to the front he discovered that the lunch money Aunt Petunia had given him wasn’t enough for a main meal. He bought a Twix instead and headed out to find somewhere quiet to sit.
He wandered for a few minutes, trying to memorise the confusing layout of classroom blocks. Everywhere was thronged with other kids, laughing and chatting, continuous streams of them walking in every direction. He’d had no idea it was going to be this big—it felt endless, an infinite maze of portacabins, redbrick buildings, steps and railings, with an infinite number of other students. Wherever he could see to sit there seemed already to be people there, and he wasn’t sure if he would be allowed—some of the blocks were just for the older students, he knew, but he wasn’t sure which those were. He didn’t ever seem to see anyone he knew, but he wasn’t sure he would recognise any of the kids from his tutor group anyway, since he had kept his head firmly down all morning after his embarrassing entrance. And he had no wish to meet anyone from his old school.
Eventually he gave up and walked back to the building where his tutor group had been that morning. He sat on the steps and unwrapped his Twix.
Harry didn’t often get to eat chocolate. His aunt and uncle had punished him with ‘no sweets for a week’ so many times now that Harry had lost count—he thought he probably wasn’t meant to be having any for years. They wouldn’t know about this, though, and in spite of everything he felt a little flowering of joy at that thought, at the realisation of this freedom. He was going to get to choose what to buy with his lunch money every day and they would never have any way of finding out what. Harry ate his Twix as slowly as he could, licking the chocolate off the outside before finally biting into the biscuit. As he did, he imagined warmth and strength radiating outwards from his belly, as if the chocolate bar was a healing potion, a fortifying spell. For some reason an image popped into his mind: of sitting on a train on a dark afternoon, the carriage filled with anxious faces peering at him, but being handed a bar of chocolate that smelled strangely like honey. He couldn’t imagine where the image had come from, or why it was occurring to him then.
Towards the end of lunch, as other kids started streaming back into the building, a brown-skinned girl with bushy hair caught his eye as she passed him on the steps. He smiled at her, hopeful, and thought she might have returned the expression. His steps on the way to the next period seemed somehow lighter.
That afternoon they had their first real lesson—a double period of English. It turned out that this was not with their tutor groups, but in ability sets. Harry didn’t know what set he’d been put in—the printed timetable that the stern teacher had given him had specified a classroom, but not given any more information than that. Still, Harry was soon relatively sure he had been put in a low set. The teacher was named Mr Lyall, a shabbily-dressed man who managed to give off an air of exhaustion even though it was only a Monday, only the first day of term. Mr Lyall talked with the kind and patient air of someone who knew his kindness and patience were going to be called upon and tested, extensively, in the near future. He wasn’t patronising—Harry felt like his warmth was genuine enough. But he didn’t seem hopeful.
When the register was called, Harry realised that the girl with bushy hair who he’d smiled at earlier was in the same class as him, sitting two rows in front of him. When the teacher called out
“Bethany Bridger,” she put up her hand and called
“Present!” with an exaggerated brightness. Once the class had got started and they were supposed to be reading a passage from a book called Skellig in silence, Harry instead found himself wondering about her. Had she smiled back at him? He was almost sure she had. Maybe she would be willing to be his friend? It was a shame they weren’t in the same tutor group, but they had at least English together—maybe they would share more classes as well? And you didn’t have to hang out with people from your tutor group at lunchtimes and break times, after all.
Harry quite liked English, as school subjects went. He hadn’t been as fast a reader as some of the kids in his class at his old school, but he enjoyed reading nonetheless. He liked the sense of getting lost in a book, of becoming the protagonist, becoming a completely different person in a completely different life. English lessons weren’t very good for this—surrounded by other people, constantly timed and interrupted, being asked to concentrate on details that he had often somehow missed—but he liked reading the books they were set later, in his cupboard. Today, however, in the back of the classroom, exhausted by hours of continuous worrying and surrounded by the soporific quiet of turning pages and Mr Lyall’s occasional murmurs as he looked over students’ shoulders, Harry found himself getting drowsy.
He was back in the dream. He knew it was a dream, this time, could connect the mangled half-memory of the first dreaming the night before, the flashback to chocolate and train carriages at lunchtime. This time he was in a library—but it looked nothing like any real library he’d ever been in. Instead, it looked like a library from one of the historical dramas that his aunt and uncle liked to watch: great, dark-wood tables and candlelight; thousands of huge, leather-bound volumes on the shelves, some even chained to the shelves, the gold lettering on their spines winking and reflecting the yellow flames. Across from him at the table was the woman he remembered from the very end of the dream before, the woman whose name still escaped him. Her hair was a great tangled mass and she was rubbing her hand across her eyes as if she had been working for hours. The tabletop between them was littered with books, some open, others with bits of paper sticking out at odd angles.
“Hey!” Harry heard himself whisper in the dream, “Hey I think I’ve found something!” He could hear the excitement in his voice as he shoved a book across the table to her. Her brows knit as she scanned the open page.
“Harry!” She whispered back, her face lighting up and her eyes open suddenly wide, “I thi—”
Harry started awake as the bell rang for the end of school.
“Right, off you go everyone! Careful please, no need to rush,” called out My Lyall’s voice.
Trying to pretend he didn’t feel woozy and disoriented—and thankful that apparently no-one had noticed that he’d dropped off—he packed up his bag and headed out with everyone else towards the loop of road where all the school buses were waiting.
As it turned out, Harry’s bus was near the back of the queue and so wouldn’t be leaving for a quarter of an hour. Reluctant to risk sitting in a small space with the blond-haired boy and his sniggering friend for any longer than he had to, Harry hovered at the edge of the crowd of chattering students and waited. Today could have gone worse, he told himself. Yes, the problem with the planner and being late this morning had been embarrassing, but he had a copy of the timetable now—he didn’t have to admit to Mr Penrose that he needed a new planner, he would just do without one. And his clothes had been a problem, but the advantage of a teacher saying that they wouldn’t do would be that he could tell Aunt Petunia that, and surely she would get him some real ones. Yes—this was salvageable. The only other kid who had really said anything nasty to him—who had really seen through him—was the blond boy on the bus, and he wasn’t in Harry’s tutor group, and wasn’t in English. Hopefully they wouldn’t share any classes, and then it would only be the bus where Harry would have to face— to face— people like him.
But as if in answer to that thought, it was at that moment that Harry saw the blond boy again. He was standing in a small knot of other Year 7s, laughing about something—and the among them was Bethany, the bushy-haired girl from his English class. Surely they hadn’t been looking at him, why would they have been looking at him? but— then Bethany walked across the tarmac towards him.
“Hi, you’re Harry right?” She was half-concealing a smile, laughter pushing at the edges of her voice. You just have to make a good first impression, just be friendly, just.
“Yes—um, is it Bethany? Beth?” He heard his mumble as if someone else had moved his lips. But she didn’t act as if she’d heard him at all.
“So my friend David—” she inclined her head briefly towards the blond boy and his group of friends, “says that you—” a giggle escaped her mouth and she paused briefly before continuing. “Says that you’re gay, and you were watching him and touching yourself on the bus to school this morning. Is that true?” She could barely get the last words out before bursting into laughter. The rest of the gang around David roared with her, and Harry felt himself reddening, stuttering, could hardly get the words out to deny the accusation. He was pretty sure they didn’t hear anything he tried to say after that point anyway. He felt a thousand miles away from his body.
Back at number 4 Privet Drive that evening, everyone was in celebratory mode. His aunt and uncle wanted to hear the tale of Dudley’s first day at Smeltings over and over. The stories got more and more elaborate with each telling—how well Dudley had got on with the other pupils, how much his teachers had liked him, how he had impressed everyone the moment they met him. Harry noticed the changes but his aunt and uncle didn’t seem to. When Harry thought about it, he supposed the precise details didn’t much matter: the point was that Dudley had fitted in.
At one point, with his parents out of the room, Dudley had turned to Harry:
“So did they stick your head down the toilet? That’s what I heard they did on the first day at Shitwall High.” His sneer was so familiar as to feel like background noise. Harry didn’t really have the energy to argue with him. For some reason he felt more drained than he would expect to at the end of a school day—he hoped that wouldn’t be a normal feature of secondary school. He sat with the Dursleys and half-watched the gameshows they flicked through.
Eventually, the end of the evening came and he returned to his cupboard. With the door shut, with the particular click it made as it pulled into place, he felt a wash of warm exhaustion, an odd sensation of safety. It would be eight hours before he had to leave this space again—he was his own, for a little while. He pulled himself under the duvet and closed his eyes, already feeling the world wavering. Nothing could be asked of him here. As wakefullness receded, somehow he knew for sure that he would not dream.