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She’s the last girl to get picked; he’s the last boy. The teacher pairs them together and then that’s that, she leaves them standing at the side of the school yard, trying not to look at each other.
“I’m--” she starts, and he kind of winces at how happy she sounds to be paired with him. She sees, and shuts up.
Doesn’t she know he’s useless? Doesn’t she know there’s a reason no one has picked him in PE? But then, he thinks, there’s a reason no one picked her, either.
Harry is four. It's his first day of school. He isn’t used to his glasses yet. He’s itchy in the school uniform, black and red to match the crest. He’s hungry, and sad, and already he knows to avoid Dudley and his friends. He’s grumpy, too. The Dursleys couldn’t use Dudley’s hand-me-downs because there were no hand-me-downs, so they’d had to buy new, and they resented him for that, resented the way fresh clean clothes looked on Harry’s skinny body. He has never had anything new, not once, not since his parents died.
It’s Dudley’s first day, too, but he already has friends, children from nursery. Boys flock to Dudley like flies. No one flocks to Harry.
He mostly tries to avoid his cousin. They’re not in the same class but they share the yard at breaktime and lunch. The teachers are always going on about what a sweet boy he is, about how well-spoken he is, how he has such a bright future. Harry thinks it’s stupid.
It’s nearly raining. The clouds are all grey and thick-looking. Harry’s new partner is staring at him, at the beanbag in his hands.
“Throw it then?” she says.
He tosses it to her, she catches it, but barely.
“I’m Hermione,” she says, and throws it back. It lands at Harry’s feet. At least he doesn’t have to go chasing after it.
Hermione seems like a long name for a little girl. Uncle Vernon says kids with long names are pretentious. Harry doesn’t know what pretentious is.
“I’m Harry,” he says, and throws the beanbag wildly off target. It hits another kid in the back of the head. The teacher descends on them like a crow.
“Be careful,” she warns, “remember: we’re practicing aim.” She passes them back the red faded beanbag.
“Yes miss,” Hermione trills. Harry frowns at her.
He looks up at the clouds. If he wishes hard enough, he can make it rain. That happens sometimes; his wishes come true. He can’t do it with Hermione watching. She’s looking at him like his hair is all funny, like he’s doing something she can snitch on. He turns away from her and wishes for a new partner.
Dudley kicks him under the table. Dudley always kicks him, is always trying to hurt him or bruise him or make him yell out, at which point Uncle Vernon will clap him around the ear.
“Harry’s got a friend,” Dudley says, loud and exuberant. He’s gloating, and sneering, and Harry hates him, just a little, maybe a lot.
“A friend?” Uncle Vernon scoffs. “You?”
“Yeah,” he mumbles uneasily. He’s trying to focus on his dinner, sausage and mash. He’s got the fattiest sausage of all, the one that takes some chewing and he works at it now, because Uncle Vernon says talking with your mouth full is rude. Harry swallows. “Just a girl at school.”
“A girl?” Uncle Vernon explodes. He slaps the table, and Dudley is in his element, watching his father torment Harry.
“Vernon, they’re five,” Petunia finally speaks up.
“I’m allowed friends,” Harry says, then looks at his aunt. “Aren’t I?”
She shakes her head, and gives him a look, difficult to read. “You’re an odd little boy,” she snipes, “you must attract odd little friends.”
“She weird? This girl?” Vernon asks.
Harry shrugs. Vernon hates shrugs. Harry catches himself. “A little. A bit. But I like her.”
“He spends all of breaktime and lunch with her,” Dudley says.
His aunt and uncle share a look. Harry cannot fathom what they are thinking.
“Don’t talk to her too much,” Vernon warns. “And I don’t want to see her ‘round here. I don’t want any of your freak friends coming ‘round, alright?”
“Okay.”
“Is she…” Aunt Petunia seems to be chewing her words. “Freakish, really freakish?”
Harry doesn’t know what she’s asking. He just shakes his head. “She’s not a freak.” And neither am I.
“You ever do anything weird? Like stuff that no one else can do?” he asks at lunch. They’re sharing packed lunches: Harry brings soggy corned beef sandwiches, Hermione brings a salad and yogurt and strawberries cut into hearts. Harry might be six, but he knows other children have loving parents. It hadn’t taken the Grangers long to realise they should be packing extra food.
“Sometimes,” she admits. She whispers it like it’s a secret. Is it a secret? Harry isn’t allowed secrets.
He wonders, could she really be as weird as him? He’s never had a friend before; he doesn’t want to scare her off.
“Like?” he presses.
She looks around. There is no one in the herb garden but the two of them, leaning against the planters. There is never anyone here. All the other kids are on the football field, or the yard, or the playground. They often eat lunch here, amid the quiet and the coriander.
“Sometimes,” she starts, “I make my hair straighter. Just by thinking it.” She pats her head warily. Her hair tends to be frizzy and bushy, just as Harry’s tends to stick up at random angles.
“I made mine grow once,” he says, “really fast. I went to sleep and when I woke up it was long again.”
She laughs. She looks like she’s been dying to tell someone. “I made my bathwater pink, once.”
He giggles. “That’s cool.”
Dudley and his gang are watching them. Harry hopes they aren’t about to play their favourite game, ‘Harry Hunting’. He frowns at Hermione.
“You shouldn’t be my friend,” he tells her, “everyone is too scared of Dudley to be my friend.”
Hermione has no other friends, only him, and she shrugs as if dismissing. “I’m not scared of him. And, anyway, we are friends, Harry… Are we weird? Is that why no one wants to be our friend?”
“Maybe,” he allows, “but we’ll be weird together.”
He smiles, and it feels weird on his face. He is not used to it. He supposes he used to smile all the time when his parents were alive, but his smiles had gone away after the car crash. He doesn’t even have a photo to remember them by.
In his dreams, they look like him. In his dreams they are kind and loving and they never mind when Harry asks for a story, even if it’s the second time that night. The Dursley’s don’t read to him--they don’t read full stop. The only one who’ll read Harry stories is Hermione, and she reads him Three Little Pigs and Cinderella and Narnia. He likes the ones where children run away to a life of adventure.
“Weird together,” Hermione echoes, and she’s smiling too.
It takes a while for the Dursleys to let Harry go ‘round Hermione’s house, and when they do it is with a list of rules he must follow. He wants to point out that it’s the Granger’s house and they make the rules, but he doesn’t. He nods his head and says “yessir” in the way he has practised.
“I won’t have you talking to her about--about here, you understand me?” Uncle Vernon towers over him. Everyone towers over him.
“I won’t say anything,” he lies. He’s already told Hermione enough.
Aunt Petunia fusses over his hair. She wants him to look normal, ordinary, boring. She wants him to look like someone who doesn’t sleep in a cupboard.
Dudley chuckles at the television. He has friends ‘round most nights, and they always, always pick on Harry, but this time it is Harry’s turn. He’s never been to someone’s house, except Mrs Figg’s, and she’s weirder than him. He’s never had a friend before.
The Grangers pick him up, because the Dursely’s refuse to drive him there, and in the car ride back they are pleasant and polite, the two of them with their perfect teeth and Hermione’s bushy hair. They love each other, Harry can tell, and it hurts like a splinter--a splinter in his heart.
They sit on her swing set and work on their wishes. They’re getting better at controlling it, now. They are seven years old. Hermione makes a flower shrivel and then come back alive. Harry sprouts daisies in the worn patch of earth beneath the swing. He makes it rain grass.
“I wish I could live with you,” he mumbles, head bent down, hair in his eyes.
“Maybe you could,” she smiles.
“Maybe. I wish. I don’t know why my Uncle and Aunt never gave me up. I don’t know why they kept me.” His throat hurts. There’s something prickling in his eyes. “They never wanted me. So I don’t understand…”
“Surely you wouldn’t want to go into care,” Hermione whispers this like it is a terrible fate.
“Anything’s better than the Dursley’s. Anything at all.”
“You know what would be great? If my parents could adopt you. Then we’d be brother and sister. They’d adopt you, I know they would.”
Hope bubbles in his belly, but it is a liar. The Dursley’s love tormenting him too much, he cannot ever see himself getting free from them. There’d been threats, of course, that they’d send him to some institution or a group home for kids no one wants, but they had stayed threats. When he’s bad, they lock him in the cupboard. When he’s good, they lock him in the cupboard.
“I wish,” he says, and doesn’t get further than that.
They’re eight when Dudley corners them in the playground, not for the first time. Harry wouldn’t mind if it was just him, that’d be normal, but Hermione is there too, surrounded by a gang of Dudley’s friends. Some of them are in year six and they tower over her. She has yet to hit her grown spurt.
“What’re you freaks up to?” Dudley spits. Hermione flinches. She gets bullied, sure, but being cornered by a group of kids is different.
“Nothing,” Harry says. He knows how to placate Dudley. He’s not a complicated person. “Just waiting for break to end.” He points to the school behind them, Mrs Peters’ classroom with its window open and an array of plants crowding the windowsill. In summer the room smells like pollen. It gives Hermione itchy eyes.
“I saw you,” Dudley mocks, “the pair of you, whispering. What d’you talk about, anyway?”
“It’s private,” Hermione says. She’s trying to be brave.
“Ooooh,” Dudley laughs, “‘private?’.”
They’d been sitting on the floor, is all. Hermione said there were fairies around, or maybe pixies, and they wanted to see if they could tempt them out by being still. Hermione says there are all sorts of creatures out there, living in secret, creatures from stories and myths.
“None of your business,” she manages, and that right there is the moment Dudley turns bright red in such a good imitation of his father that Harry winces.
“Oi Potter,” he drawls, “your girlfriend is giving me trouble. Who does she think she is?”
Harry shoves himself between them. He’s wiry and quick, where Dudley is slow and pudgy. He’s had to be quick to escape Uncle Vernon’s back hand. He’s never fought back against Dudley; it would not end well.
“Leave her alone,” he shouts, probably louder than he meant it to be. He’s just angry, and the anger fizzles in him like a firework. It makes his belly flip, makes his chest go all funny. He’s never raised a hand to Dudley but he feels like he could, now. Instead he focuses on Dudley’s face, thinking how ugly he is, how mean, and suddenly just as he’s staring, Dudley’s face erupts in pimples and zits, blotchy red bits leaking something gross. Harry gasps. He isn’t supposed to do this. He isn’t allowed. He isn’t supposed to let others know he’s a freak.
His friends back away as if it’s catching. Maybe it is. Dudley feels his face gingerly, coming into contact with whatever that mushy yellow stuff is. He gasps at the sight of it on his pudgy fingers.
“What?” He backs away.
Hermione relaxes, smiles, kind of turns up one eyebrow. “Looks like someone needs to go and see the nurse.”
Dudley looks at her as if he’s contemplating shutting her up, then something breaks in him and he runs away, across the playground, trailed by his laughing friends.
“That was great, Harry,” Hermione says.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” he replies. He feels ashamed, and sick, and like he’s just made a big mistake.
“It was brilliant,” she continues, but Harry wonders: was it the right thing to do? “You should have done that years ago.”
Maybe. But the Dursley’s will punish him later when they find out he embarrassed Dudley in public. Usually Harry is supposed to keep to himself, to almost fade into nonexistence.
Hermione has gone back to her book. She is always reading, and it’s stuff that Harry cannot hope to keep up with. Hermione learned to read before she’d even started nursery, because of course she did.
She reads physics and cellular biology and stuff about law. She wants to work in the government when she’s grown up. Harry, who cannot imagine being allowed to have a job, has no idea what he wants to do in the future. He cannot think that far ahead; the future is in black and white, unclear as thick smoke. He has a thought, a little thing living in the back of his brain, about being a police officer and being able to help people, to do something good and worthwhile. Maybe he’ll get to punish people like the Dursleys. Maybe he’ll get to save some other kid from being miserable.
They’re ten when the Dursley’s first bring up Stonewall High. He doesn’t want to go, especially not with Dudley’s stories about the place, but he has no choice. He’s glad to be getting out of St. Gregory’s, away from Dudley’s grasp, but it sounds as if this place is worse. Harry feels a pain in his chest, something gnawing at him, a kind of misery with no way out.
Hermione is going to a special school for kids who passed the 11+, a grammar school for clever kids. She hasn’t passed her 11+ yet, but everyone knows she will. She’s the smartest girl in the school, easily. Hermione knows everything, but apparently there are some things that take her by surprise.
The letter is a weird one, Harry thinks as he reads it.
“Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?” he scowls. Is this a joke?
“Yes, it’s a school, a magical school, for children like us.”
“Like us?”
“Magic! That’s what we’ve been doing all along, only we didn’t know it and, oh Harry, it’s going to be wonderful. We’re going to the same school!”
“What do you mean? I didn’t get an invite.”
“But you will! And someone came around, a teacher from Hogwarts, to explain things to my parents. They’ll do the same with your aunt and uncle, someone will come and let them know. You just have to wait a little while, I suppose, until it’s your turn.”
It is never Harry’s turn, but hope blooms inside him, weak but real.
“The Dursley’s will never let me go,” he is sure of that, as sure as he is of the sun and moon.
“They don’t have a choice,” Hermione smiles. “We’re magical, we need to be taught how to control it. There’s laws and everything, it’s really quite amazing. They gave me my first year books, and there’s this one, Hogwart’s: A History, and it says…” She goes on and on; he’s learned to let her.
Harry wonders how the Dursley’s will react when some teacher comes along and tells them he’s not a freak, he’s a wizard, or maybe that’s the same thing in their eyes. He wonders, and wonders, until the sun starts going down and he says goodbye to Hermione.
“We’ll talk more tomorrow,” she insists, as he waves her off. “I’ll bring the books, and you won’t believe it but there’s a wand shop, and I’m going to get my own wand next week!”
The park feels empty without her. That sliver of hope goes with her. A magic school, the two of them, freedom from the Dursley’s, his own magic wand? It seems faint, so distant he can barely see it through the fog, but it’s there, Hermione said so, and they want him.
Harry’s nearly eleven, so very nearly, when there’s a tapping noise from outside. He pulls aside the curtain. There’s an owl at the window.