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Hermione Granger had a number of fascinating and new experiences the year she turned twelve. She found out that she was a witch, and the frustratingly impossible things that happened around her were not impossible, but magic. She went to boarding school in Scotland. She helped defeat a Dark Lord. And, for the first time in her life, she had a best friend: Harriet (Harry) Potter, another first year Gryffindor and the girl in the next bed in her dormitory.
Making friends with Harry was a great relief to Hermione, who had always felt subtly out of step with other children. Harry didn't own a Walkman or have a crush on any boy band members. Harry didn't collect slap band bracelets. Harry couldn't make her hair lie still either.
Best of all, making friends with Harry confirmed Hermione's sensibly withheld but always present desire for heroics and her secret conviction that she was destined for adventure, because Harry was the mortal enemy of You-Know-Who, a Dark wizard, and had defeated him when she was just a baby. (But, according to Professor Dumbledore, according to Hagrid, he wasn't entirely dead, but would be back - which, Hermione thought but had been sensible enough not to say, made it even more like a story. Hermione had read a lot of fantasy before Hogwarts.)
When Hermione went home for the summer, she held out for two days before sitting at her painted white desk and getting out the floral stationary she had received as a birthday present from a distant relative two years before, and writing an entire five pages to Harry. There was a local magical post office near her house, with a Floo you could pay a few knuts to use and owls to rent. Hermione only had to wait until her parents went to their dental practice for work the next day before she could sneak out and go there. Then she went home to anxiously wait for Harry's reply.
The next morning she leapt out of bed at dawn to find out if Harry had written, and went to look out the window every hour all day. The morning after that she got up uncharacteristically early. The third she plodded through her summer homework for a distraction, and on the fourth day she lay in bed rereading Charlotte's Web for the twenty-first time, and when they got home from work her mother asked if she was ill.
Hermione was not usually a child who moped, but Harry had been her first real friend. Thinking that she had been abandoned as soon as the school year was out, Hermione wept bitterly, was apathetic about her favorite foods at dinner, and lay around listening to the saddest music she could find rooting around her parents' cassettes. This lasted for three days. On the morning of the fourth, just over a week after her letter was sent, she was drifting in bed, half awake and thinking about Hogwarts, replaying every conversation she had had with Harry and trying to decide where she had gone wrong. Then she remembered a comment Harry had made about her aunt and uncle. It wasn't a big thing, or Hermione would have noticed it at the time, merely an idle remark about Uncle Vernon being disappointed she hadn't managed to get herself killed.
There had been rather a lot of this sort of comment, when Hermione thought about it. Since Hermione also did not speak about her parents at school and would not regard their relationship as particularly close, it had passed by her notice at the time. But now Hermione realized that these had not been idle complaints, but clues. Harry hadn't abandoned her friendship. Hermione, moping around because her best friend wasn't writing to her, had nearly been the one to abandon Harry, because Harry needed to be rescued.
Hermione got up, and absentmindedly went to brush her teeth even before she got dressed in case she happened upon a parent and they asked after her morning dental hygiene status. Then she went downstairs in her pajamas. She poured herself a bowl of cereal before collecting a stack of phone books. Fortunately, Harry's relatives had a distinctive last name, one Harry always used to refer to them, so that Hermione was certain she remembered it: the Dursleys. Dursley was not a common name. Furthermore Hermione was quite sure Harry had said she lived in Surrey, which narrowed it down substantially. Three hours later, she had come up with exactly one possible candidate for Harry's (wicked?) relatives: Vernon Dursley, resident at Number 4, Privet Drive.
At this point Hermione went to look up bus routes. Her parents both ran the dental practice and had to be out of the house all day during the summer, so Hermione was permitted to take herself on the bus on suitably educational outings, such as the library, or to the Arts Centre, as long as she didn't go too far. Hermione had been abusing this fact to go wherever and whenever she liked ever since the permission was first granted. Her parents, after all, were at the dental practice all day, and if she missed a phone call she could always say she had been reading at the library.
By the time Hermione had plotted out the best bus route possible between Hatch End and Little Whinging, it was nearly one in the afternoon. Since her father would be home between three and four, she reached the sad conclusion that there was no way she could go and rescue Harry tonight. She would have to spend a full two hours on three separate trains just to get there, by which time her father would be on his own way home, and Hermione knew it might take cunning planning to rescue Harry. It would have to wait until tomorrow.
The next day, Hermione set her alarm for six AM, sharp, the same time her parents got up. She had written down the train times for the next day carefully - all of them, just in case it took longer than anticipated to rescue Harry, and Hermione was late coming home. (She was grimly prepared to be late, and had come up with a number of convincing explanations, including ones that would work if she had to come home after the library had already closed. In all likelihood her parents would not bother asking for them, but Hermione believed it was good to be prepared for all eventualities.) She had breakfast with her parents, and made cunning small talk about dentistry by pronouncing that the root canal scheduled first thing this morning was "wicked gross, Dad, I'm eating stop telling me about it." She allowed herself to sulk over the fact that neither of her parents could identify this as a thing Hermione Granger would absolutely never say for a full five minutes as a reward.
Then her parents had cleared off for the dental practice. Hermione breathed a sigh of relief. She finished her perfectly nutritious breakfast meticulously, watching the clock, just in case either of her parents realized they'd forgotten something and came back and wanted to know why on earth Hermione had stirred herself from the house before seven in the morning.
Then Hermione got up and collected the bag she had packed last night for a Rescue Mission, and she went to catch the Overground.
Little Whinging was... normal, Hermione decided. In fact it was so normal it bent around the end of normal, came back around and became extremely weird. She consciously did not kick a piece of gravel on the road, because she had the feeling if she dared to do anything so Badly Behaved, someone would come and declare her a Miscreant Youth and hustle her out of existence.
She had to find Privet Drive, she told herself, and straightened. She was not badly behaved: she was on a rescue mission.
It helped that she fit in. Before Hermione had received her Hogwarts letter, she had been enrolled in a very good muggle school, and her parents had already gone shopping for her uniform. It had been stuffed in the back of her closet for nearly a year now, but they had bought it a little big because Hermione was still growing, so she had easily been able to put on the skirt and blouse, although it had taken her three tries to get the tie right. Aside from her hair, which she could never get to look properly neat, Hermione was exactly the sort of respectably normal girl who ought to be here, she thought, and put her chin up.
She found Privet Drive and turned down it, checking the house numbers, but she had a way to go before she found number four. In the meantime she kept an eye out in case she encountered Harry on the street (perhaps plotting her own daring escape), or gathered any useful intelligence. A woman watering houseplants waved. Hermione waved back, and then considered whether she had been drawing attention to herself. But a spy had to blend in, she reminded herself, and being rude by not waving might have drawn attention.
At long last, Hermione reached the house on Privet Drive, which was the most normal and therefore the most bizarre of all of the supernaturally normal houses in the exceedingly normal suburb of Little Whinging, Surrey. Here her plan faltered. She had planned to stake out the property and formulate a plan, but the only thing across the street from the house and to the sides across the street were more extremely normal and inhospitable houses, so there was absolutely nowhere to inconspicuously loiter. However, before Hermione could panic, something distracted her: she spotted Harry.
"Harry!" said Hermione, like an absolutely terrible spy.
"Hermione!" said Harry. She stood up, which was necessary because she had been, at that moment, lurking in a crouch among the begonias. "But you didn't write!"
"Of course I wrote!" said Hermione indignantly. "You didn't answer!"
"I was going to write," said Harry with remorse, "But they've locked Hedwig up in my room. Uncle Vernon put a padlock on her cage," and she indicated the upper story of the house.
Hermione remembered that she was on a mission then and studied Harry. On the one hand, she was not chained up, or locked in a terrible dungeon (or the spare bedroom). On the other, she was rather skinnier than she had been very recently at the end of term, and she was badly sunburned, and she was also dressed in the most ridiculously oversize and worn out garments Hermione had ever seen. "What happened to your clothes?" Hermione said.
"Dudley happened," said Harry.
"What?" said Hermione.
Harry opened her mouth to explain. Then she looked over Hermione's shoulder and her very green eyes went very, very wide.
"Harry's got a friend," said a sniggering voice behind Hermione. Hermione swallowed. This was an unfortunately familiar script. She turned, with great trepidation, and found that they had been spotted by several of the meanest looking boys Hermione had ever met - possibly even worse than Draco Malfoy at school.
"Shove off, Dudley," said Harry. Hermione said nothing, because she was remembering something important: she knew the name Dudley. Dudley was Harry's cousin.
"Harry," said Hermione, remembering this, "Do you really have to live with him?"
"Really, I do," said Harry with great resignation.
"Hey," said one of the slightly smaller, nearly as mean looking boys shadowing Dudley, "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means Hermione's a woman of great culture and taste," said Harry, seized Hermione's wrist, and set off at a dead sprint. Hermione was nowhere near as fast as Harry normally, but panic lent her speed. They took off together down the road, across the street, and into a child's playground, where Harry glanced behind them and panted, "Can you climb trees?"
"In this skirt?" Hermione gasped, then said, "I'd better."
"There - the big one with the fork--"
Hermione was reasonably adept as a tree climber when she bothered, which was rarely, as books were much more interesting in her opinion. Harry was obviously much better and it was very clear why. She shot up the tree like a squirrel, and Hermione followed, snagging her hair in the branches and nearly losing a shoe. Harry hauled Hermione up when she faltered, and pointed out useful footholds, until they were a terrifying distance in the air and the boys were just crossing the entrance to the playground.
"What happens now?" said Hermione.
"If we're lucky they don't look up far enough to see us," said Harry.
"If we're not lucky?"
"Well," said Harry, "Usually they get bored of waiting around and throwing rocks at me after a while, or they get called home for dinner or something. Their aim's not very good," she added, when this pronouncement made Hermione squeak. "Especially at a distance, that's the other reason we climbed so high."
They looked at each other.
"Is it always like this?" said Hermione, plaintively.
"No, usually it's worse," said Harry. "What are you doing here?"
"I told you! You didn't write, so I came to rescue you." Hermione looked down at the snickering boys, who she really hoped could not hear their conversation. Her face felt hot. "I'll come up with a better plan."
Harry was silent, and Hermione was starting to get worried, when Harry suddenly flung her arms around her so hard they nearly fell out of the tree.
"Harry?" said Hermione.
"No one's ever come to help me before," muttered Harry. "Well, besides Hagrid. So, er, what's the plan?"
"Can you get your things and meet me outside?" said Hermione. Obviously Harry could not stay here. "Then you can come home with me. My parents won't be home from work for ages, and you can go to the dental practice when they do. It's not far, and I've got a spare key. Nobody would notice if you slept there." Hermione had come up with this plan on the way.
Harry was shaking her head, though. "They've got all my stuff locked up in the cupboard under the stairs, and we're not supposed to do magic outside of school."
"I don't suppose you can pick locks?" said Hermione without much hope, but Harry shook her head. Hermione frowned. It did not seem fair to get all this way, find Harry, and be chased up a tree by Harry's evil cousin only to be stopped by the issue of luggage. She visualized a cupboard under the stairs. The lock would probably be simple, except if they had meant it to keep Harry out all summer they might have replaced it... One of them could do magic anyway and hope they only got a warning, but that was giving up and would probably mean Getting In Trouble. You didn't need magic to get through a door, though, Hermione thought, and they were better than Wizards, they had common sense.
Oh, wait. She remembered something that another girl in primary had once been threatened with as a punishment.
"Harry," said Hermione, squinting, "Are the hinges on the cupboard door inside or outside?"
"Er," said Harry, startled, but obviously thinking, "Outside, I think. No, wait - it has to be the outside, because the fastenings - er - aren't on the inside."
"Good," said Hermione, only half listening. "Can you get your hands on a screwdriver?"
In the end, Dudley and the horrible boys only waited at the foot of the tree for about a half hour before they got bored. Hermione climbed down, listening very hard to Harry's voice telling her where to put her feet and refusing to be scared. (They had faced You-Know-Who together just a few weeks ago and nearly died. What was a tree? What was a wicked family?)
Then Hermione went off to the closest shops and bought a screwdriver, and, feeling very clever, a clipboard and a notebook and a pack of pens. It was lucky she was so tall, and also one of the oldest in their year, because she could probably pass for a few years older if she was careful. Harry had gone home while Hermione shopped, because they needed Hermione's arrival to be as non-suspicious and distracting as possible. But this meant Hermione had no idea what was happening and she was terribly anxious about it. When she got out of the last shop, she gathered her bags up and ran most of the way back to Privet Drive, even though her shoes were not at all right for it and it definitely made people stare. She handed off the screwdriver to Harry at the back gate, and she took a deep breath and went to knock on the door.
"Mrs. Dursley?" said Hermione, with her brightest, most responsible smile. "I'm a student worker with the British Gardening Method Survey. Do you have a few minutes to answer questions about your lovely garden? Would you mind showing me around, actually, if you've got the time?"
Inside, Harry would be lying in wait, ready to start disassembling the cupboard door.