Chapter Text
Will
I can’t believe summer is over. Don’t get me wrong, I like school, but it was kind of nice to be with Dad again. Everything is simpler at home.
I already miss sitting on the balcony at Memaw’s, when the fireflies come out and the air finally starts to cool enough so your shirt doesn’t stick to you. Drinking soda—real soda, sweet and fizzy and a little warm—and Memaw smacking Dad on the shoulder when he suggests we pour a dollop of whiskey into it. He unwinds in times like that, uncoils muscles and mind and eases a weight off his shoulders that he doesn’t even know he carries. When he asks about school, I… exaggerate, tell him about all the friends I’ve made, how fun the classes are. How good I am at flying a broom, which is actually mostly true, and gives him no end of amusement to hear about.
He also asked about my “dizzy spells,” (his word for my so-called gift. I find his term more accurate, personally) and I outright lied. I told him I have a professor who’s helped me control it, and it was worth it to see him smile, satisfied that he could give me something good. It aches somewhere in my chest to think about.
But it was hard, to go back to the mundane like that, after having my eyes opened. Sometimes I’d wake in the night, sweating, thinking the entire thing was a dream, there was no such place at Hogwarts, and I was not a wizard, just borderline insane. I’d pull out Bev’s letters then, stamps stuck haphazardly all over the envelopes, address written in shimmery blue ink, and I’d read them all: remembering, reassuring. Her family took her on a backpacking trip, to Stonehenge, to Jericho, they saw dragons in Egypt and she swears she met a vampire in the Ukraine. “Graham!” they always start, “you’ll never believe…”
But I did. And I clung to those stories. She is in this other world all the time, no need for vacations to mundania where you can’t even use accio to bring you the tv remote. It doesn’t matter that I’m more than a little jealous, that my letters always sounded about the same. You can only write “oh, dad and I went fishing again this weekend,” so many times before you realize how monotonous that is.
Now, sitting in a train compartment on my way back, I’m equal parts excited and nervous, hoping she and Brian find me. I’m so ready to be back.