Chapter Text
Harry stood outside Madam Malkin’s Robes for All Occasions with a bag of Galleons in his pocket and a sinking feeling in his stomach.
Hagrid had left him at the door. The cart ride through the vaults of Gringotts had turned the giant a delicate shade of green, and he had mumbled something about a quick pick-me-up in the Leaky Cauldron before lumbering away up the street, leaving Harry quite alone.
For ten years the Dursleys had told Harry that he was odd. Aunt Petunia said it with her lips pressed thin, Uncle Vernon said it at the top of his voice, and Dudley said it with his fists. Harry had always supposed there must be somewhere he would seem ordinary. Now he had found a whole street full of people like him, and he had never felt so peculiar in his life. Witches swept past in robes of emerald and plum. A small boy went by in a cloak with silver fastenings. Harry looked down at himself: Dudley’s old jeans, rolled four times at the ankle, and a grey jumper so stretched that the sleeves hung past his fingertips. There was a hole in the left elbow. He tucked that arm behind his back, flattened his fringe over his forehead, and went in.
A bell tinkled. The shop smelled of new cloth and warm irons, and bolts of black fabric were stacked to the ceiling on every side.
‘Hogwarts, dear?’ said a plump, cheerful witch with a mouthful of pins and a tape measure draped round her neck, before Harry had managed a word. ‘I thought so. We’ve got the lot through here. There’s a young lady being fitted this very minute.’
If Madam Malkin thought anything of his jumper, she was kind enough to keep it to herself. She steered him to the back of the shop, where a girl was standing on a footstool while a second witch pinned up the hem of her long black robes. Madam Malkin stood Harry on the stool next to her, dropped a robe over his head, and set to work.
Harry glanced sideways. The girl had a pale, pointed face, and hair so fair it was nearly white, falling perfectly straight to her waist as though it wouldn’t dare do otherwise. When she turned to look at him he saw that her eyes were grey, the colour of a new Sickle. She looked like the princesses in the picture books at school that Dudley had liked to scribble on, and Harry, who had never before given a moment’s thought to whether anybody was pretty, found that he had forgotten what to do with his hands.
‘Hello,’ said the girl. ‘Hogwarts as well?’
‘Yes,’ said Harry.
She studied him for a moment, her chin tilted up. Then she held out her hand, palm down, fingers drooping, in the manner of someone who had practised in front of a mirror.
‘Dracina Malfoy,’ she said grandly.
Harry stared at the hand. He had a feeling that shaking it was the wrong answer. The hand stayed where it was.
‘You are supposed to kiss it,’ said Dracina, with the weary patience of a person explaining soup to a baby. ‘It’s how one greets a witch of good family. Everybody knows that.’
‘Oh,’ said Harry. Then, because it was the only explanation he could think of, he asked, quite seriously, ‘Are you a princess?’
For a second Dracina’s mouth fell open. Two spots of pink appeared high on her pale cheeks. She snatched the hand back and became extremely busy with her sleeve.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘Wizards haven’t got princesses.’ She sniffed. ‘Though I suppose I can see why you’d make the mistake.’
‘Sorry,’ said Harry. ‘I don’t know much about any of this. Greetings and things, I mean. Nobody ever taught me.’
Dracina looked at him as though he had told her he’d never been taught to breathe.
‘Nobody taught you? But what on earth were your family doing?’
Shouting, mostly, thought Harry, but he only shrugged. Madam Malkin tugged his shoulder straight again.
Dracina seemed to decide that the kindest thing was to move on. She had a slow, bored way of talking, as if each word had been kept waiting.
‘Father is next door fetching my books, and Mother has gone up the street to see about wands,’ she said. ‘Afterwards I shall march the pair of them off to look at racing brooms. It’s a perfectly stupid rule, first-years not being allowed their own. I expect I’ll nag Father until he buys me one, and then I’ll sneak it in somehow.’
Harry was reminded powerfully of Dudley. It was Dudley in a long blonde wig, and the thought was so horrible that he nearly laughed.
‘Have you got a broom?’ Dracina asked.
‘No,’ said Harry.
‘Do you play Quidditch, at least?’
‘No,’ said Harry again. He hadn’t the faintest idea what Quidditch was.
‘Well, I do. Father says it will be a scandal if I’m not chosen for my house team, and I happen to think he’s right. Do you know which house you’ll be in?’
‘No,’ said Harry. He was beginning to feel that it was the only word he knew.
‘Nobody can be certain until they arrive, of course, but I shall be in Slytherin. We always are, the whole family. Can you imagine being put in Hufflepuff? I’d go straight home. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Mmm,’ said Harry. He wished very much that he could think of something clever.
‘Goodness, look at him!’ said Dracina, pointing at the front window. Hagrid was standing on the other side of the glass, beaming at Harry and holding up two enormous ice-creams by way of explaining why he was staying outside.
‘That’s Hagrid,’ said Harry, delighted to know one thing that she didn’t. ‘He works at Hogwarts.’
‘Oh, him,’ said Dracina. ‘I know about him. He’s some kind of servant, I believe.’
‘He’s the gamekeeper,’ said Harry. The princess in the picture book was fading fast.
‘That’s what I said. Father told me he’s practically wild. He lives in a shack in the grounds, and now and then he drinks too much and tries a spell and sets his own bed alight.’
‘I think he’s brilliant,’ said Harry, and his voice came out cold.
‘Do you really?’ Dracina’s lip curled. ‘Why are you with him, anyway? Where are your parents?’
‘They’re dead,’ said Harry. He did not want to talk about it, least of all to her.
‘Oh. Sorry,’ she said, in a voice that wasn’t sorry in the least. Her grey eyes had gone sharp. ‘They were our sort, though? Your parents?’
‘They were a witch and a wizard, if that’s what you’re asking.’
‘Good. I honestly can’t see why the other kind are let in at all, can you? They aren’t like us. They haven’t grown up with any of it. Father says some of them have never so much as heard of Hogwarts until the owl turns up, which is too absurd. It ought to be kept for the old families. What’s your surname, by the way?’
Harry was spared from answering.
‘That’s you finished, my dear,’ said Madam Malkin, and Harry jumped down from the stool so quickly that he trod on his own hem.
‘I’ll see you at Hogwarts, then, I expect,’ Dracina called after him lazily.
Harry did not look round, so he never saw that she watched him the whole way to the door, or that she went on gazing at the place where he had been for some time after the bell had stopped ringing.
Outside, Hagrid pressed an ice-cream into his hand. It was chocolate and raspberry with chopped nuts, and it was the size of Harry’s head. He had only ever been given ice-cream when there was somebody watching whom the Dursleys wished to impress, and then it had been the cheapest lemon ice lolly on the van while Dudley had a Knickerbocker Glory. He ought to have been enjoying every mouthful.
He ate it in silence. He kept thinking of a pale hand held out to be kissed, and the pink in her cheeks when he had asked his stupid question, and then of everything she had said about Hagrid, who was at that moment humming happily beside him with raspberry sauce in his beard. Harry couldn’t make the two halves of her fit together. She was the rudest girl he had ever met, ruder even than Dudley, and it annoyed him a great deal that he was still wondering about her when they reached the end of the street.