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Adam’s mother wasn’t a very commanding person. Her rarely-given orders were always formed in a soft monotone, with as few words as possible. It was always: ‘Adam, do the dishes’ or ‘Adam, don’t upset your father.’ The former one was a regular chore; the latter was near impossible, no matter how Adam tried. His mere existence was upsetting to his father most hours of the day.
Today, his mother said, “Adam, come here.” She was just outside his bedroom door, which hadn’t been able to close more than halfway for weeks ever since Adam’s father gave it a good kicking in a fit of drunken rage. In her hands she held an envelope. Not a stark white and long like most envelopes, like the ones bills came in. It was blunt rectangle near the color of the clay-dirt their double wide trailer sat on.
There was very little room in Adam’s life for resisting, so he left his -- now three wheeled -- model car that he’d driving up his knee like a hill on his bed, and went to his mother.
Mom lead Adam to his parent’s bedroom, a place Adam didn’t have permission to enter. He hovered in the doorway, watching his mother tug an unfamiliar case -- an old-fashioned looking trunk -- out from underneath the bed. She unlatched the trunks’ clasps and threw it open.
Adam, a little short for ten years old, went up on his toes to see the contents. He didn’t consider either of his parents mysterious. They were both unhappy in routine, familiar ways.
Mom dug around in the trunk, revealing clothes and books and, most oddly, feathers, stopping only when she found a drawstring pouch. Out of it she dumped a small pile of gold and silver coins that looked like pirate’s treasure, not anything like real money, onto the bedspread. With her chapped fingers, she sorted the coins into piles, counting under her breath. That was a familiar thing in all this strangeness: the worried furrow in Mom’s brow as counted money.
“This will have to do,” his mother said, now scooping up the coins back into the pouch. “You’ll have to use my old books.” She dropped the pouch back into the case, leaned over to heave the lid of the trunk shut. She then stiffly sat on the edge of the bed, a hand to her lower back. “Push it back under the bed, Adam.”
Adam scrambled to the floor and with a series of shoves managed to hide the trunk back under the bed. He regretted it when he did, would have liked to have gotten his hands one or the other of those books, whatever they were. They didn’t have many books around the trailer and not being in school over summer break meant he couldn’t go to the school library to borrow any. There was a public library in town, but it was too far for Adam to walk to by himself and asking to be taken was too risky.
Adam was still on the floor when his mother said, “I wasn’t expecting this. I’ve never see you do a spot of magic.”
“Magic?” It was quite an accomplish, holding back all his questions until now. This wasn’t a word he was sure he had ever heard pass his mother’s lips before. There was no room in her life for fantasy.
“Here.” Mom held out the strange envelope. Only upon taking it in his tentative fingers, did Adam see that the letter was addressed to him. When he flipped it over, even though it was already open, he saw that there had been a wax seal with the impression of a coat of arms in it. Coats of arms, pirate treasure, magic -- this wasn’t Adam Parrish’s life.
Adam took out the letter and read. He kept glancing up at his mother, hoping for her to volunteer an explanation, but he knew any of his questions had to be strategic, so he read the whole thing, even the list of supplies, to the end with care, before he lower the parchment.
“Am I going?” Adam asked.
“You wouldn’t’ve been accepted if you weren’t magical. And here I was thinking you turned out to be a muggle like your father.”
Muggle was a word Adam had never heard before, and his mother never said anything directly against her husband, but it didn’t exactly kind either.
Adam was about to brave asking more when the sound of the creaky front door being yanked open interrupted him.
“Hide it,” Mom hissed. Adam shoved the letter hard into his pocket. They had both been distracted by this strange turn of events. Both of them, usually, had good ears for hearing Dad’s truck pulling up the drive.
Mom stood from the bed and went out to greet Adam’s father. Adam snuck out of the bedroom through the kitchen and back to his bedroom. There was no true privacy with his broken door but he could tuck himself in the corner out of the line of sight.
Dad's voice was low and rumbling, not angry yet. Often did Adam keep secrets with his mother or, more accurately, often Adam kept his mother's secrets. It was always best for the both of them that Dad not be provoked. It was a truce of protection though it didn't extend far beyond that. Sometimes it didn’t go both ways.
Adam heard a different kind of creak -- not the door but the easy chair, Dad's chair. Mom was moving around the kitchen. Cabinets opening and closing, and pots clinking were evidence of Mom making a meal for her husband. Only now with them both occupied did Adam pull the letter out from his pocket. It was badly crumpled; Adam smoothed it over his knee.
Adam reread the letter. Was he magic? He had never turned anyone into a toad, and knew enough people that deserved it. Was his mother? She was the one who knew about all this, and he had never seen her do a spot of magic either.
Adam didn’t know what form magic took, or what kinds of things could be done with it. Just an hour ago he had known magic to be fiction.
He thought also of two weeks ago, of the the paper airplane he had made out of glossy ads from the newspaper. The paper was too flimsy and the airplane directly dive bombed whenever Adam tossed it. But he had nothing else to do, no friends, just a long stretch of a summer day where Mom had banished him outside the trailer so he wouldn’t get in the way of her cleaning.
He tried refolding the airplane into different shapes with little effect. “Come on, fly,” he said to it, holding it across his palms as if weighing it. With the tip of his tongue stuck between his teeth, he tossed it again, and this time it flew, long, and then up, curly-q-ing over, and then back to Adam, so all he had to do was jump up and catch it. At the time, Adam thought he must’ve caught an interesting breeze. Was that magic?
Could Adam Parrish, friendless and quiet, be magic?
#
The barrier between platform nine and ten looked plenty solid to Adam’s suspicious gaze. He had a train ticket for Platform 9 ¾ and his mother’s assurance -- before she put him on the bus down here to the train station by himself -- that entrance was through the barrier itself.
He didn’t know what to make of his mother lately. After the letter from Hogwarts had arrived, she didn’t speak a word of it for days, returning to her sullen self, speaking only to give short commands, shrinking in his father’s presence. If Adam didn’t have the solid proof of the letter under his pillow where she could slide his hand under to feel the edges of before he fell asleep every night, he could’ve thought he had dreamed up the whole incident out of summer-born boredness.
Then, one morning, she commanded a terse, “Come with me,” and led him outside. He thought he was about to be assigned some tedious chore under the hot sun -- weed pulling or such -- when Mom slid a long, smooth stick out of her pocket.
“What’s that?” Adam had asked.
“It’s a wand, Adam,” she said, just as terse as earlier. A strange bus -- purple, double-decker -- appeared out of nowhere before them. Adam had jumped at the sudden appearance, the sudden noise. If Mom hadn’t a vice-grip on his arm just above his elbow he would've fallen on his butt in the dirt.
Mom paid the bus attendant out of the pouch of strange coins and took the strangest ride of Adam’s life into the city, which should’ve taken longer than the quarter hour it did. Adam didn’t see much of the city, for they went straight into the pub the bus had stopped in front of. The pub had smelled like mildew and liquor, a combination that made Adam wrinkle his nose and get wriggles in his gut. In Adam’s life, the smell of liquor was only ever a precursor to bad things: anger and upset.
Through a back room in the pub, they entered into the most fantastical place Adam had ever see, although he didn’t get to see much of it. Mom kept that tight grip on his arm and walked with a purpose, leading him like a dog on a leash to their destination. He wanted to look everywhere, but he didn’t have enough eyes. Hundreds of questions he’d probably never had the opportunity or the daring to ask his mother piled up in his head.
Their first stop was a wand shop. Mom sat in a chair by the door, checking the watch she had bought at a thrift store, as an attendant tried wand after wand in Adam’s hands, trying to match him up with something Adam didn’t understand.
“A stubborn one, aren’t you,” the attendant muttered. “But I think I’ve got just the one.” He scurried into the back and came back with a new box. “Dragon heartstring and oak. Eleven inches long. Needs a determined handler.”
He passed the wand to Adam, and Adam gave it a wave as instructed. Silver sparks exploded from the end. Adam might’ve thought it was the wrong thing except for the attendant’s whoop of delight.
Adam reached out his free hand and caught a spark in his palm. It didn’t burn, but buzzed around on his skin until it faded out. If this was magic, it was beautiful.
After, they stopped at a strange-smelling place called an apothecary to get potions ingredients and after that a second-hand store to get everything else on his supplies list: robes, lengths of parchment, quills, and a cauldron.
At the secondhand store, Mom checked the price tags on everything, running quick calculations under her breathe, picking items up and then putting them back. It was a negotiation process Adam had witnessed before, delineating priorities and what could be done without. It was unsettling, however, that for the first time in Adam’s memory, all of it was going towards him.
When they had arrived home, taking again that strange bus, Mom weighed the packages down in Adam’s arms and said nothing but, “Put them away.” Which Adam understood as ‘Put them away where your father won’t see.’
Then, Adam’s mother again when silent on the topic of magic and Hogwarts, until the evening she told Adam to go outside and wait until she came to get him. She had to have a conversation with Adam’s father.
It had been in a later day of summer, when the daylight hours were growing shorter, and Adam watched the sunset with the banging-shouting-crashing sounds from the trailer filling in the background. It was dark and breezy before Mom came to retrieve him. He entered the trailer, which was filled with a tense silence.
That was last night.
“You’ll be headed to school tomorrow,” Mom said, voice down to a whisper. She was cradling one arm close to her.
Adam waited his father for a reaction, heart duplicating it’s own pace. His father sat dark-eyed, scowling, in his armchair that neither Adam nor his mother ever sat in. He had an open beer can. The muttering TV was the only distraction.
“I won’t have you getting under my feet for the next nine months,” Dad said, his voice gravel. Later would Adam wonder if that was an argument Mom had supplied to convince Dad to let him go.
This morning, after Dad had gone for work, Mom sent Adam off on that strange bus here to the train station, this time alone.
Adam kept checking the station clock. He had less than ten minutes to find his train. If he missed it, he had no money for a trip home. He rolled his cart up to the brick partition, pressed his hand against it, but it felt as solid as it looked.
“Oy, you’re in the way. Get on with it.”
Adam withdrew his hand at the sound of the voice, nearby. It belonged to a boy a few years his senior with a trunk very much like the one his mother’s gave to Adam on his cart, plus a caged owl on top.
Adam stepped back. “You first,” he said.
Muttering something about first years, the young man pushed his cart purposefully toward the brick partition, and just as it looked like he would collide with it, he slipped right through and vanished.
Adam left out a puff of breath. Well, then.
He followed the example, and five minutes later he was on a train setting out for his future.
#
The first night, Adam couldn’t sleep. He laid in a bed -- canopied, large, comfortable -- listening to his dorm mates slow breathing and little snores. His stomach hurt from overeating, a rare occurrence, but a feast had been served up before him, the food hearty and delicious. Adam had wanted to taste everything, and used to living on a strapped budget that extended even to the amount of food available, he wasn’t used to enacting that type of self-control.
Otherwise, his mind was working itself over and back with all it had experienced. The lake ride revealing Hogwarts castle in it’s momentous glory, the Great Hall with it’s ceiling a recreation of the heavens, the Sorting Hat whispering into his ear.
“You want so much, Adam Parrish,” it had said. “You’re smart and you’re strong, but this is the rawest thing about you, all the things you ache for. You’d do anything to have them.” Adam had felt peeled open and revealed at that moment, although the Sorting Hat was only speaking privately to him.
He did want: a real house, and parents who took him to the playground, and a Christmas like in the movies with a big tree and lots of lights and colorfully wrapped packages. He wanted the life that other kids had and took for granted. He strongly doubted his parents’ would ever give it to him. That hope had been stripped away over the years. He knew them well enough at eleven years old. But his mother had given him this: magic and this school. So Adam, maybe, could make these things for himself.
Adam thought deeply on this, and a moment later was sorted into Slytherin.
#
“Mr. Parrish, can you stay after class for a moment,” his potions professor said at the end of a Friday session.
Adam was the second week into his Hogwarts education, and every day what he didn’t know about magic and about this magical world grew. It was like being thrown into the deep end of the pool when no one had ever taught you how to swim. Worse, most the students in his house seemed to already know each other or know each other’s families. Adam never found making friends easy in the first place, lacking charm or any of those things that allured children towards other children -- the newest toy, a lunchbox with the same favorite television show on the front, parents arranging playdates.
If Adam had thought being far away from home would change that… it hadn’t so far. Instead, he had a fellow Slytherin do a posturing of a snideness, asking after where ‘Parrish’ the name came from. The answer -- nowhere rich, nowhere magical -- earned him no favor and silence was just as incriminating.
Adam waited on his stool as the other students streamed out of his room, chatting, off on their way to lunch, with none -- he knew -- that would wait out in the hall to accompany him. Good thing, the first weekend here he spent in his daylight hours wandering the castle to better learn his paths to and from class.
“I’ve been grading the first assignment,” the professor said, standing up from his desk with a scroll in hand. “Yours is one of the best out of the class. A very thoroughly researched essay that I don’t usually expect from first years.”
“Thank you,” Adam said in a careful way. He was used to being baited and then betrayed, by bullies and then also his father, the worst bully of all.
“But…” the professor said. Adam tensed across the shoulders. The professor spread the length of parchment onto Adam’s desk. “The handwriting is atrocious.”
Adam blinked down at his own homework, but he knew what he would see. Ink blotches dropped from an over-dipped quill, words double-traced when the ink had run unexpectedly low, smudges and fingerprints.
“Are you muggleborn?” the professor said mildly. Adam had picked up this term and its definition and it’s wide range of implications already. “A lot of muggleborn students struggle writing with a quill at first.”
Adam shook his head, although the reasoning was exactly right. He did struggle with quill, with holding the narrow calamus between his fingers and with the loose ink. “My mother’s a witch,” he said. It was less strange to say now than the first several times, for the idle curiosity of classmates. He didn’t think of his mother as magical, although he had seen her wand himself. What he hadn’t seen was her perform any magic; all he saw was her with the drab background of her life.
“It can be learned with practice,” the professor said, letting Adam’s parchment roll back up. “But I won’t be accepting any essay’s this sloppy again, understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re dismissed.”
#
Adam received only one brief letter from home in those first months. In mid-December, from his mother, telling him to stay at Hogwarts for Christmas break. It wasn’t much of a burden. Adam had been considering it since he heard it was an option, heard that they lined the Great Hall with evergreens, and a had special feast for those who remained. He felt the sting of being unwanted regardless.
He wrote a quick note saying he would and sent it back with the same owl. It was the first letter he had wrote home since arriving. At first, he didn’t know how, until the owls came swooping in one breakfast, delivering letters and packages to swarms of his classmates but never him. After, he thought sending an owl might anger his father, which was something Adam didn’t want to do even from afar.
The deeper truth was Adam wouldn’t have known what to write if he tried. His family didn’t really talk. About money, sure, how there wasn’t enough of it, and about chores. Listening to his father’s rants and raves didn’t count as conversation. If Adam had been going to a normal school, as he had been in years previous, he wouldn’t have been asked how his school days had gone when he came home everyday. The height of academic success in the Parrish trailer was Adam doing well enough and behaving well enough in school that his parents never had to bother with attending a conference or meeting. The worst thing Adam could do was make himself a nuisance in any which way.
So Adam stayed for Christmas break. All the first years in Slytherin went home, which left Adam with an empty dorm but no less friends than before. Although, perhaps if their group had been splintered over break there would’ve been a room for him to find a place. He made a tentative connection with a second year girl who taught him how to play Exploding Snap and Wizard’s Chess whenever the girl’s older sister -- a fourth year -- wouldn’t let her hang out with her and her friends. The girl complained at length about this injustice while Adam didn’t complain once about being the girl’s second option.
“What did you get?” the girl asked Christmas morning, when they had converged in the Slytherin common room before heading to the Great Hall for breakfast. “My mum got me earrings, look.” She curled her hair behind her ear to reveal an earring that looked like a starburst.
Adam was interrupted from having to tell the truth or contrive a lie when the girl’s sister barked at her to hurry up or be left behind. His mood was lightened, see all the decorated trees in the Great Hall, by sight of the crisp layer of snow that fell overnight, by a snowball fight that wrapped in almost every student left over break despite house or year. So his parents hadn’t sent him anything for Christmas, not even a letter. This was still better than a tense Christmas at home, the weight of not having weighing on all as Dad drank too much as felt betrayed by the world. Face pinked with cold, returning to the Great Hall for supper, Adam thought this in fact might’ve been the best Christmas of his life.
The second year girl didn’t ask after Adam’s presents again. She seemed more interested in showing off her earrings than hearing anyone else brag about their gifts.
When the school year started back up, once the girl’s real friends returned, this friendship drifted away like a leaf caught on a breeze.
#
If Adam didn’t have friends, he had time for other things. He could rewrite out his essays if the first go threw became too sloppy. He could filch abandoned copies of the Daily Prophet from the breakfast table to be skimmed over later in an attempt to understand the wizarding world a little more.
You didn’t need friends to go to Quidditch games, cheer along, and feel like you were a part of something. You didn’t need a friend to play Wizard’s Chess as long as there was someone with an open board accepting challenges. In fact, Adam spent many free evenings playing a glasses-wearing sixth year in the common room who would gleefully explain the strategies he used to beat Adam every game lost. And Adam paid attention.
Also, there were books. A whole library full. He wrote inquires down on scraps of parchment as he ran across them during class and overhearing conversations and would ask the librarian who didn’t actually seem to like there to be any children in her library for books on those topics. Adam had never had this much luxury to read before: stacks to choose from, no hiding them necessary, and more free time than he ever had in his life with no chores and no navigating around Dad’s moods.
There was a lot Adam Parrish could do with his time.
#
Adam Parrish was a good student. He practiced the swing of his wand and enunciation of his spells in the off hours, in empty classrooms where there would be no one to witness is fumblings. He was good at the step-by-step preparations of portions, the satisfaction of dirt and work turning into growth in Herbology, and at the constructing of essays, probably because he was willing to dedicate more time and attention to it than his his fellow first years. He didn’t raise his hand much in class to answer questions, afraid of showing off how much he didn’t know. Here, far away from home, he never had to miss class to hide bruises.
But the exactness of being a good student was different from the joy of performing magic. Every time it felt the same as when he created those sparks in the wand shop, like pure light surging through his veins. Even when he just levitating a feather or turning a matchstick into a needle, this was him, this was his. His power, his talent, his ability to do amazing things. His, and it couldn’t be taken away or tarnished.
Adam had few things in his life like that, and none of them could compare at all to this.
#
Adam left his first year at Hogwarts near the top of his class. He had capped a school year’s length of dedicated class attention and homework with joining study groups pre-exams, with tightly pronounced spell castings, with carefully neat handwriting.
He was able to leave Hogwarts proud of himself for homegrown successes. He didn’t leave with close friends, but he did get thanks from a neebish Hufflepuff from one of his study groups whom he helped with History of Magic notes, got a ‘see you next year’ from one of his dorm mates, was invited to play Exploding Snap with the second year girl and her friends on the train ride home.
The last of these served as a nice distraction for what was to come. The length of summer where he had to keep his magic tucked away, where he had to relearn negotiating his father’s moods, where he didn’t know if his dinner plate would be filled.
As the train pulled into the station, and the students all scrambled against each other to get their trunks and get out, Adam waited. Rushing wasn’t necessary for him; he had nowhere to rush to. The walk out -- out of the train, out of Platform 9 ¾, then out of the Muggle train station, where his mother had been waiting to collect him, where like walking out of a world of color and into one of sepia tones. It was Dorothy waking up back on the farm. Adam would also choose Oz.
In transfiguration class, Adam had learned how to change one thing into another with the right words, the correct flick of the wrist, with the concentration of mind and magic. With similar dedication, Adam could transform himself.
He would bear through summer break and return to Hogwarts next year and all the years after it. He would study and work and become the best wizard attainable.
So he lifted his chin, and made a decision, silent and resilient. He would cling onto the place and the feeling of magic to know for sure it wasn’t a dream. That it was real. That magic was real, and Adam Parrish, real along with it.