November dragged.

And winter either didn’t know or didn’t care what month it was. It rocketed forcefully into Little Whinging, coating the ground in mushy gray-white snow and constantly blowing frigid winds in every direction. If you went outside, it was probable that at first you would think that you had entered some sort of wormhole, and had been transported to Antarctica. People bundled up tightly like Eskimos were always half-running on the sidewalks; eager to get where they needed to go.

I watched the window from the pew in the back of Our Lady of the People, enjoying how the wind caught the flurries and swirled them into little tornadoes. Mr. Millerton stood at the front, just finishing a speech about how you shouldn’t drink water from a plastic bottle that’s been left in the sun for awhile, because the chemicals from the plastic could seep into it and poison your system.

What sun?, I thought. I hadn’t seen the sun in two weeks. Even when the snow stopped for a few hours, a thick blanket of clouds lay across the sky.

My notebook sat open across my lap, and I was trying to get a realistic sketch of Mr. Millerton. I’d decided that the church (or whatever it is) meant something to me, enough to be included in my Twenty Things.

Mr. Millerton’s eyes kept turning out funny, sort of lopsided, and when I tried to erase, the rest of his face got smudged and warped. Frustrated, I considered giving him sunglasses, like the guy who sat in the third pew from the front. I called him Secret Agent. He always wore a crisp black and white suit, with dark shades and a little earpiece. Not the kind of guy you would have expected to be there at all, but you could say the same for me. We were a huge bunch of misfits.

I started drawing Secret Agent on the same page, thinking I could do a little collage about Our Lady of the People. I concentrated so hard on getting his suit jacket right, biting my lip and squinting my eyes, that I didn’t notice when the sanctuary was silent and I was the only one in the room, except for a couple of Goth teenagers and a guy of questionable soberness that had fallen asleep.

I also didn’t notice Mr. Millerton, standing right over me, looking down at my drawing with interested eyes and a small, indulgent smile.

I jumped, nearly out of my skin, as his hand lightly touched my shoulder, stiffening like I expected an attack, and knocking my backpack to the ground. The sound of its crash echoed throughout the empty, open room.

When I saw it was him, I relaxed and waited for him to go away.

But he didn’t. Of course he didn’t.

“I have seen you here a lot, little girl,” he announced formally, taking a seat to me on the thin-velvet-cushioned pew. With an expression that suggested he did this everyday, he held his hand out for my pencil. “If I may?”

After hesitating a few seconds, and seriously considering the option of running out the back door, I warily placed it in his waiting, callused hand. He closed his fingers around it, and they seemed like they knew what to do all on their own, with no signal from his brain. Lithely, the curled themselves around the thin, yellow wood, and he pressed the tip of the lead to the paper.

“But I have never seen you here with anyone else,” he continued. His hand began to stroke the paper, almost lovingly, and the pencil marks he left there were light and flowing, sprouting from his fingers as easily as blooming flowers. I saw then that Mr. Millerton was an artist. I almost grabbed the book back, unwilling to have him see my embarrassing scribbles. However, he barely seemed to notice there was anything else on the page. I forced myself to sit very still.

I also didn’t respond to anything he was saying, other than slight changes in expression. That didn’t seem to bother him, and he kept talking.

“If I had to guess your age from your size, I would say seven, maybe eight. But you are much older than that, aren’t you? Yes. Still… you are a child. When I see a child in my church, accompanied by no one, I have to be curious.” He paused, and smiled kindly. “Curious, but not resistant. You seem to like the things you hear here.”

“I do,” I murmured absently, almost mesmerized by his drawing. It was beautiful to me, simple an elegant.

“Ah, you can speak!” he replied, as if he had honestly doubted that I could. “Though that does not make this puzzle any less puzzling. What is you name?”

He had an interesting way of speaking. Everything was enunciated and clear, like an alien who had learned English and grammar too well. It was a little bewildering at first, but then it was almost soothing, and very rhythmic.

“Kata Potter,” I answered vaguely, still in a kind of trance. I debated giving him my whole name, just to prove that didn’t have a problem with long sentences either, but just Kata was easier.

“Short for Katherine?” he asked, almost absentmindedly as well, as his steady fingers began to form a head, and then a face. I realized that my mouth was hanging open like a fish out of water and snapped it shut.

I winced through my marveling at his drawing. “Short for Katarine-Natasha,” I admitted.

He chuckled. “Well, that is a mouthful, isn’t it?”

I almost laughed, but then shrugged. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess.”

“A lengthy middle name too, perhaps?” he asked giddily, and something about his tone finally snapped me out of my daze, and I looked up into his eyes. They were flat and black, but with a slight glint of something I couldn’t immediately name.

“You could say that,” I said with another shrug, staring at his eyes curiously. Friendship, I realized. There was nothing lurking in his sys, no secrets. Just friendship.

He laughed again, and it reminded me slightly of Mr Flinker. Always laughing, finding even the worst moments in life funny. I remembered breaking my ankle when I was eight, and laughing the whole way to the Emergency Room because I didn’t want to look scared.

“Are your parents etymologists?” He asked it conversationally, but I heard something in his voice that hinted he had a point to the question.

“Eddo-Molly-what?” I replied, confused.

“Etymologists. They are people who study language and, more often, the origins of names. I have a friend who specializes in that field, and her daughter is named Sabina Calypso Lorena. It’s amusing, to a degree,” he explained.

I shrugged… again. I made a mental note to come up with a few more ways to avoid a question. “My parents aren’t etymologists.”

He sighed, but not in a sad way, more… dejectedly. I knew what ever he was getting at was coming. “And that brings to light yet another rather prying question. Where are your parents, and why do they willingly let you come here?” He spread his arms out, illustrating the small dusty room, the man who was now stumbling drunkenly to his feet, and the charts up front demonstrating exactly how the chemicals seep into the water.

My expression didn’t change, but I sort of bristled at his criticism of his own church. “What’s wrong with here?” I demanded. It was a sanctuary in every sense of the word to me.

He laughed at my defense. “How old are you, Kata?”

“Twelve,” I answered briskly. He raised an eyebrow and gave me a look. “Ten,” I admitted

“And do you think normal ten-year-olds traditionally hang out in places like this?” he asked, keeping his tone light.

I deliberated internally for a moment. “ I guess you could say I’m not very normal.”

“Oh, I can attest to that,” he assured me, and I wasn’t sure if I should be offended. “You don’t look like a normal child, at least.”

I didn’t say anything back to him, realizing that he’d go on with or without a response. He didn’t disappoint.

“So, you haven’t answered, which makes me slightly nervous to ask again.” His tone was, just as he said, nervous, edgy. But his face was concerned. “Where are you parents?”

I hesitated. “I’m not a runaway if that’s what you’re thinking. I haven’t made it to that stage yet.”

He nodded, and I knew I had guessed correctly at his assumptions. I sort of liked how he stopped his investigation there, not caring who I was as long as I wasn’t living as a runaway. It was a nice change of pace.

“And do you plan to run away?” he asked.

I still wasn’t sure why I was telling the truth. There was just something about this guy… he didn’t want to cause any trouble. Maybe he didn’t even want to ‘help’. He was just curious.

“I dunno… there’s not much reason for me to stick around,” I murmured, trying to explain. But how could I ever fully explain it anyone, I thought.

He nodded, looking thoughtful. I wondered what the situation would look like to him… It was probably natural to assume that I was a runaway, with my scruffy shoes and lack of parental supervision. I almost liked that people would assume that. It made me feel strangely independent.

Mr. Millerton started talking again, jerking me from my thoughts.

“You say there’s no reason for you to stick around,” he began uncertainly, breaking off and looking away for a second, like he was reluctant to finish. It didn’t make any sense to me why he didn’t seem to want to have this conversation, yet he was pushing it on. “But does that mean that there’s any reason for you to go?”

That stunned me for a few seconds, because I hadn’t truly thought about it. I just wanted to get away from this town… I hated that I was attached to the people here, or any other aspect of it. And I wanted to get to Hogwarts and start proving that I could do magic just as well as anyone else.

I had always linked those two goals together because they had always been the same in my mind. Get out of Little Whinging… get to Hogwarts. They were the same… weren’t they?

Yes, of course they were. Nothing was really wrong here, except that I was I the wrong place. If I fixed that, everything would be fine again. Jilly would be my friend again, I could stop failing school… even my Twenty Things would come more easily. I knew exactly what I wanted and I thought I knew how to get it.

So I shrugged and tried really hard not to roll my eyes. “That’s just how it is for me. And… I don’t mean to be rude, but my situation doesn’t really fall into any normal category. Trust me, you’ll get confused if you keep trying to work it out.”

He smiled a bit condescendingly. “Ah, but it’s human nature to believe that we are so complicated that no one can possibly understand us. We all want to believe that we have a right to be angry, because then there is an excuse for our behavior.”

I groaned a little bit. “You’re just like my teacher,” I told him sullenly. “Same warped kind of way of looking at the world.”

He chuckled and beamed. “I love this!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you know, Kata? Hasn’t anyone told you yet? The world itself is warped. How is there any right way to look at it?”

I debated for a moment, and came up with an answer. “Maybe there isn’t one right way,” I suggested, but I thought that was reaching a bit. “Maybe there’s just a lot of wrong ways. Like… it doesn’t matter if I don’t see the world for exactly what it is… as long as I don’t see one group of things for what they aren’t.”

“I suppose I see what you’re saying,” he conceded with a nod. Then his face transformed into a grin again. “Puppet strings don’t hurt as much as pride, right?”

He passed me back my notebook, and I saw what he’d drawn.

I gasped out loud. It was that amazing. His face, perfectly copied onto paper... exactly what I’d been trying to draw. All the smile-lines were there, the little creases below the eyes, the way a couple strands of hair kind of fell into his eyes.

I glanced up at him, attempting to keep my face from showing the complete awe I felt. He smiled, again a bit dejectedly.

“You really have to know yourself to be able to draw a self-portrait. I saw the one you did a couple pages back… I’d say you were on the right track.”

He winked stood up, and walked leisurely to the front of the room.

Hurriedly, I flipped two pages back, racking my brain and trying to remember when I’d drawn a self-portrait.

I hadn’t. It was the leaf I had glued from mine and Jeremy’s clubhouse tree, just starting to shrivel at the edges.

This time I did roll my eyes. When were people going to stop shoving metaphors down my throat?

Snow kept falling.

**********

“Run!” Marty Cahill shrieked at Roger, who was sprinting as fast as he could around the bases, sneakers squeaking against the newly-waxed gym floor.

“Kick it higher, Danielle!” Winnie cried to her friend, who was still in her white flip-flops and high ponytail. Huh. So I was wrong. It was Danielle and not Tonya/Tammie.

“I wanna be pitcher! She’s done it for, like, two innings!” Abigail complained to no one in particular. And I had to say, I backed her up completely. Sherrie couldn’t pitch her way out of a wet paper bag.

My entire class was in the gym, playing a game of kickball and screaming at each other. It was too cold to play outside, so we were confined to the gym, meaning that every noise ricocheted a hundred times against the high ceiling and concrete walls. Every slap as the kickball hit the ground, every shriek as someone was tagged, magnified against the air. It added to the effect nicely.

I turned to Mr. Mendota and raised an eyebrow. “How is this Science again?” I asked. He clapped his large hands together in applause as Sherrie actually pitched the kickball hard enough that it made it to home plate.

“Force equals mass times acceleration!” he boomed with a laugh. He paused, the added after consideration, “Great acoustics, too.”

I rolled my eyes, scuffing my high-top toe against the gym linoleum. “Yeah,” I muttered, not meaning for him to hear. “And kickball game plus ‘picked last for teams’ equals Kata sitting on the bench. See, it’s math, too.”

He didn’t say anything to acknowledge that he had noticed, but his eyes started darting around, and suddenly he shouted, “Derek! Out for Kata!”

Derek walked at his usual slow, careless pace towards the bench, but I was barely watching him. I had rounded on Mr. Mendota, glaring ferociously.

“I didn’t say I wanted to play!” I hissed indignantly. He grinned at my expression.

“Exercise is good for the soul,” he countered and waved me out to shortstop.

I gave him a long once-over, and then crossed my arms across my chest, fixing him with a like-you-can-make-me glare.

He stared evenly back, and then said, “I’ll teach you the secret to beating me at chess.”

We had played about fifteen more times, and I had lost every one of those fifteen times. The pointless struggle was a serious thorn in my side, and I now forcefully maintain that a chance at winning was the only reason I went out to play.

The inning was almost up, and when Robin accidentally caught the kickball to make the last out (don’t ask me how you accidentally catch a kickball) my team rushed up to the front, jostling each other to be first in line to kick. I ended up in the back, with Abigail and Kyle behind me… and Jilly Hanks right in front of me.

She was staring determinedly away from me, her curly ponytail pointed in my direction. Her sneakers were covered in pink glitter, and her socks had little fluffs of lace. Overall she was the last person on Earth you would think to be my best friend.

But Jilly and I had once been as close as Jeremy and I. We had all the basics of a little girl friendship: the sleepovers where we never seemed to sleep, the saving seats at the lunch table, the endless stream of giggles at jokes that no one else thought were funny.

And now I was alone at school, and Jilly was glittering it up with Winnie and Crew, like a couple weeks back when Mr. Mendota had first given out the Twenty Things assignment.

So I’m a little bitter. Excuse me.

But if there was one friendship I wanted to keep when I left Little Whinging, besides the Flinkers, I would choose Jilly. Maybe she hated me now… and maybe I didn’t know why… but I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to make things right between us, or at least to know why they were wrong.

“Hey, Jilly,” I greeted, turning to look at her.

Her eyes flashed once in my direction. “Hi,” she spat. And then she was back to staring anywhere but at me, arms crossed tightly over her chest.

I looked down at my shoes until I wound up staring at “Jilly BFF,” still emblazoned on the toe. I wondered if she’d crossed “Kata BFF” out on her shoe. No, I reminded myself. She probably got new shoes. Biting my lip, my head snapped up, and I looked at anything but the shoe.

So that’s how we stood for about two minutes, as the line shifted occasionally. With Jilly staring anywhere but me, and me staring anywhere but down. The silence hung thickly in the air, and each of us was too stubborn to break it.

Her anger won out over my curiosity. “So,” I began. “I haven’t talked to you in a while.”

It was a dumb conversation starter, and I knew it, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

“No,” she replied cuttingly. “I didn’t want to talk.”

“Why?” I hazarded to ask. Because I didn’t care what she said, as long as it was an explanation and not another insult.

“Everyone knows, Kata,” she informed me crossly. I blinked several times.

My heart might have missed a beat, or it might have stopped altogether. Had I really blown it? Did everyone know?

But they couldn’t know about me! About magic! How had they found out? Who had told them? Was it Jilly? Was that why she was avoiding me, because she felt guilty? I needed answers.

But more than that, I needed Jilly to understand a couple things.

“Listen, Jilly,” I said quickly, hoping that it was only a handful of sixth graders that knew, and not… the whole planet. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. Maybe they had spells to erase memories. “I wanted to tell you, honestly. But it wasn’t my choice. Every time I turned around, someone was making me swear to keep the secret. And if it helps, I didn’t tell anyone else either. You would have been the one I told, Jill. Honestly.”

I was pleading by the end, willing her to understand. She looked at me, and it seemed like curiosity was winning out over any anger again.

“I guess I believe you,” she finally announced, somewhat grudgingly. “It’s not really something I would admit to a bunch of people anyway.

“Oh, no,” I corrected, grinning. This was the best way things could have gone. Jilly knew, and she understood and she was still my friend. “It’s actually really cool, and exciting. A whole other world, just hidden behind this one!”

Jilly gave me a look that let me know she was questioning my sanity. “What are you talking about, Kata?” she demanded confusedly.

I did the blinking thing again. “What are you talking about?” I demanded right back at her. She meant magic, right? That was the only secret I had to keep, really. Everything branched from magic.

“I’m talking,” she informed me irritably, and very quickly, almost like she was embarrassed, “about how your parents aren’t really dead, they’re in an asylum somewhere, and now your brother is there too, and you’re next.”

I experienced two heartbeats of shock, and then hurt rippled across my face for about half a second. But in the end, I swallowed my temper and burst out laughing. Because, of course, it was a joke. This was either a joke or a dream. I was going to wake up, on the floor of the smallest bedroom, listening to the snow brush against the window.

“That’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard!” I exclaimed through giggles. But, as I firmly pinched the skin of my right arm, the scene stayed clear and very real. “What do you mean, an asylum? Where did you get that idea?” I demanded, my laughter empty of any really happiness now.

She was back to glaring at me with a cold expression. “Like I said, everyone knows.”

I laughed again, a stitch opening in my side; I needed to keep laughing. I’d never laughed so hard that I cried before, but that might have been the moment.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked incredulously.

“I dunno, maybe schizophrenia? Manic depression? Oh, wait… don’t tell me. I have an irrational fear of ballpoint pens, right? Something silly like that, right?” I laughed, grinning widely despite the ice cube sitting in my stomach, expanding to fill my insides.. “Be careful, the insanity is catching!” I warned, control slipping.

“Yeah, I guess so,” she spat, and for the first time I noticed that she was back to using her cutting, icy tone. “I should stay away from you, Kata. You've messed up enough of my life, and your own.”

She moved forward to kick, and I stood there dumbfounded, hearing the exaggerated sounds of the gym.

I probably should have been upset and sad right then, but I wasn’t. Instead, I was boiling mad. I would stake my life on the fact that Winnie started those rumours. And now she had my best friend believing them?

And what did Jilly mean when she said that I had messed up enough of her life? I could understand that she was offended that I had blown her off last summer when I was learning about the worlds and that space between them, but wasn’t that overstating things a bit?

My mind concentrated on this fury, and it built inside me. I didn’t even stop to consider the fact that it was partially my fault, or that the hatred in the pit of my stomach was as irrational as Jilly’s claims. All I wanted was for something to happen to prove that I was still in charge, at least of my life. Because maybe that was all I had left.

Who needs Jilly, I thought. My eyes narrowed as her foot came back to kick the rubber ball rushing toward her. Sherrie had finally managed to push the ball with enough force that someone could get a decent kick, and it looked like that was exactly what Jilly was going to do.

And then the world did something I didn’t expect. It switched to slow motion, time rolling smoothly past me. Every motion and movement of my classmates became evident to my eyes. I saw everything. Every noise, already embellished a hundredfold, was the loudest thing in the world. I heard everything. But all I felt was anger, almost a bloodlust.

I was so aware of the world. All was laid out for me to see.

Including a flash of purple-black smoke around where Jilly was standing just as her foot connected with the ball, the sound of an explosion, and a high-pitched scream from within the smoke.

When it cleared, Jilly was on the ground, a bewildered expression making her eyes wide with fear and confusion, and a scorch mark on the bottom of her T-shirt. She stared up at the ceiling, momentarily stunned, and her arms and legs were sprawling around her on the cold linoleum.

But that was not the first thing I noticed about her. The first thing I noticed about her was that her hair, already ridiculously curly, now closely resembled the Bride of Frankenstein’s. It stood on end, sticking together in frizzy clumps. If you looked closely, there were even small streaks of white against the light blonde, stretching from her forehead to the top of her two-foot tall ‘do.

Everyone was moving at once, crowding around her. Everyone except me, that is. I was a Kata-statue, not moving, and barely breathing. Did I still need air?

But as Jilly pushed herself into a wobbly sitting position, as my classmates babbled faintly about what they had and hadn’t seen, and as Mr. Mendota blew long and hard on his whistle and rushed over, my mind was whirling.

There was no doubt in my mind that I had done that. I had used magic. On Jilly. And she had gotten hurt.

I knew there was a dark side to magic, curses and charms and hexes designed to inflict pain and humiliation. But I’d never dreamed that I might be capable of a thing like that.

I was disgusted with myself, but mostly I was scared. The magic had just come shooting out of me; I had never consciously decided anything. Could things like that happen? Could I hurt people I loved just by looking at them and getting angry?

All my thoughts of just seconds ago, thoughts of hating Jilly and not caring if she was my friend or not were gone. I looked at her, on the ground, as she rose shakily to her feet with the help of Mr. Mendota. I looked at her and I nearly started crying.

But I didn’t, mainly because of what Jilly did next.

“She did that!” Jilly yelled shrilly, pointed a quivering finger in my direction. I swallowed. “She did it to me with her eyes! I swear she did!”

“No,” I whispered, meeting her eyes. Her expression was livid, but I had no idea what my face looked like. Most of my body was still frozen; only my lips were free to do what they wanted. “No, Jilly, I didn’t.”

I wasn’t sure if she could hear me, but if she couldn’t she barreled on anyway.

“Something’s wrong with you, Kata!” she screamed, advancing toward me. She got very close, so that her nose could have touched mine if I had enough power to lean forward. “What did you do to me?” she cried, shooting lasers out of her blue eyes. I stood, stupidly staring straight ahead, my own eyes wide and reflected in hers. I willed my lips to move, to deny everything like I always did. But I wasn’t sure if I still had lips, though I knew I’d said something a moment ago.

I wanted to block everything out. I imagined the window above me shattering, thick, braided rope being tossed through. I grabbed the rope and was pulled into another world…

And Mr. Mendota’s voice brought me back.

“Jilly,” he broke in sternly. He placed a hand on Jilly’s shoulder and pushed himself between us. “Jilly, calm down. Kata wasn’t touching you. I don’t know what happened, but--”

“I told you, she did it with her eyes!” Jilly roared, fists clenched at her sides. I looked down and examined my own hands: stubby fingernails, chapped palms, paper cut on my right index finger. Unfortunately, my hands did nothing to distract me from Jilly’s rambling. “I was just standing there, and then--”

Mr. Mendota interrupted her again. “Winnie, Danielle, take Jilly to the nurse.”

Winnie and Danielle came rushing forward, and helped Jilly out of the gym doors. I didn’t think she needed help; she seemed to be supporting her own weight fine. But it didn’t feel like the moment to say anything.

Everyone’s eyes were on me, boring into my skin. Some were harmlessly curious, some were a little frightened, but others were livid, like Jilly. They believed what she had said: I had done that with my eyes.

I didn’t say anything. Because what was I supposed to tell them? That they were wrong?

But they weren’t.

***********


I was pretty sure my lower lip was going to fall off soon; I had been biting hard since we’d arrived back in the classrooom. There were just seconds in the day left, and ever since our kickball game had been abandoned, my mind had been racing, trying to come up with a plan to talk to Jilly. The clock wasn’t cooperating at all, and the moments dragged infuriatingly, filling me with anticipation.

Melanie was still sneaking little glances at me whenever she thought I had turned away. She was in the frightened group, as I called it. Curious, scared, angry. Three sharp, staccato words, like my impatiently drumming fingers as I willed the clock and time itself to hurry up.

Sherrie was the only one I couldn’t categorize, mostly because she was doing what Sherrie did best. She was staring at me blankly and unabashedly, not even looking away when I met her glance. She would just blink and keep watching calmly.

I honestly didn’t care what Sherrie, or anyone else for that matter, thought. All I wanted was to explain to Jilly… not that it was likely she’d forgive me. Still, against all logic, I wanted her to know everything.

Everything.

The shrill, piercing sound of the bell that I had never loved so much rang through the classroom. I flew to my feet and snagged my already-packed bag off my chair. Jilly had obviously guessed what I had been planning, and she was already out of the room, leaving her friends behind.

Fine with me. Like I want to talk to them anyway.

I rushed out of the classroom, preparing to sprint down the hallway after her.

But navigating the hallways of Stonewall Primary right after the bell has rung is like trying to bike through a sandstorm. I know… how many kinds can there possibly be in a town this small? But even pushing, shoving, and occasionally kicking someone out of my way, it took me forever to get to the stairs, and another forever to get outside.

And then I did start running. A flat out sprint, actually, because Jilly had a head start and I had no idea where I was going. Snow whipped my face, settling in my hair.

A flash of light gold caught my eye. I wasn’t too late! Jilly was walking very quickly towards the street, her hair secured one more in a ponytail that stuck straight out behind her.

“Jilly!” I shrieked as I started running again. Her neck twitched like she wanted to look back, but at the same time she knew who was calling. “Jilly!”

She started running, but I was faster; I always had been. I rushed up behind her and caught her arm.

Jilly screamed furiously and tugged on her arm. I held on tight, ignoring the stinging flakes that bit my cheeks before melting.

“Let go of me!” she howled. A couple parents shepherding puffy-coated kindergarteners into mini-vans stopped and stared at us openly. “Let go, Kata! Get away from me!”

“Just let me explain,” I pleaded, nearly panting from the effort of holding her into place. I glanced quickly over my shoulder, very aware that we were only a few yards away from the school. Unsecured by a winter cap, my curls blew around my face in the harsh wind, and I felt my ears go numb.

“I don’t want an explanation! I want you to get the heck away from me and stay away!” she roared, enunciating the last two words so harshly that they echoed around my mind.

“You do want my explanation! I promise! You’ll understand!” I argued, making promises to myself as much as I was to her. My mind would not except that Jilly could turn away after she got the full story. She had to listen.

And it seemed like she would. She finally stopped struggling, and she turned to face me. I have never seen anyone turn so slowly in my entire life, head barely moving, it seemed, but eventually reaching the point when her eyes found mine. Her face was cold and hard like stone as she looked at me. Reluctantly, I released her arm, but she didn’t run.

She spoke.

“Fine,” she growled, her lips turning red from cold. Her teeth looked very white against them, like my skin against my hair. “What is your amazing explanation for trying to kill me?”

In that moment, my plan fell flat. I drew a complete blank, nothing from my brilliant solution remained.

“I didn’t mean to” I squeaked, fighting hard to keep my eyes up. “I swear I didn’t.”

Both of us were swearing a lot of things today. Only more was riding on my promises.

Jilly’s mouth popped open with an audible click. Her eyes narrowed in anger, and then her eyebrows turned down at the ends in hurt, and at the end, her expression was some combination of the two.

“What?” she gasped, her voice low and scared. A gust of snow slapped us both in the face. “What did you say?”

I swallowed, very aware of the fear in her voice. “I said I didn’t mean to,” I repeated, my heart somewhere around my throat. I had no idea where the rest of my insides had gone. Maybe they’d jumped ship. “It was an accident, Jilly, I have to tell you something.”

I didn’t care that I wasn’t supposed to do this. What did it matter? I accepted that the promises for me and by me weren’t exactly fault-for-fault, but I had been attacked. That proved that I was unprotected and truly alone. So what would it matter if I did this? It was just Jilly, and I kept telling myself that she’d understand.

Jilly was totally beyond being able to respond, and I didn’t know if she was waiting to hear my secret, or even if she could still hear me. I just kept talking, wondering how to begin my story.

I decided that beginnings were too hard; better to launch right into the hard stuff.

“Jilly, I’m a witch.”

That roused her, and she glared, frowning. “I know.”

I almost sighed at her interpretation, but instead I barreled on, talking faster and faster. “No, Jilly. Like, a real witch. I can do magic, and there’s a whole other world, my world! I was trying to tell you, but then you started talking about insane asylums, and how I somehow messed up your life. It made me so mad, and the magic just came exploding out of me. But I couldn’t control it, Jill, that’s the thing. I never meant to hurt you, or anyone. You have to believe me! I promise, magic is the most amazing thing in any world, ever! You just have to listen!”

My words were slurring together by the end, and Jilly kept shaking her head robotically. I started talking again, desperately.

“That’s where Harry is, at a school for magic! Imagine that, Jilly, a whole school for magic. I’m going next year, and my parents were wizards, too. I didn’t know until last summer, that’s why I was never around, and I’m sorry about that. I should have told you when I first found out but I couldn’t. They all made me promise to keep the secret. But I don’t care anymore! It shouldn’t matter.”

Somewhere in the middle of my rambling, Jilly ran away. She hitched her pink backpack up on here shoulder, and disappeared, still shaking her head and murmuring, “No, no, no,” to herself. I had never seen Jilly run so fast. She wasn’t a runner.

“The school is called Hogwarts,” I continued, not fully grasping that I was talking to myself. Maybe I was crazy, like Jilly said. Maybe every single person in the worlds was crazy. “It’s a castle, like in a fairytale. I think the whole thing is a fairytale. But I don’t know much more about the castle because Harry hasn’t written in a while. I know there’s a reason, so I’m not worried. Aunt P and Verno never told me I was magic. I think they’re scared. I would be, too, because apparently some lunatic tried to kill Harry when we were younger. No one ever told me what role I played in that story, but he must have been trying to kill me too, right? Why else would he have attacked me?

“I think Harry asked them not to tell me. It’s the sort of thing he would do, right? But I want to know, because what if this whole thing is my fault? I was only about four months old, but I must’ve done something. No one ever told me what, though. No one told me what Voldemort was doing at our house, or why Harry lived, or why I don’t have a scar like his. But I’m not supposed to know, right? Like I said, I’m not worried.”

I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, not quite sure what had just happened. My mind was fuzzy, full of unclear images, names and things and faces I couldn’t place.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw someone else disappearing over the hill, out of sight.

The mane of odd, bronze-streaked blonde hair that billowed out behind the person was oddly similar to that of Sherrie Parker.

Later that night, when I couldn’t sleep, I reached into my bag, pulled out Alice’s Adventure’s In Wonderland. I opened the front cover and began to read:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book that her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, and what’s the use of a book Alice thought, without pictures or conversation?

I couldn’t say that I agreed with her. In that moment, I didn’t have any pictures or conversations to add to my Twenty Things notebook.

7. More Complicated Feelings I SERIOUSLY Could Have Done Without

Looking back, I would say that everything started to go wrong around the fourteenth of December. Sure, things were wrong before then, but I didn’t notice. I was too busy planning, convincing myself that I would be out of Little Whinging before the year was up. Unfortunately, when you spend all of your energy ignoring a problem, more arise very quickly.

Since the incident with Jilly, I hadn’t really given up on my Twenty Things, but I certainly wasn’t looking very hard. I wandered around, doing various things to keep my mind occupied, and for a long time I didn’t write anything in my notebook.

I had five days left, and every one of them mattered.

************************************************************************

It was too cold to breath. The teacher’s lips were a faint bluish color, and my skin was translucently pale. It was way too cold to move. Recess had been done away with; the last thing Headmistress Schnook needed was a bunch of frostbit kids. We were confined to the cafeteria, armed with blocks and thirty-six-piece puzzles. It was way, way too cold to pedal a squeaky, rusty bike two miles to school, going with the assumption that I wanted to keep all of my fingers and toes. I took the bus.

It was probably a major health risk. You know that cartoon, where Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are fighting over whether it’s duck season or rabbit season? Well, there was no debating at Stonewall Primary: Kata Season all the way. I was beginning to sympathize with Joan of Arc, though I wasn’t sure if she was a witch, or just had some freaky religious parasite in her head.

Anyway. Bus. Cold. Ostracized.

We sixth graders claimed the back row. Spitballs soared over cracked leather seats, and I stayed in the cocoon of a huge jacket I’d found balled up in the attic, probably Dudley’s from when he didn’t have to have his clothes specially tailored. My thin, worn sweater wasn’t cutting it. I was forgetting what it felt like to have feet.

There was a certain social code as to who sat with who on Ms. Greffet’s bus. Winnie and Tonya/Tammie/Danielle sat together because… well, they were them. Sherrie (who might have heard) and Melanie usually paired up because no one else really wanted to hold more than a two-word conversation with either. Kyle and Marty. Pete-From-The-Other-Class and Shane. Gemma ‘n’ Emma, the twins. I sat alone. I was the outcast. I was the village leper.

I was trying very hard to convince myself that I didn’t mind much.

Even with the heaters humming and roaring, I could hear them laughing, too loudly for it to really be funny. I wondered when everyone got so manipulative. No one was like this last year. Last year, everyone was your friend.

I was pretty sure they’d all held a secret meeting and decided to totally and completely freeze me out. No one even looked at me. As soon as I sat down at a lunch table, everyone else got up. The nametag from my desk went missing, and I found it balled up in the girls’ lavatory trashcan. They wanted to take away my name, make me an unfortunate background image. I wanted to rip their throats out. We were on good terms, considering.

Alec beaned me with a spitball. How can spit not freeze in this weather?

Whatever. I did card tricks in my mind and reviewed my newest plan, Operation G.O.O.L.W.B.C.B.A.T.G.T.H.A.P.E.W. silently. Tell you about that one later.

The bus shuddered to a stop in front of the front doors, and the real test of character began. Everyone thinks it’s cool to sit in the back of the bus until you’ve got first graders beating you to the heated halls of Little Whinging Primary. The sixth graders stormed forward. We will exit first, thank you very much. Most of the younglings learned their lesson early, and the ones that didn’t now preferred to carpool.

Slush crunched under my boots as I hopped down from the bus, and I almost lost my footing on the gray ice, slipping and grabbing the sleeve of Alec’s coat for support. He shook me off like a rag doll. I glared and scooped up some snow with my mittens, which were really gardening gloves. Here’s how it went: Snow, crunch, crunch, cold, wind-up, heave, splat, giggle, curse.

By the time he turned around, I was safe behind a brick pillar. He started to come after me, but then realized that fighting back would include acknowledging my existence. Duh. His eyes penetrated the pillar and glared at me, silently wishing me nothing but unhappiness. I stared back evenly. He retreated, and I sighed.

Suffice it to say that I was not having a good week. I barely slept, and when I did, I dreamt of Sherrie (who might have heard), a knowing little smile of her face, throwing green notebooks at me. She transformed into an owl, scratched me with her talons and hooted, “Your fault! Your fault! Bad Kata! Your fault!”

I was getting messed up in the head.

The Headmistress had taken a “personal interest” in what happened with Jilly. In the first round of Spanish Inquisition, I gave her innocent smiles and tried to deny everything. The second, I made snide comments and counted the ceiling tiles. In the third, I didn’t speak. I believe the Guardians were contacted.

So, yeah. A generally horrible week.

I ducked out from behind the pillar and trudged along, fully aware that my attitude didn’t help anything. What did anyone expect of me? They were the ones that kept reminding me of my age, like at any minute I would stop and slap my head and say, “Really? Only ten? Completely slipped my mind!” But I didn’t feel ten: I felt like a little girl who had been brought up a nobody, informed that she was a somebody, dumped by two worlds, and laden with her parents’ deaths. Pre-adolescence sucked.

Trudge, trudge, trudge. Everyone else was inside now.

Alec hated me. Jilly hated me. Winnie hated me. Heck, even Sherrie (who might have heard) probably hated me, and Sherrie (who might have heard) still didn’t know the name of our school. I couldn’t face Mr. Mendota, knowing that I was all but done searching for the Twenty Freaking Things. Two more steps, and I reached my breaking point: we were scheduled to visit Mrs. Bridge and her Crayons of Destiny.

Nope. No way, I thought. Sorry, God/Buddha/Allah, whichever one of you
has it out for me. I’m dodging you for this round. I set my jaw and turned resolutely around, walking quickly but surprisingly calmly. Emotions battled in my head, and I ignored all of them until the sidewalk ended and I turned left.

Freedom was beautiful.

The initial effect of skipping school was so elating that I almost didn’t feel the cold. My boots snapped in and out of snow drifts quickly, a brisk trot formed by independence that couldn’t be dampened by snow. Where to go? Quik Mart, Our Lady of the People… the possibilities were semi-endless! I could even go home, sneak through the window, try to sleep.

Step, step, step. Bird’s wings on my back.

The adrenaline slowly wore off as I wandered around, trying to hold onto the pleasure of this small victory. The cold found its way into my skin, and I vibrated with shivers. Maybe I should turn around. It had only been ten minutes. It was a stupid idea, after all. Skipping school. Childish. Overrated. I scowled.

I huffed and walked resolutely in another direction, any direction. The cold was nearly unbearable, like my very bones were chilled and my skin had hardened into ice. After a rumble from the sky, frigid rain began to drop against the concrete, and I shivered convulsively.

And then I stopped in my tracks. Hurrying along the side of the icy road, directly across the street from me, was a figure in a salmon pink overcoat and a neat, lace-trimmed hat pulled over her hair-sprayed ‘do.

Aunt P.

No wonder she didn’t recognize me: my thick, tomato-red hair was stuffed under a hat and inside my jacket, I was so small I probably looked like a navy coat bobbing down Main Street at a decreasing pace. And Aunt P. wasn’t one to notice details.

She disappeared into the local grocery store, Dierberg’s, her boots squeaking on the rubber mat as the automatic doors whooshed open for her. Through the clear glass windows, I saw her pick up a basket and pace down to the produce section.

I followed, luxuriating in the warm air as it touched my skin. Breathing shallowly like a fish, I gulped as much hated air down as I could, shed five-pounds worth of winter gear, and crept along the aisles like spy. I paused briefly to mock myself, looking at what I had come to. Ditching school and stalking my aunt in her ho-hum life. Pathetic. Tempting, as a memory of the cold invaded my mind.

She plucked two apples from a bin, said hello to Ms. Winch, and made her way to the junk food. Figured. Dudley was coming home for the holidays. We needed to stock up.

Following Aunt P was even stupider than skipping school. I found the Foreign Dishes section, where she would be sure not to venture, and plopped down, leaning against a display of Chow Mien.

Dear Friend,

I’m running out of paper in this notebook, but I’ve got PLENTY in the other one. I haven’t got a clue what to do there.

Everything’s screwed up. I need to get to Hogwarts fast. Pronto. Ex-treem-ily Quick-ily. School is boring, but skipping is worse. Ignoring Aunt P is probably wrong, but the woman is dull as dishwater. I’m tired.

Any other complaints, you ask. Tons. Wanna hear ‘em? No, you say. It’ll be

“What a storm!” a deep, half-recognized voice exclaimed. I jumped out of my skin and looked up in alarm.

“Boo,” the voice said, smirking.

The first thing I noticed, naturally, was that it was Mr. Millerton, and that he was sitting down next to me, looking committed to being there for a while. But the second thing was that he was sporting the weirdest assortment of clothes I had ever seen, and I had seen Mrs. Figg, my sometimes-sane neighbor.

Despite the cold, he wore lime green shorts with purple stitching (showcasing a pair of long, hairy legs), a light blue oxford shirt with a red plaid tie, short argyle socks, running shoes that looked brand new, and a cummerbund. His short dark hair was all but hidden under a fedora covered with smiley face stickers, and he reeked of cheap cologne. I realized I had never seen him in anything except the rumpled suit he wore to Our Lady of the People.

“What did you do to piss off your stylist?” I asked in surprise, holding back a laugh.

“Is that how you greet people?” he asked back, obviously offended. Which made me want to laugh harder. “You know, you’re not much better in that area yourself.”

He had a point. My clothes were slightly mismatched, but at least it was deliberate. I’d been reading fashion magazines laying around the house, and had been trying to copy the looks.

I shrugged, and then narrowed my eyes. “Are you following me?” I asked suspiciously.

He considered for a second, and then answered, “Yes.”

I rolled my eyes. “As long as you’re honest,” I muttered, shutting my notebook and sliding it into the front pocket of my backpack.

He eyed it with something that might have been interest… except it was too greedy, too wrongly curious. “Another drawing?” he asked eagerly.

“No.”

He chuckled a little and leaned back in his seat, eyeing me. “As long as you’re honest,” he quoted.

Something was off, and I couldn’t exactly place it. . “You seem… different,” I observed, not entirely sure what I meant. His voice was gruffer, with a strange edge, and he wasn’t giving me any hard-to-interpret lessons about life. He’d seemed so much like Mr. Mendota the lat time we’d talked, and now he could be any guy off the street, except for his odd outfit.

He gave me a half-bitter smile. “I’m not that good of an actor, am I?” he grunted with no more rhythm in his voice.

I was completely lost. “What?”

He shrugged, looking slightly pleased with himself. “There was some stuff I needed to find out about you,” he explained, “and I thought it would be easier if I mimicked someone you look up to. Namely, Robert Mendota.”

The fact that Mr. Mendota had a name threw me for a second, but I recovered quickly and defended myself. “I do not look up to Mr. Mendota.”

He sighed in amusement. “I tell you I’m stalking you, I tell you our last conversation was all about me getting some information… and all you’re interested in is denying that you actually care about someone.”

I tucked a curl of hair behind my right ear and did not respond, mostly because I didn’t have a clue what was going on, and I wasn’t about to let him know that.

“S’what I thought,” he rumbled smugly. He removed a pack of spearmint gum from his pocket and offered me a piece.

“I don’t take candy from strangers,” I snapped, and turned away, waiting for him to leave. No surprise, he didn’t. “Go away,” I ordered, glaring.

“Nope,” he chuckled crustily, ripping the paper off a gum and shoving it in his mouth, “This is the fun part, Potter. I have to�”” He cut off and removed a worn, wrinkled sheet of paper from his shorts pocket and unfolded it, clearing his throat with mock formality-- “tell you where you should be. That is, what you should be when you grow up. If you grow up.”

I decided to ignore that last bit. “What?” I asked yet again. “You don’t have to tell me anything, especially what I’m gonna be when I grow up. I’m ten.”

“Yeah, I know,” he muttered, examining the sheet intensely. “It’s part of the job. Would you call yourself a people person?”

“Would you call yourself a monkey?” I shot back sarcastically. “And what job? Our Lady of the People? That’s not a job.”

“Oh, it’s a job,” he corrected, not sounding like he believed it himself. “Or, at least, that’s what they told me when I got picked for it. I help people make choices. How about animals? Like working with animals?”

I shrugged and answered, “They’re okay. I’ve gotten bitten by my aunt’s creepy dog Ripper too many times to be an animal lover, so I guess no. And, isn’t the whole point of the Lady of the People that you don’t have to make any choices? No religion, nothing serious. It’s a fake church for people who haven’t got anything going for them. And me.”

“Don’t talk to me about it,” he growled. “Seems pointless, if you ask me. I didn’t want this job anyway. Are you good with numbers?”

I fidgeted. My current maths grade was… low. “No. How’d you wind up in a job you don’t like?”

I didn’t care much, but I wanted to keep him talking. The difference between this Mr. Millerton and the one I had met a week ago was so profound… There had to be a reason beyond what he told me.

“Lost a coin toss with a mate, Fletcher. All they told me was that I help people make the choices they don’t want to face. Supposed to be a life-changing thing. I could have my own television show,” he mused, smiling at the ceiling.

“And me?” I asked, pulling him from his reverie about mythical spotlights and prime time. “What’s my choice?”

“Nothing,” he grunted, and I felt a little let down, not quite sure why. Did I want to have problems worthy of a television show?

“Then why are you asking me questions?” I demanded hotly.

“Honestly? You entertain me,” he said with a low chuckle. My eyes narrowed, and I grabbed my backpack and pile of padding, shrugging on the coat and hat.

“Leaving?”

“Yeah.”

“School makes you smarter.”

“Shut it.”

~*~*~*~



The next day, I was back.

The school auditorium was wide and open, with faded, red velour seats that creaked when you sat down, and sticky, pockmarked floors. The stage stood, elevated at the front, and the podium that Headmistress Schnook used everyday at assembly had been pushed off to the side to make room for a fake castle tower. Abigail, donning a blue fez with a stringy tassel cocked over her left ear, peeked out from behind a turret, doing her best to avoid the spotlight. Winnie, her curly hair in pigtails, shouted out lines with unnecessary gusto, and Alec scuffed the toe of his shoe against the wood floorboards, looking like he had as much of a brain as his character. Liam and Brady slouched beside him.

Me? I waited backstage, eyeing the sandbags over my head and preparing to drop the curtain as soon as Robin collapsed to the ground shrieking, and Kyle seized her broomstick.

That’s right. A witch. See the irony?

My class was performing The Wizard of Oz in the infamous Winter Exhibition. Basically, it was a chance for parents to come and watch their kids do something completely un-school-related on stage. The kindergarteners were singing a song about friendship, the third graders had a short skit planned about “doing the right thing”, and Mr. Mendota’s sixth grade class had chosen to act out the climactic scene from Oz, in which the witch dies and Dorothy is saved. Supposed to be a “good triumphs over evil” thingy.

I never liked the Wizard of Oz, not as much as I was growing to like Alice in Wonderland, though the stories were similar. Dorothy gets hit on the head by a window, has a weird dream, and learns an important lesson about how it’s stupid to run away from home when there’s a tornado outside. The only interesting parts were the hot air balloon and the wizard who wasn’t really a wizard.

“I’m melting! I’m melting!” Robin bellowed, the effect somewhat ruined by how she pronounced each syllable of her lines with great care.

“Quick! Get the broomstick!” Winnie shrieked, facing her invisible audience and giving them a winning smile. Kyle jumped at his cue, but recovered and grabbed the hockey stick Robin held out towards him. Her cape billowed around her, and I understood why it had to be seventeen sizes too big. She lay on the ground, her eyes closed and her tongue lolling out unconvincingly, and the folds of black silk made her look like a puddle of melted witch with a head sticking out.

I tugged on the rope, too hard, and the curtain rushed down and slammed heavily on the stage floor. Winnie jumped back, and I hid behind a chair from last year’s Spring Musical, giggling. Everyone was convinced I was a serial murderer, or something.

“Curtain, Kata!” Mr. Mendota shouted from the seats. I obediently pulled on the ropes, making the curtain rise one slow foot at a time. You wouldn’t think a sheet of stained velvet would be so heavy, but it was.

Our teacher climbed the steps to the stage just as the curtain clicked into place in the rafters above. His navy beret, usually reserved for art class, sat perched on his head, and his rectangular glasses were low on the bridge of his nose. I was waiting for the goatee and puffy pants tucked into socks.

“Great work, everyone,” he praised, smiling at Robin and motioning that it was all right for her to stand now. “It’s really coming along. Flying Monkeys, don’t be afraid to come a little more forward,” he added, craning his neck to see Shane, Derek, Ann, and Abigail, all of whom were behind cardboard turrets, and Marty and Laura, who were off stage altogether. Almost everyone had been cast as a monkey or a guard member. Jilly, Melanie, and Roger stood like sentries with fake spears, and that just left me, Oscar, Sherrie (who might have heard), Caleb, and Gemma ‘n’ Emma, the twins, as stagehands.

“See you tomorrow!” Mr. Mendota cried, and I realized he had been talking for a while, maybe even directly to me. I followed the hoard of my classmates to the back row of seats, where our backpacks and coats were scattered. Humming tunelessly to myself, I tugged on my coat and pulled my bag over my shoulder, stepping out into the hallway/fray. As usual, people were everywhere, running in every direction with backpacks bouncing on their shoulders. I reached for the pack of gum in my pocket and came up empty.

Frowning, I patted my back pocket, which also held no gum. I bit my lip resolutely and turned back toward the auditorium’s double doors.

When I entered, though, I forgot all about spearmint.

I had never been in the auditorium alone before, and the silence hit me like a tangible sack of bricks: hard and immediately. I was afraid to let the door swing shut, scared to even take a step forward, because I was sure that either one would sound like an explosion.

“Oh,” I breathed, but it didn’t shatter the quiet. My tiny voice bounced around the room, ricocheting against walls, and clattering back down to me. Experimentally, I released my grip on the door, and it swung shut with a spectacular boom, shooting waves of vibrating sound out into the hall.

My sneakers snapped against the sticky ground as I slowly marched to the front of the room. The stage suddenly had an irresistible pull, and I wanted to stand on it and look out at the empty seats. I wanted an audience that loved me, that would think I was the best thing they’d ever seen.

Slowly but eagerly, I climbed the steps.

The lights on the stage had been dimmed, but not put out, and I found the center of the spotlight, just off the middle of the stage. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and spread my arms out.

This place… This was real magic. It was so easy to forget everything about myself, who and where I was, when there was a stage and a light and a purpose that everyone knew. The silence wrapped around my skin and I felt like flying. Wizards have broomsticks. They have Nimbuses in store windows. I took a deep breath.

When I opened my eyes, the place had transformed. Instead of discoloured velvet, the curtain was made from golden silk, and it gathered at either side of my stage with smooth, red-tasseled ropes. The spotlight was bright again, and comfortable on my skin, illuminating me, making me a pretty, young girl with shiny, blood-red hair and round eyes. Where before the auditorium floor had been sticky and flat, it was now polished and rising smoothly into a curved amphitheater shape. The seats were packed, full of fashionably dressed people, smiling brightly, waving their hands, screaming my name.

“Kata! Kata! Kata! Kata Potter!”

An announcer’s deep voice boomed over the crowd’s cries. I gave a small smile as he rumbled, “Ladies and gentlemen of Little Whinging, I give you: the one!… The only!… Katarine-Natasha Potter!”

They erupted. I waved.

For a few seconds, I let myself bask in the glow of the spotlight. My dumpy winter coat was a lacey pink princess gown, it did not clash with my hair, and I understood why every little girl wants to be a famous singer: this feeling was programmed into their minds. Who didn’t want this? Who…

I blinked, lowering my arms, my lips coming open a little.

Who didn’t want magic?

I was not in a magnificent golden amphitheater. There was no crowd, no announcer, and no screams cheering me on, praising me just for being me. I tilted my head to one side curiously, not really sure if I wanted to cry.

I jumped as a sound of real applause reached my ears. Spinning around so fast that I almost fell over, I saw Mr. Mendota standing calmly behind me, leaning against the same turret Abigail had used as a hiding spot. He smiled warmly and clapped his hands slowly.

“Miss Potter,” he began, chuckling. “You were simply born for the theater.”

I blushed, and tried to remember how to smile.

From behind his back, he pulled the small cardboard shoebox he kept his chess set in. “Rematch?”

~*~*~*~

Ten minutes later, we were set up in the middle of the stage, the spotlight turned off altogether. He had three of my pawns and a knight, and I had his bishop.

“Plans for the holidays?” he asked lightly, eyeing me while I made a bold and hardly subtle attempt at his rook.

I considered whether to tell him what I actually planned to be doing, and decided it couldn’t hurt. “I’m applying to a school up north. I’m gonna see if I can start this term, instead of waiting for next year.”

“Oh,” he said flatly, nodding. His expression was politely interested.

“Yeah. So, I might not be coming back,” I warned him, waiting for a reaction.

“That’s too bad.”

We played in silence, both losing a couple pieces, before I spoke again.

“Mr. Mendota, I… When you… What I mean is…” I didn’t know what to say. “What are your Twenty Things?”

He didn’t seem surprised. “I can’t tell you that.”

My eyes snapped up from the board. “Why not?” I demanded angrily.

He sighed. “You may recall that this is an independent project, Kata. You’ve got to find them on your own.”

I gave him an exasperated look. “I’m not asking you to help me find them! I’m just asking what yours are!”

He shook his head. “No. Sorry. I can’t help you.”

I bit my lip. “Whatever,” I grumbled.

“You know, you’re only one of three students who hasn’t turned theirs in yet,” he said, an odd look on his face. “I mean... I expected that you… No, never mind.”

I didn’t care what he had been going to say. “Who are the others?” I asked eagerly.

“I can’t tell you that, either, it’s confiden--”

“Who are the others?”

He huffed. “In this class, Jilly Hanks, Sherrie Parker, and you have not yet found the Twenty Things That Make the World Go ‘Round.”

I nodded slowly. I couldn’t say I was surprised about Sherrie (who might have heard)… she was just weird. But Jilly? Jilly seemed like she had it all figured out. I’d thought she would be first in line to show everyone how perfect she was, how wonderful her Twenty Things were.

“What were you thinking about?” he asked, suddenly. “You were onstage, and I believe you were trying to recreate an announcer’s voice, but then you stopped, and you looked like someone had broken your heart.”

I gave him a look. Broken my heart? What? “I…” I muttered, before clearing my throat and continuing in a stronger voice. “I don’t have a broken heart. I’ve never been in love.”

“Oh, all kinds of things can break hearts,” Mr. Mendota explained knowledgeably. “It’s true, people often associate broken hearts with failed romances, but it doesn’t have to work that way. A dream, perhaps, that didn’t come true. Epiphanies, those are very efficient when it comes to heart-breaking. Some combination, in your case, is my guess.”

I looked at centre stage wistfully. “I was thinking about magic,” I murmured. “I was thinking that I know why some people believe in it… and some don’t.”

“Hmm,” he said disapprovingly. I raised an eyebrow. “I don’t believe in magic,” he explained.

I choked on a piece of gum from the pack I’d finally found hiding in my shoe. It bobbed near the edge of my throat. “W-what?” I stammered. “You… you don’t believe in magic?”

“I don’t believe in anything that could have any control over my destiny,” he informed me with a stubborn voice and a shrug. “I want to believe I have that power.”

“There is no destiny!” I objected.

“You’ve got some pretty strong opinions for a ten-year-old,” he observed, once again knocking my pride down a few notches at the mention of my age.

“What about wands, and cauldrons and spells? I demanded. He shook his head. “Goblins! Goblins are real. They run banks. And ogres and hags, and people really do use newts’ eyes and rats’ tails… and they wear robes, and those hats, those pointy hats? They come in a zillion different colours, and…”

This was Jilly all over again, but for crying out loud, Mr. Mendota? People like him had to believe in magic! People like him had artsy wives named Cinnamon, and drove VW vans and listened to strange music about the young French girl who began to fight and die. It was insane for him not to believe in magic.

He was laughing at me. “Do you have experience with these matters?” he asked.

I clammed up. “No.”

He shook his head and laughed warily. “I’m never going to get a straight answer from you, am I?”

I had some pretty good sarcastic replies lined up, but he chose that moment to sweep my king off the board with his…

No.

“Pawn!” I shrieked indignantly. “I was just checkmated by a freaking pawn?”

He grinned. “It would appear so.”

“That was low!” I shouted, my pride seriously wounded. “You distract me with broken hearts and magic, and then…” I trailed off in a huff.

But, through it all, I realized that I wasn’t actually upset. How odd. Some lingering feeling of the stage was clamped in my stomach, and I felt… happy. With a lost game, and no friends, and a teacher that didn’t believe in magic, I felt weirdly perfect in that moment.

I waited for it to go away. I wasn’t sure if I liked feeling happy very much. Being happy was just letting the world line you up for disappointment.

Mr. Mendota appraised my expression. “Sorry about that,” he apologized as I calmed down. I surprised myself by smiling.

“S’okay,” I answered with a shrug. “I just thought we were done with the whole character building thing.”

“Yes, but I did promise to teach you the secret to beating me at chess,” he reminded me. The memory seemed foggy, distant. It had been too close to Jilly’s accident for me to have much time to dwell on it.

I waited.

“Sacrifice,” he announced smugly.

I blinked. “Sorry?”

“Sacrifice. That’s how you win at chess. You see, Kata, you’re going about it all wrong. You try to protect all of your pieces, except to do that you may have to use one piece to protect another piece that is supposed to be protecting a third piece. It’s a vicious circle. A bad idea. You have to accept that, sometimes, you’re going to lose men. Chess is a battle. Not everyone survives a battle.”

It seemed to me that Mr. Mendota had a remarkable ability to make something small mean something really, really huge without altering his tone of voice at all. I considered his solution, and thought there was no way I could follow that advice. I couldn’t let my chessmen die, couldn’t let them be cut down in battle for the greater good of the game. That was warped.

I was still happy.

It was infuriating and puzzling, at the very least. Of all the reasons I had to be unhappy… But I was so close. Harry was coming home for Christmas, and I could explain the situation. I needed to go to school with him. I was reasonably smart; I could handle catching up on the work. Believe me, I had it all figured out. And, sitting there, in the auditorium of Stonewall Primary, playing chess with a teacher that didn’t think my powers were real, chewing gum and forgetting what kind of person I was… I let myself feel happy. I let myself have a moment.

“I’ll leave you alone to ponder that,” Mr. Mendota announced quietly. I jumped, and realized I had been sitting still for a while, twisting a pawn round in my fingers. I was zoning out so much lately. It always surprised me when people started to talk.

He packed his chess set, but when I offered him the pawn, he hesitated. “You keep it,” he told me. “A reminder. Sacrifice.”

I rolled my eyes, enjoying how weightless I felt in my reassurance that everything was going to work out soon.

When the door swung shut behind him, I wandered over to the piano on the side of the stage and pounded out Chopsticks, the only song I knew.

I put the pawn in my jeans pocket.

~*~*~*~

Between the stage, the approaching holidays, and the fact that when I woke up four days later, fluffy snow coated the ground instead of gray mush, my good mood lasted awhile. My Twenty Things were back on. Scribbled words and sketches covered almost the entire east wall of my small bedroom, and Marc helped me compile them all into a list, which she laminated in the Quik Mart break room when Crazy Ben wasn’t looking. I almost gave Verno a coronary when I hopped down the stairs, snagged a muffin from the table, and walked lightly out the door, singing ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ in my horrendous, off-key voice.

It was Christmastime, and I loved Christmas, always had. Hated winter, yes, but Christmas was like a warm patch in a frigid, barren season. Holly garlands were twisted around staircases, red velvet bows set against the clock in Town Square, random carolers placed on street corners, smiling widely as they serenaded busy shoppers. Caravans of cars made their way out of town, driving to a bigger city that actually had a mall. I believed in Father Christmas.

Turned out, Mr. Mendota was also a fan in the holiday season. He just wasn’t allowed to sponsor any one holiday, being a public school teacher, so Menorahs, Christmas trees, and whatever those Kwanzaa-candleholder things are called turned up among the globe and encyclopedias. Somehow, everything smelled like gingerbread. Ms. Bridge taught us how to put some paint inside a glass orb, and shake it to create swirl patterns.

It was surreal, how quickly everything had changed. I’d gone from sullen recluse to relatively happy Christmas elf in less than a week. In a fit of insanity, I even stole some paper chains from the attic and strung the around my room, and dug a pair of gold buckles out of Aunt P.’s sewing kit, Super Gluing them to my rain boots.

It was Friday, the last day before the last weekend of the first term. Monday, December 19th, was the last official day of term, but it was mainly devoted to Holiday parties and, at night, the Winter Exhibition, so in my mind I was already free.

I waved merrily to the bus driver when he dropped me off at the top of Privet Drive, and when I arrived home there was an entirely impolite note telling me that Aunt P. and Verno had gone to pick Dudley up from school, they were staying a couple nights in London but would be back in time for their annual Christmas Show-Off Party, and to stay out of their fridge.

I ate a Pop-Tart from the pantry instead.

I left my crumbs rather obviously on the countertop and decided that under no uncertain terms could I sit here while the gleaming, untouched snow beckoned from the backyard. Dudley and his friends would wreck it in no time. I pulled on too-big snow pants that had previously belonged to Mrs. Next Door’s daughter, tugging on my coat, a thin scarf, and the garden gloves/mittens, and tromped out into the yard, trying to touch as little snow as possible.

I had no idea where Dudley’s sled was, and I wasn’t about to venture up to the attic, so I rolled down the hill a few times. Too dizzying. It was eerily silent. The snow seemed to create a tingling sound in the air, and my wet scarf smelled like first grade. I lay quietly on the ground, eyes turned to the sky, for a long time, long enough that snow started to fall again. It stung my sensitive skin. I wondered how long it would take the snow to bury me.

The wet snow seeped through my snow pants and through my jeans too, until the skin of my legs was numb. I’d lost all the feeling in my hands, and clumpy snow stuck to my hat. My hair was spread out around me, staining the snow like blood.

Eventually, my thoughts ebbed. I felt my pulse in my neck beating strongly. My breath was slow and almost silent, stirring the cold air. The most peculiar feeling came over me: I felt like I could look at my life objectively, think things I felt all the time without really offering any real thought. My mind was open wide, a basin for the world to slowly trickle into, to crawl around curiously and examine my feelings. I let go of my body, and soon I couldn’t feel any of it (though, in retrospect, that may have been from the cold). I was a tiny, orb of light, floating without senses. I didn’t see, or hear, or feel. I simply was.

I’d never understood the term out-of-body experience before, but I was petty sure I was having one. Here, in the snow, soaking wet, I tested this new happiness, seeing how far I could push it. I hovered. I thought I knew what it felt like to be born.

I don’t have a birth certificate. Harry might, but Aunt P. never showed it to anyone because it included ‘blood status’ and the fingerprints wiggled. But there’s no record anywhere that I was born. I could have just dropped out of the sky and tacked onto some other family… some other family that ended up dying because I didn’t die first.

I wanted to cry. Instead, I opened my eyes, realising with a slight shock that they were closed, and propped myself up on my elbows, blinking blearily, like I’d just woken up.

Snow was still falling, dusting over my coat. It fell off in little drifts when I moved. Icicles hung from the trees… very oddly shaped icicles, too. And they stuck straight up. Huh. Maybe I had gone to sleep and entered Wonderland, a strange wintry Wonderland that Alice hadn’t seen. Her Wonderland had been in the summer…

My icicle moved. I frowned, stood up, and slowly walked a few steps forward. My boots crunched in the snow, and I gasped loudly, covering my mouth with snow-caked hands. My heart raced, stopped beating then picked up again.

Because icicles don’t have wings. Icicles don’t move. And I’m not sure what goes on in Wonderland, but in Little Whinging, icicles don’t glare at you with large, amber eyes, hoot softly in annoyance, and ruffle their feathers.

“Hedwig!”

~*~*~*~

It should be discussed that, for one reason or another, I don’t function entirely like a normal person. I don’t sleep as much, and when I do-- as displayed in Mr. Mendota’s classroom-- I crash hard. There’s a great long list of things I’m allergic to, so I don’t exactly stuff my face very often. And… well, I was going to say that I don’t handle change well. But, truthfully, I don’t handle change at all. I think there’s a little part of my brain that senses when something is wrong, and automatically kicks into overdrive, ignoring the problem and drowning it out with something more trivial.

When I was four, I ate a peanut, and almost instantly started to swell up like a balloon. My lips turned puffy and blue, my vision was obstructed by my enlarging face, and all of a sudden I couldn’t draw life from the air. Since I couldn’t breathe, I didn’t really burst into tears; I just kind of went into convulsions, gripping my throat with my hands and looking around wildly for some kind of help.

Someone started laughing, someone screamed, and the next thing I knew, I was flat on my back on an emergency room table with crinkly paper and white, strangely opaque lights that blinded me further. A face flashed above me, a middle aged nurse with a flyaway bun and cracked lipstick. Spots appeared where they shouldn’t be, someone was squeezing my hand, and I just kept thinking, peanut, ouch, why, can’t breathe, hurts, peanut, peanut, how, why, ouch.

And then there was something that didn’t even last a second. Something that let air flood into my lungs and then be pushed out again, and something that sent a prick of new pain from my thigh to my spine to right between my eyes. Of course, the real phenomenon was probably the medicine itself�”the epi-pen�”but little four-year-old me only felt what the medicine had done. In a fraction of a fraction of a second, I felt my heart stop and then resume beating. The smash of blood through my arteries picked up again. And I felt it more clearly, and on a deeper level, than I’d ever felt anything. I was aware, somehow, of my body failing and then picking up right where it left off, my heart refusing to quit. Invincibility was drawn around me like a winter coat.

I think that was why I quit being afraid of anything: because of some childish notion that come rain, stormy weather, or peanuts, I’d pull through, I’d make it out okay.

Yeah… have I mentioned recently that I’m almost always wrong? Good. Then I don’t need to reiterate. Let’s just keep going, with ten-year-old me and an owl and a snowstorm and my issues with change.

~*~*~*~

There were three days left. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The Twenty Things were due Monday, before we left class for the Winter Exhibition. I want you to watch, and keep this timeline in mind. Ponder the limits set upon my shoulders as my plan was shattered and the pieces of it driven through my thin skin like knives. Remember who I thought I was.

Friday.

At ten years old, I was very well versed in taking care of myself when I was sick. This, I supposed, was just one of the many perks of living in a house where the only person who gave two wits about you was your older brother. I knew how to take my own temperature, and prepare a hot water bottle brimming full of heat and comfort. And, perhaps most useful of all, I could hold my own hair as I viciously vomited up everything I’d eaten since the previous Tuesday. A letter, cramped into the shape of my sweaty fist, rested forlornly by my knobbly knees as I practiced this very skill.

It was the third letter Harry had written me since September, and before I even read it I registered how his handwriting had changed. Before, it had all been scratchy and block-like, the lowercase letters merely smaller versions of the capital ones. Similar to my own, accept that his had been legible. Now, it was a kind of semi-cursive scrawl, with the letters running together and overlapping each other like fish scales. I gazed at the change and remembered how he’d spent three solid hours teaching me to tie my shoes when I was four. I’ll admit, it was a strange moment to think of, out of the countless ones we’d shared growing up together. But I couldn’t help thinking that his new way of writing looked like a puddle of knots.

And there I was.

I like to think of throwing up as a defense mechanism: it’s just your body purging itself of all the bad things that have found their way in. I kept my eyes squinted tightly shut as I tossed my cookies, but, to take my mind off of the rancid smell, I pictured every mean word that I’d ever heard and every blow that I’d ever been dealt collecting in the porcelain bowl along with half-digested Pop Tarts.

As my violent sickness turned to dry heaves and then faded into a lingering icky-ness, I shut the toilet lid with a clunk, wound my disheveled hair into a ponytail, and flushed three times for thoroughness. While my breathing fell back into a normal pattern (it’s pretty hard to get air when your mouth is otherwise occupied), I folded myself into a fetal position and keeled over on my side on the cold floor of the Dursley’s bathroom. The tiles were off-white, and had a little china pattern stamped on their edges in jade green. In my peripheral vision, I followed the rows of sparkling tiles all the way to the mirror-facing wall, where some had broken free from their caulking and were wrestling their way up the trim.

I cannot even begin to describe to you how fascinating I found these tiles, then, in my weakest moment. It seemed like someone needed to appreciate the little things, that was all. The stubborn bathroom tiles, the glorious, light-headed emptiness that came tacked onto bad news and vomiting… the redhead pre-adolescents that got picked last for kickball and sat alone at lunch and were really just hoping to catch a break in the holiday season.

Among other things.

When you lie, you have to make it uniform. If you tell somebody that you’re fifteen instead of twelve, then you’d best be ready to forge a birth certificate and other appropriate papers, or at least introduce yourself as a fifteen-year-old from that moment on.

When you keep telling people that you’re fine, and that everything is normal in your life, then I suppose you run the risk of starting to believe those things yourself. I mean… I was practically walking up to everyone I knew and saying, “I’m Kata Potter, and I’m fine with everything.”

Fine.

There was a steadily growing list of things that I was currently not fine with. I was not fine with the fact that I was currently collapsed on a bathroom floor, I was not fine with the knowledge that I was failing sixth grade, or that I had reached the end of Alice and learned that Wonderland was all a pathetic dream. I didn’t much care for the way I had been unceremoniously abandoned�”both for the weekend and when I was too young to even support my own head. I hated my age, because people saw it as a way to hold me back, I’d never liked my hair-color because I couldn’t wear anything pink,and-- to be quite honest-- I didn’t like being a witch in that moment.

Because what was the use of being a witch if you had to live like a Muggle?

I kept up that train of thought, lying on the floor and exhaling though my nose because the scent of my own breath was revolting. Anger boiled next to my heart, but I felt so cold, like I’d been transformed into an ice sculpture of Kata, and was no longer the real thing. Exhausted and freezing, I huddled on the bathroom floor, staring at tiles and wishing for nameless, unreachable dreams.

I was terminally empty; nothing was in me but memories. And I didn’t want those. Minutes tripped by, and hours swallowed them, and I was aware of the wind-brushing-the-treetops sound of the sunset. Darkness cried forlornly as it sat on the end of the day. I slept fitfully. I woke up. Never did I try to stand, or budge an inch from the rock bottom I’d reached.

I pondered the perfection of the Dursley’s house. It was all wood polish and lace, flawless posh, with no dust bunnies in sight. There wasn’t a single piece of china in that house that wasn’t chipped. When I once dropped a coffee mug and a little crack curled onto the side, Aunt P just threw it away. From a very young age, I’d understood the symbolism. I was the chipped china and the dust bunny-- the short, twiggy girl with impossible hair and a crooked top tooth and green eyes that were obnoxiously larger than the rest of her features. Everyone was finally tossing me into the bin.

Don’t tell me that’s melodramatic�”it’s true. I already knew it; I only lay there to finally accept it. On my fourth grade report card, Ms. Owens had written, “Katarine has spunk, and is mature for her age. However, she lacks the patience, discipline, ability, reserve, cooperation, and obedience necessary for real-life interaction.” My faults, as displayed there, had always outweighed my strengths. I wasn’t trying to be tragic or misunderstood by thinking that, or thinking it now. It just was what it was.

Always.

I began to count the individual seconds of my night, and only stopped when a) I’d reached 1,367 and b) the tinny tone of the doorbell invaded my thoughts and shook me back into reality.

I stuttered down the stairs, disgruntled, wrapped in a navy cardigan that hung around my body and did basically nothing to chase away the chills that were sleeping under my skin. Cold sweat matted my hair, my face was clammy and ashy, and my breath still stunk of vomit. Groggy, I struggled to remember how to work a doorknob. Twist and pull, I reminded myself.

The door swung open, and my jaw dropped. Jeremy Flinker, wearing a snow-dotted parka and damp sneakers, stood on the Dursley’s front porch. He held a ceramic casserole dish and breathed shallowly in the cold.

I raised an eyebrow. “Jeremy?”

He nodded, his shoulders hunched up to his chin and his entire body tightened against the wintry weather. “Hey, K-Kata,” he greeted, stammering. “You look like sh-shit.”

I sighed. Jeremy had recently developed a bit of a swearing habit, in a valiant effort to sound more grown up and attract girls.

“Yeah,” I deadpanned. I could name at least one girl who wasn’t attracted to his new vocabulary, and her name rhymed with ‘Mata’. “I know.”

“Can I come in?” he asked quickly. “There’s a motherfucking blizzard out here.”

Surprised, I peeked over his shoulder. In the time that I’d been hovering catatonically (Katatonically. Get it?) on the bathroom floor, the sky had opened up and let loose its wrath upon Little Whinging. The snow chased after buildings and cramped the sidewalks, piling up under trees and weighing down their branches. A threatening, ominous indigo painted the sky, and the streets were pretty much deserted, except for a certain eleven-year-old boy who needed a haircut, and my loony neighbor Mrs. Figg. She sat on her doorstep, petting one of her interchangeable cats and staring right at us. It was like she didn’t even notice the cold.

Oh well, I thought. She’s loony.

“Please?” Jeremy pressed. His lips had a faint blue tint.

“What’s in the dish?” I asked disinterestedly as I stepped aside and allowed him to scuff into the foyer, spewing snow everywhere as he shed his jacket and boots. Before answering, he made sure to shake out his snow-infested hair and spray me with cold, dirty-smelling water. I grimaced appreciatively.

“It’s, uh… potato-noodle casserole,” he explained dubiously, eyeing the dish as if it was actually toxic waste.” My mum made it, not my dad, so you might want to just chuck it. But she talks to your aunt, and found out that you were home alone for the weekend and didn’t know if you could cook for yourself.”

I had to smile. Jeremy’s family was just so… present. They were the kind of people who said they loved each other before they went to bed, and when they got up in the morning, and when they left for work and school. They had two cats and a handful of fish, and all three kids�”Jeremy, his sister Mattie, who was in my year, and his much older brother Finn�”were just generally happy.

“I’m home alone all the time,” I pointed out, hooking a wild curl behind my ear. Ponytails could only contain my feral mass of hair for so long.

“She was bloody worried about you, though,” Jeremy shrugged. “I dunno. I think she just has a lot of time on her hands.”

I just stood. After a few seconds of dripping silence, he seemed to finally take in my pinched, stoic expression.

“What the hell, Kat?” he quipped softly, gazing at me nervously. “Are you all right? You look like someone punched you in the face.”

Immediately, I lost it. Anger pumped a boil into my blood and fury pinched my hands into fists while I closed my eyes and emptied myself into the bottomless, unfeasible rage that I was shot through with.

“I’ll bet I do,” I seethed bitterly. He looked taken aback, but I was made of stone. “I mean, why not? Why doesn’t everybody just come up and punch me in the face? You can go first, Jeremy. Right now. Just give me your best shot. Let’s see if I feel it!”

He took a step back. “What the fu--”

“You’d better finish that sentence with ‘funnel’!” I shrieked hotly, crossing my arms and glaring passionately. He gave me a look that suggested I was crazy. It didn’t offend me, though, because I was. In that moment-- with a letter and a casserole and a best friend who needed a censor button-- I was fairly insane. “Because lately, every other word that comes out of your mouth has four letters, and I’m getting really sick of it! You sound stupid. Go suck on a bar of soap.”

Temporary shock rang in my ears.

He scrambled for an argument, still giving me the Kata is crazy look. “I sound stupid?” he repeated, anger entering his voice. His arguments were slow-coming, but they picked up speed, shaking off their dust. “I’m not the one screaming about funnels and having people punch me in the face! I’m not the one who’s been acting like I’m from bloody Mars since August! And I’m definitely not the one constantly sulking about nothing, or whining about my fucking Twenty Things, or ditching school and failing all my classes, and then blaming the whole damn mess on the world!”

“Who do you want me to blame?” I demanded desperately at top volume, throwing my arms up and taking a defensive step toward him. “Myself?”

“That,” Jeremy screeched passionately, boxing me in with his hands, “would be wonderful! For once, Kata, just admit that the world isn’t screwing you over just for fun. Yeah, life can suck, but other people have problems, too, and�””

“I challenge you to find a person with more problems than me!”

He groaned, exasperated. “Oh, look at me! I’m Kata!” he imitated, throwing a falsetto into his cracking voice. “Everyone’s out to get me--”

“People are out to get me!” I retaliated, remembering Halloween night.

“�”and everyone hates me because I’m a lunatic--”

“You’ve got no idea what they say!”

“�”and I’m so alone! No one gives a damn about poor! Little! Me!”

His tongue sliced me open. His words drew blood from my core, and I stood shell-shocked. I shivered from cold and pain and the unavoidable truth of what he’d just said. Sometimes things just hit you. I’d been avoiding the truth so long, and it couldn’t wait to get its restless hands on me.

I didn’t even know what lies I was telling myself anymore.

Jeremy knew me well enough to see that his taunts had stuck. “Kat,” he whispered. I climbed inside myself. Him: “I’m sorry.”

I peeked up from under my hair�”which was flailing around my head like a mop now�”and glared. There was nothing kind or forgiving left in me. “You think that’s funny?” I hissed quietly, staring at my hands as tears clambered into my eyes.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he objected hurriedly , but I cut him off by lifting a commanding hand. My fingers were as straight as bone.

“There isn’t anyone who does give a damn about me, Jeremy,” I whispered, chuckling ironically. “Not you, apparently. Not my aunt or uncle. Not my brother.”

“Harry?” Jeremy asked, startled. “What’s he got to do with this?”

We were still in the foyer, and there was nowhere to sit but the floor. So that’s where we plopped down, his knee brushing mine and my hair a cyclone between us. The metaphorical dust had settled, we were best friends again. I suppose.

“Nothing,” I murmured. “He hasn’t got anything to do with me. Except everything.”

“I don’t speak girl,” Jeremy declared, exasperated but trying to be patient. Our previous spat still hung over us like a wart, refusing to disappear. “So either spit it out or forget about me understanding this shit.”

I took a deep breath and tried to exhale everything I was feeling, like vomiting. Purging. Strangely, I found that I couldn’t. I felt like a much different person than I’d been when I woke up that morning. If you’d have asked me, I would have said that I didn’t believe people could change, but the evidence was glaringly obvious inside of me. My heart felt as cold and empty as a stone, weighing down my chest.

I gave explaining my best shot. “He’s my older brother,” I squeaked, voice strangled by unwanted emotion. “I’m exactly eleven months and twenty-five days younger. Which apparently makes the biggest difference in the world.”

Age felt like a chasm. I wasn’t strong enough, or important enough, or big enough to cross it.

“What do you mean?” Jeremy prodded. “I’m older than you. You’ve never complained about th--”

“It’s school,” I whispered. Absently, I began twirling my hair around my index finger. Winding it up and letting it spring back into place. “His school. I, uh… applied, but I’m too young. I can’t get out of here until next year.”

When I looked up, I expected to see some sort of sympathy from Jeremy. But… this time he looked like someone had punched him in the face. His wounded eyes hooked onto mine.

I fell deep into the many things that I never had wanted to feel. I was caked inside my own confusion. Jeremy’s lips were letting truths slide out from between them, and these stung me.

“You say that all the time,” he croaked, his gloom poorly disguised by a hair flick. “You talk about getting out of here. What’s so bad about here, Kat? I’m here. All your other friends are here. You grew up in this town. For the life of me, I can’t understand why you want out.”

Not a curse word to be found. Embarrassed, I realized Jeremy was saying what he felt. I blushed, bizarrely. Truth was becoming a little foreign.

I refused to cry, but that didn’t stop the tears from collecting in my eyes. “He never writes me,” I choked out brazenly. “He’s my brother, and he doesn’t ever write me. I�”” Here, Jeremy may tell you that the tears collapsed onto my face, but I will maintain that they didn’t. “�”don’t… know why. What the hell could be more important than me?”

I know that sounds egotistical, ignorant, self-centered, etc. That’s because it was. Just remember that no one had exactly explained to me the happenings of the Wizarding world. The extent of my knowledge stood at:

a) Magic is real. Woo hoo.
b) Harry was has superpowers.
c) Kata does not.

Solitary, I watched Jeremy’s face.

“People change,” he acknowledged with surprising defensiveness. “Circumstances, too. Look at us, Kata. We’re sitting in your damn foyer, you’re effing crying, and I’m spewing nonsense and shit trying to make you stop. How did we get here? I don’t have a bloody clue. But ever since you came back in August�”with no explanation as to where you were�”you’ve been moody and insane and caught up in this whole ‘life sucks’ parade. And now there’s the screaming and the crying and the Twenty Things, and… someone’s got to tell you. I didn’t want it to be me. But that little notebook you carry around, those pieces of paper with the words that the shitty drawings? You’re not in there.”

I stuck my head in my hands and lost track of which pieces of my body were where. “Would someone care to tell me who I am, then?” I spat, bitter and shaking and not in a rhetorical fashion. Someone�”be it Jeremy or Harry or Mr. Mendota�”needed to let me know.

“You’re… you, I guess,” Jeremy attempted. Key word: attempt. Good effort, though.

“I’m nobody.”

“Says who?”

“Everybody. Jilly. Verno. Hagrid.”

“Is that code?”

“Only if you want it to be.”

Irony wiggled under my skin as Jeremy started to laugh. I know, I know. I’m just so funny. “Do you plan that kind of shit ahead of time, or does it just pop out?”

I shrugged. “I’m naturally sarcastic.”

“You’re a bloody piece of work,” he declared.

“My parents are dead.”

Moments collected. Moments fell. The Earth rolled its way through another cycle, and the pure tonight-ness of the moment came upon me. Time, it seemed, was inescapable. Through the ringing in my ears, I could almost hear the sand as it whispered through the hourglass. I wanted to scream. Silence dewed on the back of my neck.

“…”

“…”

“I’m going to leave now,” Jeremy announced, after we’d both reassembled ourselves. I think I’d stuck one of my arms on the wrong way though, because it felt too heavy, like there was too much sadness inside.

“I think that’s a very good idea,” I said to my knees. The light bulb in the foyer illuminated us. Home is where one hangs one’s hat, I recited internally, remembering reading that somewhere. Jeremy and I�”among the coat closet and the shoe bench and the umbrella stand�”were in the very essence of home. And I could not have felt more out of place.

The door shuffled shut behind him.

Before then, I hadn’t believe that a person could cry herself to sleep. When I cried, I was usually so preoccupied with it that my mind could never settle down enough to sleep. But it isn’t about settling down. When you feel so dead inside that your body is only lolling out of one unconsciousness and into the next, that’s when it happens. When you’re so hopeless and wrecked that there is nothing left to think about pain… you sleep. When you would rather die, you mind substitutes the next best thing. Endlessly, I slept.

The world slept with me.

~*~*~*~

For the next few days, I was decidedly uninteresting. But, would you like to know who was interesting? Mr. Mendota. As I’ve tried to convey, he was an extraordinary sort of man. There is a dense, surviving kind of humanity to him. He parted his hair on the right side, ironed his pants, and smelled of drug store soap.

Loneliness was written all over him, even if I didn’t care enough to see it.

He had a small house in the outskirts of town. The best that a teacher’s salary could rent. In his den, he had a desk, where he sat to grade his student’s papers and pound away at the novel he’d been trying to write since he was twelve. On this desk, there were several desk-ish items. Pens, memo pads, chewing gum, newspaper clippings. However, there was also a computer, where he typed the aforementioned dead-end novel. Taped to the upped-left corner of the computer monitor, there was a photograph roughly the size of a playing card.

It did not move. But it shivered with its own meaning.

A girl of about seventeen sat on the lip of an outdoor fountain, wearing tight gray jeans and a man’s red sweater. This red clashed gloriously with her hair, which was a carefree auburn. There was a smudge of mascara above her left eye, and a peppering of freckles on her cheeks. Her smile made the sun look like a flickering forty-watt bulb. This girl’s name had been Kailey. A car accident, five years previously, had ripped her from the world. The edges of where she had been were still sharp, and they dug into Robert Mendota’s skin every single time he looked at her photograph.

Having a sister or brother is universal. There is a kind of easy, enduring love that comes with it. A company of blood and of unfaltering understanding. I tried very, very hard not to miss Harry that year, but I didn’t try nearly as hard as Mr. Mendota did.

We were in a remarkably similar position. A world was between my brother and I, and a lifetime was between Kailey and hers.

Mr. Mendota had promised himself that he wouldn’t see her in me. All the teachers had been talking of Harry Potter’s mysterious disappearance and ‘scholarship’�” Harry was far beyond me in academics, but quite average�”and he had immediately remembered that Harry had a sister. A sister with red hair and a name that started with ‘K’ and an older brother that she was now separated from.

He taught me indifferently, at first. Maths and science and English. I was another face in a classroom in a school in a world choked up with sisters and brothers. But soon he noticed the way I played with my hair, and became fascinated with why I couldn’t be bothered to pay attention, and wondered at the things going on behind my glassy eyes as I stared disinterestedly out the window. Innocent curiosity boxed him in.

I thought I was unreachable. But I was alive. I suppose when you lose someone, you’ll grapple at any opportunity to feel what it was like to be with them just one more time. Me… I was in denial. But Mr. Mendota had begun bartering with the world.

He taught me chess, and forced me to read about Wonderland, and hoped that I could find my Twenty Things. No, he wasn’t delusional. I wasn’t Kailey, and that was clear to him. But I’d become his newest mystery, and he wanted to solve it. He waited for the gorgeous comprehension to enter him.

We were so alike it stabbed him.

He didn’t know very much about me, though. And I, of course, didn’t know that story way back then. All I could see was the result.

But how do you see something you think you saw, when you know you didn’t really see it?
~*~*~*~

Saturday and Sunday were spent in much the same way. I flitted between sleep and ill-fitting awareness. My dreams stormed my mind, and shocked me into reality, but reality numbed me to the point where sleep came automatically. In addition to being Katatonic (Katatonic! What a katastrophe. What had katapulted me into this state? What was the katalyst?), I had also gotten sick from lying around in my snow clothes for hours. I sneezed so much that my throat felt like someone had stabbed it with a rusty railroad spike. I sweated and then shivered and then sneezed again. Just generally miserable.

The Dursleys came back late Sunday afternoon, and did nothing to acknowledge me. I kept my door locked and�”to help pass the time�”imagined what I was going to do to everyone when they finally got around to giving me a wand.

Here is what else I thought about:

Twenty Things That Make The World Go ‘Round. An assignment, a ceremony, and a quest. What means something to you? What can’t you live without? Who are you, and why? How did you become yourself? Make a list. Write a letter. Gather a box of things, or paint Styrofoam numbers, or just come into your own using the method of your choice. You have until December 19th. Now, away with you, on a quest to find meaning! I hereby sic you on the unsuspecting world!

What kind of hopeless case was I? Did nothing matter? I’d managed to make a list, at least, of twenty items. I planned to turn it in, but now… it wasn’t even worth the passing grade. Somewhere along the way, I’d stopped caring about the schoolwork aspect of the project, and started challenging myself to just become. I wanted to find the key to all my problems, through a project that I had been doomed to fail from the start.

Question: When did I decide that I didn’t know who I was?

Answer: When they told me I should be looking.

The questions festered like disease in my mind, and I rotted from the inside out. Loneliness was a shell, and I crawled inside myself, not sure that I ever wanted to come out.

I watched the clock and dozed off and on.

After a long bout of nightmare-packed sleep, I awoke to a clock that read 8:21. Morning. Clearing my raspy throat, I sat up and gripped the window with my eyes, wondering how it could still be dark. Yes, it was winter, but the sun had usually risen by this time. School would be starting in about half an hour… Was it worth it?

Barely bothering myself with pondering this, I creaked to my feet, my bones sliding and squeaking. Indifferently, I yanked back the curtains and�”

Died.

Or maybe just blacked out for a moment. Not only had the snow been driven into dense, tenacious piles on the sides of the road, but it was illuminated by streetlamps. The amber circles of light from these also tossed parked cars, in safe driveways, into vision. Verno’s SUV-of-the-week was standing guard in the driveway. And he never, ever left the house after eight, unless it was Dudley’s birthday.

Which I was fairly certain it wasn’t. Unless they’d started celebrating it twice a year. Let’s not rule out that possibility.

It hadn’t just slept through a weekend: I’d slept through a day in school. The last day before winter break. The day that the Twenty Things were due.

I’d slept it off. How had I not felt it?

Identity teased me, hovering just out of reach. Abruptly and completely, it didn’t much matter whether or not I knew what my Twenty effing Things were. I’d given it my best shot, and gone down fighting, and the room closed in around me as I was drenched with renewed purpose. In the distance, in Town Square, the clock sang out the half hour, and time sliced me open.

It was Christmastime. School was over for the term, I was more alone than I cared to be, and I had a completed assignment snoozing in my backpack. What do you think I did? I plunged my feet into my sneakers and my body out of the smallest bedroom. I�”with a chessman in my pocket and a letter still gripping the tiles of the bathroom floor�”began to fight.

It was a fight I’d been fighting since a scarlet engine had evaporated into the horizon, leaving me behind: I’ll-Show-Them-All.

Still coughing and wheezing and sneezing from my run-in with the snow, I tramped downstairs in a hodgepodge of clothes. Everything felt very far off, as if I were at the bottom of a deep well. My breath came in great, frenzied slabs, and my vision kicked about. The same ratty cardigan I’d worn the night Jeremy had visited was flung over my shoulders, my jeans were ancient and holey.

I didn’t even want to know what my hair looked like. I imagined that by now it had gone from mildly unmanageable to murderously feral, and that was not something anyone wants to see. Small children have been known to get lost in my hair.

“And just where are you going?” Verno demanded almost semi-cordially from the sitting room. This was one of the three or four phrases he traditionally directed at me. The others held expletives.

My insanity gushed onto my face in answer. He didn’t say anything else.

I couldn’t quite hear myself tumble through the house and out the door. Phantom hands snagged my school bag on the way out. Routine. The ice-caked sidewalk pounded at my feet as I sputtered and coughed to the garage, digging my stone cold bike out from under a tarp.

The night was cracked open wide, the streetlights flinging their beams down my throat and the stars bobbing indifferently in the sky. They skirted along the edges of the moon, watching me as I pedaled and coughed and sneezed. My chest metaphorically bled. My heart barely beat, lazily stirring my blood around. All I could feel was the dense sensation that air had replaced my legs and my arms were now listless, skin-colored noodles. The pieces of me were there, certainly. They just weren’t doing a very good job of behaving as a whole.

I didn’t even know what I wanted to feel. All I had was a backpack slung over my bones.

It was December 19th, 1991. I don’t suppose I’ll ever forget that night, though sometimes I wish I would. As the solemn tolling of the clock crawled off into the night, silence collected around me. My legs strained as I pedaled for all I was worth (Which was approximately three letters, a pawn, and a potato-noodle casserole.).

I rode through a town, and saw it. The houses clustered on the edges of roads, blinking their windows shut for the night. Our Lady of the People, on Dashwood Place, was half shrunk into the shadows, so dark I wasn’t sure if it was there. Slowly, the houses turned into businesses and office buildings. Quick Mart glowed, its proud ‘Open 24 Hours’ sign parked in the window. Marc sat at an empty register, propping her feet up on a conveyor belt and thumbing through a tabloid. Flinker’s had closed down for the night, but the shape of it still resided across the street from the bank where Jilly’s mum worked as a teller/love goddess. Halfman Park sat off to the side of Town Square, hovering ominously. I got the odd, eternal feeling that I was being watched.

And, of course, the clock. Always the clock.

The fact of it was, this: a thousand people had lived and worked and been in this town. Maybe some of them had died here. I was just a tick mark on the history of Little Whinging. I wouldn’t be the last person to pedal insanely through deserted streets that seemed to crowded even without the presence of other human souls.

Stonewall Primary rested at the barest edge of town, which was still only about five blocks from where I lived. By the time I arrived there, cold sweat was crowding my skin and a stitch was pressed into my side. My backpack bit into my shoulders. I can stop with the descriptions, right? You get it. I was a right bloody mess.

Cars were jumbled into every available space�”I’d missed school, but I hadn’t missed the dreaded Winter Exhibition. Just a bunch of parents being proud of their kids.

I now feel the need to take the time to outline a very important detail: I didn’t exactly miss my parents. I wasn’t especially sad that they were dead, as I’ve mentioned. A bit ticked off, certainly. But I was hardly the type to cry over something that had just been a constant in my life for ten years. I missed the idea of parents. In essence, I was a little girl who wanted to feel like someone cared.

Another very important detail: I was insanely jealous of Harry. When we’d gone to Diagon Alley�”when I still thought I was getting to go to school with him�”almost every single person we met told him that he looked like James. I wanted someone to look at me and say, “You look quite a bit like your father, too, Kata. Your mother as well.”

You know what else would have been amazing? If (literally) every wizard or witch we meant hadn’t said, “A sister? Harry Potter has a sister? Who knew!”

Yeah. That would have been sort of neat.

Another description: The cold parted around my body as I pressed my way up the steps and to the mouth of the door. A ribbon of wind played with my hair as I once again struggled with a doorknob. I got it open and skimmed inside, the peeling rubber bottoms of my sneakers complaining against the newly-waxed linoleum.

The sound slapped the halls, which were deserted and a bit forlorn. The finger-paintings and lockers ran along the walls.

Fear�”the cold, jittery kind�”fell down my throat, but something made me keep walking. I sensed, oddly, that if I didn’t walk this road now, I’d just be postponing it for later. People have defining moments when they’re young, particularly when they’re searching for them. And one of my biggest moments, when I look back, is wandering slowly down the empty, desolate halls of a school.

I sort of got the impression that fear was just as scared as I was.

The smell of spotlights leaked out from under the doors of the auditorium as I stood outside. Numbly, I yanked hard on the handle and slid in without letting the door slam behind me. Every single human being faced the front.

I couldn’t have timed it better. Winnie was belting her lines, while Robin prepared to melt. Liam, Brady, and Alec slouched, Jilly held her spear with frightening intensity, and Sherrie hid behind the curtain.

I was supposed to close that curtain. Vaguely, I remembered this, but it didn’t do anything.

Or… perhaps it did.

When I sat down to tell this, I knew there were going to be parts I’d want to gloss over. That moment in my fifth year, for instance, with Adam Null. You guys won’t be hearing all of that. Or the moment in the graveyard where it will all begin to unravel. Those are times when I won’t go into as much detail as maybe some of you would like�”by choice, though. Right now, when I skip over things, it’s because I honestly don’t remember. I suppose I ran.

I’ll bet I kept going even when I heard the door roar shut behind me. My sneakers probably pounded the floor. I stormed the school. If you were there, you wouldn’t have thought of me as Harry Potter’s little sister. I was the Kata, for whom people clapped and hallways parted. I feel like you could have known me if you’d watched me run. Just for a few seconds. Maybe.

It was like swallowing that peanut. Standing in the crevice between the theater and the hallways, I felt my heart cough to a stop. It didn’t start again until I found myself spread across the floor in front of a door that read: 201: Mendota 6.

I heard him rumble down the hallway. He was laughing. The sounds of it raided the walls. I picked at a scrap of resilient nail polish on my thumb and waited patiently. Sherrie Parker and a careworn-looking woman with a professional suit and well-worn shoes followed him. She apologized frequently.

“I’m so sorry,” she announced for the billionth time.

“It’s fine,” my teacher assured her. “I’ve got the keys. We’ll find her coat.”

“I’m sorry. Sherrie can be so forgetful.”

Forgetful Sherrie didn’t object to this description. She twiddled a piece of hair with her first two fingers and appeared deeply interested in the pattern of the ceiling tiles. She saw me before the two adults did, and a brief kinship extended between us.

“Mr. Mendota,” she quipped matter-of-factly. Her voice was kind of high and breathy. Out-of-sorts, like it was a big deal for her to form coherent sentences. “Kata Potter is on the floor.”

And the kinship evaporated. I missed it already.

Mr. Mendota, Sherrie, and the woman that I assumed was Sherrie’s mum all gazed at me. I swallowed and dragged myself into a standing position. My expression was businesslike, and my body felt hollow. There wasn’t much I had to say, but there were still things that needed to come out. They gathered in the back of my throat, frothing at my lips. I shook. Sherrie raised an eyebrow, and Mr. Mendota nearly dropped his keys.

“Kata!” he cried. “What are you doing here? Are you feeling better? Are you all ri�”Kata, breathe!”

I obeyed, grudgingly, taking in the air through my nose. See, if I opened my mouth, the words would have come out in the wrong order. They’d mean the wrong things. As I bent over, unzipped my bag, and extracted one green notebook, I kept my lips dutifully stitched together.

“Hey, Mr. Mendota,” I greeted, my voice brittle. “I just figured I’d stop by and tell you.”

He asked the obligatory follow-up question, while Sherrie’s mum looked at me in the way that most people’s mums look at me. I call it ShockPityDisgust. An unusual combination.

“Tell me what?” he demanded in his teacher voice. I was impervious to the command behind it, though. I was strung out on a mysterious, adrenaline-like substance. It broke over my blood and gripped my veins like reigns. “Kata, are you here alone? It’s really late. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“No,” I said clippingly. The truth felt… good. “I’m not okay. But whatever. I’m here to tell you that… I give up. There are no Twenty Things for me. You told me that the secret to winning at chess was sacrificing all that you can. Mr. Mendota, I’m standing here and telling you that I have absolutely nothing left to sacrifice. Some people aren’t attached to anything. They don’t have things that make their worlds go ‘round. I’m just one of those people. I don’t even know what kind of person I’m supposed to be. But things change too much for me to have Twenty Things.”

My fingers released that notebook, and it kissed the floor. He stared at me openly.

I knew how to make a speech, I suppose. None of them said a word. Sherrie went back to staring at the ceiling, her wide hazel eyes distant and dreamy. Mrs. Parker fiddled uncomfortably with her jacket sleeve, and Mr. Mendota did something that I didn’t expect. (What else is new?)

His eyes whispered shut. His face fell slack, slipping out of its composure and calm. As he spoke, his lips barely touched the words. Still, they came. “This is how the world ends. This is how the world ends. This is how the world ends. Not with bang, but a whimper.”

I didn’t realize that I had run away again until I found myself in Halfman Park, sitting on a bridge hovering above a small, crusty pond. My feet dangled over the edge, reaching for the surface. The stars battled to be seen in the bottomless, watery sky. Random clusters of snow freckled the open lots where people played cricket and Frisbee in the summer. I closed my eyes and breathed shallowly.

There’s a piece of good news here: I’ve almost reached my worst. Things will spiral a bit more downward, but they’ll eventually rise. I don’t really have the patience to tell a sad story. This one is sad, yes… but I wasn’t. Not when I sat there, feeling numb and hollow and thoroughly enjoying the way the sky looked against my skin.

I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted, but I dearly hoped I got it someday.

~*~*~*~
A six-sentence summary of my Christmas:

Snow pleated the ground, filling in the cracks in the sidewalk. I took a long walk around Little Whinging, admiring the larger-than-life evergreen that had been erected in Town Square. Everything smelled like holly and home. I wondered about Christmas at Hogwarts, and about who could possibly be responsible for the random purple sweater that had shown up in my room that morning.

Too late to do anything about it, I realized I’d sent Hedwig away without a reply.

With cold fingers, I touched the other thing Harry’s letter had contained: a small sterling silver pendent in the shape of a ‘K’, strung thoughtfully on a thin chain.

~*~*~*~
Jeremy and I were going to get married in June, when he was twenty-one and I was twenty. He wanted to go for twenty and nineteen, but I’d told him flat out that I wasn’t going to become a ‘Mrs.’ while my age still had a ‘teen’ tacked onto the end. We’d stick with the traditional vows, because I just didn’t have the patience or eloquence to write my own. Instead of roses, I would have sunflowers in my bouquet. Jeremy would wear a tux�”a real one, like in movies, with a triangular-folded handkerchief in the breast pocket and shoes so spit-shined he’d be able to see himself�”and I wanted a dress dripping with diamonds and lace. I wasn’t interested in a veil; I figured it would get in the way. I told him to forget about kids, and he fought me tooth-and-nail when I informed him that I intended to keep my own name. The compromise: one kid, and I got to stay Potter. Harry conceded to walking me down the aisle, but I don’t think he took the whole plan very seriously.

This all was decided when Jeremy and I were very young, under that tree in the woods behind the school. The main idea behind it was that neither of us had any interest in marrying, so we might as well just marry each other to get it over it. We dubbed it a ‘partnership of convenience’ (a phrase we’d read in a book somewhere), and shook on it. He suggested a kiss to seal the deal, but I wasn’t having it. I told him he could kiss me when the preacher said so, and not before then.

As I grew up, I think Jeremy and I realized how ridiculous an idea it all was. Still, we’d both make vague references to Sometime in the Future, when we’d take each other in sickness and in health, till death did we depart.

My marriage was the last thing on my mind when the letters started coming. It didn’t once enter my brain as Verno drove aimlessly around the country, or when we stayed at a motel empty except for vermin and chipping paint. And as we rowed haphazardly across an icy stretch of water in a steady deluge of rain, I was simply thinking, Cold. Cold. I hate all of you. Cold. Nothing about vows or veils.

But when Hagrid said the magic words (Get it? Magic words? Humph. Well, I think I’m funny.), I had three thoughts. This is how it went.

Hagrid: “Yer a wizard, Harry.”

Kata’s first thought: Did he just say lizard?

Kata’s second thought: Oh, wizard. That makes more sense. NOT.

Kata’s third thought: If Harry’s a wizard, I’m a wizard. And if I’m a wizard, how am I going to marry Jeremy?

Unbelievable, I know. After steady years of knowing it was preposterous to actually think I would marry Jeremy, a plan I had made when I was four or five was the first (well, third) thing that jumped into my head after a half-giant gave me the best and worst news of my life.

I guess it should have been a warning. Even when I asked Hagrid and he told me that Muggles married wizards all the time, I should have sensed it. There was an uncertain price I’d need to pay for entry into this brave new world that was blossoming before my eyes.

I would have to give up more than I wedding I didn’t even want. I’d be waving a wand with hands that would have to learn how to let go.

…Would you like to hear about it?

~*~*~*~
“Off the top of my head” I announced. “I can literally think of a thousand things I’d rather be doing than sitting here and freezing to death.”

Harry nodded silently, agreeing with me. Verno was busy trying to convince wet chip bags to burst into flame. Aunt P watched this process hopefully, and Dudley whined.

Perhaps I was just bored. But I was determined to get one of them (them being the Durselys) to say something rude or degrading to me. This just wasn’t natural. Verno’s eyes were pointing in different directions, and he grinning like he’d won the lottery. Aunt P’s mouth was stitched shut, and she kneaded her hands restlessly. Dudley�”having run out of things to whine about approximately a half hour ago�”was now simply making a series of high-pitched grunting noises, trying to get his mother’s attention. These were not the Dursleys I knew.

“So, let me get this straight,” I tried again. “You brought matches… and no food?”

“I brought food,” Verno smiled cheerfully, indicating the chip bags.

Then, he smiled. I think I had a tiny aneurysm.

Harry was staring off into space, way past caring what I said or did to upset Verno. But he shot me a warning look as I geared up for third attempt. I could only think of one thing the Dursleys hated more than me.

“Which came first, the chicken or the egg? What’s Madonna’s real name? Where do babies come from?”

Aunt P stopped wrestling with her own grip and looked at me quizzically. Verno hummed softly as match after match failed and was deposited into the fireplace alongside the chip bags. Tiny fires occasionally broke out, but the bags simply spouted blue smoke and curled up at the edges.

“What are you doing?” Harry said under his breath. I smiled coldly.

“Asking questions,” I said evenly. I’d hoped to make him smile, but all he did was look worried.

Hurt at the way my brother was behaving, and thoroughly annoyed with my unresponsive aunt and uncle, I finally shrieked, “Dudley, you’re fat!”

The response was a dark look from Aunt P and an unintelligible whine from DinkleDork. Or whatever they were calling him these days.

Finally, Verno gave up on the fire and began to take stock of the sleeping arrangements. There was a large, lumpy mattress set upon a groaning slab of box springs in the other room, but one would be lying to call it a bed. In addition, there was a fragile-looking couch composed of moldy cushions. And then there was the floor.

They say sleeping on the floor is good for your back. I intend to have a fantastic back one day, or I’m demanding my money back.

“You okay?” Harry said as Dudley snored on the couch and we lay sprawled over the floor. He let me hog the one blanket that’d been tossed our way, even though I could feel him shivering. For once, though, I decided to take advantage of the ridiculous selflessness that was Harry; I estimated that, out of the two of us, I’d be most likely to freeze to death.

“Mm-hmm,” I said sleepily. “Why?”

“The storm…”

I opened one bleary eye and defensively said, “I got over that a gazillion years ago.”

He nodded indulgently. “Last week?”

Yeah. On the fourteenth of never, I thought peevishly. “I’m not five, Harry.”

He merely bobbed his head knowingly. He understood me too well; it was irritating. Besides, this was more than just a little water. There was thunder and lighting and screaming winds and a flapping sea. It was perfectly natural to be scared of a storm like this.

I was drifting off, and had almost forgotten about the storm and the cold and the annoying older brother when he spoke again. “Do you think they’ll remember?”

“I’m trying to sleep here, bro. Who’s they?”

“Them.” He jerked his head toward the door to the tiny room with where Aunt P and Verno slept. “About my birthday.”

I sighed and rolled over to face him. “Considering we’re sleeping on the floor of a shack miles from home in the middle of Freaking Nowhere, and bearing in mind that they hate us both on principle, I’d say the chances are slim to none.” He blinked, smiling ironically at my logic. “I will, though.”

He groaned. “You’re not going to sing again, are you?”

“Try and stop me.”

“C’mon,” he said , probably remembering the time every dog in the neighborhood started howling uncontrollably when I broke into a chorus of “Carry On My Wayward Son.” “Don’t I get a wish or something?”

“Wish for a pony,” I said. Giving up on sleep, I opened my eyes and looked around. Dudley was out like a light, his ham-like wrist dangling over the side of the grimy sofa. 11:55, his watch read.

Suddenly, Harry went stiff and wrenched partially upright, propped up on his elbows. “Did you hear that?”

I shook my head. “All I hear is the sound of me starving to death. I’m allergic to the stuff they make those chips with. And you wouldn’t let me eat banana peels.”

“Shh,” he said , paying no attention to my food rant. “It sounds like something’s outside…”

“It’s called wind,” I said through a yawn. “Would you mind if I roasted and ate Dudley?”

Once again, I got no reply. He lay back down, one ear cocked warily. 11:56.

I was internally debating what Dudley would taste like when Harry twitched and looked around again. “Kata…”

“It’s the storm!” I said impatiently. “Go back to wishing for that pony. A pink one. With sparkles.”

He laughed, but it was forced and uneasy. Barely audible over the moaning of the waves against rocks. The bullet sound of lightning split the sky, and I buried my face in the crook of my arm, trembling.

“You got over it?”

“Shut up!”

“It’s not a big deal, Kat.”

“Happy birthday to yoooooou!” I belted in punishment, hoping the Dursleys would wake up at the sound of my nails-on-a-chalkboard voice. That would be quite the celebration.

Harry covered his ears, protecting them from permanent damage.

“Happy Birthday tooooooo yooooooou!”

“You’ll wake everyone up!” he hissed as I continued my whale imitation/singing.

“Happy Birthday, dear Harryyyyyy! Happy Birrrthdayyy toooo yoooou!”

I trilled off into a note that would make opera singers ashamed of their genre.

Can I pause for a second? I just want to describe it. The storm battered the little cabin, spraying it with wind and dousing its sides in foam-capped waves. The cold was bone-deep and painful, and I was hungry enough to consider cannibalism. My brother and I laughed at my appalling lack of talent as thunder slashed at the clouds. There was a watch, and it read, 11:59.

The last minute before life as I knew it came to a permanent close. I spent it in laughter.

When the door was broken down, I was still smiling.

~*~*~*~
My account of what happened when Hagrid came in isn’t entirely different than Harry’s. A bit more sarcastic, certainly. Longer, wordier. Essentially, though… it’s the same as what you know.

But that’s the point of not writing it out: to let you know that some things will be the same. Sometimes, Harry and I are in the same place doing the same thing with the same intent. We are related, after all. Just like the color of our eyes, our unpredictable tempers, and a curious form of stupidity that some people mistake for bravery, we share experiences.

But because this story is about me, I’ll give you one image. One box of words to help you assemble the climax of my life.

A girl. On the shorter side. With ornery hair and a shaggy wall of bangs her aunt cut by roping Scotch tape around her forehead and lopping off what hung over the edge. She’d been left on somebody’s doorstep and life was dead-end; that’s what she knew about herself. Just imagine the blaze of possibilities that lit up her face when the truth was unmasked. Think about how she must have felt, to know that she�”who was decidedly ordinary�”had the kind of roaring potential to someday be extraordinary.

There was pride, handfuls of it. Prospect, another foreign word.

This girl, she learned so much about herself in such a short period of time. Magic, Hogwarts, her parents, a Dark wizard with a name that reminded her of mold…

And this girl, who had always thought she didn’t have a middle name, got half a dozen of them thrown at her. The giant gazed at her skeptically as he recited these, like he expected her to react in a certain way.

“Katarine Natasha Elisabeth Rose Lillian Alice Mintaka Potter.”

Oh, yes, the girl thought. That’s very good.

The night was tinted. That’s the best way I can describe it. Tinted and too big to fit within the small hours it was allotted.

~*~*~*~
The Leaky Cauldron was sewn haphazardly onto the corner of a bust London street. It wasn’t the ideal spot for a business; the passerby seemed to collectively walk by it without even glancing up from their individual pursuits. Hagird led Harry and I toward it like it was the most important building in the world.

“It’s a right famous place,” Hagrid said. Doubtful, I glanced at Harry, who shrugged.

The inside of the Leaky Cauldron was no more promising. The tables had an ancient, greasy look to them�”as did the people sitting at them. A dusty barman stood behind a counter, wiping a frosted glass with a stained rag and talking with a man wearing a top hat. The air smelled of sherry and resin.

The bartender and the top-hatted man smiled and waved at Hagrid. I wondered offhandedly where I could buy a top hat like that. “Hagrid,” the bartender said. “Your usual, I presume?”

“Sorry, Tom,” Hagird said gruffly, clapping Harry on the shoulder. I noticed a few old ladies in the corner pointing at Harry and whispering. One nodded eagerly, puffing on a pipe. “Not today. I’m on official Hogwarts business.”

Tom dropped the dish rag. “Well, bless my soul,” he breathed, his eyes going wide and his hands shaking. A cross between surprise, fear, and reverence was making its way across his face. “Harry Potter.”

Immediately, the Leaky Cauldron was in uproar. Tom the bartender was the first to reach Harry. With tears clouding his squinty eyes, he pumped my brother’s hand. “Welcome back,” he said, wheezing slightly. “Welcome back, Mr. Potter…”

A tidal wave of people followed. Quite a few of them stepped on my feet or shoved me aside in a mad dash to meet Harry. There was quite a lot of hand-shaking and introductions.

“�”so proud, Mr. Potter, just so proud�””

“�”always wanted to meet you…can’t believe it�””

“�”Diggle’s the name, my boy, Dedalus Diggle�””

I expected the swarm of people to eventually thing, but it did not�” some kept coming back to shake Harry’s hand again. Tom the bartender was all of a flutter, excited to have a celebrity in his undeserving pub. Slightly angered, I crossed my arms and stared at the floor. I didn’t understand.

A pale man with dark blue robes and a curious turban came forward, wringing his hands. One of his eyes twitched off and on, making his whole face contort and smooth out in little spasms.

“Well, hello, Professor Quirrell!” Hagrid said. “Harry, this is Professor Quirrell. He’ll be your Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at school.”

“Harry P-P-P-Potter,” Quirrell said in greeting, inclining his head nervously. “S-so p-p-pleased t-t-to finally m-meet you.”

“Defense Against the Dark Arts?” I repeated, confused. “What sort of magic is that?”

Quirrell shook his head as if he’d rather not elaborate. His eyes fell on me for just a moment, and something behind them twitched�”not the eyes themselves. Quirrell was staring at me as if he knew exactly who I was, and as if I quite terrified him. But then he was gone, and a woman who introduced herself as Doris Crockford was shaking Harry’s hand for the umpteenth time.

It took an ungodly amount of time to disentangle Harry from his mass of admirers. While Hagrid worked at this, Tom the bartender finally asked my name.

“I’m Kata, Kata Potter,” I said proudly, hoping for some recognition.

Tom glanced at Harry, and then back to me. “You’re not… related to Mr. Potter, now?”

I bit my lip. “I’m his sister.”

This seemed to shock Tom a fair amount. He kept glancing my way, as if there was some sort of physical test he could use to determine whether I was a Potter. I watched Harry be met and greeted by a dozen eager fans, and wondered what the hell was going on.

“Must be going, now,” Hagrid finally called. “Lots ter do�”c’mon, you two.”

We slipped through the back door of the Leaky Cauldron and I found myself in a dirty alleyway. A few broken bottles littered the ground, and patches of weeds sprung up through the cracks in the pavement. “What,” I said, “was that all about?”

Hagrid grinned. “Told yeh. Yer famous, Harry.”

“Yes,” I said. “You mentioned that. What you failed to mention were the mobs of fans and the handshaking and the Doris Crockfords and the whatever that was!”

Hagrid chuckled. My head was spinning. “And why didn’t any of them know me?” I demanded. “He’s the Boy Who Lived, right? Doesn’t that make me… I dunno, the Girl Who Lived?”

Hagird and Harry both seemed uncomfortable, as if they knew something I didn’t. “Well,” Hagrid said, “I s’pose yeh technically lived. But it’s complicated. Now, let’s see… two from the left, three up… right. Yeh may want ter stand back.”

Hagrid extracted his pink umbrella from a deep pocket in his overcoat and began tapping what seemed to be a random sequence of bricks on the alley wall. But the bricks he touched began to tremble… they pulsated, wiggling in place. A great rumbling noise�”something like gallons on water pouring thickly onto a bed of rocks�” sounded through the alley as the bricks in front of me began to fold backwards onto each other, forming a massive archway that led out to a cluttered cobblestone street.

I whistled out lowly through me teeth, a trick Jeremy had taught me. Harry’s jaw was hovering somewhere between the ground and its normal location. I took a step onto the street, barely able to think over the babble and commotion of the people and shops that stood before us. A chunk of sunlight replaced the shadow of the alley on my face.

“Welcome,” Hagrid said. “This�”this is Diagon Alley.”

For the first time in my life, I was grateful for the what the mental quack the Dursleys had taken me to see mistook for ADHD�”a short attention span that enabled me to look everywhere at once and not miss a single piece of Diagon Alley. Stores that sold things I’d never heard of or hadn’t thought existed lined the streets. People in wizard robes or old-fashioned Muggle clothes wove in between each other. There seemed to be no uniform direction of motion. We passed an apothecary, where a woman stood shaking her head, complaining about the raising price of dragon liver�”dragons?!�”and a department store called Monday’s. The windows of the latter were filled with statuesque mannequins charmed to switch poses every few seconds and wave to the passerby. Two girls of about my age stood outside a lopsided looking bookstore, passing a bag of candy back and forth. Whenever one of them ate a piece, smoke would pore from her ears and she’d squeal. I had a huge, stupid grin on my face as my eyes sifted through the massive amount of things worth staring at.

A perpetual hum of magic filled the air. Things banged and pinged and spontaneously exploded. The buildings were very close together, and seemed to almost lean against each other for support. As well as being seemingly endless, the street was crooked and turned sharply in some places.

“Here it is,” Hagrid said as we walked through the street, “Gringotts bank.”

Gringotts towered over everything else in Diagon Alley. It was also a pure, marble white, which further contributed to making it stand out. Hagrid led the way up the steps, toward a huge, polished set of doors. Just before I stepped inside, I turned around and looked down at Diagon Alley from this new vantage point. It was so different from the flat, dull world of Privet Drive that I knew and had grown up in. After years of being told otherwise, I suddenly felt like I belonged somewhere. Like I was where I was supposed to be.

“I’m back,” I said softly, standing up straight and moving forward, toward Gringotts and toward what would come.

~*~*~*~
I stood against a wall�”though, it didn’t make much sense to call it a wall… the entire shop was made of shelves that were cluttered with long, flat boxes�”my eyes half-closed from boredom. Mr. Ollivander bustled around the shop. He was a curious man; he seemed to inhabit his entire body, throwing himself this way and that with rapid, sharp movements.

Harry looked uncomfortable, waving wand after wand with nothing to show for it. “Wand number sixty-four,” I said. “Not that anyone’s counting.”

I understood the wand was an important part of being a wizard… but, come on! I was waiting for my turn, and at this rate it didn’t look like the moment was ever coming.

“No, no, no…” Ollivander said. “Here�”try this… made of pine, that’s rather unusual. Unicorn hair core. Nine and a half inches…”

Predictably, the wand did nothing. I sighed as quietly as I could. Hagrid had grown distracted, and was staring out the window with glazed eyes. I tried poking my fingers through the bars of Harry’s owl’s cage to pet her feathers, but the bird snapped at me and turned away. Hagrid had explained that the owl might not take to me easily because a) my voice is apparently very high-pitched, b) owls are loyal to their masters more than anyone else, and this owl would recognize Harry as her master, and c) snowy owls have some kind of issue with the color red.

“What about that one?” I said, indicating a strange wand sitting on a velvet cushion in the window. It wasn’t made entirely the same as other wands; cords of glass were ingrained with the wood from the grip to the apex. Ollivander followed my eyes, but glanced away a mere second later with disdain.

“That wand will not favor Mr. Potter,” he said dismissively, handing Harry another wand (number sixty-six).

Shocked by his swift disregard, I bit my lip and studied the glass wand and a bit further. It was sleek, if short. The wood was sand-colored and smooth. Under the examination of my gaze, the wand abruptly quivered and rolled over.

“Mr. Ollivander!” I shrieked in shock, losing my footing and collapsing back onto a wall of shelves. Boxes immediately toppled down over me like rain; their corners struck my face and arms painfully. A raucous clatter shivered down the walls of the small shop as wands broke free of their boxes and rattled around me. In the commotion, I stepped on a loose wand, went flailing forward, and somehow wound up flat on the ground, surrounded by supposedly magical twigs.

Someone shouted my name, but I couldn’t tell who over the roar of sound in my ears. One large hand seized the back of my t-shirt and hauled my to me feet. Hagrid. I wobbled unsteadily, but stood my ground. Mr. Ollivander was already doing damage control, gathering up boxes and the wands that went inside them. Feeling guilty, I tried to help, but he only waved me away, muttering incoherently.

“Quite all right… really, quite all right… happens all the time…”

“That wand,” I said. “It just…”

I glanced at Harry, and he was giving me The Kata Look.

I’ll outline this look for all you fine spectators. Start with your standard worried expression. Add a pinch of shame, a glob of brotherly concern. Mix in something close to exasperation. Knit the eyebrows together, open the mouth ever so slightly. Depending on the situation, there may also be a bit of I can’t take you anywhere. Stir together, add calamity and Kata. Bake at three-fifty, and there you have your Kata Look.

“I’m all right,” I said. “Just in case anybody’s interested.”

“You’ve got a wand in your hair,” Harry said, unsure of whether to smile. I reached up and searched through my curls, further humiliated. Locating the intruder, I plucked it out and weighed it in my palms. The wand was carved from darkish wood and had a scent I couldn’t place, but felt like I knew. It was about twice the size of my forearm, and had a single knot on the side.

Impulsively, I held it out to Harry, flattening my hair with my other hand. “Try it. It has good wand vibes.”

His arms cluttered with boxes, Ollivander chuckled. “Do I have a Seer in my shop?”

I glanced at Harry. “She’s good with these things,” he said. “She called the World Cup last year.”

I nodded proudly. “Argentina.”

Ollivander blinked his pale eyes and took the wand from my fingers before Harry could. His nimble hands folded over it knowingly, and his face lit up devilishly. “I wonder,” he breathed. He glanced at Harry, then at me, and handed Harry the wand. “Holly and phoenix feather, eleven inches. Supple.”

I waited anxiously as Harry slashed wand number sixty-seven through the air. The uncomfortable look on his face evaporated, and a spray of red and gold light filled the room. I smiled widely, watching the display. Hagrid applauded, and even Mr. Ollivander seemed excited. He beamed. “ Oh, finally! Bravo! Very good, very good. Well, well…”

Abandoning the reconstruction of his shelving system, Ollivander slid Harry’s wand into a box and packaged it with brown paper. “Curious. How very curious… indeed…”

Now anticipating my turn to find a wand, I didn’t particularly care what was so curious about wand number sixty-seven. My brother, however, apparently did. “Sorry,” he asked. “What’s curious?”

Dragging his gaze away from the wand box, Ollivander raised his eyes and stared directly at Harry’s lightning scar. It was as if Hagrid and I weren’t in the room anymore. Suddenly, I was very conscious of my own forehead�” I am unmarked.

“I’ve done this for more years than I care to say, Mr. Potter. And I remember all of it. Every wand I’ve ever sold, every customer I’ve ever dealt with. Some more than others. And, it just so happens, that this wand had a brother. The cores of these wands are identical. It’s curious, you see, that this wand should choose you so completely when its brother�”the wand with the twin feather at its core�”was the wand that gave you that scar.

A brief chill slid across my skin. Harry swallowed audibly.

Nervously, I watched my brother extract some of the large gold coins from his pocket to pay for the holly and phoenix feather wand.

Something clicked into place in my mind. “Wait,” I said. “What about me? What about my wand?”

Eyes�”pearly gray, beetle black, and emerald green�”landed on me. They asked and answered questions. Confused, I took a step back. A rickety floorboard, slathered with age and dust, creaked. Slowly, I shook my head.

There had been one set of books, one cauldron, one telescope. I was so used to sharing everything I owned that I hadn’t realized what this really meant.

I understood abruptly. It was disorienting.

“Kata,” Harry started to say.

“No.”

“Hold on a second�””

“No!” I shouted, and I bolted from the shop. The bell above the door screamed as I wrenched it open. Too quickly, I was thrust into the commotion of Diagon Alley. Busy shoppers, moving every which way, surrounded me. None of them paid attention to the scrawny redhead kid moving underfoot. Battling my way through the crowd, I stuttered over the patchy cobblestone roads. The neon colors of everything slapped a pulsing headache between my eyes. My eyes watered from the sensory overload. I ran and ran and ran.

My lungs didn’t ask for air. Adrenaline kept the pain of my pounding heart and the stitch in my side to a minimum. I’d always been terrible with remembering how to get from one place to another, and didn’t know which way to go to reach the Leaky Cauldron.

Instead, I settled for a more general direction: that way.

No longer interested with taking in everything around me, I ran until the shops and shoppers became a blur. I didn’t even let myself be amazed at the size of the Alley. All I wanted to do was run until I was hopelessly lost.

Gasping, I rounded one last corner and reached a deserted dead end. A tall, impenetrable wall of orange brick stood before me. Hunched beneath it and the blazing sun, I felt two feet tall.

And completely out of place.

It was the first time I understood I had the capacity to hate my brother. As a general practice I hated many people�”Verno, Aunt P, Winnie Alderton. But Harry, though we fought like any other siblings, was someone I had always considered to be on my side.

My stomach felt rather hollow, and there was nothing to do but kick the brick wall.

“Ow!” I cried out as pain shot up my leg. Indignant, I gave the wall another solid kick for revenge. The sun scratched my skin as I did this again and again. This sunken section of the street was entirely isolated but for the sun and my exclamations of pain and frustration.

Ow. Ow, ow, ow.

“I’m not supposed to talk to lunatics,” a voice said behind me. “But I’d really like to know why you’re doing that.”

I whirled around, heatedly angry. A boy with chin-length black hair, aristocratic features, and a confident grin slouched a few feet away from me. He wore all black, which made him look contrastingly pale. For someone who thought I was crazy, he looked completely at ease. In a way, I was strangely drawn to him. Something about the way his chin cocked gave me the impression he thought of the world as one big game and experiment. It reminded me of… me.

Chest heaving, I spat out an answer. “None of your business.”

“You’re right,” the boy said. “It’s not. I’m Zane, by the way. Zane Liestman.”

“Kata.”

Zane raised an eyebrow. “D’you have a last name, Crazy Kata?”

I bit my lip and debated for a moment. “No.”

Zane nodded. “Right.” He began to walk away.

As I caught my breath from my fit of wall-kicking, a few more words stumbled out over my lips. “I’m not crazy!”

“I know,” Zane said as he slouched away. A swatch of sweat clung to my forehead.

“How?” I asked. “How do you know?”

His shrug was easy and incomplete. “Because,” Zane Liestman said, “I am.” And then he was gone.

Huffing, I placed my back against the wall, slid down to sit on the summer-baked ground, and threw my head into my hands.

It was the first time I hated Harry. It wouldn’t be the last.

~*~*~*~
Together, Harry and Hagrid explained most of it. Patches of words stuck in my mind like flies in marmalade.

“Hagrid told me this morning. At first,” Harry said, “I said I wasn’t going without you. I said I wasn’t leaving you. But then he explained more of it, and… if you think about it… it’s better this way.”

No. No, it’s not. I don’t have to think about it to know that.

Hagrid gave it a shot: “Dumbledore’s thought this through. He’s a great man, Dumbledore, an’ he knows what he’s doin’. No witch or wizard younger ‘an eleven has ever come to Hogwarts. It’s how it is. But yer gonna be fine, Kata”

“I’ll write,” Harry promised. “I’ll come back every chance I get.” A pause cluttered his voice. “We used to hope for something like this. Remember how many times I told you it would never happen?”

Vividly.

I couldn’t read Harry’s expression. “It did.”

I didn’t say a word.

As the truth was outlined for me, I stared at my brother’s eyes. Shielded behind his glasses, they held a possibility of excitement. I realized how many doors had always remained closed for us, and how much of his life had been spent making sure I was okay, alive, and out of trouble. How could I begrudge him the chance to see what awaited him beyond Privet Drive?

Not a single word.

~*~*~*~
“I can’t find it.”

The final month Harry spent on Privet Drive wasn’t the happiest of my life. The final night, however, was one of my worst. Tension had been erected, and I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to shatter the silence that stood around our room.

Some poor, ignorant soul had given Dudley a book of poetry at one time or another. Neither a big reader nor a particular fan of depressed loners stringing angst-filled rhymes together(My interpretation of poetry: Oh, pain. Oh, suffering. My soul is dead. Nobody loves me. And then it rained. The end), it was out of pure desperation that I became the first person to crack open Best-Loved Poems of Childhood.

“Kata,” Harry said. Pretending to be immersed in my book, I ignored him. “Have you seen my copy of A History of Magic?”

I got the feeling I would’ve gotten along with this John Clare fellow.

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live with shadows tost.

“Self-consumer of my woes…” I said quietly, licking my finger and turning the page thoughtfully. “That’s nice…”

“I left it around here somewhere,” Harry said, pawing around under the bed. Clouts of dust bubbled near the floorboards. “Are you sure you haven’t seen it?”

I paged through a brief section of Brontë (both Emily and Charlotte) and said nothing.

Finding no other pieces that could hold my interest, I flipped back to the Clare. “Shades in love and death’s oblivion lost…”

There was a boil of silence and anticipation.

“Oi!” Harry yelled. “Katarine! Care to put down the book and help me out?”

Simmering, I slammed the book closed. Its pages rioted. “I’m sorry, Harry. Maybe the book is crammed up your�””

“Watch it!”

I laughed ironically. “Oh? You’re playing the first name card and telling me to watch my language? Who do you think you are?”

“Right now, I’m your older brother who’s telling you to get over yourself and tell me what you did with my book!”

“What I did?” I said indignantly, standing up and taking three furious strides towards him. “What makes you think I’d want anything to do with that stupid book?”

“Come off it!” Frustrated, Harry flattened his hair�”a habit we shared�”and redirected. “Look. I hate this thing just as much as you. If it made sense, I’d make them take you. But�””

“Nothing about this makes sense!” I objected, a trademark redhead blush seeping into my cheeks. “It doesn’t make sense that you’re a wizard who comes from a wizard family and is going to go to a wizard school and wave a wizard wand! It doesn’t make sense that you’re famous and no one even knows I exist! There’s a whole other world hidden behind London, and it doesn’t make sense. But do you know what really doesn’t make sense? Why you would leave me in this last-chance town just because some people in robes tell you that’s how it’s supposed to be done. I mean, does it really suck that bad, being my older brother?”

Later, Harry would tell me what he was thinking.

The innermost thoughts of Harry Potter on August 31st, 1991: There is no right thing to do.

But I didn’t know. All I could see was a roadmap of what we’d always been: two. Joined. Brother and sister. I’d like to say we always got along, that we became best friends and talked about everything and were forever bonded. But, no. In nutshell, Harry and I were best friends because we annoyed the crap out of each other but there was no one else so we forced ourselves to be a part of the other one’s life.

I was what most little sisters are: a pain. I irritated him, got in the way, judged and criticized. Gave him the silent treatment for days at a time, indulged in rude remarks and huffy bouts of anger when I felt they were necessary. Stole his stuff. Accidentally broke the stolen stuff. Hogged the shelf space and sang loudly even when he begged me to stop.

Harry never resented me, but he certainly had more than a few good reasons to.

And as we stood in the smallest bedroom, facing each other and arguing about books, I could see those reasons. They stood in the corner, loud and conspicuously there. They wrapped heavy hands around my wrists, making their presence known.

My question. It was still there. Damp and challenging.

Does it suck that much, being my older brother?

“No,” Harry answered, because it was what he was supposed to say. “This has nothing to do with me.”

It was true, quite possibly. And I should have treasured it. For a very long time, everything in my life would have less to do with me and more to do with a legend named Harry Potter.

~*~*~*~
It took us a little while to leave the house the next morning, due mostly to the fact that Verno caught me trying to slash his tires. That sort of thing never ends well. After a) Aunt P convinced him not to slit my throat with the kitchen knife I’d been using and b) I discovered that being a witch didn’t give me the inherent power to slash tires by staring unblinkingly at them for several minutes, we were on our way.

Silence was pungent in the car. Verno seemed to be in another nastily satisfied mood; he was convinced Harry’s ticket was phony. I’d never heard of platform nine and three-quarters either, but personally I found it difficult to hold anything connected to magic in contempt. I’d seen a lot of freaky, seemingly impossible stuff in a very short time.

Verno’s car du jour pulled up to King’s Cross about a half-hour before Harry was scheduled to be on a train. As we made our way to the platform, I dragged my feet and stared at the ground as Verno�”sinister and chipper�”wheeled Harry’s trunk through the clamoring station.

Morning�”what was left of if�”fell into the station by way of people. I had never felt so surrounded, so connected. Bodies of every shape and origin made their ways through each other, passing over like light. Shoes attacked the concrete floors, and voices coming from every direction meshed into one indecipherable language. A pang entered my stomach as I thought that these people didn’t know me and I didn’t know them. Straps of sunlight in the windows. Smiles of greeting and tears of goodbye, all around me. This was a place of coming and of going.

Suddenly, nothing sounded separate from the rest. Verno’s lips were parting and closing, saying something (probably a horrible something), but I couldn’t pick out the gruff pitch of his voice from the squeals of train brakes or the dribble of footsteps. Harry’s eyes were widening, dry panic spreading as Verno strode back to the car. Laughing, the Dursleys drove away. There was a single snarl of unyielding sound and the clock was punishing and my brother was looking at me and there should have been words between us but I couldn’t find the right ones so I just said, “Where’s the platform?”

People were beginning to stare. Well, duh, I thought. That’s what happens when two kids, a snowy owl, and a trunk stand staring at a blank patch of wall as if they expect it to do tricks.

Harry said something about asking a guard, and what could I do? I followed.

“Excuse me!” Harry called to a passing man in a uniform and an unfortunate mustache. “Can you tell me where I can find the train leaving for Hogwarts?”

“It’s a school,” I said, because I was ten and I thought that would help.

“Hogwarts,” the guard echoed, his eyebrows contorting suspiciously. “Never heard of it. What part of the country?”

Harry shook his head. “I don’t know.”

The guard didn’t like that. “A really big school,” I tried again.

“What about the train that leaves at eleven?” Harry said.

A very ticked-off guard said, “No train in this station leaves at eleven.” He strode away, shaking his head and muttering.

“Well,” I said. “Well.”

The long hand on the clock shuffled closer to the vertical position.

“There’s got to be a trick or something,” Harry said. “Like getting into Diagon Alley.”

Well.

I was still having a hard time picking out individual sounds from the passing crowds, but Harry and I turned around simultaneously as we both heard a swatch of conversation from behind us.

“�”always packed with Muggles�””

I punched Harry’s arm and bounced on the soles of my feet, squealing, “They said Muggles, that’s a wizard word, Muggles, they’re wizards, and they have an owl, talk to them, ask about the platform!”

Though we were desperate, Harry hesitated slightly. “It’s fine,” I said. “I always trust redheads. It’s like a secret code between us.”

He wheeled his cart after the speaker�”a small red-haired woman�”and her family. One could immediately tell they (the small woman, four boys, and a girl around my age) were family by their matching shocks of trustworthy red hair. I quite envied any kind of family resemblance. With Harry and I, you had to stare at us for several minutes before finally saying, “Well, I guess you look a little alike… no, never mind. Just a trick of the light.”

We watched as the mother directed her children toward the space between platforms nine and ten. “Percy,” she said. “You first.”

A boy with an owl strapped to his trunk and glasses pressed far up onto his nose nodded, marching toward the platform gap and pushing his cart. Forever vexed by my height, I stood on my toes to watch.

And I saw.

“Holy hell,” I said under my breath. The bespectacled boy had vanished completely in a shadow of tourists.

“Fred,” the woman said, nonplussed. She indicated one of the three remaining boys. “Go next.”

“I’m not Fred,” the boy said, “I’m George. Honestly, woman, can’t you tell us apart?”

I smiled as the redhead mother apologized. “Only joking,” Fred/George said, “I’m Fred.”

He ran towards the barrier, completely nonchalant. His twin was right behind him. They were almost there… and then they just weren’t.

I stepped on Harry’s foot. “Excuse me,” he said to the woman.

“Hello, dear,” she said kindly. “First time to Hogwarts? Ron’s new as well.”

She indicated the last of her sons: a tall, ginger creature with something smudged on his nose.

“Yeah,” Harry said. “The thing is… I can’t figure out…”

“How to get on the platform?” she asked. Harry nodded gratefully.

“No one here’s heard of it,” I said, remembering the guard.

The woman smiled at me, and then addressed Harry. “It’s very simple. All you have to do is walk straight at the barrier. Don’t stop. And don’t be afraid, that’s very important. Get a good running start. Just go now, before Ron.”

Harry swallowed, preparing to run at the barrier. “Wait,” I said impulsively.

I scurried around to the front of the cart and climbed aboard, sitting on the trunk and gripping the straps for support. Hedwig hooted in surprise. “Gun it, Four-Eyes,” I said.

Harry looked at me, opened his mouth, closed it, and then nodded.

Oddly enough, it was like a kind of truce. I knew Harry could barely push the cart with me sitting on it, but he didn’t say anything about this. Maybe he realized that the return of my Kata-ness (I’d been sulking for days, but who else would demand to ride through a magic barrier on a luggage trolley?) meant I forgave him for what was happening. That, instead of just me, it was now happening to both of us.

We were going to crash. As soon as Harry started running, and the wheels started rocking and complaining under my feet, I knew that. The redheaded mother started to say something about my chosen method of transportation being unsafe, but it was too late. The speed of the air rushing past me was somewhat exhilarating, and I took several clenched breaths. Eyes wide open.

I saw the true platform nine and three-quarters before Harry did. An enormous steam engine in a shiny shade of red was parked next to a bustling platform. It was like a smaller version of the actual station. People and luggage and noise. A black iron archway crowned the scene.

I repeated an earlier sentiment: “Holy hell.”

The cart slowed and then stopped. Harry cleared his throat, which I took as my cue to get down. We walked along the side of the train until Harry found an empty compartment. Loading the trunk into said compartment turned out to be the hard part.

“Lift with you knees,” I grunted as he pushed and I dragged from above. The thing had to weigh more than I did. “I don’t think you’re really trying.” And then I promptly dropped the trunk on Harry’s foot.

One of the red-haired twins ambled towards us. “Need a hand?”

He called his brother over, and the three of them easily tucked the trunk inside. “Would’ve gotten it eventually,” I muttered.

Stepping away from the compartment stairs, I took in the surrounding area. Owls called to each other in that perpetually annoyed manner owls have. A few straggling students hugged their parents or talked animatedly to friends. Two girl in their mid-teens played a complex-looking card game on an overturned trunk. In the corner, a sulking boy with frizzy clumps of black hair�”as if he’d been recently electrocuted�”stood with his parents, hands in pockets. He saw me looking, and I glanced away to a group of giggling girls, embracing and touching each other’s hair.

If I closed my eyes, I could have been somewhere else. Noise was just ambiguous noise. These people, if you ignored the robes and wands, didn’t have to be wizards; they were the people I passed everyday as I walked through Little Whinging. They were Jeremy and Marc and Harry and Jilly and maybe even me. Linked.

One minute to eleven, and the clock chimed a single toll in warning. Students hastily ran everywhere, their families convening at the very edge of the platform to wave goodbye.

The following conversation was short and complete and final. Harry stepped down from the train and stood in front of me, awkwardly. I smoothed my hair, tucking it behind an ear. Deep breaths were taken. Efforts were made to remain calm.

The truth was, we had no idea how to do this. I knew he’d thought about it, and I had, but obviously neither of us had planned anything.

“Kata?”

“Yeah?”

“…”

“...”

“I’m sorry. About this. It… might not make sense to you, but it does to me.”

I swatted that away and settled for a pathetic joke. “Knew you’d find a way to get rid of me sooner or later.”

His smile was forced. “Took me long enough.”

“Yeah, well. Having Kata is like having mold.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I think we covered that.”

“Stay out of trouble. Please. I’ll see you soon.”

“Yeah,” I said. It didn’t matter if Harry was telling the truth, I just needed to believe he was. “Soon.”

Those were the words we said. The ones we needed to say, to keep us from floating away. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of better ones. Neither of us were sentimental people, and you can only promise to write so many times. It was like ripping off band-aid: just do it, and do it quick. Just leave before you lose your nerve.

It turned out there was one more thing to say. I don’t remember which one of us said it first. “’Bye.”

If you’ve never stood next to a train just as it prepares for departure, you’re one up on me in the luck department. Trains are loud�”deafening�”and relentless. They smother everything with smoke, making it impossible to see anything, even your brother as he gets on board and slides the compartment door closed. The whistle sounded twice, staccato and earsplitting, the slow grind of wheels started up, and suddenly there was movement.

I wish I would have run after the train, like the other younger siblings left behind. Nothing would have been different, but at least I could have felt like I did something besides watch. I don’t even remember if Harry waved, or if I cried, or if I did anything besides choke on the air I was supposed to be breathing as my limbs turned to stone and a train erupted into the distance.

“You’re Harry Potter’s sister?” a meek voice asked from behind me just as the din of the train died away. It was the first time I got that label. Turning around, I saw the lone redhead child who had not gone to Hogwarts. “My brothers told me,” she said. “Your brother told them.”

“Yeah, I am” I said. It was true, and my sarcasm was running on ‘E’; I couldn’t think of anything witty to say.

“Oh.” She nodded. “I wondered why you were alone.”

I thought about earlier, in the main station where I’d felt so connected to every person moving through the crowd. “I’m pretty much surrounded,” I said, mostly to myself.

She nodded again, a reflex. “I’m Ginny Weasley.”

“Kata,” I said, introducing myself sans surname.

Ginny Weasley blinked at the disappearing train. I could see something pressing on her mind, and after a few seconds she finally voiced it. “Do you have…?” she indicated her forehead.

I lifted my overgrown bangs. “I’m no one special.”

I stayed at the platform as it emptied out, as Ginny Weasley and her mother went home and the scent of train smoke dissipated. I liked how a place that had been so alive and so filled with noise could settle into an eerie calm. I liked the vacant tracks, no longer rumbling with the movement of the Hogwarts Express. The way the air around me was still and indifferent as I sat down and leaned back against the iron archway, refusing to think about how I was going to get home. No one made me get up. No one asked who I was or why I was there or why I didn’t leave. Finally, I got a bit of peace, and I relished it.

I just didn’t understand magic.

And that’s the end of it, I guess.

~*~*~*~

Here’s the thing about the Dursleys: I wasn’t entirely sure they knew my name.

All my life, Aunt P had scrupulously maintained that ‘Katarine’ wasn’t a real name. Whenever anyone used it instead of my preferred nickname, she muttered bitterly about how whoever named me was both a freak and a junkie. She called me Katherine if she called me anything at all; most of the time she just ignored me.

Verno, however, didn’t bother with correcting spellings. He liked, “devil spawn”, and “mutant twerp”. I imagined one of his favorite pastimes to be reading the thesaurus, trying to think of more varied ways to insult me. So far, I hadn’t heard him use the same one twice.

So, when the phone rang a week after Christmas and Verno shouted, “GIRL!” up the stairs, I knew it was for me. A bit disappointed he hadn’t included a fun adjective (something endearing, like “oddball” or “runt”), I dragged myself into the kitchen. He thrust the receiver at me with a grunt.

I cleared my throat. “This is your twenty-four-hour suicide hotline. My name is Kata, how may we stop you from offing yourself today?”

A brief round of feedback crackled on the other line. “Kata?”

My stomach suddenly felt full of air as I recognized the voice. “Mr. Mendota?” I asked incredulously.

“What are you doing operating a suicide hotline?” he responded shrewdly. I could practically hear him raising his eyebrows.

I swallowed, pushing a chunk of hair from my eyes. “How’d you get this number?”

“I’m your teacher, Kata. Of course I have your number.”

That particular aspect of the public education system slightly creeped me out, but I shoved that aside and concentrated on the matter at hand.

“Are you dying?” I asked, annoyed.

More feedback, louder this time. “Excuse me?”

“Are you on the side of the road, bleeding profusely, all alone?”

“No! And where did you learn the word ‘profusely’?”

“It was on one of those dippy vocabulary lists you hand out,” I said defensively. Just because I was failing school didn’t mean I was stupid. “Not that I read them. I skimmed. One time. Anyway, are you telling me the only reason for this call is that you want to say hello?”

“Believe me, Kata Potter, if I were dying on the side of the road, you would not be the person I’d call.” He paused, and I smiled a bit; I loved making adults talk in circles. “I’m calling because of your Twenty Things project.”

My stomach did the airy thing again. A swell of clamminess broke over my skin, and I bit my lip. “Did I fail?” I said stridently.

“No, no,” he said hurriedly. “No. Actually… This is the best, most authentic, most spectacular response I’ve ever been given to the question, ‘What are the twenty things that make that world go ‘round?’.”

I choked on surprise, my head a mess of crumpled thoughts. “You… you liked it?”

Mr. Mendota was odd, but he wasn’t that odd. My project had barely been done. It was a few stringy pieces of paper tossed together in a notebook. It wasn’t deep, or meaningful, or conclusive. Not an assignment, ceremony, or quest. In short, my project had been nothing that a Twenty Things project was supposed to be. Unless my teacher had recently sustained a life-altering blow to the head, or actually was dying on the side of the road, I didn’t see how he could have anything good to say about me or my notebook. Especially after my performance at the school two weeks previously.

Maybe he was just going to quote more T.S. Eliot (I’d looked it up in Dudley’s poetry book), say something completely cryptic and unhelpful, and then leave me even more confused and annoyed. That seemed like him.

“Of course I liked it!” he said. I could hear his trademark grin being smiled into the phone. Maybe I’ve fallen into Wonderland, I thought. Maybe this is Anti-Mr. Mendota, and he’s just messing with me. “You’re a very good writer, you know. Very moving. I’m proud of you, Kata.”

To understand how I felt after those words, all you have to know is that no one had ever said them to me.

I rode the rush of approval as Mr. Mendota kept piling on the praise. “I’ve seen students write letters before,” he said, “but the concept of ‘Dear Friend’�”especially coming from someone like you�”was so unexpected and so… real. I feel like you really understood the point of the assignment.

“Anyway, I’m calling to let you know that I’ve entered your Twenty Things in a competition for young writers, and I’m confident you’ll do well. I’m out of town for the holidays, but once we’re back in school I’ll give you the details�””

My hand flexed and I dropped the receiver, letting it drip to the ground. A sudden clamminess cooked on my forehead, and gravity wasn’t enough to keep me standing anymore. Breathing as if I’d just run the circumference of the world, I leaned onto the wall and tasted panic on my tongue. My vision went pulpy, and suddenly all I could see was the color green�”the waxen, solid leaf green that had been both the Twenty Things notebook and the Dear Friend notebook.

Identical. Indistinguishable, accept for a stupid Hello Kitty sticker that I couldn’t have been expected to see when having a mental breakdown.

My voice was fractured, full of cracks. It wobbled, collapsed as soon as I spit it out. “Mr. Mendota,” I said, even though he couldn’t hear me anymore, “I think I may have given you the wrong notebook.”

~*~*~*~
When 1991 arrived, Harry and I were at Mrs. Figg’s. The Dursleys had gone to a New Year’s Eve party hosted by one of Verno’s colleagues, and for whatever reason, I wasn’t invited. Figg wasn’t much of a party animal. She fell asleep by ten o’ clock, one of her interchangeable cats curled up and purring on her lap. I conked out soon after, my head pillowed against my arm. Harry let me sleep for a while, but woke me up when the clock in Town Square chimed the midnight hour and people could be heard whooping and toasting each other throughout the streets.

“Kat,” he said, nudging my arm. “It’s midnight. It’s New Year’s.”

I shifted into awareness roughly. A bluish glow from the muted television clouded my
brother’s face. Blearily, I yawned and shook my hair out of my eyes. “What?”

“Happy New Year. It’s 1991.”

I threw a tasseled, moldy-smelling cushion at him. “Go away. I’m sleeping.”

Harry continued to nudge me. “You told me to wake you up when it was New Year’s,” he reminded me.

“It’s not New Year’s until I say it is.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“Shh. Sleeping.”

But that was the last year; the last of years. And things always change.

~*~*~*~

“I am going to murder Dudley!” I shrieked, clutching my arm. “I’m going to slit his stomach open with a butcher knife, yank out his intestines, and strangle him with them!”

I should mention that I shrieked all of this into a pillow, in my bedroom, after I’d gotten home from the Whinging General Hospital Emergency Centre on New Year’s Eve, 1991. Hidden under a black Velcro brace, I had a fracture on my left wrist.

“And then I’m going to burn the Smelting Stick! Profusely!” I continued, because the Smelting Stick was more of a problem than my git of a cousin, and because I really wanted another chance to use the word ‘profusely’. It made me feel smart.

Earlier that day, I had learned several things: a) Dudley’s fear of magic and experience with his tail had not discouraged him from harassing me, b) If you strike a young girl’s wrist just right with a Smelting Stick, said wrist will break and cause her quite a lot of pain, c) If you do nothing but ignore/insult/annoy your aunt for five months (or for your whole life), she will be very reluctant to drive you to the hospital and may even deny that anything is wrong with your injured wrist, and d) Riding on Jeremy Flinker’s bike handlebars to the hospital is not the best of ideas. Especially with a swollen and aching wrist.

Scandalized that Jeremy was my back-up plan, Aunt P caught up with us halfway down Magnolia Crescent (it was slow-going, as Jeremy couldn’t see over my hair and kept swearing as his tire struck potholes) and barked at me to get in the car. I couldn’t go to the hospital without an adult anyway, she said.

Jeremy came along (Aunt P was too irritated to argue), which I was grateful for, because Aunt P seemed to be physically swelling with anger.

“Isn’t this, like, the eighth time you’ve broken that arm?” Jeremy said, grinning in a way that a person shouldn’t when their best friend is mortally wounded.

I groaned internally. “Third,” I said. “And I think it’s my wrist.”

“It’s not broken,” Aunt P said in an undertone, gripping the steering wheel with furious intensity. She didn’t like driving, and constantly checked her mirrors and gas gauge. Her shoulders stayed taut for the entire ride, and her eye twitched every time she hit her turn signal.

“Is too,” I muttered, internally counting backwards from one hundred to distract myself. As Jeremy had pointed out, I’d been through this before and knew what it felt like.

“D’you remember that time my dad almost ran over you with his car and you broke the other arm?” Jeremy began, obviously ready to launch into that thrilling tale.

“Jere,” I said through my teeth, “That’s a great story and all, but if you don’t shut up I’m going to punch you with my other arm.”

“Be quiet,” Aunt P snapped, turning a corner. “I’m trying to drive.”

~*~*~*~

The incident Jeremy mentioned in the car occurred when I was four years old, just after Harry had started school. It was a defining moment for me, considering that, as Jeremy was a year older then me and a boy (I was four; boys had cooties), we probably never would have become friends had it not happened.

It all began when I decided to run away from home. I must have picked up the idea on a television show or something. At four, I was mature for my age (I have no idea where all that maturity disappeared to by the time I was ten), and I was also very lonely. With my older brother shut up in a classroom for eight hours of the days, and Aunt P yelling at me to stop sulking around the house, I didn’t have anyone to talk to but the obligatory imaginary friend that all four-year-olds are allotted. Her name was Katta; she had blonde hair and could do tai kwon do. But she wasn’t much company. So, one day, I decided to run away and join the circus. That was the extent of both the planning and the plan. I suppose I was simply going to walk along the side of the road until I found a circus.

I had the courtesy to alert Aunt P first. After packing a bag (a small Winnie the Pooh satchel filled with juice pouches and extra socks), I marched into the kitchen, where she was disinfecting something, and announced, “I’m going to be in the circus now.”

She barely glanced up. “Don’t walk on the floor in those shoes,” she snapped. “I just mopped.”

I made it all the way to Main Street without much incident. Little Whinging was an absurdly safe town; the only dangers were busybodies. The streets all followed a basic square grid, and I knew them well enough. I was not, however, well acquainted with basic rules of the road.

People say it all the time: Didn’t your parents ever tell you to look both ways before crossing the street?

Well. No, actually, they never did. So, my younger self naturally assumed it was perfectly all right to march from one side of Main Street to the other. She thought it was a good idea to stop in the middle and squat down to investigate a large, sweaty slug. And she thought it was a good idea to sing to herself a little song entitled “I’m going to the circus/ yeah, the circus, yeah/ that’s a cool slug right there/ yeahyeahyeah”.

I heard Mr. Flinker’s cobalt blue truck approaching, but I didn’t really process it. My four-year-old mind was more fascinated with slugs and clowns than the sound of worn tires swallowing sun-warmed pavement.

Being very small, I can understand that Mr. Flinker didn’t see me right away. But, as he told me later, my bright hair was just visible from his position in the driver’s seat, and he stomped on the brakes before the nose of the truck could do anything more than clip my side at an odd angle. The squeal of the truck woke me from my slug-induced reverie. I toppled backward, and my arm ended up sandwiched between the road and the rest of my body. And distinct crack flew into my ears. There was a tremendous popping noise and a sudden spurt of liquid as a dozen juice pouches burst and vomited their contents everywhere. My Winnie the Pooh backpack had been squished, too.

I was aware that my arm hurt, but it was weird�”the human body does this fantastic thing called “releasing hormones to block pain.” Some cocktail of endorphins and adrenaline and pure four-year-old spunk kept me from crying or doing anything other than smelling like tropical punch and confusedly muttering, “You killed the slug,” when Mr. Flinker raced out of his truck and started asking me if I was okay (at top volume). Because, indeed, the slug had gone the same way as my juice pouches; its final resting place was the underside of a tire.

Me: “The slug. You killed it. It’s a cool slug.”

Jeremy’s dad: “OH HELL, OH HELL, I MEAN HECK, JEREMY, CALL YOUR MOTHER, CALL THE HOSPITAL, ARE YOU OKAY, WHAT’S YOUR NAME, WHAT’S ALL THAT STUFF, IS THAT STRAWBERRY, ARE YOU OKAY, PLEASE BE OKAY.”

I briefly mulled over this long statement. “My arm hurts,” I said, because it did, and because I was very puzzled with the proceedings.

Not knowing what else to do, Mr. Flinker took me to the hospital, which was half an hour outside of Little Whinging. He put me in the back seat, buckled me in tightly, and kept asking for my name. I told him. Jeremy, who rode shotgun, shrieked repeatedly that I might have a “cussion”. Mr. Flinker asked Jeremy how he knew what a concussion was, and Jeremy said he’d seen it on the telly, and somewhere in all of that my arm began to burn like someone had set fire to it. I started to cry, loudly, and Mr. Flinker cursed again.

“That’s a bad word,” Jeremy pointed out. He then looked at me. “Kata’s a weird name.”

Couldn’t fault him there. I just kept crying; I didn’t want to go the to circus anymore. I just wanted to go to someplace where my arm didn’t hurt.

“I’m Jeremy Flinker,” Jeremy continued in that self-important manner little kids have. “I’m skiving off,” he added, his chest swelling with pride. I didn’t know what “skiving off” meant, and I wasn’t interested to learn.

“Jeremy!” Mr. Flinker said. “What did I say?”

Jeremy grinned. “You said I couldn’t tell Mum. You didn’t say I couldn’t tell her. ”

Mr. Flinker was probably the coolest dad ever. Whenever there was nothing particularly interesting going on at school, or whenever one of them had gotten good marks for the term, he’d let Jeremy or Mattie stay home and help him at Flinker’s. I was hugely envious of this.

I was not in good shape when we finally pulled into Whinging General Hospital, due mostly to an agonizing arm and a really annoying Jeremy. He kept up a constant stream of chatter, about everything from Batman to tattoos (“When I get old enough, I’m gonna get a python on my leg!”). Besides this, there was also the waiting room. Unless you’re having a severe allergic reaction, or you’ve been shot, or something, Whinging General Hospital makes you sit around for a while and fill out a bunch of papers about contact information and whatnot. They do this even if you’re four and adorable and are with two complete strangers and have a broken arm (“Dad! Dad! Look, Dad, her arms's turning purple! Dad!” ). Throughout the ride to the hospital, Mr. Flinker had asked me repeatedly what my phone number was, how to get in touch with my parents, etc. I didn’t know my phone number. For Christ’s sake, I didn’t even know to look both ways before crossing the freaking street. I’m sure Mr. Flinker was, at the least, unnerved with what was happening. He just kept telling me that it was going to be okay.

His fears were ebbed, though, when Dr. Hampton came into the Room of Eternal Holdup and called my name. Shocked, he looked at the clipboard, looked at me, and smiled. “Kata!” he said. “I thought we told you not to come back and see us.”

Relieved at the sight of a semi-familiar face, I straightened up in the uncomfortable waiting room chair and stopped crying long enough to sum up the morning’s events for him. “I ran away to the circus and my arm hurts and he killed the slug.”

Mr. Flinker went white. “Do you know her?” he demanded of Dr. Hampton. “I swear it was an accident. She was sitting in the middle of the road, and I didn’t really hit her, but she fell back and all her weight kind of went onto her arm like this.” Jeremy’s dad demonstrated by bending his arm into a forty-five degree angle and leaning forward as if he were falling. “I didn’t know what to do, so I just brought her here… I probably should have called someone… and I just didn’t know.” This was typical Mr. Flinker; he was very adept at stirring sauces and being a dad and all that great stuff, but he was an introvert around people he didn’t know and entirely awkward under pressure.

“I’m supposed to be in school,” Jeremy said giddily. No one responded.

“Kata came in three weeks ago with an allergic reaction,” Dr. Hampton explained to Mr. Flinker. Squatting down to my level, he shook his head and clucked his tongue. “What’re we going to do with you, madam? You ought to learn to be more careful.”

“I don’t know if she hit her head,” Mr. Flinker said, and it began to bug me that he was talking about me as if I wasn’t there.

Dr. Hampton pulled out a small, metal flashlight-ish object and shone it into my left eye.

“Ahhh,” I said, because that’s what doctors tell you to do. Dr. Hampton chuckled and shone the light into my other eye.

“What’s your name?” he asked, even though my name had been said. It’s one of those standard check and see if the child has brain damage questions.

“Katarine Potter,” I replied, pulling out the full name in hopes of getting him to shine that light somewhere else.

“Good,” Dr. Hampton said. He glanced at his clipboard. “When’s your birthday?”

I told him.

“Where am I getting the python?” Jeremy chimed in, trying to help.

“On you leg.”

Dr. Hampton stood up, motioned to a nurse wearing pink scrubs, and smiled at me again. “Well, I think your head’s fine, Kata. Let’s see what we can do about that arm, eh?”

And then he touched the skin of my wrist lightly, with the first two fingers of his right hand, reminding me that I was in pain. Faced with no other alternative, I resumed crying.

~*~*~*~

I lay in bed, eyes ogling the ceiling, thinking of nothing in particular. I wasn’t tired, but I wanted to be asleep when the bells rang out the beginning of 1992. I wanted them to wake me up. I wanted to remember. Downstairs, I knew there was a party going on. The Dursleys had hosted it this year, and given my hermit-like behavior, they trusted me enough to stay upstairs and didn’t relegate me to Mrs. Figg’s.

Glasses clinked, ice jangling around in them. Appetizers and salmon puffs�”I guess I can’t know for sure, but don’t those things always include salmon puffs? �” circled the room. It was painfully normal. My injured wrist tingled a bit, as if the sound of an ordinary, non-magical world set off some new kind of pain. I knew that those people probably weren’t happy. They probably didn’t want to get dressed up and wear agonizing shoes and make forced chitchat as a new year began. Perhaps they thought they wanted it, but even a ten-year-old girl with bottom marks and a permanent clueless-ness could tell they really didn’t.

They weren’t happy, but at least they were blissfully unaware of other possibilities. Me… I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to be happy anymore. I wasn’t sure if I wanted magic, because I just wanted things to be the way they had been. Cupboards and all.

I didn’t even move when the partygoers’ voices suddenly synchronized, counting down from ten and ending in a uproar of cheering. Laughter and careless chatter burbled. Wine glasses collided and resounded. There are only so many ways to describe the party that was happening in a million different places, a million different towns, simpering and meaningless, coated with humanity.

The bells. They opened. They sang. I had listened to them methodically, every hour of every day, for my entire life. But for the first time, I heard them.

In school, we’d been studying beginner’s chemistry�” atoms and protons and electrons, that sort of thing. I didn’t understand most of it, even though the lessons were taught very basically, at a sixth grade level. But I understood that everything is made of atoms, atoms of the different elements. There are a lot of those, like Magnesium and Boron and salt. So, essentially, I was made of the same stuff as bells. The same stuff as magic wands and green notebooks and Smelting Sticks. If you broke us down scientifically, and tore us apart, I was the same as Mr. Mendota and Winnie Alderton and Harry. We couldn’t be separate, ever.

What made us different?

Maybe that was in the next lesson.

When the bells stopped tolling, and the quiet that followed was peppered by the sounds of the party and my throbbing thoughts, I closed my eyes. “Hey, Harry,” I said. “It’s New Year’s now. Just to let you know.”

Silence. Of course. I shut my eyes tighter and barely noticed when tears squeezed out of their corners. Even with everything that happened, and everything that would happen, it was the only time I remember crying that year. But I needed to do it. It was just one of those things.

~*~*~*~

Mr. Mendota was really something.

On the first day of second term, I arrived at school a half-hour early (stooping so low as to bum a ride from Aunt P and endure a ten-minute rant on the various ways I was a failure as a person) with the sole intention of talking to my teacher about the mix-up with my Twenty Things and Dear Friend notebooks. For days, I had thought of nothing else. Sitting in my room with the door locked and the curtains drawn, I tried to remember every letter I’d written to my not-a-diary, and whether they contained details of magic. Nothing sprung to mind. Still, a horrible suspicion weighed me down; I was certain I must’ve written something I shouldn’t have.

In the words of Jeremy Flinker (I explained the situation to him as best I could, omitting the “I may have just exposed an entire secret world with my school project” part) I was “damn screwed.”

Anyway. First day. Early. Talking.

Mr. Mendota, as it happened, was not early. He scrambled through the classroom door just as the final bell sounded, and waved me away as I tried to launch into a prepared speech. A million different stories were balanced on my tongue, waiting to be fired off. I had wild and wilder excuses, but I never got a chance to use any of them. Instead of listening to my so-called high-pitched voice, Mr. Mendota quieted the class and announced we were changing seat partners. This was supposed to teach us how to Handle People in Real Life Situations. Melanie and I glanced at each other. I could tell she was anxious to be rid of me.

There were no parting tears.

My new seatmate was Sherrie. Over the holidays, someone had braided her bronze-blonde hair into cornrows. I noticed that her shoes were on the wrong feet. I was still a bit frightened that Sherrie may had heard my revelation of the truth to Jilly, but it’s hard to be a afraid of a person who can’t tell their right from their left.

“Your shoes are on the wrong feet,” was the first thing I said to her. I figured she ought to know.

Sherrie glanced unworriedly at her shoes. “No, they’re not,” she said. “I’m doing an experiment. They’re not on the wrong feet if I say they’re on the right feet. What’s wrongly right for you could be rightly wrong for me. Wrong and right could be wrong or right, depending on the right person or wrong feet. Right?”

I blinked. Well. “That makes no sense.”

Sherrie smiled and clicked her heels together. Her dreamy eyes fixed on mine. “The experiment has nothing to do with shoes. I’m trying to see who can follow what I say. Congratulations, Kata Potter�”you’re a scientist.”

I gave Sherrie an apprising sort of look. She shook her cornrows out of her eyes and swung her feet, unperturbed by my calculating gaze. She basked under my eyes as if they were spotlights. I wondered what could possibly go on inside Sherrie Parker’s head. She was certainly a bit of an oddball… a misfit…

She was the only other person in the class who had as few friends as I did. Whether she realised it or not, Sherrie was stared at as much as I was. This united us, on the surface.

“I like your sweater,” she said airily. I was wearing my Mystery Sweater, the one that had inexplicably appeared in my room on Christmas morning. “It brings out the purple in your eyes.”

“My eyes are green,” I said lamely.

“Are they?” She seemed genuinely surprised, and quickly looked at me, studying my eyes for longer than the time necessary to determine their colour. “Oh.”

“Yeah,” I said. I could’ve sworn she’d looked me in the eyes several times since the initiation of this horribly awkward conversation. “They’ve been that way for a while now.”

“It’s supposed to snow again tomorrow,” she said.

Sherrie had some kind of issue with announcing when she was going to change the subject.

“Uh,” I said intelligently.

“I got a magic kit for Christmas,” she said.

I�”logically�”took this as a threat. “YOU CAN’T PROVE ANYTHING!” I shouted.

The classroom crashed into silence. Everyone looked at us. Sherrie began doodling on a piece of notebook paper, obliviously humming under her breath. I doubted she’d even heard me.

Going red under the collective gaze of my classmates, I put my head down on the desk and resigned myself to a long second term.

He ignored me, he entered my not-a-diary into a writing competition without my consent, and he paired me with Sherrie Parker in his brilliant two-by-two seating system. So, yeah. Mr. Mendota was really something.

~*~*~*~

I approached him after class instead.

“Ah, Kata,” he said as I trudged up to his desk, backpack strung across my shoulders and arms crossed so tightly I could barely breathe. I remembered, with a jolt, that Mr. Mendota still had no clue that anything was wrong with my notebooks. Maybe he thought I’d hung up on him for fun. He gave me a proud smile, and something deep inside of me cracked.

My teacher picked up a waxy pamphlet from a pile of papers on his desk. I bit my tongue until it was bathed in blood. The title read Surrey Regional Young Writers Competition. A lump of dread fell into my stomach.

I took a moment to marvel at my ability to completely screw everything up in a period of less than six months. Other people had been left behind�”Aunt P was a perfect example, though I didn’t really enjoy being grouped with her. And none of those people had gone and blown the secret of the wizarding world. I was truly a special case: I didn’t even have to try to screw up. I just did. I screwed up, continually, every day of my life. And then there was, like, an eight-hour period in which I didn’t screw anything up because I was sleeping. But as soon as I woke up, everything started again and I just kept screwing up until there was nothing left.

I wondered what Mr. Mendota had read, how much he knew. Did he believe any of it, or think I was making up stories? Did it matter? I had no idea. He didn’t accuse me of either being a witch or pretending to be a witch, so I supposed I was in the clear. He doesn’t believe in magic, I remembered. The most conclusive proof possible was standing in front of him, and he didn’t believe in magic. How much does it take to shove a little impossibility into a person’s realm of possibility?

Next to his desk, Mr. Mendota had a large, thin-paged Dictionary sitting on a fake-wood pedestal. It was close enough that I could see what page lay open: dipstick through discretion. I was barely two meters from the words�”all the words in the world! And I couldn’t find any to say.

I took the pamphlet. It was weightless in my hand.

The hallway was pressingly silent as I walked it, which was too bad. A ragged scream was balling up in the back of my throat, and it wasn’t going to stay there forever.

~*~*~*~

January was… interesting. Between schoolwork, transportation issues (my bike had been vandalized when I left it parked outside of the library; I suspected Dark magic), and many strange conversations with Sherrie, I barely had a spare moment. Maybe it was because I had finally done something right in his eyes, but Mr. Mendota suddenly expected me to actually do the assigned homework. I maintain that it was because I had nothing better to do, but I found myself studying up on protons and electrons, struggling through maths, and writing a book report on Alice’s Adventures in WonderlandJeremy fruitlessly tried to explain History to me. History annoyed me. There seemed to be a lot of wars; I didn’t understand why everybody couldn’t just get along.

Having moved past the “Twenty Things” unit of English, Mr. Mendota had decided to teach us some mythology. Let me just say: I can’t imagine a single career in the history of forever in which I’d need to know whether Demeter was the goddess of harvest or hats, or why Poseidon cursed Cassiopeia by turning her into a W-shaped constellation. Sure, this knowledge will help you out should you ever appear on a game show. You might be a hit at dinner parties. But I see no practical use for mythology.

Mr. M disagreed. So, for the next few weeks, I was stuck mixing up Chiron and Charon and trying to remember the correct pronunciation for Eurydice.

During one of these lectures, as Sherrie and I played hangman on a scrap of paper (she won, but how was I supposed to know that ‘zydeco’ was a real word?), Mr. Mendota told us a story about the origin of love and loss.

“Humans were initially created with four arms, four legs, and two faces. Essentially, these early people were like conjoined twins. The great god Zeus, however, feared the power of humans. He was worried they might usurp the gods. So, he split them in half. And he condemned everyone to a long, long life of searching for their counterpart. Some cultures believe that one half is a man and one half is a woman, and if the two ever meet they fall into a kind of predestined love. Others disagree, however, and say that we are forever searching for a deeper understanding of ourselves.” Here, he paused and grinned sardonically. “Of course, it’s only a myth.”

~*~*~*~

I don’t know why everyone assumes I have an aversion to my full name. In reality, I actually love the name Katarine�”it sounds regal and important; it sounds like a girl that can hold her head up, a girl who laughs all the time, a girl who has the whole freaking world figured out. I sometimes thought of Katarine as a different person than myself. A worldlier, sophisticated version of the girl I wanted to be.

When I was little, so little I barely remember it, people called me Katty. I can’t even begin to describe how much I hated that. It was too frilly, too cute to be me. Katty was not a little girl who used the garden hose and some potted plants to make a realistic swamp in the backyard so that she could “go explorer-ing”. Katty didn’t ambush the neighbor’s miniature yorkie with that same garden hose, claiming the dog was the not-so-mythical Sharp-Toothed Snuffler (more on that later).

There are a lot of ways to go with my name: Katty, Kat, Kay, Rine, Rinny, Kerry�”trust me, I’ve heard it all. I don’t know exactly how or when we selected Kata, or, for that matter, who did the selecting. I probably wasn’t Harry; he calls me Kat or Katarine, depending on his mood. It certainly wasn’t Aunt P or Verno, because, like I’ve said, I don’t think they even know my first name. By the time I met Jeremy or Jilly, I was full-fledged Kata. It would seem I just woke up one morning with a name clutched in my hands. Maybe that’s all there is to it: maybe I couldn’t decide who I wanted to be, so a worldlier, more sophisticated someone made the choice I didn’t even know I had.

~*~*~*~
This part of my story is called, “Not All Who Quest Are Lost”:

I’ve had my life saved a few times over the years. I won’t go into details about those other times, because this is a story, and everybody knows you don’t give away the ending to a story before it actually is the ending. This isn’t the ending. It is the part where Mr. Mendota grabbed my backpack straps.

This is a story, like I just said. And I think it’s a pretty good thing that I’m telling it. If Mr. Mendota told this story, you might not even have realised that it was me he was saving. Yes�”it was physically me. But considering the method of saving, I can’t help but think that holding me back was his second chance. It was what he’d never get the chance to do.

Jeannie Mayfield was a fourth grade girl with straight brown hair and a tendency to bite her nails from anxiety or boredom. For a reason I’m still not sure of, she smelled like glue. She hung on the fringes, just one of those girls; the ones whose names people can’t recall when they look at their primary school yearbooks years later. She was the equivalent of Sherrie, perhaps without the random fits of intelligence and the creepy creative intuition. Jeannie was exceedingly, annoyingly ordinary, except for one thing: her mother drove like a freaking maniac. Mundane things like merge lines and stoplights meant nothing to Mrs. Mayfield. Rules of the road became suggestions. Small, redhead girls became target practice.

In an uncharacteristic fashion, I was reading as I left the school�”several days after the start of term�” and walking through the remnants of a recent snowstorm toward the sidewalk that led away from Stonewall Primary. Rereading, actually. The Fellowship of the Ring. With the exception of the Dr. Suess masterpieces, The Lord of the Rings is basically the only book I ever read. This created some problems later in life (the great ringwraiths vs. dementors debate of ’93), but that’s not the point.

I was walking�”distracted�”but still on the crosswalk�”hat over ears, distorting noise�”eyes flicking through a description of Middle-earth�”a screech of rubber tires against pavement that shone with melting snow and reflected winter sun. In surprise, I dropped my book. It dropped into a bank of snow, and my mouth fell open and confusion paralyzed me and I didn’t move on my own and there was a flash of beige that I couldn’t place.

Someone shouted my name. My eyes widened as Mrs. Mayfield’s van came barreling towards me, the tires jutting and squealing, the horn sounding. I felt a hand size the straps of my backpack, my feet struggled for purchase, and then I was back on the sidewalk, away from the speeding van. Mayfield recovered quickly and drove away, glancing furiously in her mirrors to see if anyone had noticed.

The hand released me, and I stumbled a bit before recovering my footing. Looking up, still in a mist of confusion, I saw Mr. Mendota, wrapped in a beige trench coat and breathing heavily. He was livid.

“Don’t you know to look both ways before you cross the street?” he hissed. I bit my lip, staring at my hands, realising they were empty.

“Book…” I said dumbly. I think I may have been in shock. My heart felt like it was trying to disentangle itself from my chest. My face flushed, and�”even though the danger was passed, and even though the danger had been remote�”I was afraid.

Mr. Mendota sighed and retrieved my book from where it had landed, a few meters away in a small mountain of slushy snow. The pages were bloated and soggy. I mourned, briefly, for the Hobbits and for the story I would never re-finish.

“It’s ruined,” I said.

Mr. Mendota rolled his eyes and pressed The Fellowship of the Ring into my gloved hands. From cold and belated adrenaline, I shook.

“It’s just a book,” he said, violating the sacred Code of Teachers. Thou shalt not ever sayeth, “It’s just a book.” “You almost got hit by a car.” I suppose we were both in shock.

“Thanks for that,” I said, because it’s just basic etiquette. When someone saves you from a road-raging maniac of a driver, you say thank you.

I was pretty sure that I could have dove out of the way, even if Mr. Mendota hadn’t been right behind me. It would have been delayed, and the side of the van might have clipped me, but I would have lived. So, I don’t know what exactly I was thanking him for. For being there. For having the impulse to reach out and save me, when no one else would.

“You’re welcome,” he said, and that was that. It wasn’t like I was hurt, just a little stunned. Perhaps if he’d been in better shape, he would have suggested I see the school nurse, but it wasn’t necessary. I walked away, but I took the sidewalks. That was when I started to think about the Twenty Things in a different sort of way.

The Twenty Things were a quest, as I had previously defined them. But maybe it was a quest for questing, instead of a quest that had a reachable destination. Maybe the goal was to just keep holding on, and take it day by day, and to never physically reach a point where you could say, “Boom. These are my Twenty Things. This is my victory.” We were looking for the meaning of something bigger than ourselves, right? And it’s not like sixth graders should be expected to know themselves. So maybe Mr. Mendota gave us the assignment early, with the hope that we’d carry it with us wherever we ended up. Defining yourself�”saving yourself, knowing yourself, being yourself�”is eternal.

Then again. Maybe the Twenty Things were nothing more than the bizarre ideas of a thoroughly bizarre man.

~*~*~*~

Five days after my tenth birthday, there was a total solar eclipse on the other side of the world. Mexico, Central America, and parts of Hawaii were entirely blacked out by the moon for a whole seven minutes. The BBC sent an anchor to Mexico (the point at which the sun would be directly above) to cover the eclipse, and I watched the live report in the Dursleys’ living room, with Harry.

“In just a few short minutes, the moon will slide into place in front of the sun and totality will begin,” the anchor said enthusiastically. I didn’t recognise her; she was young and clearly ecstatic to be taking on such a big story. As she continued with her report, describing mechanics of the eclipse I was too young to comprehend or care about, I remember staring at her teeth, thinking how white they were and wondering how a person got teeth that so closely resembled pearls. “The experience of totality,” she said, “is said to be a life-changing and remarkable one. As the moon closes in, the normal daytime sky will be replaced with one resembling twilight. The moon’s shadow will spread over the scene at speeds of almost two thousand kilometers per hour. Our sun, the epicenter of our cosmos, will have its light extinguished by the black shadow of the moon, except for the solar corona�” which is a ghostly, delicate collar of sunlight shining though from beyond the obstacle of the moon.”

All of a sudden, a rush of voices and momentum came from the crowd behind Veronica Jasin (that was the anchor’s name). People smiled hugely, and shoved protective glasses onto their faces. There was a moment of unity among those people�”and everyone viewing the coverage from various locations around the world. That was our sun. It was the same sun that each of us saw when we woke up in the morning, and the same sun that dipped behind clouds every night.

Mr. Mendota told me never to look directly at the sun. Hurts your eyes, he’d told me.

I wonder if he watched the eclipse, like I did. I wonder if he experienced the eclipse like I did.

I am not one to sit quietly, or keep my thoughts to myself. Fidgeting is practically a way of life for me; I don’t hold still long enough to do anything. Silence is my kryptonite. But for seven minutes�”seven minutes in which I could have soft-boiled and egg or sang “Hey, Jude” or ridden by bike to Jeremy’s house and back�”I rested on the edge of my seat, hands folded tightly in my lap, watching the unfaltering coverage of unforgettable totality. I sensed that Veronica Jasin had planned to continue her speech through the eclipse, but had then found herself dumbstruck by the beauty of a synchronized sun and moon. It must have been a million times more powerful in person.

Even if I was viewing it somewhat indirectly, I didn’t want it to end.

It did, though. Of course it did. The moon’s shadow swept over the landscape again, and the sun was just as bright as it’d ever been. People took off their protective glasses. Their voices started up, gushing about what had just happened. Veronica Jasin turned toward the camera, her expression shaky. Words weren’t coming as naturally to her as they had before. If she had rehearsed anything, it had been a wasted effort.

“The word ‘eclipse’,” she finally said, “comes from the Greek ‘ekleipsis’, meaning ‘abandonment’.”

Harry and I. Sitting there. Watching an eclipse that seemed bigger than anything in the world, even the magic we still didn’t know about.

It was over too soon. But we’re not talking about the eclipse anymore, are we?

~*~*~*~

Before I knew about magic, I believed that my parents died in a car crash. I was young and gullible and this explanation seemed to satisfy everything�”Harry’s scar; my status as a doorstep baby. I even rationalized the flash of green light Harry remembered, telling myself it was a changing traffic light. People die in car crashes all the time. It wasn’t hard to accept.

But I used to wonder where we were going. I used to wonder how things would’ve been if we’d made it there.

~*~*~*~

Remember how I said that the story of my summer was over? It isn’t. Sorry for the lies, but I promise there’s a reason for all the jumping around. There are still three major parts left in that story: The Letter Part, The Tent Part, and The Jilly Part. This is the first.

~*~*~*~

Before discovering my magical roots, I had three ideas for what I might be when I grew up: (a) An astronaut�”this was a huge fantasy of mine, thwarted mainly by Verno’s refusal to pay for space camp; (b) A fashion designer; (c) A midnight cooking show hostess. None of these options panned out in the long run, but I did have some fun practicing for the last one.

Three weeks before Harry was set to depart for Hogwarts, at two o’ clock in the morning, I spooned a bit of pancake batter into a frying pan, listing to the quiet sizzle. Balanced on a footstool in front of Aunt P’s stove, I gripped a spatula, gently prodding the edges of the batter as it spread and took shape. Although I really was hungry, and a perpetual night owl, the late night snack was more of a distraction than anything else. My brother and I hadn’t spoken in days�”it was surreal. The Dursleys, both scared and angry, ignored me as well. Even the owl clicked her beak warningly whenever I got too close, sensing my resentment. I did not walk to Jeremy’s house, or ride my bike around town, or do my summer homework. Jilly didn’t call. No one even looked at me. I spent most of my time in the attic, sulking and feeling entitled to it.

I wanted to forget all of that, for a few minutes. Who cared what Verno would do when he found me making breakfast this late (early)? Who cared what my teacher would say on the first day of school, when I hadn’t done the maths packet or read A Wrinkle in Time? Who bloody cared?

Not me.

I flipped the first pancake as quietly as I could�”but then froze, as the bottom stair’s trademark squeak sounded. My heart jumped, and I considered ditching the spatula and running for it, out the back door, through the yard, over the fence, between the hedges, down the road, never looking back. But I hesitated a second too long, and a shadow became visible in the hall, belonging to and preceding�”

“Odd time for breakfast,” Harry said conversationally�”hoping to keep things civil, maybe.

Relieved but still startled, I shut my eyes and concentrated on catching my breath. Forgetting pancakes and runaway schemes full of prepositional phrases, I set aside my spatula and turned to face him. Eyes pointed directly at the ground.

“What do you want?” I said, my voice cold even though I didn’t want it to be. I didn’t want a row�”but things had begun to spiral, and I felt caught.

Harry moved a little closer, the legs of his pajama pants�”previously Dudley’s�” trailing on the spotless kitchen floor. “To talk,” he said simply. “We haven’t since… we got back. If you’d just let me explain�””

I cut him off, uninterested. “I heard you the first time, Harry. Believe me. I get it.”

Shaking his head, Harry tried again. “I didn’t tell you everything, Kat. Just listen, and stop�””

“No,” I said evenly. “I don’t care. I don’t want to hear it. You’re getting your chance�”how can I blame you for not wanting me around anymore?”

Abruptly, I could see Harry’s frustration; his anger. He raised his voice, either forgetting or not concerned that the Dursleys were right upstairs. “Do you honestly think I would�””

“Shut up!” I hissed, waving the spatula at him threateningly and narrowing my eyes. A spark of amusement at my weapon of choice fluttered through his eyes, but then his expression hardened, and my brother turned away, walking toward the stairs. He stopped at the last second though, and looked at me again. I stood�” arms like ropes around my chest; face pinched; eyes shielded by droopy bangs.

This is my story, and what I say is how it goes. And I say that I did not want to cry right then.

“By the way,” Harry said, his voice hard. “Have you seen Hedwig? She’s been gone all day, and that’s not like her.”

I stiffened, biting my lip

“Kat?”

My hands began to shake.

Slowly, the words fell from my lips, like pebbles. Though I could barely hear my own voice, it seemed to resound in the kitchen.

“I… sent a letter.”

Harry looked appropriately stunned. I hated owls�”much more on that later. Me sending a letter via bird-mail is basically the equivalent of the Dark Lord learning to use Muggle computers. “You… you did? To who?”

I felt hollow inside, like my organs had vanished and my blood had evaporated. My legs trembled, and I was afraid I would fall off the stool.

“To Albus Dumbledore.”

All the spatulas in the world could not keep Harry from losing his temper over that one.

“YOU SENT A LETTER TO THE HEADMASTER OF HOGWARTS?!”

“It isn’t fair!” I cried. “What do you expect me to do in Little Whinging for a year without you? I want to come, Harry, and I know I can do it! This isn’t right! They’ve got to make an exception.”

Here is what I did not say: You are my older brother, and I need you. I have not the slightest clue how to be alone. It’s always been us against the world, and I am not ready for that to change.

“Do you think I’m doing this on purpose, Kat? Did you ever stop to think there might be a good reason… do you smell something burning?”

And that is why you should never, ever cook pancakes in the middle of this night (morning) while having a fight with your brother.

“Augh!” I shrieked, twisting around wildly, and taking in the sight of my pancakes�”all black as charcoal�”smoking profusely (profusely!). Not knowing what else to do, I seized the spatula and tried to chisel them from the bottom of the pan�”to little result. In the meantime, Verno thundered down the stairs, awakened by my scream and by the wailing smoke detector. Aunt P was close behind him. Harry grabbed yesterday’s newspaper from the kitchen table and fanned the reeking grey clouds away from the smoke detector.

“What the bloody hell is going on down here?” Verno bellowed.

“What did you expect to happen, Kata?” Harry demanded, still fanning. “You send one letter, and suddenly everything’s the way you want it to be?”

But my only answer came in the form of a panicked scream�”with an enormous fwoosh, the stove burst into flames. Columns of fire leapt from its surface. Screaming, I fell off the footstool, right onto my back. The air rushed from my lungs, and patterns invaded my vision. Both Aunt P and the smoke alarm shrieked.

Shouting indiscernibly above the clamor, Verno moved in with a fire extinguisher, shoving Harry aside and stepping on my fingers. Still dizzy, I tried to sit up�”but the room spun and there was an incredible, frothy fwush and a spray of white foam, and maybe I had cracked my head against the floor, because a hot, heavy pain was spreading across my forehead, and I should have made eggs, and I passed out, thinking, That’s exactly what I expected to happen.

~*~*~*~

(Before this scene, I, Kata Potter, am�”as a fully responsible adult�”obliged to say the following: Underage drinking is very, very bad and not much fun at all.

That’s it.)

When I was fifteen, and we were very drunk, Adam looked at me with clouded, unfocused eyes and said, “What was the best thing to ever happen to you?”

We normally didn’t discuss such deep things. The questions we usually asked were more like, ‘Want to hang in my dorm tonight?’ or, ‘What was the Charms homework again?’ . I think that was the main reason things went wrong with Adam�”the vapidity of it; the way our hands moved faster than our thoughts. We never knew how to properly channel what we felt for the other one into words.

But, anyway. Adam’s question.

Being drunk, I believe I just laughed and kissed him, his breath hot and sweet with Firewhiskey, matching mine. But I knew the answer.

The year I was ten, my sober self would have replied, remembering green notebooks and the magical flipside of London and the hollow flavor of alone-ness. Faces I drew with poignant clarity; Jeremy cursing just for the bloody hell of it; thick, translucent glass bottles stuffed with messages for no one to ever read and tossed into a half-frozen stream; the way it all pieced together at the end, even if, at the time, every day felt like a tiny string�”blowing helplessly in the wind, unattached to anything.

I needed that year�”I needed to stretch the beginnings of my legs, after sitting holed up in the metaphorical cupboard of childhood for all my life. Without that year, I never would have become the Kata Potter who is strong enough and whole enough to tell this story. I needed, so desperately, to spend a measurable lump of time without my older brother. Because, most of all, I needed to figure out who I was outside of the little sister role I had always played�”and would continue to play for many years.

I didn’t think I was ready; I didn’t think I could do it; I didn’t think it made any sense. And maybe I was right.

But I was also conveniently wrong.

~*~*~*~

Here in the sovereign nation of Kataslovakia, we believe everyone has an unalienable right to not being roused from an entirely peaceful slumber by her meat-faced uncle (who possibly does not even know her name). And when I say ‘we’ and, I mean ‘me’�” because I have yet to meet another individual who shares my name. But that’s a rant for another time.

“Kill,” I seethed into my pillow as Verno pounded on my door. Don’t ask why my violent impulses were so automatic at�”what was it?�”seven o’ clock on a Saturday morning. It’s not weird if you don’t think about it. “Kill with rocks.”

The door shook in its frame, knob rattling. “Get up, girl!” Verno bellowed. I find ‘bellow’ a very good verb for everything Verno does. “In case you haven’t noticed, the bloody doorbell’s been ringing for a good ten minutes, and it’s for you. Bellow! Bellow!”

Right. So, maybe I’m embellishing a little. But I’m in charge.

As my pillow was firmly smashed over my face at this point, and as the door was still shut between us, I couldn’t see him�”but, I assure you, the spit was flying and his face was purple as a mystery sweater.

Wondering who could possibly want to talk to me this early�”and trying not to think I bet it’s the wizard-people! �” I threw my pillow aside and yelled back, “Fine! Stop bellowing! Big, sharp, pointy rocks,” I added under my breath, jumping out of bed and pulling on my slippers and�”because I couldn’t find my robe in the Hurricane Kata that was my room�” jacket.

“What was that?” Verno said (bellowed) sharply.

“Just the sound of what a worthless freak I am,” I replied evenly, gathering my hair into a ponytail.

“Well, hurry up!” he said (bellowed), and he would have pounded on the door again if I hadn’t opened it in his face, which was, as I had predicted, purple and bulging.

“Tell your friend,” he spat the word, as if it was hard to believe I still had friends, “how entirely inconsiderate it is to wake a person up at seven in the bloody morning and not even offer a simple apology or a nice warning!”

I blinked up at him. But the irony was clear to only me. “You made a rhyme,” I pointed out sleepily.

Verno looked ready to slap me, but I ducked out of the way and dashed down the stairs, taking them three at a time. Skidding into the foyer, tripping over a rug, and nearly falling flat on my face, I threw open the door.

And nothing in my day really made sense after that.

I blinked. “Sherrie?”

Because it was Sherrie: Sherrie Parker, my classmate and�”by the loosest possible definition of the word�”friend. She wore mud-brown corduroys and a red overcoat with brassy buttons shaped like turtles. A floppy canvas backpack was strung over her shoulders�”when she shifted her weight, something clanked inside.

“Hello,” she said, crisp and businesslike, not at all like her usual dreamy self. “Your uncle made me stand outside. That’s not very nice.”

“Neither is he,” I said, because what do you say when someone like Sherrie Parker shows up at your house at seven o’ clock and you’re wearing your pajamas and you only just figured out that there’s a hole in your slipper because the frozen concrete is nudging the pad of your foot like a virus?

Sherrie cleared her throat. “I want you to come somewhere with me. Now.”

I did not say, But we aren’t even friends. I did not say, Sometimes I forget your last name. The last bits of sleep were still clinging to the fabric of my mind, and it was foggy. Logic isn’t my strongpoint in the mornings. Neither are needlepoint projects, grave digging, or pranks involving oatmeal (three very good stories that I will try to work in later on).

What I did say was this: “Um. I’m wearing my pajamas.”

A gust of icy wind blasted us�”cold cold cold�”and Sherrie rolled her eyes. “I noticed,” she said, her substanceless voice dry and sarcastic for the first time in my memory. “Sheep flatter you.”

Magic existed, I was a contestant in the Surrey Regional Young Writers Competition, and Sherrie Parker could accurately employ sarcasm. Sure. Why not?

I wrapped my arms around my body, as if protecting the pattern on my pajamas. “They’re mountain goats, and they’re cute, and they’re not important right now.”

Sherrie nodded once, solidly. “Exactly.”

She then turned on heel and began to walk away, beckoning for me to follow. I looked around wildly, at the sky and the ground and to both sides of where I stood, as if the answer to this wacky situation were printed on some sort of helpful sign.

“I’m not even dressed!” I yelled in protest, hurrying to catch up despite myself. "I just said that!"

Sherrie didn’t seem surprised that I was coming. Absently, she scratched her nose and stared into the white, foggy morning ahead of us. “Doesn’t matter,” she replied. “We’re not going anywhere special.”

I smoothed my ponytail nervously. “Right.”

I had absolutely no idea what was happening, but I had learned to just…just go with it. Even if you wind up walking down Privet Drive in your goat-emblazoned pajamas on a Saturday morning in the freezing mid-February frost, something good might come from it. Follow the randomness. Allow freakishly tall men to take you shopping in a secret strip mall behind an unremarkable London pub. Accept a quest. Willingly toss yourself down the rabbit hole. People spend a lot of their lives chasing magic�”but why? Magic throws itself down your freaking throat. You just have to choose magic, every chance you get; choose it over simplicity and sometimes choose it over safety.

Not that it isn’t good to exercise caution.

Which is what I did when I cleared my throat and asked, “I probably should have asked this before, since the answer might be ‘a dark, cold forest where no one can hear you scream’, but where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

That was actually worse than the forest thing.

I cleared my throat again. “So… why the field trip?”

Sherrie squared her shoulders. The contents of her backpack clinked musically. “I need to talk to you�”something I cannot do when we’re at school.”

“We talk at school.”

“Not like we’re talking now. Think about it. Listen to yourself. You’re talking differently.”

In all honesty, I had to say that I didn’t notice a particular different in our exchange of words. Sherrie was making me increasingly uncomfortable, and I really wanted to turn back. But I didn’t want to go home, and where else was I going to go this early?

“Sherrie,” I said carefully, “are you, like, really, really smart? I mean, I know you’re smart. I’ve been playing tic-tac-toe with you for the past month, and I haven’t won once. You helped me understand that ‘I Am’ poem I brought in that one time. I’m next to positive you speak Latin. But are you insanely, freakishly smart?”

For the first time since I’d met her, Sherrie Parker looked rather ticked off. “You don’t really have room to be calling anyone a freak, now do you?”

Stunned, I went completely silent, mind reeling. I wasn’t sure what to deny, if anything. Was she finally going to confront me about what she had overheard me tell Jilly months before? Had she drawn her own conclusions, or done research? Was there anything to research? Did Hogwarts have a website? Monthly newsletter? Maybe she didn’t even mean magic�”I was, after all, quite odd all on my own. Perhaps it was�”

Sherrie gave an oddly disturbing little chuckle. “I can see you speculating. Lots of questions, yes? You ask a lot of questions. I’ve noticed that.”

What in the name of banking goblins was going on?

“Yeah,” I said, lightheaded and dizzy. “Comes from years of being told not to.”

Sherrie laughed again.

I lay dormant for maybe five more seconds, but then erupted. Stopping dead in my tracks and planting my feet firmly, I threw my fisted hands into the air and shrieked, “WOULD YOU PLEASE JUST TELL ME WHAT THIS IS ABOUT ALREADY? ”

Sherrie’s face betrayed nothing�”her customary blank stare. I glowered at her, thoroughly annoyed with my decision to ‘follow the magic’. Scrap that. Scrap all of that. Stay in bed. Never do anything. Daydream, at most.

Finally, Sherrie spoke. “I’m sorry I called you a freak,” she said. “That was uncalled for. And you’re sorry you called me a freak, too, because it’s not very nice. There. Apologies. Now, if you’re worried I know something about you, don’t be. I do. But I don’t care. I don’t have anyone to tell. Besides, I can get much more out of this by keeping it to myself.

“I rang your doorbell and disturbed your uncle and asked you to come with me this morning because I just wanted to talk to you. You’re interesting. You’re weird enough to not have any grounds for calling me weird. I like… your company.”

I smiled a bit. “Sherrie. Is that, like, your awkward, freakishly smart way of saying you want to be friends?”

Sherrie sighed, exasperated, and rolled her eyes toward the sky. “I thought you just apologized for calling me a freak!”

I itched my nose, studying a pebble at my feet. Sherrie’s display of emotions still unnerved me. “Actually, you apologized for me calling you a freak, but�””

Sherrie huffed, looking very peeved. “Whatever. Just follow me, will you?”

I obeyed, walking a few feet behind her. “Where have you been hiding the personality?” I muttered to myself, arms crossed over my pyjama top.

Sherrie led me down a few side streets, in the general direction of Stonewall Primary. The morning slowly thawed, it’s cold loosening around us. I didn’t shiver so much in my thin jacket. As Sherrie and I walked along, the sky molted its last stains of darkness and gathered the pigeon-grey colour of winter. It wasn’t until we were a few metres away that I realised where we were headed: the forest behind Stonewall. The school loomed, an ice-sheathed giant, just to our right.

“You know they’re going to cut these trees down?” Sherrie called back to me. I had fallen into a slower pace, wary of being led into the trees.

Vaguely, I remembered Jeremy telling me that�”eons ago, when the Twenty Things had only just begun and he still wanted to help me find them. A sign at the mouth of the forest confirmed this: over the Easter holidays, a portion of the forest would be cleared for development. This portion held the tree that had once been Jeremy’s and my clubhouse. I wondered where the wood would end up; where the bizarre cycle of life and objects would take it.

Sherrie pushed aside a frosted, leafless bough and disappeared into the tangle of barred sticks and trunks. My slippers sunk slightly into the mud. I took a moment to resent Sherrie for not letting me dress properly, but then gathered my bearings and crept after her.

“So it really was a cold, dark forest where no one could hear me scream,” I grumbled to myself. “Brilliant.”

But we didn’t venture far into the trees. When Sherrie finally came to a stop at the bank of a mucky, reeking creek, I could still kind of see the school, in the fractured distance. Shrugging out of her backpack, Sherrie dug through the pocket of her coat and withdrew a small pad of paper and a pen.

She held them out to me, an offering. “You wrote a bunch of letters to your brother for your Twenty Things project, right?”

At this point�”deep in the woods and still wondering what was in the backpack�”I was too worried I was about to be sacrificed to some sort of voo-doo tree god to fully comprehend what she’d said. “Eh? Oh, no. No. It was… a journal, I guess. And it wasn’t my real Twenty Things project; it was an accident�””

Sherrie raised an eyebrow, and I stopped.

“We, uh, don’t write. It’s complicated. How did you even know I have a brother?”

Sherrie shrugged, pulling at the ties of her backpack. “You doodle a lot. In class, I mean. You’re actually a fairly good artist, you know.”

I tried to process the fact that Sherrie Parker had complimented me, but it got stuck somewhere in my brain.

Of all the things I had imagined Sherrie to be carrying�”marbles; pipe bombs; a medieval flail�”she pulled none of them from her pack. Instead of the weapons I envisioned, Sherrie produced several empty bottles with peeling labels that read Mo’s Finest Ginger Ale: A Reason to Smile. Some had scraps of paper sticking out from their necks.

Sherrie grinned a genuine grin, grasping one of the paper-filled bottles. “The opening of a bottle is nothing,” she said brightly. “Yet, without it, a bottle would not be a bottle.”

I blinked. “Sorry, but I have no idea what that means. Kat no learn good.”

Sherrie’s smile remained fixed to her lips. “It’s a Buddhist thing. Everything is empty; nothing is born; nothing dies. That sort of thing.”

I bit my lip, nodding along as if I understood. “Right. That… sort of thing.”

Abruptly, Sherrie stood straighter, formal and sombre. She gestured to the bottles at our feet, and to the pad of paper I held loosely in my hand. “My mum used to take me to do this when I was little,” Sherrie said. “She’s sort of a hippie. Said it’s a release. Letters to no one. They don’t have to be long�”they don’t even have to be letters, really; just stuff you need to get out. Write it down. Let it go.”

She tossed the first bottle into the slow-moving creek. I was amazed it wasn’t iced over; it was topped only by a thin layer of slush. I stood, slightly dubious about the whole thing. It seemed like a good way to litter to me, but not such a good way to heal my mind. Sherrie was waiting, though, and what could it hurt?

I stared at the paper, and poised the pen above it. Started scribbling.

I don’t know why I’m doing this. I’m still really tired. It’s cold.

Sherrie said I’m good at drawing. Mr. M said I’m good at writing. I never knew I was good at anything.

This has been the weirdest year of my life, and it isn’t even over yet.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.

I don’t like Valentine’s day. It clashes with my hair.

Who am I writing to?

You. I’m writing to you.

I always complain that we don’t write, and now I don’t know what to say.

I’m doing the best I can.

Love, Kata

Taking a huge breath, I rolled up the paper and shoved it roughly into the bottle Sherrie offered me. Without hesitating, I chucked it into the thick water, trying to appear nonchalant.

It actually felt pretty good.

I watched the green of my bottle�”green like a planet; like a smell�”bob and swell against the lolling current of the river, leaning into the yielding skin of liquid. It was the crux of winter: everything still dead and lank. Grass that crinkled like paper under my light footsteps. Oyster skies spotted with seamless clouds. Invisible sun that had all but given up on breaking through.

Hints of spring, though, too. The barest awareness of change, like an instinctual feeling of being watched. No matter what, the seasons would never, never fail.

The bottle.

So full.

And I thought: We are sinking.

And I thought: We are clearly unsinkable.

And I thought: We have only just begun to breathe.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, Kata,” Sherrie said smugly, as if she’d won something.

~*~*~*~

Love�”or something�”was in the air. What I discovered at Jeremy’s, two days later, was only further proof.

“Jeremy, it’s me!” I called as I let myself into his house and yanked off my wool hat. Clumps of snow fell onto the doormat; the descent of the flakes had started up again and I was covered in sodden white powder. The hems of my jeans, which perpetually dragged on the ground, were soaked through. This created an awful sensation every time I took a step, and ensured that I could never properly warm up. When a person’s feet are cold, all of them is cold. Due to that, my good relationship with winter was on a hiatus. Spring was starting to sound pretty nice. “And you should know I’m mad at you, too, because I walked all the way from school to Flinker’s, and you weren’t there, so I had to walk all the way here, which is where your dad said you were. And I’m very cold, and icicles have started to form on the ends of my hair, and I’m going to jinx whoever stole my bike handlebars. I mean, who knew handlebars could even be unscrewed from the rest of the bike? And yes, I said jinx.”

This was met by silence, which was unnatural for the Flinker household. Jeremy’s mum was a teacher in the next town over, and usually was home by the time Stonewall got out. His little sister, Mattie, was often around as well, with her friends from school. Even though Mattie and I were in the same grade, and possibly had more in common than Jeremy and I, we were never close as children.

I started to plow up the stairs, automatically headed in the direction of his room. No wonder he couldn’t hear me; a horrible sound was leaking out from the crack beneath his door. It was the kind of sound that made me want to either run in the other direction or shoot myself in the face. I can’t really describe it beyond that; you’ll just have to imagine the worst sound you’ve ever heard and multiply it by infinity.

“Jeremy?” I shouted over the din, pounding on his door. “Jeremy, are you in there? Are you being tortured? Are you being dipped in acid? Scream twice if you’re being dipped in acid!”

Abruptly, the screeching and wailing and grinding stopped, and the door swung open. An unidentifiable creature stood on the other side. It was taller than I was, it wore baggy sweatpants and a grungy flannel shirt, and its head was entirely obscured by a mass of uncombed sandy hair.

I let out a panicked shriek. “What are you?”

The creature was chewing gum, and it took the time to blow an enormous pink bubble before answering. When this bubble popped, a few strings of pink got caught in its (the creature’s) floppy bangs and hovered there. “Devon,” it finally said. “I’m in the band.”

“Okay, Devon,” I said, trying to calm my heart rate. My pulse rumbled like thunder in my ears, which were still a bit numb from the noise that had preceded Devon. “Where’s Jeremy? Did he explode from all that…noise? Were you dipping him in acid? Is the acid in the closet? Does that�””

“Flinker’s next door,” Devon reported without any sort of inflection to his voice. I immediately began to suspect him of being an android. “He’s borrowing chopsticks from Mrs. Chu.”

I put my tongue between my teeth. “Why?”

Devon held up a splintered drumstick, sliced almost cleanly in half by what I can only assume was face-melting, stick-smashing rock ’n’ roll passion so intense I cannot hope to capture it with words alone. “My sticks broke,” he said.

I bit my lip and glanced over Devon’s shoulder. A set of aged and grimy drums stood in the centre of Jeremy’s eternally messy room. There was no snare drum, but who needs snare? One of the cymbals was dented, but I was sure Mrs. Chu had a nice wok that would work just as well. Next to the drums, a very new-looking guitar was leaning against Jeremy’s bed, a pick shoved between the strings along its neck.

In a sloppy manner that reeked of Jeremy, someone had painted the words “Jeremy Flinker and the Untitled” onto the front of the bass drum in large red letters. I raised an eyebrow dubiously. I should really have TV cameras following me around, I thought. This is too good.

“So,” Devon said in his monotone, “are you Rachel?”

I spun around, stunned and indignant, forgetting all about my chances as a reality television star. “No!” I said. Who’s Rachel?”

“Jeremy’s girl. None of us have met her yet.”

My arm twitched and a strange noise burbled out of my mouth. Does not compute.

I underwent a serious internal struggle, debating whether to press Devon for more information or go find Jeremy and kill him. He’d formed a band without me, and he had a girlfriend. When had he grown up? When had this started? I suppose I knew, underneath it all, that (a) The distance between Jeremy and I was hardly new�”just newly embellished, and (b) In the history of eleven-year-olds, there has never once been a meaningful, competently-conducted relationship. But Jeremy was supposed to be my best friend. And I really needed someone to be my best friend, as the person to whom the title normally fell was off turning pumpkins into carriages and playing “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board”.

I decided to kill Jeremy later and ask questions now. “And by ‘us’, you mean…?”

“Milo Omerivic. Ian Franc. Our friends. The band. Who are you, anyway?”

“I’m Kata. I used to be Jeremy’s friend.”

“He never mentioned you.”

I wasn’t entirely surprised by this, but a blade of something like disappointment stung between my shoulders. My heart jumped a little as I wondered�”did my brother ever mention me to the other wizard-people? Was I a conversation piece; a funny story; a something to miss about Little Whinging? Did it matter to him, now that there were all these chances and possibilities and rubbish, that we never saw each other? Did the pervasive feeling of aloneness hit him the way it always hit me�”hard; fast; without warning?

Was he still angry with me?

(Right. Remember how I also told you that I sent Hedwig back without a reply at Christmastime?

I didn’t. And that’s sort of significant.

I am a terrible storyteller.)

Devon gazed at me with renewed curiosity. “If you shove a pencil in your hair, does it stay?”

I was silent (but, for the record, Harry and I tried this one day, and the answer is yes. Other items that “stick” in my hair include plastic forks, Pick-Up Stix, bendy-straws, and wands), but this was just as well, because Jeremy entered the room just then, brandishing a pair of chopsticks and grinning in his usual Jeremy-way. Even though this smile generally made me laugh, I was immune to it. “Hey, mate,” Jeremy said, flicking his hair and tossing the chopsticks to Devon. “They’re the kind girls stick in their hair, but I reckon they’ll work all right�””

Devon cut him off by clearing his throat and nodding towards me. I stood silently and seamlessly in the corner. As Jeremy turned to face me, I shoved my hands into my pockets and my eyes onto his. The fringe of his bangs was tangled in his eyelashes, now; I couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a haircut.

“Hey, Kat!” Jeremy crowed. “Did you just get here? I was going to ring you, but your aunt keeps telling me to stop. Did you see the drums? I’m in a band now. I play guitar. Not very well, mind you, but I’m learning and stuff.” He was oblivious to my expression, to my hostile body language. I wondered what had driven the wedge between Jeremy and me.

Out of the blue, I remembered something called chaos theory. Mr. Mendota had tried fruitlessly to explain it to my class. Some scientists believe that you can only explain the last thing that happened, not a string of events. By this rule, I could understand that Jeremy and I had grown apart, but I couldn’t get my hands around the ‘why’. Was it because we’d fought in my foyer? Because I was constantly moping, and searching for my seemingly unattainable Twenty Things? Because he was suddenly interested in girls and music and swearing, while I was still stuck where I’d always been?

I could fully comprehend and accept that I was the little sister, the less important one, the one left behind; I knew that my friendship with Jilly was demolished; I knew that I was a witch and thereby forever separated from the world I’d grown up in. Things were different this year and everyone, including myself, had changed.

But I didn’t know why. And when you’re ten years old and you don’t know why, it’s the worst thing in the world.

“Actually, Jeremy,” I said quietly, “I was just leaving.”

“Wait!” he called as I pivoted to the door. I paused, glancing back over my shoulder without an ounce of hope that anything he said would make this better. “We can find a spot for you in the band, if that’s what you’re mad about. You sing like shit, but you can probably play tambourine or something. Every good band needs a cute girl playing tambourine in the background. And… well… we could put a really bright light on you or something and no one would notice that…”

I filled in the blanks. “That I’m not cute?”

Jeremy’s face went slack. “I didn’t say that,” he said defensively.

I knew he meant to say something more like, People often think you're several years younger than you actually are, or, Your hair needs to be periodically evaluated by a medical professional to make sure it isn’t forming a conscious personality separate from your own, but I just wanted to be mad. This was a chess game�” and righteous, unfounded anger could topple slack-jawed curses any day.

I laughed ironically, and turned back to the door, my steps strangely confident and upbeat. “Yeah, well,” I shouted as I descended the stairs, “why don’t you ask Rachel to be your tambourine girl?”

My hand was on the doorknob�”my heart beating overtime from the unwarranted fury roiling within me�”when Jeremy appeared at the top of the stairs, seething.

“Y’know,” he said, too loudly, “you have no bloody reason to be mad at me.”

I blinked, hit with déjà vu. The foi-ay. Come on. “Didn’t we already do this?” I said, the red of anger in my tone diluted by complete exhaustion with this fight and this friendship.

Jeremy glowered. “I’m just saying, Kat. You don’t.”

I raised an eyebrow, puzzling to myself. “I have no reason to be angry with you? I can think of nine, right now.”

Shaking his head, Jeremy squared his feet as if preparing for a boxing match. He jabbed a finger in my direction. “Uh-uh. No. You don’t get to be mad, Kat-uh-rin-eh, because I’m the one you’ve been lying to, and keeping shit from, and whining to all year�”and I’ve put up with it, because you’re my friend, and because… well, you’ve made a few good points in all the rubbish you’ve been spouting, but…” Jeremy’s voice grew strong then, like steel. “But I’m the one who’s not getting any answers from you, Kat. Yeah, you’re the one with no family, and you’re the one with…”

And I’ll just stop there. Jeremy may have said a few more things, but I didn’t hear them.

Because… have you ever had the person you thought was your best friend look you in the face and say, “You’re the one with no family”? Right after mispronouncing your name?

It actually kind of stings.

So I said things back.

First, I laughed. Sardonically, and right in his face. And then, it all just broke loose. “You want answers? You want answers? Okay. But first give me some answers. Why would anyone leave the most important wizard ever on a doorstep? How does that even make sense? Is my name even a real name? It sounds like a two-year-old is trying to pronounce Katherine. Where did the glass go? Huh? Did it just disappear into the magical kingdom of Nothingness? And how did it come back? Also, wizards must have about a thousand ways to communicate with each other, right? I mean, even excluding e-mail. So why waste thousands of pieces of parchment and an entire mob of bloody owls before just sending the Gamekeeper? Was his schedule all booked up? Could Hogwarts not spare their Gamekeeper for a few hours? Or do they just like killing trees? Is Diagon Alley supposed to sound like ‘diagonally’? That’s just a generally bad idea.

“How is leaving me supposed to help anything? I mean… how? He’s the brave one. I’m a Hufflepuff. Why can’t he at least write me? It’d be a start. Why is Jilly upset with me? We never had a fight. I saw her once over the summer, and we were fine. And why twenty? Seems like a pretty random number to me. Why not nineteen? Twenty-one? Who decided that, anyway? And why is it so hard? And why does it hurt so much? And why do I constantly feel like the answer is right there, but it never is, and what do you mean I haven’t got any family? And, for crying out loud, will someone please just tell me why I’m even involved an all this? If he’s more important than me, and if he’s the one that matters, than why bother getting me even remotely involved? Huh? Got any answers for me, Jeremy?”

These are the questions that�”to this very day�” torment my thoughts. Some more than others.

Jeremy stared at me for a full ten seconds, slack-jawed and silent. Finally, he spoke. “What the hell is a Hufflepuff?”

I felt like something had exploded deep inside of me. My face flushed, and my pulse jumped, but I found myself smiling. Slowly and sadly, I shook my head, not even shocked. “Oh, Jeremy,” I said softly. And then I left.

~*~*~*~

Jilly Hanks joined choir in fourth grade, and almost immediately regretted the decision. She was a better singer than I was; talent wasn’t a problem. The issue was that when we were younger, Jilly was painfully shy and forgot everything she knew about music when faced with an actual audience. Because of this, she approached the choir director, a man named Mr. Greene, and tried to hand in her resignation. Mr. Greene, however, wasn’t the kind of man to give up without a fight. He was intensely passionate about his music, and didn’t understand when other people felt differently. Even if she was shy, Mr. Greene didn’t comprehend why Jilly would ever devote her life to anything other than choir.

After twenty-five minutes of arguing (in which Jilly mostly stood silently and Mr. Greene lectured endlessly), he agreed to let her go. Before that, though, he had some parting words for her.

“When you quit once, it’ll be very easy to quit again. And you’ll just keep quitting and quitting, until you have nothing left.”

Very good advice, really, but Jilly was nine, and it sort of went over her head. Looking back, though, now that she was ignoring me in favor of Winnie & Co., Jilly couldn’t help thinking that he was right. She had quit at being my friend because I was unpopular and high maintenance and inevitably got her into trouble.

As Mr. Mendota had said when we played chess on stage, Jilly was one of three people who hadn’t turned in their Twenty Things as of December sixteenth. She quit looking for them after a while. Jilly didn’t know why the project stumped her so completely. Her life was in order, ever since I somehow exited it. She had a perfect, unbroken family; she had her new friends and their equally perfect families; her marks never moved from the top of the top. When she sat down to look at everything, however, Jilly Hanks couldn’t find the Twenty Things that made her world go ‘round. So she simply stopped looking and handed in a simple list, as I had tried to do.

Maybe the above information�”the quitting and the uncertainty and our falling-out�”acted as Jilly’s motivation as she marched into the school library one day after the final bell had rung. Ducking past our substandard librarian, who could often be seen smoking outside the upper school building or napping in the microfiche room, Jilly took a seat at a computer and wiggled the mouse. While waiting for the humming monitor to wake up, she glanced around covertly, as if making sure no one was watching her.

Jilly clicked on the Internet browser and navigated to a search engine. Taking a deep breath, she typed ‘twenty things that make the world go ‘round’ and hit enter. After a few lolling seconds, her screen flashed to a new page. More hits than she’d expected.

The very first was a death announcement. With a couching heart, Jilly pounced on the link. Next to the blurb was a picture of a smiling girl who had no clue that her life wouldn’t last forever. It was the same picture Robert Mendota kept taped to his computer. It was the same picture he stared at every night, trying to force words to appear on his lips. The right words. The goodbye words.

MENDOTA, KIERRNAN “KAILEY” entered into eternity on Dec. 19, 1986. Dear daughter of Paul Mendota and Meredith Mendota (nee Rhodes); dear sister of Robert; dear friend to many. Survivors remember Mendota as an aspiring writer who, at sixteen, published a novella entitled “The Twenty Things That Make the World Go ‘Round”. After its publication, Mendota built on this project, locally publishing many poems of the similar titles and forming the Twenty Things Alliance. Services held…

But then Jilly stopped reading. This may have been because she couldn’t see anymore; the connection between her eyes and her mind appeared to have broken. All of her senses felt severed, and her hands shook without her wanting them to. An eerie silence stretched across the library�”a more silent silence than usual, seeing as libraries are traditionally quiet�”and Jilly held on to the sides of her chair with those quivering hands, afraid she would fall out of it.

It was similar to when I found out about magic�”my first concerns were whether Hagrid had said ‘wizard’ or ‘lizard’, and if wizardry would complicate my marriage plans. When Jilly read Kailey Mendota’s death announcement, the first sane thought that breezed into her mind was: She died the same day the Twenty Things were due.

It’s funny, the things we think when we’re trying so hard not to accept the ever-elusive truth. It’s funny, the way our minds protect themselves.

As if by magic.

~*~*~*~

When I entered the sanctuary of Our Lady of the People and saw Mr. Millerton sitting cross-legged at the front of the room, with his eyes shut and hands resting on either knee, it was all I could do not to groan out loud. “What religion does this church even do?” I said with all the eloquence of a ten-year-old.

Mr. Millerton’s face was tranquil and slack. His lips barely moved as he answered. “I told you,” he said, slightly annoyed. “This is not a church. I don’t know much about its history. I took this job somewhat… unwillingly.”

“Right,” I said, dumping my schoolbooks and taking a seat in the pew closest to him. “But you were never really clear on that, either.”

One eye snapped open. I flinched. To avoid talking about his employment situation, perhaps, Mr. Millerton chose to expound on my first question. “This isn’t a church,” he repeated. “It used to be an air raid shelter.”

I rolled my eyes. “How thick do you think I am? We’re above ground. And who in their right mind would bomb Little Whinging?”

He ignored the last bit. “This floor is above ground, yes. But there’s quite an impressive tunnel system underneath. Rumour has it you can follow those tunnels all the way to London. But it hasn’t had a purpose in a long time. City turned it into a homeless shelter�”not that this town has a lot of homeless. Not exactly a metropolis. Take three left turns; you’re back where you started.”

I sighed, blowing my bangs from my eyes. “Tell me about it.” Digging through my bag, I located my maths homework and resigned myself to at least an hour of confusion and frustration. Mr. Millerton resumed his lotus position. I shook my head�”one of these days, I was going find a normal, uncomplicated friend. “Find me a tunnel to Hogwarts, then we’ll talk,” I muttered to myself, tapping my pencil against my worksheet.

For several minutes, silence settled. I scratched away fruitlessly at my pre-algebra, and Mr. Millerton… breathed. I grew bored. And Kata plus boredom is like kerosene plus match: a very bad idea, and for the same reason.

“Are you going to tell me why you’re doing that?” I finally demanded, chucking my pencil away and sliding my books to the side.

Mr. Millerton sucked in his cheeks. “I’m trying to concentrate,” he said through his teeth.

“You look ridiculous.”

“You’re annoying.”

“You’re weird!”

“You’re scared.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

I shook my head, fuming. I told you�”when Kata gets bored, things blow up. Quickly. “Every time I come in here, I get a headache. I’m having a perfectly normal day, and then you’re meditating�””

“Concentrating.”

“You’re concentrating, and apparently I’m sitting in a bomb shelter, and why can’t x solve its own problems, and suddenly you tell me I’m scared? Where does that even come from?”

Mr. Millerton stood, calmly dusted off his pants, and rolled his eyes. “You rant a lot. Is that a redhead thing?’

“I’m not afraid of anything. I mean… heights. But nobody likes heights. And storms. Cats. Owls. Whatever! I get scared, yeah, but it’s not like I’m a scared person.”

Mr. Millerton just chuckled. He sat down next to me. I stood up. “You did the same thing to poor Jeremy Flinker yesterday,” he said nonchalantly. The headache worsened. “Kid nearly had an aneurysm. Maybe you need an outlet for your anger. Considered kickboxing? Blimey, that would be adorable.”

To be fair, it was true. Not the thing about the kickboxing, but the thing about my tendency to indulge in heated, one-sided arguments to vent my anger. I was replaying the scene with Jeremy. I hadn’t gotten everything out in those two minutes of shouting at him. But to be fairer, I had a lot to be angry about, and even more to be confused about.

“How do you know Jeremy?” I demanded, suddenly itchy and uncomfortable.

Mr. Millerton shrugged. “Like I said, small town. I know a lot of people.”

My pulse slowed. I bit my lip. Crossed my arms. Studied the ground. “What’s your deal? Why are you even here? It’s not like you took a job opening. There was no you before this year. This was an abandoned building. Upper school kids came here to get high. That’s about it. There was no Lady; no religion-less sermons; no wack-job following me around and taking my every random comment as something that needs to be picked apart and studied. So don’t tell me you took a job. There was no job to take. Why. Are. You. Here?”

I raised my eyes to meet his. We stared at each other for a long moment. Finally, he sighed. “I told you already. I lost a bet.”

I found another flaw in his ever-changing story, and pounced on it. "You said you lost a coin-toss."

"Did I? Same thing, really. Stakes were set; money changed hands; now I'm stuck here."

“Okay, fine,” I said, waving his words aside. “You lost a bet with a mate and wound up giving motivational speeches to nobody in a building that goes all the way to London. I heard you the first time. I’m asking why. Why was there a bet? Why did someone need to be here?”

For a moment that seemed to swallow us, he started at me, somehow sizing me up. I gazed steadily back. Just when I thought I wasn’t going to get any sort of reply, Mr. Millerton answered my question with one of his own. “How’d you break your wrist?”

“My cousin’s a git. Don’t change the subject.”

Another silence passed us. Then, abruptly, Mr. Millerton stood, clapped me on the shoulder (my knees wobbled), and nodded contentedly, as if our conversation had come to a clear and satisfactory end.

“I like you,” he declared, smiling tightly. I blinked. “You’re fun.”

And without saying another word, he strode out of the sanctuary, away from where I stood, shell-shocked. I heard the main door to the building whoosh open and snap shut. A vacant, lonely feeling collected in the room. I sat back down and put my head in my hands.

If ever there was a time for somebody to bomb Little Whinging.

~*~*~*~

Here is what I remember from when I was little: I couldn’t sleep.

Rather, I wouldn’t sleep. Dudley�”ever the bully; the manipulative git�” planted stories of ghosts and monsters in my mind, and, no matter how Harry insisted there was no such thing, my overactive imagination kicked into overdrive and turned every stray noise into a growl or malicious laugh. While my brother snored, I sat up, a croquet mallet that I’d nicked from Jeremy’s house by my side.

In theory, this did keep the monsters away. But I fell asleep in class. Dark bruises marked the skin under my eyes, giving me a gaunt, droopy appearance. Sunken with exhaustion and frustration, I kept to myself and supplied snippy, one-word responses to my friends’ worried questions.

After a few months of this, Harry found the solution. “I bet I can stay awake longer than you can,” he told me.

I’m competitive by nature.

Though I had, of course, been trying to stay awake all along, there was something comforting about his company that dulled the fear in my stomach. My eyelids wilted. My head pitched forward. I descended into the first good night’s sleep I’d had in a long time.

The following evening, we did the same thing. My brother stayed up until he knew I was asleep. I was frustrated by losing, but too revived to care.

He always won. But I didn’t sleep in school anymore.

If you think this little anecdote has deep, sentimental meaning… well, so do I. But I’m not entirely sure what it is.

~*~*~*~

For the next few days, I couldn’t stop thinking about Mr. Millerton: his odd behavior; his careful dodging of questions; the way he seemed to know exactly what was going on all the bloody time. I wanted there to be a connection, somehow. In my head, I gathered up all the times I’d spoken with him, every interaction we’d had. Disappointingly, I could see no common trend.

Or… perhaps that was the common trend. Mr. Millerton seemed to be a different person every time I talked to him. Nothing was ever the same. It was almost as if he was watching me�”analyzing me; kataloguing me, so to speak�”and adjusting his own personality based on mine.

I like you, I kept hearing. The words tumbled around inside my head like smooth stones. You’re fun.

There had been a ring of familiarity to his words there�”as if we had known each other for years. Decades. Longer than I’d been alive. As if Mr. Millerton and I were old friends, and he knew, more or less, what to expect from me.

As if he’d just decided there was something in me he could identify�”a tiny shard of a prematurely bitter girl with which he could communicate.

I wondered what it was, exactly, on which he wished to concentrate.

One night, long after the streetlamps had bathed Privet Drive in muted orange light, in the hollow silence of Number 4, I made my way up into the attic. There, leaning against the rough, unpainted wall, was a tall mirror. Don’t ask me why the Dursleys kept that mirror up there�”compared to the rest of the house, there was some fairly odd stuff in the attic. During one excavation, I uncovered a box of patterned neckties, an autographed picture of David Hasselhoff, and a glass jug nearly as tall as I was, filled entirely with loose change. At first, I grew excited, imagining that perhaps my aunt and uncle had an eccentric side. But, at the same time, I knew that Verno hated nothing more than abnormalities and Aunt P hated nothing more than clutter. Instead, my suspicions fell on the notion that these bizarre artifacts had been gag gifts my aunt had been too tactful to donate to Used But Not Abused, the local thrift store.

However that mirror got there (for it probably wasn’t a joke present), there it was. And I sat before it, staring at my own face. My slight forehead covered with shaggy, frizzy bangs. My small face and pointed chin. My thin, chapped lips and my right front tooth, ducked slightly behind the left as if from embarrassment. In the dull light of the single, low-watt bulb hanging from the attic ceiling, my skin looked white as pearls�”albeit freckled pearls. My hair, balled into a knot at the back of my head, looked even kinkier than usual. Soft sprigs of it curled at my temple and behind my ears.

At ten, I was too young for spots or oily patches. I hadn’t begun to experiment with make-up�”who was going to show me how to ring my round, doll-like eyes with kohl, or sculpt layers of rogue over my thin cheekbones? Aunt P? Not likely. No, I wasn’t looked at myself critically, or with ambition to change or correct. I wanted to see what I believed Mr. Millerton saw: something predictable and understandable. Someone who was not so stranded that she couldn’t recognize even herself. I let everything slip away from me: the Twenty Things, my brother’s absence, my fights with Jeremy and Jilly, my gnawing questions about… well, pretty much everything. I let it vanish. Isolated myself and sought not to be so isolated. I wanted to find the Before girl�”the girl who slept in a cupboard and played Monopoly to the death with her brother and didn’t even know the word ‘Hogwarts’. The person I had been before Mr. Mendota had told me I didn’t know who I was.

~*~*~*~

I ate lunch with Sherrie Parker, now. She showed me card tricks (I demanded explanations, received none) and made me quiz her on spelling, history, astronomy - anything. My suspicions has been proven correct: Sherrie was really, freakishly smart. Unlike a certain other (bushy-haired) freakishly smart girl I’d have the… pleasure of getting to know over the next couple years, though, Sherrie could have cared less about what we were learning in the classroom. While I struggled constantly to keep up with Mr. Mendota’s lectures, Sherrie ignored him completely, reading books she hid under her desk.

I didn’t mind having a smart friend as much as I thought I would (notice I chose to spend my time almost exclusively with Jeremy, who didn’t know how to use a can-opener, and who once asked my brother if he wore glasses to protect his eyes from any sharp objects that might suddenly fly through the air). My self-esteem did get knocked down a few pegs when I watched Sherrie mow through Jane Eyre in a quarter of the time it had taken me to finish Alice, but, hey - she proofread my essays. I had no concept of a silent ‘e’.

Speaking of spelling.

I bit my lip, studying the word printed in block letters on Sherrie’s flashcard. â€�“Pre… pre-cee…puh…puh… Sherrie, I don’t know how to pronounce this! It looks like precious.”

Sherrie took a deep breath; I could see she was trying to be patient. â€�“Is it precocious?” she asked.

I took a second look at the word, squinting and tilting my head at a sharp angle. â€�“Maybe…” I muttered to myself. I tucked a clump of tangled curls behind my ear and glanced up at my new friend. â€�“Do you want the language of origin? I can pronounce the language of origin. It’s Latin.”

â€�“All right,” Sherrie replied primly. â€�“I’ll just assume it’s precocious. P-r-e-c…”

While Sherrie perfectly spelled the word I had been unable to even decipher, I took a bite from the sandwich I’d made myself that morning and stared out the window. Though it had stopped snowing (for the first time in a solid two weeks, I reckoned), the sky was grey and soundly overcast. I’d all but forgotten when green grass or sunshine looked like. March had come in like a lion - we received another blizzard - but now it sat, bored and stuck, like a turtle.

Sherrie cleared her throat, jolting me from my thoughts. I turned my attention to the next flashcard, and bit my lip. â€�“I think this says hustle, but if it does, I’ve been spelling it wrong all my life.”

Currently, Sherrie was studying for the Stonewall Primary Annual Spelling Bee, a competition from which I had been banned since the first grade.

(Yes, I suppose I should explain that before I go any further. The Bee, like Winter Exhibition, was an excuse for parents to visit Stonewall and make sure the teachers weren’t screwing up their kids too badly. After a series of preliminary competitions held during the school day, two children from each grade were chosen to battle for the grand prize: bragging rights and a plastic scepter. In first grade, I somehow passed the first few rounds and wound up in front of an audience, spelling monkeys. Perhaps I was a good speller; perhaps I wasn’t - the problem was not my skill or lack thereof. It was that I had no concept of taking turns. As my fellow spellers stood in front of the microphone and slowly sounded out their words - mouthing and tasting the contours of them - I grew bored waiting and called out my own guesses. Because the difficulty of the word correlated to the age of the student, I hardly ever understood what the older students were supposed to be spelling, and often simply shouted random letters. At one point, I just spelled my name. This was all very amusing to the audience, but I imagine it got a little annoying. After a few minutes, I was escorted off stage and given detention. In case anyone’s interested, I have served one-hundred and six detentions at Stonewall Primary. I think they ought to give me an award, or name a building in my honour. Yes?)

Sensing my disinterest, Sherrie cleared her throat. â€�“We can be done if you’d li-”

â€�“I’d like that very much, thank you.”

She rolled her eyes, and traded her flashcards for those of a different variety. As she had informed me previously, Sherrie had received a â€�“magic” kit for Christmas and was something of an enthusiast. Remarks about â€�“real” magic rose to the back of my throat quite often, but I bit my tongue. Though I hadn’t seen anyone pulling a rabbit from a hat in Diagon Alley, that didn’t mean it didn’t happen. Besides, Sherrie was good.

Shuffling the new deck in a practiced, offhand manner, she dealt me three cards and told me to turn them over.

I did - three of hearts; four of spades; five of spades.

Grinning like she’d performed a minor miracle, Sherrie gestured to the cards, like there was something deeply significant there, and I was missing it.

â€�“It’s a Pythagorean triple!” she cried when she saw I wasn’t going to cotton on.

I bit my lip, wholly unimpressed. â€�“You do know you’re ten years old, right?”

My dismissal glanced off her, though, and she just shrugged, shuffling and spreading the cards over the saliva-and-cleaner-scented surface of the cafeteria table. â€�“Actually,” she said, â€�“I’m eleven. I had my birthday in December.”

I huffed, my overgrown bangs fluttering and snagging between my eyelashes. â€�“Of course,” I said, as Sherrie mixed the kings and jack and aces; as no snow fell. She splayed the cards before me, faced down, and I dutifully took one, angling it away from her view. The Queen of Diamonds - the picture displayed her as a redhead. â€�“Because the whole freaking world is going to turn eleven before I do.”

â€�“Queen of Diamonds,” Sherrie said surely.

â€�“Yep.”

She plucked the card from my fingers, kneaded it back into the other fifty-one, and soon I lost track of it.

~*~*~*~

Later that night, I walked home alone, hands in pockets and face flushed from the cold. The straps of my backpack bit into my shoulders, but I ignored them. I really needed new trainers - the tread on the bottoms of mind had worn flat, and I skidded through the mess of slush.

As I turned onto Magnolia Crescent, I became conscious of something above me. A noise like a frantic heartbeat. A flash of pure, snowy white against the greying sky.

I gasped, and it turned into a shriek. â€�“Hedwig!”

The owl ignored me. She twitched the pointed feathers on the ends of her wings, and soared in a different direction, disappearing from my view. I was positive, though, that is had been her. How many snowy owls did you see flying around Little Whinging?

I rushed home, falling twice in my hurry and tearing open the knee of my already holey jeans. Aunt P screeched for me to take off my boots as I blasted through the front door, and I did so hastily, sprinting up the stairs as soon as my feet were free.

After a wild, noisy search of my room, I was forced to admit there was nothing to find. No letters, packages, or anything even resembling correspondence.

Bloody owl .

What was going on? Had Hedwig come just to tease me? Why bother? I looked around my room - my small, Spartan room, with its wobbly floorboards and cold wood furniture - and felt something was missing. No. Not missing. Rather, something was there and ready and I just couldn’t see it.

If I had been watching my life as someone else, maybe I would have understood. But I watched my life as me, full to the brim of my own view and unable to select another. A set of eyes looking in the window could have figured it out, but my eyes were peering out from the confused expression on my face, and they didn’t do me much good.

~*~*~*~

â€�“You know,” I said dully, scuffing the toe of my shoe on the sidewalk, â€�“most people do that before March.”

My time spent wandering around Little Whinging had taken me to its very outskirts - and, apparently, right outside the home of Mr. Mendota. It was an old brownstone, regal and suburban at the same time. A rusted car - the kind of car Verno would have called there-and-back-again - was parked in the sloping driveway. My teacher looked like he always did at school: clean, orderly, and slightly off balance. But these traits were somewhat overshadowed by what he was doing at the time.

Mr. Mendota had a wilting Christmas tree halfway through the door—stump-side facing outward - and was tugging with all his might to try and extract its other half from his small foyer, where it was stuck fast. A collar of sweat looped around his forehead and his shirtsleeves were rolled up messily to his elbows. I watched a forgotten glass bauble, hidden under the folds of evergreen braches, tumble out of the tree and shatter on the walkway.

Mr. Mendota stopped tugging. One of his sleeves slumped back to his wrist, hanging there wrinkled and forlorn. A swatch of his brown hair snuck out of place and fell into his eyes. My teacher stared and stared at the remains of the bauble, his glasses fogging up with his smoky breath.

I wasn’t sure he heard me. â€�“Mr. Mendota?”

His head moved independently of the rest of his body as it turned in the direction of my voice. I stood unsurely, with my teeth clamped around my bottom lip and my hands feeling conspicuously empty as the hung at my sides. Mr. Mendota was hunched slightly forward, his chest heaving in the aftermath of his battle with the tree. A carpet of dead needles surrounded him. It was nighttime and the streetlamps gave his skin a sickly gleam and I didn’t know what to say.

â€�“I think you might need some help with that tree,” I said, my voice small. The naked beginnings of a grin found his face. Mr. Mendota lifted one needle-scarred hand and pinched the bridge of his nose, as if trying to get rid of a headache. I pushed my hair out of my eyes and waited.

He began to laugh. Uproariously. The sound of it resounded down the street and stung my skin.

â€�“I don’t even know why I got a tree,” he said through waves of laughter. â€�“I was out of town. I told you that. I took a holiday. I wanted to get out of here for a few days. This town is small, Kata. It’s small and it makes me feel small, too. So I left. But I got a tree. And I wasted my time decorating it, and I put one of those stupid stars on top and no one even saw it.”

â€�“Oh,” I said. Oh. I crossed the deserted street to his walkway. Needles crunched under the soles of my purple Converse trainers, which were even more mangled and filthy than they’d been at the start of the school year - and not exactly all-weather footwear.

Mr. Mendota shook his head incredulously, barely noticing that I’d come closer. A patch of strong-smelling sap decorated his shirt. â€�“What am I talking to you for? You’re a student. I shouldn’t talk to you about my personal-”

â€�“Well, who else are you going to talk to?” I said unthinkingly, interrupting him. â€�“There’s only one car in the driveway - you haven’t got a girlfriend, have you?”

Mr. Mendota’s face hardened. â€�“Kata, that’s my own business-”

â€�“Have you?”

â€�“It doesn’t-”

â€�“Do you have friends?”

â€�“Of course I—”

â€�“Do you have brothers and sisters?”

â€�“STOP!” Mr. Mendota bellowed. It was even louder than his laughter, and the contrasting silence deafened me. Shock wrapped around me, and I felt bizarrely, momentarily afraid. I was too self-centered to think about such things then, but I know now that my teacher must have been duly afraid of me. He saw my red hair and my imperious eyes - I saw his dark hair and glasses - we stood - facing what we didn’t even realise we needed to fear - with a wrecked and wasted Christmas tree laying defeated among the sidewalk and our shoes. The night hovered nervously around us, the streetlamps puncturing it at intervals.

â€�“You,” Mr. Mendota huffed, â€�“have no tact. You’re rude and don’t consider people’s feelings. You’ve got no respect for me as a teacher. Every other sentence that comes out of your mouth is cheeky and I don’t know if you think it’s - it’s - it’s cute, or something - or you think you can just do whatever you like and no one will - will stop you. But I don’t appreciate - don’t want - one of my sixth grade students telling me… talking to me like you do. You don’t know everything, Miss Potter. Have you even remotely considered the possibility that you don’t have it all figured out?”

I supposed that was what Mr. M considered to be a telling-off. I took it calmly, avoiding his eyes and watching the patterns of fallen needles on the concrete below us. They blurred as my eyes filled with tears - but I didn’t believe in crying, so the tears stayed inside of me.

In my mind, the fact that he referred to me by my surname marked the end of whatever friendship we’d compiled since the beginning of the Twenty Things assignment. This knowledge didn’t affect me in any particular way. Most of my friendships had been falling apart over the year, and I wasn’t sure if I’d even liked Mr. Mendota to begin with.

I walked away. Buried deep, there was a shard of Kata who was tired of people leaving her; she wanted to do the leaving. So, I left him, walking methodically down his driveway, past his there-and-back-again car, between and under the craters of the streetlamps. Houses and families and picket fences meshed together at my sides, and I didn’t give them a passing glance. My eyes focused dully on whatever lay directly in front of me. A simple drone of whatever buzzed between my ears. It was my anthem. It wasn’t happy or sad or anything, really. Thoughtlessly and endlessly, I walked until I lost the will to do anything else. My mind swallowed me.

I am clearly unsinkable, I thought, but, as I made my way back to Number 4, I didn’t feel it.

~*~*~*~

That weekend, I found myself sitting next to Sherrie Parker’s mother in the Stonewall School Auditorium, watching the Bee and wishing I wasn’t. Other kids’ parents make me uncomfortable, but not for the obvious reason. You see, I’m what you might call ‘strong-willed’ - this means I don’t mesh well with adults of any kind. My tentative friendship with Mr. Millerton (and, all right, maybe Mr. Mendota) was an anomaly in the long, long history of me hating anyone who had even the slightest power over me. As soon as I could, I made an excuse and dashed out for some air.

I shuffled down the hallway (I’ve already spouted prosey nonsense about empty school hallways, right? We don’t need to revisit that? Awesome.) and bit my nails for something to do. The solitude settled around me like an old friend. Enjoying a break from the clamour of my life - both metaphorical and literal - I allowed the silence around me some space and tread lightly, smoothly.

Or maybe… not so silent. As I passed the girls’ lavatory, I heard a nervous shuffling from inside, as if someone was trying and failing to be unseen and unheard. I stopped dead in my tracks, debating and fighting the urge to investigate. I fought it and fought it and fought it. For, like, eight and a half seconds.

Curiosity killed the Kat, and I doubled back, poking my head in dubiously. Impenetrable darkness. Blinking, I took a tiny step forward.

If my life were a horror movie - and, believe me, it sometimes is - the tinkling, warning music would have crescendo’ed at that moment. A pair of luminously pale, phantomlike hands emerged from the blackness and grabbed the front of my shirt, yanking me forward into the shadows. I yelped in shock and - quickly sizing up my options - employed what my brother and I once called the Windmill.

Glad you asked. The Windmill is a defensive strategy developed by us Potters as soon as Dudley discovered that Harry minus glasses equals easier target. Basically, you stiffen your arms, thrust them out at random angles and swing your fists wildly and unpredictably. The perfect defense against both bullies and myopia.

Anyway, I was struggling and Windmilling and maybe cursing a bit when-

â€�“Ow!” a shrill, girlish voice cried indignantly.

My insides tightened; shock choked me. â€�“J-Jilly?” I croaked out.

â€�“You punched me!” she shrieked in answer. My eyes began to adjust to lonely darkness of the windowless bathroom, and I could see her. Knife-sharp features; colourless hair - wild and curly, but in a kinkier, scratchier way than mine. And a disarmed, furious expression.

â€�“You yanked me out of the hallway!” I fired back, sheepishly defensive.

â€�“You punched me!”

â€�“I thought I was being kidnapped!”

â€�“You pun-”

â€�“We’re walking in circles; I recognise that tree.”

Both breathing hard, we stared each other down with malice and the awkward knowledge that we had once been friends. This is Jilly Hanks, I thought. This is Jilly Hanks, who knows that I hate filing my nails; who knows that I like the smell of hairspray even though it makes me sneeze. This is Jilly, who brought me a me-sized stuffed bear when I had my appendix out two years ago. And this is Jilly Hanks, who is now a stranger.

Unsaid apologies deafened us.

â€�“I just… need to tell you something,” Jilly said.

I huffed, smoothing my hair. â€�“Is it ‘I’m sorry’?” I said, and I did not mean for pulling me into the abandoned girls’ loo and scaring me three-quarters to death. No. I meant for ignoring me and quitting me as a friend and not even offering an explanation.

(I never really did say what happened with Jilly, did I?

It’s coming up. Promise.)

â€�“No,” Jilly said, calmly. A resonate note of shame could be heard in her clipped tone. â€�“It’s not. It’s… just…” She took a huge breath, as if courage could be drawn from the air around us. â€�“Just read this, okay? And don’t make any cracks about how you’re allergic to books or something, because I saw you mow through Alice in Wonderland in a month and then start over. Just read it. And don’t bring it to class.”

She pushed a paperback of medium-thickness into my unprepared hands. I looked at it, and then up at her. Our eyes met. Stunned with what I saw in hers, I bit the inside of my mouth, trying to make the physical pain somehow overpower what I felt looking at her.

â€�“I do not even recognise you,” I said without meaning to. My voice came out dull and small.

I knew she was thinking the same thing.

Jilly ran off, then, either afraid of being seen with me or being seen by me.

I looked down at the book she had given me, and the first thing I saw was a name.

K. R. Mendota.

~*~*~*~

Dr. Hampton slowly undid the Velcro straps of my arms brace, gingerly sliding it off my arm. Six years had passed since Jeremy and his dad rushed me to the hospital, and the same Doc was still treating my broken bones (as Jeremy previously hinted, they were numerous and mostly all my fault).

â€�“Right,” Doc said softly, carefully turning over my arm in his large, neatly manicured hands. I stared at a point on the wall, swinging my feet absently. The paper strip covering the examination table crinkled beneath me. Doc prodded my palm and asked me to wiggle my fingers. I did, without pain. This break was far from the worst I’d ever experienced. Eight weeks in a Velcro brace was nearly twice what I’d needed, but Aunt P had put off making a check-up appointment with the Doc.

Just to be sure, though, he put me through some routine exercises. I zipped through them all. â€�“I could do a cartwheel, too, if you like. And my friend Sherrie just taught me how to stand on my head. Turns out all this is a pretty good cushion.” I patted my mass of hair with my free hand. â€�“We also think bullets might bounce off of it, but I didn’t actually want to test that one.”

Doc laughed. â€�“No cartwheels necessary, Miss Potter. I pronounce you completely healed. Let’s be a little more careful next time, though, eh?”

â€�“Sure,” I said breezily. If I had a Sickle for every time someone told me that… I’d probably have, like, two Galleons, I thought.

I hopped from the exam table. Doc scribbled a few things on his clipboard and, without looking up, neatly caught my high-five. Taking advantage of my newly-freed left hand, I gathered my things and stuffed my feet into my boots. My wrist felt oddly exposed and vulnerable, though of course it was in no worse position than the rest of me. Odd. It was as if-

â€�“So, where’s your brother?” Doc asked. â€�“Can’t remember the last time I had you in here without him. Kid skipped school for three days when you were in the pediatric surgery wing, right?”

I shrugged, as if Doc had brought up the weather (false alarm, it’d started snowing again) instead of the cornerstone of all my problems. â€�“He’s at a school up North.”

Doc nodded nonchalantly. I couldn’t tell if he’d really been interested. â€�“Well, good for him. Okay - stay safe, Miss Potter, and let’s hope we never see each other again, yeah?”

I smiled and said goodbye, beginning to make my way back to the lobby. I knew Great Whinging General like I would come to know the secret passageways of Hogwarts.

Chewing my bottom lip, I tried to figure out what had just happened. Doc had brought up my brother, and I had not felt the stab of loneliness and betrayal slide through me. I had found I could talk about my brother and hardly feel it. Had I grown used to being separated? Was it getting better? Could I go days without thinking of him or missing him, and feel nothing?

Did I want that?

~*~*~*~

(The first part of) The Jilly Part:

If you want the short version, I wasn’t there and then I was, and Jilly was there and then she wasn’t. If you want the long version, I guess it started with gin rummy.

I am uncommonly good at gin rummy.

At least, I’m uncommonly good at beating my brother at gin rummy.

â€�“Harry,” I called, leaning against the doorframe of our bedroom, shuffling a deck of cards in what I intended to be an offhandedly cool, threatening manner. I dropped a few and kicked them aside so he wouldn’t notice.

He looked up from 1001 Magical Herbs and Fungi. (Neither of us were ever especially studious, but those new schoolbooks did hold a certain promise of discovery.) â€�“What? Oh, not right now, Kat.” He paused; grinned in a way that was supposed to reach out and invite me into his side of the magic. â€�“Hey, come take a look at this - there’s this plant called the Bau Bau root; it can-”

His offering did nothing to soften me. Effectively cutting him off, I tossed the cards on the ground; they landed like choices. â€�“Whatever,” I said. â€�“You can play fifty-two pick-up, instead.”

â€�“Kat!” I heard him call after me, shocked, as I stormed off to the attic, which was accessed by a small door next to the linen cupboard. A slanted, narrow staircase led me to the place that had come to be my refuge. For occasions such as these, when I needed to be alone, I had smuggled up my drawing pads, a bag of marshmallows, and (purely to annoy him) Harry’s copy of A History of Magic. As I said before, the Hogwarts books intrigued me, and I paged through the first few chapters when bored. I’d never been much good at reading - the words swam off the page and reordered themselves - but I tried.

I sat against a pile of dusty boxes and stared apathetically at the sketches littered around me. The main subject of these was the boy I’d met in Diagon Alley - Zane something. Whenever the weight of what had happened in the last week became too thick and nauseating inside me, I had been coming up here and drawing him as I remembered. The oily wink of the summer sun off his ridiculous leather jacket; the flat bridge of his nose, which was slightly too big for his face; eyes brown like milky tea. His voice added to the orchestra of confusion playing continuously in my mind: I know… I am, when I asserted that I wasn’t crazy. But he had seemed so sane; so cool…

Sighing, I flipped a nearly-finished drawing of his face over to its blank side and cracked A History, hoping to replace one commotion with another.

In the latter days of the final �“”kirtan covenant, I read, chaos reigned. The Usurpers neglected the duties of the government they had seized, paying attention only to their Dark agenda. Anarchy claimed the streets of magical and Muggle Paris. Fearing for their lives, many attempted to leave the country - as stated in Section 19.4, thought, the Usurpers kept tight constraints on emigration, and trans-continental Apparition was not yet advanced enough to be considered safe. The people’s desperation for escape led to the construction of L'Évasion - a wizard-built expansion of the Parisian catacombs that grew to span a good portion of the European continent. In this manner, citizens were able to flee from the tyranny.

After the covenant was broken at Tripoli, L'Évasion was effectively abandoned. Left unchecked, the magic used to create such an intricate structure began to mutate. This resulted in an entirely unsafe magical anomaly: a veritable, literally unnavigable labyrinth of tunnels lurking fifty feet below modern Europe. Today, these tunnels â€�“change” frequently, and an assortment of Dark creatures call them home. Many who have attempted to explore or map what remains of L'Évasion have not returned, and those who do tell some very horrible tales indeed.

(At the time, I did not understand a single word of that. But you might want to keep it in mine, for future reference.)

There was a footnote: Added to Bagshot’s original work, c.1948. -A.W.

Abruptly, a feeling I had once dubbed â€�“Cupboard Syndrome” crashed down upon me. The room shrunk, and I couldn’t draw breath from the air around me. The weight of what had happened, and the weight of what was to come, sat on my chest and suppressed my lungs as I tried to inflate them.

The problem was this: it just didn’t make any sense to me. How could anyone possibly think it was a good idea to split up Harry and I? We were a team. Without him, who would make sure I kept my marks up in school? Who would prevent me from doing things like stealing the neighbors’ lawnmower, and then inadvertently setting it on fire?

(Though, if you want to get technical about it, the whole lawnmower debacle was really Harry’s fault. Merlin - I keep bringing up these stories that I’ve got no time to tell! Sorry.)

Without me, who would remind him that his hair was weird? Who would entertain him by blowing up stolen power tools? (Once again, his fault.)

Anyway, it was a very symbiotic relationship, mine and Harry’s. And I could not imagine how it could ever be any different.

The barest hint of a plan began to form in my mind. I could go to Hogwarts, couldn’t I? Now. I could go now and speak to whomever was in charge. This Dumbledore bloke. Yes, I’d board a train - I’d freaking walk if it got me there - and I’d find this school, walk calmly and professionally into the Headmaster’s office, and present my case.

I know I’m a year younger¸ I imagined myself saying. And I know I’m not all that smart. But I can do this. I have to be able to do this.

I suppose, if I’d been older and smarter, I would have known it wasn’t a question of being old enough and smart enough. But we’ll get to that later.

Satisfied with my plan, I launched into preparation. From under a stack of boxes, I unearthed a dusty, smelly duffle-bag big enough to hold A History of Magic, the bag of marshmallows, and a jumper. Feeling very sly, I snuck out of the attic, past Harry’s and my bedroom - I paused there for a moment, very much wanting to tell him of my intentions, but though better of it - and down the stairs.

Only then did it strike me that a person needs more than marshmallows and books to make it all the way to an unknown part of Scotland. A person needs cash.

I had five pounds and a cubic zirconium earring to my name, and it was all hidden away in a cigar tin, stashed under Jilly Hanks’ bed. The faraway nature of this hiding place was mostly due to Dudley, who sometimes nicked my stuff because he knew he wouldn’t be the one getting in trouble.

I hadn’t thought about or seen Jilly since coming home from Diagon Alley one week previously, which was sort of unintentional - but not entirely. My obsession had become this: to get out of Little Whinging and go to a magical school with my brother. Unlike Harry, though, I had people I actually liked in Little Whinging. Namely, Jilly and Jeremy. I’d subconsciously avoided them both, perhaps because I did not want to face what I was working so hard to lose. Jeremy said it best, that night in the foyer: All your friends are here. For the life of me, I can’t see why you’d want to leave.

But, faced with losing my family and losing my friends, I knew what I would pick. And, faced with an international journey with no money in my pockets, I knew I had to go see Jilly.

But what would I say? Hey, Jilly. Listen, I’m sorry we haven’t talked all summer, and I can’t tell you why. But you know how you have my life savings under your bed? I need it. Can I come in?

Even in my mind, it sounded stupid.

Ten minutes later, I found myself standing outside Jilly’s bedroom window, which was on the first floor, since she had sleepwalked when she was younger. Slightly out of breath (I’d pedaled there at, like, the speed of sound), I said, â€�“Hey, Jilly. Listen, I’m sorry we haven’t talked all summer, and I can’t tell you why. But you know how you have my life savings under your bed? I need it. Can I come in?”

Jilly looked back at me, pale and confused, one hand holding back her lace curtains. Her hair was done into a neat French plait, and smooth, classical music played from a stereo in the corner. Jilly’s parents were the sort of people that thought Mozart would greatly increase their daughter’s academic potential. â€�“Er. Sure,” she said, after a delicate cough into her elbow.

So, you know how I bite my lip a lot? Well, Jilly coughed. It wasn’t because there was anything physically impeding her airway - rather, it was just something to do.

Jilly took my hand and helped me clamber over her windowsill, into her white, clean room. We were used to this procedure, as Jilly’s mother silently disapproved of me.

My bag snagged on the windowsill, its contents spilling over the floor. "I'll get it," she said as I bent to pick up A History of Magic, which had slid beneath the bed.

So I just stood there, sweaty and disheveled, in a room painted an almost-white blue and trimmed with lace, feeling patently out of place.

With another cough, Jilly emerged with the cigar tin that held my life savings. I, sitting lightly on the edge of her bed, reached out and took it from her. We stared at each other for a weighted moment, and then she said, â€�“What’s that smell?”

I grimaced. â€�“Well. It’s not this backpack that I didn’t steal from the attic.”

Rolling her eyes, Jilly shut the window. The hangings around her four-poster bed (as a girl who grew up sleeping in a cupboard, it is difficult for me to describe how deeply I envied Jilly’s canopy bed), which had been billowing in the breeze that leaked in from the outside world, collapsed around me.

â€�“Well,” I said, because I didn’t know what to say, and I wanted to hug her. She gazed at me, clearly befuddled by my sudden and unceremonious appearance. The reality of leaving and being left struck me again, and I tried to soften the situation. â€�“Jilly, I’m sor-” I began, but she cut me off.

â€�“You’re running away again, aren’t you?” she asked. She seemed tired.

â€�“It’s complic-”

â€�“You are a mess.”

She meant it metaphorically, and she was right. I felt like a mess. But I also felt cornered.

â€�“It’s complicated.”

Jilly sniffed in a way that reminded me of Aunt P, and crossed her arms over her chest. â€�“I bet it’s not.”

And so I told her everything. I mean, I left out the bits about magic and Hagrid and Diagon Alley, but the essentials remained. Jilly listened. She let me talk. She let me tell her about how Harry had been accepted to a school up North, and how I hadn’t been accepted, and my brilliant plot to change those facts.

When I was through, Jilly raised an eyebrow. â€�“Is that all?” I nodded. She walked to her desk and retrieved a pen and a piece of stationary. â€�“Kata. Instead of hitchhiking across the country - write a freaking letter.”

I smiled. See, that’s why Jilly and I were good together. She balanced out my half-baked antics with cool logic and perspective. Often, I ignored her words of wisdom, but in this case she had a point. With five quid and no way to travel, I wouldn’t make it very far.

So. I took Jilly’s stationary home, not wanting her looking over my shoulder as I wrote. After many false tries on scrap paper and many trips to the dictionary and thesaurus, I composed the following.

From the desk of Jillian C. Hanks Kata

August 14 1991

Dear professor Dumbledor.

Hello. My name is Katarine Potter. We have never met but I have been told you are headmaster of Hogwarts. My brother Harry Potter recently got a letter from your school about magic. This was new information. I do not know a lot about magic yet but I like it. I am not a big fan of owls tho.

I know I am younger then Harry and also not so good in school but it is not a good idea for me not to go with him. I think my brother would miss me

Even tho I’m younger I would study a lot. Especially jinxes. And I would try for fewer detentions but no promises.

If its a finanshul problem, do not worry. I have recently come into some mony.

Please reconsider. I would be very greatful.

Sinseerly,

Katarine Potter
The attic
4 privet drive
Little Whinging
Surrey

p.s. I am sorrey for any spelling mistakes in the last part of this letter. My cusin took the dictonary to use for a footstool. I am also sorrey that I do not write good like I talk. I will work on this.

I hoped that would suffice.

~*~*~*~

This is how Twenty Things That Make the World Go ‘Round, by Kailey R. Mendota, begins:

The following is a raw, unabridged record of how I moved to Swartownshot and started a small revolution in the year after my sister Bea did a nosedive off a bridge. She was eighteen, and it still feels odd to use the past tense when speaking of her.

It’s like this: there was once a girl named Beatrice Frampton and everyone called her Bea and she was beautiful and brave and she smiled all the time—only, not so much, now that I think of it - and she was full of sadness the way most people are full of blood. So now there isn’t a girl named Beatrice Frampton, called Bea or otherwise. She left us to sort those things out, and - believe me - I was plenty mad at her about it for a long time.

But.

She may have mucked up our lives, but she was only returning the favor.

So, I guess the following is also a raw, unabridged record of everything that happened in the eighteen years before the nosedive and the revolution.

From what I understood of that (which, actually, was quite a bit), I thought that I would have really, really, gotten along with this Kailey Mendota. She wrote kind of like how I thought, but how I could never capture on paper.

~*~*~*~

So, in the first week of March, I sat at the kitchen table with all of these things churning around in my head - things of the Jilly variety and the Twenty variety and the Mr. Mendota had a sister? variety. I wore a striped stocking cap with these ridiculous tassels, because I needed a haircut in a way you can’t imagine. Aunt P bustled around the kitchen, doing something, but we ignored each other. I ignored everything, really. I sat and sat and stared out the fogged windows and thought, Gee, it sure would be nice to have an older sibling to talk to right now.

A fresh batch of snow worked its way over the backyard as I watched. Huffing in frustration, I tugged my stocking cap over my eyes and let my head fall onto the table with a satisfying, yarn-muffled thunk.

Aunt P looked up. â€�“If you’re going to mope around the house all day, make yourself useful. Go get the mail.”

I shrugged, thinking that I didn’t really have a good reason not to. â€�“All right,” I said as I trudged out of the kitchen, â€�“but just so you know, the last time one of us went to get the mail, we wound up in the middle of the North Sea trying to light plastic bags on fire.”

She didn’t hear me.

â€�“Well, maybe there’ll be a letter for me,” I mused as I made my way down the hall, tapping the door to the cupboard under the stairs as if for luck. â€�“And maybe I’ll move to a faraway land and live with flying monkeys in a castle made of gumdrops.”

I froze, realising what I was doing.

â€�“Bloody he - I’m talking to myself.”

Shaking my head, I scooped up the letters and sorted through them. â€�“Bill. Bill. Fashion catalogue - sorry, Aunt P, that’s mine now. Bill. Still talking to myself. Smeltings newsletter. Shut up, me!”

And then I saw it. Opened it. Read it.

Holy hell.

Oh good, my voice is in my head again.

But mostly, HOLY HELL.

I wandered back into the kitchen, dazed and a inexplicably a little frightened. Dumping the rest of the mail on the table, I collapsed into a chair and read through the letter again. Made sure my poor reading comprehension skills weren’t messing with me. Was it real?

I checked the envelope again.

It was real.

Aunt P materialized behind me. â€�“Took you long en - What are you reading?” she demanded, her voice sharp and, yes, a little panicked.

My face felt slack and molten; my expression could have been anything. I looked at her and she looked at me and holy hell.

When I didn’t respond, my aunt assumed the worst. â€�“Did you - oh goodness - no you didn’t! Of course you didn’t! You can’t! Give me that-”

I wrenched it out of her reach. â€�“It’s not from Hogwarts,” I said, and she clapped her hand over her mouth as if I’d just uttered some horrible word. â€�“I won the Surrey Regional Young Writers’ Competition.”