When Ginny Weasley awoke one cloudy morning half way through July, it was one of the few times she couldn’t hear any of her brothers already awake. She glanced toward her wardrobe to decide what to wear. This wardrobe was one of the few things she owned that was filled with unusual items. In it, she mostly had Muggle clothes like jeans, t-shirts and those hooded jumpers, which were slightly more durable than normal wizard wear. She didn’t have much, gazing back and forth at what was hung there, so she always went to great lengths to take care of what she did have. Not that it really mattered, because her mother could fix just about anything that wasn’t too mangled by an unruly girl.

Her parents at first thought it quite odd that she often asked for t-shirts when browsing in thrift stores, but compared to her brothers, this peculiarity was the least of their worries. Ginny had hoped once that if she had shown enough interest in Muggles, her father would agree to let her study in primary school with the rest of the kids her age from the nearby village. However, a few years ago her mother and father broke the news to Ginny that they just couldn’t afford it with so many of her brothers still in wizard school.

Everyone Ginny knew had gone to wizard school. She had four older brothers currently attending Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Shopping with her mother in Diagon Alley, she heard all sorts of stories of kids from wizarding families who were waiting for their eleventh birthdays to get their letters by owl. There were half-bloods who worried whether they would get them or not, and half-bloods who didn’t know they had a magical parent until they got their own letter. Then, interestingly enough the Muggle-borns, who didn’t know anybody in the wizarding world, and were visited not by an owl but rather by someone from Hogwarts itself.

Ginny, in fact, came from a very long line of wizards. Nobody in her family even thought twice about whether or not she would be accepted at Hogwarts. Last year in Ron’s first-year letter on his eleventh birthday Hogwarts expected a reply by the last day of July regarding whether or not he would accept or decline their invitation to attend. There was only one small complication Ginny had only recently come to realize. That was, her eleventh birthday came after that fateful reply no later than date.

Ginny clearly remembered when half of her brothers received their letters on their eleventh birthdays. She was too young to remember the others. She had two other brothers besides the four currently attending Hogwarts, both of which had already graduated.

Bill, the eldest, worked for the nearest wizarding bank, Gringotts in London. He was currently stationed in Egypt, breaking curses protecting ancient Egyptian tombs and collecting gold for the goblins that ran the bank. He always wrote with exasperation about the horrible ways in which Muggles had died trying to bypass the magical traps set by ancient wizards. When Ginny was younger her mum sometimes wouldn’t let her read Bill’s letters, fearing they would give her nightmares. Apparently, the days Bill was in any real danger were few and far between though. Most of his job required him poring over maps or texts, and translating hieroglyphics and ancient runes into English, Latin, or Greek and figuring out how to disable the traps before even attempting to open the tombs. Whenever Bill would talk about work and go into detail about the curse traps around tombs he would pull out all these complicated charts and notes all of which Ginny found very dull.

Charlie on the other hand, made Ginny’s mum give a great worried sigh whenever he was mentioned. Charlie was Ginny’s other graduated brother, the second eldest, who also lived abroad. These days Charlie stayed in Romania, where he worked with wild dragons. Last Christmas Ginny and her parents went to visit Charlie on the Longhorn reserve in Romania. The Longhorns had very pretty golden horns, it appalled her that they had been slaughtered just for those horns so much so in the past that their population had dwindled down to next to nothing.

Charlie explained that wizards used the horns in spells and potions, that the blood, hide, and some organs were also harvested, and that much of a hunted dragon was used for practical wizard purposes. They weren’t simply making trinkets like when Muggles had poached elephants or rhinoceroses to near extinction. Working at the reserve everyone helped the main breeding program to bring back the Longhorn numbers.

Mollified only slightly, Ginny had continued her tour and instantly fell in love with the Peruvian Viper. She loved the way the light caught on the orangy-red smooth copper scales, like campfire in the form of an animal. And they were so cute and tiny compared to the other dragons, the adults not getting much taller or longer than her father’s Muggle car, which was sort of like an automated carriage. Smiling, she told Charlie this was the enclosure where she’d spend most of her time if she worked here like he did and would focus on breeding these adorable little guys. Charlie had laughed and told her that everyone here stayed as far away from the Peruvians as possible because one of their most preferred food sources was people.

Sure enough, glancing back at the enclosure, two of them had come up close and were eyeing Ginny with such an intensity she could feel her heart begin to hammer in her chest. At the time everything around her had been drowned out and for a moment, all she could see in the world was their faces, taking in her every move. Charlie had broken the predator-prey spell when he spoke and pointed out their small fangs, telling Ginny that even if you did manage to evade one, getting nicked by one of those was still more lethal than the same thing happening from one of the other breeds.

Ginny had calmed down a bit after visiting an Antipodean Opaleye. Another pretty dragon, if you were into girly rainbow-like pearly iridescent shimmers in the scales in their hides, it was easily Ginny’s mum’s favorite in the least. Opaleyes weren’t considered aggressive and Charlie had agreed that they were a bit boring. He didn’t personally see to these dragons very often.

Charlie worked with the bolder dragons similar to the Romanian Longhorns that needed many highly trained and strong wizards such as the Norwegian Ridgebacks, Hungarian Horntails, and the Ukrainian Ironbellies, of which he said there was a rumor of one in the depths of Gringotts even though Bill wouldn’t confirm it. Charlie looked at Ginny with a sly smile though and said Bill hadn’t denied it either. Ginny had just shaken her head, already well aware of how her brothers teased each other, and her for that matter.

Ginny’s dad wanted to see what Charlie did on a regular daily basis and Charlie put his mother slightly at ease when he said that his team mainly just studied the dragons’ lives. Ever since Dumbledore discovered the twelve uses of dragon’s blood, whatever they were, the wizarding world has been adamant about studying dragons and finding out what other uses their magical properties could achieve.

Back in her room, the knot Ginny had been carrying in her stomach all summer began to tighten at the thought that she herself might never get to learn what the twelve uses of dragon’s blood were.

Traditionally, students received the letter and sent their reply back regarding whether or not they would be attending Hogwarts at all on their eleventh birthday. Ginny’s birthday however, fell right into the roughly six weeks of between when the letter would already be past due at the end of July and the cutoff date in September that forced all students, Muggle or wizard, to wait to begin school the following year. Her eleventh birthday was less than a month away, but the reply for the acceptance or declination letter Hogwarts sends to all of its first-year students was due back nearly two weeks before her birthday even came around. If Ginny didn’t get her invitation letter soon, it meant she either wasn’t deemed magical enough to attend Hogwarts, or that she would have to unfairly wait another full year before she could go.

Trying to tell her mum or dad about her worries over the letter was nearly impossible. With so many people in the house, Ginny rarely got a word in edgewise unless all her brothers were outside. Quite different than when she was alone at the house with her mother all year long while they were at school and their father at work. It was okay up until last year when Ron, the youngest Weasley boy who was just a little over a year older than Ginny, started at Hogwarts. Ron was twelve now and beginning his second year this fall. Being absolutely the only kid in the house during that time was very lonely. She couldn’t stand the idea of having another year of hearing about what her brothers were getting up to and learning or getting into trouble for without being a part of it. Whenever Ginny could broach the subject of her missing letter neither one of her parents seemed anywhere near as bothered as she was and they never tried to solve every problem for their kids like some parents she’d see in Diagon Alley anyway, probably because there were so many of us, Ginny thought.

Mum did her best, she supposed, teaching Ginny not only Muggle primary school lessons, but household charms, and proper pronunciation of verb conjugations in the magical language as well. Even if Ginny only practiced wand and wrist movements with a fresh cut switch from outside, she was at least much better at her Greek and Latin pronunciation than she used to be, better than Ron even.

Ginny hated the switches that she practiced with; no matter how short she cut them, they always felt too wobbly and messed with her wrist movements, meaning her mum would make her do them over and over again until she got them right with the makeshift wand. Ginny’s mum had promised her a brand new wand of her own for when she started at Hogwarts, brand new school robes, and a small pet of her own too since she couldn’t take Abellios. Bill and Charlie usually sent a small pile of gold in the middle of summer to help out with all the school supply shopping and this time they both had sent more than usual, knowing five younger brothers and sisters were attending this year. Last year, Charlie had helped by sending his old wand as a gift to Ron as well.

She was glad that girls’ wizard robes differed from guys’ robes a bit and that she didn’t get hand-me-downs from her brothers in those at least. Everything else was going to need to be purchased second hand though, books, cauldron, and potion scales. With only two graduated brothers, there just weren’t enough hand-me-downs to go around.

Ginny reached into the closet and pulled out a slate colored t-shirt; it was a bit big, but that was the point in all the clothes that she ever asked about getting. She pulled on an old pair of jeans handed down from one of the twins her mum had shown her how to patch up last year. Finally she dug around the not too dirty pile of clothes her mother hated and pulled out an old subdued-green colored hooded jumper she’d been given from Charlie and hastily threw her hair into a ponytail. It was finally getting long, so she managed a few braid plaits, more to keep it from getting too windblown later rather than any sense of style as she’d been taught to braid for. She tied off the end and tiptoed downstairs.

The bottom of the staircase came to a little landing where the Weasleys stored feed for their animals. Going straight on the landing would take you out the back door, and turning right would take you into the kitchen. Ginny could hear her mother bustling around in the kitchen after all. She carefully opened the chicken feed bin and half-filled two of the small drawstring bag pouches they used to carry the feed outside with, then she stuffed some bird seed to the remainder in both bags her mum kept for the robins, sparrows, and quail when they came for the summer. Both pouches went into her front pocket, one of which she also tied the drawstring to one of her belt loops on her jeans so she wouldn’t lose it if it fell out later. As stealthily as she knew how she snuck over to the back door and managed to open a space just wide enough without it creaking for her to slip outside. If her mother saw her, she’d be roped into practicing more kitchen spells before the boys woke up and breakfast started, and as much as she wanted to talk to her mum again about her non-existent acceptance letter, she couldn’t miss this chance to practice riding a broom in the orchard on a cool brightening sunny morning when all her brothers slept in at the same time.

Once outside, the chickens flurried over to Ginny as soon as she stepped off the porch. She took out one of the drawstring bags and began throwing corn and bird seed to them to keep them as quiet as possible, and right on cue the garden birds followed the chickens. With the sentries adequately bribed and too busy to cluck after her, Ginny took off for the broom shed.

There were three brooms in the shed; one of them was Ron’s old Shooting Star that Bill and Percy used to ride around on, which was originally a hand-me-down from Arthur, Ginny’s dad. Percy was the next eldest brother after Charlie, he was turning sixteen soon and starting his sixth year at Hogwarts. The other brooms were both Cleansweep Fives, not as good as the Cleansweep Seven out now and nowhere near in league with the Nimbus 2000, but the best the Weasleys had. The Cleansweep Fives belonged to Ginny’s older twin brothers Fred and George. Fred and George were fourteen and starting their fourth year at Hogwarts this fall; both of them had previously made their house Quidditch team and Charlie, who used to be a Quidditch captain, chipped in with Bill to get them their very own brooms to play on so they didn’t have to use old school ones. These were what Ginny looked forward to when they came home on holidays.

Ginny grabbed the one on the left this time; the one on the right she used last time and she wanted to get a good feel between the slight differences between two brooms of the same model. Ginny loved flying and loved watching Quidditch but was rarely allowed to play or practice with her brothers. She didn’t have a broom of her own, and they weren’t keen on standing around on the ground taking turns either. Mum said it was a boy thing, and that Ginny could use the Shooting Star all she wanted when they were away at school. Up until last year though she had had to sneak out here when Ron wasn’t around to notice to get a chance. Riding his broom in peace was the only consolation she had had while all her brothers were away at school and even though she knew she would have that advantage again if she didn’t attend Hogwarts this year, the old Shooting Star’s ride wasn’t worth missing out on learning magic with her own wand.

Quick before anyone at home missed her she mounted the broom and took off through the rows of trees in the orchard. Stopping at a tree that held quite a few ripe apples, she paused to take out the drawstring bag she had emptied for the chickens and garden birds and looked for two of the biggest apples she could fit to put inside it. Tying it closed, she looped the ends of the strings through another belt loop so she wouldn’t lose that one either before putting it back in her pocket and took off again.

She stayed below the trees’ canopy so Muggle villagers wouldn’t see her and slowed down when she got near a tree grove bordering the Weasleys' land and the neighbors to wind her way slowly over briars and under branch hangings at the grove entrance and then practiced her acceleration and braking both while turning and rising and diving. The trees inside the tree grove were very old and had many thick branches spread far apart from each other, making maneuverability fairly easy for the practiced rider. When she felt confident enough with the controls, she looked for and began to chase squirrels up and down and through the branches of the grove trees.

The little gray squirrels were quick and very agile, bounding from one branch to another, racing around tree trunks, and even jumping from one tree’s branch clear over to the wisps of another tree’s branches. Once, a couple of years back, a squirrel actually missed, and Ginny dove for it before it hit the ground. At the time she was riding Ron’s old Shooting Star though and never would have caught up, but luckily it managed to snag a branch a bit further down the tree with its front paws and didn’t seem any worse for the wear when it scampered away. After that incident, Ginny didn’t chase them quite so closely, but rather followed them parallel to the trunks and along the branches as they scurried along.

She never knew which path they would follow and often laughed out loud when they out-maneuvered her. When she was younger they got away from her easily but just this past summer and the one before that, Ginny found herself nearly able to brush their tails without even seeming to hardly try when on one of the Cleansweeps. She didn’t know if this was because she had more reach with longer arms now, or if the squirrels were simply that accustomed to her after generations of her visiting their grove, or if she was actually getting better at flying. She supposed it was a combination of all three.

After more than a quarter of an hour of practice with the squirrels Ginny took a break and landed on the ground, panting slightly and holding a stitch in her side from the constant balance corrections on the broom in the air. The squirrels all began to edge down the trunks towards the ground, stomachs heaving as well. Ginny began to click her tongue, much like one does when calling a dog, or any animal towards you, and looked around for Abellios, a rare black squirrel she had found as a pup, or a kit, she still wasn’t sure what the correct term was, a juvenile in the least.

Abellios had been wandering around in the apple orchard in late March when there was still some snow on the ground, easily seen with his black fur. Ginny had scooped him up and not being able to locate a single other squirrel in the area had taken him straight home, letting him go outside as he pleased all summer long in order to learn to be on his own. That fall Ginny had taken him farther and farther away from the house until finally she introduced him to the tree grove. After a few days had passed, Abellios stopped coming back to the Burrow, the wizarding name for the Weasleys’ home. Ginny had always been able to find him in the tree grove though.

Sure enough, Abellios came down a tree, and when Ginny produced seed and grain in her hand he came and sat down right beside her. She began to throw the chicken and bird feed out to the other squirrels, and placed a small pile in front of Abellios. When all of her feed supply was gone she reached over and stroked the fur on the top of Abellios’s head, who still stayed calm while she did so. Ginny knew better than to pick him up or scratch him anymore; living out in the grove he’d more than likely picked up all the bugs and parasites again that her mother normally spelled off of animals before letting them come into the house. Abellios had just turned three this past spring. Ginny wasn’t sure how long squirrels lived. She tried looking them up once in Flourish and Blotts while her mother was helping her brothers purchase text books for school, but as squirrels aren’t magical she couldn’t find anything about them anywhere. When she asked the manager he pointed her in the direction of the small section dedicated to Muggles, but there was nothing squirrel related.

Ginny’s breathing returned to normal and she waited until the squirrels had gathered all the feed she’d thrown them in thanks for her practice and moved away to forage elsewhere. After that she got on her broom again, whereupon the remnant squirrels scurried away, and she headed to other edge of the tree grove opposite the apple orchard. Over there was a paddock, with four horses in it. Two bright bays, a somewhat young flea-bitten gray, and an old sorrel.

All of them seemed pretty gentle, Ginny knew the neighbor girl who took care of them went away to Muggle college in the winter times, but didn’t see her nearly as much the past couple of summers as she had in years before. She put up her hood which she wore in case Muggles were near or when it rained and flew slowly and low in the tree line that ran parallel to the paddock to a vantage point she knew well. There, she spied the cars in the neighbor’s driveway. All of them were gone, including the girl who came outside to see to the horses. Ginny thought she may have gotten a job which she worked at in the village, and that was possibly why she wasn’t in the pasture as often during the summer times anymore.

When she was sure no one was home, Ginny flew back to the back of the paddock, the part that went into the tree grove and provided shade for the horses, and again clicked her tongue calling the animals toward her like she had seen the Muggle girl do many times before. The two bays trotted right up to Ginny, by now used to seeing her on her flying broomstick. Together the three of them raced out to the tree line and then clear of the trees but turning to gallop parallel so Ginny could nip back inside the grove if she needed too. The bays tossed their heads and would whinny their excitement at the race.

The other two horses always looked on from a distance, the old sorrel occasionally following their progress with her head, the gray timidly keeping the sorrel between herself and Ginny as Ginny played with the bays. The gray wasn’t new so much anymore, yet it wasn’t untrained either. Ginny almost got it to take an apple from her a few weeks ago, but it stayed far away since then. The sorrel on the other hand, didn’t seem to be afraid nor to particularly care for Ginny. The sorrel grazed where it wanted and would let Ginny approach, let her pet it, and even took apples when they were offered but for the most part left well enough alone. One time Ginny saw it take off running across the paddock and chase a fox back into the tree grove, but the old girl had immediately settled down after that.

Ginny always kept an eye on her when playing with the bays. The old sorrel paid attention to everything and could hear Muggle cars coming from a long way off; she tended to point her ear at the road before turning her head to look at the passing vehicle, giving Ginny just enough time needed to turn and fly back into the trees. For now though she was just grazing contently. Ginny turned her broom for another race with the bays. She loved watching them run, they just looked so free and powerful and confident and proud; she wasn’t sure what her neighbors used them for. She knew the gray was for jumping, as was what the old sorrel used to do. She also knew that the bays were geldings and the other two were called mares. She didn’t know any of their names though. Whenever the neighbor girl was out in the paddock with them Ginny could never hear her call them by name.

The sun was starting to really warm the air by now, Ginny got down from the broom and one of the bays walked up to her and bumped his nose against her sweater pocket. Feeding the horses was special to Ginny, just like when she fed Abellios, and she didn’t want to have to run back into the trees if a Muggle car approached, so she laid the broom on a patch of dry grass. She got out the drawstring bag and pulled out one of the apples.

Both bays started tossing their heads up and down in anticipation. Ginny got out the other apple and put the empty bag back into her pocket with the other one. Holding one apple flat in each hand she fed them to both horses at the same time. She had learned before not to feed them one after another, because no matter which was second fed it always stamped and bugled its frustration and Ginny needed the animals she visited and trained with on her broomstick to stay quiet.

Giving the bays a final rub on their foreheads she walked back into the tree line and mounted the broom, flew through the tree grove, zoomed down one of the orchard rows and landed right by the broom shed. She had just put the borrowed broom away and shut the door, her hand still on the handle when from around the corner came Percy. Percy was the only brother who regularly got up as early as Ginny and their mum. Odd seeing him outside though; he usually stayed in his room and Ginny was able to sneak away whether he was awake or not.

â€�“Don’t even think about flying off on one of your little disappearing acts. Mum went upstairs to look for you after calling for you about a hundred times from downstairs and sent me outside to stop you,” said Percy. â€�“Come on, she wants you to help her with breakfast; she woke up Ron and the twins calling for you.”

â€�“Why can’t you help her with breakfast?” Ginny asked, somewhat miffed by his bossy tone.

â€�“I have N.E.W.T classes to prepare for. As you well know because I’ve been…” Percy began.

Ginny, however, had cut him off, â€�“Yeah, uh huh, and numerous more secret letters to write and send, no doubt.” She was getting better at that, cutting off her brothers as often as they normally did her. Her brothers always said she talked nonstop and yet she was the one who was most often interrupted. She supposed it was unfair to practice on Percy though, who never resorted to childish games ever. Percy was fifteen going on fifty. He had become very tight lipped when she brought up his letters and they began walking back to the house in silence. Percy’s birthday was coming up too, now that she thought about it, which meant he also fell into that small six weeks window of turmoil she was currently worried about.

â€�“Hey, Perce? Um, when did you get your invitation letter from Hogwarts when you turned eleven? Was it on your birthday? I mean, isn’t your birthday after the reply no later than date? …I mean, did you get two letters or something that year? Because…” Ginny trailed off not really knowing how to say ‘because she was worried’ without sounding as fretful as their mum could get.

Percy though, had paid little attention to what Ginny did not say and answered her questions directly, â€�“Yeah, I got two letters, one a couple of weeks into the summer holidays and the other with the school list for first-years when Bill and Charlie got their lists.” This should have cheered her up but was already problematic for Ginny; it was already past a couple of weeks into the school holidays and she still hadn’t received anything.

â€�“So, you didn’t get any letter on your eleventh birthday at all?” said Ginny, she wanted to be absolutely sure.

â€�“No and I should think not, my birthday is just days away from Hogwarts Express leaving King’s Cross. It would be ridiculous to wait until the last minute like that. Both for us to shop for supplies, and the school administration paperwork I imagine,” said Percy.

So what was taking so long for Ginny’s letter to arrive? Today was the fifteenth of July, almost a whole month after everyone came back for the summer holidays this year. They got to the back door and went inside. With Percy right beside her, Ginny didn’t put away the drawstring bags for chicken feed just yet. They rounded the corner and Percy went to see if Hermes, his owl, had come back this morning while Molly, Ginny’s mum, stood at the stove and a basket of eggs sat on the counter beside her.

â€�“Percy got to you before you took off again, did he then?” Molly asked.

Ginny hesitated for a single heartbeat and then said, â€�“Yes.”

Before she could ask if her mother wanted her to work on the toast to go with the eggs Molly replied, â€�“Really? Because the chickens didn’t swarm me when I stood outside forty-five minutes ago looking for you in the yard when you didn’t answer me from upstairs.” Molly turned around so fast shouting, â€�“Accio!” and pointing her wand at Ginny she didn’t have time to react. The two pouches untied themselves from her belt loops and sped into Molly’s waiting hand. â€�“You don’t need two pouches to feed the chickens, dear. You were off at the neighbor’s house visiting those Muggle work animals again, weren’t you? I suppose you were flying with them again, were you? Ginny, how many times must I tell you that you could be SEEN???”

â€�“But I wasn’t!” Ginny began.

â€�“How can you be so sure?” Her mother’s eyes bored into Ginny.

â€�“I …I flew over close to the house and made sure there weren’t any Muggles cars in the drive first,” Ginny muttered quietly, "nobody was home."

â€�“YOU FLEW OVER CLOSE TO THE HOUSE?” Molly’s nostrils had begun to flare at this point. Luckily Arthur Weasley, Ginny’s dad, strolled in from work at this moment while Percy went outside to wait for Hermes. Arthur collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table. Molly began to shout at Arthur about his daughter, that she had taken the Weasley Crown of Mischief already this morning and how the rest of the day ought to be smooth sailing because there was no way Molly was going to tolerate something worse from one of the boys during the rest of it.

Ginny miserably sat down next to her dad, eyes lowered, listening to her mum relate her 'shenanigans' to her father, and stared at a spot on the surface of the table where George had stabbed it with a fork when he had been a toddler and had left four tiny indented holes in the surface. Molly could easily fix household furniture when it was broken by the kids but every now and then she chose not to. She called them little inconspicuous mementos from when the kids were little.

All the kids were allowed to do whatever they wanted to their rooms but these special sorts of marks were all over the common areas of the house. There was a small wisp of a burnt spot on the book shelf in the living room that Molly left behind when sanding the burn spots off magically after Bill nearly torched her collection. If you opened the pantry door, on the inside of it were drawings Charlie did once when he was young of a sinewy black dragon. In a corner near the counters for the sink on the floor were orange paint drips from when Ron messily painted the logo for his favorite Quidditch team while Molly was working on the dishes and Ginny played in a playpen. Fred had accidentally made a dent on the front side of the house outside, now hidden behind a bush, with an apple from the orchard tossed to him by George when he was pretending to hit Bludgers before they had made their house team. Applesauce had covered the side of the house and Ginny’s mum had used a water charm to rinse it off but left the dent the apple made. Even Percy had ink spills on quite a few end tables from when he was learning to write with a quill. Ginny glanced over at the living room picture window where if you looked carefully enough there was a small perfect handprint from when she was little and waiting for her dad to come home. She had stuck her greasy hand on the pane, and instead of cleaning it off her mother cast a protective charm over it to seal it to the window, so even if you cleaned over it the handprint remained.

When Molly finished catching Arthur up on Ginny’s latest attempt to break the International Statute of Secrecy, her dad turned to her and asked how she knew nobody saw her. Put on the spot, Ginny realized how foolish her response was going to sound, but ploughed on anyway. â€�“One of the horses is an old mare, I think she’s the leader. Anyway, she wasn’t disturbed by anything outside the paddock the whole time I was there.” Ginny went on to explain to her father how the mare constantly flicked her ears and turned her head to the road or the trees whenever something was nearby and how Ginny had learned to trust the mare’s body language. She also went into more detail of how gingerly she’d approached the house and spied on the cars that would sit in the driveway.

After her father asked her for the umpteen millionth time if she realized how important it was not to do anything where Muggles could see you perform magic, like riding a broomstick, with nobody around to fix their memories, Ginny was grounded for a week and told to clean the giant fireplace in the living room after breakfast.

She was quiet during the meal, and when Ron came downstairs he asked if Errol had returned yet with anything for him. Percy had come back in after Molly finished preparing breakfast and replied that no post had come yet today, and the twins were talking about what had happened at Hogwarts at the end of the school year again. When the boys had come home they hadn’t stopped talking for days about a teacher who died trying to attack Harry; even Percy said it was true.

Ginny had seen Harry Potter twice now in person, once last fall when Ron left for his first year and then again when Ginny and her mum picked the boys up at King’s Cross Station in the spring. Ginny didn’t know it was Harry Potter the first time she’d seen him, but he had asked her mother very politely how to get onto the platform for the Hogwarts express. Ginny suspected he was a Muggle-born at the time but was still surprised he didn’t have any parents with him. It was only after he had gotten onto the train that the twins had bounded back down to the platform after stowing away their luggage, saying they had helped Harry Potter with his trunk. Mum wouldn’t let Ginny get onto the train though to see him; actually she didn’t let her out of her sight the whole time they were in London. Afterwards Ginny had heard her mother saying that Harry Potter lived with some of his Muggle relatives and that it was a shame they must’ve just dropped him off.

When Ron got off the train that spring, Harry Potter and a girl Ginny supposed was Hermione Granger from Ron’s descriptions in the letters he wrote home were with him. They didn’t get an introduction though. Harry Potter’s Muggle relatives were there and they took him straight away. As soon as they got into their father’s Muggle car Molly asked Ron what really happened with Harry Potter and that teacher.

Ron told everyone all about Hermione saving them from the Devil’s Snare, which sounded dangerous, and Ginny couldn’t believe first-years dealt with plants like that; he told them about the flying keys and how he beat the Deputy Headmistress’s transfigured-to-life chessmen.

That didn’t surprise Ginny. Dad had taught them all how to play chess and Ginny was pretty good at it, about on par with Bill. She even beat Percy quite often. Charlie and the twins didn’t care much for it, but Ron surprised everyone at his skill from a young age. Ginny hadn’t seen him lose in years, even when he played against their great aunts and uncles at family reunions.

Ron apparently even won when he was knocked out in a game too, because during the race to the Sorcerer’s Stone Harry Potter got to make the last checkmate move and he and Hermione had moved on to the next obstacle. Harry Potter had sent Hermione back though to get help, and took on some form of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named by himself at the end. Whatever happened, that professor he met down there couldn’t hurt Harry Potter and died trying to attack him while Harry Potter protected the Stone.

Fred and George loved the idea of the Sorcerer’s Stone, and nagged Ron about why he didn’t tell them about it at school. The twins were always looking for ways to make more money though and were always making random bets with people who usually lost to them. So when Ron started writing letters to Harry Potter to ask him to come stay over the summer, Ginny felt very starstruck at the idea. Weeks went by though, and there was no word back. Even the twins were worried about him now; they had heard stories about how awful his Muggle relatives treated him and felt very protective of him after he became the youngest and smallest teammate on their house Quidditch team at school.

Ginny became even more starstruck when she learned that Harry Potter was the youngest Seeker on the Quidditch team in about a hundred years and that the head of the house got all kinds of permissions granted to him to have a broom at school even though first-years weren’t allowed them. Harry Potter didn’t get just any broom either, he got a Nimbus 2000, the fastest broom in the world. If he did come to visit he would bring his Nimbus, and Ginny still couldn’t think of a way to ask him to have a go on it without sounding like a complete dork.

When all her brothers left the breakfast table Ginny stayed behind to help with the dishes. Molly was a great deal calmer now about Ginny’s escapade that morning but she was still scrubbing the plates with more fierceness than was necessary. Until she came to a wooden spoon with rodent teeth marks on one end, another little inconspicuous memento. Molly slowly examined the teeth marks, then sighed and asked Ginny, â€�“So, did you see Abellios this morning?”

Ginny smiled, and nodded yes. â€�“He looked fine. He still lets me pet him, and he sat down right beside me, munching on the corn and bird seed.” She looked up at Molly and said quickly, â€�“I didn’t pick him up or pet him any more than just a quick rub between his ears though.”

It was Molly’s turn to smile. â€�“I know you know better than that by now.” She glanced over at Ginny with a serious expression on her face. â€�“It's laws I’m worried about you breaking, not rules,” she said, pointing the soapy spoon at her as she spoke.

Ginny smiled again and let out her own great sigh, one of relief. Her mum wasn’t going to tell her off any more about this morning. Once her punishment was done, it would be done.

â€�“Now go get out of that terrible jumper that makes you look like a hoodlum, put on some old clothes and comb your hair properly. Your father should have the fireplace ready soon.”

Mum hated her jumpers with hoods, probably because many Muggles didn’t care for them because the Muggles who wore them weren’t considered upstanding, or some such thing like that. Ginny didn’t care what it made her look like, it hid her face and especially her easily identifiable vivid red hair in case she did see Muggles, and it kept the rain off her head until she got home if it randomly started raining on the cloudy days.

Ginny never had outsider problems in the Muggle village. Everyone knew she was that Weasley girl who lived outside of town with the family that kept to themselves. People she had never spoken to called her by name when saying hello, knowing she was the only girl child. Ginny decided long ago that she would never part with her hand-me-down Muggle jumpers; they were the only anonymity she had.

Back up in her room, Ginny hung her jumper in the back of her wardrobe again and put on a pair of shorts that were once trousers for Bill when he was small enough to fit in them and one of Percy’s old boring shirts. She dug around in a drawer and found one of her mother’s old bandannas that was clean which was saved just for dirty jobs like this and headed back downstairs.

In the living room her father was reading the Daily Prophet which meant the mail had come. Errol came back empty from Harry’s, again, but Hermes had another secret reply for Percy, who immediately took his owl back upstairs, much to Hermes’s displeasure. The only other owl was this morning’s paper.

A little downhearted but not too surprised, Ginny went to the fireplace. Her father temporarily disconnected it from the Floo Network so that she wouldn’t be accidentally interrupted by anyone who might come through while she was standing inside it for the next few hours. Not that anyone ever came by usually. Occasionally the wizards who lived nearby popped in, or just their heads sometimes, magically through the fire, but most people Apparated into the Burrow’s designated field a little ways away from the house and then walked up to knock on the door.

Brushing soot and ashes from the grate and heaving it out onto the floor made the already tired muscles in Ginny’s stomach and arms shake, but she managed it. She pulled her bandana over her face up to her eyes and proceeded to brush the ashes into a bucket, one dustpan at a time. Her mother kept the ashes, using it in the garden in some places, making a harsh soap for cleaning by mixing it with water and boiled with animal fat and salt; some of it she sprinkled in the pond outside to keep away algae, and it was also used to polish the little bit of silver they owned when made into a paste with water. After that was all collected, Ginny began scrubbing the soot off the stones making up the walls inside and out, as high as she could reach. This part took the longest, and she whiled away the rest of the morning and into mid-afternoon before she was nearly finished.

While Ginny was working, Ron popped downstairs with a letter in his hand.

â€�“Is that another letter for Harry Potter?” Ginny called from inside the hearth.

â€�“No, this one is to Hermione. I want to know if she’s heard back from Harry yet either,” Ron said. Ron headed over to the owl perch, an area where Errol usually sat. It was big area with a wide window to fly in and out of, spelled to keep the bugs, heat, and cold out. Hermes preferred to stay there because there were more posts and poles to walk along and roost on. The owl perch used to be really small and it didn’t used to have a window, and Errol never minded that, but Charlie, ever the animal lover, added onto it every summer he came home from school until he left for Romania, and it was probably intricate enough now to for twelve owls to roost comfortably.

Hermes, technically an adult but still a young owl, loved to wander up and down the poles as he stretched his wings. Percy’s room just had a single perch, with barely enough room for Hermes to turn around on, so Ginny could see why he acted disgruntled whenever Percy carried him upstairs. Mum once thought that the owl perch took up too much space, that two owls didn’t need half the living room; even when Bill or Charlie visited and their owls were here, they didn’t justify the square yardage. Her mum had told her dad to tear some of it down when all the boys were at school last year, but her dad had simply magically expanded the living room walls, inside and out so it was permanent, to accommodate Charlie’s carpentry.

â€�“You shouldn’t send Errol on another long trip like that. He just got back from Surrey. Hermes came back this morning; I’m sure he wouldn’t mind, and for him it would probably be just a day trip. See if Percy will let you borrow him,” Ginny suggested.

Ron looked at Errol, asleep slumped against a wall, so tired he couldn’t even hold himself up. â€�“Useless,” Ron muttered and sat down on the couch, â€�“I already tried to use Hermes, Percy left him alone in his room to use the bathroom and I went in and started tying my letter to his leg. The stupid bird didn’t leave though. Percy came in and hollered at me for trying to ‘steal’ him. He took my letter off Hermes and tossed it back at me, saying he already told Hermes that he was nearly done with his next letter and that Hermes would be leaving again with it later after Percy polished it up. When I asked why Hermes couldn’t take both letters he got all mad and said something about Hermione getting his letter and reading it before Hermes left with it to wherever that one goes. I told him that Hermione would never do that, but his face got all red and he slammed his door in my mine.”

Ginny made a face at her brother from within the hearth much like Percy did before pointing out something obvious. â€�“If Hermes is so loyal that he wouldn’t leave because Percy already had a job for him to do, he certainly wouldn’t let Hermione or anyone else read a letter that didn’t belong to them.”

Ron considered this for a few seconds, then stood up. â€�“You are absolutely right.” And he walked back upstairs with his letter.

Sometime later, Ginny was outside with the grate pouring water onto it with a sponge. She repeated this over and over to rinse the soot off better than when she had brushed it off earlier before finally scrubbing it clean. All of a sudden, she heard shouting drift down from upstairs. Apparently, Percy’s letters were so important to him that it didn’t matter how much he trusted Hermes to protect them, he wasn’t letting him make any unnecessary stops, period.

When Ron shouted for their mum to interfere, Molly simply told him that Percy earned his owl by becoming a school prefect and could do with him as he pleased; Errol would be awake soon enough and Ron could use him then. Fuming, Ron threw his arms into the air and stomped all the way back up to his room and slammed the door shut, yelling about how nothing he ever did was important and that everything he ever got to have or use was always rubbish.

When Ginny came back inside with the grate, she heaved it back into the clean fireplace and wiped down the living room floor where they ash bucket had sat earlier and where the grate had rested. She even added the finishing touch of putting fresh firewood into the hearth, ready to go, and swept up the bits and pieces that fell off the chopped wood as she put them into the grate. Everything looked picture perfect when she’d finished.

Afterwards Ginny herself was a mess. Her clothes were dirty, her hands were black and gray, her nails were black underneath, she could feel her face smeared with soot, and her ponytail was falling out and hanging lopsided. All she wanted to do was fall down onto the couch and catch her breath but instead Molly entered the room and inspected the fireplace. Pleased, she let Ginny run back upstairs to finally shower, change, and rest.

A couple of hours later, after washing up from cleaning the fireplace, Ginny sat at her writing desk. Her dad had attached a mirror to the wall a few years ago behind it so it also functioned as a vanity desk. She brushed out her now clean long red hair and toyed with different ways of putting it up like how she saw girls in the village do. Many of them didn’t wear theirs parted down the middle like how Ginny’s fell on its own, but rather a side part.

Ginny pulled her comb along to make her own side part, but her hair kept trying to fall back into a middle one. No matter what she did, she couldn’t make it lie normal with the side part, and wound up pulling it into a low ponytail halfway between the nape of her neck and the crown of her head. The ponytail held the part in place and it didn’t look like a little girl mess nor like the style was too old for her.

She could just hear her mother’s voice in her head, â€�“I’m harping on you now to care about managing your hair and learning how to do it properly because I’m not going to be there at school to help you or remind you.” Yeah, well I won’t have to worry about that if I never get my letter so I guess all this is a waste of time, Ginny thought to herself bitterly. Ginny was used to waking up early not only because she wanted to ride her brothers’ brooms in peace, but because she had been trained every day since she was six to get dressed and fix her hair before presenting herself to her mum at breakfast time.

Checking her hair from all angles one last time before going downstairs to where her mum could see her, Ginny noticed the very back of the side part closest to the ponytail was starting to disappear already; it was straightening, and looking loose. Normally when she ponytailed her hair it all went straight back and the hair ties kept it in place out of sheer resistance. However, with a side part, some of the hair had to curve a bit before neatly going into the hair tie. Then when it straightened, it loosened and flopped about a bit.

How did Muggles deal with this problem? She viciously wet down her comb with the water cup she kept just for that purpose on her desk and pulled it tight again with the side part and reworked the ponytail, using some of the Muggle hairspray her mum got for her quite some time ago that was nearly run out, Ginny waited for it to dry and, satisfied, went back downstairs.

It’s not fair, thought Ginny. Her brothers never had to present themselves. They just rolled out of bed and went on with their day. Molly only made them sit still long enough to cut their hair when it got too long and that was it, but Ginny’s mum’s words came back to her again, â€�“I don’t care if you want to think and act like a boy, you like your long hair, don’t you? Well, then I expect you to take care of it, simple as that. It won’t look right when you do want it to look nice, not without a lot of magic, and you shouldn’t have to whip your wand out for everything when you’re an adult!”

If I ever get a wand, thought Ginny.

Downstairs she began to help set the table for dinner. When Molly looked over she said, â€�“Ginny, dear, I love that ponytail. You should wear it more often.” Ginny explained the problems she found with it, and Molly showed her a tricky little charm that was somewhat difficult to use but styled a person’s hair based on how you can imagine it. â€�“It’s because everyone’s hair is so different from everybody else’s. I didn’t master this charm until I was half way through third year and back then I could only do it on my own. One charm doesn’t really manage all so in the beginning there are variations for wrist movements for curly, straight, and wavy depending on what you want it to do. Much better to use Sleekeazy’s Hair Potion; you can comb it the way you want it to look and done,” explained her mum.

Errol woke with all the noise downstairs at dinner time and afterwards Ron sent him out with his letter to Hermione. The old family owl l didn’t look like he wanted to go but drank a lot of water and then took off out into the darkening evening. Then Ron sat down at the dinner table after it was cleared off so he could shout questions to whoever was within listening distance about his summer homework essays. The twins had gone back up to their room where if you listened hard enough you could hear small popping noises, probably some game they were playing, and Percy had shut himself into his own room again as well.

Ginny sat at the dinner table and pulled one of Ron’s books towards her, and began leafing through the pages. â€�“A Beginner’s Guide to Transfiguration, what’s a snuff box?” she asked Ron.

Ron seemed annoyed at first that his concentration was broken. â€�“It’s a little ornamental box Muggles keep this brown powdery stuff in that they inhale or chew to make them ‘feel good in their heads.’ ’’ He shook his head, clearly not knowing what that meant any more than Ginny did. â€�“Dad would probably know what it was called. There was a bit of it still left in most of our boxes at school and it smelled weird,” he said.

â€�“You didn’t ask what that meant in class?” Ginny asked. I would want to know details like that if I were learning about this stuff, she thought to herself.

â€�“We didn’t have to know what that meant,” said Ron exasperatedly. â€�“We only had to know what they looked like, so that’s all me and everyone else cared about.”

She knew her brother only did as much as he needed to in order to get by in lessons; that much was apparent when their mum taught them basic math and reading skills instead of going to the primary school in the village. Ginny, however, loved getting the minutiae details on the backgrounds of stories and lessons. Mundane as they feigned to be, the finer points made everything unique and interesting.

â€�“And you had to turn a mouse into one?” asked Ginny.

â€�“Yeah, I mean, mine wasn’t very good; it still had whiskers, not like Hermione’s which of course was perfect, but yeah, you got extra points if it looked pretty,” he replied. Ginny grinned to herself and imagined her brother probably rolled his eyes in class upon hearing about the extra points instructions.

Ginny never really got to see transfiguration magic. Most of what she was exposed to was potions, usually cleaning ones, and charms. Especially charms that made cooking and chores a whole lot easier. She and her brothers didn’t really have to do chores, not when their mother could do it all with a wave of her wand, but as they were all in trouble for one thing or another much of the time, they were all quite proficient at helping out around the house with no magic. Ron still had to make up for all the yelling and stomping he did earlier today.

Ginny watched her brother run his hands through his hair in frustration, making it stick up more than it already was. â€�“What are you working on?” she asked him.

â€�“My potions essay. I’m starting with this one to get it out of the way. I don’t need to give Snape an excuse to give me detention my first day back,” said Ron. â€�“He would love that too much,” he muttered to himself.

â€�“Why would he love it?” Ginny asked, picking up his potions book while Ron referenced his notes in his untidy scrawl.

â€�“He loves to punish Gryffindors,” Ron replied offhandedly at the same time trying to prepare his next sentence to write in his essay, â€�“and to show favoritism to the Slytherins because he’s a horrible git,” was all the explanation Ron gave.

Every single one of Ginny’s brothers, even Bill and Charlie, were Gryffindors. Molly and Arthur were also sorted into Gryffindor back when they attended Hogwarts. Ginny didn’t know how she would feel if she were sorted into a different house, especially Slytherin, if she ever got to go, that is. She would be more of an outcast in her own house than she already felt.

Only girl child, only girl Weasley in all of the extended family. Ron had his close friends now and paid more attention to his unanswered letters, the twins had each other like always, and even boring Percy had whoever he was sending secret letters back and forth to. No matter how much Ginny tried to be interested in their interests, it seemed they thought she was either copying them to aggravate them or it didn’t matter because she was just the little sister.

Her earlier thoughts echoed in her mind: everybody at home was positive that Ginny was a witch and that it was a no brainer she would be attending this year with the boys, they probably even expected her to be a Gryffindor, but that nagging feeling came back. What if she wasn’t? She knew math pretty well from Molly’s elementary homeschooling and didn’t think the odds of seven brothers and sisters all getting into the same house were very high. Glancing over at Ron, she remembered in one of his letters home last year he described a boy in his dorm who thought for years he wasn’t magical enough to go to Hogwarts because his family didn’t ever see him do anything. That boy was from an all wizard family like Ginny, and nobody paid enough attention to her for a long enough time to even see if she was magical.

As much as Ginny did not miss Ron telling her how annoying she was for always trying to tag along with him, she was almost jealous of these friends of his that she didn’t know. How is it Ron, of all her brothers, has a girl who is one of his best friends? Ginny had asked herself this question since just after Halloween last year after getting over the shock of Ron saving this Hermione from a mountain troll in the first place, and Ron’s letters began to include this Hermione more and more often. She was mentioned every time Harry Potter was.

Not for the first time Ginny came to the conclusion that it must be Harry Potter who held the three together, and she tried not to resent Ron wanting to spend more time worrying about him than hanging out with his sister who was right here with him. After all, Ginny probably wouldn’t be able to think of anything else either if world-wide-known Harry Potter was her friend period, let alone best friend.

Ginny put Ron’s book back in the pile. He gave her an irked sigh warding off any more interrupting questions from her. One of Ron’s brotherly ways of shooing away the annoying little sister. Ginny just raised her hands in mock surrender and headed upstairs to bed. Between the broomstick ride and cleaning out the fireplace and worry about her Hogwarts acceptance she went to bed more exhausted than she ever thought it was possible to be.

The next morning Ginny woke up much later than usual. She could hear commotion going on downstairs and realized her brothers were already up and at breakfast. She hastily got dressed and went to throw her hair up in a ponytail. Hearing her mother’s voice in her head made her pause though. She sat back down, and again forced her hair into the side part with a low ponytail. After putting in more Muggle hairspray she headed down to the kitchen where she heard the twins making fun of Ron’s dismal toast attempt.

As soon as Ginny entered the kitchen she was scooped into a hug by Fred, â€�“GINNY! We miss you! Just look at this poison Ron is trying to feed us!” He brandished a half burnt half undercooked piece of bread in front of her and looked over at Ron to see his expression while Fred made fun of him. Before setting Ginny back down Fred whipped his face back to hers and said, â€�“Hey! Your hair smells good. Why does your hair smell good?”

Ginny dropped into a seat at the table and before she could answer, Fred’s twin George had jumped up to smell her hair for himself and tilted her head back so he could get his own whiff. Boys were so gross about that, thought Ginny, I would never stick my nose right into something to see how it smelled.

â€�“Kind of stinky in the nose, but good,” agreed George. â€�“Did you put perfume in your hair or something? Why would you put perfume in your hair?”

Freed from her brother, so she could sit and eat normally, Ginny rolled her eyes and said, â€�“It’s Muggle hairspray, not perfume. I’m training my hair to lie how I want it to, not how it wants to.”

Molly rescued Ginny from the three blank stares her brothers gave her and said, â€�“Ginny you look lovely. You boys leave her alone now, what she’s doing is good practice for when she’s at school.”

â€�“Hermione doesn’t care what her hair looks like,” commented Ron offhandedly. â€�“All she cares about are books and learning magic and always knowing the right answer to every question a teacher asks.”

â€�“Yes, well knowing how to put in a good appearance never hurt anyone either. I can put mine into a nice do for smart parties your father gets us invited to for the Ministry,” said their mum. â€�“You boys could use some practice yourselves.”

â€�“Ron could use some practice making a simple piece of toast,” said Ginny, inspecting what her brother had made in her absence.

â€�“I forgot to turn the bread, that’s all!” said Ron, â€�“Sheesh, you’d think you’d get a little appreciation for even doing it!” Ron eyed Ginny when she sat down in front of the kitchen fire and began make her own toast in the small cooking fire to go with her eggs and he went on, â€�“Where have you been this morning anyway? You always help Mum make breakfast.”

â€�“I was sleeping,” said Ginny. â€�“Even servants get days off,” she shot back.

â€�“You wouldn’t have been so tired if you weren’t in trouble in the first place and had to clean out the fireplace. What did you do anyway? It must’ve been awful to make Mum make you do that,” said Ron.

â€�“Never you mind, Ron,” said Molly. â€�“Ginny is doing her punishment and that’s the end of it.”

â€�“That’s not fair!” said Ron. â€�“She always knows why we’re in trouble,” gesturing around the table at the boys.

â€�“That’s because you holler about it at the top of your lungs the whole time you’re being punished,” said Molly.

â€�“Wait, she’s still doing her punishment?” asked Ron. He turned to goggle at Ginny. â€�“What did you do?”

Arthur and Molly didn’t ground the kids very often, and Ginny had never been grounded in her life; she only knew that when her brothers were grounded they hung around the house a lot. Smiling at Ron’s puzzlement, Ginny began to eat without answering him. After the boys finished, Percy went back to his room, and the twins and Ron went to ride their brooms in the Weasleys' paddock by the orchard to practice Quidditch.

When Ginny was nearly finished, there was a knock on the backdoor. Curious, Ginny went with her mother to go see who it was. Wizards usually knocked at thenbackdoor since it was closer to the Burrow’s Apparition site, and Muggles knocked at the front door which was closer to the road and driveway. Standing there with a basket in one arm, stooped over a bit while petting and talking to their chickens, was one of their wizarding neighbors, the Lovegood girl.

Luna Lovegood was as recognizable by her hair as the Weasleys were by theirs. Hers was very, very long, down past her bottom, and pale, pale yellow, almost white. It was also curly, not tightly curled so as to look bushy, but great big ringlets that if she pulled back a bit at the top would have made her look like a princess. Ginny almost never saw Luna with her hair pulled back in anyway though. It was always down, sometimes over her shoulder but usually just cascading down her back.

Ginny’s mum opened the door with a great big smile and walked out to hug Luna in hello. Luna looked up with her pale blue eyes and smiled her warm unassuming smile she always gave everyone and hugged Ginny’s mum in return.

â€�“Did you walk all the way over here all by yourself?” Molly asked Luna when she looked around and didn’t see anyone else.”

â€�“Yes.” Luna never said anything more than was necessary.

â€�“Whatever for, dear?” asked Molly, full of concern and ushering her back inside the kitchen.

â€�“Well, I tried to use the Floo Network yesterday but I didn’t go anywhere when I said the Burrow. I thought maybe I had said it wrong and tried again. Then I thought, maybe you changed the name of your homestead. So I decided to walk over here today and find out. But I saw the sign outside still said the Burrow. Is your fireplace not working right now?” Luna inquired.

â€�“No, dear it’s fine, it’s fine! We just had it disconnected yesterday while …while Ginny cleaned it,” Molly responded.

Luna walked over to the fireplace and inspected it herself. If you didn’t know her you would’ve thought that she was trying to see if you were being dishonest, but Luna had always done whatever she chose to satisfy her curiosity. â€�“Well, you did a very good job. I’m sure your mum is very proud of you,” she said to Ginny.

If only Luna knew how proud Mum was of me yesterday, Ginny thought to herself as she picked her plate up from the table and carried it over to the sink to begin washing the breakfast dishes her brothers had just left behind. (Mum said before that the boys were used to just leaving them at the table at Hogwarts and to just be thankful that they at least carried them to the sink.)

â€�“I am very proud of her, dear. Was there something you needed to come by for yesterday though?” Molly asked Luna.

Luna serenely turned away from the fireplace and looked directly at Molly, â€�“I came to ask about three things,” she said, â€�“I was wondering if you had any spare eggs? A fox got into our chicken coop a few days ago, it killed all of our chickens and I was hoping to make a cake before term starts.”

â€�“That’s right, you are just a few months older than Ginny, aren’t you?” said Molly, getting into their ice box and putting eggs into Luna’s basket, â€�“Well, giving you eggs is the least I can do as you looked after our chickens while we were away to Romania last Christmas. Goodness, you didn’t walk over here every day in the snow did you?”

â€�“No, no, Daddy let me use the Floo Network to come over and back,” Luna said matter of factly.

Perking up from the sink and glancing at Luna, Ginny asked, â€�“You used Floo powder by yourself?”

â€�“Oh yes,” said Luna. â€�“I only do so for short trips though. Daddy often finds it useful to send me with messages to writers and to get their columns while he works at his printing press. Since it doesn’t require a wand, I can come and go without breaking the Reasonable Restriction for Underage Sorcery.”

Molly pursed her lips but didn’t say anything. Ginny was astounded somebody so young traveled on her own so often. Luna’s father was the editor for the Quibbler, which he printed out of his own home, and Luna was his only daughter. Young witches and wizards under the age of seventeen weren’t allowed to do magic outside of school, period.

Ginny thought about this though: they can, however, travel by Floo powder. Normally, an adult travels before or after them in accompaniment because it’s cramped trying to get two or more people to go at the same time. Ginny still traveled with her mother but that was getting more and more arduous. In a few months Ginny should be able to travel on her own. She supposed it was a good thing that her father already owned a Muggle car for her to practice with otherwise.

There was an awkward pause as Molly and Ginny adjusted to the idea of Luna traveling alone throughout the wizarding world, but Luna didn’t seem to notice it. Finally, Molly asked, â€�“Well, what else did you need dear?”

Luna paused in a rare show of hesitation, took a deep breath and said, â€�“Mrs. Weasley, I was wondering if you would give my hair a trim for school? Daddy and I always notice that your boys’ hair is never shaggy and when Ginny wore her hair short it was always very straight and even. I was hoping that you could do something with mine to help with the split ends? My mother used to trim them but she kept it long overall, and my hair hasn’t been cut for two years now. Not since my mother’s passing.” Luna said it all very slowly and precisely the way she spoke all the time, but Ginny could tell it immediately broke her mum’s heart.

Luna’s flirtation with underage magic forgotten, Molly went and put an arm around her, â€�“You listen to me now, you come over here anytime you need help with anything your mother used to help you with, mmm?”

â€�“Thank you, Mrs. Weasley,” Luna smiled.

Turning around to get a chair and towel and to hastily wipe her eyes, Ginny’s mum said, â€�“Would you like a spot of breakfast before we get started?”

â€�“No, thank you. Daddy always wakes early to print during the summer time; that way it isn’t adding to the summer heat in the afternoons,” said Luna, â€�“So we breakfast then.”

Luna sat in the chair Molly provided and her hair hung to within inches of the floor, her mum performed the Engorgio Charm to raise the height of the chair and it made Luna look barely older than a toddler sitting in it. Molly asked, â€�“Now how much were you thinking of cutting off? And did your mother do it wet, dry, or damp?”

Ginny listened as Luna gave her mother a complicated set of directions and they discussed curly hair springiness and how cutting off bottom sections always made the top even shorter than anticipated because the cut away section was no longer weighing down what was left behind…

Ginny was lost early on as she tried to pay attention while drying and putting away the silverware, but Molly, who loved cutting hair, seemed to understand exactly what Luna was describing. Ginny, and her brothers all had straight hair and so she never thought about these things before. She had no clue what they were talking about until she watched her mother begin to magically cut Luna’s hair with a severing charm at a point farther down the strands than they had discussed the final length should be. As the cut sections fell away, Ginny watched the still cascading hair above pull into tighter ringlets shortening the overall length to almost where they initially talked about leaving it. Ah, now she understood, the curls were originally being pulled straighter by the weight, and Ginny’s mum had to compensate.

After she magically removed the majority of the split ends Molly went to work on evening out the remainder into a gorgeous v-shape. This took quite a bit of time, much longer than she spent on Ginny or any of her brothers. Ginny remembered when her mother made Weasley sweaters last year for Christmas like she did every year and she included one for Harry. His she made with far more care and quality. Apparently if you weren’t one of Molly’s own, you received quite a bit more effort from her.

While Luna sat patiently on the engorged kitchen chair, Molly remembered she had one last thing to ask about. â€�“I was wondering if Ginny would like to accompany me to make our first-year purchases together in Diagon Alley,” said Luna as though she were asking if they could simply take a stroll in the yard and not wander around the largest gathering of wizards in the middle of London by themselves. â€�“Daddy and I are taking a trip next week to do some investigating for one of his future editorials and we won’t be back until just before school term begins,” she explained.

Ginny could tell her mother instantly went into protective mode but kept her voice calm when she asked, â€�“Accompany you? Is your father not taking you?”

â€�“No,” said Luna, â€�“I have been to Diagon Alley many times on my own to meet with daddy’s writers. I know my way around quite well.”

Ginny was torn. She didn’t know Luna that well, but they were the only two girls from wizard families their age who lived anywhere around here. She wanted to go exploring Diagon Alley without her brothers or mum moving her along at their pace, but on the other hand it was terrifying to think about traveling all the way there without an adult, even if Luna had done it many times before.

Then realization hit before her mother could respond. â€�“I can’t,” said Ginny. â€�“I haven’t gotten my letter from Hogwarts yet,” she admitted hanging her head a bit.

Noticing how downhearted Ginny looked, Molly attempted to lighten the mood by saying, â€�“She can’t anyway. Ginny is grounded.”

Puzzled, Ginny said, â€�“Wait. What does being grounded have to do with not being able to go to Diagon Alley?” She looked inquisitively at her mum.

Molly smiled in disbelief and said, â€�“Sweetheart, what do you think being grounded means?”

Ginny didn’t want to admit in front of Luna that she didn’t know, but put her best guess out there, â€�“Doesn’t it mean I have to stay on the ground, that I can’t ride any brooms?”

Molly burst out laughing so heartily that she had to walk away so she didn’t accidentally ruin Luna’s hair. â€�“No dear, it means you aren’t allowed to leave the house and yard, so yes, in a way I guess it does also mean no broom riding,” she said.

Luna, polite as ever, merely smiled after Ginny had answered and then said, â€�“You’ve never been grounded before have you? Is that why you had to clean the fireplace yesterday?”

A little guarded, Ginny lowered her eyes and felt her face getting hot when she said, â€�“Yes.”

Luna however, did not pry and said, â€�“Well, it’ll be over before you know it. I’m sorry that you can’t go with me.”

Finished with cutting her hair, Molly began to brush it out and took a deep breath before saying, â€�“You know, Luna, I wouldn’t let Ginny go with you by yourselves even if she had her letter and weren’t grounded. I don’t think you should be coming and going that far away alone either. It’s just not safe. I would have been happy to accompany the both of you and taken the boys another time if we could’ve arranged it.”

â€�“Mrs. Weasley, I would have loved for you to come with us as well. I did not want to take you away from the rest of your children,” said Luna.

Molly shrank the chair back to normal size and walked around to the front to face Luna, â€�“You just promise me that you stay safe, and stick to the places where there are lots of people, lots of families. I can’t tell you what to do, but I can at least give you my opinion and my advice, and important business father or not, I don’t think you are old enough to be on your own.”

â€�“Mrs. Weasley,” Luna smiled again, â€�“you are one of the kindest people I know and therefore your opinion and advice are both treasured.”

Pleased, Molly walked back around to Luna’s hair again and asked, â€�“Now, how would you like a nice side part like what Ginny is sporting?” Ginny watched as her mother easily made Luna’s hair stay exactly as she styled it without any Muggle hair spray or spells to keep it in place. It’s all the curls, her mum explained when Ginny got a look of incredulity on her face.

Shortly afterwards Luna picked up her basket of eggs, thanked Molly graciously, and bade them both farewell. Ginny’s mum invited her to come over any time and thanked her again for watching their chickens over Christmas. As much as Ginny enjoyed the company, Luna was vastly different than any other person she knew, aside from maybe Luna’s father, and Ginny didn’t know if she would have wanted to spend all day with her in Diagon Alley. On the other hand Ginny’s own dad collected Muggle plugs, and she adored him. Perhaps she just needed to get to know Luna better.

* * *

Ginny spent the next six days leafing through more of Ron’s spell books and helping Molly around the house. She practiced spells with her makeshift wand and fixed all the rips and tears in every single pair of wizard robes and Muggle artifact of clothing she owned, a project she had always meant to start a long time ago but never got around to it until she didn’t have anywhere to go. Her mum had shown her how to use a needle and thread when she was eight, and let her do it on her own since she was nine. During this time, Ron had received a reply from Hermione that no, she had not been getting any word from Harry and was also very concerned about him. Even the twins started to wonder about their prize Seeker.

On her last day of being grounded Ginny passed the morning hours away by practicing different braided looks in her hair. Ready to give up and find a new project to start, and anticipating being finished with her grounding tomorrow, Ginny put down her comb and changed out of her pajamas. Right when she found her shoes to slip on, thinking she would sit outside on the porch and leaf through another of Ron’s books he’d left on the kitchen counter, Ginny heard her father’s voice calling to her from downstairs.

Hurrying with her laces, she heard him call for her again and again. Ginny took off down the steps as fast as she could go, nearly knocking over the chicken feed bin at the bottom of the stairwell. Her father never hollered her name like that throughout the house, especially not right when he arrived home.

Everything Ginny had done this past week raced through her mind. She had made fun of Ron when he had to take all the rugs outside and beat the dust out of them for stomping in the staircase while yelling and slamming his door the other day. She had played lookout for the twins when they tried to capture and hide Hermes from Percy as a prank. The feathers Hermes lost weren’t flight ones; he was okay. She had deliberately burned Ron’s toast a couple of mornings in a row for his jab about her not being out of bed in time to help make him and the rest of their brothers a perfect breakfast.

Ginny was apprehensive at the thought of further groundings; none of these incidences should have merited her father calling for her so urgently. Ginny wanted her freedom back, she missed Abellios, and flying, and the horses.

She found her father in the living room, gesturing towards the owl perch. There were two unfamiliar owls there. One had a bag which her father was putting five Knuts inside of to pay for his copy of the Daily Prophet. The other had an envelope still tied to its leg on what looked like heavy parchment and written in emerald green ink was:

Miss G. Weasley
The First Floor Bedroom
The Burrow
Ottery St. Catchpole,
Devon

Ginny stared at the letter. The owl it was attached to kept stretching his wings and ruffling his feathers, in anticipation of finishing his delivery.

At long last Ginny’s letter had come, inviting her to Hogwarts. She was magical enough after all. She wasn’t going to be left behind by the rest of her family and forced to live as a Muggle, although her father probably would’ve loved that.

She was going to learn the twelve uses of dragon’s blood and how to turn a mouse into a snuff box, she was going to get proper flying lessons, and one day be able to try out for her house Quidditch team. At this moment she didn’t even care if she were sorted into Slytherin house, because even if that came true, it still meant she would be at Hogwarts.

â€�“Ginny, don’t keep that owl waiting all day,” her dad said gently. Arthur knew this was a big moment for his daughter and watched as she carefully untied the thongs from around the owl’s leg. As soon as it was free, the school owl took off into the morning again. Ginny, slit the envelope open. She sat down on the couch and read:

Hogwarts School
of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Headmaster: Albus Dumbledore
(Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Sorc., Chf. Warlock,
Supreme Mugwump, International Confed. of Wizards)

Dear Miss Weasley,
We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Term begins on September 1. We await your owl by no later than July 31.
Yours sincerely,
Minerva McGonagall,
Deputy Headmistress(1)

Ginny couldn’t believe it. It was a like a balloon had absorbed all the worry she’d been holding inside and it floated away lighter than air.

â€�“There see, nothing to worry about,” her father said.

Molly bustled into the living room and held out her hands for Ginny to take and then pulled her into a hug. â€�“Looks like you get to go shopping in Diagon Alley after all,” she laughed, â€�“with me of course.”

Ginny spent the rest of the day happily drifting from one chore to the next, never minding that this was her last day of being grounded. With her mother’s help she composed a neat reply accepting her reserved position at Hogwarts and sent the letter on with Errol, hoping that he would make it okay.

The next day, finally off her grounding, Ginny woke very early and flew straight to the tree grove and told Abellios her good news while she fed him more seeds. From there she walked to the part of the horse pasture that was also inside the tree grove and called the bays over to her and visited with them on the ground, giving each another apple from the Weasleys' orchard before flying back home again. Too excited to concentrate on Quidditch training, Ginny kept her flying to a minimum of carrying her to the tree grove and home for the next week, trying to visit Abellios and the horses as often as she could now that she knew she would be gone for quite some time soon.

* * *

Errol came back from Hogwarts a full seven days after leaving with Ginny’s answer, just in time for Ron to send him away again with a birthday card for Harry Potter. The money Bill and Charlie sent in the summers arrived and Molly had added it to her shopping purse. Ginny began to get excited about her future brand new school robes and especially about her wand. She spent many hours in her room going over her wardrobe again and again trying to decide which Muggle clothes to wear to King’s Cross and bring with her to school for the weekends.

Most astonishingly, everyone in the whole house seemed more distracted than usual this past week, so much so that not a single Weasley kid got grounded, let alone in trouble. Ginny thought it was some kind of record, and realized that the twins were absolutely just as concerned about Harry Potter as Ron was by now and their dark brooding mood permeated the entire house, dampening Ginny’s genuine happiness considerably. One evening she heard her mum and dad talking at the kitchen table, agreeing that if Ron didn’t hear from Harry soon, Arthur would travel to Surrey to check up on him.

Then, on the very first morning of August, precisely one month before Ginny got to go to Hogwarts herself, her dad came home with terrible news about Harry Potter. â€�“Last night Mafalda Hopkirk had to send Harry a letter, apparently he did a hover charm at his aunt and uncle's house, and what’s worse, they’re saying at work that he did it in front of two completely Muggle strangers who weren’t related to him!” said her dad.

At the breakfast table everyone turned to look at Ron, â€�“Harry would never do that, Dad. We were put in a lot of stressful situations at Hogwarts and he never lost control of his magic. He knows we aren’t supposed to do magic outside of school.” Ron looked really shaken up. From what Ginny gathered, students were only given one warning about doing magic outside of school while under age, and the next time you were expelled from Hogwarts. Ron agreed with the twins to write another letter to Harry. Errol seemed extremely put out as he only just made the same journey and hadn’t been back long.

The next day Errol arrived with another school owl with him. Once again he had no reply, but the school owl had a letter for Percy. Percy opened the letter, which told him he passed all twelve OWL’s he took last spring. Uncharacteristically, Percy folded up and gave a smug satisfied smile to everyone downstairs and then just disappeared right back up to his room. A few minutes later he had sent Hermes out with yet another secret letter.

When Ron saw this it only emphasized the no responses from Harry, â€�“I keep hoping if he doesn’t send a quick reply back with Errol that maybe he’s writing a longer letter to send with Hedwig,” Ron said mournfully to them. â€�“Hermione gets the same thing though, her owls come back with no reply and she hasn’t seen Hedwig either.”

Curious about something new about Harry Potter, Ginny asked, â€�“Who’s Hedwig?”

â€�“She’s Harry’s snowy owl. Hagrid got her for Harry for his birthday last year when they were school shopping in Diagon Alley,” replied Ron listlessly.

At the mention of Hagrid, Ginny remembered that Ron and Harry had tea with the Hogwarts groundskeeper a few times according to Ron’s letters. â€�“Has Hagrid heard from Harry at all this summer?” Ginny asked tentatively.

â€�“I don’t know,” said Ron, â€�“and now I can’t write to him to find out because both Errol and Hermes are gone again.”

â€�“What do you mean Errol’s gone again? Didn’t he just get back from Harry’s?”

â€�“Yeah, but I sent another letter to Hermione,” said Ron a bit evasively.

Casting around for anything to distract Ron, Ginny thought back to a point he made earlier, â€�“Hey, Hermione is Muggle-born, right?”

â€�“Yeah, so?”

â€�“So, where is she getting owls to send to Harry that are coming back with no replies? Does she have her own owl too?” As much as her dad loved Muggles, Ginny never really paid attention to what he said about them before.

â€�“No, I have no idea. I …I don’t know. Ginny, can you just shut it for once and stop asking so many questions? I’m trying to think,” said Ron.

â€�“Oi! Ron!” called Fred, â€�“Let’s go play Quidditch.” Apparently Ron was done thinking, as he got right up and left with the twins. Ginny went to her room in a huff. I was only trying to help, she thought to herself.

Later on, when the three of them came back inside, Ron was talking about them going to Surrey to check on Harry themselves.

â€�“You can’t ride your broom stick there and back,” said George. â€�“Never mind someone seeing you, that old Shooting Star is way too slow. It’ll take you ages.” Ginny lingered in the stairwell out of sight, originally having come down to looking for a snack, and listened to their conversation. Her brothers traveling the countryside without Mum or Dad? That was as crazy as Luna doing it.

â€�“Well, we can’t use the Floo Network. Dad says the Muggle fireplaces aren’t hooked up to it and to get them hooked up you have to get all sorts of permission from high ranking people,” said Ron. â€�“If we go on our brooms, Harry can at least ride his own back.”

â€�“That Shooting Star is too slow, Ron!” interjected Fred this time. â€�“It would take days to ride that thing just fifteen miles!” Ginny listened to them go back and forth on this until Ron noticed she was there and shooed her out.

The next day Ron and the twins had a lie-in longer than usual. They must have been up pretty late talking about Harry, thought Ginny. The twins came down first and Ginny hung out in the kitchen while they got themselves something to eat that morning. â€�“Is Ron still thinking of a way to go see Harry Potter?” Ginny asked them.

â€�“Yep, he’s still adamant about flying on that old Shooting Star,” said Fred, rolling his eyes.

Glancing outside at the driveway, Ginny sarcastically said, â€�“Wouldn’t it make more sense to take Dad’s car? You all could fit and it’s faster than Ron’s broom at least.” Both of the twins immediately stopped focusing on their food and glanced at Ginny. â€�“I mean, haven’t you both driven it before?” she asked. Ginny just shook her head and headed outside to feed the chickens and collect eggs from their nests for her mum.

After another visit to the tree grove, this time in the late evening as the boys had been gone nearly all day playing Quidditch in the orchard, Ginny headed upstairs to read some more in her room. It was quite some time after dark when she realized that she hadn’t heard a peep out of the twins’ room right above hers for the last few hours. Normally, she fell asleep listening to them making little explosion noises and laughing at each other.

Figuring they tired themselves out playing Quidditch to distract from Harry Potter’s predicament, Ginny rolled over and fell asleep.

Quote References:

1 SS/PS page 51 (I realize I took out the part of the quote that included another paper that listed a first-year’s supply list, I plan to write about Ginny receiving her list with her brothers like she does in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and that is why that line is missing from the quote from Sorcerer’s/Philosopher’s Stone. For aesthetic purposes of how my blog looks while one reads it I chose not to include a set of ellipses â€�“…” to denote a missing part of a quote. I simply ask you to please excuse this grammar atrocity and just know that I debated with myself back and forth for quite some time before finally settling on the final product you see, knowing that I would make a full explanation and apology here because I did not want to confuse readers unfamiliar with ellipses. That being said, I’m sorry.)

â€�“YOU COULD DO WITH TAKING A LEAF OUT OF PERCY’S BOOK!” (1)

Ginny woke the next morning at her usual time, which explained why she was very surprised to hear her mother yelling at her brothers already this morning. It sounded like they were outside. In her sleepy haze she could hear her mother still hollering at her brothers, but her mum must have toned it down some because she could no longer make out the actual words.

She combed her hair her so mother wouldn’t nag her but didn’t style it, and very few of the kinks from sleeping actually smoothed out, but at least it was tangle-free for the time being. She didn’t bother to get dressed yet this morning either, wanting to see if she could figure out what all the fuss was about downstairs before she was shooed away. Ginny whole-heartedly believed in people minding their own business, but also knew her brothers loved to know terrible things about each other to hold it over one another, and learned from an early age if you don’t play this sibling game you’ll automatically lose.

As Ginny crept very slowly to keep boards from creaking, all that drifted up to the top of the stairs were muffled voices at first. Now everyone was in the kitchen instead of outside, and it sounded like her mum was still telling them off. About three quarters the way down the steps Ginny could make out Fred saying, â€�“It was cloudy, Mum!”

â€�“You keep your mouth closed while you’re eating!” their mum snapped.

â€�“They were starving him, Mum!” said George.

â€�“And you!” said (2) their mum.

Cloudy? Starving him? Ginny was in disbelief. Did her brothers actually fly to Surrey and back last night to visit Harry? Thinking back to how the twins got real quiet when she mentioned the idea yesterday, Ginny couldn’t figure out whether or not they listened to her and took it to heart or if they had already planned a rescue themselves and she had surprised them by thinking of it also and voicing it aloud. What if they told mum it was her idea in the first place?

Bracing herself just in case, ready to say she was only joking at the time if her brothers tried to bring Ginny in on their punishment, she walked into the kitchen. The first thing she noticed was that there was someone sitting at the kitchen table eating next to her brothers. Someone who didn’t have Weasley red hair.

Holy Freaking Crap! It was Harry Freaking Potter! It had to be! It was the same boy who got off the train with Ron at the end of the school year last spring and everything!

Frozen to the spot for a millisecond, and then realizing she was still in her pajamas, Ginny let out a small squeak of humiliation and raced back upstairs. She barely heard Ron say, â€�“Ginny. My sister. She’s been talking about you all summer.” (3)

Ginny was completely taken by surprise that her brothers did not just go to visit and check on him. They brought him here! HERE! THE Harry Potter was in HER house! THE Harry Potter who saved all of Britain and Europe and quite possibly the world from an evil wizard as a mere baby and again a few months ago saving that stone thingy was eating breakfast made by HER mum off of plates SHE’D washed! Ginny was mortified that she had ignored her mother’s voice in her head this morning which always said to get dressed and look presentable before coming downstairs.

She also grew slightly angry that Ron said she had been talking about Harry Potter all summer. Well, how could she not? Ginny was going to be at Hogwarts with him for the next six years! Her very own brother was his best friend! Her very own brother was worried about him nearly all summer, and the only times Ron and Ginny or the twins and Ginny ever had a conversation it had turned to their concern for Harry Potter. She was sure that anyone who talked to Ron asked him a ton of questions about The Boy Who Lived.

Ginny got up off her floor and got dressed. Harry Potter had been wearing Muggle clothes, although they looked much too big for him. She didn’t know if she should put on her comfortable Muggle clothes or not. What if she had been wearing them wrong somehow? Muggle village girls wore t-shirts with jeans, didn’t they? Ginny had seen pictures of other forms of Muggle clothing from Muggle books her dad had, but nobody in the village that she ever saw wore it. She didn’t own any of those tartan skirts or triangular blanket things or anything of the sort anyway.

While looking through her wardrobe, she heard voices drifting up to her window from outside again. All of her brothers who were at breakfast and Harry Potter were now outside in the garden. They all started digging around in the bushes. It looked like they were going to be out there for some time. Ginny threw on some clothes and pulled her hair back again like she’d been wearing it lately and went down to the kitchen to ask her mum what was going on while everyone else was outside.

Molly had a plate ready for her when she got downstairs, â€�“Mum, why is Harry Potter HERE?” asked Ginny. She glanced out the window to check that the boys were all staying outside.

â€�“Apparently, your brothers rescued him. I have a mind to go to these relatives of his and demand to know why the poor boy was locked in his room all hours of the day for half a week bored, angry, and starving. Imagine if a wizard did such a thing to one of them, there would be an outrage!” Molly went on, â€�“That is no way to a treat a child or anyone for that matter, not ever! I haven’t discussed it yet with your father, but the boy is not going back to Surrey for the rest of the summer. He’ll stay here with people who understand him and we’ll get to the bottom of this underage magic incident.”

â€�“Harry Potter is going to stay here? With US? For a whole month almost? Mum! We’re going to be famous!” Ginny’s eyes got big as she wondered at what people at school would think when they found out she lived with Harry Potter.

â€�“No, we are not, dear. You’ll keep quiet about all this and mind Harry’s privacy. As far as we are concerned, he is just Ron’s friend staying for a few weeks and that’s all. He’s a person, not a zoo animal to be gawked at, and I expect you treat him as such. You carry on like normal; that’s what I expect of you,” finished her mum.

â€�“Why was he locked in his room? Were they punishing him for doing underage magic and getting a warning from the Ministry?” asked Ginny.

â€�“I don’t know, dear. Usually when I hear about these things it’s because Muggles are afraid,” said her mum.

It was difficult for Ginny to imagine Harry Potter as just another one of her brother’s friends. Getting up to put her dishes away she noticed a beautiful white owl sitting in the perch area with Errol. So this was Hedwig, a beautiful bird, fitting for someone so famous. Of course Harry Potter wouldn’t have a common brown owl. Hedwig was asleep at the moment, probably had been up all night with Harry Potter and her brothers while they flew here last night. Ginny didn’t disturb her and instead glanced out the window and was taken aback.

â€�“Mum? Is Harry Potter de-gnoming our garden?” she called to Molly. â€�“You’re punishing him? For what?”

â€�“Of course not, dear.” Molly walked out to the living room to stand beside Ginny to watch the boys finish the chore. â€�“I told the boys to do it as a punishment because they could’ve been seen, or worse lost your father his job at the Ministry by exposing his enchanted Muggle car, and he chose to go, outside and help them. He really is actually very polite.”

Ginny thought about all this. Her brothers came just as close as she did at breaking the International Statute of Secrecy, if not more so. If Ginny had been exposed, her breach never would have brought her own father’s job into question. To top it off Ginny had been still within walking distance of home if anything had gone wrong. Her brothers’ crime was much worse than hers, all things considered, and yet here they were doing their punishment all together, having fun even!

She kept watching, knowing what usually happened during a de-gnoming, and sure enough her brothers didn’t even have to finish their punishment either. After the gnomes figured out they were being kicked out, they all began to walk away to the field on the other side of the garden wall.

That was so not fair! It took Ginny hours and hours to do her punishment chore and she was grounded for a whole week afterwards. She debated bringing this up to her mum, but decided keeping quiet would be better than getting a speech on final parental authority. Her mum already poked fun at her earlier when she was at the table about not being vigilant about being dressed, and lo and behold we had a visitor, which her mum had found utterly hilarious. At the Burrow, what Mum said was the final word and that was that; even Dad became tongue-tied when she started yelling.

Even though her mum had laughed about Ginny’s earlier predicament ,it was only half-heartedly, and Ginny didn’t want to be anywhere near her anger target when Dad got home and found out about the car-flying incident. So Ginny stayed as she was and let the irritation of the injustice simmer away.

Molly had been watching the clock as she usually did in the mornings and switched her gaze to the door when Arthur’s hand switched from Work to Traveling before coming to rest on Home. The front door slammed and outside George shouted, â€�“He’s back! … Dad’s Home!” (4)

Ginny, not ready in the least to treat Harry Potter like just another one of her brother’s friends, made the decision to not be anywhere near him today. She disappeared to the staircase and sat at the top; with nobody in trouble at the moment they all spoke loudly enough she could easily hear her father talking about his raids at work and her brothers asking him questions about Muggle baiting.

Arthur got himself into a predicament commenting on how it was unbelievable that wizards would put enchantments on the most random Muggle artifacts. He was taken by quite the surprise when Molly butted in, â€�“LIKE CARS, FOR INSTANCE?” (5)

Uh oh. It sounded like her mum never knew the car could fly until now. Maybe that’s why the boys got off easy on their punishment. Their mum was waiting to punish the person who made it possible for them to fly it in the first place.

How did Ginny learn it could fly again? Oh yeah, she heard the twins talking about it last summer. That’s right, she promised not to tell if they kept quiet about her accidentally breaking Mum’s old pair of knitting needles. Molly had been in a frenzy to get new ones once school started in order to get the Weasley sweaters done in time for Christmas, especially since she had taken on the extra project of making Harry Potter one last year as well.

Ginny had blamed the rocking chair crushing them, that they had rolled near it on the floor, when in reality she had made a makeshift bow in the tree grove and had used them as arrows because she didn’t want to take the time to make arrows once the bow was finished. Mum’s new needles were enchanted to knit for her, reducing her chore to only designing the sweaters, so Ginny never thought about the incident anymore now that she saw how pleased her mum was with the new ones.

Listening to what was going on in the kitchen, Ginny’s dad was now trying to make a case about the car being perfectly legal to fly as long as it wasn’t intended to be flown. Unfortunately her mum was not interested in the validity of the car flying. Instead she was trying to impress how wrong it was for the boys to have access to it to bring Harry Potter here. Ginny’s dad attempted to use Harry being there and meeting him as an excuse to try to the change the subject but failed.

It began to get awkward hearing her mum bellow at their dad, and Ginny got up to read through one of Ron’s books on charms she had taken from downstairs that he didn’t seem to miss, to avoid Harry Potter and her parents today and practice with one of her switches that wasn’t too dried up yet. Truth be told, she preferred them dried up a bit and rigid, but her mother didn’t want them flaking dirty branch particles in the house and made her throw them away when they weren’t supple anymore. As she stood up, Ron and Harry Potter began to come around the corner at the bottom of the staircase from the kitchen.

Ginny raced to the safety of her room and watched as her brother and Harry Potter walked past through a tiny crack she still had open. She thought it would be enough to have the door most of the way closed, thinking that it wouldn’t draw too much attention if she held very still.

Her heart stopped when Harry Potter’s emerald green eyes looked directly into hers anyway. Spellbound for only a moment, Ginny did the first thing she could think of to break his cheery gaze and slammed her door shut.

â€�“Ginny,” said Ron. â€�“You don’t know how weird it is for her to be this shy. She never shuts up normally-” (6)

She leaned her back against her door from within her room and let out a deep breath. He is just another one of Ron’s friends, he is just another one of Ron’s friends, she repeated over and over to herself. She picked up Ron’s book, The Standard Book of Spells (Grade 1), but couldn’t concentrate.

This was going to be a very long rest of the summer.

Quote References:

(1) CoS Page 33
(2) CoS Pages 34-35
(3) CoS Page 35
(4) CoS Page 38
(5) CoS Page 38
(6) CoS Page 40

Over the following week, Harry Potter surprisingly blended in very well with the family. Ginny was alone in getting nervous and flustered around such a famous person. If Celestina Warbeck were living with the Weasleys maybe it would be a different story. Her brothers and dad would fall over themselves trying to be helpful around her and their mum would probably be all in a dither during her entire stay, as she was Molly’s favorite singer. However, where Harry Potter was concerned, her mum treated him almost similar to the orphan Abellios when Ginny first brought him home and seemed just as determined to show him wizard family life until he could be on his own.

Her mum insisted on feeding Harry Potter extra helpings of everything, which he gladly took, she magically mended all of his clothing after he unpacked and she brought his laundry down with Ron’s the day after arriving. Ginny spent many evenings after dinner with her mum, learning how to tear the Muggle clothing apart at their seams and cutting them down to a more appropriate size for Harry Potter.

Molly was more amazing at looking at a person and tailoring their clothes than she even was at cutting hair. She merely glanced at Harry Potter whenever he sat and finished his summer essays with Ron in the kitchen and made new seams so his Muggle clothes would fit him better. Ginny supposed it was all the practice she had had with her brothers over the years. Her mum did comment once though that she had to take some extra care because Harry was thin like Percy but short like the twins and had to combine techniques she used to only use separately when redesigning clothes.

One of those evenings Ginny was working with a Muggle seam ripper on one of Harry Potter’s old jumpers while her mum worked with her wand on a piece of one of his blue t-shirts. Molly firmly believed that Charm magic was much stronger if you could very clearly see what the magic was supposed to be doing and that doing it by hand first helped with understanding the physical concepts. This was why Ginny worked with the Muggle tool.

It occurred to her that it wasn’t just some of Harry Potter’s Muggle clothes that were too big for him; looking at his pile, she noticed all of his clothes were several sizes too large. Pausing, Ginny turned to Molly. â€�“Mum, if Harry Potter’s parents died when he was a baby, isn’t he an only child? Why do none of his clothes fit him?”

Molly turned to her daughter and smiled when she said, â€�“You have more in common with Harry than you think, dear. Nearly all of his clothes are hand-me-downs, just like most of yours and all of Ron’s are. Harry’s cousin is considerably bigger than he is and gives his clothes to him when he no longer wants them, or so I’m told.” She paused before she added, â€�“Harry never had his own clothes before going to Diagon Alley and buying a set of brand new school robes last year.”

Ginny looked over at Harry Potter sitting with her brother in the kitchen. He had a Nimbus 2000, a beautiful rare snowy owl, school robes tailored just for him when purchased, and glossy new text books. Hearing that Harry Potter had to wear hand-me-down clothes his whole life prior to going to school at Hogwarts, was the first time Ginny found him relatable.

â€�“Why didn’t his aunt fix the clothes so that they fit him better?” she asked.

Molly didn’t answer right away; she kept right on manipulating the thread into a strong overlocking plain seam pattern to connect the two new pieces she’d finished cutting before finally saying, â€�“Not everyone is capable of mothering other people’s children. That doesn’t make them a bad mother, just a very protective one. It probably wasn’t a priority. As long as Harry had clothes that’s all that really matters.”

Ginny thought about Luna’s hair, and the extra time her mum put into Harry Potter’s Weasley sweater she made him last year. She smirked to herself when she thought that if Ron were sitting here with them he would ask what about mothers who mother other people’s children better than her own?

â€�“How do you always know the answers to my questions, Mum? Especially about Harry Potter?” Ginny asked, puzzled as to how her mother knew so much about him already.

â€�“Your brothers don’t go to bed as early nor as easily as you do. They don’t need to be outside anymore after dark so if they want to stay up I make them stay in the living room or kitchen with me while I butt into their lives asking tons of questions,” she laughed. â€�“When they get annoyed or tired of answering they go to bed.” Glancing at Harry her mum said quietly, â€�“I think he wanted us to know that he didn’t do the charm that gave him his warning from the Ministry, that he doesn’t try to do things to get into trouble, but it seems his Muggle family tends to blame him for everything, whether or not it’s his fault. His first couple of nights here Harry spilled quite a bit of his home life after your father left for work and stopped interrupting with his Muggle bumbling.” Picking up on her mother’s protective instincts, Ginny began to understand Ron’s concern for him all summer long not answering his letters.

Ginny’s dad was entertaining at dinner times before leaving for work. He asked Harry Potter all sorts of questions about Muggles and Muggle life. Ginny could barely follow what her father was saying most of the time and was pleased when even Harry Potter didn’t know the answer sometimes. When her father asked about plumbing without spells, Harry Potter’s amusing but somewhat serious response was simply the word, â€�“Science?”

Her father laughed so hard. â€�“Science! That’s a good one! I gotta use that next time someone asks me questions like this at work!”

The perplexed look on Harry Potter’s face told Ginny that he didn’t understand how her dad found that as a hysterical joke but continued, â€�“Hermione could probably explain it.” Ron nodded in agreement.

About a week after her brothers brought him home, Ginny was finally getting around to thinking about the famous Harry Potter she learned about growing up as simply Harry, one of her brother’s friends. When she spoke to her mother or father about him she was comfortable just calling him Harry now, and didn’t stare in wonder anymore when he did ordinary things like help pick vegetables from the garden or set the table.

Normal as she could be now when he wasn’t right in front of her, she still had problems being in the same room with him though, and often was so nervous she dropped things, blushed quite a bit whenever the attention was on her, bumped into things she normally never did before, forgot what she was doing in the moment, and worst of all couldn’t manage to speak in front of him for fear of saying something that made her sound ridiculous.

It was especially embarrassing when her birthday finally rolled around and world-famous Harry Potter attended her family birthday feast. Her mum always said August was the most fun and at the same time saddest month because there were two birthday celebrations and also the last night of holidays when the family threw parties. They didn’t buy gifts to give in the Weasley family, instead they made or did things for each other.

Percy left his bedroom, abandoned his secret letters, and sat with Ginny all morning answering questions she had about Hogwarts, classes, things she found interesting in Ron’s text books, and anything she could think of about school. Ron and Harry took her outside and played Quidditch with her. They let her take one of the twins’ brooms and Ron stayed on his Shooting Star and Harry on his Nimbus. Although she practiced as much as she did with the squirrels and horses, it was nothing compared to flying with other people. Ginny had trouble watching both of them at the same time and afterwards resigned herself to training harder for her house team. Her mum spent the day preparing the dinner feast and her father just smiled and simply told her that he was working on a surprise for her at work.

Her twin brothers fired off some of their Filibuster fireworks in her favorite colors: forest green, like where Abellios lived, and fiery orange-copper like the dragons in Romania. Her mum made all her favorite dishes, and Ginny didn’t have to help with any of the chores around the house. As pleased as she was for the special guest, it would have been nice to be able to laugh and joke out loud with everyone without worrying about making any kind of blunder.

Ron sometimes commented how weird it was that Ginny was being this quiet lately, but nobody else noticed because they spent much less time with Harry than Ron did. The twins hung out with him when the boys went to play Quidditch together, and Percy ignored him as he usually ignored everyone all summer.

One morning Ginny was peacefully eating a leisurely breakfast with both parents after her father came home from work. None of her brothers had gotten up yet. Arthur was reading the Daily Prophet and pointed out a section to her mum. â€�“Look, Molly, that Gilderoy Lockhart you go on about is having a book signing in Diagon Alley next Wednesday at Flourish and Blotts. He’s promoting his semi-new autobiography Magical Me.”

A female Little owl suddenly swooped into the owl perch through the big open window and landed with a heavy thud on one of the rail posts with a stack of envelopes tied to her leg. Hedwig, being the only owl there, flapped and ruffled her wings in acknowledgement. Ginny was surprised; normally post owls brought the mail at the same time the Daily Prophet arrived.

â€�“Go get the mail, dear,” Ginny’s mum said to her while she read the Gilderoy Lockhart article Arthur had just pointed out.

As Ginny approached the owl, it was no wonder she arrived a bit late this morning; the stack of envelopes tied to her leg was much bigger than she’d initially realized. She pulled off six letters from Hogwarts written on heavy parchment in emerald green ink.

Ginny absentmindedly reached over to pet the Little owl who surprisingly relaxed her head down and spread her wings. She really wanted to get to reading her first ever Hogwarts school list but obligingly began to scratch the owl between the shoulder blades and massage the back of her neck. Most owls her size only carried letters and this one was fairly brave to carry such a big stack alone. The bird closed her yellow eyes, and her white eyebrows amused Ginny as they moved up and down while the bird was getting kneaded.

The Little owl abruptly pulled away and shook out her feathers, scattering little dust motes that had been trapped beneath them into the air before getting ready to fly again. Post owls didn’t usually stick around when delivering mail. Ginny wondered, because of the way it relaxed into her scratching, if it had been a pet before becoming a school owl.

Back at the table Ginny gave the stack of Hogwarts letters for her brothers to her dad while her mum began to compare the Lockhart article from the Daily Prophet to a calendar. Then she opened her own letter to read.

Hogwarts School
of Witchcraft and Wizardry

UNIFORM
First-year students will require:
1. Three sets of plain work robes (black)
2. One plain pointed hat (black) for day wear
3. One pair of protective gloves (dragon hide or similar)
4. One winter cloak (black, silver fastenings)
Please note that all pupils’ clothes should carry nametags

COURSE BOOKS
All students should have a copy of the following:
The Standard Book of Spells (Grade 1)
by Miranda Goshawk
A History of Magic by Bathilda Bagshot
Magical Theory by Adalbert Waffling
A Beginners’ Guide to Transfiguration by Emeric Switch
One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi
by Phyllida Spore
Magical Draughts and Potions by Arsenius Jigger
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
by Newt Scamander (1)
Break with a Banshee by Gilderoy Lockhart
Gadding with Ghouls by Gilderoy Lockhart
Holidays with Hags by Gilderoy Lockhart
Travels with Trolls by Gilderoy Lockhart
Voyages with Vampires by Gilderoy Lockhart
Wanderings with Werewolves by Gilderoy Lockhart
Year with the Yeti by Gilderoy Lockhart (2)

OTHER EQUIPMENT
1 wand
1 cauldron (pewter, standard size 2)
1 set of glass or crystal phials
1 telescope
1 set brass scales
Students may also bring an owl OR a cat OR a toad

PARENTS ARE REMINDED THAT FIRST YEARS ARE NOT ALLOWED THEIR OWN BROOMSTICKS (3)

â€�“Mum,” Ginny said to take Molly away from the newspaper article, â€�“look at my school list of books I have to get.”

â€�“Yes, dear,” said her mother not looking up. â€�“Yours will be the longest as you have to get all the ones that you’ll carry for your whole time at Hogwarts.”

â€�“No, mum, look,” said Ginny again. â€�“Half of them are by Gilderoy Lockhart!”

â€�“What?” said Molly, taking Ginny’s list. â€�“Your new professor must be using them as the texts for your Defense Against the Darks Arts classes.” Ginny’s father leaned over to look at Ginny’s list after her mum said that, and then Ginny’s parents exchanged dark looks.

â€�“What does that mean?” asked Ginny, already thinking she knew the answer, based on watching her mum scrimping and saving for Lockhart’s books when she found ones she wanted to buy for the house in the past.

â€�“That means your brothers will probably need them all as well, and we probably won’t be able to get them second hand,” said Ginny’s dad, groaning.

â€�“And that we might not be able to get you everything new like we talked about earlier this summer, Ginny,” said her mum quietly. â€�“We’ll know for sure after your brothers wake up and open their own letters.”

Ginny didn’t have to wait long. Harry and Ron came downstairs first. As soon as Ginny saw Harry Potter in the kitchen, she put down her letter and tried to turn back to her bowl of porridge at the same time. Naturally her arms betrayed her and she knocked over her bowl somehow all the way off the table. When Ginny ducked under the table to retrieve her bowl, she felt her face instantly grow hot and knew she was blushing red from embarrassment, which of course made her further blush more. She took a moment to compose herself, red face and all, before scooping up her bowl and its spilled contents and carefully bringing it up to set it back on the table.

Ginny could hear her father sorting through the letters, looking for Harry and Ron’s all the while she was being awkward, and her Mum had been occupied with getting toast ready for the boys. Either nobody noticed Ginny’s bowl tumble to the floor or they had gotten too used to odd things happening to her when Harry Potter entered the room. Arthur had the letters sorted out to the right kids by the time Fred and George came downstairs and everyone was quiet while they read their letters for a few minutes. Ginny slowly felt the blood recede from her face while everyone was busy.

The twins caught on first that every student needed a copy of all of Lockhart’s expensive books. Molly couldn’t keep the worried look off her face when she mentioned that Ginny could get most of her requirements second hand.

â€�“Oh, are you starting at Hogwarts this year?” Harry asked Ginny. (4)

Feeling her face start to burn again but still trying to keep her cool at being spoken to directly by Harry Potter, Ginny tried to just nod and casually lean on the table when doing so. Unfortunately, her mother must have moved the butter dish while making the boys' toast while Ginny hadn’t been paying attention because right as she stuck her elbow on the table to lean on, she felt a slippery warm sensation and realized she had stuck it right in the middle of the room-temperature butter stick.

Harry Potter politely pretended he didn’t notice Ginny’s sudden mortification, and instead focused on what thankfully had distracted everyone else, Percy coming downstairs. Percy seemed to be in an annoyingly happy mood and didn’t even cry out in alarm when he nearly sat on an owl after he pulled out the last chair from around the table. He simply stood up again and passed him right over to Ron who did cry out in excitement that Errol was finally back.

â€�“Errol!” said Ron taking the limp owl from Percy and extracting a letter from under its wing. â€�“Finally—he’s got Hermione’s answer. I wrote to her saying that we were going to try and rescue you from the Dursleys,” (5) he said to Harry. That explained Ron’s evasiveness the night before he and the twins left for Surrey, thought Ginny.

Errol must have gotten in late last night or very early this morning to have beaten the Daily Prophet delivery owl and had been asleep all this time on the chair while Ginny and her mum and dad were eating breakfast together earlier. After Ron tried to stand him up on the old perch in the kitchen by the chicken feed, he was too tired and weak to stay standing, and Ron unceremoniously laid him down right in the way of where Ginny and her mum would be doing dishes later.

If Harry Potter hadn’t been sitting at the table with them, Ginny would have told Ron off for being too lazy to walk Errol the few feet to the new perch where he could really rest. But it didn’t seem as though Ron would have paid any attention anyway, as he began reading Hermione’s letter out loud for the family.

Hermione wanted to meet in Diagon Alley next Wednesday if the Weasleys could make it to go shopping for new school books. Ginny perked up; so far there had been no discussion on when they were going to Diagon Alley this summer as the letters all came so late. Normally they waited until the last couple of weeks before school began. That way Arthur and Molly could save as much as possible before going, but the family at least usually had a plan by now.

â€�“Well, that fits in nicely; we can go and get all your things then, too,” said (6) Ginny’s mum.

Ginny knew that that fit in nicely because it was precisely the day Gilderoy Lockhart was going to be at Flourish and Blotts doing his book signing. She only hoped that she and her mum would have enough time to find second hand supplies that weren’t too beat up before spending the afternoon in a bookstore.

After Percy went back upstairs and the other boys outside to play Quidditch, where Harry was going to let them all have a go on his Nimbus 2000, Ginny asked her mum what they needed to cut back on to be able to afford all of Lockhart’s books.

â€�“It’s not fair,” Ginny stated. â€�“Why would a professor do that? Assign seven expensive books that every single student has to purchase brand new because nobody used them before as text books?”

â€�“Bill and Charlie helped out more this year than usual. We’ll manage,” said her mother repeating what she said to the twins earlier. â€�“We’re probably not going to be able to buy you brand new robes, and Ginny, we’re not going to be able to buy you a pet to take to school either.”

â€�“I should be allowed to take Abellios, Mum,” said Ginny. â€�“Ron takes Scabbers and he’s a rodent! Fred and George’s friend Lee takes a tarantula! I saw it last year when they were boarding the train. Rats and spiders aren’t on the list but they can go, so why can’t I take a tame squirrel?”

â€�“Abellios isn’t tame, Ginny. He’s wild. He was born wild, and we raised him to be able to live wild,” said her mum. â€�“Taking him to Hogwarts will take away his wild freedom. If Abellios didn’t want to live wild and free, he would come back to the Burrow; he wouldn’t stay in the tree grove with the other squirrels where he has to fight for food and territory.”

Ginny knew Abellios was happy in the tree grove. For a fleeting second she thought about taking him to live free on the Hogwarts grounds and then remembered what her mum said about fighting for territory. She didn’t want him to have to reestablish a home all over again at a place so large she might never see him no matter how hard she looked.

Her mum tried to distract Ginny by finishing their conversation of what they needed to cut back on. â€�“Are you okay with getting second hand robes, dear? You know I can make them look almost brand new.”

Ginny nodded her head yes; second hand clothes were easy for her to make her own. That she was used to doing. Really, all she had looked forward to was a brand new wand and a pet of her own.

â€�“Now, I’m going to write to some of the extended family members and see if any of them have a spare wand to pass down to you,” said Molly. â€�“Ron seems to be getting on okay with Charlie’s old wand. I’m sure you’ll do well with one too.” This was exactly what Ginny did not want to hear, but she nodded her head, accepting the unfairness of some die-hard Lockhart fan wreaking havoc with her family’s finances.

* * *

When Wednesday rolled around Ginny awoke much earlier than she normally did. Her disappointments after the Hogwarts letters had come were nearly forgotten, and this morning all she could think about was going to Diagon Alley. Who cared if she didn’t go into Madam Malkins and get fitted and tailored robes? Her mum had been tailoring her clothes since she was born. Ginny had never cared how new her books were going to look. As far as she had been concerned, a book was a book; they had the same information in them no matter the year they were printed. Furthermore, the twins went to school without a pet (although you could make the argument that they had each other and therefore didn’t need one to take care of). Mum had written to their extended family. Great Aunt Muriel claimed that if she looked around enough she might be able to come up with a wand, but told Molly not to hold her breath.

Ginny could just imagine what Aunt Muriel thought when she’d received her mum’s letter. â€�“Wouldn’t have to ask family for favors like this if she hadn’t married into that Weasley family that breeds like gnomes.” If she ended up with an old wand or not, Ginny was determined to have a good time while out with the family today.

She jumped out of bed and began to look for one of the Weasley sweaters her mum had made her and her purple wizard cloak that draped over a wizard’s day-wear outside. Muggle clothes just would not do in Diagon Alley. She ran downstairs where her mum was already awake frying bacon, and she helped finish making the sandwiches while her mother went upstairs to wake the boys.

After everyone had finished a quick breakfast, Molly set the dishes to do themselves this morning and gathered everyone around the still clean fireplace, where Harry Potter admitted that he had never traveled by Floo powder before. Molly began to fret, but Fred and George showed him how easy it was, and after Arthur said he would be fine she let Harry go after Ginny’s dad whipped out of sight.

Ron gave Harry a few tips and then Harry whooshed out of sight as well. Ron hurried after him, then Percy, and then Ginny and her mum went last together. Ginny wasn’t allowed to travel alone yet. Her mum and dad had decided that the kids weren’t allowed to be on their own when off the property of the Burrow until after their first year at school and they’d had a bit of magical training. Ron was ecstatic when he found out he, Harry, and Hermione would be allowed to wander and buy their own supplies this summer, just like the twins had been able to for the past few years.

Ginny still got a little sick but knew the feeling would pass when she and her mother went through the Floo Network. She did her best to keep her eyes open through the flying soot and was relieved when she saw her father and brothers on the other side before landing in the Leaky Cauldron’s hearth.

When she arrived with Molly, the Weasley boys were frantic. Harry Potter was nowhere to be found. He should’ve come out before Ron. Molly began to fret again and Arthur told the boys to stay together. That way, when they found Harry, everyone would know at the same time.

â€�“Harry had to come out of a wizard’s fireplace; Muggle ones aren’t connected to the Floo Network normally. He probably just went one grate too far, so we’ll check Diagon Alley. Maybe Harry came out into one of the shop’s hearths,” said Arthur calmly.

The Weasleys went out the back of the Leaky Cauldron and tapped the brick to open the door to Diagon Alley. Arthur and Percy began scanning over everyone’s heads, and Ron and the twins looked around for both Harry and Hermione in the sea of faces everywhere. â€�“Hermione is looking for us too. She might find Harry first,” said Ron, â€�“or she could help us look.”

They ran and peered into every shop, systematically eliminating where Harry definitely was not. Ron noticed Hagrid standing in front of Gringotts and Percy at first seemed exasperated. â€�“We’re not looking for Hagrid…”

But then Arthur, taller than everyone else, said, â€�“There he is, he is with Hagrid!” The Weasley boys began to sprint to Gringotts, and Ginny’s mum grabbed her hand and dragged her after them.

Ginny ran as fast as she could, but it was awkward being pulled along by her mother at the same time. She could see Harry now, standing next a ginormous man and a young girl with bushy brown hair who didn’t look much older than herself. Ginny recognized her as Hermione Granger from last spring when she got off the train and walked out of Platform 9¾ with Ron and Harry. From a distance it looked as though Harry was fine, but her mother didn’t slow down until they reached the steps of the white building and she could get her hands on Harry herself.

While Ginny worked to catch her breath, her mother took out a clothes brush and began brushing soot from Harry’s cloak. She watched her dad fix Harry’s glasses and her mum thank Hagrid over and over for finding him down Knockturn Alley, of all places.

Harry told Ron and Hermione about seeing a boy all three disliked from the Malfoy family in Knockturn Alley with his father. At first Ginny’s dad wanted to know what the Malfoys were up to in Knockturn Alley, but changed gears when meeting Hermione’s parents. Both of Hermione’s parents were dentists in the Muggle world. Dentists were professionals at cleaning and caring for people’s teeth, a field Ginny had neither heard of before, nor wanted to think about. Wizards would brush their teeth like Muggles but on the occasion of neglect could simply take a regenerative potion or perform a spell to help with any complications.

They left Hermione and her family behind once the goblins were ready to take the Weasleys and Harry to their vaults underground. Ginny couldn’t help but think about how at ease Hermione seemed to be around Harry Potter. Like with her brothers, the idea of him being famous must have worn out its novelty quite some time ago during school last year.

She really needed to get a grip on herself, she decided. Her mother was right; she needed to really act like Harry was just another one of her brothers’ friends. It was no big deal. She decided she was determined to act normal around him… and that somehow, today, she would speak… while he was within hearing distance.

Stopping at the Weasley vault, Ginny only vaguely paid attention to her mum feeling around inside of it before scooping it all into her bag and adding it to what Bill and Charlie sent weeks before. She was trying to pay attention to her brothers’ conversations so that she could add to it, and fulfill her new promise to herself to act normal. Unfortunately an opportunity never came up, as Harry’s vault was next and when the goblin opened it with Harry’s key, everyone’s eyes almost popped out of their heads.

Harry Potter was rich.

Harry Potter was not just famous, Harry Potter was the epitome of rich and famous. He tried not to show it; he tried to block what was in his vault from everyone being able to see it. But his skinny frame could not conceal the piles of gold and the mountains of silver and bronze.

He never talked about his money at the Burrow. Harry Potter would probably never have to worry about money his whole life even if he never worked after graduating from Hogwarts. He could probably leave school after his O.W.L.s, not take any N.E.W.T.s to get into a real profession, and still be happy for the rest of his life. Ginny’s earlier courage after seeing Hermione’s apathetic attitude dwindled away. She sat quietly in the cart that took them around turns at breakneck speeds until they all made it back up to the main floor of Gringotts and met back up with the Grangers.

Outside everyone separated and Molly took Ginny to find supplies from the required list that would be easy to locate. They ghosted through a junk shop first. Molly didn’t think they would find anything remotely close to the precision instruments needed for school but said it was always worth a try. You never knew what treasures you might find that other people simply threw out. All the scales they saw were lopsided, the clothes were covered in stains, books had pages hanging half way out, and there was even a case filled with broken wands.

After poking around a bit, Molly came across a small pewter cauldron. It wasn’t collapsible and it had a thick black mush stuck to the bottom of it. Ginny watched her mum take out her wand and glance around to look for the shopkeepers. She muttered a charm and then a spell under her breath and some of the thick mush sizzled away. Giddy with excitement, Molly heaved the cauldron out from under a pile of dirty measuring instruments for potion making and again tapped the cauldron with her wand. It levitated only for a moment and then settled itself back onto the floor.

Satisfied, her mum called over the shopkeeper to help lift the cauldron to the checkout counter. Ginny wasn’t sure what her mum was up to; she knew she wouldn’t be able to haul that thing around on her own at school. Perhaps her mum planned to give her the one at home and keep this one? Probably not, the one at home was much bigger than the standard size 2 her school list called for.

The junk shop listed the dirty old cauldron at nearly half the cost of a brand new one from Potage’s Cauldron Shop. Ginny watched though, as what her mum did next was fascinating. She casually mentioned that her husband, Arthur Weasley, would be there in a few minutes to help move the cauldron after it was purchased, and she was wondering if they minded knocking down the price some? Molly was going to need to take it to a professional cleaner and then have all the old charms placed back on it after all.

The shopkeeper mentioned that by the time she did all that, it would be cheaper to go buy a new one. Ginny’s mum had an answer though. â€�“Oh, Arthur knows someone at the Ministry who excels at re-charming these things. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. Lots of people owe him favors. I’m sure it wouldn’t take him any time at all to find someone. It’s just the cleaning that will cost me later.”

By the time they finished haggling over a price, Ginny’s mum barely paid ten percent of the original cost of a cauldron from Potages. The shopkeeper knew plenty of Weasleys who visited his establishment and admitted that this particular cauldron had sat on the shelf for quite a few years in the back because he didn’t think anyone would ever be interested in buying it. The man had put it on the display floor half-heartedly to hold the measuring instruments together in one place with it.

Once outside with the unwieldy cauldron, Molly heaved it to a nearby bench and focused her wand on the thick sludge at the bottom where it began to sizzle and melt away. Within a few minutes the sludge was gone. The cauldron wasn’t shiny and new, but Ginny could see that now it could easily be cleaned and polished.

â€�“What did you do to it?” asked Ginny.

â€�“Remember what I always say about knowing how to do things the Muggle way, then doing magic,” asked her mother with a smile. â€�“Well, most wizards would try to just vanish that stuff away, except you can’t just vanish some magic away, you have kind of to neutralize it first.”

Lost already, Ginny tried to pay attention to what her mother was telling her. â€�“You see, that was a bit of magical potion gone wrong stuck to the bottom there, and the residual magic was helping to bond it to the surface. Only a true Potions master can vanish away a mess like that. So I had to imagine it loosening like how food comes off of soaking dishes and use a scraping spell. Then as the bits came away, I vanished those pieces little by little until it was gone.” Excited at her own success, Molly continued, â€�“Now that it’s gone, it can be cleaned properly and once it is the old spells like feather lightness should return. A safety you see, because a cauldron with anything in it should not float away… and if they don’t come back, well, your father does know someone who can fix that.”

Ginny was still puzzled, â€�“Why couldn’t the shopkeeper just do that though?”

Molly paused before answering, indicating Ginny had again asked a question with a complicated answer. â€�“You’d be surprised how many witches and wizards expect their magic to just work, and don’t try to improve upon anything they’ve learned. Especially for something as mundane as cleaning, they suppose if you can’t clean something with a simple spell, then it is damaged beyond repair.”

â€�“Like, Ron?” asked Ginny, remembering her brother’s unwillingness to ever do more than necessary with his lessons.

â€�“Yes, exactly like your brother Ron,” laughed her mother.

Molly put a temporary feather light spell on the cauldron and Ginny dragged it along behind her like she’d seen Muggle children do with balloons in her village. It didn’t levitate very high though; it stayed right about waist level.

After the junk shop Molly took Ginny to a secondhand book shop and bought decent copies of all of her school books with the exception of Lockhart’s. Those went into the cauldron which dropped down ever so slightly with the added weight of the books. Once inside the cauldron the books also became feather light. Then they popped into Scibbulus’s Writing Instruments to buy ink, parchment, quills, and envelopes for writing home and doing homework. These Ginny got new as they weren’t that expensive.

Next door to that was Quality Quidditch Supplies, where Ginny could just make out a small sign that read, â€�“COMING SOON: NIMBUS 2001.” Before she could read the description, her mum pulled her along to their next stop.

At Wiseacres Wizarding Equipment they found a decent set of scales marked down which someone had returned because the customer thought they were gold colored brass scales, not brass colored brass scales. The witch had realized her mistake after using it once at home. Ginny studied a pair of gold colored scales and didn’t see that much of a color difference, but it must’ve been enough to not match the rest of the witch’s potion making instruments.

â€�“You said that they still work absolutely fine though?” Molly asked.

â€�“Yes,” said the shopkeeper. â€�“The lady who brought them back said they worked perfectly and that she tried to overlook the mismatched colors but decided to get the gold colored ones anyway.”

â€�“Like these ones?” Ginny pointed at a comparably priced set, only slightly more expensive than the brass colored ones.

â€�“The very same,” said the man, nodding.

â€�“That’s kind of ridiculous, spending more money buying something just because it will match the rest of your stuff,” Ginny remarked. â€�“Isn’t it just going to stay hidden away in their potions chamber at home anyway where almost nobody will see it?”

â€�“GINNY!” said her mother, giving her that look that said Ginny had been impolite.

â€�“It’s quite alright,” said the shopkeeper, chuckling. â€�“You get all sorts of customers, really. Some are less about form and function than they are about appearances.”

â€�“What do you mean 'form and function'?” asked Ginny, before her mum could shush her.

â€�“Well, you see, the scales you’re purchasing are a student model. You’ll need a set with a vastly greater acuity for anything more advanced than O.W.L. level potions. But of course, Hogwarts provides those for the few students who do reach N.E.W.T. levels. The gold colored ones, which are made of brass and are simply gold colored, are also just basic student models,” replied the man behind the counter.

He must have noticed Ginny’s still puzzled expression because he went on, â€�“meaning that those scales will probably never be used to make anything overly complicated, if they are used at all. They will probably sit, as you said, just hidden away looking pretty all lined up with their matching instruments.”

Ginny couldn’t imagine wasting gold that way, and thanked the shopkeeper like her mother did when he finished packaging up her slightly used merchandise. Into her cauldron it went with the books, and on to Slug and Jiggers Apothecary to get her potions ingredients that she would be using her new scales for. While they were there they picked up a brand new set of glass phials for Ginny to use as well.

â€�“Nobody ever thinks to buy miscellaneous potions equipment at the Apothecary,” said Molly, â€�“but I found out years ago that they sell their phials much more reasonably priced than Wiseacres or Potages. Now, what’s left?”

â€�“Um,” Ginny looked at her list, â€�“Lockhart’s books, robes, a telescope, and… a wand.”

â€�“Well, your father confiscated a telescope a few weeks ago from someone during one of his raids who enchanted it to find, well, never mind what he enchanted it to find, the point is he no longer wants it now that it’s no longer enchanted. Arthur told me just this morning that he has to put it on a new tripod but that he did get permission to take it out of custody for you to have it. From what he says, it’s very high quality,” said Molly. â€�“So let’s head over to the second hand robe shop. I’m sure tons of witches drop off their old school robes when they no longer fit.” Excited about her high quality telescope surprise, Ginny happily let herself be led away.

There she stood in a changing room, trying on many robes as fast as she could. Her mum kept bringing her more of various sizes too big so that they could alter them later at home. Finally, when she had three full sets and a cloak with silver fastenings all of which Molly was confident she could tailor for Ginny, they rushed over to Flourish and Blotts where they had agreed to meet the other kids.

It was only a quarter to noon but Molly wanted to get a good place in line to see Gilderoy Lockhart when he showed up. Ginny’s mum had brought Lockhart’s book Magical Me that she had previously bought while the boys were still in school last year. So at least her mum didn’t have to fret over buying that to experience seeing him in person.

By the time they arrived at Flourish and Blotts, there was already a line forming up inside, and Molly and Ginny jumped in to save a place for all the rest of the Weasleys when they showed up. Eventually, Arthur and Hermione’s parents came back from the Leaky Cauldron where Ginny was sure her father had been asking all sorts of questions about Muggles. Percy and the twins showed up a few minutes after them, and by then Gilderoy Lockhart had begun his signing.

Ginny looked behind her to see where Ron, Harry, and Hermione were and saw how the line had started to go out the front door and people were jostling around outside trying to get in. The trio appeared through the window and pushed their way inside and then slipped past everyone to stand in line with the rest of the Weasleys.

Ron was immediately trampled by the rude photographer who had been shoving people out of his way to get perfect shots of Gilderoy Lockhart for the Daily Prophet. Lockhart must have had the ears of a bat, for when Ron muttered his criticism to the photographer, Lockhart glanced his way and saw Harry Potter standing right next to him. â€�“It can’t be Harry Potter?” (7)

Gilderoy Lockhart grabbed Harry and yanked him up front next to himself. The photographer had a field day shoving people aside and getting shots from different perspectives, all the while Harry’s face began to turn red with embarrassment. Ginny had never seen Harry embarrassed before; it had never occurred to her that someone as famous as he was wouldn’t like being in the center of attention.

She watched as Lockhart forced Harry to stand next to him even after he let go of his hand and the photographer had finished taking pictures of them meeting. The longer Harry looked uncomfortable up there next to Lockhart, the angrier Ginny became on his behalf. Polite as ever, Harry let Lockhart parade him in front of everyone until Lockhart broke the news that he would be the next Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts this year.

Upon hearing this Ginny was no longer angry at Lockhart on Harry’s behalf; now she hated him all on his own. This was the self-absorbed git who assigned every Hogwarts student to buy his books as text books. This was the slimeball who made Ginny’s parents fret about being able to afford to send their kids to school this year. This professor was so dirty, the first thing he did in his new job was find a way to make himself that much richer and more famous.

It was the first time Ginny felt the longing that her twin brothers must feel all the time. The longing to rebel against an injustice. She didn’t know the first thing about making life hard for anyone, but she would do her best to make up for every promise her mother was forced to break because one man didn’t know how to play fair.

Ginny didn’t have time to think about Lockhart at the moment though. Harry Potter was walking right towards her. â€�“You have these,” Harry mumbled to her, tipping the books into the cauldron. â€�“I’ll buy my own-”

â€�“Bet you loved that, didn’t you, Potter?” said a voice Harry had no trouble recognizing, (8) but Ginny had never heard before. Harry looked up from her cauldron and right into the face of a pale-haired boy whose eyes showed a hatred Ginny had never seen emanate from anyone, but based on what she heard from Ron, Harry, and the twins had to say about him, could only be Draco Malfoy.

â€�“Famous Harry Potter,” said Malfoy. â€�“Can’t even go into a bookshop without making the front page.”

â€�“Leave him alone, he didn’t want all that!” said Ginny. It was the first time she had spoken in front of Harry. She was glaring at Malfoy.

â€�“Potter, you’ve got yourself a girlfriend!” drawled Malfoy. Ginny went scarlet as Ron and Hermione fought their way over, both clutching stacks of Lockhart’s books.

â€�“Oh, it’s you,” said Ron, looking at Malfoy as if he were something unpleasant on the sole of his shoe. â€�“Bet you’re surprised to see Harry here, eh?”

â€�“Not as surprised as I am to see you in a shop, Weasley,” retorted Malfoy. â€�“I suppose your parents will go hungry for a month to pay for all those.”

Ron went as red as Ginny. (9)

Ginny watched as Harry and Hermione held Ron back before he could start a fist fight with Draco Malfoy. They didn’t have to hold him back for long though. Both Draco’s father, Lucius Malfoy, and Arthur Weasley showed up to get in the middle of the argument.

To Ginny’s bewilderment, Lucius Malfoy began egging on her father just as his son had her brother. She watched as this stranger yanked one of her second hand books out her cauldron and brandished it in front of her father like he was a failure to all wizard kind. Lucius Malfoy began to tell her father precisely what he thought about them hanging out with Hermione’s family when all of a sudden Ginny’s cauldron tipped over and the contents spilled out.

Her father had rushed past her and started a fist fight with Lucius, in the middle of a bookshop in Diagon Alley. Some of her brothers cheered him on, while Molly began shrieking for Arthur to stop and one of the store assistants tried to break them up. Ginny could only stare, until Hagrid came up and picked both of them up and set them apart from each other.

Lucius Malfoy slammed Ginny’s book back into her cauldron and said, â€�“Here, girl- -take your book- -it’s the best your father can give you-” Pulling himself from Hagrid’s grip he beckoned Draco and swept from the shop. (10)

Molly began helping Ginny put all of her things back into her cauldron that had spilled out. She picked up her second hand books but paused when she got to the new ones. â€�“Where did these Lockhart books come from?”

â€�“Harry gave me the ones that Gilderoy Lockhart gave him for free on stage. He said he would buy his own,” Ginny replied to her mother while she gathered up packages of potions ingredients and rolls of parchment.

â€�“He did?” asked her mother.

Ginny nodded. â€�“I don’t think he liked being up there with Lockhart, forced to get his picture taken, and not being able to move until Lockhart was done talking,” she said huffily.

â€�“Now who wouldn’t want to have their picture taken with Gilderoy Lockhart?” asked her mum.

Ginny rolled her eyes and sighed, but Hagrid seemed to be finished talking to her father and so her mother took the opportunity to scold him for brawling in public while everyone trekked back to the Leaky Cauldron. Harry and her brothers and father prepared to travel by Floo powder back to the Burrow, and everyone said good-bye to Hermione and her parents before they left for Muggle London. The Grangers seemed a bit upset from the fight at Flourish and Blotts, but Hermione was assuring them that this was not a normal wizard interaction.

Molly sent the boys home one by one and Arthur took Ginny’s new purchases. When she was alone with her mother in the Leaky Cauldron her mum turned to her, beamed, and said, â€�“Well, I suppose we better get you a wand before we head home.”

Quote References:

(1) SS/PS Pages 66-67
(2) CoS Pages 43-44 to make reading the blog chapter seamless, I again neglected to use ellipses, therefore the quote from CoS REPLACES the book for Defense Against the Dark Arts listed in Harry’s first-year letter as I imagine it would have to look for Ginny’s first-year letter.
(3) SS/PS Page 67
(4) CoS Page 44
(5) CoS Page 45
(6) CoS Page 45
(7) CoS Page 60
(8) CoS Page 61
(9) CoS Page 61
(10) CoS Page 63

â€�“Really?” Ginny squealed and then promptly clapped a hand over her mouth because she was in public and didn’t want to attract any more attention than her family already had.

â€�“Since Harry was kind enough to give you those books that he did not need for free, that left over enough gold to get you your very own wand,” said her mother appreciatively.

â€�“I didn’t know Lockhart’s books were that expensive,” said Ginny, feeling annoyed all over again.

â€�“Well, not quite, and it really depends on what your wand will be made of and how rare the wood or core is. They normally cost right around seven Galleons apiece,” her mum answered, â€�“but since we didn’t have to get the books and combined with what we have left over saved from getting your cauldron so reduced, we should be able to buy you a wand from Olivanders.”

Ginny couldn’t believe her mum’s attitude change. Minutes ago she was admonishing her dad; now she seemed as giddy as Ginny felt about going through one of her first milestones to becoming a fully qualified witch.

They quickly made their way back down Diagon Alley and stopped in front of Olivanders. Inside was a boy who must’ve been Ginny’s age but wasn’t much bigger than herself, trying different wands. With him was a man and an even smaller boy, who had a camera hanging around his neck. Ginny’s mum poked her head inside, and Mr. Olivander beckoned them in. He showed them to a small waiting area and went back to his first customer. Ginny listened interestedly to what was going on inside.

â€�“Now, how many ‘Galleons’ did you say I should be considering here?” asked the man kindly.

â€�“I tell you what, since this is your family’s first time, I won’t have you pay absolutely no more than seven, no matter which wand chooses the boy,” said Mr. Olivander in his slow and whispery voice.

â€�“Well, Dennis, can you stay here with Colin while I go and get them then?” said the man to the smaller boy. Turning back to Mr. Olivander he explained, â€�“I had no idea how much to start out with so we’ve just been taking it as we go along.” He seemed to be the boys’ father.

Mr. Olivander shooed him away to Gringotts while he continued to pick wands for the older one, Colin, to try. Finally, while the father was still away, Colin took a wand from Mr. Olivander and his eyes lit up. Very excited, he waved the wand and red and gold sparks whooshed out the end of it.

â€�“Very good! Yes indeed, that’s the one!” said Mr. Olivander, very exuberant that they had found a match.

â€�“Dennis,” said Colin getting his little brother’s attention from Mr. Olivander, â€�“Dennis, get the camera ready like I showed you, Dennis, and take a picture of me waving my new wand!”

Little Dennis brought the camera to his eye and focused it. Then he pointed at Colin with his hand that wasn’t going to click the camera button. Colin waved his new wand again until the sparks came out and Dennis snapped a picture.

â€�“I can’t wait to see what it looks like!” exclaimed Colin.

â€�“Okay, boys,” said Mr. Olivander. â€�“I’m going to put you into the waiting room while I wait on young Miss Weasley now and we wait for your father to return.” He made to usher the boys to the seats that Ginny and her mum had just stood up from and then he turned to magically send all the boxes of wands he tried with Colin back to their places on the shelves.

Colin and Dennis watched starry-eyed as the boxes picked themselves up, sorted back to their rightful places, and softly set themselves back down in neat and orderly stacks. â€�“I can take a picture of you with your new wand when one chooses you, if you like,” said Colin to Ginny.

Molly smiled at Colin. â€�“Are you starting at Hogwarts this year, dear?”

â€�“Yes, ma’am,” said Colin, glancing up at Molly.

â€�“So is Ginny,” said her mum, nodding in her direction.

â€�“I can take the picture now and give it to you at school when I see you after I develop it,” said Colin politely. â€�“I’m going to develop these straight away. I want to remember everything about my first trip to Diagon Alley, huh, Dennis?” Dennis nodded, his eyes the size of saucers.

Charmed by little Dennis’s innocent wonder, Ginny agreed, â€�“Okay, sure.”

â€�“This way, Miss Ginevra,” said Mr. Olivander, bringing out a tape measure.

Delighted, the boys sat down to wait for their dad to return to pay for Colin’s wand and to watch Ginny get measured for her turn. Ron didn’t go to Olivanders last year, as Charlie gave him his old wand, and Ginny was only eight when the twins got theirs, but she had stayed home with her father and Ron that year. (Mum wouldn’t let the twins out of her sight yet at the time and together they were a handful). So while Mr. Olivander was looking through boxes to bring Ginny, she asked her mother, â€�“Mum, how does Mr. Olivander know my name?”

Molly chuckled. â€�“Mr. Olivander has been selling wands to everyone in the Weasley and Prewett family for generations now, Ginny. He’s probably been expecting you.” Her mum left it at that.

Mr. Olivander returned with a very short wand. Seeing Ginny eye its length, he began with that. â€�“Seven inches, a beautiful Maple, phoenix feather. Give it a try.” Ginny saw her mum’s eyeballs bulge; maple wands were rare and very expensive.

Ginny began to wave it and handed it right back. It was nearly as wobbly as the switches her mum had her practice with. Molly sighed in mock relief making Ginny giggle. Mr. Olivander brought out another wand. â€�“Blackthorn and dragon heartstring, 10¼ inches, swishy. A warrior’s wand.” Again, Ginny handed it back. â€�“No?” said Mr. Olivander looking genuinely puzzled that the warrior wand didn’t choose her.

Ginny tried another, fir and phoenix feather, stiff, but not stiff enough. She shook her head and handed it back to Mr. Olivander. The next one was cherry, unicorn hair, thirteen inches, but again she handed it back to Mr. Olivander, who cried, â€�“We’re getting closer!”

Mr. Olivander brought out more and more wands for Ginny to try. They made a much bigger pile than Colin had. She tried to figure out the pattern he was using to determine what sort of wand he would bring her next, but she didn’t know enough about wand woods to guess. She was at least pleased that Mr. Olivander seemed to figure out that she preferred a wand that wasn’t whippy. Colin and Dennis’s father returned, and when he noticed that Mr. Olivander was already in the depths of helping another customer, sat to patiently wait and watch with his sons.

Mr. Olivander came out from the back muttering to himself. Ginny caught the words â€�“gentle lady” and â€�“warrior heart” a fair few times before hearing him say, â€�“Aha! Curious combination but it could work, in the right hands, it could work.”

Mr. Olivander brought out a box and opened it, this time letting Ginny take it out herself instead of handing it to her. The wand felt warm and alive in her hand, and it was the same exhilarating feeling you get during your first breath of fresh orchard air after spending hours in a dank basement. Ginny raised the wand and brought it slashing down to one side and a stream of red and gold sparks emitted. There was a flash and Colin lowered his camera. â€�“I just knew that would be the one as soon as Mr. Olivander brought it out,” he said, grinning.

â€�“Miss Weasley,” said Mr. Olivander. Ginny turned to look at him. â€�“I want you to know that I have never sold a rowan wand and the owner later turn into a dark wizard. One needs to be pure of heart to be chosen by a rowan wand.”

â€�“What’s inside it?” asked Ginny.

â€�“Rowan, unicorn hair, 9¼ inches, and… hard,” said Mr. Olivander. â€�“Miss Weasley, you should also know that I expect exceptional magic from this wand. In general the suppleness of a wand can be an indicator of a person’s willingness to change. In your case however I should hope that a pure heart will always prevail. Be that as it may, this is no simple little girl’s wand. A rowan wand is excellent for charm work, and very protective of its master. My dear, I wish to never have to face you in a duel.”

Ginny was a little starry-eyed herself after Mr. Olivander told her that little bit about her wand. Colin and Dennis’s dad paid for Colin’s wand and Molly paid for Ginny’s; then Mr. Olivander bowed all five of them out of his shop.

â€�“Are you taking the Hogwarts Express on September first?” Colin asked Ginny once they were in Diagon Alley again.

â€�“Yeah, most everyone does,” said Ginny, still thinking about what Mr. Olivander had said about her wand.

â€�“Okay, I’ll see you then,” said Colin, â€�“and I’ll bring you your picture too.” With that Colin waved goodbye good-naturedly and he and his little brother and his dad went off to explore the rest of Diagon Alley and finish his school shopping.

â€�“Okay,” called Ginny. She’d forgotten about the picture in the wake of hearing the details of her wand. Remembering what Mr. Olivander had said about it being their first wand purchase in the family and that the dad had to go get more Galleons, Ginny asked her mum, â€�“Were they Muggle-borns?”

Molly nodded her head. â€�“Yes, how could they not be? The look of wonder on those boys’ faces when they watched Mr. Olivander do magic, absolutely endearing. Wizard families don’t get to see that with their children. You see magic as babes and it’s just part of ordinary life for you.”

â€�“Is it safe, that he has a picture of me performing magic?” Ginny asked. Cleaning the fireplace was punishment enough, she didn’t want to ever come close to breaking the law again.

Molly smiled and nodded once more. â€�“Even the Muggles in the boy’s family must abide by the International Statute of Secrecy now.”

It felt weird at first, knowing a person she just met would have a picture of her at their house. But she would see him again at school and take classes with him for the next seven years. She imagined many people in that time would have pictures of her at their homes by the end of it, and so she put the matter out of her mind.

Excited to try her wrist movements at home with her brand new wand, Ginny and her mum quickly made their way back to the Leaky Cauldron and took the Floo Network back to the Burrow.

After Ginny and her mum returned to the Burrow, her father had already put all of her purchases in her room. Not yet ready to go through her school things, Ginny left it all where it was for a few days.

The following Saturday was Percy’s birthday. Ginny wrote him a birthday poem and drew the words so the letters could be colored in. She spent a couple of hours making sure every letter was neat and tidy the way Percy wrote. She could never mimic his hand writing, but he would at least appreciate the craftsmanship.

When she colored in the words by hand she randomly changed the color of every individual letter to deliberately annoy her extremely organized brother. She didn’t know what Ron, Harry, or her father did for him, but her mother once more cooked a rather large feast and the twins set off fireworks again. This time in Percy’s favorite colors, purple and white.

At his dinner feast, before everyone started eating, Ginny presented the card to her brother:

Neat, tidy, and orderly is he,

My brother, who does look out for me.

Studious, and well-read, you’ll agree,

I hope he becomes what he wants to be!

â€�“It’s beautiful, Ginny,” said Percy genuinely. â€�“You have the colors completely random on purpose, don’t you?”

â€�“YUP!” she said grinning mischievously. Even though she was able to talk in front of Harry now, she still kept her words short and to the point. Percy made to pass the card around the table for everyone to see, but Ginny snatched it back, â€�“Mum and Dad have already seen it. It’s for you to keep.”

â€�“Okay,” said Percy, and he laid it down next to his plate where it stayed for the rest of the dinner. Ginny did not need her other brothers taking the mickey out of her, especially in front of Harry, for writing a poem.

After the celebrations, Ginny’s curiosity about her wand finally got the better of her and she started pulling her things from Diagon Alley out of their shopping bags. She opened her school trunk and very carefully packed the telescope that her father finished putting on a new tripod. The scales went into it with the telescope, along with all the miscellaneous items like parchment, quills, and potions ingredients. She set aside her school robes to take downstairs to her mother. Molly told her to bring down everything that would need patching up before term began while Ginny had been helping to prepare the feast for Percy’s birthday.

She pulled out all of the sleek Lockhart books and put them into the trunk with the other items ready to go. Then she slowly began to sort through her second-hand books for her other classes. The ones that did not need to be repaired went into the trunk; the ones that required a bit of mending went back into the cauldron, which also needed to be brought downstairs. The temporary levitation charm her mum had put on it in Diagon Alley had long since wore off, so Ginny left it where it was and decided to just put everything inside it that needed to be worked on, ready to be dragged back downstairs in the morning.

Finally, she came to her last book. It was so roughed up, the binding was coming off the back and it flopped about quite a bit. Ginny began to put it in a proper book-looking pile when out of nowhere, a smaller book fell out of it. She delicately placed the mangled text book back in her cauldron and picked up the smaller book. The black cover was a little beat up, and inside all the pages were empty. No, not all the pages—flipping through again, Ginny saw on the first page was a name, T. M. Riddle, and the other pages had date marks. It was an empty diary. The second-hand book her mum found for her must have belonged to this Riddle, who left the diary in the book. The year was from fifty years ago.

A little worse for the wear, the diary was not in need of repair. However, instead of putting it in her trunk or the cauldron, Ginny stood up from her floor and laid it on her bed to look at later. Then she scooped up her robes and tossed them into the cauldron to go downstairs with the rest of her broken hand-me-downs. Finally, she pulled out what had been on her mind since leaving Diagon Alley… her wand.

Ginny went over the wrist movements her mum had been having her practice as far back as she could remember with the new wand. She loved the way it felt through the snappier movements. It didn’t wobble at all. Now that her mum wasn’t making preparations anymore for anyone’s birthdays, she would be having her practice in the mornings again.

She was careful not to think any thoughts of producing magic while waving her wand around. Young children and those that didn’t know any better but accidentally performed magic weren’t given warnings. Now that she was eleven and owned a wand though the trace was officially on her and any magic where she lived would be detected. Living in a wizard home at least provided some shade from the Ministry, not like where Harry lived and apparently even the magic of a house-elf was blamed on the only wizard who lived in the vicinity. The Ministry could only detect magic, not the caster, so they relied on wizard parents to monitor their children.

The following morning Ginny’s mum spent nearly half an hour watching her practice wrist movements with her new wand. Molly was very impressed by Ginny’s upswing in doing it correctly more often than not, now she was using something that matched her preference. After Arthur came home from work he heaved the cauldron full of items needing mending to the living room where it sat while the family breakfasted. Afterwards, Molly produced a roll of Spellotape from a junk drawer and showed Ginny how to mend and reinforce the bindings on her text books.

Her mum put all of her books in a pile and told Ginny to leave them there when she wasn’t working on them so they wouldn’t be in the way of daily traffic and then set her robes in a basket next to them. With the cauldron empty, the two of them began cleaning it together. They soaped it out by hand first and used a soft cloth to dry it with. The surface was still severely scratched but her mum had a recipe for pewter polish ready to go.

After they finished making the outside shiny and perfect again, her mum tested the original charms on the cauldron. The levitation charm came back sparingly and the heat resistant charm balked as well.

â€�“Why does a cauldron need to be heat resistant?” Ginny asked her mum, â€�“Aren’t they supposed to get hot?”

â€�“Yes, but pewter doesn’t seep into magic like other metal alloys can and it's a better metal for students to use. However, it has a very low melting point,” replied Molly. â€�“Sticking a Muggle pewter kettle over a fire will result in a puddle of hot metal. Spelled heat resistant, a pewter cauldron shouldn’t interfere with student mishaps and it allows you kids to have longer simmering times to fix mistakes or add ingredients.”

Her mum wasn’t pleased with the levitation charm. Molly pointed her wand at the cauldron and said quite forcefully, â€�“Scourgify!” to clean and banish any residual old potions, dust, and soap from inside the cauldron. After a moment it emitted a barely noticeable glow for a fraction of a second and then easily floated up to chest height for Ginny. She pushed the cauldron away and it gently floated a few inches from within her grasp and back again. â€�“Well, that at least all appears to be in order now,” said Molly.

Next her mum used a charm that shot heat out of the end of her wand. Ginny saw that she was ever so slightly melting the interior surface and dissolving away all the scratches on the inside. Afterwards her mum went over it with a short-lived freezing charm to keep the re-surfaced form exactly as she left it until the metal cooled completely on its own. â€�“Your father’s friend at the Ministry taught me that one when I was agonizing over throwing out my own cauldron I’ve had since I was a girl back when Bill and Charlie were children,” said Molly proudly. It didn’t look as shiny on the inside as the outside did with its polish layer but it did look brand new again.

â€�“Why couldn’t we just polish the inside?” asked Ginny. A few swipes with a cloth seemed like a lot less work than slowly covering every square inch with spells.

â€�“Polish just fills in the scratches temporarily, and you don’t want it mixing with your potions,” said her mum. â€�“This way the abrasions are actually gone and there is nowhere for your potion residue to sit and hide from a soapy washing.”

They left the cauldron alone to let the metal finish re-hardening, and over the following week Ginny helped her mum wrangle her brothers one by one so all the Weasleys could have their robes tailored. In years past Molly would fold lengthy robes so that every fall she simply had to undo the stitching and let more down in the arms and legs or out in the torso. Then she would use a mending spell to get rid of the lines of thread holes the boys had worn in over the past year. Ginny tried on all three sets of robes nearly every day until her mum thought they matched the pictures in Witch Weekly she was subscribed featuring a few back to school articles.

The original heat-resistant charm must have also come back after the resurfacing stabilized the interior because her mum finally deemed the cauldron satisfactory when she tried to heat it to melting again. This time though the cauldron had nicely boiled the water her mum poured into it to test with. Ginny finished adding Spellotape to her text books and had put them back into her cauldron one at a time and then grasped it by the handles to lightly pull it to a hover position and took it to her room to pack with the rest of her Hogwarts stuff.

In her room, Ginny put her books, robes and cauldron into her trunk. She pulled out all her wizard day robes from her wardrobe which she’d patched over the summer while grounded and packed them as well. She didn’t see an occasion that would require any of them before leaving for King’s Cross in a few days’ time.

All that was left were her Muggle clothes to sort through and to decide what she wanted to take. Ginny decided to leave that task for another day though. Instead she picked up the old diary and leafed through it again.

Every night since she found it she had picked it up and rifled through its pages absentmindedly. At first she felt guilty about having it, knowing it had belonged to someone named T.M. Riddle. But after a few nights she decided that since it was fifty years old and nothing was written inside, it was fortuitous that it was now in the hands of someone who could actually use it.

Ginny didn’t see herself as a writer exactly, but she like to come up with little four liners to describe what was going on around her. These were usually for her own amusement though and not really shared with anyone else. Giving one to her brother for his birthday was a rare public display.

She decided to work on artfully covering T.M. Riddle’s name with her own and practiced on scratch paper first. When she was confident that she could cleverly cover his name with her unsteady makeshift calligraphy she began to ink her name over his own. However, about half way through she noticed that the ink in the G of her name began to disappear. She waited and sure enough, every stroke of her quill turned lighter and lighter until it was gone. Like a paper left out in the sun for months at a time and the effects fast forwarded until it looked blank again.

Enthralled, Ginny began to draw random squiggles all over the first page with T.M. Riddle’s name on it. Sure enough all of it disappeared. She flipped to random pages and made similar messy lines all crisscrossing over each other each. Every single one slowly disappearing. She began to draw pictures: a smiling sun, a rainbow pouring from a cloud, a crooked version of the Burrow. All of them disappeared. The diary seemed to have an endless capacity of absorbing the ink.

Finally, confident that she could write the words and nobody would see them again, Ginny wrote a stanza about Abellios that she thought up earlier that day while out in the woods with him and the other squirrels.

His fur is very sleek and dark,

A clear contrast with snow,

I found you when you were alone,

My baby squirrel, Abellios!

Pleased, she wrote it quickly so that she could see the poem in its entirety before it disappeared. After the last drop of ink vanished Ginny was about to put the diary turned poetry book on the nightstand and get ready for bed, when she noticed some ink starting to seep back onto the paper. Slowly a message scrawled across the page she was open to in the very ink she had just used and thought was gone for good.

â€�“That was delightfully sweet. Tell me more about Abellios.”

Ginny slammed the book shut and tossed it into the back of a drawer. Someone was watching her write in the diary after all! Someone read her words that were meant only for herself! Shaking a bit she changed into her pajamas and got ready for bed.

The next morning Ginny was sitting at breakfast after her father had come home. He was going on about one of his raids where a pull-out couch ended up in a second hand shop that had been spelled to roll back up after Muggles had already lain down upon it. It wasn’t outrageously dangerous per se but required quite a few task forces from different departments to show up.

â€�“Dad, why are some spells on Muggle things outlawed but others aren’t? Like… why is my cauldron allowed to float?” Ginny struggled to ask her father questions she wanted answered but tried to seem curious rather than worried. Despite the scare the night before, she wasn’t ready to give up on her diary just yet.

â€�“A spell is only outlawed if it allows the enchanted object to make its own decisions, or if it deliberately harms an unsuspecting victim,” he replied. â€�“A levitation charm only levitates, and cauldrons aren’t so much a Muggle artifact anymore as they are a wizard’s anyway.”

â€�“What about magical animals? Can’t they think for themselves?” asked Ginny.

â€�“Yes, but with magical animals you can see where they keep their brains. Besides, they aren’t spelled, they are born magical,” he said knowledgeably. â€�“Anything born with a brain and you can see where it keeps it, should be allowed to think for itself,” laughed her father. This prompted another conversation between her parents about the under-representation of magical creatures such as centaurs and house-elves at the Ministry. She had heard all this before though and went back upstairs to her room before her brothers came down.

Ginny knew where her parents stood on such matters and one-hundred percent agreed with them about magical creatures, but she didn’t need to hear it rehashed out. She was still worried about her diary.

Sitting in her room later, Ginny had pulled the diary out of the drawer and now she sat cross-legged, staring at it while it lay harmlessly opposite her at the foot of her bed. She had been deciding how best to figure out if the person in the diary was a threat or not and decided in the end that she would simply ask it straight out.

Fingers shaking only slightly, she opened the diary. The pages were blank as ever. She dipped her quill into a dark blue ink and began to write, â€�“Who are you?” A reply came back almost instantly.

â€�“My name is Tom Riddle.”

â€�“All I know about you is that your name starts with G I N.”

â€�“How did you find my diary, Gin?”

Ginny realized the diary must only know what you write in it and quickly made a note to herself not to tell it any more specifics until she figured out if it was dark magic or not. â€�“It was inside a book I bought for school at second-hand store.”

â€�“Interesting. It shouldn’t have been in a second-hand shop.”

Confused about the diary’s â€�“tone of voice,” Ginny decided to get as much information from it as she could before deciding whether or not to tell her father about it. â€�“How old are you? Are you a wizard? What are you? Are you trapped in the book? Are you going to try to hurt me?”

â€�“Yes, I was a wizard, I attended Hogwarts. Now, I am a memory.”

â€�“I don’t know what year it is, so I don’t know how old I am.”

â€�“I suppose you could say I am ‘trapped’ in this book, though I would say I am not.”

â€�“Now, do be polite. Who are you?”

Ginny was conflicted. She didn’t want to tell the diary any more about herself just yet but at the same time she wanted more answers. â€�“My surname is Weasley. Are you going to try to hurt me? You didn’t answer that one.”

â€�“Weasley? I’ve known many Weasleys. Very old wizarding family.”

â€�“No, I have no intentions of hurting you, my dear Miss Weasley.”

â€�“How do you know I’m a MISS Weasley?” Ginny asked Tom in the diary.

â€�“Rainbows and sunshine my dear. You drew pictures of rainbows and sunshine.”

â€�“You also wrote a poem, about a baby squirrel.”

â€�“Tell me more about Abellios.”

An odd sensation of happiness overcame Ginny as she wrote out Abellios’ story. How she found him in the orchard with no other squirrels around. How her mum let her keep him in the house. How she trained him to live outside where he’d been for the last three years. How sad she was that she couldn’t take him with her to Hogwarts this fall. How her parents couldn’t afford to give her any pet to take with her to Hogwarts. When she was finished, Ginny couldn’t believe how quickly it had all poured out.

â€�“I couldn’t afford anything of my own at all during my first year at Hogwarts.”

â€�“I grew up in an orphanage and the school bought all my things for me.”

â€�“No extras here either.”

â€�“That’s terrible!” Ginny genuinely replied. Now that she was no longer writing about Abellios, that happy feeling was ebbing away and she was very empathetic towards Tom the orphan. â€�“So, why are you in a diary?”

â€�“I was simply trying an experiment for the first time.”

â€�“I made a complete copy of everything I knew about the world and preserved it here.”

â€�“In this diary, I am eternally sixteen years old.”

â€�“And I only remember what I knew up until the day I made this.”

â€�“So, you aren’t actually trapped then?” Ginny wrote back. â€�“I’m just talking to a copy of a real person? Someone who in real life is sixty-six years old now? The real you might still be alive somewhere!” Ginny felt a little intimidated that she was talking to a sixteen year old boy, but resolved to not make it into a big deal.

â€�“Well, I should hope so.”

â€�“Otherwise, this version of me may be all that is left.”

Ginny felt sad that that could be a possibility. â€�“I could do some research at school. If I’m not too busy with homework. I could look you up and see what happened to you.”

â€�“Would you take me to school with you?”

â€�“I could help you with your work. All the teachers said I was quite gifted.”

â€�“Really?” Ginny wrote back. â€�“That would be excellent.”

Over the following day Ginny learned that Tom was a Half-blood, that he’d reunited with his surviving Muggle father and grandparents and that they had been very surprised to meet him. He didn’t have any memories after their first meeting though because he had chosen to preserve this diary right after what he termed the happiest day of his life. Ginny was happy that he had reunited with his family after so long. She found out that Tom was an only child, and Ginny told him all about how her brothers would tease her endlessly, but that she wouldn’t have it any other way. She couldn’t imagine life without any of them.

She told him about Ron’s friend Harry Potter who was staying with them for the remainder of the summer and how she had learned not to be so star-struck around him over time since he was so popular everywhere he went. Tom teased her back that maybe she was more than star-struck, maybe she actually liked him. Ginny furiously wrote back a denial, but she could see Tom’s amusement when he wrote that he was sure she would find other people at Hogwarts to be attracted to and then this Harry Potter wouldn’t seem like such a big deal to her.

When she replied back, she mentioned that what he said reminded her a lot of what her mother told her when Harry first came to stay with them. That Harry was just another of her brother’s friends. It didn’t occur to Ginny at the time that Tom Riddle wouldn’t know anything about Harry Potter and his defeat of You-Know-Who. Then she told him about how he brought his Nimbus 2000 broom with him and that she really wanted to try it but was too embarrassed to ask.

â€�“You know, you could just take it like you do your brothers’ brooms.”

â€�“This Harry would never need to know.”

Ginny got that same feeling of elation that she did when she wrote about Abellios’ story. Her mind slightly hazy, she got up and drifted downstairs. All of her brothers were out front, so when she went out the back door, nobody noticed her disappear down to the broom shed. Ginny opened the door and there it was. Harry’s Nimbus 2000. She reached out her hand to touch it. As soon as she grasped the handle she could feel it begin to hum and for the smallest of seconds her instinct to put it down and walk away reared up. Because it belongs to Harry! Her guilty-self tried to stop her, only to be squashed away again when she saw that it hovered just a little higher than she would have liked to be able to mount it.

Once she was in the air, flying cleared all the haze from Ginny’s mind. She was still guilty that she had taken something without asking first. Her moment of joy dwindled away and she silently landed in front of the broom shed and shoved the Nimbus back inside.

Confused, but mostly angry with herself, she marched back up to the house. There her mother wrangled her into helping prepare their last dinner before leaving for King’s Cross tomorrow. It was a welcome distraction as she made Harry’s favorite treacle pudding, an old recipe from her mum’s side of the family. Fixing the pudding helped Ginny calm down from her horror at herself. She couldn’t think what would have possessed her to take out Harry’s broom without permission.

All through dinner Ginny’s stomach was in a tighter knot than it had ever been in while she worried about her invitation letter from Hogwarts. Shaking internally from both guilt and shame, it was difficult for her to enjoy the last of her twin brothers’ fireworks, this time red and blue stars after the meal. Afterwards, she headed back to her room on the pretense of needing to pack last minute items, and then she quietly closed her door to sit by herself and reflect on her uncharacteristic behavior.

A closed door, however, was meaningless to Molly, who popped her head inside Ginny’s room not a half hour later to check on her packing progress.

â€�“You have everything all set, my dear?” her mother asked gently as she bustled over to Ginny’s trunk to check the contents herself.

â€�“Yes. Everything on the list, and everything I couldn’t possibly live without while I’m away. Just like you said,” Ginny attempted a winning smile for her mum but her face betrayed her.

â€�“First-year jitters getting to you?” her mum asked patiently.

â€�“I guess so,” Ginny replied.

"My last baby is going to school!" her mum sniffed.

Ginny wasn’t ready to hash over her emotions after taking Harry’s broom without permission, and she certainly didn’t want that to be her last memory with her mother before leaving.

â€�“Well, your father’s going to have a little chat with you before bed, just like he did with your brothers,” said her mum. â€�“One of his little traditions in this family. Now you put the last of this laundry I brought you away and I’ll go get him.”

â€�“Okay.”

Ginny sorted through the last of the clothes her mum brought her and put most of it in her wardrobe to be left behind. She picked out what she planned on wearing to King’s Cross in the morning and prepared an entire set of Hogwarts robes to change into on the train. Then she closed her wardrobe for the last time until she returned home next spring and heard a knock at her door.

Arthur Weasley popped his head into Ginny’s room and beckoned her to sit next to him on her bed. â€�“I’ve spent nearly this whole day looking around the house and imagining it without anyone here but your mother and I, and I still can’t see it,” her father began. Ginny smiled; she knew her parents were both sad and happy that all of their children were now officially Hogwarts students. â€�“Now, I’m going to tell you the same things I’ve told all your brothers, and ask you the same questions I asked each of them. Okay?”

Ginny nodded.

â€�“First off,” Arthur began, â€�“don’t try to be friends with people who ultimately make you unhappy. The kids you go to school with, are going to be around for the rest of your life. Take it from me, surround yourself with people who love you for who you are and help build you up; and furthermore, love those people for who they are and do your best to help build them up to their best selves. Okay?”

Knitting her eyebrows together, Ginny replied, â€�“Okay.” This was going to be heavier than she anticipated.

â€�“Secondly, Hogwarts, is first and foremost a school. I know you are going to make friends, and you’re going to want to do activities with them, but as a parent I must tell you that your school work is your first priority. Am I clear?”

Ginny smiled, â€�“Yes, Dad.”

â€�“Good. Now along with that, Hogwarts is secondly your home away from home. You got your letter, no matter what anyone will ever say to you, no matter what House you are placed in, you belong there, okay?”

Ginny thought about her brothers. Each one of them looked forward to going back to school every year. Even Ron after his first year, which ended in a scary sounding disaster. â€�“Okay.”

â€�“Now, tell me honestly. Just out of curiosity, which House do you think you belong in?” asked her father.

â€�“I want to be in Gryffindor, like everyone else,” said Ginny immediately.

â€�“Do you want to be in Gryffindor because everyone else in the family has been in Gryffindor, or do you think that’s where you belong?” asked Arthur gently.

Ginny racked her brain for all the qualities of the different houses from the stories she’d heard from her brothers. â€�“Gryffindors are brave, Ravenclaws are smart, Hufflepuffs are hard workers, and Slytherins are … mean?” she finished questionably.

â€�“Close,” replied her father. â€�“Gryffindors are chivalrous, dauntless in the face of a challenge, and always stand up for what they believe is right. Ravenclaws are curious, about all sorts of fields and satisfying that curiosity most often leads to their renowned intelligence. They are also extremely creative, original, and believe in accepting everyone’s individuality. Hufflepuffs are hard-working, yes, but they are more than that. They are fiercely loyal to the people they care about, they are absolutely tenacious when attempting to achieve a goal, they are also incredibly kind, tolerant, and utterly believe in fairness. Now, as for Slytherins. I can see where your brothers see them coming off as mean, but it only seems that way on the outside. Slytherins excel at not only amassing useful information, but at using their intelligence. They are resourceful in the face of an obstacle, they have the capacity to both think outside of the box when necessary and maintain traditions, and leadership is a natural desire for them. Slytherins don’t settle for just doing what they love most. Slytherins want to be the best at what they do, and so sharing that same belief, they do all they can to help each other achieve some sort of status in life. And they expect that same regard in return. The other Houses aren’t nearly so exclusive, which is why your brothers see Slytherins the way that they do. Now, after hearing all that, tell me where you think you belong.”

Ginny felt only a little uncomfortable admitting to her father what she thought, but decided to name the house that she identified the most characteristics with. â€�“To be honest, I think I can see myself in any of the Houses after you said all that. But if I had to pick, I guess Hufflepuff?”

Her father smiled at her, â€�“That is exactly the right answer, not the Hufflepuff part, the first part. Everyone has some of all of the other Houses' qualities inside of themselves. Now, why do you think Hufflepuff over all the others?”

â€�“Well, I think I’m resourceful, like the twins, and that’s a Slytherin quality. But I also think that I always say and back up what I believe is right like a Gryffindor, and I know I’m always curious about all sorts of off the topic details in my studies like a Ravenclaw. But I really like what you said about Hufflepuffs being fiercely loyal and kind and utterly fair,” said Ginny.

Her father smiled, â€�“Bill said he was going to be a Ravenclaw for sure, Charlie a Hufflepuff, Percy worried he would be put in Slytherin for his ambition to be in the Ministry, and Ron didn’t have a clue except that he absolutely didn’t want to be in Slytherin after some of your other brothers’ stories. Only the twins knew for sure they were destined to be Gryffindors. They both had talked about it since they found out your mother and I were there and before Percy even started school.”

â€�“Really?” asked Ginny. It never occurred to her that any of her brothers considered being anything other than a Gryffindor. â€�“But, what if I’m not a Gryffindor?” and then she asked one of the questions that had haunted her while she waited for her invitation letter, â€�“What if, I’m the only Weasley in this family that isn’t a Gryffindor?” She had just thought of her mother’s math lessons again and remembered that the odds of seven kids in one family being in the same House were not in her favor. She looked up at her father as he put his reply together.

â€�“I’m going to tell you the last thing I told each of your brothers. Your mother and I will still love you and be proud of you, no matter which House you are chosen for,” he said. â€�“Now, is there anything else on your mind?”

For one split second, Ginny thought about showing her father the diary. It was his area of expertise after all. But she had already grown fond of Tom and he was just a copy of a memory after all and she didn’t want him taken away with no chance of getting him back before she left tomorrow. So she shook her head no, and gave her dad a weak smile.

After her father bade her good night, Ginny had a hard time falling asleep. Sure, she was nervous about her train ride tomorrow, but she was also still guilt -ridden. She needed to tell someone what she did who would tell her that it was wrong so she could get on with making amends.

In the flickering light of her relit candle, Ginny once again opened the diary to write to Tom. â€�“Dear Tom, after I told you about Harry’s Nimbus 2000, the weirdest thing happened. I remember being excited that one was in our broom shed, and being embarrassed about asking to have a go on it. Then all of a sudden, I couldn’t think of anything except riding it. I felt like, I wouldn’t be able to do anything else until after I knew exactly what it felt like to be in the air on the Nimbus. I don’t know what came over me, Tom. It was like I couldn’t control what I thought about or what I did. I’m a horrible person.”

Ginny waited for Tom’s reply, and started to wonder if the â€�“memory” needed to sleep and that perhaps she just woke him. But sure enough, ink started to trickle back onto the page, and Tom’s reply was not what she was expecting.

â€�“Did you enjoy riding the Nimbus?”

â€�“Well, yes,” she wrote back, â€�“but that’s not the point. I didn’t ask. I feel terrible.”

â€�“Did anyone find out that you took it without asking?”

â€�“No.”

â€�“Did you damage it?”

â€�“No.”

â€�“Then I fail to see why this is such a big deal.”

â€�“You found an opportunity to do something you dearly desired to do.”

â€�“I am quite proud of you.”

Ginny was taken aback that anyone would be proud of what she did, but she thought back to what she discussed with her father about feeling close to Hufflepuffs. â€�“No, it was still wrong not to ask. I should feel bad.”

â€�“Do you feel bad when you take your brothers’ brooms out?”

â€�“No, but we’ve always shared our things with each other. It’s different with Harry, he’s not my brother,” Ginny wrote back.

â€�“Does your brother see him as a brother? Do you parents treat him like a son?”

â€�“Well, yeah. Harry’s an orphan, just like you. His parents died when he was a baby, their whole house blew up actually. Nobody knows how Harry survived, but that’s why he started school so famous already. He’s the Boy Who Lived.”

â€�“Well, there you have it. Everyone sees him as family. You should too.”

â€�“Don’t think on what you did as wrong.”

â€�“Think of it as treating Harry like you would any other brother.”

â€�“Perhaps that will get you over your crush on him.”

â€�“I don’t have a crush on Harry Potter, Tom! He’s just famous!” Ginny wrote back. Tom didn’t send a written reply but Ginny swore she could feel him smirking even though she couldn’t see him.

Writing to Tom had the effect Ginny was looking for, albeit in a very indirect way. She confided in someone who ultimately made her feel better. â€�“Thank you, Tom. I still think that I was in the wrong. But I suppose, what you say makes sense. If I treated Harry as one of my brothers like my father and mother sort of suggested I try to do, then I shouldn’t feel bad for taking his broom out for a ride.”

â€�“You see? And now you can go off to Hogwarts with a clear conscious.”

â€�“So, have you decided to bring me with you?”

â€�“Of course I’m going to bring you to school with me, Tom. You’re like a friend I can carry around in my pocket,” Ginny replied.

â€�“Most excellent. Now pay attention.”

â€�“Write to me as soon as you can after you get settled.”

â€�“I know tomorrow will be a very busy day and class days will be as well.”

â€�“So promise me that you will set aside a good long chunk of time on the first Saturday.”

â€�“I want to hear about everything that happens at school. Okay?”

â€�“The first Saturday. I hope I’ll talk to you before that, but I got it. I’ll find time to write to you on weekends for sure.” Ginny was excited that Tom wanted to keep talking to her. She vaguely wondered how he would know whether or not it was a Saturday when she wrote to him, but decided he was right that the other days would she would be busy with classes.

Ginny said goodnight and put the diary down on her nightstand. Then she blew out her candle and fell asleep almost instantly.

On the morning of the first of September Ginny had a stomach full of butterflies. The Weasley house was chaos, and as much as everyone tried to be prepared the night before, it still took hours to get the car packed. Ginny’s mum had a simple stack of toast and eggs ready for everyone to snack on while other family members helped each other bring down school trunks.

Arthur started taking trunks out to the car one by one, and when the twins burst into Ginny’s room to heave her trunk downstairs, she volunteered to get all the boys’ broomsticks from the shed outback like she did for them every year.

â€�“Where do you think you’re going?” Molly called to Ginny. She had almost made it out the backdoor to the broom shed.

â€�“Out to get the broomsticks…,” she said hesitantly.

â€�“Oh, no, you aren’t!” said her mother, â€�“You have to finish packing for yourself this year. The boys can pack their own brooms. Go feed the chickens; they’ve been bothering your father every time he takes a trunk to the car.” With that Molly turned around and filled the sink with water by magically turning on the tap, floated the dish soap over to it, and laid out bread to make sandwiches for the train ride, all with a few flicks of her wand.

Ginny sighed as her mother waved her away. She really wanted to hold the Nimbus again, but instead she filled a sack with feed and went out the backdoor to find the pesky birds. She walked all the way around to the front of the house where she found them trailing after her father, who had just gone into the front door.

Throwing the corn grain well away from the door but still in view, Ginny began to call to the chickens. All but one of them, the one who nearly followed Arthur into the house, ran over to her in a flurry of feathers and clucking noises. The one on the porch noticed the other chickens flocking towards Ginny and started to amble its way back down the front steps. Arthur reappeared, carrying Ginny’s trunk this time. Just noticing the stray chicken, Ginny began calling it more urgently, but it was too late. Her father was already at the bottom of the steps and the chicken wasn’t quite fast enough to get out of his way.

The chicken connected with the same foot Arthur was using to step off the last step, and trying not to squish it, he and the trunk pitched forward. Ginny watched in horror as her father ended up kicking the chicken off to the side while her trunk flew forward out of his hands. The trunk was heavy however, and didn’t fly very far and still unsteady, her father promptly tripped right over it. Her dad planted his face straight into the dirt in the front walk-way and immediately the kicked chicken ran over to peck at his arms in anger.

Her father yelled quite a few swear words when he told Ginny to call the chicken off of him. She ran over and scooped it up away from him, and Arthur rubbed his neck as he got up to put her trunk into the car. After she set the chicken down with the others to feed, she quietly skulked back around to the backdoor and into the kitchen again.

â€�“Ginny! Are the chickens out of your father’s way?” hollered her mother.

â€�“They are now!” Ginny called back, then she heard her mother telling the boys one by one to go get their own brooms this year. She ran up to her room and did a last check for things she wanted with her in her dorm room. Her bed was made, wardrobe was checked last night, vanity top was empty, bookshelf organized and pile of books to read on breaks on the nightstand by her bed. Her mum called for everyone to get loaded into the car as her dad loaded Harry and Ron’s trunks last. Ginny climbed into the front with her mum.

â€�“Dad, stop. I gotta go back and get my box of Filibuster fireworks!” George said. He popped out and returned within a couple of minutes. While he was gone, Fred asked Ginny how all the brooms fit together this year with the extra trunks.

â€�“Didn’t you pack yours?” Molly asked, â€�“I told you boys to pack your own things this year. Ginny had to worry about her own luggage today.”

In disbelief, Fred got out too to fetch his Cleansweep.

The car was trundling past the village and they were near the highway when Ginny started doing a mental check and decided she couldn’t wait to write to Tom about today. It would definitely be a day she would never forget. That’s when an image of the diary on the stack of books on her nightstand appeared in her mind. â€�“Dad! Turn around! I forgot my diary!” she shrieked.

They finally arrived at King’s Cross Station with only fifteen minutes to get onto the train. They went through the wall to Platform 9¾ in pairs, Ginny and her mum second to last with Ron and Harry bringing up the rear. Once she and her mum were through, there was only a couple of minutes left to board the train. In a slight panic Molly began dashing up and down the platform to find at least a partially open carriage.

Then a voice sounded over the milling crowd of families saying their good-byes, â€�“Ginny! There you are! I saved you a spot!” Hanging out an open window, where his dad and brother stood under it still on the platform, was Colin Creevey.

A look of relief fell over her parents’ faces, and her dad heaved the trunk to the carriage, Colin’s father helped to lift it onto the train’s steps, and Colin whisked it away to his compartment while Arthur lifted Ginny onto the steps and gave her a quick kiss good-bye on the forehead before hurrying off to help Ron and Harry. Molly went up to Ginny and gave her a hug, and after promising that she would write home as often as she could, Ginny was allowed to go into the compartment with Colin and wave out the window.

For as long as Ginny could remember, she was the one standing on the platform waving good-bye and watching the train recede into the distance year after year as the train carried more and more of her brothers away, one by one. Except of course when it took the twins as the same time. She watched her mother shake Colin’s father’s hand, thanking him for helping with her trunk and then scan the windows, waving farewell to her brothers. The train was already moving when she saw her father race back to her mother’s side. They both had concerned looks on their faces and rushed away.

This year there was no one to chase the train as it slowly picked up speed. Colin’s father was still standing there waving with little Dennis next to him. Ginny politely waved back with Colin until the Hogwarts Express turned a bend in the tracks and the platform disappeared out of sight.

Settling in for the long journey, Ginny and Colin sat on opposite sides of the compartment when they heard a rumbling in the corridor. Another student popped her head in, â€�“You guys first-years too?” She had very dark colored skin and eyes, and her hair was pulled back in what looked like a million tiny equal sized braids that trailed off, held together with nothing at their ends yet still staying in place with no magic. It fascinated Ginny, just like Luna’s hair did when her mum cut it.

â€�“Yeah,” said Colin, moving over and making room, â€�“You can bunk with us for the train ride.” Ginny helped the girl heave her trunk into the luggage rack while Colin made introductions, â€�“My name is Colin, and this is Ginny.”

Sitting down on the bench next to Ginny, the girl replied, â€�“Everyone just calls me Ash.” Looking at Ginny she said, â€�“Ginny, as in Ginny Weasley?”

â€�“How did you know?”

â€�“Everyone talks about the ONE Weasley girl when talk of the old families come up. Plus, my family follows your brother, makes sure he doesn’t give the goblins wizard artifacts,” said Ash.

â€�“Oh,” said Ginny, â€�“you’re a Burke aren’t you?” She had heard some of the stories from Bill about the Burkes breathing down his neck, constantly inspecting his work before it was turned over to the goblins at Gringotts. Bill understood their work was important for the wizard community, but he wished they trusted him more to do his job well.

â€�“Yup,” said Ash smiling, â€�“I’m going to be the first person in my family who is both a historical wizard artifact expert and a curse breaker. That way we’ll be there on sight when ruins and tombs are first opened and explored so nothing is missed or lost.”

Ginny remembered the name of the shop that Harry came out of when they couldn’t find him in Diagon Alley, â€�“Is your family connected to that shop in Knockturn Alley? Borgin and Burke’s?”

â€�“Kind of,” replied Ash, â€�“that’s one of my dad’s distant cousin’s side of the family. The Borgins run the shop and we procure the merchandise. They only get the sellable artifacts of course; my father’s side focuses on keeping and maintaining historical ones.”

Colin, who had been listening with interest, asked, â€�“What do you do with the historical artifacts? Put them in a museum? Do wizards have museums?”

Ash looked at him, puzzled, and Ginny answered. â€�“Usually, the old families just hoard them,” she explained.

â€�“Are you a Muggle-born?” Ash asked Colin.

â€�“What’s a Muggle-born?”

Ash began nodding her certainty that yes, he was. â€�“Muggles are non-magical people. So if a wizard is born to two non-magical parents, your status is called Muggle-born. Oh, and by the way, if you are a wizard, you say ‘Do we have museums?’ You’re one of us officially now, okay? Since the day you received your letter.” She said it as though she were debating someone who wouldn’t consider Colin a wizard. Ginny inwardly smiled at Ash’s personal convictions. The Burkes come from a long line of Slytherins, most of whom believed in pure-blood statuses only.

â€�“Ok,” said Colin, â€�“what does status mean?”

â€�“It’s just a classification. It doesn’t have anything to do with magical ability,” said Ginny, catching Ash’s eye to silently convey her agreement.

â€�“These days it’s just an easy way to gauge how long someone’s family has been part of the magical community,” added Ash.

â€�“… And you guys are both from old families?” asked Colin.

â€�“Yeah, but you’ll find most students are half-bloods, and everyone starts at the same place at Hogwarts,” said Ginny.

â€�“You know what?” said Ash, changing the subject, â€�“I like that idea of a wizard museum. My dad will hate it, but I can do what I want with what I find.”

â€�“You can put it in Diagon Alley,” said Ginny. â€�“That’s where I met Colin. We were getting our wands at the same time at Olivander’s.”

â€�“That reminds me!” exclaimed Colin. â€�“I have your picture!” He dug around inside his trunk and pulled out an ordinary folder. When he opened it, there were all sorts of little strips with miniature-looking pictures inside plastic sleeves and black and white photographs of varying sizes. Colin rifled through a specific stack that looked like places from around Diagon Alley and pulled out the photograph of Ginny.

â€�“That’s beautiful!” said Ash, recognizing Colin’s potential talent from growing up surrounded by relics.

It was pretty amazing, Ginny had to admit. It made her a little self-conscious that she was the subject in something someone said was beautiful, but she glowed a little inside too.

She was perfectly clear in the picture and everything behind her was slightly blurred out of focus. The sparks emitting from the wand made little bright spots that formed a perfect arc around her upper body, following the trail through the air she had made when she had felt that it was her wand. She wasn’t looking at the camera, like in the pictures she normally took with her family, but that somehow made it better. Instead, it let the observer see what she was seeing and feel what she was feeling in that particular moment.

â€�“Why doesn’t it move?” asked Ginny.

â€�“All Muggle photographs are stationary,” said Ash knowledgeably. â€�“Only wizard ones brewed in a special potion are animated.”

â€�“You, I mean we, have animated photographs?” asked Colin in awe.

â€�“Yeah, it’s a pretty easy potion; every family has it in their household potions book,” said Ash.

A couple of hours into the train ride, Ginny, Colin, and Ash were having a great time getting to know each other until Percy popped his head into the cabin just before midday. â€�“Ginny! There you are. I thought you would be sitting with the twins,” he said.

â€�“Why?”

â€�“Never mind that,” he said. â€�“Ron and Harry are missing. Hermione just found me in the prefects’ compartment and she told me that she searched the entire train after asking the twins if they were supposed to have been on the Hogwarts Express with the rest of us.” He rushed back out of the cabin.

"Is he talking about Harry Potter?" asked Ash.

Ginny froze in indecision, does she let on that her family is close to THE Harry Potter?

â€�“Does your brother know Harry Potter?” asked Ash.

Worried about Ron and knowing that there was always a slight danger being with Harry, Ginny was a little reserved when she said, â€�“Yeah, Ron is one of his best friends.” They were going to find out at school eventually she decided.

â€�“That’s so cool!” exclaimed Ash. â€�“Can you introduce me?”

â€�“Uh, to be honest, I’ve never actually talked to him myself,” admitted Ginny. She was also not going to mention Harry staying with them this past summer.

â€�“Who’s Harry Potter?” asked Colin. â€�“Who’s Ron?”

Ginny and Ash looked around at each other, not knowing where to begin. Ash started. She told Colin Harry’s basic story that all wizards knew about him defeating He-Who-Must-Be-Not-Named, and Ginny recapped his Quidditch achievements and the finding of the Sorcerer’s Stone last year. Colin was amazed that Harry Potter was only a year older than them.

Ash asked Ginny more questions about Bill’s work, and conversation centered around the Weasley boys for some time, all of whom Colin found compelling. Talk of her brothers being on the Gryffindor Quidditch team led to further explaining Quidditch, which led to the House tournament every year at Hogwarts.

â€�“What do you mean, House?” asked Colin. Ash took over explaining again, the histories, the founders, how some families were all over the place and others tended to be legacies in certain Houses. Colin admitted remembering some of this when a school representative visited, but at the time he was too excited about being a wizard to remember it all.

â€�“Most of my family has been in Slytherin,” said Ash. â€�“It’s the best for making political connections, but I wouldn’t mind being around older Ravenclaw students who like to pursue all sorts of knowledge.”

â€�“What House is Harry Potter in?” asked Colin.

â€�“Gryffindor,” Ginny replied, â€�“just like my whole family. Not just my brothers, my mum and dad too.”

â€�“So you’re wanting Gryffindor then?” asked Ash.

â€�“Yeah, my parents won’t mind which House I’m in, and I actually told my dad it would probably be a toss-up between Gryffindor and Hufflepuff,” she answered.

â€�“Why Hufflepuff?” asked Ash.

â€�“I’m the youngest of seven,” said Ginny, smiling. â€�“Sometimes I think I’m the only kind, honest, and fair kid my parents had.” That garnered a laugh from everyone in the compartment.

â€�“I have an older brother too,” said Ash, â€�“Dax is a sixth-year Slytherin. Dad’s been grooming him to take over the family business our whole lives because he’s the one who’s going to pass on the Burke name,” she said bitterly. â€�“It’s not fair. Dax doesn’t even try, and any time he does manage to do something right he gets all this praise. That’s why I’m going to do my own thing.”

â€�“What about you?” asked Colin to Ginny. â€�“Do you have an old family business to get into?” He seemed to feel better when she shook her head no.

â€�“My father works for the Ministry,” said Ginny.

Hermione and another boy entered the compartment late that afternoon. Hermione was still trying to piece together Ron and Harry’s disappearance.

â€�“Ginny, do you remember me?” she asked.

â€�“Yeah, you were shopping in Diagon Alley with my brother,” said Ginny. Then she quickly made introductions for Colin and Ash, and Hermione introduced the boy as Neville Longbottom. Colin looked excited at meeting two more of Harry Potter’s friends.

â€�“Do you remember exactly the last time you saw them?” Hermione asked.

â€�“Not exactly. My mum walked with me through barrier at King's Cross and she told Ron and Harry to come together right after us. They were supposed to be the last ones through,” said Ginny.

â€�“So, maybe they never even got onto the platform,” pondered Hermione.

â€�“Percy will know what to do,” said Ginny reassuringly. Ash and Hermione furled their eyebrows at that statement, but faith in her family was one of the few things Ginny felt one-hundred percent sure about.

â€�“I don’t think Percy is capable of safeguarding against the kind of trouble that manages to find Harry,” said Hermione flatly.

With that, Hermione and Neville left to go change into their Hogwarts robes. Ginny suggested to Colin and Ash that they should do the same.

When they felt the Hogwarts Express pull into the Hogsmeade Station and a voice told them to leave their luggage, Colin had the idea to walk all the way to the train door that led outside. That way they would be the first ones off.

â€�“Firs’ years this way!” Ginny saw Hagrid calling over the heads of all the disembarking students.

â€�“That’s Hagrid,” said Ginny when she noticed Colin and Ash’s eyes bulge at the sight of him.

â€�“I saw him in Diagon Alley!” said Colin excitedly. â€�“He’s huge!”

Hagrid was leading them all to the side of a lake where scores of little boats were calmly floating. Ginny saw a familiar cascade of white blonde ringlets sitting in a boat by herself.

â€�“Four to a boat,” boomed Hagrid, who was still herding first years. Ginny beckoned Colin and Ash to the boat with the lone girl and introduced them both to Luna.

Once all the first years were seated, the boats began to glide across the lake and a silence fell over all the passengers. Everyone was eager with anticipation to see the Hogwarts castle for the first time. It was beginning to grow dark, so when the turrets of the castle became silhouetted against the sky there were many audible intakes of breath.

Colin fumbled for his camera and waited with it pressed to his eye for their boat to be precisely positioned before taking a shot of the castle. He took a few more after fiddling with some of the knobs. â€�“I can’t wait to see how these turn out, especially that first one,” he exclaimed.

After they had sailed quite a bit closer Ginny watched him focus his lens a bit more and asked everyone in the boat to duck down so he could clearly see over them. From her crouched position, Ginny watched as he rapidly took a series of shots with a slight change in angle from left to right in between each.

â€�“What was that for?” she asked after he let them straighten up again.

â€�“A panoramic, they’re pretty difficult to take. Especially from a moving platform, but I think it’ll turn out okay,” Colin replied.

â€�“Lucky the lake was so placid today,” remarked Ash.

â€�“What’s a panoramic?” asked Ginny.

Colin took a deep breath like he was going to give a lengthy explanation, but seemed to decide against it. â€�“I’m just going to have to show you.”

They neared a cliff that the castle was sitting at the top of, and Ginny heard Hagrid’s voice boom out again, â€�“Everybody! Heads down!” For the second time Ginny bent down low within the boat as the fleet went under hanging ivy, disguising a cave opening within the cliff. Once there, they all sailed through a dark tunnel coming to a landing underneath the castle itself. Hagrid led them all up a narrow path which ended at a door, three booming knocks and the door swung open. On the other side was a tall dark-haired witch with a stern face. â€�“This year’s crop of firs’ years, Professor.”

â€�“Thank you, Hagrid. That will do,” she said. â€�“All of you, my name is Professor McGonagall, Deputy Headmistress to Hogwarts. Form a line please, and then follow me.”

All the first years scrambled into a haphazard line, Luna led their little foursome group to a place somewhere in the middle, and Ginny stood right behind her. Colin motioned for Ash to get in line next in a lady’s first fashion but Ginny glanced over and met Ash’s eyes. They had a silent acknowledgement to protect and stand in solidarity with their new Muggle-born friend in this unfamiliar environment while the pack of first years moved through the school. At the same moment, both of them put their hands on Colin’s shoulders and thrust him in line between themselves, Ginny ahead and Ash bringing up the rear of their section of the line.

â€�“What the heck…?” Colin started to say, but Ash just shushed him and faced him forward. Professor McGonagall had looked over to see what the commotion was and Colin clamped his mouth shut and stood quietly. When the line began to move Colin glanced between them, clearly puzzled, but started to look around in wonder and picked up his camera to take pictures once they reached the entrance hall.

Professor McGonagall led them to a small empty chamber where she addressed the first years more formally. â€�“Welcome to Hogwarts. The start-of-term banquet will begin shortly, but before you take your seats in the Great Hall, you will be sorted into your Houses. The Sorting is a very important ceremony because, while you are here, your House will be something like your family within Hogwarts. You will have classes with the rest of your House, sleep in your House dormitory, and spend free time in your House common room.”

â€�“The four Houses are called Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin. Each House has its own noble history, and each has produced outstanding witches and wizards. While you are at Hogwarts, your triumphs will earn you House points, while any rule-breaking will lose House points. At the end of the year, the House with the most points is awarded the House Cup, a great honor. I hope each of you will be a credit to whichever House becomes yours.”

â€�“The Sorting Ceremony will take place in a few minutes in front of the rest of the school. I suggest you all smarten yourselves up as much as you can while you are waiting.” (1)

Ginny knew from hearing her brothers talk about their Sorting Ceremonies that Professor McGonagall was telling them all exactly what she told every group of first years. Nevertheless, it was still intimidating when her eyes lingered on Colin’s camera, which he had raised to take a picture of the room they were in. Realizing that Professor McGonagall was looking at him, he slowly let it hang around his neck again and backed up a bit. Moving as one, Ginny and Ash stepped a little closer together in front of him as if shielding Colin from Professor McGonagall’s shrewd look.

â€�“I shall return when we are ready for you,” said Professor McGonagall, the smallest glint of a smile in her eyes as she glanced away from Colin. â€�“Please wait quietly.” (2)

Ginny, Colin, and Ash listened as many of the students began to whisper about what sort of examination they would have to go through with the whole school watching.

â€�“What if you don’t pass, what if none of the Houses want you?” asked Colin worriedly.

Ash gave Colin a reassuring smile, â€�“You got your letter, you’ll get a House too.”

Professor McGonagall returned, and looked around with approval that they were still formed up in lines. Beckoning them all to follow her again, she led them into the Great Hall.

It was just like Percy had described it. Candles floating in mid-air lighting the giant space. The ceiling bewitched to reflect the sky outside. Four long tables were filled with the older students and at the other end of the hall was a fifth table where the teachers and staff sat.

Ginny quickly looked around and found the table where most of her brothers were sitting, and where she imagined Bill and Charlie once sat. She saw the twins taking part in jeering at the first years, and Percy gave her a small wave. Hermione and Neville were sitting near them at the same table, but she couldn’t spot Ron or Harry anywhere. Professor McGonagall had them all line up in one long row in front of the staff table and then turn around and face the older students, the teachers' table to their backs.

With no cue that Ginny noticed, the entire hall quieted down at once. Professor McGonagall silently placed a three-legged stool in front of the first years, and on top of that an old pointed wizard's hat. When she stepped back, everyone turned their attention to the hat. Colin once more made to raise his camera, but trying to avoid any more embarrassing attention, both Ginny and Ash silently put a hand over it and forced him to lower his arms again.

Colin jumped a bit when a rip near the brim opened and the hat began to sing:

Welcome! Salutations!
Let’s begin with this address.
For many generations
Young students, I assess.
I’m the Hogwarts Sorting Hat,
I’m really quite astute.
Once chosen, arguments fall flat,
As I don’t allow dispute.
So step on up, don’t be shy,
And place me on your dome.
Deep inside your mind, I’ll pry,
So I may find your home.
Hear me now, as I speak,
Each House’s noble lore.
Which of these does interest pique,
Exceptional Houses four?
Loyal Badgers show their grace,
Steady, sure enough.
Fiercely protective of their space,
Tenacious, kindly, Hufflepuff!
And nothing dares too daunting,
For the intrepid Lion’s roar.
Courageous spirits flaunting,
In gallant Gryffindor!
Or perhaps an Eagle in the sky,
Broad visions they may draw.
All endeavors aiming high,
In passionate, Ravenclaw!
Or once the Serpent’s on your side,
Elite brotherhood within.
Cunning and ambitious stride,
Do not mistake, great Slytherin!
Now upon your noggin, I will sit,
Your thoughts I shall decipher.
Once decided, ‘twill be writ,
Good luck to all, whomever!

Everyone, staff and students alike, began to clap for the Sorting Hat’s song. Professor McGonagall walked to the front again and held a long roll of parchment. â€�“When I call your name, you will put on the hat and sit on the stool to be sorted,” she said. (3) â€�“Alderton, Katherine!”

A girl with dark brown hair and green eyes walked over to the stool, lifted the hat, sat down, and placed it on her head. A heartbeat later, the brim of that hat opened wide again and shouted, â€�“RAVENCLAW!” loud enough for the entire hall to hear.

The second table from the main entry door burst into applause, some of the students standing up whilst cheering on the newest addition to their House. The dark-haired girl took off the hat, grinning from ear to ear and set it back on the stool and ran to join her Hogwarts family.

â€�“Archer, Terra!” A dark-skinned girl apprehensively approached the stool.

After a moment the hat shouted, â€�“HUFFLEPUFF!” The table next to the one where her brothers were sitting erupted into cheers this time.

â€�“I can’t believe we have to try on that nasty old hat,” said a snobby looking girl a few people down on the other side of Ash. â€�“It’s so old and dirty, it’s disgusting.” Ash rolled her eyes so that only Colin and Ginny could see her.

â€�“Avery, Kindra!”

â€�“That’s another old family last name,” Ash whispered to Colin. The girl who thought the hat was disgusting walked up to the stool. She picked it up touching it as little as possible.

She hadn’t even sat all the way down on the stool while lowering the hat over her head at the same time, when the hat shouted, â€�“SLYTHERIN!” All the Slytherins began shouting, â€�“AVERY! AVERY! AVERY!” Kindra Avery happily tossed the hat back onto the three-legged stool and sauntered over to the table on the far right nearest the main entry door, the one farthest from the table where Ginny’s brothers were sitting.

â€�“Baker, Charity!”

â€�“HUFFLEPUFF!” Charity went to sit next to Terra Archer.

â€�“Burke, Ashantae!” Ash gave Ginny and Colin an excited look and walked over to the stool. She sat down, took a deep breath and placed the hat on her head determinedly. It was several moments before the hat moved, significantly longer than any of the other first years so far.

Finally, the hat shouted, â€�“SLYTHERIN!”

Once again all the Slytherins began shouting, â€�“BURKE! BURKE! BURKE!” The loudest Slytherin had stood up and was leading the rest of them in the shouting, punching his fist into the air with every shout of her name. He looked like he was probably the brother Ash had talked about on the train ride, Dax.

â€�“Calhoun, Connor!” was the first boy Professor McGonagall called out of the line.

â€�“RAVENCLAW!”

â€�“Carpenter, Dylan!” followed Connor into Ravenclaw, and then it was â€�“Cassidy, Thaliana!” who became the first Gryffindor. The table Ginny’s brothers sat at to the far left exploded with applause. Thaliana went to sit at an open space near Hermione.

Ginny was sure Colin was going to be next, but Professor McGonagall then called, â€�“Cooper, Cepheus!”

â€�“SLYTHERIN!” The Slytherin table exploded again, but this time there was no chanting of â€�“Cooper! Cooper! Cooper!” Ginny supposed this was because it wasn’t one of the old family last names. Nevertheless, many of the Slytherins still greeted little Cepheus with enthusiasm.

â€�“Creevey, Colin!” Ginny started when she heard Colin’s name. She was watching the Slytherins and forgot that alphabetically he would be coming up.

Colin went to sit on the stool and jammed the hat on his head. In next to no time, a big smile cracked across Colin’s face just before the Sorting Hat shouted, â€�“GRYFFINDOR!”

Once again the table Ginny’s brothers sat at exploded into applause. Colin went and sat in another empty spot near Hermione and motioned that he was saving a seat for Ginny. Then he looked over across the hall to the Slytherin table and a look of concern fell over his face that Ash sat all the way over there. Ginny just shrugged with a â€�“that’s life,” look when Colin’s pained expression came back to hers.

â€�“Deverill, Charlotte!” and â€�“Faulkner, Emerson!” became back to back Gryffindors right after Colin. The Gryffindor spots were filling up fast now Ginny noticed. Knowing Weasley was going to be at the very end of the line, Ginny settled into waiting for the majority of the first years left around her to be sorted.

At â€�“Jones, Gwendelyn!” a staff member who hadn’t been watching the Sorting came into the room from a door behind the staff table. He had dark-black, oily-looking hair, and he bent his head down to whisper into the ear of a man with half-moon spectacles and a long white beard. The wizard with the beard motioned to a very short staff member who stood up and went to speak to Professor McGonagall. He took her long roll of parchment and she pointed to where she was at on the list. Professor McGonagall, the oily-haired wizard, and the wizard with the long white beard went to stand in a quiet corner and had a discussion that seemed urgent to Ginny.

After the Sorting Hat shouted â€�“SLYTHERIN!” and Gwendelyn Jones went to join Ash and Kindra, the short staff member introduced himself.

â€�“Hello, I’m Professor Flitwick. I’ll be finishing the Sorting for Professor McGonagall. Up next is, Lawless, Logan!”

â€�“SLYTHERIN!”

â€�“Li, Mei!”

â€�“RAVENCLAW!”

â€�“Lovegood, Luna!”

Ginny watched as the last person she knew who was still standing in line with her approached the stool. Luna picked up the Sorting Hat and dramatically placed it on her head as though she were doing a scene in a play. Well, she is technically on stage, thought Ginny, smiling.

â€�“RAVENCLAW!”

Well, will you look at that, Ginny thought to herself again. I arrived here at the castle knowing all of three other first years and wouldn’t you know that each one of them was put in a different house? That means I must be going to Hufflepuff. It would round everything out nicely, she thought worriedly.

There weren’t that many people left to be sorted now.

â€�“Pyrites” . . . , â€�“Reilly” . . . , â€�“Riordan” . . . , then a â€�“Rosier” for whom which the Slytherin table had leaned forward with bated breath only to be disappointed when he was placed in Ravenclaw. â€�“Ruiz” . . . , â€�“Smith” . . . , â€�“Sullivan” . . . , and then a â€�“Vasquez, Ana Lucia!” Finally there was only two people left waiting to be sorted.

â€�“Weasley, Ginevra!”

Ginny rolled her eyes at the use of her full first name, and that alone was enough distraction from the butterflies in her stomach to allow her to walk towards the stool and place the Sorting Hat on her head.

â€�“Well, aren’t you a force to be reckoned with?” asked a small voice in Ginny’s ear. It could only be coming from the Sorting Hat. She hadn’t heard it talk to the other students it had Sorted, so she must be the only one who could hear it at the moment. â€�“I wouldn’t expect anything less than a powerful force from the first Weasley girl in generations though,” said the hat with genuine interest.

â€�“You have a very inquisitive mind,” said the hat and Ginny was surprised that maybe it was considering putting her in Ravenclaw. â€�“Ravenclaw?” whispered the hat, â€�“There I’m sure you’d do well, but that isn’t where you belong.”

Sensing her thoughts that she belonged in Hufflepuff, â€�“Yes, I could see you fitting in with those who are fair-minded, and they would certainly help you develop an inquisitive mind.” Heart plummeting, anticipating the hat proclaiming her a Hufflepuff, Ginny began to mentally fight against the hat’s obvious choice.

She decided right then and there that she WANTED to be a Gryffindor. No longer was she just happy to be attending Hogwarts. She was just as magical as anyone else here and she would fight for where she wanted to be. She wanted to hang out in the common room with her brothers and with Colin, she wanted to try out for the Gryffindor House Quidditch team and wear the same robes in scarlet and gold as her brothers with her own number on the back. She mentally demanded that the hat let her Hogwarts family and her Weasley family be one in the same.

Throughout this emotional mental tirade Ginny went through, the Sorting Hat had been quiet. It listened to the fire that brewed up so easily seemingly out of nowhere to fuel Ginny’s determination to stand up for herself. It stayed patient while it let Ginny find out for herself that she had goals, she had expectations, and she had a spine to throw behind exactly what she thought.

â€�“Well, let’s see now,” it whispered, â€�“Inquisitive mind, fair in the heart, fearless in scores, belongs in … GRYFFINDOR!” The hat shouted the last word for the whole hall to hear and the Gryffindor table burst into applause as they welcomed another Weasley into their fold.

Colin scooted over and laughingly said, â€�“See? I saved ya a seat again!”

â€�“It felt like I had that hat on for forever,” said Ginny.

â€�“You weren’t the longest person,” replied Colin, â€�“but you weren’t exactly quick either. What’d it say to you?”

â€�“Um, we fought … maybe,” said Ginny, puzzling out how the hat incited her into fighting for what she wanted instead of just going with the flow like she usually does. â€�“Did it talk to you too then?”

â€�“Yeah, it said I could work on my ‘passion for photography’ in Ravenclaw, but I wanted to be in the same house as Harry Potter, and the one you would most likely be in,” said Colin. â€�“I guess it eventually agreed.”

Just then Ginny heard someone with an Irish accent lean over and ask Hermione if she’d heard about the rumor going on about Ron Weasley and Harry Potter. Ginny and Colin both leaned closer and listened intently as a boy named Seamus said someone had a copy of the Evening Prophet with an article of a Muggle car seen flying north from London.

Professor Flitwick announced the name of the last student standing that was waiting to be sorted, â€�“Zhang, Tai!”

â€�“HUFFLEPUFF!” With that the Sorting Ceremony was over. Professor Flitwick rolled up the parchment and picked up the Sorting Hat and the three-legged stool and carried them all out of the Great Hall. Professor McGonagall went out the door behind the staff table with the oily-haired wizard.

The wizard with the long white beard moved to address the students next. â€�“Welcome! Welcome to yet another year of learning here at Hogwarts.”

â€�“Is that Dumbledore?” whispered a first-year boy who would be sharing a dorm room with Colin. Ginny racked her brain for his name but couldn’t remember it from the sea of names that was announced during the Sorting.

â€�“Yeah,” whispered another one back to him.

â€�“Before we begin, let me say a few words,” announced Dumbledore. â€�“Feast founds, forthwith!”

Many from the Ravenclaw table burst out laughing. Hermione and Percy were among the few Gryffindors who understood and chuckled to themselves. Colin caught Ginny’s eye to see if she understood what the Headmaster said but they both just shrugged and applauded along with everyone else in the Great Hall until Dumbledore also disappeared through the door behind the staff table. Before either of them could ask what it meant, the golden plates on the table magically filled with food. Ginny saw all sorts of dishes she was familiar with from her mother’s cooking, and a few odd things that she had never seen before.

Colin’s initial surprise was short lived, for soon after, he elbowed Ginny and nodded in the direction of Hermione and the twins, who were in deep conversation with some other Gryffindors Ginny didn’t recognize. She caught the words flying car, tree, and expelled.

The Welcoming Feast couldn’t be over soon enough. Sick with worry for her brother and Harry Potter, Ginny followed Percy's example and quietly listened while the other first-year Gryffindors were introducing themselves to the older students. The boy who asked about Dumbledore was named Jasper Greene, a half-blood who loved Muggle sports. The one who answered him was named Jai Misra, a pure-blood of Indian heritage. The other boys in Colin’s dorm, Emerson Faulkner and Blake Sullivan, were also half-bloods.

The only first-year girl sitting close enough to Ginny for her to learn anything about was Thaliana Cassidy. She had dirty-blonde colored hair and talked about some of the instruments that she liked to play. She seemed somewhat interesting to Ginny, except that when she spoke it was always with an air of authority. The other three Gryffindor first-year girls were seated too far away for Ginny to get introduced to.

After she and Colin had finished eating, Ginny glanced back up at the staff table again and was surprised to see that all three members who had left earlier were now back and enjoying the feast. When Professor Dumbledore finished, long after most everyone else had, Ginny was taken aback that all the plates and goblets were magically wiped clean at once.

Leaning back when it happened, Colin looked at Ginny with a look of fascination on his face and said, â€�“That was so cool! It appears, and then disappears!” Now Ginny knew why her mum was said to be happy that her brothers at least carried their plates to the sink after meals at home. They literally had to do nothing here at Hogwarts.

Everyone in the hall quieted down when Professor Dumbledore got to his feet once more to address them again. â€�“Now that we are all fed and watered, I have a few start-of-term-notices.”

Professor Dumbledore explained to the first years that the forest was forbidden to all students, no magic was allowed in the corridors, and that Quidditch tryouts were to begin next week. These were all things Ginny already knew though from stories from her brothers. She just wanted to find out what happened to Ron and Harry.

"Finally, I want you all to give a nice warm welcome to our newest Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Professor Gilderoy Lockhart," Professor Dumbledore gestured towards Lockhart who was sitting between Professors McGonagall and the oily-haired Professor. Lockhart stood up, waved his hands in a few quick circles, and took a deep bow for the applause that broke out around the hall. He was wearing robes of what Ginny could only describe at grape and clearly stood out from the rest of the staff members, all of whom were wearing black for the Welcome Feast. Ginny was among the few who did not clap exuberantly at the idea of a celebrity being everyone's new teacher.

Once they were released, Percy began to call for all of the first years to follow him and the other prefects up to Gryffindor Tower. Ginny thought about going with a different prefect for a moment but then thought better of it. With Ron missing she dutifully got into Percy’s line with Colin right behind her. Percy gave her a nod of acknowledgement and then began to explain tricky parts of the castle to her group as he showed them secret passageways and short cuts up to the common room. Colin picked up his camera again and pulled Ginny to the back of the line so they could straggle a little ways behind everyone else.

â€�“I just want to take some shots of these hidden passageways for my dad,” said Colin.

â€�“That’s not very secretive of you,” commented Ginny. She really wanted to laugh but was still too filled with worry for her brother.

â€�“Dad won’t know the difference.”

When the group made it all the way up to the portrait of the Fat Lady, Percy told them that they would need to give her a password every time they wanted to enter the common room. The password changed regularly, but for now it was ‘wattlebird.’

Everyone scrambled through the hole behind the portrait, and Ginny and Colin got their first look at the Gryffindor common room. It was spacious, round, and full of squashy armchairs with some tables for doing homework and a large fireplace on one side. Percy directed the boys to one door that led up to their dormitory and the girls to another that went up to theirs.

Ginny glanced at the door to the girls’ dormitory and looked back at Colin. It was the first time they would be separated since they began this journey together of leaving behind everything they knew.

â€�“Meet for breakfast tomorrow? Here, at like 7:00,” asked Colin.

Immense relief swept through Ginny. She knew she could find her way back down to the Great Hall in the morning with one of her brothers and sit with them at breakfast, but it made her feel much better knowing that she would be with a fellow first year who wanted to hang out with her and would actually be attending classes with her. She smiled and nodded her head yes and went to explore her dorm room.

She found a door with a plaque that read First Years on it, and when she opened it saw that the only other girl who had so far arrived was Thaliana.

â€�“Lights out within the hour. I want all of us fresh for our first day of classes tomorrow,” she immediately said to Ginny. Thaliana sat at her vanity and began to brush out her hair.

â€�“No problem,” replied Ginny, rolling her eyes. She located the bed her trunk was next to and pulled out Tom Riddle’s diary. She thought about writing in it, but put it down again in favor of picking out her clothes for the next day and putting them on top of her own vanity, folded up. Then she checked her bag and put the general class materials inside it: parchment, quills, and some folders. She would add the necessary books after getting her schedule.

Then she went back down to the common room. Colin stayed up in the boys’ dormitory, no doubt taking more pictures. Downstairs, Hermione was pacing. Eventually Hermione couldn’t take no real news anymore and declared that she was going to go talk to Professor McGonagall. While she was away, the twins and their friend Lee Jordan came back down from their dorms and excitedly talked with more confidence about Ron and Harry having arrived at school in the Weasley family Muggle car. People were passing around copies of the Evening Prophet, reading some sections out loud.

Less worried about where her brothers were, and now only concerned if they had been expelled or not, Ginny waited with many of the older students for Ron and Harry to finally arrive in the common room. Everyone grew quiet when they heard a commotion on the other side of the portrait hole.

â€�“Skip the lecture,” said Ron impatiently, â€�“and tell us the new password.”

â€�“It’s ‘wattlebird’…” (4) Ginny heard Hermione say before the twins and Lee Jordan shoved the portrait hole open and grabbed Ron and Harry and yanked them back through the hole, drowning out the rest of Hermione’s words. Everyone started yelling and clapping them on their backs and praising Ron and Harry for their unbelievably awesome entrance into the school year. Hermione was left to scramble through the hole by herself after them and stood there with a scowl on her face while the rest of the common room talked excitedly.

Ron and Harry confirmed that yes, they drove the car to school, yes, they crash landed, but no, they weren’t expelled. Fred and George claimed that they would have gone with them, if they had known. Lee Jordan couldn’t stop going on about them using the Whomping Willow as a landing site. Then Percy came back downstairs from his dorm, and Ginny watched Ron and Harry immediately disappear up to their room before he could tell them off.

Percy went over to check on Ginny after Ron and Harry disappeared upstairs. â€�“Our brother is fine. Are you going to be able to sleep okay?” Ginny nodded her head yes. â€�“Off to bed then.”

Ginny went back to her dorm room. The other three Gryffindor girls were up there now.

â€�“Lights out in twenty minutes!” said Thaliana. A girl with tan skin and dark chocolate brown hair and eyes rolled them behind Thaliana’s back. Another one with light blonde hair who was already sitting on her bed in her pajamas smiled over the book she was reading at the dark-haired girl in a sort of covert agreement. Ginny’s last roommate didn’t roll her eyes or smile. She had merely glanced at Thaliana when lights out was announced and obediently finished getting ready for bed. Ginny pulled her pony tail lower so it was more comfortable to sleep in and decided to puzzle out these girls tomorrow.

If Thaliana wanted to be large and in charge, that was fine with her. If the other girls wanted to giggle and rebel, that was fine too. Ginny didn’t want any part of any of it. She snuggled under her covers and fell asleep almost instantly. She thought about her first night sleeping so far away from all her family members only for a few seconds before drifting off.

Quote References:

(1) SS/PS Page 114
(2) SS/PS Page 114
(3) SS/PS Page 119
(4) CoS Page 84