When 1991 arrived, Harry and I were at Mrs. Figg’s. The Dursleys had gone to a New Year’s Eve party hosted by one of Verno’s colleagues, and for whatever reason, I wasn’t invited. Figg wasn’t much of a party animal. She fell asleep by ten o’ clock, one of her interchangeable cats curled up and purring on her lap. I conked out soon after, my head pillowed against my arm. Harry let me sleep for a while, but woke me up when the clock in Town Square chimed the midnight hour and people could be heard whooping and toasting each other throughout the streets.
“Kat,” he said, nudging my arm. “It’s midnight. It’s New Year’s.”
I shifted into awareness roughly. A bluish glow from the muted television clouded my
brother’s face. Blearily, I yawned and shook my hair out of my eyes. “What?”
“Happy New Year. It’s 1991.”
I threw a tasseled, moldy-smelling cushion at him. “Go away. I’m sleeping.”
Harry continued to nudge me. “You told me to wake you up when it was New Year’s,” he reminded me.
“It’s not New Year’s until I say it is.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“Shh. Sleeping.”
But that was the last year; the last of years. And things always change.
“I am going to murder Dudley!” I shrieked, clutching my arm. “I’m going to slit his stomach open with a butcher knife, yank out his intestines, and strangle him with them!”
I should mention that I shrieked all of this into a pillow, in my bedroom, after I’d gotten home from the Whinging General Hospital Emergency Centre on New Year’s Eve, 1991. Hidden under a black Velcro brace, I had a fracture on my left wrist.
“And then I’m going to burn the Smelting Stick! Profusely!” I continued, because the Smelting Stick was more of a problem than my git of a cousin, and because I really wanted another chance to use the word ‘profusely’. It made me feel smart.
Earlier that day, I had learned several things: a) Dudley’s fear of magic and experience with his tail had not discouraged him from harassing me, b) If you strike a young girl’s wrist just right with a Smelting Stick, said wrist will break and cause her quite a lot of pain, c) If you do nothing but ignore/insult/annoy your aunt for five months (or for your whole life), she will be very reluctant to drive you to the hospital and may even deny that anything is wrong with your injured wrist, and d) Riding on Jeremy Flinker’s bike handlebars to the hospital is not the best of ideas. Especially with a swollen and aching wrist.
Scandalized that Jeremy was my back-up plan, Aunt P caught up with us halfway down Magnolia Crescent (it was slow-going, as Jeremy couldn’t see over my hair and kept swearing as his tire struck potholes) and barked at me to get in the car. I couldn’t go to the hospital without an adult anyway, she said.
Jeremy came along (Aunt P was too irritated to argue), which I was grateful for, because Aunt P seemed to be physically swelling with anger.
“Isn’t this, like, the eighth time you’ve broken that arm?” Jeremy said, grinning in a way that a person shouldn’t when their best friend is mortally wounded.
I groaned internally. “Third,” I said. “And I think it’s my wrist.”
“It’s not broken,” Aunt P said in an undertone, gripping the steering wheel with furious intensity. She didn’t like driving, and constantly checked her mirrors and gas gauge. Her shoulders stayed taut for the entire ride, and her eye twitched every time she hit her turn signal.
“Is too,” I muttered, internally counting backwards from one hundred to distract myself. As Jeremy had pointed out, I’d been through this before and knew what it felt like.
“D’you remember that time my dad almost ran over you with his car and you broke the other arm?” Jeremy began, obviously ready to launch into that thrilling tale.
“Jere,” I said through my teeth, “That’s a great story and all, but if you don’t shut up I’m going to punch you with my other arm.”
“Be quiet,” Aunt P snapped, turning a corner. “I’m trying to drive.”
The incident Jeremy mentioned in the car occurred when I was four years old, just after Harry had started school. It was a defining moment for me, considering that, as Jeremy was a year older then me and a boy (I was four; boys had cooties), we probably never would have become friends had it not happened.
It all began when I decided to run away from home. I must have picked up the idea on a television show or something. At four, I was mature for my age (I have no idea where all that maturity disappeared to by the time I was ten), and I was also very lonely. With my older brother shut up in a classroom for eight hours of the days, and Aunt P yelling at me to stop sulking around the house, I didn’t have anyone to talk to but the obligatory imaginary friend that all four-year-olds are allotted. Her name was Katta; she had blonde hair and could do tai kwon do. But she wasn’t much company. So, one day, I decided to run away and join the circus. That was the extent of both the planning and the plan. I suppose I was simply going to walk along the side of the road until I found a circus.
I had the courtesy to alert Aunt P first. After packing a bag (a small Winnie the Pooh satchel filled with juice pouches and extra socks), I marched into the kitchen, where she was disinfecting something, and announced, “I’m going to be in the circus now.”
She barely glanced up. “Don’t walk on the floor in those shoes,” she snapped. “I just mopped.”
I made it all the way to Main Street without much incident. Little Whinging was an absurdly safe town; the only dangers were busybodies. The streets all followed a basic square grid, and I knew them well enough. I was not, however, well acquainted with basic rules of the road.
People say it all the time: Didn’t your parents ever tell you to look both ways before crossing the street?
Well. No, actually, they never did. So, my younger self naturally assumed it was perfectly all right to march from one side of Main Street to the other. She thought it was a good idea to stop in the middle and squat down to investigate a large, sweaty slug. And she thought it was a good idea to sing to herself a little song entitled “I’m going to the circus/ yeah, the circus, yeah/ that’s a cool slug right there/ yeahyeahyeah”.
I heard Mr. Flinker’s cobalt blue truck approaching, but I didn’t really process it. My four-year-old mind was more fascinated with slugs and clowns than the sound of worn tires swallowing sun-warmed pavement.
Being very small, I can understand that Mr. Flinker didn’t see me right away. But, as he told me later, my bright hair was just visible from his position in the driver’s seat, and he stomped on the brakes before the nose of the truck could do anything more than clip my side at an odd angle. The squeal of the truck woke me from my slug-induced reverie. I toppled backward, and my arm ended up sandwiched between the road and the rest of my body. And distinct crack flew into my ears. There was a tremendous popping noise and a sudden spurt of liquid as a dozen juice pouches burst and vomited their contents everywhere. My Winnie the Pooh backpack had been squished, too.
I was aware that my arm hurt, but it was weird”the human body does this fantastic thing called “releasing hormones to block pain.” Some cocktail of endorphins and adrenaline and pure four-year-old spunk kept me from crying or doing anything other than smelling like tropical punch and confusedly muttering, “You killed the slug,” when Mr. Flinker raced out of his truck and started asking me if I was okay (at top volume). Because, indeed, the slug had gone the same way as my juice pouches; its final resting place was the underside of a tire.
Me: “The slug. You killed it. It’s a cool slug.”
Jeremy’s dad: “OH HELL, OH HELL, I MEAN HECK, JEREMY, CALL YOUR MOTHER, CALL THE HOSPITAL, ARE YOU OKAY, WHAT’S YOUR NAME, WHAT’S ALL THAT STUFF, IS THAT STRAWBERRY, ARE YOU OKAY, PLEASE BE OKAY.”
I briefly mulled over this long statement. “My arm hurts,” I said, because it did, and because I was very puzzled with the proceedings.
Not knowing what else to do, Mr. Flinker took me to the hospital, which was half an hour outside of Little Whinging. He put me in the back seat, buckled me in tightly, and kept asking for my name. I told him. Jeremy, who rode shotgun, shrieked repeatedly that I might have a “cussion”. Mr. Flinker asked Jeremy how he knew what a concussion was, and Jeremy said he’d seen it on the telly, and somewhere in all of that my arm began to burn like someone had set fire to it. I started to cry, loudly, and Mr. Flinker cursed again.
“That’s a bad word,” Jeremy pointed out. He then looked at me. “Kata’s a weird name.”
Couldn’t fault him there. I just kept crying; I didn’t want to go the to circus anymore. I just wanted to go to someplace where my arm didn’t hurt.
“I’m Jeremy Flinker,” Jeremy continued in that self-important manner little kids have. “I’m skiving off,” he added, his chest swelling with pride. I didn’t know what “skiving off” meant, and I wasn’t interested to learn.
“Jeremy!” Mr. Flinker said. “What did I say?”
Jeremy grinned. “You said I couldn’t tell Mum. You didn’t say I couldn’t tell her. ”
Mr. Flinker was probably the coolest dad ever. Whenever there was nothing particularly interesting going on at school, or whenever one of them had gotten good marks for the term, he’d let Jeremy or Mattie stay home and help him at Flinker’s. I was hugely envious of this.
I was not in good shape when we finally pulled into Whinging General Hospital, due mostly to an agonizing arm and a really annoying Jeremy. He kept up a constant stream of chatter, about everything from Batman to tattoos (“When I get old enough, I’m gonna get a python on my leg!”). Besides this, there was also the waiting room. Unless you’re having a severe allergic reaction, or you’ve been shot, or something, Whinging General Hospital makes you sit around for a while and fill out a bunch of papers about contact information and whatnot. They do this even if you’re four and adorable and are with two complete strangers and have a broken arm (“Dad! Dad! Look, Dad, her arms's turning purple! Dad!” ). Throughout the ride to the hospital, Mr. Flinker had asked me repeatedly what my phone number was, how to get in touch with my parents, etc. I didn’t know my phone number. For Christ’s sake, I didn’t even know to look both ways before crossing the freaking street. I’m sure Mr. Flinker was, at the least, unnerved with what was happening. He just kept telling me that it was going to be okay.
His fears were ebbed, though, when Dr. Hampton came into the Room of Eternal Holdup and called my name. Shocked, he looked at the clipboard, looked at me, and smiled. “Kata!” he said. “I thought we told you not to come back and see us.”
Relieved at the sight of a semi-familiar face, I straightened up in the uncomfortable waiting room chair and stopped crying long enough to sum up the morning’s events for him. “I ran away to the circus and my arm hurts and he killed the slug.”
Mr. Flinker went white. “Do you know her?” he demanded of Dr. Hampton. “I swear it was an accident. She was sitting in the middle of the road, and I didn’t really hit her, but she fell back and all her weight kind of went onto her arm like this.” Jeremy’s dad demonstrated by bending his arm into a forty-five degree angle and leaning forward as if he were falling. “I didn’t know what to do, so I just brought her here… I probably should have called someone… and I just didn’t know.” This was typical Mr. Flinker; he was very adept at stirring sauces and being a dad and all that great stuff, but he was an introvert around people he didn’t know and entirely awkward under pressure.
“I’m supposed to be in school,” Jeremy said giddily. No one responded.
“Kata came in three weeks ago with an allergic reaction,” Dr. Hampton explained to Mr. Flinker. Squatting down to my level, he shook his head and clucked his tongue. “What’re we going to do with you, madam? You ought to learn to be more careful.”
“I don’t know if she hit her head,” Mr. Flinker said, and it began to bug me that he was talking about me as if I wasn’t there.
Dr. Hampton pulled out a small, metal flashlight-ish object and shone it into my left eye.
“Ahhh,” I said, because that’s what doctors tell you to do. Dr. Hampton chuckled and shone the light into my other eye.
“What’s your name?” he asked, even though my name had been said. It’s one of those standard check and see if the child has brain damage questions.
“Katarine Potter,” I replied, pulling out the full name in hopes of getting him to shine that light somewhere else.
“Good,” Dr. Hampton said. He glanced at his clipboard. “When’s your birthday?”
I told him.
“Where am I getting the python?” Jeremy chimed in, trying to help.
“On you leg.”
Dr. Hampton stood up, motioned to a nurse wearing pink scrubs, and smiled at me again. “Well, I think your head’s fine, Kata. Let’s see what we can do about that arm, eh?”
And then he touched the skin of my wrist lightly, with the first two fingers of his right hand, reminding me that I was in pain. Faced with no other alternative, I resumed crying.
I lay in bed, eyes ogling the ceiling, thinking of nothing in particular. I wasn’t tired, but I wanted to be asleep when the bells rang out the beginning of 1992. I wanted them to wake me up. I wanted to remember. Downstairs, I knew there was a party going on. The Dursleys had hosted it this year, and given my hermit-like behavior, they trusted me enough to stay upstairs and didn’t relegate me to Mrs. Figg’s.
Glasses clinked, ice jangling around in them. Appetizers and salmon puffs”I guess I can’t know for sure, but don’t those things always include salmon puffs? ” circled the room. It was painfully normal. My injured wrist tingled a bit, as if the sound of an ordinary, non-magical world set off some new kind of pain. I knew that those people probably weren’t happy. They probably didn’t want to get dressed up and wear agonizing shoes and make forced chitchat as a new year began. Perhaps they thought they wanted it, but even a ten-year-old girl with bottom marks and a permanent clueless-ness could tell they really didn’t.
They weren’t happy, but at least they were blissfully unaware of other possibilities. Me… I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to be happy anymore. I wasn’t sure if I wanted magic, because I just wanted things to be the way they had been. Cupboards and all.
I didn’t even move when the partygoers’ voices suddenly synchronized, counting down from ten and ending in a uproar of cheering. Laughter and careless chatter burbled. Wine glasses collided and resounded. There are only so many ways to describe the party that was happening in a million different places, a million different towns, simpering and meaningless, coated with humanity.
The bells. They opened. They sang. I had listened to them methodically, every hour of every day, for my entire life. But for the first time, I heard them.
In school, we’d been studying beginner’s chemistry” atoms and protons and electrons, that sort of thing. I didn’t understand most of it, even though the lessons were taught very basically, at a sixth grade level. But I understood that everything is made of atoms, atoms of the different elements. There are a lot of those, like Magnesium and Boron and salt. So, essentially, I was made of the same stuff as bells. The same stuff as magic wands and green notebooks and Smelting Sticks. If you broke us down scientifically, and tore us apart, I was the same as Mr. Mendota and Winnie Alderton and Harry. We couldn’t be separate, ever.
What made us different?
Maybe that was in the next lesson.
When the bells stopped tolling, and the quiet that followed was peppered by the sounds of the party and my throbbing thoughts, I closed my eyes. “Hey, Harry,” I said. “It’s New Year’s now. Just to let you know.”
Silence. Of course. I shut my eyes tighter and barely noticed when tears squeezed out of their corners. Even with everything that happened, and everything that would happen, it was the only time I remember crying that year. But I needed to do it. It was just one of those things.
~*~*~*~
Mr. Mendota was really something.
On the first day of second term, I arrived at school a half-hour early (stooping so low as to bum a ride from Aunt P and endure a ten-minute rant on the various ways I was a failure as a person) with the sole intention of talking to my teacher about the mix-up with my Twenty Things and Dear Friend notebooks. For days, I had thought of nothing else. Sitting in my room with the door locked and the curtains drawn, I tried to remember every letter I’d written to my not-a-diary, and whether they contained details of magic. Nothing sprung to mind. Still, a horrible suspicion weighed me down; I was certain I must’ve written something I shouldn’t have.
In the words of Jeremy Flinker (I explained the situation to him as best I could, omitting the “I may have just exposed an entire secret world with my school project” part) I was “damn screwed.”
Anyway. First day. Early. Talking.
Mr. Mendota, as it happened, was not early. He scrambled through the classroom door just as the final bell sounded, and waved me away as I tried to launch into a prepared speech. A million different stories were balanced on my tongue, waiting to be fired off. I had wild and wilder excuses, but I never got a chance to use any of them. Instead of listening to my so-called high-pitched voice, Mr. Mendota quieted the class and announced we were changing seat partners. This was supposed to teach us how to Handle People in Real Life Situations. Melanie and I glanced at each other. I could tell she was anxious to be rid of me.
There were no parting tears.
My new seatmate was Sherrie. Over the holidays, someone had braided her bronze-blonde hair into cornrows. I noticed that her shoes were on the wrong feet. I was still a bit frightened that Sherrie may had heard my revelation of the truth to Jilly, but it’s hard to be a afraid of a person who can’t tell their right from their left.
“Your shoes are on the wrong feet,” was the first thing I said to her. I figured she ought to know.
Sherrie glanced unworriedly at her shoes. “No, they’re not,” she said. “I’m doing an experiment. They’re not on the wrong feet if I say they’re on the right feet. What’s wrongly right for you could be rightly wrong for me. Wrong and right could be wrong or right, depending on the right person or wrong feet. Right?”
I blinked. Well. “That makes no sense.”
Sherrie smiled and clicked her heels together. Her dreamy eyes fixed on mine. “The experiment has nothing to do with shoes. I’m trying to see who can follow what I say. Congratulations, Kata Potter”you’re a scientist.”
I gave Sherrie an apprising sort of look. She shook her cornrows out of her eyes and swung her feet, unperturbed by my calculating gaze. She basked under my eyes as if they were spotlights. I wondered what could possibly go on inside Sherrie Parker’s head. She was certainly a bit of an oddball… a misfit…
She was the only other person in the class who had as few friends as I did. Whether she realised it or not, Sherrie was stared at as much as I was. This united us, on the surface.
“I like your sweater,” she said airily. I was wearing my Mystery Sweater, the one that had inexplicably appeared in my room on Christmas morning. “It brings out the purple in your eyes.”
“My eyes are green,” I said lamely.
“Are they?” She seemed genuinely surprised, and quickly looked at me, studying my eyes for longer than the time necessary to determine their colour. “Oh.”
“Yeah,” I said. I could’ve sworn she’d looked me in the eyes several times since the initiation of this horribly awkward conversation. “They’ve been that way for a while now.”
“It’s supposed to snow again tomorrow,” she said.
Sherrie had some kind of issue with announcing when she was going to change the subject.
“Uh,” I said intelligently.
“I got a magic kit for Christmas,” she said.
I”logically”took this as a threat. “YOU CAN’T PROVE ANYTHING!” I shouted.
The classroom crashed into silence. Everyone looked at us. Sherrie began doodling on a piece of notebook paper, obliviously humming under her breath. I doubted she’d even heard me.
Going red under the collective gaze of my classmates, I put my head down on the desk and resigned myself to a long second term.
He ignored me, he entered my not-a-diary into a writing competition without my consent, and he paired me with Sherrie Parker in his brilliant two-by-two seating system. So, yeah. Mr. Mendota was really something.
I approached him after class instead.
“Ah, Kata,” he said as I trudged up to his desk, backpack strung across my shoulders and arms crossed so tightly I could barely breathe. I remembered, with a jolt, that Mr. Mendota still had no clue that anything was wrong with my notebooks. Maybe he thought I’d hung up on him for fun. He gave me a proud smile, and something deep inside of me cracked.
My teacher picked up a waxy pamphlet from a pile of papers on his desk. I bit my tongue until it was bathed in blood. The title read Surrey Regional Young Writers Competition. A lump of dread fell into my stomach.
I took a moment to marvel at my ability to completely screw everything up in a period of less than six months. Other people had been left behind”Aunt P was a perfect example, though I didn’t really enjoy being grouped with her. And none of those people had gone and blown the secret of the wizarding world. I was truly a special case: I didn’t even have to try to screw up. I just did. I screwed up, continually, every day of my life. And then there was, like, an eight-hour period in which I didn’t screw anything up because I was sleeping. But as soon as I woke up, everything started again and I just kept screwing up until there was nothing left.
I wondered what Mr. Mendota had read, how much he knew. Did he believe any of it, or think I was making up stories? Did it matter? I had no idea. He didn’t accuse me of either being a witch or pretending to be a witch, so I supposed I was in the clear. He doesn’t believe in magic, I remembered. The most conclusive proof possible was standing in front of him, and he didn’t believe in magic. How much does it take to shove a little impossibility into a person’s realm of possibility?
Next to his desk, Mr. Mendota had a large, thin-paged Dictionary sitting on a fake-wood pedestal. It was close enough that I could see what page lay open: dipstick through discretion. I was barely two meters from the words”all the words in the world! And I couldn’t find any to say.
I took the pamphlet. It was weightless in my hand.
The hallway was pressingly silent as I walked it, which was too bad. A ragged scream was balling up in the back of my throat, and it wasn’t going to stay there forever.
January was… interesting. Between schoolwork, transportation issues (my bike had been vandalized when I left it parked outside of the library; I suspected Dark magic), and many strange conversations with Sherrie, I barely had a spare moment. Maybe it was because I had finally done something right in his eyes, but Mr. Mendota suddenly expected me to actually do the assigned homework. I maintain that it was because I had nothing better to do, but I found myself studying up on protons and electrons, struggling through maths, and writing a book report on Alice’s Adventures in WonderlandJeremy fruitlessly tried to explain History to me. History annoyed me. There seemed to be a lot of wars; I didn’t understand why everybody couldn’t just get along.
Having moved past the “Twenty Things” unit of English, Mr. Mendota had decided to teach us some mythology. Let me just say: I can’t imagine a single career in the history of forever in which I’d need to know whether Demeter was the goddess of harvest or hats, or why Poseidon cursed Cassiopeia by turning her into a W-shaped constellation. Sure, this knowledge will help you out should you ever appear on a game show. You might be a hit at dinner parties. But I see no practical use for mythology.
Mr. M disagreed. So, for the next few weeks, I was stuck mixing up Chiron and Charon and trying to remember the correct pronunciation for Eurydice.
During one of these lectures, as Sherrie and I played hangman on a scrap of paper (she won, but how was I supposed to know that ‘zydeco’ was a real word?), Mr. Mendota told us a story about the origin of love and loss.
“Humans were initially created with four arms, four legs, and two faces. Essentially, these early people were like conjoined twins. The great god Zeus, however, feared the power of humans. He was worried they might usurp the gods. So, he split them in half. And he condemned everyone to a long, long life of searching for their counterpart. Some cultures believe that one half is a man and one half is a woman, and if the two ever meet they fall into a kind of predestined love. Others disagree, however, and say that we are forever searching for a deeper understanding of ourselves.” Here, he paused and grinned sardonically. “Of course, it’s only a myth.”
I don’t know why everyone assumes I have an aversion to my full name. In reality, I actually love the name Katarine”it sounds regal and important; it sounds like a girl that can hold her head up, a girl who laughs all the time, a girl who has the whole freaking world figured out. I sometimes thought of Katarine as a different person than myself. A worldlier, sophisticated version of the girl I wanted to be.
When I was little, so little I barely remember it, people called me Katty. I can’t even begin to describe how much I hated that. It was too frilly, too cute to be me. Katty was not a little girl who used the garden hose and some potted plants to make a realistic swamp in the backyard so that she could “go explorer-ing”. Katty didn’t ambush the neighbor’s miniature yorkie with that same garden hose, claiming the dog was the not-so-mythical Sharp-Toothed Snuffler (more on that later).
There are a lot of ways to go with my name: Katty, Kat, Kay, Rine, Rinny, Kerry”trust me, I’ve heard it all. I don’t know exactly how or when we selected Kata, or, for that matter, who did the selecting. I probably wasn’t Harry; he calls me Kat or Katarine, depending on his mood. It certainly wasn’t Aunt P or Verno, because, like I’ve said, I don’t think they even know my first name. By the time I met Jeremy or Jilly, I was full-fledged Kata. It would seem I just woke up one morning with a name clutched in my hands. Maybe that’s all there is to it: maybe I couldn’t decide who I wanted to be, so a worldlier, more sophisticated someone made the choice I didn’t even know I had.
This part of my story is called, “Not All Who Quest Are Lost”:
I’ve had my life saved a few times over the years. I won’t go into details about those other times, because this is a story, and everybody knows you don’t give away the ending to a story before it actually is the ending. This isn’t the ending. It is the part where Mr. Mendota grabbed my backpack straps.
This is a story, like I just said. And I think it’s a pretty good thing that I’m telling it. If Mr. Mendota told this story, you might not even have realised that it was me he was saving. Yes”it was physically me. But considering the method of saving, I can’t help but think that holding me back was his second chance. It was what he’d never get the chance to do.
Jeannie Mayfield was a fourth grade girl with straight brown hair and a tendency to bite her nails from anxiety or boredom. For a reason I’m still not sure of, she smelled like glue. She hung on the fringes, just one of those girls; the ones whose names people can’t recall when they look at their primary school yearbooks years later. She was the equivalent of Sherrie, perhaps without the random fits of intelligence and the creepy creative intuition. Jeannie was exceedingly, annoyingly ordinary, except for one thing: her mother drove like a freaking maniac. Mundane things like merge lines and stoplights meant nothing to Mrs. Mayfield. Rules of the road became suggestions. Small, redhead girls became target practice.
In an uncharacteristic fashion, I was reading as I left the school”several days after the start of term” and walking through the remnants of a recent snowstorm toward the sidewalk that led away from Stonewall Primary. Rereading, actually. The Fellowship of the Ring. With the exception of the Dr. Suess masterpieces, The Lord of the Rings is basically the only book I ever read. This created some problems later in life (the great ringwraiths vs. dementors debate of ’93), but that’s not the point.
I was walking”distracted”but still on the crosswalk”hat over ears, distorting noise”eyes flicking through a description of Middle-earth”a screech of rubber tires against pavement that shone with melting snow and reflected winter sun. In surprise, I dropped my book. It dropped into a bank of snow, and my mouth fell open and confusion paralyzed me and I didn’t move on my own and there was a flash of beige that I couldn’t place.
Someone shouted my name. My eyes widened as Mrs. Mayfield’s van came barreling towards me, the tires jutting and squealing, the horn sounding. I felt a hand size the straps of my backpack, my feet struggled for purchase, and then I was back on the sidewalk, away from the speeding van. Mayfield recovered quickly and drove away, glancing furiously in her mirrors to see if anyone had noticed.
The hand released me, and I stumbled a bit before recovering my footing. Looking up, still in a mist of confusion, I saw Mr. Mendota, wrapped in a beige trench coat and breathing heavily. He was livid.
“Don’t you know to look both ways before you cross the street?” he hissed. I bit my lip, staring at my hands, realising they were empty.
“Book…” I said dumbly. I think I may have been in shock. My heart felt like it was trying to disentangle itself from my chest. My face flushed, and”even though the danger was passed, and even though the danger had been remote”I was afraid.
Mr. Mendota sighed and retrieved my book from where it had landed, a few meters away in a small mountain of slushy snow. The pages were bloated and soggy. I mourned, briefly, for the Hobbits and for the story I would never re-finish.
“It’s ruined,” I said.
Mr. Mendota rolled his eyes and pressed The Fellowship of the Ring into my gloved hands. From cold and belated adrenaline, I shook.
“It’s just a book,” he said, violating the sacred Code of Teachers. Thou shalt not ever sayeth, “It’s just a book.” “You almost got hit by a car.” I suppose we were both in shock.
“Thanks for that,” I said, because it’s just basic etiquette. When someone saves you from a road-raging maniac of a driver, you say thank you.
I was pretty sure that I could have dove out of the way, even if Mr. Mendota hadn’t been right behind me. It would have been delayed, and the side of the van might have clipped me, but I would have lived. So, I don’t know what exactly I was thanking him for. For being there. For having the impulse to reach out and save me, when no one else would.
“You’re welcome,” he said, and that was that. It wasn’t like I was hurt, just a little stunned. Perhaps if he’d been in better shape, he would have suggested I see the school nurse, but it wasn’t necessary. I walked away, but I took the sidewalks. That was when I started to think about the Twenty Things in a different sort of way.
The Twenty Things were a quest, as I had previously defined them. But maybe it was a quest for questing, instead of a quest that had a reachable destination. Maybe the goal was to just keep holding on, and take it day by day, and to never physically reach a point where you could say, “Boom. These are my Twenty Things. This is my victory.” We were looking for the meaning of something bigger than ourselves, right? And it’s not like sixth graders should be expected to know themselves. So maybe Mr. Mendota gave us the assignment early, with the hope that we’d carry it with us wherever we ended up. Defining yourself”saving yourself, knowing yourself, being yourself”is eternal.
Then again. Maybe the Twenty Things were nothing more than the bizarre ideas of a thoroughly bizarre man.
Five days after my tenth birthday, there was a total solar eclipse on the other side of the world. Mexico, Central America, and parts of Hawaii were entirely blacked out by the moon for a whole seven minutes. The BBC sent an anchor to Mexico (the point at which the sun would be directly above) to cover the eclipse, and I watched the live report in the Dursleys’ living room, with Harry.
“In just a few short minutes, the moon will slide into place in front of the sun and totality will begin,” the anchor said enthusiastically. I didn’t recognise her; she was young and clearly ecstatic to be taking on such a big story. As she continued with her report, describing mechanics of the eclipse I was too young to comprehend or care about, I remember staring at her teeth, thinking how white they were and wondering how a person got teeth that so closely resembled pearls. “The experience of totality,” she said, “is said to be a life-changing and remarkable one. As the moon closes in, the normal daytime sky will be replaced with one resembling twilight. The moon’s shadow will spread over the scene at speeds of almost two thousand kilometers per hour. Our sun, the epicenter of our cosmos, will have its light extinguished by the black shadow of the moon, except for the solar corona” which is a ghostly, delicate collar of sunlight shining though from beyond the obstacle of the moon.”
All of a sudden, a rush of voices and momentum came from the crowd behind Veronica Jasin (that was the anchor’s name). People smiled hugely, and shoved protective glasses onto their faces. There was a moment of unity among those people”and everyone viewing the coverage from various locations around the world. That was our sun. It was the same sun that each of us saw when we woke up in the morning, and the same sun that dipped behind clouds every night.
Mr. Mendota told me never to look directly at the sun. Hurts your eyes, he’d told me.
I wonder if he watched the eclipse, like I did. I wonder if he experienced the eclipse like I did.
I am not one to sit quietly, or keep my thoughts to myself. Fidgeting is practically a way of life for me; I don’t hold still long enough to do anything. Silence is my kryptonite. But for seven minutes”seven minutes in which I could have soft-boiled and egg or sang “Hey, Jude” or ridden by bike to Jeremy’s house and back”I rested on the edge of my seat, hands folded tightly in my lap, watching the unfaltering coverage of unforgettable totality. I sensed that Veronica Jasin had planned to continue her speech through the eclipse, but had then found herself dumbstruck by the beauty of a synchronized sun and moon. It must have been a million times more powerful in person.
Even if I was viewing it somewhat indirectly, I didn’t want it to end.
It did, though. Of course it did. The moon’s shadow swept over the landscape again, and the sun was just as bright as it’d ever been. People took off their protective glasses. Their voices started up, gushing about what had just happened. Veronica Jasin turned toward the camera, her expression shaky. Words weren’t coming as naturally to her as they had before. If she had rehearsed anything, it had been a wasted effort.
“The word ‘eclipse’,” she finally said, “comes from the Greek ‘ekleipsis’, meaning ‘abandonment’.”
Harry and I. Sitting there. Watching an eclipse that seemed bigger than anything in the world, even the magic we still didn’t know about.
It was over too soon. But we’re not talking about the eclipse anymore, are we?
Before I knew about magic, I believed that my parents died in a car crash. I was young and gullible and this explanation seemed to satisfy everything”Harry’s scar; my status as a doorstep baby. I even rationalized the flash of green light Harry remembered, telling myself it was a changing traffic light. People die in car crashes all the time. It wasn’t hard to accept.
But I used to wonder where we were going. I used to wonder how things would’ve been if we’d made it there.