~*~*~*~
Remember how I said that the story of my summer was over? It isn’t. Sorry for the lies, but I promise there’s a reason for all the jumping around. There are still three major parts left in that story: The Letter Part, The Tent Part, and The Jilly Part. This is the first.
~*~*~*~
Before discovering my magical roots, I had three ideas for what I might be when I grew up: (a) An astronaut”this was a huge fantasy of mine, thwarted mainly by Verno’s refusal to pay for space camp; (b) A fashion designer; (c) A midnight cooking show hostess. None of these options panned out in the long run, but I did have some fun practicing for the last one.
Three weeks before Harry was set to depart for Hogwarts, at two o’ clock in the morning, I spooned a bit of pancake batter into a frying pan, listing to the quiet sizzle. Balanced on a footstool in front of Aunt P’s stove, I gripped a spatula, gently prodding the edges of the batter as it spread and took shape. Although I really was hungry, and a perpetual night owl, the late night snack was more of a distraction than anything else. My brother and I hadn’t spoken in days”it was surreal. The Dursleys, both scared and angry, ignored me as well. Even the owl clicked her beak warningly whenever I got too close, sensing my resentment. I did not walk to Jeremy’s house, or ride my bike around town, or do my summer homework. Jilly didn’t call. No one even looked at me. I spent most of my time in the attic, sulking and feeling entitled to it.
I wanted to forget all of that, for a few minutes. Who cared what Verno would do when he found me making breakfast this late (early)? Who cared what my teacher would say on the first day of school, when I hadn’t done the maths packet or read A Wrinkle in Time? Who bloody cared?
Not me.
I flipped the first pancake as quietly as I could”but then froze, as the bottom stair’s trademark squeak sounded. My heart jumped, and I considered ditching the spatula and running for it, out the back door, through the yard, over the fence, between the hedges, down the road, never looking back. But I hesitated a second too long, and a shadow became visible in the hall, belonging to and preceding”
“Odd time for breakfast,” Harry said conversationally”hoping to keep things civil, maybe.
Relieved but still startled, I shut my eyes and concentrated on catching my breath. Forgetting pancakes and runaway schemes full of prepositional phrases, I set aside my spatula and turned to face him. Eyes pointed directly at the ground.
“What do you want?” I said, my voice cold even though I didn’t want it to be. I didn’t want a row”but things had begun to spiral, and I felt caught.
Harry moved a little closer, the legs of his pajama pants”previously Dudley’s” trailing on the spotless kitchen floor. “To talk,” he said simply. “We haven’t since… we got back. If you’d just let me explain””
I cut him off, uninterested. “I heard you the first time, Harry. Believe me. I get it.”
Shaking his head, Harry tried again. “I didn’t tell you everything, Kat. Just listen, and stop””
“No,” I said evenly. “I don’t care. I don’t want to hear it. You’re getting your chance”how can I blame you for not wanting me around anymore?”
Abruptly, I could see Harry’s frustration; his anger. He raised his voice, either forgetting or not concerned that the Dursleys were right upstairs. “Do you honestly think I would””
“Shut up!” I hissed, waving the spatula at him threateningly and narrowing my eyes. A spark of amusement at my weapon of choice fluttered through his eyes, but then his expression hardened, and my brother turned away, walking toward the stairs. He stopped at the last second though, and looked at me again. I stood” arms like ropes around my chest; face pinched; eyes shielded by droopy bangs.
This is my story, and what I say is how it goes. And I say that I did not want to cry right then.
“By the way,” Harry said, his voice hard. “Have you seen Hedwig? She’s been gone all day, and that’s not like her.”
I stiffened, biting my lip
“Kat?”
My hands began to shake.
Slowly, the words fell from my lips, like pebbles. Though I could barely hear my own voice, it seemed to resound in the kitchen.
“I… sent a letter.”
Harry looked appropriately stunned. I hated owls”much more on that later. Me sending a letter via bird-mail is basically the equivalent of the Dark Lord learning to use Muggle computers. “You… you did? To who?”
I felt hollow inside, like my organs had vanished and my blood had evaporated. My legs trembled, and I was afraid I would fall off the stool.
“To Albus Dumbledore.”
All the spatulas in the world could not keep Harry from losing his temper over that one.
“YOU SENT A LETTER TO THE HEADMASTER OF HOGWARTS?!”
“It isn’t fair!” I cried. “What do you expect me to do in Little Whinging for a year without you? I want to come, Harry, and I know I can do it! This isn’t right! They’ve got to make an exception.”
Here is what I did not say: You are my older brother, and I need you. I have not the slightest clue how to be alone. It’s always been us against the world, and I am not ready for that to change.
“Do you think I’m doing this on purpose, Kat? Did you ever stop to think there might be a good reason… do you smell something burning?”
And that is why you should never, ever cook pancakes in the middle of this night (morning) while having a fight with your brother.
“Augh!” I shrieked, twisting around wildly, and taking in the sight of my pancakes”all black as charcoal”smoking profusely (profusely!). Not knowing what else to do, I seized the spatula and tried to chisel them from the bottom of the pan”to little result. In the meantime, Verno thundered down the stairs, awakened by my scream and by the wailing smoke detector. Aunt P was close behind him. Harry grabbed yesterday’s newspaper from the kitchen table and fanned the reeking grey clouds away from the smoke detector.
“What the bloody hell is going on down here?” Verno bellowed.
“What did you expect to happen, Kata?” Harry demanded, still fanning. “You send one letter, and suddenly everything’s the way you want it to be?”
But my only answer came in the form of a panicked scream”with an enormous fwoosh, the stove burst into flames. Columns of fire leapt from its surface. Screaming, I fell off the footstool, right onto my back. The air rushed from my lungs, and patterns invaded my vision. Both Aunt P and the smoke alarm shrieked.
Shouting indiscernibly above the clamor, Verno moved in with a fire extinguisher, shoving Harry aside and stepping on my fingers. Still dizzy, I tried to sit up”but the room spun and there was an incredible, frothy fwush and a spray of white foam, and maybe I had cracked my head against the floor, because a hot, heavy pain was spreading across my forehead, and I should have made eggs, and I passed out, thinking, That’s exactly what I expected to happen.
~*~*~*~
(Before this scene, I, Kata Potter, am”as a fully responsible adult”obliged to say the following: Underage drinking is very, very bad and not much fun at all.
That’s it.)
When I was fifteen, and we were very drunk, Adam looked at me with clouded, unfocused eyes and said, “What was the best thing to ever happen to you?”
We normally didn’t discuss such deep things. The questions we usually asked were more like, ‘Want to hang in my dorm tonight?’ or, ‘What was the Charms homework again?’ . I think that was the main reason things went wrong with Adam”the vapidity of it; the way our hands moved faster than our thoughts. We never knew how to properly channel what we felt for the other one into words.
But, anyway. Adam’s question.
Being drunk, I believe I just laughed and kissed him, his breath hot and sweet with Firewhiskey, matching mine. But I knew the answer.
The year I was ten, my sober self would have replied, remembering green notebooks and the magical flipside of London and the hollow flavor of alone-ness. Faces I drew with poignant clarity; Jeremy cursing just for the bloody hell of it; thick, translucent glass bottles stuffed with messages for no one to ever read and tossed into a half-frozen stream; the way it all pieced together at the end, even if, at the time, every day felt like a tiny string”blowing helplessly in the wind, unattached to anything.
I needed that year”I needed to stretch the beginnings of my legs, after sitting holed up in the metaphorical cupboard of childhood for all my life. Without that year, I never would have become the Kata Potter who is strong enough and whole enough to tell this story. I needed, so desperately, to spend a measurable lump of time without my older brother. Because, most of all, I needed to figure out who I was outside of the little sister role I had always played”and would continue to play for many years.
I didn’t think I was ready; I didn’t think I could do it; I didn’t think it made any sense. And maybe I was right.
But I was also conveniently wrong.
~*~*~*~
Here in the sovereign nation of Kataslovakia, we believe everyone has an unalienable right to not being roused from an entirely peaceful slumber by her meat-faced uncle (who possibly does not even know her name). And when I say ‘we’ and, I mean ‘me’” because I have yet to meet another individual who shares my name. But that’s a rant for another time.
“Kill,” I seethed into my pillow as Verno pounded on my door. Don’t ask why my violent impulses were so automatic at”what was it?”seven o’ clock on a Saturday morning. It’s not weird if you don’t think about it. “Kill with rocks.”
The door shook in its frame, knob rattling. “Get up, girl!” Verno bellowed. I find ‘bellow’ a very good verb for everything Verno does. “In case you haven’t noticed, the bloody doorbell’s been ringing for a good ten minutes, and it’s for you. Bellow! Bellow!”
Right. So, maybe I’m embellishing a little. But I’m in charge.
As my pillow was firmly smashed over my face at this point, and as the door was still shut between us, I couldn’t see him”but, I assure you, the spit was flying and his face was purple as a mystery sweater.
Wondering who could possibly want to talk to me this early”and trying not to think I bet it’s the wizard-people! ” I threw my pillow aside and yelled back, “Fine! Stop bellowing! Big, sharp, pointy rocks,” I added under my breath, jumping out of bed and pulling on my slippers and”because I couldn’t find my robe in the Hurricane Kata that was my room” jacket.
“What was that?” Verno said (bellowed) sharply.
“Just the sound of what a worthless freak I am,” I replied evenly, gathering my hair into a ponytail.
“Well, hurry up!” he said (bellowed), and he would have pounded on the door again if I hadn’t opened it in his face, which was, as I had predicted, purple and bulging.
“Tell your friend,” he spat the word, as if it was hard to believe I still had friends, “how entirely inconsiderate it is to wake a person up at seven in the bloody morning and not even offer a simple apology or a nice warning!”
I blinked up at him. But the irony was clear to only me. “You made a rhyme,” I pointed out sleepily.
Verno looked ready to slap me, but I ducked out of the way and dashed down the stairs, taking them three at a time. Skidding into the foyer, tripping over a rug, and nearly falling flat on my face, I threw open the door.
And nothing in my day really made sense after that.
I blinked. “Sherrie?”
Because it was Sherrie: Sherrie Parker, my classmate and”by the loosest possible definition of the word”friend. She wore mud-brown corduroys and a red overcoat with brassy buttons shaped like turtles. A floppy canvas backpack was strung over her shoulders”when she shifted her weight, something clanked inside.
“Hello,” she said, crisp and businesslike, not at all like her usual dreamy self. “Your uncle made me stand outside. That’s not very nice.”
“Neither is he,” I said, because what do you say when someone like Sherrie Parker shows up at your house at seven o’ clock and you’re wearing your pajamas and you only just figured out that there’s a hole in your slipper because the frozen concrete is nudging the pad of your foot like a virus?
Sherrie cleared her throat. “I want you to come somewhere with me. Now.”
I did not say, But we aren’t even friends. I did not say, Sometimes I forget your last name. The last bits of sleep were still clinging to the fabric of my mind, and it was foggy. Logic isn’t my strongpoint in the mornings. Neither are needlepoint projects, grave digging, or pranks involving oatmeal (three very good stories that I will try to work in later on).
What I did say was this: “Um. I’m wearing my pajamas.”
A gust of icy wind blasted us”cold cold cold”and Sherrie rolled her eyes. “I noticed,” she said, her substanceless voice dry and sarcastic for the first time in my memory. “Sheep flatter you.”
Magic existed, I was a contestant in the Surrey Regional Young Writers Competition, and Sherrie Parker could accurately employ sarcasm. Sure. Why not?
I wrapped my arms around my body, as if protecting the pattern on my pajamas. “They’re mountain goats, and they’re cute, and they’re not important right now.”
Sherrie nodded once, solidly. “Exactly.”
She then turned on heel and began to walk away, beckoning for me to follow. I looked around wildly, at the sky and the ground and to both sides of where I stood, as if the answer to this wacky situation were printed on some sort of helpful sign.
“I’m not even dressed!” I yelled in protest, hurrying to catch up despite myself. "I just said that!"
Sherrie didn’t seem surprised that I was coming. Absently, she scratched her nose and stared into the white, foggy morning ahead of us. “Doesn’t matter,” she replied. “We’re not going anywhere special.”
I smoothed my ponytail nervously. “Right.”
I had absolutely no idea what was happening, but I had learned to just…just go with it. Even if you wind up walking down Privet Drive in your goat-emblazoned pajamas on a Saturday morning in the freezing mid-February frost, something good might come from it. Follow the randomness. Allow freakishly tall men to take you shopping in a secret strip mall behind an unremarkable London pub. Accept a quest. Willingly toss yourself down the rabbit hole. People spend a lot of their lives chasing magic”but why? Magic throws itself down your freaking throat. You just have to choose magic, every chance you get; choose it over simplicity and sometimes choose it over safety.
Not that it isn’t good to exercise caution.
Which is what I did when I cleared my throat and asked, “I probably should have asked this before, since the answer might be ‘a dark, cold forest where no one can hear you scream’, but where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
That was actually worse than the forest thing.
I cleared my throat again. “So… why the field trip?”
Sherrie squared her shoulders. The contents of her backpack clinked musically. “I need to talk to you”something I cannot do when we’re at school.”
“We talk at school.”
“Not like we’re talking now. Think about it. Listen to yourself. You’re talking differently.”
In all honesty, I had to say that I didn’t notice a particular different in our exchange of words. Sherrie was making me increasingly uncomfortable, and I really wanted to turn back. But I didn’t want to go home, and where else was I going to go this early?
“Sherrie,” I said carefully, “are you, like, really, really smart? I mean, I know you’re smart. I’ve been playing tic-tac-toe with you for the past month, and I haven’t won once. You helped me understand that ‘I Am’ poem I brought in that one time. I’m next to positive you speak Latin. But are you insanely, freakishly smart?”
For the first time since I’d met her, Sherrie Parker looked rather ticked off. “You don’t really have room to be calling anyone a freak, now do you?”
Stunned, I went completely silent, mind reeling. I wasn’t sure what to deny, if anything. Was she finally going to confront me about what she had overheard me tell Jilly months before? Had she drawn her own conclusions, or done research? Was there anything to research? Did Hogwarts have a website? Monthly newsletter? Maybe she didn’t even mean magic”I was, after all, quite odd all on my own. Perhaps it was”
Sherrie gave an oddly disturbing little chuckle. “I can see you speculating. Lots of questions, yes? You ask a lot of questions. I’ve noticed that.”
What in the name of banking goblins was going on?
“Yeah,” I said, lightheaded and dizzy. “Comes from years of being told not to.”
Sherrie laughed again.
I lay dormant for maybe five more seconds, but then erupted. Stopping dead in my tracks and planting my feet firmly, I threw my fisted hands into the air and shrieked, “WOULD YOU PLEASE JUST TELL ME WHAT THIS IS ABOUT ALREADY? ”
Sherrie’s face betrayed nothing”her customary blank stare. I glowered at her, thoroughly annoyed with my decision to ‘follow the magic’. Scrap that. Scrap all of that. Stay in bed. Never do anything. Daydream, at most.
Finally, Sherrie spoke. “I’m sorry I called you a freak,” she said. “That was uncalled for. And you’re sorry you called me a freak, too, because it’s not very nice. There. Apologies. Now, if you’re worried I know something about you, don’t be. I do. But I don’t care. I don’t have anyone to tell. Besides, I can get much more out of this by keeping it to myself.
“I rang your doorbell and disturbed your uncle and asked you to come with me this morning because I just wanted to talk to you. You’re interesting. You’re weird enough to not have any grounds for calling me weird. I like… your company.”
I smiled a bit. “Sherrie. Is that, like, your awkward, freakishly smart way of saying you want to be friends?”
Sherrie sighed, exasperated, and rolled her eyes toward the sky. “I thought you just apologized for calling me a freak!”
I itched my nose, studying a pebble at my feet. Sherrie’s display of emotions still unnerved me. “Actually, you apologized for me calling you a freak, but””
Sherrie huffed, looking very peeved. “Whatever. Just follow me, will you?”
I obeyed, walking a few feet behind her. “Where have you been hiding the personality?” I muttered to myself, arms crossed over my pyjama top.
Sherrie led me down a few side streets, in the general direction of Stonewall Primary. The morning slowly thawed, it’s cold loosening around us. I didn’t shiver so much in my thin jacket. As Sherrie and I walked along, the sky molted its last stains of darkness and gathered the pigeon-grey colour of winter. It wasn’t until we were a few metres away that I realised where we were headed: the forest behind Stonewall. The school loomed, an ice-sheathed giant, just to our right.
“You know they’re going to cut these trees down?” Sherrie called back to me. I had fallen into a slower pace, wary of being led into the trees.
Vaguely, I remembered Jeremy telling me that”eons ago, when the Twenty Things had only just begun and he still wanted to help me find them. A sign at the mouth of the forest confirmed this: over the Easter holidays, a portion of the forest would be cleared for development. This portion held the tree that had once been Jeremy’s and my clubhouse. I wondered where the wood would end up; where the bizarre cycle of life and objects would take it.
Sherrie pushed aside a frosted, leafless bough and disappeared into the tangle of barred sticks and trunks. My slippers sunk slightly into the mud. I took a moment to resent Sherrie for not letting me dress properly, but then gathered my bearings and crept after her.
“So it really was a cold, dark forest where no one could hear me scream,” I grumbled to myself. “Brilliant.”
But we didn’t venture far into the trees. When Sherrie finally came to a stop at the bank of a mucky, reeking creek, I could still kind of see the school, in the fractured distance. Shrugging out of her backpack, Sherrie dug through the pocket of her coat and withdrew a small pad of paper and a pen.
She held them out to me, an offering. “You wrote a bunch of letters to your brother for your Twenty Things project, right?”
At this point”deep in the woods and still wondering what was in the backpack”I was too worried I was about to be sacrificed to some sort of voo-doo tree god to fully comprehend what she’d said. “Eh? Oh, no. No. It was… a journal, I guess. And it wasn’t my real Twenty Things project; it was an accident””
Sherrie raised an eyebrow, and I stopped.
“We, uh, don’t write. It’s complicated. How did you even know I have a brother?”
Sherrie shrugged, pulling at the ties of her backpack. “You doodle a lot. In class, I mean. You’re actually a fairly good artist, you know.”
I tried to process the fact that Sherrie Parker had complimented me, but it got stuck somewhere in my brain.
Of all the things I had imagined Sherrie to be carrying”marbles; pipe bombs; a medieval flail”she pulled none of them from her pack. Instead of the weapons I envisioned, Sherrie produced several empty bottles with peeling labels that read Mo’s Finest Ginger Ale: A Reason to Smile. Some had scraps of paper sticking out from their necks.
Sherrie grinned a genuine grin, grasping one of the paper-filled bottles. “The opening of a bottle is nothing,” she said brightly. “Yet, without it, a bottle would not be a bottle.”
I blinked. “Sorry, but I have no idea what that means. Kat no learn good.”
Sherrie’s smile remained fixed to her lips. “It’s a Buddhist thing. Everything is empty; nothing is born; nothing dies. That sort of thing.”
I bit my lip, nodding along as if I understood. “Right. That… sort of thing.”
Abruptly, Sherrie stood straighter, formal and sombre. She gestured to the bottles at our feet, and to the pad of paper I held loosely in my hand. “My mum used to take me to do this when I was little,” Sherrie said. “She’s sort of a hippie. Said it’s a release. Letters to no one. They don’t have to be long”they don’t even have to be letters, really; just stuff you need to get out. Write it down. Let it go.”
She tossed the first bottle into the slow-moving creek. I was amazed it wasn’t iced over; it was topped only by a thin layer of slush. I stood, slightly dubious about the whole thing. It seemed like a good way to litter to me, but not such a good way to heal my mind. Sherrie was waiting, though, and what could it hurt?
I stared at the paper, and poised the pen above it. Started scribbling.
I don’t know why I’m doing this. I’m still really tired. It’s cold.
Sherrie said I’m good at drawing. Mr. M said I’m good at writing. I never knew I was good at anything.
This has been the weirdest year of my life, and it isn’t even over yet.
Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.
I don’t like Valentine’s day. It clashes with my hair.
Who am I writing to?
You. I’m writing to you.
I always complain that we don’t write, and now I don’t know what to say.
I’m doing the best I can.
Love, Kata
Taking a huge breath, I rolled up the paper and shoved it roughly into the bottle Sherrie offered me. Without hesitating, I chucked it into the thick water, trying to appear nonchalant.
It actually felt pretty good.
I watched the green of my bottle”green like a planet; like a smell”bob and swell against the lolling current of the river, leaning into the yielding skin of liquid. It was the crux of winter: everything still dead and lank. Grass that crinkled like paper under my light footsteps. Oyster skies spotted with seamless clouds. Invisible sun that had all but given up on breaking through.
Hints of spring, though, too. The barest awareness of change, like an instinctual feeling of being watched. No matter what, the seasons would never, never fail.
The bottle.
So full.
And I thought: We are sinking.
And I thought: We are clearly unsinkable.
And I thought: We have only just begun to breathe.
“Happy Valentine’s Day, Kata,” Sherrie said smugly, as if she’d won something.
~*~*~*~
Love”or something”was in the air. What I discovered at Jeremy’s, two days later, was only further proof.
“Jeremy, it’s me!” I called as I let myself into his house and yanked off my wool hat. Clumps of snow fell onto the doormat; the descent of the flakes had started up again and I was covered in sodden white powder. The hems of my jeans, which perpetually dragged on the ground, were soaked through. This created an awful sensation every time I took a step, and ensured that I could never properly warm up. When a person’s feet are cold, all of them is cold. Due to that, my good relationship with winter was on a hiatus. Spring was starting to sound pretty nice. “And you should know I’m mad at you, too, because I walked all the way from school to Flinker’s, and you weren’t there, so I had to walk all the way here, which is where your dad said you were. And I’m very cold, and icicles have started to form on the ends of my hair, and I’m going to jinx whoever stole my bike handlebars. I mean, who knew handlebars could even be unscrewed from the rest of the bike? And yes, I said jinx.”
This was met by silence, which was unnatural for the Flinker household. Jeremy’s mum was a teacher in the next town over, and usually was home by the time Stonewall got out. His little sister, Mattie, was often around as well, with her friends from school. Even though Mattie and I were in the same grade, and possibly had more in common than Jeremy and I, we were never close as children.
I started to plow up the stairs, automatically headed in the direction of his room. No wonder he couldn’t hear me; a horrible sound was leaking out from the crack beneath his door. It was the kind of sound that made me want to either run in the other direction or shoot myself in the face. I can’t really describe it beyond that; you’ll just have to imagine the worst sound you’ve ever heard and multiply it by infinity.
“Jeremy?” I shouted over the din, pounding on his door. “Jeremy, are you in there? Are you being tortured? Are you being dipped in acid? Scream twice if you’re being dipped in acid!”
Abruptly, the screeching and wailing and grinding stopped, and the door swung open. An unidentifiable creature stood on the other side. It was taller than I was, it wore baggy sweatpants and a grungy flannel shirt, and its head was entirely obscured by a mass of uncombed sandy hair.
I let out a panicked shriek. “What are you?”
The creature was chewing gum, and it took the time to blow an enormous pink bubble before answering. When this bubble popped, a few strings of pink got caught in its (the creature’s) floppy bangs and hovered there. “Devon,” it finally said. “I’m in the band.”
“Okay, Devon,” I said, trying to calm my heart rate. My pulse rumbled like thunder in my ears, which were still a bit numb from the noise that had preceded Devon. “Where’s Jeremy? Did he explode from all that…noise? Were you dipping him in acid? Is the acid in the closet? Does that””
“Flinker’s next door,” Devon reported without any sort of inflection to his voice. I immediately began to suspect him of being an android. “He’s borrowing chopsticks from Mrs. Chu.”
I put my tongue between my teeth. “Why?”
Devon held up a splintered drumstick, sliced almost cleanly in half by what I can only assume was face-melting, stick-smashing rock ’n’ roll passion so intense I cannot hope to capture it with words alone. “My sticks broke,” he said.
I bit my lip and glanced over Devon’s shoulder. A set of aged and grimy drums stood in the centre of Jeremy’s eternally messy room. There was no snare drum, but who needs snare? One of the cymbals was dented, but I was sure Mrs. Chu had a nice wok that would work just as well. Next to the drums, a very new-looking guitar was leaning against Jeremy’s bed, a pick shoved between the strings along its neck.
In a sloppy manner that reeked of Jeremy, someone had painted the words “Jeremy Flinker and the Untitled” onto the front of the bass drum in large red letters. I raised an eyebrow dubiously. I should really have TV cameras following me around, I thought. This is too good.
“So,” Devon said in his monotone, “are you Rachel?”
I spun around, stunned and indignant, forgetting all about my chances as a reality television star. “No!” I said. Who’s Rachel?”
“Jeremy’s girl. None of us have met her yet.”
My arm twitched and a strange noise burbled out of my mouth. Does not compute.
I underwent a serious internal struggle, debating whether to press Devon for more information or go find Jeremy and kill him. He’d formed a band without me, and he had a girlfriend. When had he grown up? When had this started? I suppose I knew, underneath it all, that (a) The distance between Jeremy and I was hardly new”just newly embellished, and (b) In the history of eleven-year-olds, there has never once been a meaningful, competently-conducted relationship. But Jeremy was supposed to be my best friend. And I really needed someone to be my best friend, as the person to whom the title normally fell was off turning pumpkins into carriages and playing “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board”.
I decided to kill Jeremy later and ask questions now. “And by ‘us’, you mean…?”
“Milo Omerivic. Ian Franc. Our friends. The band. Who are you, anyway?”
“I’m Kata. I used to be Jeremy’s friend.”
“He never mentioned you.”
I wasn’t entirely surprised by this, but a blade of something like disappointment stung between my shoulders. My heart jumped a little as I wondered”did my brother ever mention me to the other wizard-people? Was I a conversation piece; a funny story; a something to miss about Little Whinging? Did it matter to him, now that there were all these chances and possibilities and rubbish, that we never saw each other? Did the pervasive feeling of aloneness hit him the way it always hit me”hard; fast; without warning?
Was he still angry with me?
(Right. Remember how I also told you that I sent Hedwig back without a reply at Christmastime?
I didn’t. And that’s sort of significant.
I am a terrible storyteller.)
Devon gazed at me with renewed curiosity. “If you shove a pencil in your hair, does it stay?”
I was silent (but, for the record, Harry and I tried this one day, and the answer is yes. Other items that “stick” in my hair include plastic forks, Pick-Up Stix, bendy-straws, and wands), but this was just as well, because Jeremy entered the room just then, brandishing a pair of chopsticks and grinning in his usual Jeremy-way. Even though this smile generally made me laugh, I was immune to it. “Hey, mate,” Jeremy said, flicking his hair and tossing the chopsticks to Devon. “They’re the kind girls stick in their hair, but I reckon they’ll work all right””
Devon cut him off by clearing his throat and nodding towards me. I stood silently and seamlessly in the corner. As Jeremy turned to face me, I shoved my hands into my pockets and my eyes onto his. The fringe of his bangs was tangled in his eyelashes, now; I couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a haircut.
“Hey, Kat!” Jeremy crowed. “Did you just get here? I was going to ring you, but your aunt keeps telling me to stop. Did you see the drums? I’m in a band now. I play guitar. Not very well, mind you, but I’m learning and stuff.” He was oblivious to my expression, to my hostile body language. I wondered what had driven the wedge between Jeremy and me.
Out of the blue, I remembered something called chaos theory. Mr. Mendota had tried fruitlessly to explain it to my class. Some scientists believe that you can only explain the last thing that happened, not a string of events. By this rule, I could understand that Jeremy and I had grown apart, but I couldn’t get my hands around the ‘why’. Was it because we’d fought in my foyer? Because I was constantly moping, and searching for my seemingly unattainable Twenty Things? Because he was suddenly interested in girls and music and swearing, while I was still stuck where I’d always been?
I could fully comprehend and accept that I was the little sister, the less important one, the one left behind; I knew that my friendship with Jilly was demolished; I knew that I was a witch and thereby forever separated from the world I’d grown up in. Things were different this year and everyone, including myself, had changed.
But I didn’t know why. And when you’re ten years old and you don’t know why, it’s the worst thing in the world.
“Actually, Jeremy,” I said quietly, “I was just leaving.”
“Wait!” he called as I pivoted to the door. I paused, glancing back over my shoulder without an ounce of hope that anything he said would make this better. “We can find a spot for you in the band, if that’s what you’re mad about. You sing like shit, but you can probably play tambourine or something. Every good band needs a cute girl playing tambourine in the background. And… well… we could put a really bright light on you or something and no one would notice that…”
I filled in the blanks. “That I’m not cute?”
Jeremy’s face went slack. “I didn’t say that,” he said defensively.
I knew he meant to say something more like, People often think you're several years younger than you actually are, or, Your hair needs to be periodically evaluated by a medical professional to make sure it isn’t forming a conscious personality separate from your own, but I just wanted to be mad. This was a chess game” and righteous, unfounded anger could topple slack-jawed curses any day.
I laughed ironically, and turned back to the door, my steps strangely confident and upbeat. “Yeah, well,” I shouted as I descended the stairs, “why don’t you ask Rachel to be your tambourine girl?”
My hand was on the doorknob”my heart beating overtime from the unwarranted fury roiling within me”when Jeremy appeared at the top of the stairs, seething.
“Y’know,” he said, too loudly, “you have no bloody reason to be mad at me.”
I blinked, hit with déjà vu. The foi-ay. Come on. “Didn’t we already do this?” I said, the red of anger in my tone diluted by complete exhaustion with this fight and this friendship.
Jeremy glowered. “I’m just saying, Kat. You don’t.”
I raised an eyebrow, puzzling to myself. “I have no reason to be angry with you? I can think of nine, right now.”
Shaking his head, Jeremy squared his feet as if preparing for a boxing match. He jabbed a finger in my direction. “Uh-uh. No. You don’t get to be mad, Kat-uh-rin-eh, because I’m the one you’ve been lying to, and keeping shit from, and whining to all year”and I’ve put up with it, because you’re my friend, and because… well, you’ve made a few good points in all the rubbish you’ve been spouting, but…” Jeremy’s voice grew strong then, like steel. “But I’m the one who’s not getting any answers from you, Kat. Yeah, you’re the one with no family, and you’re the one with…”
And I’ll just stop there. Jeremy may have said a few more things, but I didn’t hear them.
Because… have you ever had the person you thought was your best friend look you in the face and say, “You’re the one with no family”? Right after mispronouncing your name?
It actually kind of stings.
So I said things back.
First, I laughed. Sardonically, and right in his face. And then, it all just broke loose. “You want answers? You want answers? Okay. But first give me some answers. Why would anyone leave the most important wizard ever on a doorstep? How does that even make sense? Is my name even a real name? It sounds like a two-year-old is trying to pronounce Katherine. Where did the glass go? Huh? Did it just disappear into the magical kingdom of Nothingness? And how did it come back? Also, wizards must have about a thousand ways to communicate with each other, right? I mean, even excluding e-mail. So why waste thousands of pieces of parchment and an entire mob of bloody owls before just sending the Gamekeeper? Was his schedule all booked up? Could Hogwarts not spare their Gamekeeper for a few hours? Or do they just like killing trees? Is Diagon Alley supposed to sound like ‘diagonally’? That’s just a generally bad idea.
“How is leaving me supposed to help anything? I mean… how? He’s the brave one. I’m a Hufflepuff. Why can’t he at least write me? It’d be a start. Why is Jilly upset with me? We never had a fight. I saw her once over the summer, and we were fine. And why twenty? Seems like a pretty random number to me. Why not nineteen? Twenty-one? Who decided that, anyway? And why is it so hard? And why does it hurt so much? And why do I constantly feel like the answer is right there, but it never is, and what do you mean I haven’t got any family? And, for crying out loud, will someone please just tell me why I’m even involved an all this? If he’s more important than me, and if he’s the one that matters, than why bother getting me even remotely involved? Huh? Got any answers for me, Jeremy?”
These are the questions that”to this very day” torment my thoughts. Some more than others.
Jeremy stared at me for a full ten seconds, slack-jawed and silent. Finally, he spoke. “What the hell is a Hufflepuff?”
I felt like something had exploded deep inside of me. My face flushed, and my pulse jumped, but I found myself smiling. Slowly and sadly, I shook my head, not even shocked. “Oh, Jeremy,” I said softly. And then I left.
~*~*~*~
Jilly Hanks joined choir in fourth grade, and almost immediately regretted the decision. She was a better singer than I was; talent wasn’t a problem. The issue was that when we were younger, Jilly was painfully shy and forgot everything she knew about music when faced with an actual audience. Because of this, she approached the choir director, a man named Mr. Greene, and tried to hand in her resignation. Mr. Greene, however, wasn’t the kind of man to give up without a fight. He was intensely passionate about his music, and didn’t understand when other people felt differently. Even if she was shy, Mr. Greene didn’t comprehend why Jilly would ever devote her life to anything other than choir.
After twenty-five minutes of arguing (in which Jilly mostly stood silently and Mr. Greene lectured endlessly), he agreed to let her go. Before that, though, he had some parting words for her.
“When you quit once, it’ll be very easy to quit again. And you’ll just keep quitting and quitting, until you have nothing left.”
Very good advice, really, but Jilly was nine, and it sort of went over her head. Looking back, though, now that she was ignoring me in favor of Winnie & Co., Jilly couldn’t help thinking that he was right. She had quit at being my friend because I was unpopular and high maintenance and inevitably got her into trouble.
As Mr. Mendota had said when we played chess on stage, Jilly was one of three people who hadn’t turned in their Twenty Things as of December sixteenth. She quit looking for them after a while. Jilly didn’t know why the project stumped her so completely. Her life was in order, ever since I somehow exited it. She had a perfect, unbroken family; she had her new friends and their equally perfect families; her marks never moved from the top of the top. When she sat down to look at everything, however, Jilly Hanks couldn’t find the Twenty Things that made her world go ‘round. So she simply stopped looking and handed in a simple list, as I had tried to do.
Maybe the above information”the quitting and the uncertainty and our falling-out”acted as Jilly’s motivation as she marched into the school library one day after the final bell had rung. Ducking past our substandard librarian, who could often be seen smoking outside the upper school building or napping in the microfiche room, Jilly took a seat at a computer and wiggled the mouse. While waiting for the humming monitor to wake up, she glanced around covertly, as if making sure no one was watching her.
Jilly clicked on the Internet browser and navigated to a search engine. Taking a deep breath, she typed ‘twenty things that make the world go ‘round’ and hit enter. After a few lolling seconds, her screen flashed to a new page. More hits than she’d expected.
The very first was a death announcement. With a couching heart, Jilly pounced on the link. Next to the blurb was a picture of a smiling girl who had no clue that her life wouldn’t last forever. It was the same picture Robert Mendota kept taped to his computer. It was the same picture he stared at every night, trying to force words to appear on his lips. The right words. The goodbye words.
MENDOTA, KIERRNAN “KAILEY” entered into eternity on Dec. 19, 1986. Dear daughter of Paul Mendota and Meredith Mendota (nee Rhodes); dear sister of Robert; dear friend to many. Survivors remember Mendota as an aspiring writer who, at sixteen, published a novella entitled “The Twenty Things That Make the World Go ‘Round”. After its publication, Mendota built on this project, locally publishing many poems of the similar titles and forming the Twenty Things Alliance. Services held…
But then Jilly stopped reading. This may have been because she couldn’t see anymore; the connection between her eyes and her mind appeared to have broken. All of her senses felt severed, and her hands shook without her wanting them to. An eerie silence stretched across the library”a more silent silence than usual, seeing as libraries are traditionally quiet”and Jilly held on to the sides of her chair with those quivering hands, afraid she would fall out of it.
It was similar to when I found out about magic”my first concerns were whether Hagrid had said ‘wizard’ or ‘lizard’, and if wizardry would complicate my marriage plans. When Jilly read Kailey Mendota’s death announcement, the first sane thought that breezed into her mind was: She died the same day the Twenty Things were due.
It’s funny, the things we think when we’re trying so hard not to accept the ever-elusive truth. It’s funny, the way our minds protect themselves.
As if by magic.
~*~*~*~
When I entered the sanctuary of Our Lady of the People and saw Mr. Millerton sitting cross-legged at the front of the room, with his eyes shut and hands resting on either knee, it was all I could do not to groan out loud. “What religion does this church even do?” I said with all the eloquence of a ten-year-old.
Mr. Millerton’s face was tranquil and slack. His lips barely moved as he answered. “I told you,” he said, slightly annoyed. “This is not a church. I don’t know much about its history. I took this job somewhat… unwillingly.”
“Right,” I said, dumping my schoolbooks and taking a seat in the pew closest to him. “But you were never really clear on that, either.”
One eye snapped open. I flinched. To avoid talking about his employment situation, perhaps, Mr. Millerton chose to expound on my first question. “This isn’t a church,” he repeated. “It used to be an air raid shelter.”
I rolled my eyes. “How thick do you think I am? We’re above ground. And who in their right mind would bomb Little Whinging?”
He ignored the last bit. “This floor is above ground, yes. But there’s quite an impressive tunnel system underneath. Rumour has it you can follow those tunnels all the way to London. But it hasn’t had a purpose in a long time. City turned it into a homeless shelter”not that this town has a lot of homeless. Not exactly a metropolis. Take three left turns; you’re back where you started.”
I sighed, blowing my bangs from my eyes. “Tell me about it.” Digging through my bag, I located my maths homework and resigned myself to at least an hour of confusion and frustration. Mr. Millerton resumed his lotus position. I shook my head”one of these days, I was going find a normal, uncomplicated friend. “Find me a tunnel to Hogwarts, then we’ll talk,” I muttered to myself, tapping my pencil against my worksheet.
For several minutes, silence settled. I scratched away fruitlessly at my pre-algebra, and Mr. Millerton… breathed. I grew bored. And Kata plus boredom is like kerosene plus match: a very bad idea, and for the same reason.
“Are you going to tell me why you’re doing that?” I finally demanded, chucking my pencil away and sliding my books to the side.
Mr. Millerton sucked in his cheeks. “I’m trying to concentrate,” he said through his teeth.
“You look ridiculous.”
“You’re annoying.”
“You’re weird!”
“You’re scared.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
I shook my head, fuming. I told you”when Kata gets bored, things blow up. Quickly. “Every time I come in here, I get a headache. I’m having a perfectly normal day, and then you’re meditating””
“Concentrating.”
“You’re concentrating, and apparently I’m sitting in a bomb shelter, and why can’t x solve its own problems, and suddenly you tell me I’m scared? Where does that even come from?”
Mr. Millerton stood, calmly dusted off his pants, and rolled his eyes. “You rant a lot. Is that a redhead thing?’
“I’m not afraid of anything. I mean… heights. But nobody likes heights. And storms. Cats. Owls. Whatever! I get scared, yeah, but it’s not like I’m a scared person.”
Mr. Millerton just chuckled. He sat down next to me. I stood up. “You did the same thing to poor Jeremy Flinker yesterday,” he said nonchalantly. The headache worsened. “Kid nearly had an aneurysm. Maybe you need an outlet for your anger. Considered kickboxing? Blimey, that would be adorable.”
To be fair, it was true. Not the thing about the kickboxing, but the thing about my tendency to indulge in heated, one-sided arguments to vent my anger. I was replaying the scene with Jeremy. I hadn’t gotten everything out in those two minutes of shouting at him. But to be fairer, I had a lot to be angry about, and even more to be confused about.
“How do you know Jeremy?” I demanded, suddenly itchy and uncomfortable.
Mr. Millerton shrugged. “Like I said, small town. I know a lot of people.”
My pulse slowed. I bit my lip. Crossed my arms. Studied the ground. “What’s your deal? Why are you even here? It’s not like you took a job opening. There was no you before this year. This was an abandoned building. Upper school kids came here to get high. That’s about it. There was no Lady; no religion-less sermons; no wack-job following me around and taking my every random comment as something that needs to be picked apart and studied. So don’t tell me you took a job. There was no job to take. Why. Are. You. Here?”
I raised my eyes to meet his. We stared at each other for a long moment. Finally, he sighed. “I told you already. I lost a bet.”
I found another flaw in his ever-changing story, and pounced on it. "You said you lost a coin-toss."
"Did I? Same thing, really. Stakes were set; money changed hands; now I'm stuck here."
“Okay, fine,” I said, waving his words aside. “You lost a bet with a mate and wound up giving motivational speeches to nobody in a building that goes all the way to London. I heard you the first time. I’m asking why. Why was there a bet? Why did someone need to be here?”
For a moment that seemed to swallow us, he started at me, somehow sizing me up. I gazed steadily back. Just when I thought I wasn’t going to get any sort of reply, Mr. Millerton answered my question with one of his own. “How’d you break your wrist?”
“My cousin’s a git. Don’t change the subject.”
Another silence passed us. Then, abruptly, Mr. Millerton stood, clapped me on the shoulder (my knees wobbled), and nodded contentedly, as if our conversation had come to a clear and satisfactory end.
“I like you,” he declared, smiling tightly. I blinked. “You’re fun.”
And without saying another word, he strode out of the sanctuary, away from where I stood, shell-shocked. I heard the main door to the building whoosh open and snap shut. A vacant, lonely feeling collected in the room. I sat back down and put my head in my hands.
If ever there was a time for somebody to bomb Little Whinging.
~*~*~*~
Here is what I remember from when I was little: I couldn’t sleep.
Rather, I wouldn’t sleep. Dudley”ever the bully; the manipulative git” planted stories of ghosts and monsters in my mind, and, no matter how Harry insisted there was no such thing, my overactive imagination kicked into overdrive and turned every stray noise into a growl or malicious laugh. While my brother snored, I sat up, a croquet mallet that I’d nicked from Jeremy’s house by my side.
In theory, this did keep the monsters away. But I fell asleep in class. Dark bruises marked the skin under my eyes, giving me a gaunt, droopy appearance. Sunken with exhaustion and frustration, I kept to myself and supplied snippy, one-word responses to my friends’ worried questions.
After a few months of this, Harry found the solution. “I bet I can stay awake longer than you can,” he told me.
I’m competitive by nature.
Though I had, of course, been trying to stay awake all along, there was something comforting about his company that dulled the fear in my stomach. My eyelids wilted. My head pitched forward. I descended into the first good night’s sleep I’d had in a long time.
The following evening, we did the same thing. My brother stayed up until he knew I was asleep. I was frustrated by losing, but too revived to care.
He always won. But I didn’t sleep in school anymore.
If you think this little anecdote has deep, sentimental meaning… well, so do I. But I’m not entirely sure what it is.
~*~*~*~
For the next few days, I couldn’t stop thinking about Mr. Millerton: his odd behavior; his careful dodging of questions; the way he seemed to know exactly what was going on all the bloody time. I wanted there to be a connection, somehow. In my head, I gathered up all the times I’d spoken with him, every interaction we’d had. Disappointingly, I could see no common trend.
Or… perhaps that was the common trend. Mr. Millerton seemed to be a different person every time I talked to him. Nothing was ever the same. It was almost as if he was watching me”analyzing me; kataloguing me, so to speak”and adjusting his own personality based on mine.
I like you, I kept hearing. The words tumbled around inside my head like smooth stones. You’re fun.
There had been a ring of familiarity to his words there”as if we had known each other for years. Decades. Longer than I’d been alive. As if Mr. Millerton and I were old friends, and he knew, more or less, what to expect from me.
As if he’d just decided there was something in me he could identify”a tiny shard of a prematurely bitter girl with which he could communicate.
I wondered what it was, exactly, on which he wished to concentrate.
One night, long after the streetlamps had bathed Privet Drive in muted orange light, in the hollow silence of Number 4, I made my way up into the attic. There, leaning against the rough, unpainted wall, was a tall mirror. Don’t ask me why the Dursleys kept that mirror up there”compared to the rest of the house, there was some fairly odd stuff in the attic. During one excavation, I uncovered a box of patterned neckties, an autographed picture of David Hasselhoff, and a glass jug nearly as tall as I was, filled entirely with loose change. At first, I grew excited, imagining that perhaps my aunt and uncle had an eccentric side. But, at the same time, I knew that Verno hated nothing more than abnormalities and Aunt P hated nothing more than clutter. Instead, my suspicions fell on the notion that these bizarre artifacts had been gag gifts my aunt had been too tactful to donate to Used But Not Abused, the local thrift store.
However that mirror got there (for it probably wasn’t a joke present), there it was. And I sat before it, staring at my own face. My slight forehead covered with shaggy, frizzy bangs. My small face and pointed chin. My thin, chapped lips and my right front tooth, ducked slightly behind the left as if from embarrassment. In the dull light of the single, low-watt bulb hanging from the attic ceiling, my skin looked white as pearls”albeit freckled pearls. My hair, balled into a knot at the back of my head, looked even kinkier than usual. Soft sprigs of it curled at my temple and behind my ears.
At ten, I was too young for spots or oily patches. I hadn’t begun to experiment with make-up”who was going to show me how to ring my round, doll-like eyes with kohl, or sculpt layers of rogue over my thin cheekbones? Aunt P? Not likely. No, I wasn’t looked at myself critically, or with ambition to change or correct. I wanted to see what I believed Mr. Millerton saw: something predictable and understandable. Someone who was not so stranded that she couldn’t recognize even herself. I let everything slip away from me: the Twenty Things, my brother’s absence, my fights with Jeremy and Jilly, my gnawing questions about… well, pretty much everything. I let it vanish. Isolated myself and sought not to be so isolated. I wanted to find the Before girl”the girl who slept in a cupboard and played Monopoly to the death with her brother and didn’t even know the word ‘Hogwarts’. The person I had been before Mr. Mendota had told me I didn’t know who I was.
Twenty Things That Make the World Go 'Round by eva_writes
Chapter Notes: A lot of the conversations in this chapter are very strange and do not make any sense. It’s pretty much the same scene repeated a few times, with Kata and Sherrie; Kata and Jeremy; Kata and Mr. Millerton. I promise there’s a reason for all the wackiness. Later in the story, more than once, you will point to something on your screen and say, “That was in Chapter Eleven! Chapter Eleven is a garden of bountiful foreshadowing, and everyone should pay special super-duper attention to Chapter Eleven!” This will happen later in the series, too. Evidence: the scene featuring fifteen-year-old drunk Kata. That will be explained in the veryveryveryvery distant future. Adam is another OC. He’s important. So is Millerton. I bet a lot of people have already figured out what’s up with him… or not. Okay. Read and you shall discover!
I don’t own Harry Potter, or A Very Potter Musical. If you find the AVPM reference, I will give you twenty Eva Points. They’re about as useful as House Points, except you don’t even get a cool trophy. I might Fed-Ex you a coffee mug with some sequins glued around the rim, but that’s both a longshot and weird.
Chapter Endnotes: The Twenty Things Alliance exists. You may join on Facebook. You may also friend Kata Potter (I have a half-formed idea to update her Facebook page in correlation with this story. So, she starts at ten years old; she ages; she changes her profile picture; etc.). Also, the first chapter of this fic has been modified to include a short prologue-type thingy. It also features another character that won’t come up till later—Imogene Lang. Kata’s an unreliable narrator: she brings up subjects and characters before they’ve been fully introduced. I recommend you read it (the prologue), because it might be important… and I like it… and stuff. Yeah. ~*Eva*~