“Kata!” Mr. Mendota exclaimed as I walked into class the next day. I had an electric blue ball cap pulled down over my face to try and hide my brand new purple-black eye. Of course, there was no getting past Super Teacher. “What happened to your eye?”
I swallowed and gave the excuse I’d been using for black eyes for five years, “I’m prone to nosebleeds, and sometimes my eyes swell up. I’m fine.”
Then I turned away and quickly walked to my seat. Removing the cap, I shook my hair out. Melanie leaned back, in danger of being smacked in the face by loose red curls.
“Are you in a gang?” she asked. Melanie is always asking me questions like that.
“Yeah, and we’re called the Vipers… And you’re on our hit list,” I informed her. She nodded.
It used to be fun telling Melanie stuff like that, but now she never believes any of it. Last month, I told her I’d placed a bomb under the London Bridge, and she blew a couple gaskets. Now, she just nods, and maybe makes a comment on how there’s a twelve-step program for that.
I lifted my fingers and brushed gingerly at my right eye. That’s what I get for going to a church where people sing classic rock instead of hymns. That’s what I get for coming in late. The bruise on my shin is what I get for fighting back.
While I was unloading my books into my desk, Mr. Mendota walked to the front of the room and cleared his throat to get our attention. He was biting his lip, like I do when I get upset. He looked like he was holding something back, though, and he kept looking at my eye.
“Have any of you gotten started on your twenty things?” he asked. Most of the hands went up, including mine. Well, I’d finished that drawing. And I had “details”. Other than that… Zippo.
“Has anyone finished?” he asked. I frowned. Who could have finished?
Seven hands stayed up. Jennie, Laura, Kyle, Shane, Robin, Ann, and Derek had all finished their projects.
Mr. Mendota made them all get up and present what they’d done. Jennie, Shane, and Ann had all made lists. They read them out loud, but most of it was dumb stuff. At least Ann and Shane were honest, putting kid things on there, like action figures, or a ballerina tutu. Jennie’s list sounded like her mom had written it. “Love”… “Hope”… “Photographs”… Photographs! Jennie, there are only nine photographs of me in this world, and one of them includes a giant hot dog. No one needs photos.
Kyle had brought in a box of his stuff, like I’d tried, but he hadn’t put a toothbrush in, that was for dang sure. His parents must be freaking loaded.
Derek is a hippie-ish boy, with long unkempt hair and baggy tie-dye shirts. I sort of like him. He’s interesting. And he occasionally gives me half of his bologna sandwich if I don’t have a lunch.
Even if I don’t eat meat (though, what is bologna, really?), it’s a nice gesture.
Derek’s project was my favorite. He’d taken some Styrofoam and carved it into a big ‘20’. Then he’d painted the ‘2’ red, and the ‘0’ yellow, and had drawn all over them. Derek is a much better artist than me, and the whole effect was pretty cool.
Melanie didn’t think so. “What is that?” she whispered.
I glared. “You just got yourself bumped up to Number One on my hit list. Derek’s project is the best there, and you know it.”
“Where’s yours?” she asked with a superior smile.
“Mine is gonna be brilliant. But it’ll take a while,” I told her.
She snorted. “You don’t have a while.” Then she pointed to the blackboard.
In the upper left corner, Mr. Mendota had written in big, block letters, TWENTY THINGS THAT MAKE THE WORLD GO ‘ROUND. DUE DECEMBER 19TH.
It was a few days before Halloween. December 19th was a good month and a half away. I had plenty of time.
And I told her so. Then I took out my Dear Friend notebook and scribbled a letter quickly. Melanie didn’t bother to look. I’d been writing in this book since school started, and she knows what will happen if she peeks.
Dear Friend,
I’m going to look for my twenty things after school today. But not past seven. My eye really hurts. “Kata
I shoved the notebook into my desk and turned back to the presentations. Robin was just finishing up with her project, which resembled wads of tissue paper glued to a piece of faded blue poster board.
Robin has always been a little off.
Laura came last. She had written a letter to her parents, thanking them for the twenty things they’d done to make her a better person. She read them off in a chipper voice, and a lot of people zoned out. Who writes a letter for a school project?
A letter.
Letter…
***
It was mid-July, and the hot sun poured through the glass door, streaking the blue and white-checkered tablecloth with rows of light. There were plates off eggs and bacon and potatoes set out on the table, but I was nibbling on a piece of toast and watching the grass sway from side to side in the steamy breeze.
In Little Whinging, it is always one thing or the other: you’re either frying in the summer, or freezing into a human Popsicle in the winter. Today it was at least thirty-seven degrees, Celsius, and only nine o’ clock. The air conditioner was turned up full blast.
Dudley was wearing normal clothes instead of his uniform, but was still carrying that stupid Smelting stick. As he snorted down about twelve pieces of bacon, I was thinking of ways to try and steal it, because I already had a blossoming bruise on my shin, and a few more on my arms. Some people will tell you that I was baiting him, but I like to think that it was an unprovoked attack, no matter how many of his computer games I did or did not hold hostage.
Anyway. Summer. Hot.
Aunt P was jabbering about Mrs. Rube next door, and how she was sure that those geraniums of hers could not have reached four feet without Miracle Grow. I was about to say that I had certainly reached four feet, and all I was eating was this piece of toast, when I heard the mail slot swish open and flap shut. Letters dropped onto the rug.
“Mail,” Aunt P announced, breaking off from her rant and pushing two more fried eggs onto Dudley’s plate.
Verno looked up from his paper and grunted, “Dudley. Mail.”
Dudley let out an exaggerated whine, pointed a pudgy finger at Harry and said, “Make him get it!”
“Harry. Mail,” Verno muttered, turning the page of his paper with a rustle. I looked up, eyeing the Smelting stick and wondering if this was my chance.
Harry waved a hand back at Dudley and muttered, “Make him get it.”
Verno lowered his paper and exclaimed, “Hit him with your Smelting stick!”
While Dudley hunted for his stick (which was now under the table at my feet), Harry wordlessly held his fist out to me. Rock Paper Scissors.
“One, two, three,” I counted off, tapping his fist with mine each time. I came out with paper, and he had rock.
I grinned.
“Aren’t you the one who’s always telling me that rock could grind paper if it wanted to?” Harry asked, but he got up to get the mail anyway.
I finished my toast and began to read the headlines off of the back of Verno’s paper. Some country was bombing another, and some electric company’s stock was down seventeen points. I didn’t know what that meant, so I switched to reading the cover of Aunt P’s tabloid. A baby in Bath had been born with two heads.
I am so sure.
Harry came back in, examining a letter on top of the pile. He passed a bill, a postcard, and a catalog to Aunt P, but began to slide his finger through the wax seal of the last letter, sitting back down.
Wax seal?
He held the letter under the table and I craned my neck over to see. I caught sight of the address just as Dudley ripped the envelope from Harry’s loose grip.
Mr. H. Potter
The Cupboard under the Stairs
Number 4 Privet Drive
Little Whinging
Surrey
The cupboard. That tiny cupboard, shared between us, with the cardboard divider I’d made. The cupboard that I’d never told anyone about -- not Jilly, or Jeremy, or Marc. The cupboard that someone, apparently, had seen, and knew about.
“Dad, Mum, Harry’s got a letter!” Dudley crowed, waving it around in his fat fist.
I lunged for the letter, grabbing Dudley’s arm, and Harry shouted, “Give it back!”
Verno stood up and snatched the letter away from Dudley, knocking me to the ground. I landed facedown next to the Smelting stick, and heard Verno scoff, “Who would write to you?”
I poked my head up and saw Aunt P and Verno leaning over the letter with matching expressions of paralyzing fear.
Fear?
“I wanna read it! I wanna read it!” Dudley whined.
“It’s mine!” Harry objected.
For once in my ten years, I stayed silent, my eyes flicking all over the place.
Aunt P made a noise like a deflating chew toy, Verno had a strange expression on his face, and neither of them moved.
I glanced at Harry and made a fist, holding my index finger out from the others. Our sign for, “On three, go”. He barely inclined his head, not even looking in my direction, but I knew he had seen.
Aunt P was still gasping and saying things like, “Vernon, oh, Vernon!” as I tapped the floor once. One.
Verno was a delicate shade of green; his only movements were to repeatedly jerk the letter out of Dudley’s reach. Two.
“I wanna read it!” Dudley squealed.
“It’s mine,” Harry broke in. “I want to read it!”
Three.
I grabbed the Smelting stick and swiped at Verno’s feet. He faltered for a second, but did come crashing to the floor like I had hoped.
It was enough time for me to spring. I lurched forward and reached for the letter. Harry was there too, grabbing for it, and Dudley was still whining and hitting whoever was in reach with his fists.
Verno stuffed the letter back in its envelope and shook me off a second time. “Out!” he boomed, his face reddening. “Out, all of you!”
Somehow, with a lot of shouting, screaming and Smelting stick smacking, Harry, Dudley, and I were in the hall, behind a locked kitchen door. Almost immediately, there was another fight between the three of us. I got in a couple good hits, but I don’t know if they were for Dudley or Harry. Either way, when the metaphoric dust finally settled, Harry had his ear pressed to the crack of the door, his glasses dangling limply from one ear, and Dudley and I were both trying to hear through the keyhole in the knob. He kept pushing me out of the way, though, and I only caught snippets of what was being said.
“How do they know where…” someone hissed.
“What do we do…?” someone asked frantically.
“-- swore to ourselves…” someone muttered.
“But would there be one for her, too?” Aunt P asked, bizarre fear filling her high-pitched voice.
One for her, too? Her… that could only be me of course; Aunt P and Verno usually hated Harry and I both at the same time, in equal amounts. What would be going on that could involve a letter, Harry and I, and a secret that my aunt and uncle were trying very hard to keep?
I dropped to my knees and pressed my ear to the crack between the floor and the door, straining for --
“Kata? We’re leaving for lunch now,” Melanie’s voice came, breaking into my memory. She stood over me with a lunch bag in her hand, her eyes cautious and distrustful.
There was an entire lesson of math printed up on the board, one that I had completely missed, stuck in my daydream. I nodded and followed Melanie out of the room.
I just had a memory, I thought.
***
“Jeremy!” I shouted in no particular direction. I was standing within a clump of trees, in the forest behind the school. “Jeremy, there’s nothing here!”
”Yes, there is!” I heard him yell back, and turned in the direction of his voice. Jeremy had taken it upon himself to help me find my twenty things, and he seemed to think that one of them was in this gnarled forest that nobody but us had ever ventured into. Right.
“Can we leave? I think the woods is trying to eat me,” I called, smoothing my hair down and jumping onto a rock to get out of the mud I was parked in.
“There has to be something here!” he shouted in response.
“Like a rabid raccoon? ” I exclaimed. There are not many things that can scare me, but for some reason, I just hate raccoons. They freak me out, with the dark circles around their eyes, and their ringed tails that resemble a bull’s-eye.
“Scared, are we?” came a voice from behind me. I jumped and spun around, and there Jeremy was, doubled over with laughter at my expression.
“Not scared,” I muttered, whacking him on the head with my Twenty Things notebook. Not scared, just paranoid. I tried to tell myself that no one from either world was actually after me, but it took a couple seconds to get my heart beating the right way.
“Don’t you remember this place?” he asked, settling down enough to talk.
“No,” I said testily. “Is this the place where I murder my best friend?”
He shook his head, not bothered by my threat. “This is where our old clubhouse was.”
Our clubhouse. The summer that I was six and Jeremy was seven, we’d constructed a wobbly lean-to with some sticks and scraps of cardboard and dubbed it our clubhouse. The only other people allowed inside were his little sister, Mato, and Harry. It was the site of endless play-pretend games, most, ironically, involving one or both of us having magic powers.
Now that Jeremy had said something, I recognized it immediately. The actual clubhouse was gone, but the “sacred rock” was still there -- in fact, I was standing on it. The tree, with its curved branches that reminded me of an umbrella, was so familiar, that I crossed the small clearing and ran my hands over the bark.
“It’s gone,” I murmured.
Jeremy nodded. “I thought you might like to take one last look at the tree.”
I nodded then realized what he had said and whipped around to face him. “What do you mean, ‘one last look’?” I demanded.
He shrugged, stuffing his hands in his pockets and flicking his hair out of his tortoiseshell eyes. “You know Allen Development, that business Winnie Allen’s mum runs? They’re building some new stuff here. And when up go the buildings, down come the tree.”
“No!” I objected, running my fingers over the rough bark again. “What’ll happen to it?”
It was a stupid question, but Jeremy answered it anyway, “I guess it’ll go to some sort of tree factory and be made into wood for houses, and furniture, and cupboards. Stuff like that.”
Cupboards.
It was late at night, but my small alarm clock had stopped ages ago, and I didn’t know what time it was. Harry knocked lightly on the cardboard divider every few minutes, but I was curled up in my nest of a bed, feigning sleep.
Like sleep was ever gonna come.
What was in that letter? My mind was racing, looping around and around, and always coming to rest on the sentence, “One for her, too”. The letter had been addressed to Harry only, and that was odd. Mostly, though, it was depressing, because it ruled out any long lost relative trying to find us. It would have said, Harry and Kata Potter. Maybe even Katarine-Natasha, the lengthy first name used only for official things like school records and Social Services. Everyone called me Kata, except for Aunt P, who forcefully maintained that Katarine-Natasha was not a real name, and simply called me Katherine.
I heard another knock, but this one was not from the other side of the divider. It was from the cupboard door itself.
For a few seconds, Harry didn’t answer. Then, he said, “Uh… come in.”
The cupboard door creaked open and I sat very still, barely breathing. There was no reason I could think of that someone would be visiting us.
“Er… hello, Harry.” It was Verno’s voice. There was a pause; and then, “Is she asleep?”
“Yes,” Harry muttered. “What do you want?”
He was not even trying to hide the anger in his tone. I wondered what conclusion he had reached about the mysterious letter that he blamed Verno for.
Then an idea, so wonderful, popped into my mind, and I did not let logic smash it to pieces. What if it didn’t matter that the letter was only addressed to him, if it was for both of us? What if the letter was from them?< i>
Verno began to speak, with a lot of pauses in his gruff voice. “Well… Petunia and I were thinking… it doesn’t make sense for two people to live in here; you’ll both outgrow it soon. We thought… maybe you should take Dudley’s second bedroom, and Kata could stay --”
“You think I’ll leave her in here?” Harry asked coldly. I hugged my skinny knees to my chest.
“She’s small,” Verno said meekly.
“I won’t pretend to know why you want us out of here, but Kata isn’t staying in here by herself. She comes with me,” Harry announced with ice in his voice. It was actually a little scary, even if he was sticking up for me, Tiny Kata.
“Fine,” Verno growled. “I don’t care. Just get out.”
“Why?” Harry asked.
“Don’t ask questions,” Verno snapped. It was the number one rule in this house: things are the way they are, and don’t question that.
***
Twenty minutes later, we had dragged all our stuff upstairs in three cardboard boxes. That was all it took, to move everything we owned somewhere else.
I’d barely said anything the entire time, mostly because my mind was still zooming around the fantastic theory that the letter could be from the same people that were the reason we were here.
Someone had put an extra mattress on the floor, along with a thin pink blanket. I slapped my box down on top of it, and immediately started digging around for my coffee tin of special things.
“What are you --” Harry began, but I held a finger up to stop him. In the very bottom of the tin, nestled between a coin purse that held exactly three pounds, and a Polaroid photo of me with a Cheeto balanced on my tongue, was a square of pure white cardstock with fancy writing and an embossed silver flower:
Violet and Richard Evans
Do Proudly Announce
The Marriage of Their Daughter
Lily Marie
To
James Charles,
Son of
Dorea and Charles Potter
On August the fourteenth,
In the Hayberry Catholic Church
At 3 o’ clock
R.S.V.P.
In all the time I’d spent exploring the attic, this was the only piece of proof I had that my parents had existed. Aunt P had kept it in a small shoebox, along with a few other items that were meaningless to me: a twig, a wilted flower that hadn’t even bloomed yet when it was picked, and a scrap of starry-sky blue cloth. The box had simply been labeled, ‘L’.
I handed the invitation wordlessly to Harry and watched the slideshow of emotions play across face. Sadness first, then anger, confusion, more anger, and then sadness mixed with something like a condescending smile.
“Kata,” he said gently, “there’s no way that either of them could have --”
“Why not?” I demanded. “Why not?” I realized I was about to cry and hated myself for it. It had been years since I’d cried, and now I was about to do it over an invitation that I had stared at a million times? Stupid.
“I don’t want to go over this again,” he muttered, sitting down on the mattress meant for me, and pulling me with him. “They are dead, and --”
I cut in again. “Maybe not!” I cried, my jaw jutting out with determination. “Maybe one of them is trying to find us, maybe even Violet and Richard, or Dorea and Charles! Maybe everyone didn’t leave, and…” I trailed off, biting my lip.
Harry didn’t say anything for what felt like forever. We sat on the mattress and looked at everything except each other, and I didn’t cry. I stared out into the night (we had a window now) and wished for about a million things on a million different stars.
‘Kata,” Harry began, “it is always going to be just two of us. Harry and Kata, and never anyone else. You have to understand that.”
I couldn’t remember Harry ever saying anything like that. We both knew it, and I hoped and wished despite it, but no one had ever said it to me like that, with a cold finality. Harry and Kata Potter, but never a Lily or James Potter.
That was all right, most of the time. We could take care of ourselves. Harry kept me out of trouble, and made sure I didn’t do anything crazy, and that I did well in school. He put up with my antics, my weird quirks, and tried to defend them to teachers. I, on the other hand, was better with people, and could usually get whatever we needed. I was also more of a fighter, and though I was barely four-feet and could hardly tip the scale at twenty-seven kilograms , I could pin Piers Polkiss in ten seconds flat. Being a two-person team was okay.
Slowly, I nodded.
“Well, then.” Harry sighed, getting up from where we sat. Like nothing had happened at all. “This isn’t bad at all. I’ll take the mattress, you sleep on the bed, and-”
“Not a chance,” I said.
“No. You are sleeping there and I --“
“Kata? Kata, can you hear me?” Jeremy asked.
I was still standing in the forest next to Jeremy, looking at a tree that was doomed to death as surely as I was to succumb to the memories like that one that I’d been trying to bury.
Maybe it would all come out eventually.
“Yes,” I answered. “I can hear you. I’m right here, aren’t I?”
Twenty Things That Make the World Go 'Round by eva_writes
Chapter Notes: Hello, again! I hope that this chapter didn't take as long, though I warn you, chapter four might. I hope you enjoy this installment in Kata's story. As always, Azhure is absoulutely wonderful and I don't own Harry Potter. Note: There's something funny going on with what is an isn't in italics. Use your best judgement, guess, because I can't find any way to fix it. To help, all parts that mention Harry are flashbacks, and at the very end, when Jeremy starts talking, that's the present. If you really can't figure it out, let me know and I'll try to edit.
Chapter Endnotes: I really will try to get chapter four up as quick as I can! Thanks for reading! -Eva