By the time we were finished cleaning the suits of armor, I was exhausted and walked back to the Slytherin common room at a skrewt’s pace. Harper, as he hadn’t actually done much of the work, practically ran most of the way, and I soon lost sight of him. I also suspect that he simply didn’t want to be around me any longer than he had to, and the feeling, frankly, was mutual. I reached the patch of damp wall and muttered ‘Boudicca’”the wall slid aside and I lumbered in like a zombie. Halfway down the stairs, I realized I wasn’t alone.
The pair of dark-trousered legs moved slightly; the rest of the figure was obscured by the high back of the dark green easy chair. I almost missed it entirely because it was cast in silhouette by the fireplace, which I was surprised to see was still lit.
I heard the sound of a page turning, and I crept over to the chair to see who it was. I must have been making more noise than I thought, because I heard the book close when I was within a couple metres.
The broad jaw of Jacinto Neithercut poked out from behind the chair, his face and the strawberry-blond hair that framed both cast in partial shadow by the fire behind him.
“Hello, Mich…Coplin.” he said, trying to pass off the first half of my name as ‘miss’. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Jacinto nodded down at his book. “Just doing some late reading.”
“Hi, Jacinto,” I said, suddenly blushing. Jacinto was not bad looking, but he did not have the sort of face I found appealing in a boy. The blush came more from the fact that he had saved me from a painful array of dislocations. “I didn’t know it was you.”
I took a step closer, failing miserably at being casual about it, and tilted my head sideways a bit. The spine of the book, which Jacinto now clutched to his chest, read: 1984 “ GEORGE ORWELL.
“I just wanted to say thanks,” I said after a moment. “Where did you learn that Spongify spell?”
“My mother,” he said with a flicker of a frown. “She has dozens of spell books from her days at Charmbridge stuck on her shelves. I took to reading them in my spare time. I always thought I’d be going into Treadstone Academy myself. It’s in New York. That… didn’t pan out.”
“Well Hogwarts isn’t so bad, is it?” I wasn’t sure if I
believed that myself. “Lucky for me your mum is such a pack-rat.”
Jacinto nodded. “Take care,” he said, and went back to reading. I stood there
for a moment, feeling awkward, as though I should say something else, but I
could think of nothing. I backed away slowly and then turned and shuffled
towards the girl’s dorm.
0000
The next week saw Amanda and me shooting letters back and forth, mine telling of what I had learned and of all the Death Eaters’ children I pissed off. Amanda’s mostly chronicled my parents repeated demands that Amanda tell the truth and go back to jail for what she had done. Amanda noted, however, that they never once demanded that she send me back home.
They’re heartbroken, Michelle, but I can see that they’re also scared. They think I’ve poisoned you against them. And honestly, I think they’re scared of how they’ll react when you return. I’m no Legimens, but I can only guess they’re equally afraid they’ll come to hate you as they are of you hating them. Your mother starts to threaten punishments for you and then trails off, unable to complete the thought. And I assure you they have no trouble completing their thoughts when it comes to threats against me.
It might do a lot of good if you write to them
yourself. I’ve about exhausted my capacity to placate.
Be safe.
-Amanda
So I sat down at a table in my dorm one evening while all the other girls in my year were in the common room, and began writing. I used up two pieces of parchment on false starts that I eventually threw away, and then started writing on some muggle stationery that Amanda had sent me.
Dear Mum and Dad
How are you? Well that’s a dumb question I guess. I know you’ve got a lot on your mind. Amanda said I should write you and assure you I was okay, So… here I am. Writing you, and I am okay. These past few weeks have been hectic. I’m learning a lot. Not just… you know… magic and stuff. I’m learning a lot about myself, too, I guess. I’ve made a new friend called Grant. He’s weird, but he can be pretty cool. He’s an albino and the other students call him The Nasty when they think I can’t hear them. I feel sorry for him sometimes, which is why I guess I keep hanging out with him even though he can be a little rude.
There’s another boy here who is sweet. His name is Endy. But he’s in another House”Hogwarts is divided into houses like in a public boarding school. So I don’t get to see him as much as I’d like. He grins a lot and talks as though he thinks everyone is an audience and he is a performer. And he’s also brilliant at maths and potions. I…
I… er…
I’m still reading my Bible and I still pray and stuff. I know you think all
sorts of horrible things must be going on, but it really isn’t like that. There
are other religious students here too. The girl in the bed next to mine in the
dorm is Jewish, even. And whatever you think, I’m not suddenly okay with all
this. I still worry about whether I made the right choice. Also, it was my
choice, not Amanda’s. Please don’t blame her. I can’t learn to hate as quickly
as you do, but maybe someday.
I still love you both and want to make you
proud.
Michelle
The drafts I tossed into the bin had mentioned all sorts of nasty details about Blood Prejudice and Daniel Rosier making a game of tossing me around, but I left those out in the end because I didn’t want to scare them more than they already were. Reading it again today, I wonder if calling my parents quick to hate was something of a backhanded compliment, something meant to be a thorn on their conscience. But I can’t remember. In some people, hate is a virtue. Not necessarily hatred of people, but hatred of their religion, their background, their music or games. And I grew up in a home where hatred of the Otherness of people was valorized. “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” they told me. But when you get used to hating, it is so hard to hate just a little. It’s easier to hate a lot.
0000
Grant’s birthday fell on 21 September and I had sent off for Amanda to buy him a present and I’d pay her back by working in her greenhouses over the summer. She told me not to worry about it, and sent in a box of chocolate frogs. I kind of felt embarrassed as I handed him the package, since it was such an impersonal gift. But I had little sense of what Grant liked to do for fun beyond playing Wizards’ Chess against students twice his size and stalking people with his Chamelomancy.
“Chocolate Frogs?” He said
staring at them.
“I’m sorry,” I said, looking away. “I couldn’t think of anything to suggest””
“Sorry?” he blurted. “Michelle, this is the best birthday
present I’ve ever got. Last year my sister Sophitia gave me a
manticore pup.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It had rabies,” Grant said, clutching a scar on his right hand and shuddering.
Grant took out a frog and wolfed it down, then stuffed the box into the truck at the foot of his bed. I noticed that ‘PROPERTY OF THE NASTY’ had been scribbled onto it in Permo-spell Ink.
“Cryopagos,” he said, twirling his wand in a circular motion. I felt a sudden chill from the trunk as it cooled off. Grant shut the lid and locked it. He looked up at me. “Thanks.”
His eyes were softer than usual, as if the storm of emotion he usually hid behind them had calmed somewhat.
“You’ve mentioned your sisters being horrible before,” I said, sitting down on Harper’s trunk. I honestly didn’t care what he thought of it. “Why do they get away with all this stuff?”
Grant sat down on his own trunk and sighed. “They’re not freaks,” he said,
pointing to his stark white skin. “Mum and Dad aren’t ashamed of them the way
they are of me, so it’s only natural that basically anything they do to me goes
unpunished.”
“That’s horrible,” I said. “You’ve got a lot of nerve to
talk bad about my parents when yours don’t even seem to care about you.”
“Like yours care about you,” he spat.
“That’s not true!” I said. “I know they’ve done some… bad
things, but it’s not because they don’t care about me.”
“They hate you for being a witch. How is that any different than my parents
hating me?”
“You didn’t choose to be an albino,” I said, pounding a fist on the trunk.
“You didn’t choose to have magic,” Grant shot back.
“No, but I chose to come here.” I looked away. I honestly felt that no other
choice could possibly keep me from going mad, but it was still, technically a
choice. I still could have chosen insanity over mortal sin. I stared at grant
for a moment. “It also sounds like your parents don’t care what happens to you.
That’s completely the opposite of mine. They’re afraid for me.”
“For you?”
Grant said, leaning forward. “They think something bad is happening to you?”
“That I’m being deceived by Amanda and all the professors,” I said quietly.
“They’re terrified that God is going to disown me, or maybe that I’ve turned my
back on God. They think that if I don’t change my ways and see the light, then
I’ll be damned to hell. Maybe I won’t, but the idea of me coming to harm must
be eating them up inside.”
“In that case,” Grant said, “I was wrong.”
“Wrong about what?” I asked.
“Obliviating them.” Grant stood
up and took a step over to me. “If they really care about you, and you being
here causes them pain, then you did the right thing by
not having their memories erased. They should suffer like they’ve made you
suffer.”
The word suffer
echoed in my mind. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Suffer. Maybe the
reason they killed off witches or suspected-witches back then was because the
thought of their sons and daughters being caught up in evil rituals was too
much for them to bear. So much pain that they’d rather see them die than go on
living in sin.
Thou shalt not suffer.
Suddenly, I wondered if what I was doing was wrong not because the magic itself
was evil, but because it was causing so much harm to my parents. I could only
hope my letter had helped them out, but I still had no reply, and Amanda hadn’t
mentioned them in the letter she included with Grant’s chocolates.
I stood up, and started to walk out of the dorm. “You’re still wrong, Grant,” I
said. “I don’t want to make my parents suffer. I want them to change their
minds.”
“Sometimes pain is the only way things get done,” Grant said.
As I walked out of the boy’s dorm, Harper walked in.
“What, the Mudblood and the Nasty
sharing some alone time? How typical, rubbish sticking together with
rubbish.”
I punched him in the face before I knew what I was doing. Harper didn’t say
anything to me for three days.
Maybe Grant was on to something with that pain thing.
0000
No reply came from my parents, but Amanda did mention in one of her notes that they’d received my letter. When the little owl that delivered it kept waiting around for a tip, my dad had swatted it out of the window with a broom, and the bird left its retaliation on his car windshield. She said that they’d calmed down some, but they still had no kind words for her.
October went by with alarming speed; in our classes, Flitwick apologized multiple times when he realized he’d started going over charms he’d already covered, a symptom of having changed his curriculum to emphasize spells that had proved useful to Potter and his friends the previous year Draco made it clear where he thought Potter could shove his hero complex. I was mostly surprised that Malfoy knew what a hero complex was.
And that brings us to Halloween. I barely recall the feast that night, only what happened after it as dozens of us poured out of the Great Hall into the corridor. The quiet that started at the front of the throng and spread to the back stopped me in my tracks; Grant kept talking even after I was staring transfixed. I tried to slip through the crowd and managed to get to the front in time to hear Malfoy shouting: “You’ll be next, Mudbloods!”
Then I saw the message scribbled on the wall in red, the
tiny form dangling below, and Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley
standing in a puddle of water below it. At first I thought that it was about
time someone gave that cat what was coming to her, but then Filch and a group
of professors surrounded the three Gryffindors and I heard Filch’s
pathetic lament. I realized then that this wasn’t some cheap prank or first year
spell.
They killed the cat! I thought. Harry Potter killed Filch’s
cat.
0000
By the time I got back to the common room, I had been disabused of the notion that Potter murdered the cat. The message, which I hadn’t been able to make out, implicated a nameless figure known only as the Heir of Slytherin, someone with the supposed legendary power to open the Chamber of Secrets.
“What’s in the Chamber,” I asked quietly, transfixed on Sypha’s big blue eyes.
“Well, Secrets, of course,” she said.
“But what Secrets?” Artemis
insisted.
“If we knew that, it would be the Chamber of Known Aspects.” Sypha said,
tossing a smirk towards her. “They say Salazar Slytherin left a hideous
monster behind that would eventually be used to purge the school
of Muggleborns.”
“That’s bollocks,” I said. “They’d never allow that. Dumbledore would get rid
of something like that.”
“If he could find it,” Emma chimed. “There are so many secret passages and hidden rooms in this castle that you could hide a herd of unicorns.”
“Unicorns don’t travel in herds,” Sypha said in manner
calculated to make Emma feel stupid.
“I know that!” Emma hissed back. “I just mean, if they did.”
At that point I turned from the conversation and flopped open my sketchbook. I drew sketches of cats playing in a field and then threw Mario in for good measure, focusing all my mental energies into the drawing so as to forget the events that had transpired. The sketch-kitties began playing with each other, while Mario ran around jumping and whooping. I drew a few swirls that were supposed to represent a ball of yarn for the cats to play with and they began tossing it back and forth across the page. I turned the page in my sketchbook and drew something else, a hasty sketch of the potions classroom, complete with Ginny, Apollo, and Artemis periodically exploding their cauldrons only for Snape to flick his wand out. A line shot up from his mouth and scribbled REPARO, causing the graphite explosion on the page to reassemble into a cauldron.
I stared at sketch Ginny, and felt synapses firing in my
brain.
“She was acting funny, wasn’t she?” came my own voice, but not out of my mouth.
I turned several pages back to find Copi, reclining
on a crudely-drawn easy-chair that I had given her. She toyed with an equally
sketchy Gameboy that made little bleeps and bloops.
“Yeah, she was. She never acted like that in class.” I thought back to my late night encounter. It was fresh in my mind because it was the last time I’d seen Mrs. Norris”or at least given her any thought”until tonight.
“She sounded like she was talking Pureblood nonsense,” Copi said. “And now we have someone writing threats to
purebloods on the walls.”
“Ginny can’t be the Heir of Slytherin,” I said. I didn’t know why exactly I
thought that, but it didn’t add up, it was too illogical. She wasn’t even IN
Slytherin.
“No, you’re missing the point,” Copi said, waving her finger at me. “If Slytherin has an heir, he’s probably really powerful, right?”
(At this point, I heard Sypha cattily telling Emma that I was ‘talking to that
sketch again.’ I tried to ignore her.)
“Yeah,” I said. “You think maybe Ginny is being
manipulated or controlled?”
“It would explain why she was so far away from her dorm that night, and why she
suddenly turned into Malfoy Lite.
“Is there a spell that can do that?” I wondered aloud.
“Maybe,” said Copi. “You know who you should ask.”
“Neithercut?” I thought a
moment. If he had some of his mum’s uni spell books
here, then I could research information about mind control spells or potions.
“What about Neithercut?” Josie said from the bed beside mine. She settled down
on the mattress in her green pajamas and slipped under the comforter. “You
think he’s cute?”
“Oh, hell no!”
Copi and I blurted at once. We both blushed.
“He’s not my type either,” Josie said. She turned over
and sank her head into her pillow.
I looked back at Copi and nodded, at this point sure
we were both thinking the same thing. I left her page facing up and put the
sketchbook in my nylon bag, then lay back and began to pray. I was, really,
deeply afraid for the first time since I’d learned the Knockback Jinx, and I
begged God that nobody else would come to harm. It wasn’t until later that I
realized that this was the first time I felt a sense of camaraderie with the
rest of the school, as though we were all on the same team. Well, no, not all
of us”those like Rosier and Timothy Shepherd, who actively tormented other
students. And Draco Malfoy, who gleefully wished death upon
me and Terrance and every student who came from a Muggle family.
But the rest of us? We didn’t deserve this. God, send someone to stop this Heir of
Slytherin, I thought. Even as I did so, I was terrified God’s answer would
be, I’m sending you.
Narcissist? Me? Perish the thought.
0000
Try as I might, I rarely found Jacinto in a position
where I could talk to him in confidence; we were in classes together, but he
and I never sat close by. In the common room he was often surrounded by other
students, sometimes including Draco Malfoy, Tim Shepherd, or Sypha and her
growing circle of mean girls, and I grew to worry that he would begin to pick
up Blood Prejudice osmotically. Though, I never heard or saw him behaving badly
to Muggleborns. Close to nobody, he got on well enough with everyone… on the
few occasions where he was forced to interact with us at all.
I tried to secure him as a Potions partner one afternoon, but before I could
blink a line of girls (and Collin Creevey, who might as well have been a girl)
formed next to him, trying to claim him as her partner.
I had about given up until late one night in Astronomy; as I observed the skies, I heard movement and felt the warmth of a body appear
on the bench next to me. I thought it was Grant, but when he leaned forward, I
saw the deep tan of Jacinto’s hands. I jumped so
suddenly I nearly fell off the bench. When I finally managed to regain my
balance, I straightened my robes and tried to will the redness out of my face.
“Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said dryly. “I noticed you’ve been trying to get
near me for the past few days. What’s up?”
I stared at him for a moment, then said, “How did you know”did Grant mention””
“Danesti didn’t say anything,” he said; his voice was so low I’d almost say it was a whisper or a growl, but the former implies that it was secretive and the latter that it was harsh. It was neither, just… low. Calm. Casual, even. “I pay attention to my surroundings.”
“I see.” I stared at my sandals as I usually did when I wanted to avoid someone’s eyes. It was getting too cold to wear them to Astronomy classes. I’d have to retire them and put on my sneakers soon.
“You said your mum still had some university books left
over. I was wondering if you could let me borrow them for some research I
wanted to do. On the side.”
“Research? Hm.” There was a flicker of a smile.
“What kind of research?”
“Er…”
“You’d rather not say? Well, it doesn’t matter anyway. I
don’t actually have any of my mother’s books here at Hogwarts.”
“Oh,” I said. My crest, she was fallen. “I was hoping to look up information
about mind control magic, to be honest. A girl I know was acting weird and I
wonder if””
I left the thought unfinished as Jacinto closed his eyes. “My mom definitely could help you there,” he said with a trace of bitterness. “But there is really only one mind control spell worth using”the Imperius Curse. This is something you would have learned from your parents if they were our kind.”
“You don’t look down on them for that.” A warning more than a question.
“No. I’m fascinated by Muggles to be honest. But back on
topic, this Imperius thing is one of the two curses forbidden by the American
Wizarding Bureau. It puts the victim under the complete control of the user and
forces them to do anything the user wants.”
“I heard there were three Unforgivable Curses,” I said.
“In the UK, yeah,” Jacinto said. “But you know how we are across the pond. The Killing Curse isn’t forbidden in America. As they say: wands don’t kill people, people kill people.”
I had never heard that permutation before, but it seemed reasonable…if somewhat fatalistic…to me.
“And the third curse?”
“It couldn’t be used to control anyone. Well, at least not subtly. I don’t want
to say any more about it, though,” Jacinto said. “It’s kind of a grim spell.
Take care.”
He returned to the opposite side of the Tower and began packing up his
belongings. I stared off into the night sky without my telescope, half-did the
rest of my assignment, and then packed up as well. If this Imperius Curse was
as powerful as Jacinto implied, what could I do about it?
My only option was to catch the Heir of Slytherin unawares and somehow take him
down before he could act. For some reason this thought deeply unnerved me.
0000
That night I had another dream like the one I had on the
train, except instead of a horned red devil, the beast that towered over me was
a bearded scaly monster with fangs that dripped acidic poison onto the ground
in front of me. It leaned in close, declaring itself the Heir of Slytherin, and
then struck, like a snake.
I startled awake, my mind certain of one fact, one sentence running through my
head over and over again: Jacinto
Neithercut is the Heir of Slytherin.