After Ginny and her mum returned to the Burrow, her father had already put all of her purchases in her room. Not yet ready to go through her school things, Ginny left it all where it was for a few days.
The following Saturday was Percy’s birthday. Ginny wrote him a birthday poem and drew the words so the letters could be colored in. She spent a couple of hours making sure every letter was neat and tidy the way Percy wrote. She could never mimic his hand writing, but he would at least appreciate the craftsmanship.
When she colored in the words by hand she randomly changed the color of every individual letter to deliberately annoy her extremely organized brother. She didn’t know what Ron, Harry, or her father did for him, but her mother once more cooked a rather large feast and the twins set off fireworks again. This time in Percy’s favorite colors, purple and white.
At his dinner feast, before everyone started eating, Ginny presented the card to her brother:
Neat, tidy, and orderly is he,
My brother, who does look out for me.
Studious, and well-read, you’ll agree,
I hope he becomes what he wants to be!
–It’s beautiful, Ginny,†said Percy genuinely. –You have the colors completely random on purpose, don’t you?â€
–YUP!†she said grinning mischievously. Even though she was able to talk in front of Harry now, she still kept her words short and to the point. Percy made to pass the card around the table for everyone to see, but Ginny snatched it back, –Mum and Dad have already seen it. It’s for you to keep.â€
–Okay,†said Percy, and he laid it down next to his plate where it stayed for the rest of the dinner. Ginny did not need her other brothers taking the mickey out of her, especially in front of Harry, for writing a poem.
After the celebrations, Ginny’s curiosity about her wand finally got the better of her and she started pulling her things from Diagon Alley out of their shopping bags. She opened her school trunk and very carefully packed the telescope that her father finished putting on a new tripod. The scales went into it with the telescope, along with all the miscellaneous items like parchment, quills, and potions ingredients. She set aside her school robes to take downstairs to her mother. Molly told her to bring down everything that would need patching up before term began while Ginny had been helping to prepare the feast for Percy’s birthday.
She pulled out all of the sleek Lockhart books and put them into the trunk with the other items ready to go. Then she slowly began to sort through her second-hand books for her other classes. The ones that did not need to be repaired went into the trunk; the ones that required a bit of mending went back into the cauldron, which also needed to be brought downstairs. The temporary levitation charm her mum had put on it in Diagon Alley had long since wore off, so Ginny left it where it was and decided to just put everything inside it that needed to be worked on, ready to be dragged back downstairs in the morning.
Finally, she came to her last book. It was so roughed up, the binding was coming off the back and it flopped about quite a bit. Ginny began to put it in a proper book-looking pile when out of nowhere, a smaller book fell out of it. She delicately placed the mangled text book back in her cauldron and picked up the smaller book. The black cover was a little beat up, and inside all the pages were empty. No, not all the pages—flipping through again, Ginny saw on the first page was a name, T. M. Riddle, and the other pages had date marks. It was an empty diary. The second-hand book her mum found for her must have belonged to this Riddle, who left the diary in the book. The year was from fifty years ago.
A little worse for the wear, the diary was not in need of repair. However, instead of putting it in her trunk or the cauldron, Ginny stood up from her floor and laid it on her bed to look at later. Then she scooped up her robes and tossed them into the cauldron to go downstairs with the rest of her broken hand-me-downs. Finally, she pulled out what had been on her mind since leaving Diagon Alley… her wand.
Ginny went over the wrist movements her mum had been having her practice as far back as she could remember with the new wand. She loved the way it felt through the snappier movements. It didn’t wobble at all. Now that her mum wasn’t making preparations anymore for anyone’s birthdays, she would be having her practice in the mornings again.
She was careful not to think any thoughts of producing magic while waving her wand around. Young children and those that didn’t know any better but accidentally performed magic weren’t given warnings. Now that she was eleven and owned a wand though the trace was officially on her and any magic where she lived would be detected. Living in a wizard home at least provided some shade from the Ministry, not like where Harry lived and apparently even the magic of a house-elf was blamed on the only wizard who lived in the vicinity. The Ministry could only detect magic, not the caster, so they relied on wizard parents to monitor their children.
The following morning Ginny’s mum spent nearly half an hour watching her practice wrist movements with her new wand. Molly was very impressed by Ginny’s upswing in doing it correctly more often than not, now she was using something that matched her preference. After Arthur came home from work he heaved the cauldron full of items needing mending to the living room where it sat while the family breakfasted. Afterwards, Molly produced a roll of Spellotape from a junk drawer and showed Ginny how to mend and reinforce the bindings on her text books.
Her mum put all of her books in a pile and told Ginny to leave them there when she wasn’t working on them so they wouldn’t be in the way of daily traffic and then set her robes in a basket next to them. With the cauldron empty, the two of them began cleaning it together. They soaped it out by hand first and used a soft cloth to dry it with. The surface was still severely scratched but her mum had a recipe for pewter polish ready to go.
After they finished making the outside shiny and perfect again, her mum tested the original charms on the cauldron. The levitation charm came back sparingly and the heat resistant charm balked as well.
–Why does a cauldron need to be heat resistant?†Ginny asked her mum, –Aren’t they supposed to get hot?â€
–Yes, but pewter doesn’t seep into magic like other metal alloys can and it's a better metal for students to use. However, it has a very low melting point,†replied Molly. –Sticking a Muggle pewter kettle over a fire will result in a puddle of hot metal. Spelled heat resistant, a pewter cauldron shouldn’t interfere with student mishaps and it allows you kids to have longer simmering times to fix mistakes or add ingredients.â€
Her mum wasn’t pleased with the levitation charm. Molly pointed her wand at the cauldron and said quite forcefully, –Scourgify!†to clean and banish any residual old potions, dust, and soap from inside the cauldron. After a moment it emitted a barely noticeable glow for a fraction of a second and then easily floated up to chest height for Ginny. She pushed the cauldron away and it gently floated a few inches from within her grasp and back again. –Well, that at least all appears to be in order now,†said Molly.
Next her mum used a charm that shot heat out of the end of her wand. Ginny saw that she was ever so slightly melting the interior surface and dissolving away all the scratches on the inside. Afterwards her mum went over it with a short-lived freezing charm to keep the re-surfaced form exactly as she left it until the metal cooled completely on its own. –Your father’s friend at the Ministry taught me that one when I was agonizing over throwing out my own cauldron I’ve had since I was a girl back when Bill and Charlie were children,†said Molly proudly. It didn’t look as shiny on the inside as the outside did with its polish layer but it did look brand new again.
–Why couldn’t we just polish the inside?†asked Ginny. A few swipes with a cloth seemed like a lot less work than slowly covering every square inch with spells.
–Polish just fills in the scratches temporarily, and you don’t want it mixing with your potions,†said her mum. –This way the abrasions are actually gone and there is nowhere for your potion residue to sit and hide from a soapy washing.â€
They left the cauldron alone to let the metal finish re-hardening, and over the following week Ginny helped her mum wrangle her brothers one by one so all the Weasleys could have their robes tailored. In years past Molly would fold lengthy robes so that every fall she simply had to undo the stitching and let more down in the arms and legs or out in the torso. Then she would use a mending spell to get rid of the lines of thread holes the boys had worn in over the past year. Ginny tried on all three sets of robes nearly every day until her mum thought they matched the pictures in Witch Weekly she was subscribed featuring a few back to school articles.
The original heat-resistant charm must have also come back after the resurfacing stabilized the interior because her mum finally deemed the cauldron satisfactory when she tried to heat it to melting again. This time though the cauldron had nicely boiled the water her mum poured into it to test with. Ginny finished adding Spellotape to her text books and had put them back into her cauldron one at a time and then grasped it by the handles to lightly pull it to a hover position and took it to her room to pack with the rest of her Hogwarts stuff.
In her room, Ginny put her books, robes and cauldron into her trunk. She pulled out all her wizard day robes from her wardrobe which she’d patched over the summer while grounded and packed them as well. She didn’t see an occasion that would require any of them before leaving for King’s Cross in a few days’ time.
All that was left were her Muggle clothes to sort through and to decide what she wanted to take. Ginny decided to leave that task for another day though. Instead she picked up the old diary and leafed through it again.
Every night since she found it she had picked it up and rifled through its pages absentmindedly. At first she felt guilty about having it, knowing it had belonged to someone named T.M. Riddle. But after a few nights she decided that since it was fifty years old and nothing was written inside, it was fortuitous that it was now in the hands of someone who could actually use it.
Ginny didn’t see herself as a writer exactly, but she like to come up with little four liners to describe what was going on around her. These were usually for her own amusement though and not really shared with anyone else. Giving one to her brother for his birthday was a rare public display.
She decided to work on artfully covering T.M. Riddle’s name with her own and practiced on scratch paper first. When she was confident that she could cleverly cover his name with her unsteady makeshift calligraphy she began to ink her name over his own. However, about half way through she noticed that the ink in the G of her name began to disappear. She waited and sure enough, every stroke of her quill turned lighter and lighter until it was gone. Like a paper left out in the sun for months at a time and the effects fast forwarded until it looked blank again.
Enthralled, Ginny began to draw random squiggles all over the first page with T.M. Riddle’s name on it. Sure enough all of it disappeared. She flipped to random pages and made similar messy lines all crisscrossing over each other each. Every single one slowly disappearing. She began to draw pictures: a smiling sun, a rainbow pouring from a cloud, a crooked version of the Burrow. All of them disappeared. The diary seemed to have an endless capacity of absorbing the ink.
Finally, confident that she could write the words and nobody would see them again, Ginny wrote a stanza about Abellios that she thought up earlier that day while out in the woods with him and the other squirrels.
His fur is very sleek and dark,
A clear contrast with snow,
I found you when you were alone,
My baby squirrel, Abellios!
Pleased, she wrote it quickly so that she could see the poem in its entirety before it disappeared. After the last drop of ink vanished Ginny was about to put the diary turned poetry book on the nightstand and get ready for bed, when she noticed some ink starting to seep back onto the paper. Slowly a message scrawled across the page she was open to in the very ink she had just used and thought was gone for good.
–That was delightfully sweet. Tell me more about Abellios.â€
Ginny slammed the book shut and tossed it into the back of a drawer. Someone was watching her write in the diary after all! Someone read her words that were meant only for herself! Shaking a bit she changed into her pajamas and got ready for bed.
The next morning Ginny was sitting at breakfast after her father had come home. He was going on about one of his raids where a pull-out couch ended up in a second hand shop that had been spelled to roll back up after Muggles had already lain down upon it. It wasn’t outrageously dangerous per se but required quite a few task forces from different departments to show up.
–Dad, why are some spells on Muggle things outlawed but others aren’t? Like… why is my cauldron allowed to float?†Ginny struggled to ask her father questions she wanted answered but tried to seem curious rather than worried. Despite the scare the night before, she wasn’t ready to give up on her diary just yet.
–A spell is only outlawed if it allows the enchanted object to make its own decisions, or if it deliberately harms an unsuspecting victim,†he replied. –A levitation charm only levitates, and cauldrons aren’t so much a Muggle artifact anymore as they are a wizard’s anyway.â€
–What about magical animals? Can’t they think for themselves?†asked Ginny.
–Yes, but with magical animals you can see where they keep their brains. Besides, they aren’t spelled, they are born magical,†he said knowledgeably. –Anything born with a brain and you can see where it keeps it, should be allowed to think for itself,†laughed her father. This prompted another conversation between her parents about the under-representation of magical creatures such as centaurs and house-elves at the Ministry. She had heard all this before though and went back upstairs to her room before her brothers came down.
Ginny knew where her parents stood on such matters and one-hundred percent agreed with them about magical creatures, but she didn’t need to hear it rehashed out. She was still worried about her diary.
Sitting in her room later, Ginny had pulled the diary out of the drawer and now she sat cross-legged, staring at it while it lay harmlessly opposite her at the foot of her bed. She had been deciding how best to figure out if the person in the diary was a threat or not and decided in the end that she would simply ask it straight out.
Fingers shaking only slightly, she opened the diary. The pages were blank as ever. She dipped her quill into a dark blue ink and began to write, –Who are you?†A reply came back almost instantly.
–My name is Tom Riddle.â€
–All I know about you is that your name starts with G I N.â€
–How did you find my diary, Gin?â€
Ginny realized the diary must only know what you write in it and quickly made a note to herself not to tell it any more specifics until she figured out if it was dark magic or not. –It was inside a book I bought for school at second-hand store.â€
–Interesting. It shouldn’t have been in a second-hand shop.â€
Confused about the diary’s –tone of voice,†Ginny decided to get as much information from it as she could before deciding whether or not to tell her father about it. –How old are you? Are you a wizard? What are you? Are you trapped in the book? Are you going to try to hurt me?â€
–Yes, I was a wizard, I attended Hogwarts. Now, I am a memory.â€
–I don’t know what year it is, so I don’t know how old I am.â€
–I suppose you could say I am ‘trapped’ in this book, though I would say I am not.â€
–Now, do be polite. Who are you?â€
Ginny was conflicted. She didn’t want to tell the diary any more about herself just yet but at the same time she wanted more answers. –My surname is Weasley. Are you going to try to hurt me? You didn’t answer that one.â€
–Weasley? I’ve known many Weasleys. Very old wizarding family.â€
–No, I have no intentions of hurting you, my dear Miss Weasley.â€
–How do you know I’m a MISS Weasley?†Ginny asked Tom in the diary.
–Rainbows and sunshine my dear. You drew pictures of rainbows and sunshine.â€
–You also wrote a poem, about a baby squirrel.â€
–Tell me more about Abellios.â€
An odd sensation of happiness overcame Ginny as she wrote out Abellios’ story. How she found him in the orchard with no other squirrels around. How her mum let her keep him in the house. How she trained him to live outside where he’d been for the last three years. How sad she was that she couldn’t take him with her to Hogwarts this fall. How her parents couldn’t afford to give her any pet to take with her to Hogwarts. When she was finished, Ginny couldn’t believe how quickly it had all poured out.
–I couldn’t afford anything of my own at all during my first year at Hogwarts.â€
–I grew up in an orphanage and the school bought all my things for me.â€
–No extras here either.â€
–That’s terrible!†Ginny genuinely replied. Now that she was no longer writing about Abellios, that happy feeling was ebbing away and she was very empathetic towards Tom the orphan. –So, why are you in a diary?â€
–I was simply trying an experiment for the first time.â€
–I made a complete copy of everything I knew about the world and preserved it here.â€
–In this diary, I am eternally sixteen years old.â€
–And I only remember what I knew up until the day I made this.â€
–So, you aren’t actually trapped then?†Ginny wrote back. –I’m just talking to a copy of a real person? Someone who in real life is sixty-six years old now? The real you might still be alive somewhere!†Ginny felt a little intimidated that she was talking to a sixteen year old boy, but resolved to not make it into a big deal.
–Well, I should hope so.â€
–Otherwise, this version of me may be all that is left.â€
Ginny felt sad that that could be a possibility. –I could do some research at school. If I’m not too busy with homework. I could look you up and see what happened to you.â€
–Would you take me to school with you?â€
–I could help you with your work. All the teachers said I was quite gifted.â€
–Really?†Ginny wrote back. –That would be excellent.â€
Over the following day Ginny learned that Tom was a Half-blood, that he’d reunited with his surviving Muggle father and grandparents and that they had been very surprised to meet him. He didn’t have any memories after their first meeting though because he had chosen to preserve this diary right after what he termed the happiest day of his life. Ginny was happy that he had reunited with his family after so long. She found out that Tom was an only child, and Ginny told him all about how her brothers would tease her endlessly, but that she wouldn’t have it any other way. She couldn’t imagine life without any of them.
She told him about Ron’s friend Harry Potter who was staying with them for the remainder of the summer and how she had learned not to be so star-struck around him over time since he was so popular everywhere he went. Tom teased her back that maybe she was more than star-struck, maybe she actually liked him. Ginny furiously wrote back a denial, but she could see Tom’s amusement when he wrote that he was sure she would find other people at Hogwarts to be attracted to and then this Harry Potter wouldn’t seem like such a big deal to her.
When she replied back, she mentioned that what he said reminded her a lot of what her mother told her when Harry first came to stay with them. That Harry was just another of her brother’s friends. It didn’t occur to Ginny at the time that Tom Riddle wouldn’t know anything about Harry Potter and his defeat of You-Know-Who. Then she told him about how he brought his Nimbus 2000 broom with him and that she really wanted to try it but was too embarrassed to ask.
–You know, you could just take it like you do your brothers’ brooms.â€
–This Harry would never need to know.â€
Ginny got that same feeling of elation that she did when she wrote about Abellios’ story. Her mind slightly hazy, she got up and drifted downstairs. All of her brothers were out front, so when she went out the back door, nobody noticed her disappear down to the broom shed. Ginny opened the door and there it was. Harry’s Nimbus 2000. She reached out her hand to touch it. As soon as she grasped the handle she could feel it begin to hum and for the smallest of seconds her instinct to put it down and walk away reared up. Because it belongs to Harry! Her guilty-self tried to stop her, only to be squashed away again when she saw that it hovered just a little higher than she would have liked to be able to mount it.
Once she was in the air, flying cleared all the haze from Ginny’s mind. She was still guilty that she had taken something without asking first. Her moment of joy dwindled away and she silently landed in front of the broom shed and shoved the Nimbus back inside.
Confused, but mostly angry with herself, she marched back up to the house. There her mother wrangled her into helping prepare their last dinner before leaving for King’s Cross tomorrow. It was a welcome distraction as she made Harry’s favorite treacle pudding, an old recipe from her mum’s side of the family. Fixing the pudding helped Ginny calm down from her horror at herself. She couldn’t think what would have possessed her to take out Harry’s broom without permission.
All through dinner Ginny’s stomach was in a tighter knot than it had ever been in while she worried about her invitation letter from Hogwarts. Shaking internally from both guilt and shame, it was difficult for her to enjoy the last of her twin brothers’ fireworks, this time red and blue stars after the meal. Afterwards, she headed back to her room on the pretense of needing to pack last minute items, and then she quietly closed her door to sit by herself and reflect on her uncharacteristic behavior.
A closed door, however, was meaningless to Molly, who popped her head inside Ginny’s room not a half hour later to check on her packing progress.
–You have everything all set, my dear?†her mother asked gently as she bustled over to Ginny’s trunk to check the contents herself.
–Yes. Everything on the list, and everything I couldn’t possibly live without while I’m away. Just like you said,†Ginny attempted a winning smile for her mum but her face betrayed her.
–First-year jitters getting to you?†her mum asked patiently.
–I guess so,†Ginny replied.
"My last baby is going to school!" her mum sniffed.
Ginny wasn’t ready to hash over her emotions after taking Harry’s broom without permission, and she certainly didn’t want that to be her last memory with her mother before leaving.
–Well, your father’s going to have a little chat with you before bed, just like he did with your brothers,†said her mum. –One of his little traditions in this family. Now you put the last of this laundry I brought you away and I’ll go get him.â€
–Okay.â€
Ginny sorted through the last of the clothes her mum brought her and put most of it in her wardrobe to be left behind. She picked out what she planned on wearing to King’s Cross in the morning and prepared an entire set of Hogwarts robes to change into on the train. Then she closed her wardrobe for the last time until she returned home next spring and heard a knock at her door.
Arthur Weasley popped his head into Ginny’s room and beckoned her to sit next to him on her bed. –I’ve spent nearly this whole day looking around the house and imagining it without anyone here but your mother and I, and I still can’t see it,†her father began. Ginny smiled; she knew her parents were both sad and happy that all of their children were now officially Hogwarts students. –Now, I’m going to tell you the same things I’ve told all your brothers, and ask you the same questions I asked each of them. Okay?â€
Ginny nodded.
–First off,†Arthur began, –don’t try to be friends with people who ultimately make you unhappy. The kids you go to school with, are going to be around for the rest of your life. Take it from me, surround yourself with people who love you for who you are and help build you up; and furthermore, love those people for who they are and do your best to help build them up to their best selves. Okay?â€
Knitting her eyebrows together, Ginny replied, –Okay.†This was going to be heavier than she anticipated.
–Secondly, Hogwarts, is first and foremost a school. I know you are going to make friends, and you’re going to want to do activities with them, but as a parent I must tell you that your school work is your first priority. Am I clear?â€
Ginny smiled, –Yes, Dad.â€
–Good. Now along with that, Hogwarts is secondly your home away from home. You got your letter, no matter what anyone will ever say to you, no matter what House you are placed in, you belong there, okay?â€
Ginny thought about her brothers. Each one of them looked forward to going back to school every year. Even Ron after his first year, which ended in a scary sounding disaster. –Okay.â€
–Now, tell me honestly. Just out of curiosity, which House do you think you belong in?†asked her father.
–I want to be in Gryffindor, like everyone else,†said Ginny immediately.
–Do you want to be in Gryffindor because everyone else in the family has been in Gryffindor, or do you think that’s where you belong?†asked Arthur gently.
Ginny racked her brain for all the qualities of the different houses from the stories she’d heard from her brothers. –Gryffindors are brave, Ravenclaws are smart, Hufflepuffs are hard workers, and Slytherins are … mean?†she finished questionably.
–Close,†replied her father. –Gryffindors are chivalrous, dauntless in the face of a challenge, and always stand up for what they believe is right. Ravenclaws are curious, about all sorts of fields and satisfying that curiosity most often leads to their renowned intelligence. They are also extremely creative, original, and believe in accepting everyone’s individuality. Hufflepuffs are hard-working, yes, but they are more than that. They are fiercely loyal to the people they care about, they are absolutely tenacious when attempting to achieve a goal, they are also incredibly kind, tolerant, and utterly believe in fairness. Now, as for Slytherins. I can see where your brothers see them coming off as mean, but it only seems that way on the outside. Slytherins excel at not only amassing useful information, but at using their intelligence. They are resourceful in the face of an obstacle, they have the capacity to both think outside of the box when necessary and maintain traditions, and leadership is a natural desire for them. Slytherins don’t settle for just doing what they love most. Slytherins want to be the best at what they do, and so sharing that same belief, they do all they can to help each other achieve some sort of status in life. And they expect that same regard in return. The other Houses aren’t nearly so exclusive, which is why your brothers see Slytherins the way that they do. Now, after hearing all that, tell me where you think you belong.â€
Ginny felt only a little uncomfortable admitting to her father what she thought, but decided to name the house that she identified the most characteristics with. –To be honest, I think I can see myself in any of the Houses after you said all that. But if I had to pick, I guess Hufflepuff?â€
Her father smiled at her, –That is exactly the right answer, not the Hufflepuff part, the first part. Everyone has some of all of the other Houses' qualities inside of themselves. Now, why do you think Hufflepuff over all the others?â€
–Well, I think I’m resourceful, like the twins, and that’s a Slytherin quality. But I also think that I always say and back up what I believe is right like a Gryffindor, and I know I’m always curious about all sorts of off the topic details in my studies like a Ravenclaw. But I really like what you said about Hufflepuffs being fiercely loyal and kind and utterly fair,†said Ginny.
Her father smiled, –Bill said he was going to be a Ravenclaw for sure, Charlie a Hufflepuff, Percy worried he would be put in Slytherin for his ambition to be in the Ministry, and Ron didn’t have a clue except that he absolutely didn’t want to be in Slytherin after some of your other brothers’ stories. Only the twins knew for sure they were destined to be Gryffindors. They both had talked about it since they found out your mother and I were there and before Percy even started school.â€
–Really?†asked Ginny. It never occurred to her that any of her brothers considered being anything other than a Gryffindor. –But, what if I’m not a Gryffindor?†and then she asked one of the questions that had haunted her while she waited for her invitation letter, –What if, I’m the only Weasley in this family that isn’t a Gryffindor?†She had just thought of her mother’s math lessons again and remembered that the odds of seven kids in one family being in the same House were not in her favor. She looked up at her father as he put his reply together.
–I’m going to tell you the last thing I told each of your brothers. Your mother and I will still love you and be proud of you, no matter which House you are chosen for,†he said. –Now, is there anything else on your mind?â€
For one split second, Ginny thought about showing her father the diary. It was his area of expertise after all. But she had already grown fond of Tom and he was just a copy of a memory after all and she didn’t want him taken away with no chance of getting him back before she left tomorrow. So she shook her head no, and gave her dad a weak smile.
After her father bade her good night, Ginny had a hard time falling asleep. Sure, she was nervous about her train ride tomorrow, but she was also still guilt -ridden. She needed to tell someone what she did who would tell her that it was wrong so she could get on with making amends.
In the flickering light of her relit candle, Ginny once again opened the diary to write to Tom. –Dear Tom, after I told you about Harry’s Nimbus 2000, the weirdest thing happened. I remember being excited that one was in our broom shed, and being embarrassed about asking to have a go on it. Then all of a sudden, I couldn’t think of anything except riding it. I felt like, I wouldn’t be able to do anything else until after I knew exactly what it felt like to be in the air on the Nimbus. I don’t know what came over me, Tom. It was like I couldn’t control what I thought about or what I did. I’m a horrible person.â€
Ginny waited for Tom’s reply, and started to wonder if the –memory†needed to sleep and that perhaps she just woke him. But sure enough, ink started to trickle back onto the page, and Tom’s reply was not what she was expecting.
–Did you enjoy riding the Nimbus?â€
–Well, yes,†she wrote back, –but that’s not the point. I didn’t ask. I feel terrible.â€
–Did anyone find out that you took it without asking?â€
–No.â€
–Did you damage it?â€
–No.â€
–Then I fail to see why this is such a big deal.â€
–You found an opportunity to do something you dearly desired to do.â€
–I am quite proud of you.â€
Ginny was taken aback that anyone would be proud of what she did, but she thought back to what she discussed with her father about feeling close to Hufflepuffs. –No, it was still wrong not to ask. I should feel bad.â€
–Do you feel bad when you take your brothers’ brooms out?â€
–No, but we’ve always shared our things with each other. It’s different with Harry, he’s not my brother,†Ginny wrote back.
–Does your brother see him as a brother? Do you parents treat him like a son?â€
–Well, yeah. Harry’s an orphan, just like you. His parents died when he was a baby, their whole house blew up actually. Nobody knows how Harry survived, but that’s why he started school so famous already. He’s the Boy Who Lived.â€
–Well, there you have it. Everyone sees him as family. You should too.â€
–Don’t think on what you did as wrong.â€
–Think of it as treating Harry like you would any other brother.â€
–Perhaps that will get you over your crush on him.â€
–I don’t have a crush on Harry Potter, Tom! He’s just famous!†Ginny wrote back. Tom didn’t send a written reply but Ginny swore she could feel him smirking even though she couldn’t see him.
Writing to Tom had the effect Ginny was looking for, albeit in a very indirect way. She confided in someone who ultimately made her feel better. –Thank you, Tom. I still think that I was in the wrong. But I suppose, what you say makes sense. If I treated Harry as one of my brothers like my father and mother sort of suggested I try to do, then I shouldn’t feel bad for taking his broom out for a ride.â€
–You see? And now you can go off to Hogwarts with a clear conscious.â€
–So, have you decided to bring me with you?â€
–Of course I’m going to bring you to school with me, Tom. You’re like a friend I can carry around in my pocket,†Ginny replied.
–Most excellent. Now pay attention.â€
–Write to me as soon as you can after you get settled.â€
–I know tomorrow will be a very busy day and class days will be as well.â€
–So promise me that you will set aside a good long chunk of time on the first Saturday.â€
–I want to hear about everything that happens at school. Okay?â€
–The first Saturday. I hope I’ll talk to you before that, but I got it. I’ll find time to write to you on weekends for sure.†Ginny was excited that Tom wanted to keep talking to her. She vaguely wondered how he would know whether or not it was a Saturday when she wrote to him, but decided he was right that the other days would she would be busy with classes.
Ginny said goodnight and put the diary down on her nightstand. Then she blew out her candle and fell asleep almost instantly.