re: deathly hallows
AP Comp essay re: the night deathly hallows came out.
(i realize it kind of sucks but i wrote half of it tonight. xD)
“So… you’ve never been to a midnight premiere of anything before?”
I shook my head vigorously, my ponytail swishing around behind me. “What do you do?”
My best friend Amie snorted. “What don’t you do is a better question. They have costume contests and giveaways and food and you get to hang out with tons of your friends and it’s just awesome!”
My fourteen-year-old imagination swirled with possibilities. Why hadn’t I done this before? It sounded amazing. “So, we arrive and just wait in line to get the book?” I asked.
She nodded and reassured me, “But it’s totally worth it, Beth. Trust me.”
I smiled earnestly and looked down at the slip of paper in my hand. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows express pickup for July 21, 2007. Redeemable at Books-A-Million only. I felt an exciting jump in my stomach: usually I wouldn’t waste my time with waiting in line for two hours with three hundred other people, but this was different. This was Harry Potter. This was the symbolic ending of my childhood, and I would not let it go out any other way than with a bang.
I had spent the last ten years of my life enraptured with Harry Potter. From the minute I laid my hands on The Sorcerer’s Stone, I was in love with it. The humor was impeccable; the writing was (admittedly) mediocre but the plot was the stuff of every child’s dreams: finding out you can do magic, going away for three-fourths of the year to a school for it, and having adventures with your best friends. The story drew me, and the rest of the world, into its world.
However, the window was coming to a close: in a mere week, the seventh and final book would be published. It would mark the end of an era. No more misadventures for Harry, Ron, and Hermione; no more speculation about who would die in the next book. In a way, Harry Potter had been such a constant in my life that I felt as though something was being taken away from me. The only thing I had going for me in that department would be the movies coming out, and even then those, too, would end.
I cleared my head of these depressing realities by shaking it, hard. I had to focus on the present and not what would come. My best friend and I were going to the midnight premiere party of Deathly Hallows, and I would be darned if we weren’t going to enjoy ourselves.
Over the next week excitement mounted as I prepared for the party accordingly. I planned to go dressed as the character Bellatrix Lestrange (not because I particularly liked her character, I actually hated the woman, but because I look the most like her): I carved a wand out of a stick in the forest in my backyard; I was going to wear a cloak, tease my hair, wear dark eye shadow, and apply the Dark Mark (the sign of the followers of Lord Voldemort) to my forearm with a black Sharpie marker. I was going “whole hog” or not going at all. Amie, however, was content with being herself.
The night of Friday, July 20, came and I could hardly contain the excitement I felt. I had gone to sleep extra early the previous night with the knowledge that I would be staying up all night devouring the book and discussing it with Amie. I paced around the house, going over a mental checklist: Costume? Check. Ticket? Check. My night was going to go perfectly. I would not let anyone ruin this for me.
As evening came around, my mom drove me over to Amie’s house. I bounced my heel restlessly on the carpeted floor of the car, making a quick, dull, thudding tattoo. I was so ready for the night to begin. My duffle bag full of pajamas, Harry Potter paraphernalia, and toiletries rested in my lap. Once I arrived at her house, we still had about two hours left to wait. I perfected my costume and Amie scanned the sixth book, Half-Blood Prince, to the sounds of the fourth movie. We were “pumping ourselves up”, so to speak.
The time for us to leave soon arrived. Our heads were appropriately full of Harry Potter as we filed into her dad’s ten-year-old Jeep Cherokee. I stuffed myself in between a smelly bag full of soccer balls and an overstuffed backpack. Amie sat in the front seat and smiled back at me. I returned the smile and fingered the stuffing coming out of a crack in the car seat nervously: we were on our way.
Even before we pulled in to the Books-A-Million parking lot, I could see how many people were there. The entire lot was filled, and the traffic had spilled over into the spaces designated for the mall. What seemed like hundreds of people in various and extremely creative costumes (I saw a Madame Hooch, a house-elf, and a Golden Snitch) I squealed and reached forward to squeeze Amie’s hand.
We entered the book store, tickets in hand, and immediately I knew why Amie liked to go to midnight premieres: there were so many things going on that I wasn’t quite sure where to start. We shuffled in line towards a bored-looking, acne-ridden boy a few years older than we were. He took our tickets and looked at them, handed them back to us, and asked us how old we were.
“Fourteen,” we replied.
“You’re in Ravenclaw.” He ushered us to a station where two women were handing out pins on which the Ravenclaw House crest was emblazoned. Apparently, people ages 9-12 were in Hufflepuff, those 13-16 were sorted into Ravenclaw, 16-20 were Slytherins, and anyone older was in Gryffindor. I could already tell that I was going to have a good time. We pinned the badges to our clothes and proceeded to walk around the store. Buying a caramel latte (me) and a green tea (her), we sat down and waited for the book selling to start. The employees would start giving books to those with express passes at 12:01.
After visiting with the friends we ran into, entering (and losing) the costume contest, and dueling against multiple people, the intercom announced that in five minutes, the selling of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows would commence. I jumped up and down and cheered with the rest of the store, my hair bouncing with me. We formed a long, winding line that took up the majority of the space in the building: and so the waiting began. We stood in line, moving at a maddeningly slow pace, for the better part of an hour.
Finally we reached the front of the store near the checkout. I could feel the caffeine of the coffee working in my blood stream, and I smiled: I was only just getting energized. I had the rest of the night to read. We walked up to the counter. The girl behind it held out my copy of the book to me, however, I just stared at it. On the cover, Harry’s hand was outstretched towards the sky with a triumphant look on his face. I smiled wistfully. After I finished this, it would all be over. I reached out to get it, and was promptly shoved by Amie. “Come on, we’ve got to go!” I snapped out of my reverie and was rushed out of the store by the people behind us in line.
I looked down at the book in my hands, clutched it to my chest, and didn’t let go until we arrived back at Amie’s house. Once we were inside, the race was on. Collapsing on her queen-sized bed, we began reading and did not stop until six o’clock in the morning. With every turn of the page my heart was jerked more. I felt tears prickling at the edges of my eyes as Harry buried the house-elf Dobby by hand; I smiled when Ron returned back to his friends a la the Prodigal son; and I felt a sense of lonely peace when I read the last word of the series. I fell asleep, my head resting on the open book. When I woke up, I looked down at the book and smiled. While I wasn’t ever going to read more about Harry Potter, I was just fine with the time I’d had with him.
(i realize it kind of sucks but i wrote half of it tonight. xD)
“So… you’ve never been to a midnight premiere of anything before?”
I shook my head vigorously, my ponytail swishing around behind me. “What do you do?”
My best friend Amie snorted. “What don’t you do is a better question. They have costume contests and giveaways and food and you get to hang out with tons of your friends and it’s just awesome!”
My fourteen-year-old imagination swirled with possibilities. Why hadn’t I done this before? It sounded amazing. “So, we arrive and just wait in line to get the book?” I asked.
She nodded and reassured me, “But it’s totally worth it, Beth. Trust me.”
I smiled earnestly and looked down at the slip of paper in my hand. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows express pickup for July 21, 2007. Redeemable at Books-A-Million only. I felt an exciting jump in my stomach: usually I wouldn’t waste my time with waiting in line for two hours with three hundred other people, but this was different. This was Harry Potter. This was the symbolic ending of my childhood, and I would not let it go out any other way than with a bang.
I had spent the last ten years of my life enraptured with Harry Potter. From the minute I laid my hands on The Sorcerer’s Stone, I was in love with it. The humor was impeccable; the writing was (admittedly) mediocre but the plot was the stuff of every child’s dreams: finding out you can do magic, going away for three-fourths of the year to a school for it, and having adventures with your best friends. The story drew me, and the rest of the world, into its world.
However, the window was coming to a close: in a mere week, the seventh and final book would be published. It would mark the end of an era. No more misadventures for Harry, Ron, and Hermione; no more speculation about who would die in the next book. In a way, Harry Potter had been such a constant in my life that I felt as though something was being taken away from me. The only thing I had going for me in that department would be the movies coming out, and even then those, too, would end.
I cleared my head of these depressing realities by shaking it, hard. I had to focus on the present and not what would come. My best friend and I were going to the midnight premiere party of Deathly Hallows, and I would be darned if we weren’t going to enjoy ourselves.
Over the next week excitement mounted as I prepared for the party accordingly. I planned to go dressed as the character Bellatrix Lestrange (not because I particularly liked her character, I actually hated the woman, but because I look the most like her): I carved a wand out of a stick in the forest in my backyard; I was going to wear a cloak, tease my hair, wear dark eye shadow, and apply the Dark Mark (the sign of the followers of Lord Voldemort) to my forearm with a black Sharpie marker. I was going “whole hog” or not going at all. Amie, however, was content with being herself.
The night of Friday, July 20, came and I could hardly contain the excitement I felt. I had gone to sleep extra early the previous night with the knowledge that I would be staying up all night devouring the book and discussing it with Amie. I paced around the house, going over a mental checklist: Costume? Check. Ticket? Check. My night was going to go perfectly. I would not let anyone ruin this for me.
As evening came around, my mom drove me over to Amie’s house. I bounced my heel restlessly on the carpeted floor of the car, making a quick, dull, thudding tattoo. I was so ready for the night to begin. My duffle bag full of pajamas, Harry Potter paraphernalia, and toiletries rested in my lap. Once I arrived at her house, we still had about two hours left to wait. I perfected my costume and Amie scanned the sixth book, Half-Blood Prince, to the sounds of the fourth movie. We were “pumping ourselves up”, so to speak.
The time for us to leave soon arrived. Our heads were appropriately full of Harry Potter as we filed into her dad’s ten-year-old Jeep Cherokee. I stuffed myself in between a smelly bag full of soccer balls and an overstuffed backpack. Amie sat in the front seat and smiled back at me. I returned the smile and fingered the stuffing coming out of a crack in the car seat nervously: we were on our way.
Even before we pulled in to the Books-A-Million parking lot, I could see how many people were there. The entire lot was filled, and the traffic had spilled over into the spaces designated for the mall. What seemed like hundreds of people in various and extremely creative costumes (I saw a Madame Hooch, a house-elf, and a Golden Snitch) I squealed and reached forward to squeeze Amie’s hand.
We entered the book store, tickets in hand, and immediately I knew why Amie liked to go to midnight premieres: there were so many things going on that I wasn’t quite sure where to start. We shuffled in line towards a bored-looking, acne-ridden boy a few years older than we were. He took our tickets and looked at them, handed them back to us, and asked us how old we were.
“Fourteen,” we replied.
“You’re in Ravenclaw.” He ushered us to a station where two women were handing out pins on which the Ravenclaw House crest was emblazoned. Apparently, people ages 9-12 were in Hufflepuff, those 13-16 were sorted into Ravenclaw, 16-20 were Slytherins, and anyone older was in Gryffindor. I could already tell that I was going to have a good time. We pinned the badges to our clothes and proceeded to walk around the store. Buying a caramel latte (me) and a green tea (her), we sat down and waited for the book selling to start. The employees would start giving books to those with express passes at 12:01.
After visiting with the friends we ran into, entering (and losing) the costume contest, and dueling against multiple people, the intercom announced that in five minutes, the selling of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows would commence. I jumped up and down and cheered with the rest of the store, my hair bouncing with me. We formed a long, winding line that took up the majority of the space in the building: and so the waiting began. We stood in line, moving at a maddeningly slow pace, for the better part of an hour.
Finally we reached the front of the store near the checkout. I could feel the caffeine of the coffee working in my blood stream, and I smiled: I was only just getting energized. I had the rest of the night to read. We walked up to the counter. The girl behind it held out my copy of the book to me, however, I just stared at it. On the cover, Harry’s hand was outstretched towards the sky with a triumphant look on his face. I smiled wistfully. After I finished this, it would all be over. I reached out to get it, and was promptly shoved by Amie. “Come on, we’ve got to go!” I snapped out of my reverie and was rushed out of the store by the people behind us in line.
I looked down at the book in my hands, clutched it to my chest, and didn’t let go until we arrived back at Amie’s house. Once we were inside, the race was on. Collapsing on her queen-sized bed, we began reading and did not stop until six o’clock in the morning. With every turn of the page my heart was jerked more. I felt tears prickling at the edges of my eyes as Harry buried the house-elf Dobby by hand; I smiled when Ron returned back to his friends a la the Prodigal son; and I felt a sense of lonely peace when I read the last word of the series. I fell asleep, my head resting on the open book. When I woke up, I looked down at the book and smiled. While I wasn’t ever going to read more about Harry Potter, I was just fine with the time I’d had with him.