The Girl and the Boy: A Story
The Girl and the Boy
Summary: Some have compared the opening chapters of Harry Potter to the Cinderella story. But Petunia is living out a much older, darker tale.
“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words.” C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
A/N: I challenged readers of my essay on the Dursleys who thought Petunia was abusive to try to convince HER, not me, that she should have treated the boy differently. No one took me up on it. Well, as they say, if you want a job done right….
But first, someone has to finally hear Petunia. The world looking out from Petunia’s eyes is a narrow, nasty, mean sort of place. Sorry about that; not something I can alter. But please don’t give up after Part I; it’s not meant to stand alone without Part II.
*
Part I: Petunia sets the record straight about the boy.
“She stopped to draw a deep breath and then went ranting on. It seemed she had been wanting to say all this for years.” J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
“The complaint was the answer.” C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
It started with that blizzard of owls. Like when that, that school was harassing us about the boy. Except these were worse, even; these were all carrying those red exploding letters.
Language I’d never been subjected to in my life. Language I’d never heard in my life!
“Muggle b-ch” was the least of it.
They all seemed to think that Vernon and I had abused the boy.
We never hit him! Not once!
(Though that one time I raised a frying pan to him, I do admit. But I stopped myself with just a swing, though the boy had asked for worse. And Vernon never did that much, just yelled and pushed. Where’s his credit for his restraint, eh, when the boy might have been the better for a good beating? Certainly we thought so at the time. But there were things we couldn’t bring ourselves to do. Or let ourselves do. Even when we thought maybe we should.)
And those dratted owls bit, and left feathers and droppings. I suppose you freaks think that sort of thing is funny to do to a respectable woman.
After three days of being subjected to almost non-stop screaming and owl pellets, I awoke to blessed silence. Then a single bird came, and its letter read,
“Dear Mrs. Dursley:
Your nephew, Mr. Potter, has requested that the Ministry of Magic intercept all Wizarding mail addressed to you. Please send by return owl a list of correspondents whose letters you wish forwarded to you. (Should there be none, no reply is necessary.)
Sincerely,
Richendis Malaprop
Department of Magical Communications”
Well, of course there were none. What kind of fool would think otherwise?
That should have been the end of it. But the whole thing made me burn. It shouldn’t have; I shouldn’t care what you freaks think. But if there’s one thing I’ve always hated, it’s injustice. People should get what they deserve. I think that way; I can’t help it. Vernon used to tease me for it, call me his little idealist. No need to tell me the world doesn’t really work that way; I’m not a fool. But I have my feelings.
Not that I had ever expected to be thanked or anything, oh no. And good thing I didn’t! But instead, for there to be some book out there, spouting lies about Vernon and me… Even though only you freaks will ever read the lies, I want to set the record straight.
So I’m writing this. Even though I can never show it to anyone normal. And no one in your world, that abnormal one, will ever care what a ‘Muggle’ says, no matter that it’s the truth.
But at least someone, sometime, will have dared to tell the truth to you lot. However little you listened.
Dumbledore the great. That’s how everyone there, in your world, talks about him. My sister did too, you know-I heard all about her headmaster, how kind he was, how wise, what a genius.
And I knew that she and that wastrel husband of hers were following him, in some sort of in-fight among you freaks. Do your freak history books mention that that’s what killed my parents? They were only Muggles, so probably not. They were targeted as her parents, my sister’s, that’s all I know for sure. Best not to say the rest of what I think, even now.
And following him killed her. He told me so outright, that Dumbledore. He told me that she and her husband were killed by the other side, and their baby attacked to boot. But my sister sacrificed herself to save the baby, and for some freakish reason, some magical reason, that made it so those other freaks couldn’t touch the baby just then. But they’d try again. And Dumbledore the Great decided he couldn’t be bothered to protect his followers’ baby himself, oh no. Instead, he put a spell on the boy that so long as he lived with his mother’s blood kin, the other side couldn’t touch him.
That meant me and Dudley.
The boy had to live with us, or die.
That’s what Dumbledore told me. Except he didn’t have the face actually to tell me that he’d gotten my last kin killed, was dumping an orphan on me, and had set it up so the orphan would be murdered if I wouldn’t raise it with my own son.
He left a letter. In the middle of the night. With the baby. That’s what I found, a letter and a baby, on my doorstep when I went out with the bottles. On my doorstep. In November.
And the baby none the worse for it, mind. Any normal child would have caught its death or wandered off or something, but this one, you’d have thought being left about like a parcel on a cold night was what it liked. It only started screaming when I brought it indoors and tried to clean it up.
Well, I kept it, of course. I’m a Christian woman, a decent woman, not like you lot; I’m not going to turn a child out to die. That Dumbledore wrote, “I am sure that I may depend on you to do the right thing.” As I’m not one of you lot, he could.
For a day or two I even hoped that the boy might be normal. Despite his parentage, despite that letter. He was puny and peevish, to be sure, a ratty little thing, not at all like Dudley; but what made me finally lose all hope was that hair. Dudley’s was just like a little angel’s, you know; you slicked it down and there it was. The boy’s, though, was absolutely uncontrollable. And worse, after just a few days I could see it was unnatural, how fast it grew. It scared me.
I’d figured that part out, you see-that you can tell by the hair, even more than the clothes. Vernon never did figure that one; he just looked at how you lot dressed. But I spotted it: the ones who have the freakishness in them the worst, you all have hair that’s unnatural some way. His father’s was just like the boy’s, all over the place, and that Snape boy’s was awful in a different way. His mother’s the same. And Dumbledore, when I finally saw him-no normal, decent man could grow hair that long. And that group of freaks who threatened us at King’s Cross that time-all of their hair, unkempt, and one of them, it was pink. And you needn’t trouble to lie to me that it was dyed.
So I knew for sure he was unnatural, almost right away. But that’s the other thing. How sickly he was when he came to us. From those exploding letters, anyone would think that I’d starved the boy, that that’s why he was runty. But he was wizened and pale when he first came to us-and whose fault was that, pray tell? I took him to Dudley’s own pediatrician first thing, you know, before I was sure what he was. Only a month younger than Dudley, and he weighed five kilos less!
Tell me whose fault that was. Tell me that! If I starved him, his own mother did too!
No, I gave him food, but the boy never had what I’d call a healthy appetite, not at all like Dudley. He only ate what he chose, and little enough of that.
We did have to send him to bed without supper, sometimes, to punish him. Of if he mouthed off at the table-he always was a cheeky one. But any time he went hungry was his own fault; he knew what to do to avoid it.
If he told people I didn’t feed him, he’s a liar. But then, he is; always has been, from the time he could talk.
Oh, the lies that boy told. First he’d go on about freaky things, babbling about flying motorcycles and brooms and colored lights and what not as though they were right there before his eyes.
I’m not saying he didn’t see all manner of queer things back there in his own world, but he was fifteen months old when he came to us! Dudley’s blue blanket with the ducks, that he carried everywhere till he was four, his favorite bear he had until five-by the time he was seven he didn’t remember a thing of either, doesn’t recognize them now when I show him them in his baby pictures. Don’t tell me a baby who couldn’t even talk right when we got him could remember anything from before!
That boy was so slow at first, I worried he was retarded too. When he came to us “Mama” and “dada” were the only words I could make out, and I couldn’t help him with that. He couldn’t even ask for food! When he cried, and he was the peevish one, I couldn’t find out if he was wet or hungry or what he wanted. My Dudley, now, could say “no” and “more” and “cookie” and “won’t” and “ball” and I don’t know what else by then, clear as day. Dudley told you what he wanted. And what he didn’t want! No problems there. His baby book, I listed every word as he learned them, until I couldn’t keep up. Not that other one.
But that boy, later, when we’d finally taught him to talk properly, made up all these stories about strange things, just as though he’d really seen them. When he couldn’t possibly have remembered any such things. But when it came to strange things he was actually doing, oh, no, “I dunno what happened.” Anything to get out of being punished. Not that it saved him. I knew whenever anything strange happened it was him doing it.
And he wouldn’t stop. No matter what we did to punish him, he wouldn’t stop. Malicious, he was; he liked upsetting decent folk too much to stop his fun.
Just like, as a baby, he wouldn’t stop his howling at night, waking up Dudley, waking up Vernon, no matter what I did. I did try, at first, even after I knew what he was, but nothing I did made any difference. That’s how he ended up in that famous cupboard. I had him in with me in the spare room at first (I would never have risked putting him in with Dudley, and Vernon needed his rest, so he couldn’t come in with us). But oh no. He’d wake and start screaming-he wasn’t wet, he wouldn’t eat, he didn’t have fever, he’d shake his head and scream harder when I asked if his tummy hurt…. The more I tried to soothe him, the worse he got.
Putting him that far away, finally, with extra insulation in the ceiling, was the only way for the family to get any rest. You try weeks of listening to screaming every night. And before you try telling me he was just crying for his parents, poor little boy, oh, no. You weren’t there; I was. He wasn’t sad; he was angry. I can tell the difference. Mad that I wouldn’t wave a wand to entertain him, no doubt, or take him flying away on a broomstick.
He was always the most spiteful little thing. And I can see that that hasn’t changed a bit, else you lot wouldn’t have been told those lies. Do you know, the first time he ever hurt himself, skinned his knee it was, when I put iodine on it, he kicked me in the face and blacked my eye? And then screamed and screamed as though I’d hurt him. I had the neighbors knocking to see what was wrong-me, a respectable woman! And then the next time he was hurt, he fought like a mad thing to keep me from helping him. That’s the kind he was. After that I knew to hold him down.
The same thing about baths-he’d scream when I tried to scrub him, scream when the suds got in his eyes, try to eat the bubbles and then scream at the taste. He’d flail about so, it took Vernon holding him down and me scrubbing to get him clean. Left to himself he’d have been coated in mud like a pig and happy with it, the dirty little thing. Now Dudley liked baths, he loved playing in the water; he looked so sweet in the tub, too. I was sad when he got too old for me to bathe him.
But that Snape boy, he had been the same way, parading his filthy hair and clothes in front of decent people. That’s why it’s unfair to criticize us about the cupboard. So it had spiders, so what? You lot like dirt and vermin; rats, toads, those disgusting owls…. My sister, even, was brought up decently, but she changed after she started associating with you lot. I know what you’re like!
You think the boy should have had a window, is that what it is? You saw what he did when he had one, even with bars on! Whatever he tells you, it was like a little bedroom. He had a proper crib in there at first, and later, a proper bed. And I kept it clean, probably cleaner than he liked, the ungrateful little thing.
And his clothes. I couldn’t believe it at first; I simply could not credit it, that any of YOU LOT would have the nerve to criticize ME about how I dressed the boy. He was ALWAYS dressed decently in boy’s clothes. ALWAYS. They were clean and they were whole, or decently mended, and they were appropriate boys’ wear, the same as Dudley’s. Is that what was wrong with them? Should I have been sending him out in my old blouses instead, or rags and tatters, like that Snape woman did? They weren’t colorful enough, eccentric enough, for you weirdoes’ taste?
So they were Dudley’s old clothes, so what? If the boy would have eaten more, they’d have fit him just fine. I was supposed to spend Vernon’s good money on new, and pander to a freak’s tastes? Yes, I can see it! Maybe a crimson and gold nightgown for the boy to wear to school, like his father wore to my wedding? Or a black cloak like a vampire, like that Snape boy flaunted when he started buying his own?
And then come to find out the boy had property, was rich even, all that time. Never thought to offer us a stipend to cover the boy’s expenses, did Dumbledore? Mind, you lot still would have complained about how I dressed the boy; I never would have bought him the outrageous getups you wear. But I would have bought him new, if it hadn’t been snatching bread from Dudley’s mouth. If only to do ourselves credit in the neighborhood. Why’d the great Dumbledore let us think the boy was a pauper, and spend OUR hard-earned money on him, if he didn’t want the boy treated like one? Tell me that!
And then you lot to be complaining about how DUDLEY treated HIM? Dudley never did a thing to him, not like the freaky things the boy’s friends did to Dudley! Sure, Dudley roughhoused with him all the time. But the boy roughhoused too; boys will be boys. The boy was normal enough that way, if no other. It’s not Dudley’s fault he’s bigger! And it’s not Dudley’s fault he’s a natural leader, like his dad! Blood will tell, you know. Sure, Dudley and his friends chased the boy. But the boy provoked them with his weirdness-kids don’t like anyone too strange, you know that. Or probably you don’t, being what you are. So trust me on this: normal kids usually do turn on one who’s strange.
But the truth is, Dudley didn’t actually treat his cousin any differently than he did other boys. He was a leader in his group, in our neighborhood, in his school, and he and his little friends did usually keep the boys who weren’t in their group in their place. They never hit girls, though, they were gentlemen. What’s wrong with that? That’s how the world works. It’s good training for later life, like the Smeltings handbook says. Keeps the boys from growing up wimps. Other boys had to learn to either join Dudley or fight him.
And the boy fought back. We didn’t make him sit there and accept it, just because Dudley was our son. We could have, after all, but that would have been a bad example to Dudley. The boy was allowed to fight back, and he did, all the time. It’s not Dudley’s fault he was bigger and a better fighter, and so he usually won. It was perfectly natural and normal; why is the boy whining about how the world works? Am I responsible for the fact that the boy got wet when it rained, too?
And as I said, we never hit him ourselves. Never once. I was afraid to, to be perfectly frank. We talked about it, you know, Vernon and I, about using corporal punishment, as it became clearer and clearer that the boy was incorrigible. Grounding him, yelling at him, sending him to bed without supper, just had no effect at all. He just shrugged our punishments off, with that defiant little glare. Or mouthed back at us.
So we talked about it. But the experts at places like St. Brutus’s say use it as correction only. Stay in control. Don’t ever hit the child in anger. And we would have. We would have. The mouth on that boy, and the way that he lied, and those abnormal, scary things he insisted on doing…. Looking up at us after he’d done them, scared of how we’d punish him, but doing them all the same. Like he looked at me the morning the Masons were to come. I knew he hadn’t DONE anything freaky that time; I could hear the boys through the kitchen window, after all. But still, saying things like that, and in public, where the neighbors could hear! And to threaten Dudley for no reason-the look on poor terrified Dudley’s face, when he came to get me! The boy only said those things to torment us. He only did those things to torment us. Like later that night, breaking the Wizard law, risking expulsion and a wand-breaking (oh yes, I knew what he risked), to try to ruin Vernon’s career and get me back for the punishment he’d practically begged for…. Oh, the malice in that boy!
If we’d let ourselves hit the boy, if we’d ever let ourselves go, we might have killed him. We really might have. We might not have been able to stop ourselves, when he did things like that. So we were careful never to touch him. We were careful!
If he had stopped just that one thing. That one thing! We never punished him for mouthing off; we never punished him for disobeying or defying us, with anything except a lecture. Anytime he did something wrong that a normal boy might have done, he never got worse than a scolding. We never punished him at all for fighting with Dudley, even when he started it; fighting is natural, after all. It was the other things. The abnormal ones. That he did and that he said. He knew that. If there’s any truth in him at all, he’ll admit it. Ask him! He was only punished severely for doing unnatural things.
If he had just stopped. But he refused to. He gloried in his freakishness. Like that awful goblin-boy. Like his father. Like my sister.
It’s just too bad it didn’t kill him like it did them.
He’d have deserved it.
And that’s God’s own truth.
*
A/N: The “book”, of course, the readers’ reactions to which set Petunia off, is Skeeter’s newest best-seller, the (highly) unauthorized biography From Cupboard to Conqueror: the True Story of the Boy Who Lived (Thrice).
Part II: The boy and the girl try to set Petunia straight.
“... oh, you'll say (you've been whispering it to me these forty years) that I’d signs enough ...,
[that I] could have known the truth if I'd wanted.
But how could I want to know it?
Tell me that.”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
“[my sister]… who has, in my mind, waited in a fury of righteousness, cleaning and polishing, all these years.” Marilyn Robinson, Housekeeping.
Closure. I snort.
But the girl had been polite enough to send me a real letter, not a dratted owl. Though probably that was only because owl letters are still being intercepted. At least she’s dressed like a normal person, a young professional at that. Not sloppy like the boy in his jeans and trainers.
If it weren’t for that wild hair, I wouldn’t have known her for a freak.
I know this is a mistake. Still, I let them in.
I look at her. What is she doing here with him? The letter just said he wanted to talk, maybe clear some things up. She blushes; she acknowledges my glare. Shame in one of them? That’s better than I expected. “I’m Hermione Granger, you know; I’m the one who wrote you. I’m one of Harry’s best friends. I’m here because… well, I thought it would be good for him to talk with you, but I didn’t want Harry to get out of hand. And also the headmistress wanted me to give you a message. So I’m sort of here to facilitate. And I’m Muggle-born; my parents are both dentists. So I thought, maybe, I could understand your background a little better.”
Well, that explains her outfit, if her parents are professionals. Still, my sister never bothered with that. This girl at least has some lingering grasp of decency.
The boy is looking at me with dislike and keeping mum. No surprises there.
I remember my manners and offer them tea. Unlike that Dumbledore, they did ask first if they could come, even if I didn’t exactly invite them. I’m glad when they accept; it lets me leave the room for a time. And then it gives us all something to do with our hands.
The girl fiddles with her teacup and looks at the boy. He doesn’t look up. He always was the rude one. The girl purses her lips and pushes her hair off her face. Then she looks at me. “Um… your letter, or whatever. It did reach Professor McGonagall-she’s the current headmistress of Hogwarts-and it was read. The overall impression it made, um, it didn’t make people in our world like you better, let’s put it that way. But there were some points you made-well, Professor McGonagall said she had had misgivings about putting Harry with you in the first place, and she thinks we-the Wizarding World, I mean-probably owe both you and Harry an apology for doing so. I said I had a message. Professor McGonagall asked me to tell you that she personally apologizes for going along with Dumbledore so readily, and for not checking on how you were doing with Harry. If she’d seen how it was for you both, she would have gone against even Dumbledore to get him removed.”
I almost drop my teacup. One of them, apologizing? For anything? The boy looks like he wants to hit something; he obviously doesn’t like the thought of me receiving an apology. I look at the girl hard. She gulps and says, “See, one of the things you wrote… about the iodine, and Harry kicking you?”
I nod. “He was a little demon.”
The girl bites her lip and says, “No. He was a little boy. A scared, hurt, little boy with strangers who he thought were mistreating him even when they were trying their best to treat him right. See, when I read that part I realized what must have happened. And I explained it to the headmistress. Because my mum and the school nurse used iodine on my scratches all the time, and it STINGS!”
I nod, confused. Of course it does.
“But see, Mrs. Dursley, how witch mothers take care of minor bumps and scratches is they wave their wand and it’s gone. Harry had never been around an adult before who couldn’t do that. So when he came to you with that scrape, he expected you to just make the blood and the pain go right away. Instead you did something that made it hurt worse. He couldn’t understand that that’s the Muggle way of making sure it wouldn’t get infected; he was just a baby. So he thought you wanted to hurt him. That’s why he kicked you and screamed. And the baths-I’ve helped Mrs. Weasley bathe Victoire. Wizard baby soap won’t go in the baby’s eyes, and it tastes good. And you don’t have to scrub to get off pitch or anything. Things like that, misunderstandings, must have happened over and over and OVER. I don’t even want to think about the first time you had to take out a splinter.”
I look at the boy, slouched sullenly on the sofa. “You’d have thought I was murdering him, the way he screamed. I never did get that first one; it got infected, and I had to take him in to have it lanced. And endure a lecture on neglecting it!” I say.
“Professor McGonagall says-see, this, this sort of placement, had never happened before. And they’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again. Everyone just assumed that you’d be in the position of, well, my mum. Or any other parent of a Muggle-born. And we’re not, wizards and witches, really any different, usually, to raise than any other kid, except that sometimes when we get really angry or scared or excited we make something strange happen. Enough that when the Hogwarts letter comes, it’s easy to believe what it says.
“But taking a toddler who’d already been raised in the magical world and sticking him with a Muggle family-the headmistress says, it’s obvious in retrospect that it’s a recipe for disaster. In fact, it’s exactly the wrong age to make such a transition. An older child could have understood why you couldn’t do things the way his parents did; a tiny infant wouldn’t already believe that all adults can do magic, and would have accepted your care instead. But a toddler-Harry must have been furious with you for months, as you kept on and kept ON doing things in Muggle ways that hurt, or were slow, or weren’t fun. He, as a baby, thought you were doing things that way to be mean to him-and you thought he was an ungrateful little monster, treating your best efforts to take care of him with anger.”
It’s true enough that the boy had seemed enraged all the time. I say, “I knew… from the way wizards always act so superior, I figured they had superior toys, too, and what-all, that the boy was missing. The one time I gave him one of Dudley’s balls to play with, he threw a tantrum when it wouldn’t roll back to him. He smashed some of Dudley’s toys, and they were supposed to be smash-proof. So we never let him mess with Dudley’s things again. But I never thought-about the iodine-how could I have known? And I couldn’t have done different if I had; I don’t have a wand, and I wasn’t about to let a child get gangrene because iodine stings!”
The girl hesitates. “But you might have-. Well. Never mind. That’s why Professor McGonagall says it was a recipe for disaster. With the benefit of hindsight. And that’s why she apologizes for never looking in on you, to see how you were doing with him.”
The boy raises his head at that and speaks for the first time. “But Dumbledore did. I mean, not himself, probably, but Mrs. Figg was a member of the order and reported to him how things were. When did she move into Magnolia Crescent?”
Arabella Figg was one of that lot? Well, that explained some things. I’d just thought she was scatty. The boy is staring at me, his face hard and angry. I try to remember. Yes, it was about then; I remember being too exhausted to take a proper interest in the new neighbor at first. “Mr. Anderson lost his job unexpectedly, and they had to move. In with their oldest boy, as I recall. And Mrs. Figg bought the place; she said she was a widow and wanted to take up gardening. It was right after you came, a few weeks, I forget exactly. It all happened quite suddenly.”
I stiffen, realizing. “So when that Dumbledore had the, the face to come into our home, attack us with our own furniture, and lecture us on how we’d treated you-he’d known all along, from the very first, and never done or said anything? He’d had a spy on us all along, and he lectured us after it was too late to change anything if we’d wanted?”
The boy looks as though he’s as happy about this as I am. He says a little jerkily, “That’s the part I don’t understand. Why he didn’t do anything, if he knew. Maybe Mrs. Figg didn’t really tell him everything.”
The girl pats his hand and says nothing.
I am fuming, still digesting this. That Arabella a spy all along. And I’d thought she was sympathetic-well, of course she made me think so. “So all those times I let her take you-she was teaching you things, eh, telling you everything, and you lying that you didn’t know!”
That wakes up the boy. “No! Stop always assuming that I’m a liar! She never-first off she’s a Squib, um, that means someone non-magical born into a magical family, so she couldn’t have taught me anything. Second off, she never-never broke her cover, I guess I mean, when she had me over. I never knew about her until the Dementors-she’s the one who called for backup, when she was helping me get Dudley home.”
I shake my head. “So Dumbledore set a spy on me, but made it one who couldn’t do anything, from your lot’s point of view? And he talked big when it was too late about not liking how I treated you, but he did nothing to stop it? That man makes no sense at all.”
The boy shakes his head in turn, miserably.
The girl says, “There’s another thing you couldn’t have known and couldn’t have done anything about if you had, but maybe you would have felt differently. His screaming at night at first? Harry, tell her about your nightmares.”
He shakes his head, hard, and looks down. She bites her lip again and says to me, “He actually heard his mother being killed, and then he was attacked himself. And he didn’t understand death, but he knew he wasn’t with his parents any more. Don’t you think it would be natural for a little boy to have nightmares at first?”
He’d listened to her die?
I look at her, not him, and snap, “What kind of fool do you take me for? Of course I thought about that. But he wasn’t crying for his mummy and daddy; he was furious! Anyone can hear the difference!”
She takes a breath. “But see, that’s the part you didn’t know. Sometimes Harry’s scar hurt. Terribly. He said it sometimes felt like his head was splitting. I think it might have been hurting then, a lot, because one of the things that made it happen was when You-Kno---Voldemort-was either thinking about Harry or having intense emotions. And he must have been thinking about Harry practically nonstop, and feeling pretty angry, right after it happened.
“So Harry must have been, just, just this baby, in terrible pain. And you didn’t do anything to help him. Of course he was furious! I don’t know if even a wizard could have done anything to help that kind of pain-I don’t remember Harry being given anything for it later-but I do know YOU couldn’t do anything at all. It’s not like baby aspirin would have helped. Only the baby would have blamed you for that, for not helping him; remember, every time he ever hurt before, his mum or dad just waved a wand and he felt better right away. So of course he was angry.”
I lift my chin and tell her, “The doctor said the scar was healing up just fine and shouldn’t hurt him.”
She takes another breath. “It’s a magical scar, Mrs. Dursley. It didn’t hurt like a regular one, only sometimes, when something set it off. I’ve seen Harry-unable to move, it hurt so bad. And I think it was probably being set off a lot at first. So he was in pain, bad pain, and you never even knew.”
“He wasn’t screaming for no reason, then, at least,” I say. “Nor for malice, like I’d thought. Not but what we all still needed our sleep, and couldn’t get it until we had soundproofing between us.”
I glare at him. What was I supposed to have done differently?
He glares back and explodes, “Why did you-why did you always think I did everything out of malice? Just because you’re that way yourself? And why did you think I was a liar? You never, ever, believed anything I said!”
I can’t believe this. I just gape at him. He’s lied, his whole life, nearly every other time he’d opened his mouth. What was there to believe?
The girl puts her hand on the boy’s arm, and he folds his arms, shutting up. He glares at me some more. I return the favor. The girl says, “Mrs. Dursley, that’s something that really didn’t make sense in your, er, letter. You sounded like you thought Harry was doing his baby magic out of spite or something. Surely you know it doesn’t work that way?”
What doesn’t work what way? I regard her suspiciously. She looks back innocently, her brow creased.
She says, “Baby magic, child magic, is accidental. It’s triggered by fear, rage, or some other extreme emotion, and it’s totally uncontrolled. Most children can’t do anything deliberately until they are ten to twelve, though they can use pre-charmed objects such as brooms much earlier than that. Whatever magic Harry did when he was little, he couldn’t help it.”
She’s lying. My sister could help it. She did it deliberately. Always. She showed me! She showed off to me, doing things that I couldn’t!
I look at the girl hard. She looks back. She says, “Why won’t you believe he couldn’t help it?”
I explode, “Because he could! They could! The first thing he did besides his hair was flying, and that’s what she did to show off! He was showing off to the other kids, and then he lied when it got him in trouble instead.”
He yells, “I was scared shitless of Dudley’s gang, and desperate to get away from them before they beat me bloody. I was trying to jump behind the rubbish bins-I thought they wouldn’t dirty themselves to go after me-and instead I suddenly found myself on the roof where they couldn’t get me! I didn’t know how-I don’t know now-how I did it! I didn’t know then that I DID do it. But you never listened-you never even asked what really happened!”
I yell back, “You knew! Not how, maybe, but you controlled it! She controlled it!”
He quiets suddenly. “I saw that in the professor’s memories.”
What professor?
“Professor Snape’s memories showed that my mum-did control it, by the time she was nine or ten. Maybe I could’ve, by then, or maybe not, but I never tried. Did you ever see me try?”
That awful boy became a professor? I knew that school was a terrible place. Who would want the likes of him teaching?
I don’t answer the boy.
He says, “I saw how it was. She showed you, her sister, privately, things she could do. Did you ever see me show off to Dudley like that?”
No, but I protected her. Dudley would have told us, Vernon and me. And we would have stopped it. Or tried. I should have stopped her then. Before it was too late. Instead I sheltered her, hid it, let her continue… until that awful goblin-boy found her, and then it was too late.
The girl says reasonably, “It’s really exceptional to have any control at all before you’re ten. Most children start developing some ability to control their magic between ten and twelve; that’s why Hogwarts starts when we’re eleven. But just like entering adolescence, some do a little earlier and some a little later. Witch baby books talk about this. Your sister must have been unusually early, and the professor too. But Harry wasn’t. I was in class with him, remember; he was one of the youngest in class, and he only started really being able to control his spells at all a couple of months after term started. I was practically the oldest in our year, and I never realized until, well, quite recently, what an advantage it gave me over everyone else, especially at first.”
The boy says more quietly, “My mum flew when she was nine or ten. I did it when I was six. And I didn’t know what I was doing. Do you really insist it’s the same?”
I don’t answer. It was the same. It must have been. She always controlled it.
Always?
I shift a little, a memory surfacing uncomfortably. That time by the river when she wandered off, and when I found her those boys had been teasing her and she was up a tree away from them. She was scared stiff up there, I remember that. Like a treed cat. I had to climb up after her to get her down, and she couldn’t tell me how she’d gotten up there.
Later on she couldn’t tell me how she flew, but she certainly did it on purpose. Always.
But that time she was scared, and confused.
We never told Mummy about it. We didn’t want to get into trouble. I was supposed to be keeping a close eye on her; she was supposed to be sticking close.
The tree, the roof-they were about the same age, that first time. If it was the same.
If the boy really couldn’t help it-but he could.
They were lying.
They must be lying. To make me feel bad.
But if the boy really couldn’t help it-then perhaps he shouldn’t have been punished like that. It would have been like punishing Dudley for his high spirits. I sometimes had to explain that to his teachers, that it would be unfair to punish Dudley for normal boyish behavior, something he really couldn’t help. If the other children would provoke him, they had only themselves to blame. He was only doing what came naturally.
If I had thought the boy couldn’t help it-would I have punished him the same? He was still being freakish, still disgracing us in front of normal people. Perhaps I still would have. Perhaps.
But perhaps I shouldn’t have.
I don’t look at the boy.
I say, “No one ever told me. That it could be accidental.” I keep my voice hard.
The girl sighs. “See, that’s the other way a real parent of a Muggle-born would be different. Like my mum, she didn’t believe in magic until the letter came, so she believed the whole time that the things I made happen were mostly accidents. In fact, at first she couldn’t even believe that they did happen. But you knew about magic, and you knew Harry was a wizard, so you knew it was him doing it. But they really were magical accidents on his part.”
Magical accidents. I narrow my eyes at the girl and say that back. “Magical accidents.”
She looks at me and cocks her head a little.
I’m on firm footing here. I ask the girl, “Did you ever have a magical accident at that school? One where you were hurt?”
She nods, looking confused.
I say, “And of course they contacted your parents to let them know exactly what had happened? Like they do when it’s a witch from a magical family? Your parents, probably, were allowed to visit you while you were recovering? Like witch parents were?”
I smile when she doesn’t want to answer.
That’s good enough for me.
“I heard my sister and that boy talking about it. But when I told our parents, those two said that they had just been winding me up. Like the time they told me first-years aren’t given bedding until they can conjure it, and lie on bare stones until then. But what I heard was true, isn’t it? ISN’T IT? When Muggle-born children are hurt, the headmaster hides it. Forges letters, even, until the girl’s recovered. Because Muggle-born parents “might not understand”. And then when she recovers, she’s trained to LIE to her parents in turn. To cover up the truth. Because if the parents knew the truth, they might try to take her back.”
I smile at the girl.
She says fiercely, “No. It’s not like that. I mean, it’s true they didn’t tell my parents when I was hurt, but you don’t understand how it was. And it was always my own fault, anyhow; I didn’t want them to know I’d been disobeying the rules!”
I smile wider. “I don’t understand? I think I do. That lot stole you, and they made sure your parents didn’t know what was what, in time to try to take you back. They twisted your mind so you lied to your own folk to defend them. To stay with them, if your family might have been worried and brought you home safely. Tell me, Missy, when was the last vacation that you spent the whole time with your own family, rather than off with wizard-born friends?”
She fidgets, and colors, and tries not to answer, but I smile at her until she gives in.
“I-but-the circumstances were unusual! The Quidditch World Cup might never be in Britain again in my lifetime, and then after that I had to help with Harry! I had to! And that’s why I had to-not tell my parents everything, in case they wanted to take me out. Harry needed my help, he always has!”
“Oh yes, the circumstances are always unusual. I saw how it works. As soon as they get to you, they start twisting you, so you don’t want to be with normal folk any more. Like that goblin-boy did-”
I cut myself off. Go back to the attack, I tell myself.
I smile again. “When’s the last time you even saw your parents, Missy?”
She flinches. I lean forward. “Eh?”
She goes white. “They’re in Australia now. Even for witches, international travel, that distance, is rather hard.”
I lean closer. “The last time?”
“Two years.”
I look at her harder. She says, “Two and a half. That Christmas.” It’s October now. Two and three-quarters, then. More.
But she’s still hiding something, the shifty, tricksy thing that she is now.
She had paled when she said Australia. I say, “You don’t have an Aussie accent, girl. How did your folks, those respectable dentists, suddenly end up on the other side of the world? Was it like Mr. Anderson, maybe, just happening to lose his job when that Dumbledore needed a house to open up in my neighborhood? Was it?”
She closes her eyes. “That’s not your business, Mrs. Dursley.”
I’m on to her. “You did it. You sent them there. They twisted you so badly you were willing to send your own folks into exile, to keep them away from you.”
She cries out, “I did it for their protection! You-Know-Who might have attacked them to get at me! I had to!”
I smile at her. “You just said it. “I did it.” Not, “I asked them to.” You did it without their permission, didn’t you? To your own parents. They don’t even want to see you anymore, do they? After whatever it was you did to them. To force them against their will.”
She drops her teacup. After a moment, she draws her wand and cleans up the spilled tea.
The little heathen.
Her hand is shaking. The boy puts his arm around her and murmurs something in her ear.
I sit back, satisfied. “And you didn’t have to, Missy. Stop lying. It was just easier. You just didn’t want to bother with telling them the truth and persuading them that your way was right. When it might not have been. You say you were in the boy’s year; then you were still a minor in the real world. Your parents would have had the legal right to stop you from whatever it was you wanted to do. You were afraid to give them the chance.”
I nod cordially at the girl, who is leaking tears and shaking. She deserves it. “You were a normal girl once, probably a decent enough one, and now you’re one of them. That’s what they do. They steal children, and twist them to their side, and never give them back. That’s what they did with her.”
The girl looks up sharply at that. The inward-looking mask of misery drops away, replaced with a look first of enlightenment, then of calculation.
I try to think what I might have said, to make the girl change like that.
The girl says, very softly, “What was it that they did with her?”
I shouldn’t say it. I’ve never said it.
Saying it makes it true.
And it is true.
I whisper, “They stole her, and they changed her, and they never gave her back. And then they killed her, and left that-that changeling-in her place.”
The boy says, “Wh-?”, but the girl interrupts him, putting her hand on his arm again. “She-your sister-is honored in the Wizarding World. She has a memorial, even. Have you ever visited it? Or her grave?”
I stop trying to figure out what her freakish mind is calculating. I stare at the girl. “Her grave? Witches are buried like Christian folk? No one ever said anything about that. That Dumbledore, he never wrote anything about a grave. Or a service, or anything. Or about letting her come back to us to be buried. I figured that there was nothing left. Or that you lot refused to do that. Let ravens or wolves eat the bodies rather than let normal folk bury them. Or use them. Something sick and freakish like that.”
The boy looks sick and the girl bristles indignantly. “Witches are Christian folk too! Well, I mean, some of us are. I think the Patils are Hindi or something, and Anthony Goldstein is observant Jewish. I’ve seen him with those fringe things. And some people aren’t anything, of course. But yes, your sister’s buried in the graveyard in Godric’s Hollow, C of E, and the same graveyard as Mug - as everyone else from the village. It’s wizards and M-regular people all together in there. Harry’s been to visit the grave. He left flowers.”
She hesitates, and adds, “If you wanted to go, we could take you there. Right now, even. Or I could give you directions, if you’d rather go there using, um, more conventional transportation.”
I look away from them, out the window. There’s nothing out there. Only the dusty light of late afternoon. That boy and girl have been wasting my time for too long now.
I should never have let them in.
I put down my empty teacup, gathering myself to get rid of them.
I’m too slow.
The girl says, “Would you like us to take you there? Right now?”
I nod stiffly. Yes, I would. I keep my face hard. Does she think this makes up for anything?
Their freak way of traveling makes me feel sick, and I hate having to let the girl touch me. But it’s instant, I’ll give them that. We’re in the shadow of a kissing gate, and then they lead me to a grave.
I look at the stone and I can’t help it, I laugh myself sick. The children can’t even see it; they just look at me.
Worried. Like what’s wrong is me.
Finally I stop laughing enough to tell them, “Not even her own stone. Not even her own name on it. Doesn’t that just say everything?”
The boy looks more confused. The girl, though, looks at the stone and flinches. Then she taps it with her wand. Now the one side reads Lily Evans Potter.
So magic is good for something, after all.
The children have drawn back a bit; do they think I’ll cry?
She was just a freak. She left her family to become a freak, and it killed her. She deserved it.
The boy says, “Hermione, what’s a changeling? I can’t remember.”
The girl answers, “A changeling… that’s just a Muggle superstition, Harry. In their folklore, it’s when the Good Folk steal a human child and leave a construct, a non-human thing, to take its place.”
And suddenly the boy is running at me, grabbing me, shaking me. The girl tries to pull him off me, but he pays no heed. That unnatural hair, his father’s, waves around his contorted face. But the eyes are hers, my sister’s, narrowed to slits. Like when she’s about to go off into one of her screaming tantrums.
And sure enough, the boy starts screaming.
“IT ISN’T TRUE! I wasn’t a changeling! I wasn’t! I was HUMAN! I AM human!”
The boy is spurting tears now, still shaking me. Like my sister at her finest.
He’ll kick me next.
“I AM human!” the boy insists. “I am, I am, I AM!!!”
I look at him, Lily’s child, screeching in a tantrum.
And he is.
*
A/N: From Wikipedia, on how to identify changelings: “Their hair is hopelessly tangled, no matter how many times you brush it, and grows very fast. It is said that if you cut a changeling's hair, it will have grown back the next morning…. Their eyes are earth colors, green or brown. They also grow slower than other humans. Compared to other children, Changelings tend to be extremely eccentric in personality and in clothing choices. As young adults, their strange traits will become harder and harder to conceal.”
And the other thing that’s known is that “if a human child was taken …, the parents could force the return of the [human] child by treating the changeling cruelly, using methods such as whipping or even inserting it in a heated oven. In at least one case, a woman was taken to court for having killed her child in an oven.”
When I was working on my “Defense of the Dursleys” essay, the last thing to slot into place was the rather abrupt realization that Petunia would have had strong reason to assume that Harry’s magic use was deliberate.
And I thought, “But that just turns everything around. If Petunia truly believes that Harry has, all along, been doing magic deliberately just to spite her and then lying about it, what kind of monstrous creature must Harry seem to her…? It’s like that reversal C. S. Lewis uses in Till We Have Faces, that the jealous sister couldn’t actually see Psyche’s magical palace….
“Oh.”
A changeling, you recall, is normally left in the place of a treasured child.
Summary: Some have compared the opening chapters of Harry Potter to the Cinderella story. But Petunia is living out a much older, darker tale.
“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words.” C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
A/N: I challenged readers of my essay on the Dursleys who thought Petunia was abusive to try to convince HER, not me, that she should have treated the boy differently. No one took me up on it. Well, as they say, if you want a job done right….
But first, someone has to finally hear Petunia. The world looking out from Petunia’s eyes is a narrow, nasty, mean sort of place. Sorry about that; not something I can alter. But please don’t give up after Part I; it’s not meant to stand alone without Part II.
*
Part I: Petunia sets the record straight about the boy.
“She stopped to draw a deep breath and then went ranting on. It seemed she had been wanting to say all this for years.” J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
“The complaint was the answer.” C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
It started with that blizzard of owls. Like when that, that school was harassing us about the boy. Except these were worse, even; these were all carrying those red exploding letters.
Language I’d never been subjected to in my life. Language I’d never heard in my life!
“Muggle b-ch” was the least of it.
They all seemed to think that Vernon and I had abused the boy.
We never hit him! Not once!
(Though that one time I raised a frying pan to him, I do admit. But I stopped myself with just a swing, though the boy had asked for worse. And Vernon never did that much, just yelled and pushed. Where’s his credit for his restraint, eh, when the boy might have been the better for a good beating? Certainly we thought so at the time. But there were things we couldn’t bring ourselves to do. Or let ourselves do. Even when we thought maybe we should.)
And those dratted owls bit, and left feathers and droppings. I suppose you freaks think that sort of thing is funny to do to a respectable woman.
After three days of being subjected to almost non-stop screaming and owl pellets, I awoke to blessed silence. Then a single bird came, and its letter read,
“Dear Mrs. Dursley:
Your nephew, Mr. Potter, has requested that the Ministry of Magic intercept all Wizarding mail addressed to you. Please send by return owl a list of correspondents whose letters you wish forwarded to you. (Should there be none, no reply is necessary.)
Sincerely,
Richendis Malaprop
Department of Magical Communications”
Well, of course there were none. What kind of fool would think otherwise?
That should have been the end of it. But the whole thing made me burn. It shouldn’t have; I shouldn’t care what you freaks think. But if there’s one thing I’ve always hated, it’s injustice. People should get what they deserve. I think that way; I can’t help it. Vernon used to tease me for it, call me his little idealist. No need to tell me the world doesn’t really work that way; I’m not a fool. But I have my feelings.
Not that I had ever expected to be thanked or anything, oh no. And good thing I didn’t! But instead, for there to be some book out there, spouting lies about Vernon and me… Even though only you freaks will ever read the lies, I want to set the record straight.
So I’m writing this. Even though I can never show it to anyone normal. And no one in your world, that abnormal one, will ever care what a ‘Muggle’ says, no matter that it’s the truth.
But at least someone, sometime, will have dared to tell the truth to you lot. However little you listened.
Dumbledore the great. That’s how everyone there, in your world, talks about him. My sister did too, you know-I heard all about her headmaster, how kind he was, how wise, what a genius.
And I knew that she and that wastrel husband of hers were following him, in some sort of in-fight among you freaks. Do your freak history books mention that that’s what killed my parents? They were only Muggles, so probably not. They were targeted as her parents, my sister’s, that’s all I know for sure. Best not to say the rest of what I think, even now.
And following him killed her. He told me so outright, that Dumbledore. He told me that she and her husband were killed by the other side, and their baby attacked to boot. But my sister sacrificed herself to save the baby, and for some freakish reason, some magical reason, that made it so those other freaks couldn’t touch the baby just then. But they’d try again. And Dumbledore the Great decided he couldn’t be bothered to protect his followers’ baby himself, oh no. Instead, he put a spell on the boy that so long as he lived with his mother’s blood kin, the other side couldn’t touch him.
That meant me and Dudley.
The boy had to live with us, or die.
That’s what Dumbledore told me. Except he didn’t have the face actually to tell me that he’d gotten my last kin killed, was dumping an orphan on me, and had set it up so the orphan would be murdered if I wouldn’t raise it with my own son.
He left a letter. In the middle of the night. With the baby. That’s what I found, a letter and a baby, on my doorstep when I went out with the bottles. On my doorstep. In November.
And the baby none the worse for it, mind. Any normal child would have caught its death or wandered off or something, but this one, you’d have thought being left about like a parcel on a cold night was what it liked. It only started screaming when I brought it indoors and tried to clean it up.
Well, I kept it, of course. I’m a Christian woman, a decent woman, not like you lot; I’m not going to turn a child out to die. That Dumbledore wrote, “I am sure that I may depend on you to do the right thing.” As I’m not one of you lot, he could.
For a day or two I even hoped that the boy might be normal. Despite his parentage, despite that letter. He was puny and peevish, to be sure, a ratty little thing, not at all like Dudley; but what made me finally lose all hope was that hair. Dudley’s was just like a little angel’s, you know; you slicked it down and there it was. The boy’s, though, was absolutely uncontrollable. And worse, after just a few days I could see it was unnatural, how fast it grew. It scared me.
I’d figured that part out, you see-that you can tell by the hair, even more than the clothes. Vernon never did figure that one; he just looked at how you lot dressed. But I spotted it: the ones who have the freakishness in them the worst, you all have hair that’s unnatural some way. His father’s was just like the boy’s, all over the place, and that Snape boy’s was awful in a different way. His mother’s the same. And Dumbledore, when I finally saw him-no normal, decent man could grow hair that long. And that group of freaks who threatened us at King’s Cross that time-all of their hair, unkempt, and one of them, it was pink. And you needn’t trouble to lie to me that it was dyed.
So I knew for sure he was unnatural, almost right away. But that’s the other thing. How sickly he was when he came to us. From those exploding letters, anyone would think that I’d starved the boy, that that’s why he was runty. But he was wizened and pale when he first came to us-and whose fault was that, pray tell? I took him to Dudley’s own pediatrician first thing, you know, before I was sure what he was. Only a month younger than Dudley, and he weighed five kilos less!
Tell me whose fault that was. Tell me that! If I starved him, his own mother did too!
No, I gave him food, but the boy never had what I’d call a healthy appetite, not at all like Dudley. He only ate what he chose, and little enough of that.
We did have to send him to bed without supper, sometimes, to punish him. Of if he mouthed off at the table-he always was a cheeky one. But any time he went hungry was his own fault; he knew what to do to avoid it.
If he told people I didn’t feed him, he’s a liar. But then, he is; always has been, from the time he could talk.
Oh, the lies that boy told. First he’d go on about freaky things, babbling about flying motorcycles and brooms and colored lights and what not as though they were right there before his eyes.
I’m not saying he didn’t see all manner of queer things back there in his own world, but he was fifteen months old when he came to us! Dudley’s blue blanket with the ducks, that he carried everywhere till he was four, his favorite bear he had until five-by the time he was seven he didn’t remember a thing of either, doesn’t recognize them now when I show him them in his baby pictures. Don’t tell me a baby who couldn’t even talk right when we got him could remember anything from before!
That boy was so slow at first, I worried he was retarded too. When he came to us “Mama” and “dada” were the only words I could make out, and I couldn’t help him with that. He couldn’t even ask for food! When he cried, and he was the peevish one, I couldn’t find out if he was wet or hungry or what he wanted. My Dudley, now, could say “no” and “more” and “cookie” and “won’t” and “ball” and I don’t know what else by then, clear as day. Dudley told you what he wanted. And what he didn’t want! No problems there. His baby book, I listed every word as he learned them, until I couldn’t keep up. Not that other one.
But that boy, later, when we’d finally taught him to talk properly, made up all these stories about strange things, just as though he’d really seen them. When he couldn’t possibly have remembered any such things. But when it came to strange things he was actually doing, oh, no, “I dunno what happened.” Anything to get out of being punished. Not that it saved him. I knew whenever anything strange happened it was him doing it.
And he wouldn’t stop. No matter what we did to punish him, he wouldn’t stop. Malicious, he was; he liked upsetting decent folk too much to stop his fun.
Just like, as a baby, he wouldn’t stop his howling at night, waking up Dudley, waking up Vernon, no matter what I did. I did try, at first, even after I knew what he was, but nothing I did made any difference. That’s how he ended up in that famous cupboard. I had him in with me in the spare room at first (I would never have risked putting him in with Dudley, and Vernon needed his rest, so he couldn’t come in with us). But oh no. He’d wake and start screaming-he wasn’t wet, he wouldn’t eat, he didn’t have fever, he’d shake his head and scream harder when I asked if his tummy hurt…. The more I tried to soothe him, the worse he got.
Putting him that far away, finally, with extra insulation in the ceiling, was the only way for the family to get any rest. You try weeks of listening to screaming every night. And before you try telling me he was just crying for his parents, poor little boy, oh, no. You weren’t there; I was. He wasn’t sad; he was angry. I can tell the difference. Mad that I wouldn’t wave a wand to entertain him, no doubt, or take him flying away on a broomstick.
He was always the most spiteful little thing. And I can see that that hasn’t changed a bit, else you lot wouldn’t have been told those lies. Do you know, the first time he ever hurt himself, skinned his knee it was, when I put iodine on it, he kicked me in the face and blacked my eye? And then screamed and screamed as though I’d hurt him. I had the neighbors knocking to see what was wrong-me, a respectable woman! And then the next time he was hurt, he fought like a mad thing to keep me from helping him. That’s the kind he was. After that I knew to hold him down.
The same thing about baths-he’d scream when I tried to scrub him, scream when the suds got in his eyes, try to eat the bubbles and then scream at the taste. He’d flail about so, it took Vernon holding him down and me scrubbing to get him clean. Left to himself he’d have been coated in mud like a pig and happy with it, the dirty little thing. Now Dudley liked baths, he loved playing in the water; he looked so sweet in the tub, too. I was sad when he got too old for me to bathe him.
But that Snape boy, he had been the same way, parading his filthy hair and clothes in front of decent people. That’s why it’s unfair to criticize us about the cupboard. So it had spiders, so what? You lot like dirt and vermin; rats, toads, those disgusting owls…. My sister, even, was brought up decently, but she changed after she started associating with you lot. I know what you’re like!
You think the boy should have had a window, is that what it is? You saw what he did when he had one, even with bars on! Whatever he tells you, it was like a little bedroom. He had a proper crib in there at first, and later, a proper bed. And I kept it clean, probably cleaner than he liked, the ungrateful little thing.
And his clothes. I couldn’t believe it at first; I simply could not credit it, that any of YOU LOT would have the nerve to criticize ME about how I dressed the boy. He was ALWAYS dressed decently in boy’s clothes. ALWAYS. They were clean and they were whole, or decently mended, and they were appropriate boys’ wear, the same as Dudley’s. Is that what was wrong with them? Should I have been sending him out in my old blouses instead, or rags and tatters, like that Snape woman did? They weren’t colorful enough, eccentric enough, for you weirdoes’ taste?
So they were Dudley’s old clothes, so what? If the boy would have eaten more, they’d have fit him just fine. I was supposed to spend Vernon’s good money on new, and pander to a freak’s tastes? Yes, I can see it! Maybe a crimson and gold nightgown for the boy to wear to school, like his father wore to my wedding? Or a black cloak like a vampire, like that Snape boy flaunted when he started buying his own?
And then come to find out the boy had property, was rich even, all that time. Never thought to offer us a stipend to cover the boy’s expenses, did Dumbledore? Mind, you lot still would have complained about how I dressed the boy; I never would have bought him the outrageous getups you wear. But I would have bought him new, if it hadn’t been snatching bread from Dudley’s mouth. If only to do ourselves credit in the neighborhood. Why’d the great Dumbledore let us think the boy was a pauper, and spend OUR hard-earned money on him, if he didn’t want the boy treated like one? Tell me that!
And then you lot to be complaining about how DUDLEY treated HIM? Dudley never did a thing to him, not like the freaky things the boy’s friends did to Dudley! Sure, Dudley roughhoused with him all the time. But the boy roughhoused too; boys will be boys. The boy was normal enough that way, if no other. It’s not Dudley’s fault he’s bigger! And it’s not Dudley’s fault he’s a natural leader, like his dad! Blood will tell, you know. Sure, Dudley and his friends chased the boy. But the boy provoked them with his weirdness-kids don’t like anyone too strange, you know that. Or probably you don’t, being what you are. So trust me on this: normal kids usually do turn on one who’s strange.
But the truth is, Dudley didn’t actually treat his cousin any differently than he did other boys. He was a leader in his group, in our neighborhood, in his school, and he and his little friends did usually keep the boys who weren’t in their group in their place. They never hit girls, though, they were gentlemen. What’s wrong with that? That’s how the world works. It’s good training for later life, like the Smeltings handbook says. Keeps the boys from growing up wimps. Other boys had to learn to either join Dudley or fight him.
And the boy fought back. We didn’t make him sit there and accept it, just because Dudley was our son. We could have, after all, but that would have been a bad example to Dudley. The boy was allowed to fight back, and he did, all the time. It’s not Dudley’s fault he was bigger and a better fighter, and so he usually won. It was perfectly natural and normal; why is the boy whining about how the world works? Am I responsible for the fact that the boy got wet when it rained, too?
And as I said, we never hit him ourselves. Never once. I was afraid to, to be perfectly frank. We talked about it, you know, Vernon and I, about using corporal punishment, as it became clearer and clearer that the boy was incorrigible. Grounding him, yelling at him, sending him to bed without supper, just had no effect at all. He just shrugged our punishments off, with that defiant little glare. Or mouthed back at us.
So we talked about it. But the experts at places like St. Brutus’s say use it as correction only. Stay in control. Don’t ever hit the child in anger. And we would have. We would have. The mouth on that boy, and the way that he lied, and those abnormal, scary things he insisted on doing…. Looking up at us after he’d done them, scared of how we’d punish him, but doing them all the same. Like he looked at me the morning the Masons were to come. I knew he hadn’t DONE anything freaky that time; I could hear the boys through the kitchen window, after all. But still, saying things like that, and in public, where the neighbors could hear! And to threaten Dudley for no reason-the look on poor terrified Dudley’s face, when he came to get me! The boy only said those things to torment us. He only did those things to torment us. Like later that night, breaking the Wizard law, risking expulsion and a wand-breaking (oh yes, I knew what he risked), to try to ruin Vernon’s career and get me back for the punishment he’d practically begged for…. Oh, the malice in that boy!
If we’d let ourselves hit the boy, if we’d ever let ourselves go, we might have killed him. We really might have. We might not have been able to stop ourselves, when he did things like that. So we were careful never to touch him. We were careful!
If he had stopped just that one thing. That one thing! We never punished him for mouthing off; we never punished him for disobeying or defying us, with anything except a lecture. Anytime he did something wrong that a normal boy might have done, he never got worse than a scolding. We never punished him at all for fighting with Dudley, even when he started it; fighting is natural, after all. It was the other things. The abnormal ones. That he did and that he said. He knew that. If there’s any truth in him at all, he’ll admit it. Ask him! He was only punished severely for doing unnatural things.
If he had just stopped. But he refused to. He gloried in his freakishness. Like that awful goblin-boy. Like his father. Like my sister.
It’s just too bad it didn’t kill him like it did them.
He’d have deserved it.
And that’s God’s own truth.
*
A/N: The “book”, of course, the readers’ reactions to which set Petunia off, is Skeeter’s newest best-seller, the (highly) unauthorized biography From Cupboard to Conqueror: the True Story of the Boy Who Lived (Thrice).
Part II: The boy and the girl try to set Petunia straight.
“... oh, you'll say (you've been whispering it to me these forty years) that I’d signs enough ...,
[that I] could have known the truth if I'd wanted.
But how could I want to know it?
Tell me that.”
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
“[my sister]… who has, in my mind, waited in a fury of righteousness, cleaning and polishing, all these years.” Marilyn Robinson, Housekeeping.
Closure. I snort.
But the girl had been polite enough to send me a real letter, not a dratted owl. Though probably that was only because owl letters are still being intercepted. At least she’s dressed like a normal person, a young professional at that. Not sloppy like the boy in his jeans and trainers.
If it weren’t for that wild hair, I wouldn’t have known her for a freak.
I know this is a mistake. Still, I let them in.
I look at her. What is she doing here with him? The letter just said he wanted to talk, maybe clear some things up. She blushes; she acknowledges my glare. Shame in one of them? That’s better than I expected. “I’m Hermione Granger, you know; I’m the one who wrote you. I’m one of Harry’s best friends. I’m here because… well, I thought it would be good for him to talk with you, but I didn’t want Harry to get out of hand. And also the headmistress wanted me to give you a message. So I’m sort of here to facilitate. And I’m Muggle-born; my parents are both dentists. So I thought, maybe, I could understand your background a little better.”
Well, that explains her outfit, if her parents are professionals. Still, my sister never bothered with that. This girl at least has some lingering grasp of decency.
The boy is looking at me with dislike and keeping mum. No surprises there.
I remember my manners and offer them tea. Unlike that Dumbledore, they did ask first if they could come, even if I didn’t exactly invite them. I’m glad when they accept; it lets me leave the room for a time. And then it gives us all something to do with our hands.
The girl fiddles with her teacup and looks at the boy. He doesn’t look up. He always was the rude one. The girl purses her lips and pushes her hair off her face. Then she looks at me. “Um… your letter, or whatever. It did reach Professor McGonagall-she’s the current headmistress of Hogwarts-and it was read. The overall impression it made, um, it didn’t make people in our world like you better, let’s put it that way. But there were some points you made-well, Professor McGonagall said she had had misgivings about putting Harry with you in the first place, and she thinks we-the Wizarding World, I mean-probably owe both you and Harry an apology for doing so. I said I had a message. Professor McGonagall asked me to tell you that she personally apologizes for going along with Dumbledore so readily, and for not checking on how you were doing with Harry. If she’d seen how it was for you both, she would have gone against even Dumbledore to get him removed.”
I almost drop my teacup. One of them, apologizing? For anything? The boy looks like he wants to hit something; he obviously doesn’t like the thought of me receiving an apology. I look at the girl hard. She gulps and says, “See, one of the things you wrote… about the iodine, and Harry kicking you?”
I nod. “He was a little demon.”
The girl bites her lip and says, “No. He was a little boy. A scared, hurt, little boy with strangers who he thought were mistreating him even when they were trying their best to treat him right. See, when I read that part I realized what must have happened. And I explained it to the headmistress. Because my mum and the school nurse used iodine on my scratches all the time, and it STINGS!”
I nod, confused. Of course it does.
“But see, Mrs. Dursley, how witch mothers take care of minor bumps and scratches is they wave their wand and it’s gone. Harry had never been around an adult before who couldn’t do that. So when he came to you with that scrape, he expected you to just make the blood and the pain go right away. Instead you did something that made it hurt worse. He couldn’t understand that that’s the Muggle way of making sure it wouldn’t get infected; he was just a baby. So he thought you wanted to hurt him. That’s why he kicked you and screamed. And the baths-I’ve helped Mrs. Weasley bathe Victoire. Wizard baby soap won’t go in the baby’s eyes, and it tastes good. And you don’t have to scrub to get off pitch or anything. Things like that, misunderstandings, must have happened over and over and OVER. I don’t even want to think about the first time you had to take out a splinter.”
I look at the boy, slouched sullenly on the sofa. “You’d have thought I was murdering him, the way he screamed. I never did get that first one; it got infected, and I had to take him in to have it lanced. And endure a lecture on neglecting it!” I say.
“Professor McGonagall says-see, this, this sort of placement, had never happened before. And they’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again. Everyone just assumed that you’d be in the position of, well, my mum. Or any other parent of a Muggle-born. And we’re not, wizards and witches, really any different, usually, to raise than any other kid, except that sometimes when we get really angry or scared or excited we make something strange happen. Enough that when the Hogwarts letter comes, it’s easy to believe what it says.
“But taking a toddler who’d already been raised in the magical world and sticking him with a Muggle family-the headmistress says, it’s obvious in retrospect that it’s a recipe for disaster. In fact, it’s exactly the wrong age to make such a transition. An older child could have understood why you couldn’t do things the way his parents did; a tiny infant wouldn’t already believe that all adults can do magic, and would have accepted your care instead. But a toddler-Harry must have been furious with you for months, as you kept on and kept ON doing things in Muggle ways that hurt, or were slow, or weren’t fun. He, as a baby, thought you were doing things that way to be mean to him-and you thought he was an ungrateful little monster, treating your best efforts to take care of him with anger.”
It’s true enough that the boy had seemed enraged all the time. I say, “I knew… from the way wizards always act so superior, I figured they had superior toys, too, and what-all, that the boy was missing. The one time I gave him one of Dudley’s balls to play with, he threw a tantrum when it wouldn’t roll back to him. He smashed some of Dudley’s toys, and they were supposed to be smash-proof. So we never let him mess with Dudley’s things again. But I never thought-about the iodine-how could I have known? And I couldn’t have done different if I had; I don’t have a wand, and I wasn’t about to let a child get gangrene because iodine stings!”
The girl hesitates. “But you might have-. Well. Never mind. That’s why Professor McGonagall says it was a recipe for disaster. With the benefit of hindsight. And that’s why she apologizes for never looking in on you, to see how you were doing with him.”
The boy raises his head at that and speaks for the first time. “But Dumbledore did. I mean, not himself, probably, but Mrs. Figg was a member of the order and reported to him how things were. When did she move into Magnolia Crescent?”
Arabella Figg was one of that lot? Well, that explained some things. I’d just thought she was scatty. The boy is staring at me, his face hard and angry. I try to remember. Yes, it was about then; I remember being too exhausted to take a proper interest in the new neighbor at first. “Mr. Anderson lost his job unexpectedly, and they had to move. In with their oldest boy, as I recall. And Mrs. Figg bought the place; she said she was a widow and wanted to take up gardening. It was right after you came, a few weeks, I forget exactly. It all happened quite suddenly.”
I stiffen, realizing. “So when that Dumbledore had the, the face to come into our home, attack us with our own furniture, and lecture us on how we’d treated you-he’d known all along, from the very first, and never done or said anything? He’d had a spy on us all along, and he lectured us after it was too late to change anything if we’d wanted?”
The boy looks as though he’s as happy about this as I am. He says a little jerkily, “That’s the part I don’t understand. Why he didn’t do anything, if he knew. Maybe Mrs. Figg didn’t really tell him everything.”
The girl pats his hand and says nothing.
I am fuming, still digesting this. That Arabella a spy all along. And I’d thought she was sympathetic-well, of course she made me think so. “So all those times I let her take you-she was teaching you things, eh, telling you everything, and you lying that you didn’t know!”
That wakes up the boy. “No! Stop always assuming that I’m a liar! She never-first off she’s a Squib, um, that means someone non-magical born into a magical family, so she couldn’t have taught me anything. Second off, she never-never broke her cover, I guess I mean, when she had me over. I never knew about her until the Dementors-she’s the one who called for backup, when she was helping me get Dudley home.”
I shake my head. “So Dumbledore set a spy on me, but made it one who couldn’t do anything, from your lot’s point of view? And he talked big when it was too late about not liking how I treated you, but he did nothing to stop it? That man makes no sense at all.”
The boy shakes his head in turn, miserably.
The girl says, “There’s another thing you couldn’t have known and couldn’t have done anything about if you had, but maybe you would have felt differently. His screaming at night at first? Harry, tell her about your nightmares.”
He shakes his head, hard, and looks down. She bites her lip again and says to me, “He actually heard his mother being killed, and then he was attacked himself. And he didn’t understand death, but he knew he wasn’t with his parents any more. Don’t you think it would be natural for a little boy to have nightmares at first?”
He’d listened to her die?
I look at her, not him, and snap, “What kind of fool do you take me for? Of course I thought about that. But he wasn’t crying for his mummy and daddy; he was furious! Anyone can hear the difference!”
She takes a breath. “But see, that’s the part you didn’t know. Sometimes Harry’s scar hurt. Terribly. He said it sometimes felt like his head was splitting. I think it might have been hurting then, a lot, because one of the things that made it happen was when You-Kno---Voldemort-was either thinking about Harry or having intense emotions. And he must have been thinking about Harry practically nonstop, and feeling pretty angry, right after it happened.
“So Harry must have been, just, just this baby, in terrible pain. And you didn’t do anything to help him. Of course he was furious! I don’t know if even a wizard could have done anything to help that kind of pain-I don’t remember Harry being given anything for it later-but I do know YOU couldn’t do anything at all. It’s not like baby aspirin would have helped. Only the baby would have blamed you for that, for not helping him; remember, every time he ever hurt before, his mum or dad just waved a wand and he felt better right away. So of course he was angry.”
I lift my chin and tell her, “The doctor said the scar was healing up just fine and shouldn’t hurt him.”
She takes another breath. “It’s a magical scar, Mrs. Dursley. It didn’t hurt like a regular one, only sometimes, when something set it off. I’ve seen Harry-unable to move, it hurt so bad. And I think it was probably being set off a lot at first. So he was in pain, bad pain, and you never even knew.”
“He wasn’t screaming for no reason, then, at least,” I say. “Nor for malice, like I’d thought. Not but what we all still needed our sleep, and couldn’t get it until we had soundproofing between us.”
I glare at him. What was I supposed to have done differently?
He glares back and explodes, “Why did you-why did you always think I did everything out of malice? Just because you’re that way yourself? And why did you think I was a liar? You never, ever, believed anything I said!”
I can’t believe this. I just gape at him. He’s lied, his whole life, nearly every other time he’d opened his mouth. What was there to believe?
The girl puts her hand on the boy’s arm, and he folds his arms, shutting up. He glares at me some more. I return the favor. The girl says, “Mrs. Dursley, that’s something that really didn’t make sense in your, er, letter. You sounded like you thought Harry was doing his baby magic out of spite or something. Surely you know it doesn’t work that way?”
What doesn’t work what way? I regard her suspiciously. She looks back innocently, her brow creased.
She says, “Baby magic, child magic, is accidental. It’s triggered by fear, rage, or some other extreme emotion, and it’s totally uncontrolled. Most children can’t do anything deliberately until they are ten to twelve, though they can use pre-charmed objects such as brooms much earlier than that. Whatever magic Harry did when he was little, he couldn’t help it.”
She’s lying. My sister could help it. She did it deliberately. Always. She showed me! She showed off to me, doing things that I couldn’t!
I look at the girl hard. She looks back. She says, “Why won’t you believe he couldn’t help it?”
I explode, “Because he could! They could! The first thing he did besides his hair was flying, and that’s what she did to show off! He was showing off to the other kids, and then he lied when it got him in trouble instead.”
He yells, “I was scared shitless of Dudley’s gang, and desperate to get away from them before they beat me bloody. I was trying to jump behind the rubbish bins-I thought they wouldn’t dirty themselves to go after me-and instead I suddenly found myself on the roof where they couldn’t get me! I didn’t know how-I don’t know now-how I did it! I didn’t know then that I DID do it. But you never listened-you never even asked what really happened!”
I yell back, “You knew! Not how, maybe, but you controlled it! She controlled it!”
He quiets suddenly. “I saw that in the professor’s memories.”
What professor?
“Professor Snape’s memories showed that my mum-did control it, by the time she was nine or ten. Maybe I could’ve, by then, or maybe not, but I never tried. Did you ever see me try?”
That awful boy became a professor? I knew that school was a terrible place. Who would want the likes of him teaching?
I don’t answer the boy.
He says, “I saw how it was. She showed you, her sister, privately, things she could do. Did you ever see me show off to Dudley like that?”
No, but I protected her. Dudley would have told us, Vernon and me. And we would have stopped it. Or tried. I should have stopped her then. Before it was too late. Instead I sheltered her, hid it, let her continue… until that awful goblin-boy found her, and then it was too late.
The girl says reasonably, “It’s really exceptional to have any control at all before you’re ten. Most children start developing some ability to control their magic between ten and twelve; that’s why Hogwarts starts when we’re eleven. But just like entering adolescence, some do a little earlier and some a little later. Witch baby books talk about this. Your sister must have been unusually early, and the professor too. But Harry wasn’t. I was in class with him, remember; he was one of the youngest in class, and he only started really being able to control his spells at all a couple of months after term started. I was practically the oldest in our year, and I never realized until, well, quite recently, what an advantage it gave me over everyone else, especially at first.”
The boy says more quietly, “My mum flew when she was nine or ten. I did it when I was six. And I didn’t know what I was doing. Do you really insist it’s the same?”
I don’t answer. It was the same. It must have been. She always controlled it.
Always?
I shift a little, a memory surfacing uncomfortably. That time by the river when she wandered off, and when I found her those boys had been teasing her and she was up a tree away from them. She was scared stiff up there, I remember that. Like a treed cat. I had to climb up after her to get her down, and she couldn’t tell me how she’d gotten up there.
Later on she couldn’t tell me how she flew, but she certainly did it on purpose. Always.
But that time she was scared, and confused.
We never told Mummy about it. We didn’t want to get into trouble. I was supposed to be keeping a close eye on her; she was supposed to be sticking close.
The tree, the roof-they were about the same age, that first time. If it was the same.
If the boy really couldn’t help it-but he could.
They were lying.
They must be lying. To make me feel bad.
But if the boy really couldn’t help it-then perhaps he shouldn’t have been punished like that. It would have been like punishing Dudley for his high spirits. I sometimes had to explain that to his teachers, that it would be unfair to punish Dudley for normal boyish behavior, something he really couldn’t help. If the other children would provoke him, they had only themselves to blame. He was only doing what came naturally.
If I had thought the boy couldn’t help it-would I have punished him the same? He was still being freakish, still disgracing us in front of normal people. Perhaps I still would have. Perhaps.
But perhaps I shouldn’t have.
I don’t look at the boy.
I say, “No one ever told me. That it could be accidental.” I keep my voice hard.
The girl sighs. “See, that’s the other way a real parent of a Muggle-born would be different. Like my mum, she didn’t believe in magic until the letter came, so she believed the whole time that the things I made happen were mostly accidents. In fact, at first she couldn’t even believe that they did happen. But you knew about magic, and you knew Harry was a wizard, so you knew it was him doing it. But they really were magical accidents on his part.”
Magical accidents. I narrow my eyes at the girl and say that back. “Magical accidents.”
She looks at me and cocks her head a little.
I’m on firm footing here. I ask the girl, “Did you ever have a magical accident at that school? One where you were hurt?”
She nods, looking confused.
I say, “And of course they contacted your parents to let them know exactly what had happened? Like they do when it’s a witch from a magical family? Your parents, probably, were allowed to visit you while you were recovering? Like witch parents were?”
I smile when she doesn’t want to answer.
That’s good enough for me.
“I heard my sister and that boy talking about it. But when I told our parents, those two said that they had just been winding me up. Like the time they told me first-years aren’t given bedding until they can conjure it, and lie on bare stones until then. But what I heard was true, isn’t it? ISN’T IT? When Muggle-born children are hurt, the headmaster hides it. Forges letters, even, until the girl’s recovered. Because Muggle-born parents “might not understand”. And then when she recovers, she’s trained to LIE to her parents in turn. To cover up the truth. Because if the parents knew the truth, they might try to take her back.”
I smile at the girl.
She says fiercely, “No. It’s not like that. I mean, it’s true they didn’t tell my parents when I was hurt, but you don’t understand how it was. And it was always my own fault, anyhow; I didn’t want them to know I’d been disobeying the rules!”
I smile wider. “I don’t understand? I think I do. That lot stole you, and they made sure your parents didn’t know what was what, in time to try to take you back. They twisted your mind so you lied to your own folk to defend them. To stay with them, if your family might have been worried and brought you home safely. Tell me, Missy, when was the last vacation that you spent the whole time with your own family, rather than off with wizard-born friends?”
She fidgets, and colors, and tries not to answer, but I smile at her until she gives in.
“I-but-the circumstances were unusual! The Quidditch World Cup might never be in Britain again in my lifetime, and then after that I had to help with Harry! I had to! And that’s why I had to-not tell my parents everything, in case they wanted to take me out. Harry needed my help, he always has!”
“Oh yes, the circumstances are always unusual. I saw how it works. As soon as they get to you, they start twisting you, so you don’t want to be with normal folk any more. Like that goblin-boy did-”
I cut myself off. Go back to the attack, I tell myself.
I smile again. “When’s the last time you even saw your parents, Missy?”
She flinches. I lean forward. “Eh?”
She goes white. “They’re in Australia now. Even for witches, international travel, that distance, is rather hard.”
I lean closer. “The last time?”
“Two years.”
I look at her harder. She says, “Two and a half. That Christmas.” It’s October now. Two and three-quarters, then. More.
But she’s still hiding something, the shifty, tricksy thing that she is now.
She had paled when she said Australia. I say, “You don’t have an Aussie accent, girl. How did your folks, those respectable dentists, suddenly end up on the other side of the world? Was it like Mr. Anderson, maybe, just happening to lose his job when that Dumbledore needed a house to open up in my neighborhood? Was it?”
She closes her eyes. “That’s not your business, Mrs. Dursley.”
I’m on to her. “You did it. You sent them there. They twisted you so badly you were willing to send your own folks into exile, to keep them away from you.”
She cries out, “I did it for their protection! You-Know-Who might have attacked them to get at me! I had to!”
I smile at her. “You just said it. “I did it.” Not, “I asked them to.” You did it without their permission, didn’t you? To your own parents. They don’t even want to see you anymore, do they? After whatever it was you did to them. To force them against their will.”
She drops her teacup. After a moment, she draws her wand and cleans up the spilled tea.
The little heathen.
Her hand is shaking. The boy puts his arm around her and murmurs something in her ear.
I sit back, satisfied. “And you didn’t have to, Missy. Stop lying. It was just easier. You just didn’t want to bother with telling them the truth and persuading them that your way was right. When it might not have been. You say you were in the boy’s year; then you were still a minor in the real world. Your parents would have had the legal right to stop you from whatever it was you wanted to do. You were afraid to give them the chance.”
I nod cordially at the girl, who is leaking tears and shaking. She deserves it. “You were a normal girl once, probably a decent enough one, and now you’re one of them. That’s what they do. They steal children, and twist them to their side, and never give them back. That’s what they did with her.”
The girl looks up sharply at that. The inward-looking mask of misery drops away, replaced with a look first of enlightenment, then of calculation.
I try to think what I might have said, to make the girl change like that.
The girl says, very softly, “What was it that they did with her?”
I shouldn’t say it. I’ve never said it.
Saying it makes it true.
And it is true.
I whisper, “They stole her, and they changed her, and they never gave her back. And then they killed her, and left that-that changeling-in her place.”
The boy says, “Wh-?”, but the girl interrupts him, putting her hand on his arm again. “She-your sister-is honored in the Wizarding World. She has a memorial, even. Have you ever visited it? Or her grave?”
I stop trying to figure out what her freakish mind is calculating. I stare at the girl. “Her grave? Witches are buried like Christian folk? No one ever said anything about that. That Dumbledore, he never wrote anything about a grave. Or a service, or anything. Or about letting her come back to us to be buried. I figured that there was nothing left. Or that you lot refused to do that. Let ravens or wolves eat the bodies rather than let normal folk bury them. Or use them. Something sick and freakish like that.”
The boy looks sick and the girl bristles indignantly. “Witches are Christian folk too! Well, I mean, some of us are. I think the Patils are Hindi or something, and Anthony Goldstein is observant Jewish. I’ve seen him with those fringe things. And some people aren’t anything, of course. But yes, your sister’s buried in the graveyard in Godric’s Hollow, C of E, and the same graveyard as Mug - as everyone else from the village. It’s wizards and M-regular people all together in there. Harry’s been to visit the grave. He left flowers.”
She hesitates, and adds, “If you wanted to go, we could take you there. Right now, even. Or I could give you directions, if you’d rather go there using, um, more conventional transportation.”
I look away from them, out the window. There’s nothing out there. Only the dusty light of late afternoon. That boy and girl have been wasting my time for too long now.
I should never have let them in.
I put down my empty teacup, gathering myself to get rid of them.
I’m too slow.
The girl says, “Would you like us to take you there? Right now?”
I nod stiffly. Yes, I would. I keep my face hard. Does she think this makes up for anything?
Their freak way of traveling makes me feel sick, and I hate having to let the girl touch me. But it’s instant, I’ll give them that. We’re in the shadow of a kissing gate, and then they lead me to a grave.
I look at the stone and I can’t help it, I laugh myself sick. The children can’t even see it; they just look at me.
Worried. Like what’s wrong is me.
Finally I stop laughing enough to tell them, “Not even her own stone. Not even her own name on it. Doesn’t that just say everything?”
The boy looks more confused. The girl, though, looks at the stone and flinches. Then she taps it with her wand. Now the one side reads Lily Evans Potter.
So magic is good for something, after all.
The children have drawn back a bit; do they think I’ll cry?
She was just a freak. She left her family to become a freak, and it killed her. She deserved it.
The boy says, “Hermione, what’s a changeling? I can’t remember.”
The girl answers, “A changeling… that’s just a Muggle superstition, Harry. In their folklore, it’s when the Good Folk steal a human child and leave a construct, a non-human thing, to take its place.”
And suddenly the boy is running at me, grabbing me, shaking me. The girl tries to pull him off me, but he pays no heed. That unnatural hair, his father’s, waves around his contorted face. But the eyes are hers, my sister’s, narrowed to slits. Like when she’s about to go off into one of her screaming tantrums.
And sure enough, the boy starts screaming.
“IT ISN’T TRUE! I wasn’t a changeling! I wasn’t! I was HUMAN! I AM human!”
The boy is spurting tears now, still shaking me. Like my sister at her finest.
He’ll kick me next.
“I AM human!” the boy insists. “I am, I am, I AM!!!”
I look at him, Lily’s child, screeching in a tantrum.
And he is.
*
A/N: From Wikipedia, on how to identify changelings: “Their hair is hopelessly tangled, no matter how many times you brush it, and grows very fast. It is said that if you cut a changeling's hair, it will have grown back the next morning…. Their eyes are earth colors, green or brown. They also grow slower than other humans. Compared to other children, Changelings tend to be extremely eccentric in personality and in clothing choices. As young adults, their strange traits will become harder and harder to conceal.”
And the other thing that’s known is that “if a human child was taken …, the parents could force the return of the [human] child by treating the changeling cruelly, using methods such as whipping or even inserting it in a heated oven. In at least one case, a woman was taken to court for having killed her child in an oven.”
When I was working on my “Defense of the Dursleys” essay, the last thing to slot into place was the rather abrupt realization that Petunia would have had strong reason to assume that Harry’s magic use was deliberate.
And I thought, “But that just turns everything around. If Petunia truly believes that Harry has, all along, been doing magic deliberately just to spite her and then lying about it, what kind of monstrous creature must Harry seem to her…? It’s like that reversal C. S. Lewis uses in Till We Have Faces, that the jealous sister couldn’t actually see Psyche’s magical palace….
“Oh.”
A changeling, you recall, is normally left in the place of a treasured child.