The internet went from showing food recipe videos to alchemy in less than a decade. There’s going to be a quick video on how to make the philosopher’s stone from tomato sauce next week.
What if, when Petunia Dursley found a little boy on her front doorstep, she took him in? Not into the cupboard under the stairs, not into a twisted childhood of tarnished worth and neglect–what if she took him in?
Petunia was jealous, selfish and vicious. We will not pretend she wasn’t. She looked at that boy on her doorstep and thought about her Dudders, barely a month older than this boy. She looked at his eyes and her stomach turned over and over. (Severus Snape saved Harry’s life for his eyes. Let’s have Petunia save it despite them).
Let’s tell a story where Petunia Dursley found a baby boy on her doorstep and hated his eyes–she hated them. She took him in and fed him and changed him and got him his shots, and she hated his eyes up until the day she looked at the boy and saw her nephew, not her sister’s shadow. When Harry was two and Vernon Dursley bought Dudley a toy car and Harry a fast food meal with a toy with parts he could choke on Petunia packed her things and got a divorce.
Harry grew up small and skinny, with knobbly knees and the unruly hair he got from his father. He got cornered behind the dumpsters and in the restrooms, got blood on the jumpers Petunia had found, half-price, at the hand-me-down store. He was still chosen last for sports. But Dudley got blood on his sweaters, too, the ones Petunia had found at the hand-me-down store, half price, because that was all a single mother working two secretary jobs could afford for her two boys, even with Vernon’s grudging child support.
They beat Harry for being small and they laughed at Dudley for being big, and slow, and dumb. Students jeered at him and teachers called Dudley out in class, smirked over his backwards letters.
Harry helped him with his homework, snapped out razored wit in classrooms when bullies decided to make Dudley the butt of anything; Harry cornered Dudley in their tiny cramped kitchen and called him smart, and clever, and ‘better ‘n all those jerks anyway’ on the days Dudley believed it least.
Dudley walked Harry to school and back, to his advanced classes and past the dumpsters, and grinned, big and slow and not dumb at all, at anyone who tried to mess with them.
But was that how Petunia got the news? Her husband complained about owls and staring cats all day long and in the morning Petunia found a little tyke on her doorsep. This was how the wizarding world chose to give the awful news to Lily Potter’s big sister: a letter, tucked in beside a baby boy with her sister’s eyes.
There were no Potters left. Petunia was the one who had to arrange the funeral. She had them both buried in Godric’s Hollow. Lily had chosen her world and Petunia wouldn’t steal her from it, not even in death. The wizarding world had gotten her sister killed; they could stand in that cold little wizard town and mourn by the old stone.
(Petunia would curl up with a big mug of hot tea and a little bit of vodka, when her boys were safely asleep, and toast her sister’s vanished ghost. Her nephew called her ‘Tune’ not ‘Tuney,’ and it only broke her heart some days.
Before Harry was even three, she would look at his green eyes tracking a flight of geese or blinking mischieviously back at her and she would not think ‘you have your mother’s eyes.’
A wise old man had left a little boy on her doorstep with her sister’s eyes. Petunia raised a young man who had eyes of his very own).
Petunia snapped and burnt the eggs at breakfast. She worked too hard and knew all the neighbors’ worst secrets. Her bedtime stories didn’t quite teach the morals growing boys ought to learn: be suspicious, be wary; someone is probably out to get you. You owe no one your kindness. Knowledge is power and let no one know you have it. If you get can get away with it, then the rule is probably meant for breaking.
Harry grew up loved. Petunia still ran when the letters came. This was her nephew, and this world, this letter, these eyes, had killed her sister. When Hagrid came and knocked down the door of some poor roadside motel, Petunia stood in front of both her boys, shaking. When Hagrid offered Harry a squashed birthday cake with big, kind, clumsy hands, he reminded Harry more than anything of his cousin.
His aunt was still shaking but Harry, eleven years and eight minutes old, decided that any world that had people like his big cousin in it couldn’t be all bad. “I want to go,” Harry told his aunt and he promised to come home.
She noticed many things, sitting on her side of her fence with her cats chasing butterflies and nuzzling her ankles, Mundungus and the other watchers dropping by for tea now and then.
Mrs. Figg noticed that Petunia was a nosy bit of work with insecurities hanging from her every harsh angle. She noticed when Dudley learned the word MINE– the whole neighborhood noticed that one. She noticed that Vernon glared at owls.
She noticed that when Petunia gave Harry a truly horrendous haircut one year, it grew back in at a normal rate. Harry was uneven and weird-looking for ages, hiding under beanies when he could.
When Mrs. Figg had Harry over for carefully miserable afternoons of babysitting, she noticed nothing moved that shouldn’t. He didn’t accidentally make flowers out of fallen leaves, or levitate anything during tantrums, or turn toys funny colors.
Mrs. Figg called up her mother, interrupting the wizarding bridge game she was winning against the nursing home staff, and asked her how she had known, decades back, that her youngest daughter was a squib.
When Albus Dumbledore received Mrs. Figg’s letter he wrote back a polite thank you and then went to talk with Minerva McGonagall, who inhaled sharply in horror when he told her the news.
Finally, McGonagall gave a gathered sigh. “I suppose we can ask one of the wizarding families to homeschool him,” she said. “We can’t have the Boy Who Lived not knowing about his own world.”
“No, he’ll come to Hogwarts,” said Dumbledore.
“Hogwarts is not a place for–” Her voice fell. “–squibs, Albus.”
Dumbledore shook his head. “Harry must be taught.”
“Be taught what, Albus?”
But Dumbledore just sighed and offered her a lemon drop.
Years later, the owls and the letters came to 4 Privet Drive. The Dursleys ran, dragging Harry with them, and the letters and one stubborn gamekeeper followed– none of this would change with a magicless Harry.
When Hagrid asked Harry in that little cabin on that little rock in the middle of the sea if weird things always happened around him, Harry couldn’t tell him about vanishing glass and setting captive snakes free, about ending up somehow on the school roof, or growing his hair out overnight.
“Strange things always happen around you, don’ they?”
“Um,” said Harry, racking his brain. “Well… I live in a cupboard under the stairs…”
Harry could tell him about how snakes sometimes talked back, because that had never been Harry’s magic, but when he did Hagrid just blanched and changed the subject.
Hagrid held out hope, even against Dumbledore’s quiet warning explanations, until they made it to Ollivander’s Wands. Harry marveled at Diagon Alley, got his hands shaken in the Leaky, pressed his nose up against shop windows. Hagrid watched the scant boy– looked at James’s messy hair, Lily’s eyes, Harry’s own wandering gaze– and he wondered how this boy could be anything but magical.
In the wand shop, Ollivander said, “James Potter, yes… mahogany, eleven inches. Pliable. A powerful wand for Transfiguration.” He said, “And your mother, Lily… strong in Charms work, ten and… yes, ten and a quarter, willow, swishy.”
Harry picked up stick after wooden stick. They remained just that– wood with bits of feather or scale or hair. Harry wondered if the creatures who gave these offerings were still alive– if they were given or taken. What did it do to your wand when they died? He waved a maplewood wand (unicorn hair, eleven inches) and a gust from the door opening blew some receipts off the counter.
“Well, said Ollivander. “I think that’s as close as we’re likely to get.”
He sent them out with the maplewood. Hagrid bought Harry a snowy owl and a fudge sundae and tried not make it too obvious that these were condolence gifts. The next day the Prophet’s headlines read: The Boy Who Lived– A Squib? Various magical medical experts weighed in on how it might have happened. Fingers were pointed at childhood trauma, at his upbringing, at his family lineage.
Harry still met Ron on the train– Ron was still smudge-nosed and Harry still bought enough candy to share. When Molly had helped him through the platform entrance, her voice had been a little softer, a little more pitying– but it was still better than the laughter that had been in his aunt and uncle’s voices when they dropped him here to find a platform they didn’t think existed.
Hermione Granger dropped by their compartment, looking for Neville’s toad, but got distracted when she spotted Harry. “I’ve read about you! In my books, and in the paper,” she said. “You’re the Boy Who Lived, and you’re a squib.”
Harry sank down in his seat. Ron hid Scabbers under a candy wrapper.
“Squibs have never been allowed in Hogwarts,” Hermione announced. “According to Hogwarts, A History, squibs try to sneak in now and then– the furthest anyone’s ever gotten is to the Sorting Hat before they got found out.” At eleven, Hermione still believed in expulsion being worse than death. Her voice was thrumming with sympathetic horror.
“But they already found out about me,” Harry said, alarmed.
“It’s alright, mate,” said Ron. “You’re Harry Potter. Oy, Granger,” he added. “What’s this Hat? Fred and George were trying to sell me some story about having to fight a mountain troll to get your House…”
Harry sat back and watched the countryside rush by. Yes, he was Harry Potter– his aunt’s useless sister’s useless child, the boy in the lumpy hand-me-down sweaters who named the spiders who lived in his cupboard. And here, in new world, he was apparently useless too.
When they got to Hogwarts, Harry clenched his fists and stood in line with the other first years. He barely twitched at the ghosts or Peeves, just stared ahead and thought about how far he would get before they turned him around and sent him back to Vernon and Petunia.
They opened the Great Hall doors. They called the first years one by one. Harry clenched his teeth and walked up to the Hat when they called his name.
As he turned to sit down on the stool, he really caught sight of the Hall for the first time– the hovering candles, the big wooden tables, the black robes that swallowed the light. Translucent ghosts gossiped with the students beside them. The paintings on the far walls– were they moving?
Harry’s jaw had unclenched, falling open. His fists curled open, curving around the stool’s seat as he leaned forward to stare. If this was it, if this was as far as he’d get in this world, then he wanted to drink it all in. The candles were floating, in mid-air.
The Hat dropped down over his eyes and blocked out the light.
Well, said the dry voice that had been hollering House placements all night. What do we have here?
Ron had been begging for not-Slytherin. Draco from the robes shop had been scornful of Hufflepuff, desperate in his disdain. Neville had begged for Hufflepuff, sure he was not brave enough for Gryffindor.
Are you a pride and prejudice or jane eyre person? wuthering heights or sense and sensibility? dracula or frankenstein? 1984 or lord of the flies? the catcher in the rye or to kill a mockingbird?
Harry Potter star Dan Radcliffe has issued some criticisms against Warner Brothers and the film’s production team for continuing to employ Johnny Depp despite the allegations made against the Grindelwald actor.
“I suppose the thing I was struck by was, we did have a guy who was reprimanded for weed on the [original Potter] film, essentially, so obviously what Johnny has been accused of is much greater than that.”
me @ danrad
I appreciate that he’s just very “you fired a teenager for smoking weed but you’re going to defend a wife beater? Thanks for the job and everything but fuck all of you.”
Did it ever occur to you that I loved you as much as a man can love a woman? Loved you for years before I finally got you? During the war I’d go away and try to forget you, but I couldn’t and I always had to come back. After the war I risked arrest, just to come back and find you. I cared so much I believe I would have killed Frank Kennedy if he hadn’t died when he did. I loved you but I couldn’t let you know it. You’re so brutal to those who love you, Scarlett. You take their love and hold it over their heads like a whip.
Starvinbohemian 