Scaling Back the Glass
A rap on the door jolted Harry awake from a vague dream about a flying motorcycle and a hulking but calming mass of a man. After nearly ten years at the Dursleys, he still wasn’t quite used to the shrill tone of his aunt as she shrieked through the door.
“Up! Get up! Now!” Harry heard her pound on the door once more before going to the kitchen and pulling down the frying pan and placing it on the stove. Harry rolled on his back, rubbing at his face to wake himself up. He kept thinking back his dream. He was almost sure he’d had that dream before.
Petunia was back outside the door. “Are you up yet?” she demanded. Harry could hear the tapping of her foot from his vantage point on the mattress on the floor, see the shadow fall across the floor.
“Nearly,” he replied, biting back a sarcastic tone. He didn’t want to start the day off on a bad note, especially with his aunt already so impatient.
“Well, get a move on, you need to look after the bacon. And don’t you dare let it burn, everything needs to be perfect for Dudley’s birthday.”
Harry couldn’t hold back a groan.
Petunia’s voice grew even more shrill. “What did you say?” she snapped through the door.
“Nothing, Aunt Petunia.” He waited until she had stalked back down the hall. Dudley’s birthday—how could he have forgotten? The mini-whale’s only been talking about it for weeks. He gave another groan as he sat up and began looking for socks. He found a pair under the stairs, though he had to pull a spider off of one of them, letting it scuttle back into the dark, a feeling of jealousy rushing through him at the ability to just disappear back into the shadows.
When he was dressed, he opened the door to his cupboard and listened for movement. He could hear his aunt fussing around in the kitchen, and two sets up footsteps upstairs. He went down the hall into the kitchen to take over the cooking from his Aunt Petunia. The woman was tall, with a long neck that she used to look down on everything and everyone as though they were scum on her shoe. At least, Harry assumed it was everything and everyone. She definitely had that look whenever he was around, and it was still present even when he shuffled past the evidence of her darling boy’s birthday.
The kitchen table was almost entirely hidden beneath all of Dudley’s presents. It looked as though Dudley had gotten the new computer he wanted but wouldn’t know how to use, not to mention the second television so he could watch his programs while he ate dinner, and a racing bike. Harry wasn’t even sure Dudley knew how to ride a bike, let alone why he’d want a racing one. Unless the idiot had figured out how to use it for violence, which was the only thing Dudley bothered going outside for. Dudley’s favorite punching bag was still Harry, but Harry had learned quickly in these ten years to be fast and smart about his escape routes.
Harry quickly stood at the stove as he heard heavy footsteps begin down the stairs. As he turned over the bacon, his uncle entered the kitchen. The man was extremely rounded, and had more neck than sense in Harry’s opinion, which, since he didn’t have a neck, was worrying. In lieu of a greeting, Vernon just barked out a gruff “Comb your hair!”
Used to the command, Harry just ran a quick hand through the insane mop of curls tousled on his head and kept his eyes down.
Harry was frying eggs by the time Dudley thundered into the kitchen with his mother closing his eyes. Dudley looked like a carbon copy of his father—so, as Harry liked to think, like a pig in a wig.
Harry began serving plates of bacon (withholding his usual thoughts about pork cannibalism) and eggs on the already-full table as Dudley’s eyes were uncovered and he began counting his gifts. Harry bit back a comment about not knowing Dudley could count that high as he carefully balanced plates around the piles of presents.
“Thirty-six?” Dudley said incredulously, looking up at his smiling parents. “That’s two less than last year.”
Harry turned back to the stove to hide the roll of his eyes.
“Darling, you haven’t counted Auntie Marge’s present, see, it’s here under this big one from Mommy and Daddy.”
Dudley crossed his arms as his face turned red. “All right, thirty-seven then.”
Harry sighed softly and began wolfing down the last two slices of bacon as fast as possible in case this turned into a tantrum and Dudley flipped the table, as that would dictate his morning spent scrubbing the floor clean of bacon grease.
Petunia obviously knew what could happen as well, as she spoke quickly over her son’s rising temper. “And we’ll buy you another two presents while we’re out today, how’s that?”
Dudley thought for a moment. Harry thought it looked like hard work, could almost smell the steam coming from his ears. Finally, he said slowly, “So I’ll have… thirty… thirty…”
Harry bit his cheek to stop himself from laughing as Petunia had to add for her eleven-year-old son. “Thirty-nine, sweetums.”
“Oh.” Dudley sat down heavily in his chair, which creaked underneath him, and shoved multiple pieces of bacon into his mouth, grabbing the nearest parcel. “All right then.”
Vernon chuckled as he chugged at the juice Harry had brought over. “Little tyke wants his money’s worth, just like his father. ‘Atta boy, Dudley!” He ruffled Dudley’s hair, not that his son noticed in the flurry of wrapping paper that surrounded him.
At that moment, the house telephone rang. Petunia left to answer it while Harry began cleaning the kitchen, and Vernon watched Dudley unwrap the racing bike, a video camera, a remote-control airplane, sixteen new computer games, and a VCR. He was ripping paper off of a seemingly real gold wristwatch (Harry refused to believe Dudley could read an analog clock) when Petunia came back from the hall looking both angry and worried.
“Bad news, Vernon,” she said softly, trying not to disturb Dudley. “Mrs. Figg’s broken her leg, tripped over one of those infernal cats. She can’t take the boy.” Harry tried to melt into the counter, scrubbing the pan furiously in the sink, as all three of the Dursley’s turned to him.
Dudley’s mouth fell open in horror, and the box in his hands fell to the table. Harry stayed turned away, even as his heart leapt. While he appreciated the refuge Mrs. Figg’s house gave, he never got to go out with the Dursleys, not on a day like this. Vernon and Petunia always took Dudley and a friend out for the day, to amusement parks, greasy restaurants, the movies. He’d put up with any friend Dudley wanted to bring if it meant actually being able to go.
“Now what do we do with him?” she asked Vernon, even as she looked at the stiff line of Harry’s back as he moved to scrub the countertop.
"We could phone Marge,” her husband responded, putting down the paper as he joined her in eyeing Harry warily.
Petunia scoffed. “Don’t be silly, Vernon, she hates the boy.”
Harry was used to the Dursleys speaking about him like this–like he didn’t exist, or something so nonimportant they couldn’t even fathom it, like a slug.
“What about your friend from club—Yvonne, was it?”
“On vacation in Majorca, not that I’d want to make her deal with him.”
Harry didn’t turn, but asked with slight hope. “You could just leave me here?” (Maybe he could actually watch something on television, or even go on Dudley’s new computer before he broke it.)
“And come back to a house in ruins?” Petunia snarled, looking like someone had force-fed her a lemon.
“I wouldn’t blow up the house, I live here,” he said, not that anyone was listening.
Petunia had turned her back to him. “I suppose we could take him. Maybe leave him in the car?”
“That car’s new, he’s not sitting in it alone.” Vernon’s mustache was trembling.
Dudley met his eyes over his pile of unwrapped gifts. He must have seen the glimmer of hope in Harry’s eyes as he smirked slowly and then turned it into the largest pout he could muster, which, for a boy his size, was very large. He began to cry loudly, occasionally pounding a fist on the table. “I… don’t… want… him… t-t-to come! He ruins everything, I don’t want him to spoil this too!”
Petunia rushed to his side, arms trying to wrap around his frame as she tsked into the crown of his head. “Shh, Dinky Duddydums, don’t cry, Mummy won’t let him spoil your special day!”
Harry turned back to the stove at Dudley’s wicked grin behind his mother’s back. Luckily, he was saved the headache of listening to more of his cousin’s blubbering by the doorbell ringing.
“Oh, good lord, that must be them.” Aunt Petunia frantically turned to get the front door.
As his best friend, Piers Polkiss, walked in through the hall, Dudley immediately stopped pretending to cry and stood to grin at his friend. Piers was scrawny, with a face like a rat, and his mother was the spitting image of what he would grow up to be, sniffing disdainfully at Harry as she followed her son in. Petunia had somehow found the balance of telling all of her friends and the neighborhood ladies that Harry was a hoodlum while also managing to make the Dursleys seem like his saviors. Piers shot Harry a snarled smile, showing his crooked teeth. He was usually the one who held people’s arms behind their backs while Dudley hit them, and like Dudley, Harry was a preferred target.
Even with Dudley’s protests, Harry soon found himself shoved into the back of the Dursley’s car with the other two boys. He had to bite the inside of his mouth to stop himself from grinning excitedly. He couldn’t believe his luck—this was his first visit to a zoo. Not even Vernon’s threats of locking him in his cupboard until the Christmas hols should any ‘funny business’ occur could damper his enthusiasm.
Ignoring his uncle’s usual rants on anything and everything (including Harry himself) as they drove, Harry kept his nose pressed to the glass, watching the suburbs change into the city. Motorcycles sped past, cars gleamed in the sunlight, and slowly parks and two-story houses turned into looming office buildings and crowds of interesting people strolling on the pavement. He valiantly kept himself from reacting to the pushes and jeers from Dudley and Piers, instead drinking in all he could from a world he barely ever got to experience.
The zoo was bustling with people, families and school groups streaming in and out of the buildings and exhibits. A booth at the entrance caught Dudley’s eye immediately, and the Dursleys bought both him and Piers large chocolate ice creams. Harry quickly ducked around the bulk that was Vernon and slyly caught the eye of the beaming server, who asked what he wanted before they could hurry away. A few moments later, Harry was a few feet behind the Dursleys licking a decently flavored lemon ice pop. He hid his grin as Vernon grumbled at the glass in front of a gorilla scratching its head, looking rather similar to Dudley, if the gorilla had only been blond.
Harry was unusually glad for the crowds as he kept his distance from his family. Dudley and Piers got bored of the animals by lunchtime, and Harry was keeping out of eyesight so they wouldn’t start their favorite hobby of hitting him. He lingered in the exhibits, soaking up information about all the animals that were lucky enough to be from not there. As he wandered, he made a note to himself to grab a few books about animals on his next trip to the library. He always looked fondly on the spiders and small mice that would find their way into Number Four, and even got along with the surliest of Mrs. Figg’s smelly cats, maybe he could look into studying animals in the future, one without the Dursleys.
He was almost disappointed when the Dursleys stopped for lunch at the zoo restaurant, until a rampage from Dudley about the lack of enough toppings on his knickerbocker glory saw him finishing the original while Vernon bought and new extra-large one for his son. Soon enough, they were back among the animals, this time heading into the reptile house. It was cool and dark in there, reminding Harry of his own cupboard. Lit windows lined the walls, with all sorts of lizards, turtles, snakes, and even small crocodiles crawling and slithering over bits of wood and stone. While Harry took his time and each and every exhibit, Dudley and Piers quickly worked towards the most dangerous cobras and pythons the zoo offered. By the time Harry caught back up with them, they had found the largest snake in the room. It could have coiled its length around Vernon’s precious new car twice over and crushed it into a trash can—but its bulk was instead wound into a small pyramid under a heat lamp, fast asleep.
Dudley had pressed his body against the glass, breath fogging his view. “Make it move,” he whined to his father, who was scanning a newspaper he had grabbed from the food court. Vernon barely looked up as he tapped on the glass, but the glistening brown coils didn’t budge. Harry winced anyways, being to familiar with being startled awake by the fierce knock of an unfriendly face.
“Do it again!” Dudley ordered, and Harry furrowed his brow incredulously at his cousin, who seemed unable to move his own arm from literally being on the glass. Vernon rapped the glass once more, sharply, but the snake still didn’t move.
Dudley groaned and pushed away. “This is boring. C’mon, mate, let’s go find something with some teeth.”
As the rest of the group moved away, Harry slid in front of the glass, looking for the informational placard that was on one of the side walls. The snake still hadn’t shifted, and Harry wouldn’t have been surprised if it had died of boredom, being stuck in a cage by itself, only idiotic people rapping their knuckles on the glass to purposefully disturb it. It was worse than even his own situation, at least he was able to move around the rest of the house, and the ability to hide away from most of the curious glances he received.
He couldn’t help himself. He shifted as close to the snake as possible, and murmured, “This must be a horrible life, I’m so sorry.”
The snake suddenly moved its massive head to face Harry, mere inches away from each other, a terrifying sight even with the thick glass between them. Its beady eyes watched Harry for a moment.
And then it winked.
Harry nearly jumped out of his skin. Quickly, he glanced around, making sure no one was watching, before he gave a slight grin and winked back.
The snake cast its gaze towards Vernon and Dudley, and then raised its eyes to the ceiling. The look it gave was paired with what Harry swore was a male voice, low and hypnotic, saying, “I get that all the time, wix.”
Giving a startled grin, Harry nodded. He may not mean for freakish things to happen around him, but if they did, he was going to lean into it. “I bet. It must be rather annoying, not able to get away from it all, seeing ugly faces mashed up to gawk at you day after day.”
The snake nodded vigorously, uncurling his body a bit as he drew closer to Harry.
“Where are you from?” Harry leaned against the ledge along the edge of the glass, enraptured.
The boa constrictor shivered, and jabbed his tail at the sign Harry had been looking at earlier.
Boa Constrictor, Brazil, Bred in Captivity
“You’ve never even been to where your family is from? That’s horrible. But, then again, I think I’m in a similar situation. My uncle tends to go off about my father’s family being from the Middle East, or Southern Asia or something. He changes where they’re from every other rant, though.” He huffed, blowing air through the curls that tangled over the scar that marred his forehead.
As the snake shifted once more, moving his head again to face Harry, a deafening shout from the other side of the reptile house made them both jump. “DUDLEY! COME LOOK, YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT THIS SNAKE IS DOING!”
Piers shoved Harry aside to clear the way for Dudley’s waddle to settle in front of the snake’s now-hardened eyes.
“Out of the way, you,” Dudley sneered as he sent a fist flying for Harry’s ribcage. Caught by surprise, Harry fell onto the hard concrete floor, wincing as his shoulder caught his weight awkwardly. Looking up with a cold rage flooding through his veins, he was more focused on the snake’s furious hiss at the two boys standing in front of it than the sudden weight in the air, and the way the hair on the back of his neck suddenly stood on end.
No one, including Harry, could explain what happened next. One second, Piers and Dudley were pressing against the glass, and the next, they had leapt back with squeals of horror.
Harry himself scrambled back and out of sight from the elder Dursleys as his brain processed the scene in front of him. The glass front of the boa’s tank had disappeared, and the snake, still hissing at the people in front of him, began unraveling himself and pushing his way out to the floor. Everyone else in the reptile house screamed and ran for the exits, except Piers and Dudley, who had both fallen to the floor as more and more of the snake’s body fell out of the enclosure. The snake began wrapping itself around a very still Harry, and as Harry’s body disappeared in its coils, it gave a mighty hiss towards the remaining people in the room. Dudley and Piers both shrieked again and scrambled up and out of the building.
After the door slammed closed behind them, the snake pulled away, leaving Harry with the unusual feeling of scales sliding against his skin. He turned back to the boy, scenting near his cheek with a flickering tongue. Harry grinned as the constrictor began heading towards an open door at the back of the reptile house. As he left, Harry strained his ears to hear a low hiss of “Brazil, here I come… Thanks, amigo.”
By the time Harry left the building, the keeper of the reptile house had been told what had occurred, and was directing his employees to find the missing snake. His eyes were still bugging from his head, and he kept repeating “But where did the glass go?” as he shuffled the Dursley family towards the harried zoo director’s office. Harry quickly followed them, crossing his fingers in the hopes that Vernon hadn’t noticed his involvement, or that Dudley would keep his big, fat mouth shut.
In the office, the director was preparing a strong tea for a hysterical Petunia, apologizing over and over to both her and the boys. Dudley was pressed against his mother’s side, blubbering, while Piers just stared, shell-shocked, into the distance. They finally made their way back to Vernon’s car, with lifetime passes to the zoo for all five of them, even though Vernon was muttering under his breath about the audacity of these people thinking they would ever visit again. Dudley had calmed down enough to begin swearing that the constrictor had nearly taken off his leg, and Piers, with an accusing glare, said loudly, “Harry was talking to the thing, weren’t you, Potter?”
Harry, turned once more to the window, still noticed Vernon’s grip on the steering wheel slowly tighten, to the point that his knuckles were a stark white against the brown leather. When Piers was out of the house and back in his mother’s grasp, Vernon’s bulk slowly turned towards Harry, who was cleaning up from the dinner he had made them after returning to Number Four. He was so angry, he could barely speak, and his face was as red as Harry had ever seen it. “Cupboard—now—no meals—stay put.” He collapsed on a chair that creaked dangerously as Petunia ran to the kitchen to get him a large brandy.
Harry leaned against the wall in his cupboard some time later, eyes adjusted to the dark, staring at the scribblings he had drawn over the ten years he had spent with the Dursleys. He wished he had a watch hidden away, rather than just waiting for the house to settle into the silence that meant the other occupants were asleep. He didn’t want to risk sneaking into the kitchen if anyone else was going to hear the doors creak.
It was nights like these that he tried to stay awake, even long after the Dursleys were snoring away upstairs. The idea of staying locked in his cupboard, even though he had a length of string that he was able to work through the small window of the door to gain his freedom, tended to leave him shaking in the night with dreams of a flashing green light and a piercing headache. He had always assumed that it was a flashback from the car crash that he was told he was in with his parents, the night they died.
He didn’t know anything else about them. When he was younger, and hadn’t learned that questions never ended well for him, he had asked his aunt about his parents. She dropped the teacup she had been holding in surprise, and when she recovered, she dug her nails in Harry’s shoulder to the point of breaking skin as she pushed him down to the floor. “Don’t ask ridiculous questions, boy. My sister and her good-for-nothing husband got themselves killed for being freakish and stupid, and you’re going down the same path. Now clean this mess up, and don’t ask again.” Vernon would mutter about his father being a rotten immigrant, but that was all the information the two of them would share with him.
It was nights like these that he tried to chase the nightmares away with daydreams, of family that didn’t know he was still alive, still alone, of being whisked away to learn what actually being a family was supposed to be like. Or of somehow managing to get into university, getting a job as soon as possible, studying and working until he was free of Number Four, and traveling to somewhere, anywhere, that there were people that were like him.
Once the house had settled into complete silence, Harry pulled out the string and paperclip that he kept tucked in a copy of his favorite book. A few seconds and a sharp tug later, the door creaked open.
After a single piece of bread and a cup of water from the faucet, Harry snuck back into his cupboard, relocked the door, and settled in for the night, hearing the echo of a hiss as he closed his eyes.